SCOTUS, US judiciary, DOJ, and justice 11 April 2025-

5-6 November
A Trump Supreme Court tariff defeat would add to trade uncertainty
Trump tariffs met tough scrutiny in US Supreme Court oral arguments
Analysts say chances rising of IEEPA tariffs being struck down
Trump officials to tap other trade laws to keep tariffs if court voids them
Any potential US tariff refund process seen lengthy and “a mess”
(Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court’s tough questioning of President Donald Trump’s global tariffs fueled increased speculation that they will be struck down, but raised the specter of additional chaos as he is widely expected to shift to other trade tactics in the wake of an adverse ruling.
Key Justices Cast a Skeptical Eye on Trump’s Tariffs
The Supreme Court is considering whether the president acted legally when he used a 1977 emergency statute to impose tariffs on scores of countries.
(NYT) A majority of Supreme Court justices on Wednesday asked skeptical questions about President Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose tariffs on imports from nearly every U.S. trading partner, casting doubt on a centerpiece of the administration’s second-term agenda.
The outcome of the case, which could be decided within weeks or months, has immense economic and political implications for U.S. businesses, consumers and the president’s trade policy.
Several members of the court’s conservative majority, including Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, joined the liberal justices in sharply questioning the Trump administration’s assertion that it has the power to unilaterally impose tariffs without congressional approval.
Justice Barrett, who is seen as a key vote, questioned the scope of Mr. Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which she described as “across the board.”
Neil Gorsuch delivered the most withering questions in the tariffs case
The conservative Supreme Court justice was tough on Trump’s lawyers and spoke up for a fading Congress.
(WaPo) Gorsuch was Trump’s first high-court nominee, and by some measures the most conservative. He has joined the decisions Democrats most abhor, including overturning Roe v. Wade and granting presidents immunity from some criminal prosecutions. But on Wednesday, he was the justice who subjected Solicitor General D. John Sauer to the most withering questioning on Trump’s usurpation of Congress’s authority over trade.

16 October
John Bolton Indicted Over Handling of Classified Information
Mr. Bolton, a Trump aide turned critic, is part of a string of presidential foes to become prosecutorial targets. But his case gained momentum in the Biden administration.
7 October
How Trump Is Using the Justice Department to Target His Enemies
By Alan Feuer and Lily Boyce
(NYT) From the moment Donald J. Trump began his campaign to return to the White House, he has expressed a clear desire to seek vengeance against his perceived enemies. In the last few weeks, the pressure campaign has intensified with two of his foes — James Comey and Letitia James — now indicted.
Back in power, Mr. Trump has weaponized the Justice Department to his own ends, critics say, in a more direct manner than any president since the Nixon era. The department, now led by Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyers, has fired dozens of career prosecutors, many of whom had worked on cases involving Mr. Trump. And the president and his allies have targeted or pushed out several U.S. attorneys as he seeks quick movement on cases involving a number of his political adversaries.
The indictment of John Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser whose relationship with the president soured, raises fresh questions about the extent to which Mr. Trump is using the department to punish those he dislikes. But his investigation is different from Mr. Comey’s and Ms. James’s in that the Biden administration was also investigating Mr. Bolton and had gathered what former U.S. intelligence officials have described as troubling evidence.

10 October
The Beginning of a New DOJ
Trump’s quest for retribution is remaking the department.
By Will Gottsegen
(The Atlantic) … Trump installed a new prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia late last month, after the previous prosecutor refused to go after [former FBI Director James] Comey and [New York State Attorney General Letitia] James. This prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, is now bringing these seemingly retributive cases. In the Comey and James cases, she presented the indictment to the grand jury solo; that’s extremely unusual. And she is also the only person whose signature is on the indictment (typically you’d see the signature of at least one assistant U.S. attorney who is working on the case), which makes it pretty clear that she is channeling the White House’s wishes here.
… The standard for getting an indictment before a grand jury is not high, making it an authority that is really easy to abuse. What the Justice Department has done to prevent that is to build up these kinds of guardrails of internal guidelines that tell prosecutors how to behave. The Justice Department’s internal manual says you should only bring a case before a grand jury if you think you can win a conviction at trial. Prosecutors who were abiding by that seem to have reached the conclusion that there was simply nothing to the James case or the Comey case, and therefore those cases shouldn’t be brought.
… In the post-Watergate era, a thicket of norms and practices has grown up around the importance of maintaining law enforcement’s independence from the president. The department really built up this ethos, which presidents have more or less respected until Trump, that the Justice Department is part of the executive branch, it is constitutionally under the control of the president, but there are strong, normative restrictions around the president using the department as a weapon.
Trump has been very effective in reshaping public perceptions of the Justice Department as something that can be used in this way.
… Right now, there are fewer mechanisms than there used to be for policing Trump’s actions, thanks in significant part to the Supreme Court’s ruling on the immunity case, which basically said, We think that the president has the constitutional authority to tell the Justice Department what to do. And so Trump actually has a pretty strong case that what he is doing is constitutional, whether or not it is a good idea.

