US Supreme Court limits federal judges' power to block Trump orders

Decisions by courts are often enjoined based on a balancing test as well as the likelihood that the issue will succeed or not.

So, deporting people to a third-country (another decision SCOTUS allowed this term) has a simple balancing test: stay here and be fine or possibly deport a Chinese citizen to El Salvador, which could cause incredible harm. So even ignoring th elikelihood of how the issue is decided, the balancing test favors enjoining third-party deportation.

So in this case, we had a universal injunction against an executive order removing birthright citizenship. This fails on two fronts:

1. As justices noted, it's highly unlikely that the order will be held up as constitutional. There is case law on this. The language of the 14th amendment is clear. The exact issue was discussed at the time. This has no hope in a non-corrupt court of succeeding.

2. Given other decisions, bona fide US citizens could be deported to CECOT and detained indefinitely with no due process. So it should be stayed because of the potential harm.

What SCOTUS did today was say the order revoking birthright citizenship was unlikely to succeed but it allows the administration to proceed anyway while hte issue is litigated in the courts, which could take years.

That's how corrupt this court is.

People have been fed this propaganda that Supreme Court justices are apolitical legal scholars who come down from their tower to issue judgements and keep things in check. It couldn't be further from the truth. Supreme Court justices are political appointees that dress up their political positions in legalese.

Example 1: this court invented the "major questions doctrine" whereby the court decides a matter is large enough that the court gets to override both the administrative and legislative branches.

Example 2: they also invented the "historical traditions doctrine", which is used selectively. For example, abortion was completely legal 200+ years ago. Ben Franklin even published at-home instructions on how to perform an abortion [1].

Example 3: in the wake of the Civil War there was huge violence not from the freed slaves but from white people towards former slaves, most notably with the Colfax massacre. The Supreme Court went on a white supremacist tear during Reconstruction, notably gutting the federal government's ability to prosecute hate crimes like Colfax [2].

Example 4: The Tiney court in the 1850s made what is perhaps one of the worst decisions ever made (ie Dred Scott), arguing from a legal and constitutional perspective that black people weren't "people".

Example 5: the Roberts court decided that moeny equals speech, gutting any legislation around campaign spending, which is a big part of how we got here.

Example 6: the presidential immunity decision will go down in history as one of the 10 or even 5 worst decisions ever made. It completely invented far-reaching immunity that essentially made the president a king, in a country that was founded on the very idea of rejecting monarchs.

Example 7: in 1984, the Supreme Court decided that in any areas of ambiguity in legislation, trial courts should defer to the agency empowered by Congress to enforce that legislation. This is the so-called "Chevron deference".

More than 40 years passed through 7 presidents (4 Republican and 3 Democrat) where both parties at different times controlled Congress. Congress declined to legislate away Chevron deference despite having ample opportunity to do so. Moreso, they intentionally wrote legislation with Chevron deference in mind yet this court decided to reverse Chevron. Yet on other cases, the court has deferred to Congress's inaction as intent.

Fun fact: Chevron v Natural Resources Defense Council was previously known as Natural Resources Defense Council v. Gorsuch [3]. That's not a coincidence. The suit involved Reagan's head of dthe EPA, Anna Gorsuch, mother of current Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch, who was humiliated and ultimately fired from the EPA while trying to destroy it from within.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/18/1099542962/abortion-ben-frank...

[2]: https://www.theroot.com/what-was-the-colfax-massacre-1790897...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Resources_Defense_Coun...

If your contribution is to quote an old rap song and make a meta complaint about how people will react to you, then you're right - you don't deserve a positive reaction.

Yes, this is literally the entire job description of a judge: to "judge" if someone broke the law. Details on what judges have jurisdiction over differ (in some countries they can't rule on constitutional matters), but this is basically how it works everywhere. You have appeals processes and whatnot to deal with mistakes. This is civics 101 separation of powers stuff.

The three branch system allows any two to gang up on the third. Parliamentary systems don't have any checks like this and trend towards unitary authoritarians.