The expedited process of the Justice Department’s appeal of the travel ban cases may well indicate that the Supreme Court is about to rule in what amounts to a grand slam home run for Donald Trump. While nothing is ever certain when predicting future events at the Supreme Court there is still a distinct possibility that with a new 5-4 composition and Justice Gorsuch now seated the almost unprecedented expediting of the appeal signals a desire to make a statement. The Supreme Court may have just acted in a way that suggests a probability that the Court will quickly act to lift the existing stays and allow the travel ban to be enforced. The rapidity of the process hints that the majority may have reached an agreement that the lower court’s actions have gone way out of bounds and need to be quickly reined in.
The Justice Department’s has a strong case, the focus of their appeals is in part over the unprecedented concept that the President who enacted the order might somehow be unworthy of that power and lack the legal authority to do so. That things said on the campaign trail, real or imagined can invalidate an otherwise lawful authority due to a sort of implied bias or lack of legitimacy in a President. How fortunate the left that their wish to see Trump out of office might be accomplished by Judges who can simply decide that he lacks authority or validity. The fact that this concept is blatantly unprecedented and unconstitutional never appears to alarm some Judges who, despite their oath of office, appear to believe that the Constitution to be more of a moral guideline of today’s social media than a set of rules and rights guaranteed to all. How much simpler when you can just touch base with media sentiment and rule accordingly, law books, case law and rules be dammed.
The rapidity of the SCOTUS decision to expedite proceedings gives great hope to the thought that they are teeing up this political football so that they may then boot it out of the stadium. One of the dissents was quite clear on how unlikely the stays were to remain due to a lack of any genuine legal reasoning by the Judges granting the stays, he seems destined to be proven correct. The odds are extremely high that the legacy media and the left will again melt down when SCOTUS lifts the stays. When you cannot enact the doctrines of your faith through legislation then administrative fiat or judicial invention is your best hope. The problem is that when Judges invent law or ignore Supreme Court decisions (many circuits still refuse to accept that the 2nd amendment is an individual right as found in the 2008 case District of Columbia vs Heller, 54 U.S. 570) that it can take years for a remedy to be applied. Heller was in 2008, the struggle for gun rights in DC has yet to be resolved seven years later.
Why would SCOTUS want to send a quick rebuke to the Judges who have ignored precedent and indeed the Constitution in their decisions? It must be upsetting to the Justices who struggled to resolve an issue only to then watch as their work is ignored by various Judges of lower courts floating upon the winds of political progressivism. They have no way to send Judges on a “time out” or to censure them other by using the language of their opinions. Further they have to wait for the wheels of justice to grind out an opportunity for them to do so.
The almost instant expediting of this process in these cases makes it appear to me very likely that the Supreme Court will be sending a message to the lower courts that they have acted unlawfully. Eventually they will eventually issue a well reasoned and scathing opinion blasting the lower courts for their actions but in the meantime the act of lifting the stays, will in layman’s language, essentially be a very strong rebuke along the lines of “and the horse you rode in on.”