9 October
Stephen Miller mocked for ‘rebellion against logic’ by law expert after bizarre meltdown
(Raw Story) A prominent former federal prosecutor tore into a top White House advisor on Thursday, blasting the aide’s comment that a judge committed “legal insurrection” as an “absurd” “self-cancelling oxymoron.”
… Miller’s remarks caught the attention of Preet Bharara, a former federal prosecutor who served as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2009 to 2017.
“Trump adviser Stephen Miller … recently took to X to label that federal judge’s ruling itself a ‘legal insurrection.’ What the hell even is that? It’s a self-cancelling oxymoron, as absurd as saying nonviolent war or lawful terrorism. By definition, an insurrection is a violent uprising against authority. Legal process, on the other hand, is the authority of law and action,” he wrote in a Substack email.
“You can’t have a legal insurrection any more than you can have a peaceful war. The phrase collapses under its own weight. It’s nonsense and dangerous nonsense at that. It’s a rebellion against logic and an insult to the rule of law, all in two words, but it fits a pattern,” he continued.

8 October
Chief Justice Roberts Warns of ‘Potential Disaster’ in Supreme Court Case
(Newsweek) Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts warned of “potential disaster” in determining that the number of votes received should impact a candidate’s ability to pursue legal action related to mail-in ballots.

6 October
Judge Diane Goodstein’s Home Burns To Ground After Ruling Against Trump
Why It Matters
(Newsweek) The fire comes weeks after Goodstein issued a ruling against the Trump administration.
Authorities have not yet determined the cause of the blaze, and there is currently no evidence to suggest it was an act of arson. The incident quickly sparked online conversation hostility toward members of the judiciary who rule against Trump and his allies

4-6 October
Supreme Court Returns to Face Trump Tests of Presidential Power
As the justices return to the bench Monday, the court will confront a series of cases central to the president’s agenda.
(NYT) …this summer’s traditional recess was anything but a cooling-off period.
Instead, the justices churned through emergency requests from the Trump administration that sharply divided the court along ideological lines, in a reflection of how much President Trump’s agenda has consumed their calendar.
The president’s policies will have an even more central role in the term that begins on Monday, after the justices agreed to take three cases with broad consequences for his agenda. In November, they will hear arguments about the legality of Mr. Trump’s sweeping tariffs, a centerpiece of his trade strategy. In December, they will consider Mr. Trump’s efforts to wrest control of independent agencies, and in January, his attempt to fire a member of the Federal Reserve Board.
By the time the term ends in June, there could be others. Already, the administration has asked the court to take up a pair of cases testing the legality of the president’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, an issue that raises fundamental questions about what it means to be an American.
New Supreme Court term confronts justices with Trump’s aggressive assertion of presidential power
(AP) A monumental Supreme Court term begins Monday with major tests of presidential power on the agenda along with pivotal cases on voting and the rights of LGBTQ people. The court’s conservative majority has far been receptive, at least in preliminary rulings, to many of President Donald Trump’s aggressive assertions of authority. They could be more skeptical when they conduct an in-depth examination of some Trump policies, including his imposition of tariffs and his desired restrictions on birthright citizenship. Read more.

1 October
Supreme Court Refuses to Let Trump Oust Fed’s Cook for Now
The US Supreme Court refused to allow President Donald Trump to immediately oust Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook while she sues to keep her job, dealing a setback to his efforts to exert more control over the central bank.
The order issued Wednesday means Cook can remain in her position at least until the justices rule after hearing arguments in the case in January. The economist has remained on the job since late August, when Trump said he would remove her over mortgage fraud allegations that she’s denied.

