Why Is the Supreme Court Unshackling the Presidency?
We have just witnessed another example of the Supreme Court’s unshackling of the U.S. presidency. On Thursday morning the court issued a decision allowing the Trump administration to cancel Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of individuals from Haiti and Syria. The administration is now free to move forward with what immigrants’ rights advocates describe as the largest de-documentation in U.S. history.
In addition to its awful human toll, the decision allowing the T.P.S. terminations to go into effect highlights one of the more troubling mysteries of this era. Between the first and second Trump terms, why has the conservative majority of the Supreme Court become so much more accommodating of and deferential to this president? And, in particular, why has Chief Justice John Roberts proved so much less willing to call the administration out on its lies and challenge its motives — particularly since, according to virtually every metric, the second Trump administration has been far more extreme, and far more lawless, than the first?
