Trump Admin SCOTUS cases | SCOTUS blocks AEA deportations

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The first of many has reached SCOTUS …

US supreme court temporarily blocks firing of head of federal whistleblower protection office​

Trump administration is seeking to oust Hampton Dellinger, head of the office of special counsel

www.theguardian.com

US supreme court temporarily blocks firing of head of federal whistleblower protection office

Trump administration is seeking to oust Hampton Dellinger, head of the office of special counsel
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

“… The justices said in an unsigned order that Hampton Dellinger, head of the office of special counsel, could remain in his job at least until Wednesday. That’s when a lower-court order temporarily protecting him expires.

…With a bare majority of five justices, the high court neither granted nor rejected the administration’s plea to immediately remove him. Instead, the court held the request in abeyance, noting that the order expires in just a few days.

US district judge Amy Berman Jackson has scheduled a Wednesday hearing over whether to extend her order keeping Dellinger at his post. The justices could return to the case depending on what she decides.

Conservative justices Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito sided with the Trump administration, doubting whether courts have the authority to restore to office someone the president has fired. Acknowledging that some presidentially appointed officials have contested their removal, Gorsuch wrote that “those officials have generally sought remedies like backpay, not injunctive relief like reinstatement”.

Liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have rejected the administration’s request.

…The new administration already has indicated it would seek to entirely overturn the Humphrey’s Executor decision, which held that Franklin D Roosevelt could not arbitrarily fire a Federal Trade Commission member during his presidency. Trump has taken aim at people who are on the multimember boards that run an alphabet soup of federal agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit System Review Board.

Like Dellinger, they were confirmed to specific terms in office and the federal laws under which the agencies operate protect them from arbitrary firings. Lower courts have so far blocked some of those firings. …”
 

Feb 26 (Reuters) - U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Wednesday paused a federal judge's order requiring President Donald Trump's administration to pay foreign aid funds to contractors and grant recipients.
Roberts issued an interim order placing on hold Washington-based U.S. District Judge Amir Ali's action that had imposed a deadline of 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday night.
Roberts provided no rationale for the order, known as an administrative stay, which will give the court additional time to consider the administration's more formal request to block Ali's ruling.

Roberts asked for a response from the plaintiffs - organizations that contract with or receive grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department - by noon on Friday.
The order came after Trump's administration said in a court filing on Wednesday it had made final decisions terminating most U.S. foreign aid contracts and grants, while maintaining that it cannot meet Ali's court-ordered deadline.
The administration is cutting more than 90% of the U.S. Agency for International Development's foreign aid contracts and over $58 billion in overall U.S. assistance around the world, a State Department spokesperson said separately, calling the cuts part of Trump's "America First agenda."

The foreign aid funding dispute arose from a pair of lawsuits brought by the aid organizations, alleging that the agencies have illegally frozen all foreign aid payments.
 
Interesting that Roberts considers the status quo to be suspension of what is supposed to be happening.

:rolleyes:
 
GIFT LINK —> https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy...eb?st=UCci5A&reflink=mobilewebshare_permalink

“… Roberts’s order doesn’t resolve the dispute but gives the Supreme Court time to consider the administration’s claim that a lower court overstepped its authority when it ordered the government to quickly pay aid contractors for work completed before Feb. 13.

Still, it reflects the first substantive action the Supreme Court has taken in the deluge of litigation that has followed the Trump administration’s aggressive actions to remake the federal government.

Roberts gave aid organizations challenging the foreign-assistance freeze until Friday to file their response, suggesting that his order will remain in place at least into next week.

… On Feb. 13, a federal district court ordered contractors to be paid for work already performed, finding that the blanket freeze on foreign aid likely was unlawful, a temporary measure to protect them from injury while litigation over the dispute proceeds.

… The administration says it has complied with Ali’s temporary restraining order, but the plaintiff groups, including ones that work to contain AIDS and HIV in Africa, returned to the district court arguing that the government has found ways to flout the directive.

… Ali had denied a request by aid recipients to hold the administration in contempt but on Tuesday ordered that the government make the payments by Wednesday night.

