Comment by gtowey
11 hours ago
> I hope this gets tested in court and declared unconstitutional
The rule of law has left the building. The SC is willing to rubber-stamp nearly anything right now.
Waiting and hoping for common sense to prevail is what allows authoritarian regimes to bulldoze through existing laws and norms. Even if the courts were an avenue for redress, they are being overwhelmed by the daily barrage of new illegal and unconstitutional actions. Once the courts get around to addressing these cases, the damage has been done and the precedent has been set.
Well, as an alternative to rubber stamping it they can overturn any injunctions and let him have eighteen months of moving drone bubbles until the issue has made its way through the lower courts.
See also Alito's outrage about deportations being fast tracked to SCOTUS.
Anything but an administration being able to manipulate the Fed, it seems. Most legal experts believe that will be a hard strike down on the administration
that perspective is not backed by data, and the administration doesn't appeal everything
very few supreme court cases make it to headline news, and the ones that do are the ones you're thinking about it. those are the ones split by ideological lines, which are less than 10% of what SCOTUS rules on. the government loses many cases unanimously as well. there are some unsigned opinions that do punt things back to lower courts that may be in the government's favor, or not.
all to say, its more nuanced than that. the trend, as a last and compromised bulwark, is there, but that's not how the court consistently behaves.
This is literally backed by data. 21 out of 25 emergency docker cases taken up with the Supreme Court were ruled in the Trump administration’s favor. Only one of the cases against the administration was unanimous.
At the appellate level, Trump appointed judges vote in favor of his policies at a substantially higher rate than any previous president at 92% of cases.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/01/looking-back-at-2025-the-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/us/politics/trumps-appeal...
And the emergency docket is exactly where one should look for these very recent very blatantly illegal actions and lawsuits aiming to counter them.
So yes the data is in, and yes it’s bad, and emphatically yes it’s exactly what this thread is saying. In case anyone reading in good faith was wondering.
Is there a reason you’re only choosing the emergency docket in your sample size though?
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If you think the SCOTUS has been arbitrarily rubber stamping the administration's goals, you haven't been paying attention. I'll fully agree with you it appears to have been fairly partisan, but less than a month again they blocked the administration from deploying the national guard to states:
>In one of its most consequential rulings of the year, just before breaking for the holidays last week the Supreme Court held that President Trump acted improperly in federalizing the National Guard in Illinois and in activating troops across the state. Although the case centered on the administration’s deployments in Chicago, the court’s ruling suggests that Trump’s actions in Los Angeles and Portland were likewise illegal.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-12-30/supreme-cou...
> they blocked the administration from deploying the national guard to states
That is not what the decision stated - there was even a quote from a justice saying that the administration could easily attain the same result with a different legal mechanism, all but encouraging such a change in behavior.
Edit: the ‘improperly’ portion of your quote is the operative term
Yes, and my point is exactly that a rubber stamping SCOTUS would have literally allowed it even though it was "improper." That's what rubber stamping means.
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But they also said the president can’t be punished for doing illegal things, so what difference does it make?
Trump claimed repeatedly and vigorously that whatever the President does is by definition legal. He also repeatedly and vigorously claimed that Obama had broken the law by spying on then-candidate Trump in 2016. I don't know if he himself noticed the contradiction but blustered on anwway or was too dense to notice.
[BTW, Trump wasn't spied on -- Russian assets were spied on and it turned out that some of those communications were with Trump's team. There are ~100 pages of these communications captured in the Mueller report. ]
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They made that ruling while Biden was president. It seems hard to call that an example of rubber stamping for an administration that did not exist yet.
John Roberts and other conservative members of the court do have an ideological commitment to the Unitary Executive Theory of the presidency (foolishly, in my view) but this has the potential to benefit both Democratic and Republican presidents.
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That’s not what they ruled.
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