The focal point of this post will be two SCOTUS decisions that came out this week, but a couple of quick hitters before getting to those.
In a press conference Thursday, Defense Secretary Hegseth referred to last weekend’s U.S. bombing attacks on Iran as “the most complex and secretive military operation in history”. No hyperbole here. I couldn’t help but think of the opening scene of my favorite movie of the decade, 2024’s Civil War, in which we see Nick Offerman’s unnamed U.S. President workshopping language to describe a recent battle before settling on “some are already calling it the greatest victory in the history of military campaigns.”
With Trump’s self-imposed July 9th tariff deadline looming, we can expect to see trade relations back in the news in coming days. Friday afternoon Trump posted to social media that he is terminating all trade talks with Canada, citing Canada’s announcement today that it will proceed on Monday as scheduled with the initial collection of a new Digital Services Tax that had been enacted a year ago (retroactively to January 1, 2022).
Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming…
On Monday, SCOTUS granted the administration’s request in DHS v. D.V.D. to stay a lower court’s preliminary injunction while the case is appealed to the 1st Circuit. As is typical for shadow docket cases, no explanation of rationale for the majority’s action was provided; however, Justice Sotomayor did pen a 19-page dissent, joined by the other liberals.
This case involves so-called third-country removals of deportable aliens. Some background on the concept, from Sotomayor’s opinion:
“Federal law generally permits the Government to deport noncitizens found to be unlawfully in the United States only to countries with which they have a meaningful connection. To that end, Congress specified two default options… [as well as] which possibilities the Executive should attempt next. … This case concerns the Government’s ability to conduct what is known as a ‘third country removal’, meaning a removal to any ‘country with a government that will accept the alien.’ Third-country removals are burdensome for the affected noncitizen, so Congress has sharply limited their use…”
There are also considerations here relating to the Convention Against Torture, which prohibits returning an individual to a state for which “there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.”
Lower court rulings in this case required the government to “provide noncitizens with written notice in advance of a third-country removal (as is statutorily required), along with a meaningful opportunity to raise a claim under the Convention.” As such the relief the administration sought from SCOTUS was the ability to continue conducting third-party removals without those constraints, while it appeals the lower court’s ruling.
On one level this topic seems comparatively uninteresting to the average American: The individuals in question have already received the due process to determine they are deportable (unlike in the A.A.R.P. case), so we’re talking about a somewhat lesser due process issue, with respect to their destination after leaving the U.S. However, the goings-on with this case are the closest so far that the administration has come to openly defying a court order, and that fact has elevated public interest in the case. Again quoting from Sotomayor’s opinion:
“Here, in violation of an unambiguous TRO, the Government flew four noncitizens to Guantanamo Bay, and from there deported them to El Salvador. Then, in violation of the very preliminary injunction from which it now seeks relief, the Government removed six class members to South Sudan with less than 16 hours’ notice and no opportunity to be heard. The Government’s assertion that these deportations could be reconciled with the injunction is wholly without merit. … The affected class members lacked any opportunity to research South Sudan, to determine whether they would face risks or torture or death there, or to speak to anyone about their concerns. Instead, they were left in their cells overnight with no chance to raise a claim and deported the next morning. The Government thus openly flouted two court orders, including the one from which it now seeks relief. Even if the orders in question had been mistaken, the Government had a duty to obey them until they were ‘reversed by orderly and proper proceedings’.”
In that context, the Court majority’s willingness to stay the lower court injunction while the administration appeals is disconcerting. Sotomayor described the majority’s use of discretion to grant the stay as being “as incomprehensible as it is inexcusable” and noted the following:
“This is not the first time the Court closes its eyes to noncompliance, nor, I fear, will it be the last. Yet each time this Court rewards noncompliance with discretionary relief, it further erodes respect for courts and for the rule of law.”
So, that was Monday,
Then Friday comes, and SCOTUS hands down 119 pages of opinions in Trump v. CASA, the case involving so-called universal preliminary injunctions handed down by three courts on Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order. Barrett has the 6-3 majority opinion, with Sotomayor writing the lead dissent for the liberals; there’s also a Thomas concurrence (joined by Gorsuch), an Alito concurrence (jointed by Thomas), a Kavanagh solo concurrence, and a Jackson solo dissent.
The Barrett opinion doesn’t discuss the merits of the underlying birthright citizenship dispute at all, but focuses strictly on the question that has been percolating at SCOTUS for the last several years before finally coming to a head in this case: has Congress “granted federal courts the authority to universally enjoin the enforcement of an executive or legislative policy”? Solicitor General Sauer had argued that Article III forecloses the concept of universal relief. Barrett’s opinion doesn’t go that far but instead focuses on the authority Congress granted to the courts under the Judiciary Act of 1789, concluding the following:
“Under our well-established precedent, the equitable relief available in the federal courts is that ‘traditionally accorded by courts of equity’ at the time of our founding. Nothing like a universal injunction was available at the founding… [t]hus, under the Judiciary Act, federal courts lack authority to issue them.”
What we are really talking about here is competing visions of the role of the judiciary in the U.S. Constitutional system. The majority’s view, summarized by Barrett, is that “federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them. When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.” As such, per Kavanagh’s concurrence, “district courts issuing injunctions under the authority afforded by the Judiciary Act of 1789 may award only plaintiff-specific relief.”