In a Wednesday filing with the Supreme Court, the Trump administration’s lawyer, acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris, argued it was impossible to comply with Ali’s timeline.

“To be very clear, the government is committed to paying legitimate claims for work that was properly completed pursuant to intact obligations and supported by proper documentation,” Harris wrote.

“What the government cannot do is pay arbitrarily determined demands on an arbitrary timeline of the district court’s choosing or according to extra-contractual rules that the court has devised.” …”
 
CFordUNC said:
Click to expand...

Supreme Court rejects Trump administration's bid to avoid paying USAID contractors​

The Trump administration’s efforts to effectively dismantle the foreign aid agency led contractors to file suit claiming they are owed money.

www.nbcnews.com

Supreme Court rejects Trump administration's bid to avoid paying USAID contractors

The Trump administration’s efforts to effectively dismantle the foreign aid agency led contractors to file suit claiming they are owed money.
www.nbcnews.com www.nbcnews.com

“… The court delayed acting on the case for a week. In the meantime, the contractors have not been paid.

In an unsigned order, the court said that Ali's deadline for the immediate payment had now passed and the case is already proceeding in the district court, with more rulings to come.

As such, Ali "should clarify what obligations the government must fulfill" in order to comply with a temporary retraining order issued Feb. 13, the court said. Ali should consider "the feasibility of any compliance deadlines," the court added.

Four conservative justices dissented from the denial of the application, with Justice Samuel Alito writing that Ali did not have "unchecked power to compel the government to pay out ... 2 billion taxpayer dollars."

"I am stunned," Alito added.

The other dissenters were Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. …”
 
So some thoughts on this.

1. First, let me toot my horn a bit. This is exactly what I predicted would happen. Well, almost exactly. And I can't take too much credit, because I predicted with low confidence. Best you can do with this court. But still, I thought it would go down like this, and it did. I think that means I have a pretty good read on the situation. So what does this mean going forward?

I will probably have a lot of thoughts, so be warned now about post length.

2. Barrett dissented with the three liberals in the SF sewage case Monday, and is with the liberals again today. I think she's coming into focus now -- and for once it's good news. She's not an extremist. That's not to say that she adheres to no extreme views -- she does, as evidenced by her voting for immunity, among many other cases. But she hasn't shown a desire to push those views to their absolute breaking point. I won't say that she's demonstrating judicial restraint, but she certainly seems to believe in more restraint than the Terrible Three Plus One. In several cases now, she's staked out a sort of middle position. One wonders if it's intentional, to become the median justice and thus have outsized influence. Maybe it's genuine. Anyway, I think this is good news, although again it's relative to alternatives. She does not appear to be the fully baked and hardened ideologue we feared.

I say this in part because she's an active proponent of sovereign immunity arguments. And she rejected them here.

3. As I've said before, the administration is making it almost impossible for the courts to side with it. In theory, judges decide only the cases before them on the issues presented, but we know that's not true. They don't live in a vacuum. And they can see Trump taking a wrecking ball to the constitution. I go back to the citizenship question case. Roberts was all set to rule for the administration, because on a line-by-line basis, he seemed to take the administration's side on everything. But he looked at the big picture at the end, literally saying that the administration's story just doesn't quite add up. That's not a legal principle; that's a justice finally willing to see through the bullshit.

And that's what I expect to happen in these batch of cases (again, with low confidence). There is no way to analyze these cases in isolation. They are viewed against the backdrop of Trump running wild. I'm sure all of the Justices have ideas about Elon Musk and DOGE, probably not complimentary or supportive ones. That case isn't before them precisely, but there's no way they weren't thinking about that. They were probably thinking about the press conference with Zelensky (my guess is that the vote on this case came Friday afternoon). And at least five justices concluded: we are not letting the arsonist run free through the building dumping gasoline everywhere.

4. The stupidest thing the administration has done from a strategic standpoint was to include the Fed in the order claiming presidential authority to direct all independent agencies. They exempted the Fed's monetary policy arm, focusing on the bank regulation only. But there's no principled difference between bank regulation and monetary policy. If Trump controls the bank regulation, then he also controls monetary policy whenever he chooses to act on it. And central bank independence seems very important to the Court (as it should be!).

