Immunity Wasn’t Enough. Supremes Void Checks and Balances for Trump.

yet quake in fear of retaliation by Trump should they stray from absolute fealty. Congress now only exists to do his bidding. If that's not apparent, one need only watch them frantically work all this weekend trying to pass Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" by the July 4th deadline set by feared leader.

As for the Supreme Court, its decision to shut down its own brethren in the judiciary system, while bestowing immunity and impunity upon President Trump, leaves nothing to hold him in check. “Boy, is there now an incentive to just do whatever you want”, said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia.

It was a breathtaking win for the administration. Our scrupulously impartial attorney general, Pam Bondi, had this to say:

"No longer will we have rogue judges striking down President Trump's policies across the entire nation. They tried to turn district courts into the imperial judiciary. They tried to seize the executive branch's power, and they can not do that. No longer. No longer."

A district court judge can no longer think of himself "an emperor over this administration's executive powers".

The president was jubilant if incoherent:

"Taking power away from these absolutely crazy radical left judges is a tremendous, this is such a big day. It only takes bad power away from judges, it realy doesn't take, it takes bad power, sick power, and unfair power."

injuntivitis

Injunctions thwart a president's agenda; presidents of both parties hate them. The argument is, why should a single district judge have the power to halt an action across the entire nation? Far more injunctions have been decreed during Trump's few months in office because he is an outlaw, having trampled so many statutes. Professor Frost noted that…

"It is particularly interesting they issued this ruling during Trump's presidency, not during Biden's or Obama's when these issues came up…and also it has to be said that President Trump has…engaged in more unilateral rewriting of law than his predecessors."

Doesn't Justice Amy Coney Barrett know this? How dizzy could she be, she who authored the majority opinion, for writing, “No one disputes that the executive has a duty to follow the law", while voting to clear the deck for Trump's law-breaking.

The six conservative justices leave nothing to take the place of an injunction, nothing to halt an illegal action, no construct whereby they might have required, say, an immediate review by an appeals court to void a universal injunction or allow it to go forward. To the contrary, their majority opinion restricts the district courts to only decide for or against the plaintiff who brought the case and no further.

The justices suggest that class action lawsuits remain an option. They have allowed a scant 30-day window for the district courts to mount class actions. Two states — Maryland and New Hampshire — were at the ready to do so, but by the time the slow and difficult process of building classes comes together for others who make the attempt, the damage is long since done. Trump's actions will have become embedded — just think of his denying visas for foreign students to attend Harvard and other universities. And as one might expect, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito warned that "scrupulous adherence to the rigors” of the rules for class actions would be applied, in Alito's words, and litigants had best “carefully heed this court’s guidance” else “this court will continue to be ‘duty bound’ to intervene”, warned Thomas. That they saw fit to speak out beyond the majority opinion says they will pick every nit to crush any class action that attempts to stymie Trump's rule. The Supreme Court itself tightened rules to quash class actions a few years back.

The case before the Court was the challenge to Trump's executive order canceling the automatic American citizenship endowed to anyone born in the United States — "birthright citizenship". The Court's vacating the injunction that halted Trump's edict now opens the door for the 28 states that, by virtue of their not challenging Trump's executive order, may have indicated an intent to deny citizenship to the newborn of undocumented parents, or perhaps even void the citizenship of those born past decades. The Court has made another chaos ruling, splitting the country into 50 pieces, much as did the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

It says a lot that the Court left open the challenge to birthright citizenship, guaranteed as it is by the black letter law of the Constitution it is the Court's job to defend. The Fourteenth Amendment says:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

Why didn't the Court slam the door on any challenges to the certainty of those words? The Amendment granted citizenship to Black Americans after the Civil War to block the Confederate states from denying civil rights to former slaves. Will the right-wing of the Court argue that the Amendment has no further application than former slaves? That's Trump's view, a Constitution with self-liquidating time limits: "This had to do with the babies of slaves, very obviously”, he avers. The simple clarity of the Amendment makes no such reservation.

Or might the Court attempt to twist the words "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" into something other than (foreign diplomats and to some extent indigenous American tribes excepted) we are all subject to the same jurisdiction — citizens, migrants, visitors — should we run afoul of the law. The delay in throwing out the birthright citizenship case suggests that the Court is looking for ways around parts of the Constitution that Donald Trump wants expunged.

The Court has cleared the path to tyranny.