'Doesn’t make any sense': Legal experts blast SCOTUS for 'absurd, insane' pro-Trump bent

07 July

George Conway on MSNBC

The 6-3 conservative supermajority Supreme Court of the United States' (SCOTUS) most recent term was starkly one-sided in President Donald Trump's favor, according to a recent analysis.

On Monday, ABC News' Devin Dwyer found that SCOTUS ruled in Trump's favor in numerous high-profile cases. This included decisions on removing transgender members of the military, mass firings of federal employees, the handing over of Americans' sensitive data to Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency and stripping the power of lower court judges to issue nationwide injunctions blocking executive actions.

Dwyer also found that in the 14 emergency appeals Trump brought to SCOTUS' emergency docket, the Court sided with the administration 12 times. The only two cases where Trump didn't get his way were in the case of wrongfully deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia and its freezing of $2 billion in Congressionally appropriated funds for foreign aid programs.

"Time and again, the Supreme Court came down on one side, and solidly so — on the very conservative side," University of California-Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky told ABC.

The Court's most recent ruling striking down lower courts' ability to halt Trump's actions at the national level was slammed as particularly damaging, given that Trump has lost numerous decisions at the district and circuit level only to see those losses reversed by the High Court (which includes three of his own appointees). Justice Sonia Sotomayor derisively noted that the administration has SCOTUS "on speed dial" in a dissent last week.

"I'm pretty confident that within a matter of weeks … there's going to be basically nationwide coverage of declarations or injunctions making clear that the birthright citizenship contention of the government is just absolutely absurd, insane, and unlawful," conservative attorney George Conway told the network.

Chief Justice John Roberts dismissed concerns about the Court's propensity to take Trump's side in legal disputes, and said during a recent judicial conference that his critics were likely just upset that "they lost."

"The idea that we're responsible for whatever somebody is angry about -- it just doesn't make any sense, and it's very dangerous," he said.

But Howard University law professor Sherrilynn Ifill opined that Roberts likely knows that the public views SCOTUS under his leadership as stridently far-right.

"This court not only militantly refuses to talk about the effect of their decisions, they kind of gaslight us into pretending that the effects of their decision won't be what they are," she said.

Click here to read ABC's full analysis.

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