Comment by scoofy
7 hours ago
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.
"Change this sentence, change the date and resubmit" is rubber-stamping - they just require a big-enough fig-leaf and are bold enough to publicly hint at the parameters of the fig-leaf they will accept.
But they also said the president can’t be punished for doing illegal things, so what difference does it make?
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.
That ruling[1] is even worse than rubber stamping. It's saying that no stamp is needed at all.
> It seems hard to call that an example of rubber stamping for an administration that did not exist yet.
The Trump administration absolutely did exist, both in the past and the present (waiting in the wings) in July 2024 when the ruling was issued.
While it's true that all past and future presidents are affected by the ruling, there's exactly one former president and presidential candidate at that time that was likely to face criminal charges for actions taken while in office, in either first or second terms.
It's a bit much to claim that the ruling doesn't have at least the appearance of benefiting Trump exclusively, especially given the timing. The ruling caused many of Trump's trials to be delayed to be effectively concurrent with the 2024 election.
We went 235 years without clarifying that presidents had presumptive immunity; all previous presidents (even Trump) acted under the presumption that prosecution for official acts might be unlikely but was possible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States
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What benefit does it allow for, other than the ability to turn the country into a dictatorship in a matter of hours with a single phone call?
For anyone unaware, one of the main criticisms of that ruling is that the president commanding the military is always considered an official act, and this ruling means the president enjoys "absolute immunity for official acts within an exclusive presidential authority that Congress cannot regulate such as the pardon, command of the military, execution of laws, or control of the executive branch."[0]
The ruling made no carveouts or exceptions for blatantly illegal orders. The president could unilaterally eject or kill any member of opposing political parties and future administrations (if there are any) would be completely unable to legally hold them accountable for their heinous crimes.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States
And they will be perfectly happy to walk it back when (or if) a Democrat is elected president in the future. Stare decisis is no longer a thing with this bunch.
This is all highly commical considering the US has black bagged a foreign president.
That is going to be the court case of the century by the way. Maduro will have lawyers begging to represent him. It will be America on trial and I'm looking forward to the Trump administration absolutely bungling it.
That’s not what they ruled.
How so? The ruling was that he had full immunity during "presidential duties", which has many times been interpreted by the SC as "anything he wants to do while president."
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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. ]