The Supreme Court delivered an opinion last week that not even the best of the punditry class was prepared to understand. The decision was Trump vs. CASA, and the topic concerned the nationwide injunction against Trump’s management of U.S. immigration policy. As with more than 40 other cases, federal district judges have intervened to stop the president from exercising executive powers.
The opinion could not be plainer: “Universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts.” That principle applies not only to this case but to the whole panoply of cases that have tethered the ability of the president to manage executive branch operations. The courts have presumed authority over the president that the Constitution plainly does not grant.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett said the following of the unjoined dissent by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson: “[It] is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an Imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”
Court watchers called this an unprecedented rebuke of a colleague in a majority opinion.
The practical effect of the decision is to underscore the meaning of Article 2: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
Why should this be controversial? Here we get into the overwhelming reality of the structure and operations of the U.S. government that stand in complete contradiction to the U.S. Constitution. It’s been going on for more than a century and has never been fundamentally challenged. Until Trump, most presidents were fine with it and offered no serious challenge. The legislature too has chosen to look the other way.
The issue is the fourth branch of government that is nearly the whole of the operational side of government as we know it. We elect leaders and representatives but our votes have carried ever less power over the course of a century. We know that but it has not always been obvious.
Hellbound and Down 