The frustration President Trump feels about the Supreme Court is reaching a boiling point — and the justices’ patience with the president is evaporating. That sets up an epic battle of wills, constitutional authority, and power.
After the Supreme Court issued an emergency order in the wee hours of Saturday morning directing the Trump administration to halt all deportations of immigrants being held at a northern Texas detention facility under the Alien Enemies Act, Trump took to his Truth Social account to express his displeasure.
“My team is fantastic, doing an incredible job, however, they are being stymied at every turn by even the U.S. Supreme Court, which I have such great respect for, but which seemingly doesn’t want me to send violent criminals and terrorists back to Venezuela, or any other Country, for that matter,” Trump wrote in a Monday morning post.
Advertisement
It wasn’t just the weekend emergency order that was under Trump’s skin. There was also an earlier ruling by the court requiring everyone facing deportation be first given adequate notice and an opportunity to have their claims heard in court — including an opportunity to argue that the wartime law does not apply to them because America isn’t at war with the countries of which they are nationals.
“We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years,” Trump wrote in the post, essentially making the case that he should be above the law because obeying the law is time-consuming. “We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of Illegals we are sending out of the Country. Such a thing is not possible to do. What a ridiculous situation we are in. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Advertisement
It is clear from the timing — justices, like the rest of us, like to sleep, so an order issued overnight on a weekend is unusual in its urgency — that the court is becoming increasingly convinced of the administration’s likely willingness to flout court orders. While the order earlier this month requiring those facing deportation be given due process also admonished lower courts to give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs,” the most recent directive was, well, more direct.
“The Government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this Court,” the court’s order read. The period in the sentence might as well have been an exclamation point. The justices didn’t even wait for the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to rule on an appeal by the ACLU on the detainees’ behalf before issuing the prohibition. For the justices, that screams urgency.
Is that a sign that the justices are willing to stand up to Trump in a way they haven’t yet? The New Yorker’s Ruth Marcus thinks so. She called the overnight order an example of “clarity plus backbone.”
I hope she’s right. As I’ve written before, if the Supreme Court doesn’t step in to uphold the words of the law and Constitution, it would not only give Trump the powers of a king, it would nullify its own power. And we need checks and balances more than ever now.
Advertisement
This is an excerpt from The Gavel, a newsletter about the Supreme Court from columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Sign up to get The Gavel in your inbox every Wednesday evening.
Kimberly Atkins Stohr is a columnist for the Globe. She may be reached at kimberly.atkinsstohr@globe.com. Follow her @KimberlyEAtkins.