Again, that wasn't before them precisely in this case, but they are undoubtedly aware of it (certainly the clerks are). And at least two of the conservatives do not like what they see. The administration's story doesn't quite add up. It claims to be taking reasonable and responsible actions, but the actions say otherwise. This was a winnable case for the DOJ had it been presented on its own. But against the backdrop of ongoing, random destruction, it was very hard.

5. The Justices have spent a very long time arrogating power to themselves. One consistent theme across all of the Trump court's rulings (note: it didn't start with Gorsuch's ascension but that was an inflection point0 has been "rules that increase judicial power are good." It's the most power-hungry court I've ever seen. And having worked on that project for two decades, they aren't going to give it up so easily. I don't want to overstate the point: this was a 5-4 vote, with the worst of the power grabbers in dissent. Maybe they see their power grab as grabbing the power to anoint the emperor? But I just don't think the court will go down without a fight.
 
I was wondering if the best way to fight all this is for the companies that had contracts with the government to sue Trump for breaking the contracts.
 
6. I also predicted that the court would rule against Trump on the shadow docket early in his term -- that is, on cases like this one, argued and decided in a rushed timeline in an emergency posture. Roberts has to feel humiliated by Trump, and in any case, he has to restore confidence that he's not a partisan hack. Well, he's going to do that in his own mind; in reality his redemption would take years.

The Supreme Court also has a habit of teeing up "reasonable" opinions to give the moderates cover, before unleashing the most maximalist and indefensible positions at the end of the term. It's almost as if they look for the headlines from liberal publications saying things like, "Maybe The Supreme Court Isn't As Radical As We Feared", and they see this as cover for the dastardly deeds in the pipeline. That definitely happened two years ago; it happened last year to a certain extent.

So I guess the point here is that these smaller victories are important, but don't get your hopes too far up: they don't mean there aren't gut punches coming.

7. When I was teaching, I used to tell students about my apple cart test -- that is, how willing is a court to overturn the whole apple cart because someone presents them a new argument or theory that has such an effect. The Delaware corporate law courts are extremely pro-apple cart. As I would say, if you want the Delaware courts to upend corporate law, you better have a DAMN GOOD REASON, 'cause it's really not likely to happen. The Delaware courts want corporate law to work. The Delaware Supreme Court almost never overrules prior cases, and I can only think of one instance off the top of my head when they overruled a prior decision.

I would also say, with bitter irony, that if you want to overturn the apple cart based on a half baked theory, you should take that shit to the US Supreme Court. You'll find a more receptive audience there. I'd say that pithy line has been confirmed many times over in the last decade. This Court is radical, more radical than any court ever. But there's also probably a limit. Overturn an apple cart? Sure. Overturn all of the apple carts? Maybe not. Overturn the apple cart while screaming like a lunatic. Even the Supreme Court has limits -- if not substantive, surely Roberts likes to insist on decorum.

8. Alito is such a bitch. I mean, really. First, his contempt for the lower court judges in this case was so evident and it oozed out of nearly every word. It's not hard to imagine why. It's not a posture a Supreme Court justice should ever take, really, except for the more lawless cases. But two things are going on. First, Alito hates liberals. Second, Alito hates talkback, and I'm sure he's pissed as hell about the pushback against the idiocy of the Bruen gun control case. The lower court judges are, of course, acting in good faith. They are literally saying, "I'm trying to apply Bruen but I don't know how because its test is vague, unhelpful and impossible to make sense of in the ordinary case."

Second, it's laughable that he castigated the district court for overstepping its boundaries by instructing the government to pay out money -- a quintessentially executive function, he says. But this is the same guy who wanted to give a district court judge the power to direct American military deployments, prompting even Kavanaugh to write (or say, but I think I remember writing) that "we affirm that the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces." Nobody is as naked partisan as Sam Alito. Nobody in the modern history of the court and it's not really close.

