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“…In Trump Cases, Supreme Court Retreats From Confrontation
In a series of narrow and technical rulings, the justices have seemed to take pains to avoid a showdown with a president who has challenged the judiciary’s legitimacy.
GIFT LINK—> In Trump Cases, Supreme Court Retreats From Confrontation
But as the first wave of challenges to President Trump’s blitz of executive orders has reached the justices, a very different portrait of the court is emerging. It has issued a series of narrow and legalistic rulings that seem calculated to avoid the larger issues presented by a president rapidly working to expand power and reshape government.
On Monday, the court ruled that Venezuelan migrants who challenged the administration’s plans to send them to a notorious prison in El Salvador had filed their lawsuits in the wrong court, without ruling on the underlying legal issues.
…. Challenges to initiatives from the second Trump administration have yielded five emergency rulings so far.
… In any event, the five orders said very little.
One ruled that a challenge to a trial judge’s order barring the firing of a government watchdog should be “held in abeyance.” Another instructed a judge who had told the administration to restoreforeign aid to “clarify what obligations the government must fulfill.”
A third, allowing the administration to temporarily freeze teacher-training grants, relied on a mélange of laws and doctrines — the Administrative Procedure Act, sovereign immunity, the Tucker Act — to conclude that the challengers had most likely sued in the wrong court.
These were, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent, “ancillary threshold and remedial questions” that ducked the real one: Were the administration’s actions lawful? …”