The Supreme Court’s Trump Enablers May Have Screwed Themselves

During and prior to this second Trump administration, Republican-appointed judges and justices rejected his efforts to overturn the 2020 election over 60 times. In April and May of this year the court enjoined, pending a final decision, the administration’s effort to summarily deport undocumented, alleged Venezuelan gang members; the Justice Department claimed as authority the Alien Enemies Act, a law enacted in 1798 and gathering dust ever since. The court sidelined the administration’s (lame) statutory argument with the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment guarantee that government cannot deprive any person of liberty without due process of law. Roberts’ opinion for the court admonished that, for deportation targets, the government must provide “sufficient time and information to reasonably be able to con tact counsel, file a petition, and pursue appropriate relief.” He chastised DOJ for flimflamming the lower courts and the Supreme Court with falsified factual representations, and reached outside the record to assail administration officials’ threats and actions to evade or defy court orders.

In 2019, Roberts wrote the court’s opinion quashingTrump’s scheme to include on the 2020 census questionnaire a question on individuals’ citizenship, intended to deter Hispanic citizens from voting; Roberts’ blistering rebuke called out Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, acting at the behest of Trump, for lying to the public and the courts, including the Supreme Court, “from the time he entered office,” acting in “bad faith,” spinning a story that appears “contrived,” “incongruent” with what at least two departments, Commerce and Justice, with White House complicity, actually did, a “disconnect between the decision made and the explanation given.”

On earlier occasions, in 2012 and 2015, Roberts provoked venomous, lasting furyfrom numerous Republican politicians, advocates, and voters, when he twice upheld the Affordable Care Act against challenges that would, if granted, have nailed to the wall the Republican party’s top policy priority of extinguishing Democrats’ premier 21st century accomplishment.