With a series of critical cases still to be heard, the six conservative justices seated on the Supreme Court were admonished by the New York Times editorial board that they need to listen to one of their own and rein in Donald Trump.
In an editorial published Saturday morning, the board pointed out that the lower courts have done a better job of explaining their rulings — many of them restraining the president’s worse impulses — than the nation’s highest court which has been hiding behind the so-called content-less “shadow docket.”
To make their case, the board cited a warning from conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch who, when hearing oral arguments about Trump’s use of tariffs, warned about giving the president too much power over Congress and asked, “What president’s ever going to give that power back?”
According to the editors, “Justice Gorsuch’s realism in a case involving a signature policy of Mr. Trump’s second term raises the so far elusive prospect that the court may constrain his worst abuses of power. But it’s not clear whether a majority of justices share Justice Gorsuch’s view, since the court has yet to rule in the case.”
Noting that many of the pro-Trump rulings have come in the form of issuing stays allowing the president to press ahead unrestrained with his agenda, with a full hearing scheduled for a much later date, the editors pointed to the lower courts’ judges doing their jobs and explaining the law behind their decisions.
“Many lower courts have responded heroically to Mr. Trump’s ill-founded efforts to centralize power and weaken democracy. Judges on the district courts and courts of appeal have blocked his policies hundreds of times since he retook office in January,” the editors wrote before pointing out, “In many of those instances, however, the Supreme Court later overruled the lower courts, allowing Mr. Trump’s power grabs.”
The editors advised, “First, the court should show that facts matter. Judges on lower courts, including some appointed by Mr. Trump, have upbraided the Trump administration for its falsehoods and bad faith and begun to treat its arguments with the basic skepticism they have earned. The justices should do the same,” and then noted,“… the six Republican-appointed justices have smoothed the path for Mr. Trump’s dangerous campaign to undermine the Constitution and our system of government.”
They concluded that the court needs to step up since Republicans in Congress won’t.
“Given the largely supine nature of Congress under Republican control, the stability of American democracy depends more than it should on the Supreme Court. So far, it is failing to live up to its constitutional role. But we’re only in the first quarter of this term. There’s a long way to go,” they warned.
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