Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
The Supreme Leader’s Supreme Court boosted his Supreme Powers this morning by handing down yet another 6-3 decision in his favor. This time the case involved Trump’s executive order violating the Constitution by cancelling the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.
Almost immediately after Trump issued his order—the first time a President of the United States has attempted to unilaterally eliminate part of the Constitution—lawsuits were filed challenging the constitutionality of Trump’s order. Multiple Federal District Courts found that the executive order was likely unconstitutional and issued injunctions freezing the order so that it no longer had the force of law nationally.
This morning, the Supreme Leader’s 6-3 cheering section said that lower courts cannot issue universal injunctions that apply nationwide. While not addressing the key issue, whether a right granted in the Constitution of the United States is…er, ah, I can’t believe I must write this…constitutional, the decision nevertheless stripped a key power from the federal courts that has been used again and again to limit Trump’s attempted coup against our democracy.
The ruling opens the door to class action lawsuits to address Trump’s all-encompassing orders. Justice Bret Kavanaugh seemed to confirm the possibility of that remedy by writing in a concurring opinion that complainants may “ask a court to award preliminary classwide relief that may, for example, be statewide, regionwide or even nationwide.”
Justice Samuel Alito was having none of it, however, writing in his own concurrence that, “district courts should not view today’s decision as an invitation to certify nationwide classes without scrupulous adherence to the rigors of Rule 23,” making reference to a part of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that defines the criteria for a class action, limiting the types of lawsuits that can be considered by certain rules involving numbers within a class, commonality of complaints, and complexity of the issues addressed.
Ever the seer of problems where problems do not exist, Alito foresaw a time when “universal injunction will return from the grave under the guise of ‘nationwide class relief,’ and today’s decision will be of little more than minor academic interest,” because of course we don’t want the Supreme Leader’s powers challenged by a rabble of citizens upon whose rights he has trampled.
This is yet another of the Republican dominated majority’s dream-sequence embrace of the so-called theory of unitary executive powers of the president, which holds basically that, as Richard Nixon put it so delicately, “when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.”
Buckle up. The Supreme Leader’s court is set to announce its decisions five more times today. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent to the court’s first roll of its right-wing tank treads over the rights of mere citizens, the court will be answering the question of whether the president will be given “the go-ahead to sometimes wield the kind of unchecked, arbitrary power the Founders crafted our Constitution to eradicate.”
I’ll give you two guesses what the answer will be, and the first one doesn’t count.
Lucian K. Truscott IV
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
