Donald Trump
Although the U.S. Supreme Court has leaned conservative for decades, liberals and progressives were often pleasantly surprised by Ronald Reagan appointees Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor during the 1990s and 2000s when it came to gay rights and abortion. Kennedy, a right-wing libertarian, infuriated the Religious Right in gay-friendly rulings like Lawrence v. Texas and Obergefell v. Hodges.
But the High Court went from right-of-center to far-right when Justice Amy Coney Barrett, greatly influenced by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, was seated in 2020 and GOP appointees obtained a 6-3 supermajority. And during Joe Biden's presidency, liberals were frustrated by the Court countless time — from the overturning of Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization to the outlawing of race-based affirmative action in college admissions.
Both liberals and Never Trump conservatives were horrified when six of the justices ruled, in Trump v. the United States, that presidents enjoy absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for "official" acts committed in office. Progressive legal expert Elie Mystal warned that "absolute immunity" was a much different standard from "qualified immunity."
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In an article published on June 1, however, The Guardian's Robert Tait stresses that President Donald Trump's critics are hoping the High Court — as far to the right as it is — will rein him in.
"So far had the Court's stock with Democrats fallen that Joe Biden called for radical reforms on how the Court was run and a constitutional amendment asserting that no president was above the law or immune for crimes committed in office," Tait explains. "Now, with a reelected and vengeful Trump having run rampant over democratic norms by issuing a fusillade of often illegal and unconstitutional executive orders, the same court — with the same nine justices on the bench — is being cast in the unlikely role of potential savior of American democracy."
The Guardian reporter adds, "Critics who once derided the judicial consequences of the Court’s six-three conservative majority hope that the justices will show enough fealty to the U.S. constitution to mitigate the effect of Trump's all-out assault on a range of rights, from birthright citizenship to basic due process appeals against deportation, and preserve the constitutional republic’s defining contours."
University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman believes that some of Trump's executive orders may be a bridge too far even for the High Court's hard-right supermajority.
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Litman told The Guardian, "Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett understand that the Court can't let Donald Trump get away with everything, including usurping Congress' power or obviously depriving individuals of due process. But short of that, I don’t think they are having any kind of second thoughts about their own views of executive power or about the law more generally."
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Read Robert Tait's full Guardian article at this link.