And the "I am stunned" line -- in addition to being disingenuous, it seems useless and counter-productive. What is gained by this sort of hyperbolic over-the-top rhetoric more suited to a message board post? In fairness, everyone on the court has been using increasingly harsher rhetoric. Long ago, justices saw their role in dissent as 1) trying to soften the majority opinion by making the majority concede points as to specific analogies; and 2) perhaps explain their contrary views and where they think the court has gone wrong. They did not see their jobs as "let's try to convince the world that our colleagues are incredibly stupid and incapable of comprehending simple issues." Don't get me wrong: that posture is appropriate for truly stunning cases, like the immunity decision. But for smaller disputes, it seems wrong.

Alito bemoans the court's lack of public standing. Well, what do you expect when you say things like, "my colleagues are so craven and irrational that I almost had a heart attack." If you want the court to be seen as dignified, then act dignified. It was Scalia who first initiated this turn to meanness and combativeness, and the problem has grown worse over time.

9. Gorsuch is also a bitch.
 
Carolina Fever said:
I was wondering if the best way to fight all this is for the companies that had contracts with the government to sue Trump for breaking the contracts.
Click to expand...
It's not. That's expensive for the companies. Trump doesn't mind wasting DOJ resources fighting those suits -- in fact, now that he's shut down many divisions of the DOJ and curtailed the cases they can bring, there are lawyers there with time on their hands.

Most companies would not sue, especially if they are broke and can't pay their workers -- how are they going to pay lawyers? Suing the government for breach of contract is a time consuming process and the companies would go under before getting a judgment.
 
Finally, a thought that is not really about law, and something that other posters might have more insight than me.

There's a long Catholic tradition of being life-affirming in word but quite the opposite in deed. But there's also a Catholic tradition of being actually life-affirming. You know, like Mother Teresa (whatever one can say about her views on race and her condescension toward Indians, she did spend her life helping people in what she undoubtedly believed was generous). And there's been occasionally political programs based on that instinct, mostly liberal and progressive ones. I'm not counting abortion, which is life-affirming in word. I'm talking about the Catholics who have historically pushed for better working conditions, universal education, collective bargaining rights, etc. Dorothy Day stuff.

The distribution of these roles is not random. It's quite clear that the moral conscience of the Church is its women, which institutionally means nuns. Nuns are generally life-affirming full stop. That doesn't mean they are always right, but maybe it means at least that they don't let their virgin penises (in theory) dictate their minds. It's the men who are the most egregious hypocrites, obstructors, punishers who seek control above everything else.

And maybe that helps explain Amy Coney Barrett. Catholic women are maybe less likely to overlook the practical, real world impact of their decisions on real people. You saw that in Barrett's opinion in the Idaho abortion case, which was basically little more than expression of horror that the conservatives would look at pregnant women dying and say, "eh, no big deal." The men who are loudest about their religion are also the meanest. The ones who would like to allow a man to be executed because of worries that the prosecutors who wrongly convicted him were having their reputations besmirched.

I don't know a lot about Catholic dogma nor Catholic institutions. I'm not wholly ignorant, but it's far outside my expertise. I don't know how many Catholics we have here. Maybe someone who knows these things could weigh in and tell me if I'm right about this or FOS.
 
superrific said:
So some thoughts on this.

1. First, let me toot my horn a bit. This is exactly what I predicted would happen. Well, almost exactly. And I can't take too much credit, because I predicted with low confidence. Best you can do with this court. But still, I thought it would go down like this, and it did. I think that means I have a pretty good read on the situation. So what does this mean going forward?

I will probably have a lot of thoughts, so be warned now about post length.

2. Barrett dissented with the three liberals in the SF sewage case Monday, and is with the liberals again today. I think she's coming into focus now -- and for once it's good news. She's not an extremist. That's not to say that she adheres to no extreme views -- she does, as evidenced by her voting for immunity, among many other cases. But she hasn't shown a desire to push those views to their absolute breaking point. I won't say that she's demonstrating judicial restraint, but she certainly seems to believe in more restraint than the Terrible Three Plus One. In several cases now, she's staked out a sort of middle position. One wonders if it's intentional, to become the median justice and thus have outsized influence. Maybe it's genuine. Anyway, I think this is good news, although again it's relative to alternatives. She does not appear to be the fully baked and hardened ideologue we feared.