30 September
‘Drunk with power’: Author tells how Chief Justice John Roberts ‘corrupted’ Supreme Court
(Raw Story) As chief counsel for nominations with the Senate Judiciary Committee from 2002 to 2005, [Lisa Graves] anticipated Roberts’ commitment to “advancing a right-wing political agenda through the judiciary,” she writes in her new book: Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights.
With President George W. Bush having two Supreme Court vacancies to fill, Roberts was considered a “bankable vote for the Right’s political agenda” and was supported by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, the activist and fundraising impresario now widely considered the architect of the Court’s 6-3 conservative majority, Graves said.
From rulings in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which ushered in an era of unfettered dark money influence on elections, to Trump v. United States, which granted President Donald Trump “unprecedented immunity … to act as though he is above the law,” Graves argues Roberts facilitated the politicized state of a court that’s supposed to be impartial, but is now packed with Republican “partisan loyalists.”
“Roberts had conveyed this image that he was going to be a fair umpire as part of his nomination, but he has not been a fair umpire,” said Graves, now executive director of public policy watchdog group True North Research.

25-30 September
The latest target of Trump’s abuse of power has much to answer for — just not this
(Raw Story) For principled critics of James Comey, the fraudulent and politicized indictment of him issued by a federal grand jury in Virginia is wrapped in layers of bitter irony. It would be entirely fair to suggest that the former FBI director brought this illegitimate prosecution upon himself.
His new jeopardy is only one facet of the unfolding national disaster instigated by his own actions in October 2016. In those days before a presidential election, he made a fateful decision to disclose a renewed FBI probe of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and “her emails” (which ultimately proved to contain no classified information, as the Trump administration officially acknowledged many months later).
It was a choice that violated legal ethics and Justice Department rules, and has permanently damaged the institutions of law he claimed to be protecting.
The sparse indictment of Comey by Trump’s Justice Department belies a complicated backstory
(AP) — The indictment of former FBI Director James Comey is only two pages and alleges he falsely testified to Congress in 2020 about authorizing someone to be an anonymous source in news stories.
That brevity belies a convoluted and contentious backstory. The events at the heart of the disputed testimony are among the most heavily scrutinized in the bureau’s history, generating internal and congressional investigations that have produced thousands of pages of records and transcripts.
Those investigations were focused on how Comey and his agents conducted high-stakes inquiries into whether Russia was helping Republican Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 presidential race against Democrat Hillary Clinton and her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.
Here are some things to know about that period and how they fit into Comey’s indictment:
Why the case against James Comey may end in humiliation for Trump’s DOJ
“This case should never go to trial,” one former prosecutor said.
(Politico) The indictment of James Comey, ordered up by President Donald Trump in a breathtaking breach of Justice Department independence, is being welcomed with glee in MAGA circles.
But the case against the former FBI director and longtime Trump nemesis may quickly end in disappointment — and even humiliation — for the prosecutor who was conscripted by the president to bring the charges.
The issues that could doom the case include the overt political pressure by Trump to bring the indictment, Halligan’s own inexperience, peculiarities in the indictment itself and even a five-year-old technology issue.
Comey Turns to Blagojevich Prosecutor for Trump Criminal Defense
(Bloomberg Law) Patrick Fitzgerald is advising Comey, who was indicted Thursday on charges related to obstruction of justice. Their ties reach back decades to when both lawyers worked as federal prosecutors in Manhattan.
Fitzgerald led prosecutions against Illinois governors Rod Blagojevich and George Ryan. He also steered an investigation that resulted in criminal charges against Scooter Libby, chief of staff to ex-Vice President.
Meet the Lawyers Set to Defend Comey
Comey is represented by Patrick J. Fitzgerald and Jessica Carmichael [who] previously served in the Federal Public Defender’s Office in Alexandria, Virginia, before becoming a founding partner of Carmichael Ellis & Brock.
Genius Trump Attorney Submitted Wrong Comey Indictment Docs to Judge
Trump-installed DOJ attorney Lindsey Halligan is having a tough time with the indictment from the very start.
(New Republic) Interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan got a grand jury to indict former FBI Director James Comey on two counts. But Halligan showed her inexperience Thursday as the jurors rejected a third charge, and she submitted the wrong documents to the judge.
It was Halligan’s fourth day on the job. She was formerly Trump’s personal lawyer, and recently led the president’s efforts to de-emphasize slavery at the Smithsonian museums.
“At Professional Risk”: Charging Comey Could Land Lindsey Halligan in Hot Water
(Vanity Fair) An ethics professor from Halligan’s law school warns that if she pursues charges against the former FBI director without probable cause, she could be disciplined by the Florida bar.
‘Let’s have a trial’: Comey proclaims innocence as Trump revels in grand jury indictment he demanded
A grand jury indicted the former FBI director on two felony charges stemming from congressional testimony he gave in September 2020.
The case was assigned Thursday to U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff, a Biden appointee who is set to arraign Comey on Oct. 9.
Comey has selected as his defense attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, a longtime friend, former U.S. Attorney in Chicago and former DOJ special counsel.
“Jim Comey denies the charges filed today in their entirety. We look forward to vindicating him in the courtroom,” Fitzgerald said in a statement.
Comey’s indictment immediately triggered alarm — inside and outside the Justice Department — that Trump had effectively ordered the prosecution of a political adversary, exacting retribution against a longtime foe he blames for his own years of criminal prosecution and impeachment.

