Politics
Trump Publicly Criticizes The Three Justices He Personally Appointed For Not Ruling His Way
By Mor Michael, . BSN Network. Satire.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Supreme Court opened its new term Monday with a docket that includes immigration enforcement, AR-15 restrictions, religious liberty exemptions, climate change lawsuits, and election rules, which is either the most consequential term in a generation or a pilot episode that got greenlit too fast.
What the Court does not have, as of Monday morning, is the support of the man who made three of its nine seats possible.
President Trump has spent recent weeks publicly criticizing Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett following rulings that went against his administration, a strategy legal scholars describe as unprecedented, and that anyone who has ever hired a contractor and then yelled at them on Yelp will find immediately recognizable.
"These are people I fought for," Trump said at a campaign-style event last month. "I went through hell for some of them. Hell. And now I'm reading these decisions and I'm like, what is this? What are we doing?"
Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing alone lasted four days, generated approximately nine million think pieces, and ended with a vote of 50 to 48, the narrowest confirmation margin in modern Court history. Trump described it at the time as "a great day for America." He has since revised that assessment.
The Court, for its part, has not responded. Courts do not respond. That appears to be making things worse.
The new term's cases were assembled before anyone knew Trump would return to office, which means several of them directly involve his own executive orders. Immigration enforcement actions. Visa revocations. Deportation procedures. The justices he publicly called weak will now sit in a room and decide whether the policies he is publicly calling essential are constitutional. Nobody in Washington is calling this awkward, which means everyone in Washington knows it is.
On the Democratic side, the response to all of this has been to propose restructuring the Court itself, a plan that has variously included term limits, additional seats, and a mandatory ethics code, all of which are good ideas that will absolutely never happen before the midterms, or after them, or probably ever.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who has been trying to regulate the Supreme Court's ethics practices since roughly the Obama administration, expressed cautious optimism this week. His office did not return a request for comment on what cautious optimism has gotten him so far.
The cases themselves, for anyone keeping score at home, include a direct challenge to state-level AR-15 restrictions, which places the Second Amendment question before a Court that includes three Trump appointees, one of whom was confirmed partly on the strength of her commitment to originalism, and all three of whom the President has recently described, in public, as disappointments.
The religious liberty cases involve employers, employees, and the question of how far a sincerely held belief can travel before it becomes a human resources problem. There is no clean answer. There will not be a clean answer. Six hundred words of briefing and a unanimous opinion would still leave someone furious in a parking lot in Ohio.
The climate lawsuits, brought by several states against major oil companies, ask whether state courts can hear cases that federal law might preempt. The oil companies say no. The states say yes. The Court will say something in June and everyone will spend the summer explaining why the other side misread it.
The justices themselves, according to people who work near them and speak only to say they cannot speak, are aware that both political parties currently view them as a problem to be solved. The institution that is supposed to be above politics is being discussed in both parties almost exclusively in terms of what it can be made to do next.
Trump has not publicly criticized Chief Justice John Roberts yet this term. The week is young.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.dailywire.com/news/guns-immigration-and-religious-liberty-inside-the-supreme-courts-new-term