Kavanaugh’s concurrence is interesting, as it imagines in this context a significant role for SCOTUS to play in resolving “applications for stays or injunctions with respect to major new federal statutes and executive actions”. He concurs with those who believe that “there often (perhaps not always, but often) should be a nationally uniform answer on whether a major new federal statutory, rule, or executive order can be enforced throughout the United States during the several-year interim period until its legality is finally decided on the merits,” but argues that it is SCOTUS, and not a district court, whose job it is to do that and thereby provide “a form of precedent (de jure or de facto) that provides guidance throughout the United States during the years-long interim period until a final decision on the merits.”
Sotomayor’s principal dissent criticizes the majority for ignoring the underlying context in which this case arose, namely the administration’s desire to enforce an executive order that is (per Sotomayor) “patently unconstitutional.” Per Sotomayor:
“The Court’s decision is nothing less than an open invitation for the Government to bypass the Constitution. The Executive Branch can now enforce policies that flout settled law and violate countless individuals’ constitutional rights, and the federal courts will be hamstrung to stop its actions fully. Until the day that every affected person manages to become party to a lawsuit and secure for himself injunctive relief, the Government may act lawlessly indefinitely. Not even a decision from this Court would necessarily bind the Government to stop, completely and permanently, its commission of unquestionably unconstitutional conduct.”
But the real tour de force here is Jackson’s solo dissent, which is brusquely dismissed by Barrett as being “at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself” and as “embracing an imperial Judiciary.” To Jackson, the fundamental question posed by this case is simple:
“May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the Law? To ask this question is to answer it. In a constitutional Republic such as ours, a federal court has the power to order the Executive to follow the law—and it must. It is axiomatic that the Constitution of the United States and the statutes that the People’s representatives have enacted govern in our system of government. Thus, everyone, from the President on down, is bound by law. By duty and nature, federal courts say what the law is (if there is a genuine dispute), and require those who are subject to the law to conform their behavior to what the law requires. This is the essence of the rule of law.”
And as such Jackson criticizes the majority for taking too narrow a view of the Judiciary’s power:
“[The majority thinks] that the only function of our courts is to provide ‘complete relief’ to private parties. Sure, federal courts do that, and they do it well. But they also diligently maintain the rule of law itself. When it comes to upholding the law, federal courts ensure that all comers–i.e., everyone to whom to law applies and over whom the court has personal jurisdiction (including and perhaps especially the Executive)–know what the law is and, most important, follow it.”
Jackson is also deeply worried by the consequences of the majority’s decision:
“[O]ur rights-based legal system can only function properly if the Executive, and everyone else, is always bound by law. Today’s decision is a seismic shock to that foundational norm. Allowing the Executive to violate the law at its prerogative with respect to anyone who has not yet sued carves out a huge exception–a gash in the basic tenets of our founding charter that could turn out to be a mortal wound. … [R]ather than having a governing system characterized by protected rights, the default becomes an Executive that can do whatever it wants to whomever it wants, unless and until each affected individual affirmatively invokes the law’s protection. … What the majority has done is to allow the Executive to nullify the statutory and constitutional rights of the uncounseled, the underresourced, and the unwary, by prohibiting the lower courts from ordering the executive to follow the law across the board.”
Lofty rhetoric aside, it is somewhat too early to read the tea leaves here. With respect to the birthright citizenship dispute, litigation will continue. As imagined by Kavanaugh’s concurrence, I suspect the day will soon come when SCOTUS will be asked to grant an injunction preventing the enforcement of the executive order while litigation proceeds, and I am optimistic the Court would grant that injunction. With respect to the broader issues at play, this Court keeps shifting the balance of power towards the Executive, which could be a force for a good in the right hands and a force for evil in the wrong hands.
The real lesson here, I think, is that elections matter, in a couple different dimensions. While I think Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Barrett have each brought some interesting perspectives to the court, I do think that if Hillary Clinton had been able to fill those three vacancies, the SCOTUS resulting from those appointments would not have issued these types of opinions (although in that counterfactual Trump presumably would have returned to private life after losing in 2016 so these particular cases wouldn’t have arisen).
As an aside, I continue to think of Jackson as the new Rehnquist, forging a solo path on the Court, hoping that over time the pendulum will swing back to meet her. She is 54 now and has been on the court for 3 years. When Rehnquist was 54, he’d been on the bench for 7 years, and was still 7 years away from becoming the Chief Justice; it was another 5 years after that, with the appointment of Thomas, before Rehnquist would have something approximating a majority of like-minded justices (although that majority included justices FedSoc would consider ‘squishes’, namely O’Connor and Kennedy). Where will Jackson be in 12 years, and will she ever be able to forge a Court reflecting her judicial vision? That will depend crucially on who gets to fill the Thomas (age 77), Alito (75), Sotomayor (71), and Roberts (70) seats. And that depends to a large extent on who controls the Senate in 2026, and the Presidency in 2028 & beyond.
But more fundamentally: The people who we elect are swearing an oath to uphold the Constitution (and, in the case of Senators, to provide advise and consent in the appointment of officials who also swear such an oath), and we as citizens need to take great care in assessing whether those individuals truly intend to uphold those oaths, for we can no longer expect the judiciary to enforce those individuals’ adherence to said oath.