26 September
US Supreme Court lets Trump withhold $4 billion in foreign aid
Administration challenged judge’s spending order
Supreme Court has often backed Trump emergency requests
The three liberal justice dissent from the decision
(Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court sided again on Friday with Donald Trump, allowing his administration to withhold about $4 billion in foreign aid authorized by Congress for the current fiscal year as the Republican president pursues his “America First” agenda.
The case raises questions involving the degree to which a president has the authority to rescind funds Congress has appropriated for programs that do not align with his policies. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse.
“If those laws require obligation of the money, and if Congress has not by rescission or other action relieved the Executive of that duty, then the Executive must comply,” Kagan wrote in a dissent joined by fellow liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The administration said in court papers that the money it targeted is “contrary to U.S. foreign policy,” reflecting Trump’s effort to scale back U.S. assistance abroad as part of an “America First” agenda. Trump also has moved to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, the main U.S. foreign aid agency.

22 September
The Justice Department Had 36 Lawyers Fighting Corruption Full-Time. Under Trump, It’s Down to Two.
The Public Integrity Section is the latest casualty in the administration’s attacks on Nixon-era good-government reforms.
All the other lawyers in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section have either quit under pressure, resigned in protest or been detailed to other matters across the nation, according to several sources who spoke with NOTUS. The section has also lost all but one of more than a dozen paralegals.
“To me, it just screams that public corruption cases are no longer a priority of DOJ,” said Andrew Tessman, a prosecutor who left the Justice Department this month. “I cannot understand why we would want to restrict that section.”
Sources with knowledge of the section’s operations say the reduction in staff means it can no longer advise the 94 U.S. attorneys’ offices around the country on how to build cases against crooked government officials — let alone prosecute new cases on its own.

21 July
This Is the Presidency John Roberts Has Built
The country is witnessing the creation of an all-powerful institution, and one man is responsible.
(The Atlantic) No one on the Supreme Court has gone further to enable Donald Trump’s extreme exercise of presidential power than the chief justice of the United States, John Roberts. Associate justices have also written some important opinions shaping executive power, and the Court has issued ever more important unsigned orders, but the most transformative opinions—the opinions that directly legitimize Trump’s unprecedented uses of power—are Roberts’s handiwork. This is not happenstance. Under Supreme Court practice, the most senior justice in the majority—which is always the chief justice when he so votes—determines who will write the main opinion. Roberts reserved these milestones for himself.
… In May, the Court held that Trump orders removing two federal officials at key independent agencies could remain in place while the issue of their legality makes its way through the judiciary. In June, it allowed the administration to proceed with so-called third-country deportations—that is, deporting undocumented noncitizens summarily to countries to which they had no prior connection, but where they might well face torture. On July 8, the Court effectively allowed Trump to proceed with a massive restructuring of the federal executive branch, notwithstanding that the power over executive-branch organization belongs to Congress, not the president. On July 14, the conservative majority allowed the sabotaging of the Department of Education to proceed. Trump’s use of executive power is not a distortion of the Roberts Court’s theory of the presidency; it is the Court’s theory of the presidency, come to life.

17 July
The Supreme Court, the Deep State, and Jeffrey Epstein
Robert Reich
In McMahon v. New York, the Supremes gave Trump a simple way to revoke federal spending authorized by Congress: just fire everyone responsible for implementing that spending.
The high court is allowing Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon to fire over half the people who work for the Department of Education until there’s a full hearing on the constitutionality of their action. But by then it will be too late to save much of the department.
Note that the Supreme Court made this astounding decision on its so-called “shadow docket,” where it doesn’t even have to explain itself (the only record we have is Justice Sotomayor’s dissent).
No matter that Congress created the Department of Education; apparently, Trump can effectively end it. No matter that Congress in the 1974 Impoundment Control Act prohibits a president from unilaterally refusing to spend money that has been authorized by Congress; apparently, Trump can disregard the act.
Trump now has unbridled power to repeal federal laws by the simple expedient of firing federal employees who implement them.