I say this in part because she's an active proponent of sovereign immunity arguments. And she rejected them here.

3. As I've said before, the administration is making it almost impossible for the courts to side with it. In theory, judges decide only the cases before them on the issues presented, but we know that's not true. They don't live in a vacuum. And they can see Trump taking a wrecking ball to the constitution. I go back to the citizenship question case. Roberts was all set to rule for the administration, because on a line-by-line basis, he seemed to take the administration's side on everything. But he looked at the big picture at the end, literally saying that the administration's story just doesn't quite add up. That's not a legal principle; that's a justice finally willing to see through the bullshit.

And that's what I expect to happen in these batch of cases (again, with low confidence). There is no way to analyze these cases in isolation. They are viewed against the backdrop of Trump running wild. I'm sure all of the Justices have ideas about Elon Musk and DOGE, probably not complimentary or supportive ones. That case isn't before them precisely, but there's no way they weren't thinking about that. They were probably thinking about the press conference with Zelensky (my guess is that the vote on this case came Friday afternoon). And at least five justices concluded: we are not letting the arsonist run free through the building dumping gasoline everywhere.

4. The stupidest thing the administration has done from a strategic standpoint was to include the Fed in the order claiming presidential authority to direct all independent agencies. They exempted the Fed's monetary policy arm, focusing on the bank regulation only. But there's no principled difference between bank regulation and monetary policy. If Trump controls the bank regulation, then he also controls monetary policy whenever he chooses to act on it. And central bank independence seems very important to the Court (as it should be!).

Again, that wasn't before them precisely in this case, but they are undoubtedly aware of it (certainly the clerks are). And at least two of the conservatives do not like what they see. The administration's story doesn't quite add up. It claims to be taking reasonable and responsible actions, but the actions say otherwise. This was a winnable case for the DOJ had it been presented on its own. But against the backdrop of ongoing, random destruction, it was very hard.

5. The Justices have spent a very long time arrogating power to themselves. One consistent theme across all of the Trump court's rulings (note: it didn't start with Gorsuch's ascension but that was an inflection point0 has been "rules that increase judicial power are good." It's the most power-hungry court I've ever seen. And having worked on that project for two decades, they aren't going to give it up so easily. I don't want to overstate the point: this was a 5-4 vote, with the worst of the power grabbers in dissent. Maybe they see their power grab as grabbing the power to anoint the emperor? But I just don't think the court will go down without a fight.
Click to expand...
You are not the only one taking note of ACB’s emergence at SCOTUS:





 
She doesn't "keep ruling with the liberals." She's joined the liberals on a handful of cases.

While I would love to interpret her look at Trump there as some sign of disapproval, one must remember that the last time he shook her hand, he gave her Covid.
 
superrific said:
like Mother Teresa (whatever one can say about her views on race and her condescension toward Indians, she did spend her life helping people in what she undoubtedly believed was generous).
Click to expand...
Well, Christopher Hitchens might have a word with you as to whether Mother Teresa was "helping" people.
 
superrific said:
She doesn't "keep ruling with the liberals." She's joined the liberals on a handful of cases.

While I would love to interpret her look at Trump there as some sign of disapproval, one must remember that the last time he shook her hand, he gave her Covid.
Click to expand...
I am not agreeing with them, just noting that key far right conservative influencers are pissed that ACB is not a female Alito.
 
Calheel said:
Well, Christopher Hitchens might have a word with you as to whether Mother Teresa was "helping" people.
Click to expand...
The larger point is that she represents a tradition of devotion to the poor and the affirmation of the lives of actual people. Whether she actually did or not is less relevant here than the popular understanding of what she was doing, in my view. A young Catholic girl growing up might have seen Mother Teresa's example -- again, the popular version -- and internalized that mentality to a greater extent than a man.

It's also true that ACB might simply be pissed off because of the way Trump humiliated the entire majority in Trump v. US with his actions.
 
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