The Supreme Court just handed Donald Trump a victory – but not the one you think
The United States Supreme Court has become such a detriment to the United States that the best one can hope for on any given week is that it’s not in session. Its rulings in this era have been occasionally good, mostly bad, sometimes catastrophic, often incoherent, and rarely constitutional. Now it’s happened again, in a bizarre ruling that goes way beyond the scope of the issue that had been brought before it.
It’s being widely claimed that the Supreme Court ruled yesterday in favor of ending birthright citizenship. This is not the case at all. In fact the Supreme Court explicitly stated yesterday that its ruling was not an assessment of birthright citizenship in any way. Instead the Supreme Court made a ruling that may turn out to be just as ugly: it ruled that federal judges can no longer issue nationwide injunctions.
As it applies to this specific birthright citizenship case, this is an indirect win for Trump. It means he can continue rounding up Hispanic-looking people and shipping them out of the country, even though a federal judge issued an injunction against the practice – at least until the Supreme Court comes back later and makes some kind of ruling on birthright citizenship.
In essence, the Supreme Court decided to hand Trump the ability to keep persecuting Hispanic-looking people without having to actually rule that Hispanic-looking people should have fewer rights than the rest of us. But this is only half the problem. In so doing, the Supreme Court has made it so that federal judges can’t stop any of Trump’s unconstitutional initiatives dead in their tracks. The Supreme Court has instead decided that only it can stop the President of the United States from doing unconstitutional things. How convenient.
This Supreme Court keeps issuing rulings that give itself more and more power over the United States government. First the Supreme Court ruled that only it can decide what is and is not an official act by the President. Now the Supreme Court has ruled that only it can decide what the President is and is not allowed to do. The authoritarian shift here isn’t toward Trump; it’s toward John Roberts and Samuel Alito.
This ruling is overwhelmingly bad in a number of major and obvious ways. But there is one silver lining, if we can hold out that long. The Supreme Court just handed any future Democratic Party President the power to work around federal court rulings as well. So if we can win the midterms and then win in 2028 by too large a margin for anyone to steal it, our next President will have broader powers for trying to put the nation back together.
