How a 'disastrous' SCOTUS ruling invites future 'defiance' of courts: law expert

Georgetown University Law Center Professor Stephen Vladeck said Supreme Court conservatives opened the door to Trump and future White House administrations ignoring the judicial branch of government.

“I’m not prone to hyperbole ... but the title of this piece refers to today’s ruling as ‘disastrous.’ In my view, that’s a fair characterization,” Vladeck wrote.

The majority Supreme Court’s decision to stay a lower court order in DHS v. D.V.D. gives unspoken agreement to let the Trump administration continue to defy courts. The lower court had demanded Trump provide migrants an opportunity to litigate before it removes them to a country other than the one identified as their nation of origin, possibly to face cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment in the “third” country.

Vladeck agreed with minority dissenting justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson that the court is “threatening the rule of law” by not “imposing any cost on the government” for its open defiance.

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“Each time this Court rewards noncompliance with discretionary relief, it further erodes respect for courts and for the rule of law,” Sotomayor wrote of the Trump administration’s overt insubordination of federal district judges.

“For the Court to not only grant emergency relief in this case, but to offer nary a word of explanation either in criticism of the government’s behavior, or in defense of why it granted relief … is to invite — if not affirmatively enable — comparable defiance of future district court orders by the government,” Vladeck warned. “… It at least appears to reflect the willingness of a majority of the justices to appease a government … increasingly unworthy of any such respect.”

“I would’ve thought that this was a message that this Supreme Court would be ill-inclined to send, even (if not especially) implicitly,” Vladeck added. “But it’s impossible to imagine that the Trump administration will view it any other way.”

Additionally, Vladek argues that by refusing to enforce a court order, the conservative majority “cleared the way for the government to treat as many as one million migrants as removable who weren’t previously.”

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Read Steve Vladeck’s full report at his One First link here.