I'm not going to say that the Supreme Court has been Joe Biden's biggest friend lately, but they've been surprisingly sympathetic toward him in several recent medium-button cases. They voted in favor of him yesterday in the Navajo water case, a few days ago in the Alabama redistricting case, and last month in the Section 230 case.¹ Today it's immigration:
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday ruled for the Biden administration in an important immigration case, saying Texas and Louisiana lacked the legal standing to challenge the executive branch’s priorities on who should be deported.
At issue is a....focus on arresting recent border crossers and immigrants who pose a threat to public safety, rather than the millions of other noncitizens who have lived here for years.
....Friday’s decision was 8-1, with Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. the lone dissenter. “The States have brought an extraordinarily unusual lawsuit,” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote for the majority. “They want a federal court to order the Executive Branch to alter its arrest policies so as to make more arrests. Federal courts have not traditionally entertained that kind of lawsuit; indeed, the States cite no precedent for a lawsuit like this.”
Various administrations have argued that immigration law is broadly written to give the executive wide powers, and among those powers is one that gives them control over prosecutorial discretion—that is, which immigrants to arrest and which not to. Conservatives have hit back, arguing that prosecutorial discretion is one thing on a case-by-case basis, but not when it's applied automatically to vast groups of people, as it has been in DACA to provide blanket protection for nearly a million undocumented teenagers.
Today's ruling is based on standing, not on the merits, so it's not strong and it could eventually return to the Court for another go-around. All told, though, DACA is now a decade old and has withstood a deluge of challenges. It's starting to seem pretty safe.
The vote was 8-1, and naturally Sam Alito was the lone holdout. He's a hack's hack.
¹They've also voted against him in the wetlands case, the NLRB case, and are likely to vote against him in the Harvard affirmative action case shortly. So it's not a big ol' bowl of cherries out there.
I suspect this is largely the that judges have to (well, should) worry about the impact of their official actions.
Modern rhetoric aside, Biden is being furiously reasonable. Additionally, he and his lawyers are canny and experienced enough to know how to play.
Totally agree, Sam is just a sad little failure of a human in multiple ways.
Suppose Biden was obliged to start expelling all illegal immigrants - what would be the effect on business? All sorts of businesses have dreamers and others working for them and expelling them would be an economic as well as humanitarian catastrophe.
Keep your eye on the main thing that Republican Justices are selected for - the benefit of business, especially big business.
There's a lot of crazy going around in the lower courts, so this SCOTUS (which is awful but not insane) will issue some reasonable judgments. In general, though, they're looking to whittle down privacy rights, go maximal on (some) religious freedom rights, and take non-delegation theory to some absurd extremes. Oh, and generally be hostile toward voting rights.
So all in all, pretty bad.
How much of a hack is Alito?
He claimed the states established standing by showing concrete harm existed...by way of hypotheticals.
And naturally, he flip-flopped on the underlying issue -- of how wide a discretion the Take Care clause gives POTUS -- by staking a claim against his own opinion re Trump Muslim ban.
He claimed the states established standing by showing concrete harm existed...by way of hypotheticals.
That's exactly the same move that hack judge in Texas made when he ruled a group of doctors had standing to halt the sale of mifepristone. Seems to be thing with rightwing judges these days: if the side you want to have standing doesn't have it, make shit up.
They weren't really ruling in favor of Biden.
True. However, if we keep in mind that the administration was very wrong on the Navajo water case the balance of Biden vs. SCOTUS is not all that hot.
I can make 190 US dollars an hour working on my home computer. I never thought it was possible, but my closest friend made seventeen thousand USD in just five weeks working on this historic project. convinced me to take part. For more information,
Click on the link below... https://GetDreamJobs1.blogspot.com