The Worst Supreme Court

The Cambridge Dictionary describes tyranny as “unlimited authority or use of power – a government which exercises power without control or limits.” Perhaps each of us, at least in our secret heart of hearts, could now concede that Donald Trump has gone full tyrant. We’re not approaching constitutional crisis. We’re in mid-stream. And no one knows on which side of the shore we’ll land.

Masked, thuggish ICE agents terrorize whole communities, as if they were a private Trumpist strike force. National guard units are deployed on the streets of America cities, as if we faced insurrection or civil war. The president tells his pompous, misogynistic Secretary of Defense, to consider “training” soldiers in Democratic strongholds. We’re meant to become accustomed to it all. It’s a new age.

Universities cower under a regime of extortion – do what we require, or we’ll take all your money. And, be advised, even after you do what we demand, we might take your money anyway.

Law firms, corporations, networks, newspapers, non-profits, tech companies, Democratic state and local governments, and arbitrarily “tariffed” countries get the same bullied treatment. Disney is told “we can do it the easy way, or we can do it the hard way”. Trump’s adversaries are deemed “the enemy within” – echoing Adolf Hitler and Joe McCarthy. The Department of Justice is a loaded weapon, aimed at anyone who has the temerity to speak, or to challenge, or, even to honestly do her, or his, job.

Prosecutors are fired if they insist on following the law. James Comey is boldly and unconstitutionally indicted. The President and his embarrassing, seditionist, Attorney General tell us it’s just the beginning. Lots more to come. Keep your head down. Way down. We’re coming after you.

Any executive branch official can be fired at the president’s whim. The Congress has effectively ceased independent operation. Its only obligation is submission. And Republicans are all in. Federal courts are regularly defied. All actual power resides in the White House. Dissent becomes dangerous, expensive, and criminal. When the president speaks, no matter how idiotic it sounds (think of the U.N. speech or Trump’s address to the generals), we’re all to pretend he’s making sense. The ‘old’ United States increasingly disappears.

In the face of this unfolding revolution, last week the U.S. Supreme Court did what it does best, and now most consistently – it prevented, without meaningful explanation, a thoughtful, courageous federal trial judge from enforcing the constitution against the Trump Administration. This time the 6-3 Republican majority allowed Secretary Kristi Noem to abruptly end Temporary Protective Status for 300,000 Venezuelan immigrants facing dangerous humanitarian crises at home. The dissent accurately accused the Court of “wordlessly” allowing Trump “to disrupt as many lives as quickly as possible.”

That has become the Roberts Court’s trademark – avoid conflict with Donald Trump by, literally, giving him anything and everything he wants. Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh literally cheer the spiteful anti-constitutional cascade. John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett have apparently decided the way to save the Supreme Court is to never deploy it. The combination is an endless permission slip. And the literal end of judicial review.

Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky explains that the Roberts Court has become a constant “rubber stamp approving Trump’s actions”. UCLA’s Adam Winkler adds the Chief Justice is obviously “unwilling to put any limits on the President”. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is more colorful: “This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule – there are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and the Administration always wins.”

No one doubts that Trump is the most lawless president in American history. Who would have guessed he’d also have the best win-loss record at our highest tribunal.

Welcome to a new term of the worst, and perhaps the last, Supreme Court of the United States.

Gene Nichol is Boyd Tinsley Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law and in 2015 started the North Carolina Poverty Research Fund after the UNC Board of Governors closed the state-funded Poverty Center for publishing articles critical of the governor and General Assembly.