14-15 July
The Supreme Court Won’t Explain Itself
In their decision allowing the Trump administration to dismantle the Department of Education, the justices didn’t offer one word of reasoning.
By Quinta Jurecic
(The Atlantic) The Supreme Court is allowing Donald Trump to dismantle the Department of Education. But it won’t say why.
Yesterday—almost exactly a week after the Court lifted a lower court’s block on Trump’s plans to fire thousands of federal employees—a majority of the justices decided to give the president the go-ahead for a different set of mass layoffs. Last week, the Court provided a handful of sentences that vaguely gestured at why it might have allowed the administration to move forward. This week, it offered nothing at all. There’s something taunting, almost bullying, about this lack of reasoning, as if the conservative supermajority is saying to the country: You don’t even deserve an explanation.
… Despite a frustrated dissent from the Court’s three liberal justices, the majority’s unsigned emergency ruling allowed Trump to carry out his plans while the litigation in the lower courts continues. “The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave.” She went on: “The President must take care that the laws are faithfully executed, not set out to dismantle them.”
The odd protocol of the Court’s emergency docket—sometimes called the “shadow docket”—means that the underlying question of whether Trump has the legal authority to tear apart the Education Department remains unresolved, even as a majority of the justices have allowed him to carry out his plans. Courts—even the Supreme Court—could still find the department’s dismantling illegal down the road. But in the meantime, the agency will have been devastated, perhaps irreparably.
Supreme Court will allow mass layoffs at Education Department
The Supreme Court is allowing President Donald Trump to put his plan to dismantle the Education Department back on track and go through with laying off nearly 1,400 employees.
(AP) With the three liberal justices in dissent, the court on Monday paused an order from U.S. District Judge Myong Joun in Boston, who issued a preliminary injunction reversing the layoffs and calling into question the broader plan.
The high court action enables the administration to resume work on winding down the department, one of Trump’s biggest campaign promises.

28 June
With Supreme Court Ruling, Another Check on Trump’s Power Fades
The court tied the hands of judges at a time when Congress has been cowed and internal executive branch constraints have been steamrolled.
(NYT) The Supreme Court ruling barring judges from swiftly blocking government actions, even when they may be illegal, is yet another way that checks on executive authority have eroded as President Trump pushes to amass more power.
The decision on Friday, by a vote of 6 to 3, could allow Mr. Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship to take effect in some parts of the country — even though every court that has looked at the directive has ruled it unconstitutional. That means some infants born to undocumented immigrants or foreign visitors without green cards could be denied citizenship-affirming documentation like Social Security numbers.
But the diminishing of judicial authority as a potential counterweight to exercises of presidential power carries implications far beyond the issue of citizenship. The Supreme Court is effectively tying the hands of lower-court judges at a time when they are trying to respond to a steady geyser of aggressive executive branch orders and policies.
The full scope of the ruling remains to be seen given that it will not take effect for 30 days. It is possible that plaintiffs and lower-court judges will expand the use of class-action lawsuits as a different path to orders with a nationwide effect. Such an option, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion, would be proper so long as they obey procedural limits for class-action cases.
… The supermajority also has blessed Mr. Trump’s gambit in firing Democratic members of independent agency commissions before their terms were up. The conservative justices have made clear that they are prepared to overturn a longstanding precedent allowing Congress to establish specialized agencies to be run by panels whose members cannot be arbitrarily fired by presidents.

18 June
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda (Update)
By Alex Lemonides, Seamus Hughes, Mattathias Schwartz, Lazaro Gamio and Camille Baker
(NYT) The legal clashes over President Trump’s blizzard of executive actions are intensifying, with new lawsuits and fresh rulings emerging day and night.
As of June 18, at least 189 of those rulings have at least temporarily paused some of the administration’s initiatives.
The dozens of lawsuits fall into these categories:
Immigration; Birthright citizenship; DOGE; Firings; Climate and environment; Budget freezes; Trans rights; Federal access restrictions; Tariffs; Other suits.

14 June
President Trump takes on the Judiciary (YouTube)
(GZERO media) From Supreme Court rulings on deportations and birthright citizenship to federal troop deployments in Los Angeles, the courts are becoming ground zero for challenges to executive authority. Emily Bazelon tells Ian Bremmer that the judiciary can’t save American democracy alone—and with Congress sidelined and the DOJ increasingly politicized, checks and balances are wearing thin. “The judges cannot save the country from an authoritarian president… by themselves.”

