The Supreme Court Is Committing Judicial Malpractice
The far-right justices' over-reliance on ‘emergency’ unexplained decisions to greenlight Trump’s spree of lawlessness sends the message that the president can do whatever he wants.
When it comes to how the framers structured the Constitution, federal judges – especially Supreme Court justices – are an inherent danger to democracy. That’s because, unlike presidents and members of Congress, they are unelected. Their personal predilections have profound effects on the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans, yet voters cannot choose them at the polls. Nor can they fire them at the ballot box. Unless they’re impeached, which is nearly impossible to pull off, federal judges keep their jobs for life – even if they issue rulings that seem to violate the Constitution itself.
Which over and over again appears to be what’s happening with the far-right justices these days, half of whom were hand-picked by Donald Trump personally.
The latest shocker came down on Monday, in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo – an unexplained 6-3 decision that halted a lower court’s injunction staying the Trump administration from picking up people from the streets of Los Angeles based solely on some combination of four factors, including their ethnicity, use of English, or type of work.
What the Trump administration is doing looks a lot like racial profiling, which, in 2023, the same majority went out of its way to outright ban in college admissions. The Court nonetheless held that to pause this practice for ICE agents would irreparably harm Trump to the point where he is entitled to an emergency order overriding the lower court’s order that immigration authorities temporarily stop doing this until the legality of the policy is sorted out.
Vasquez Perdomo implicates the Fourth Amendment, not necessarily the Fourteenth, but the point is obvious: racial discrimination looks like a one-way ratchet from the perspective of the justices in the majority.
‘Emergency’ Rulings: The Court’s Gift to Trump
Monday’s decision was roughly the 20th “emergency” ruling that this Court has issued to greenlight Trump’s spree of lawlessness since taking office again on Jan. 20.