5 June
Trump vs. the courts: A constitutional crisis approaches
by James D. Zirin, opinion contributor
(The Hill) The Trump presidency is mired in litigation, facing some 250 lawsuits over its hailstorm of executive orders, substantially more orders than had been filed at this point during his first term. The unprecedented flood of legal action has for the moment scotched some of Trump’s signature priorities, but courts have cleared others to move forward while litigation continues.
Judges have temporarily frozen Trump’s efforts to punish elite law firms and Harvard University, as well as to deport immigrants without due process. Courts have allowed Trump to fire independent regulators while litigation continues. The Court of International Trade blocked the 10 percent tariffs Trump imposed on all foreign products, as well as higher levies applied to imports from several dozen nations, but an appellate court stayed the ruling for the time being.

4 June
Trump keeps being overruled by judges. And his temper tantrums won’t stop that
Steven Greenhouse
A word of advice to Trump: dozens of judges keep ruling against you because you’ve flouted the law more than any previous president
(The Guardian) In seeking to put their fingers in the dike to stop the US president’s lawlessness, federal judges have issued a startling high number of rulings, more than 185, to block or temporarily pause moves by the Trump administration.
Livid about all this, White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has railed against “judicial activism”, while Trump adviser Stephen Miller carps about a “judicial coup”. As for Trump, the grievance-is-me president has gone into full conniption-mode, moaning about anti-Trump rulings and denouncing “USA-hating judges”.

17 May
Robert Reich: Trump vs. the Supremes
Yesterday’s decision by the Supreme Court needs to be understood in this larger context. The coming showdown between Trump and the Supreme Court will be the largest stress test yet of our constitutional system.
Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump regime cannot deport a group of Venezuelans while the matter is being litigated in the courts. The regime can’t merely allege that they’re members of a violent gang; it must give them sufficient time to challenge their deportations. And it can’t merely assume that the eighteenth-century Alien Enemies Act gives it authority. Both the facts of these cases and the law have to be hashed out in lower courts.
The justices called the detainees’ interests “particularly weighty” because of the risk of removal to a notorious prison in El Salvador where the migrants could face indefinite detention.
Score a big one for the rule of law.
Of course, Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined by Clarence Thomas. The two have moved so far into the dense fog of irrational right-wing legal blather that they have lost all credibility. …
Trump’s outrage has three unfortunate consequences.
It establishes that Trump and the nation’s highest court are on a collision course on what Trump considers a central goal of his regime — what he “was elected to do.”
It also increases the possibility that Trump will do what JD Vance and others in the White House have urged him to do all along — announce that he will not be bound by the Court’s rulings.
This would be momentous. If enough Americans (and their constituents) are horrified by this — as we should be — it could spell the end of Trump. Openly defying a Supreme Court decision is surely enough to warrant an impeachment in the House and conviction in the Senate.
… Attorney General Pam Bondi says the regime will target judges who oppose the president’s growing immigration crackdown:
“What has happened to our judiciary is beyond me. The [judges] are deranged is all I can think of. I think some of these judges think that they are beyond and above the law. They are not…”.
Judges and justices cannot be “beyond and above the law” because they are the final arbiters of the law. They have also become the last firewall against a Trump dictatorship — which presumably is why the regime is now taking them on.

11 April
The Supreme Court just set up a potentially huge clash with Trump
The court issued a major ruling against Trump’s deportation efforts, but that’s far from the end of it.
(WaPo) The U.S. Supreme Court late Thursday delivered the administration its most substantial court loss of President Donald Trump’s second term. …
The Supreme Court upheld a lower-court ruling that ordered the administration to “facilitate” the return of a Maryland man whom the administration has admitted it wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Very notably, the high court order featured no dissents, even from the most Trump-aligned justices. That made the court at least appear unanimous in ruling against the administration.
The administration had argued that it has no power to return Kilmar Abrego García because the Salvadoran immigrant is no longer in U.S. custody. But the case raised concerns that a favorable ruling for the administration by the justices would effectively allow it to deport people — even illegally — before courts could weigh in on individual cases. Some critics have even posited that such a ruling could green-light unreviewable deportations of U.S. citizens who run afoul of Trump, as the court’s three liberal justices noted Thursday. …
It’s not impossible to see the administration making or at least telegraphing only a token effort to get Abrego García back. It could then throw up its hands, thus challenging the courts — and even the Supreme Court — to take a more significant stand that could test their desire to avoid dictating foreign policy actions.
In many ways, that’s a clash the administration has seemed to crave.