SCOTUS Conservatives Go On Late Night Bender And Accidentally Do Their Jobs

Whatever they're drinking, they should order another round.

The Supreme Court has fallen … or taken the slightest motion to get off its knees, depending on your perspective. After a wild weekend featuring a dramatic late-night ruling, Republicans are hopping mad and advocating open defiance of the Court.

The action came in the rendition cases, where the Court’s conservatives have twice signaled that they would prefer the Trump administration to just be normal, for the love of Galt! There are so many ways to deport immigrants legally — we’ve been locking them into a dangerous purgatory in Mexico for years. Why must that lunatic insist on a theatrically evil plan to evade judicial review by dumping human beings into a Central American torture gulag?

Of course, if the Supreme Court’s conservatives hadn’t bigfooted into J.G.G. v. Trump and blown up Judge Boasberg’s TRO blocking the administration from disappearing people into a Salvadoran hellhole, we might not be here. And if the justices hadn’t blithely dismissed the effort to kidnap foreign nationals with a hand-wavey admonition that deportees are entitled to notice “within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue,” the government might have understood that there would be consequences for defying a court order.

Instead the Department of Homeland Security simply shifted its deportations to different venues, after courts in Colorado, New York, and the Southern District of Texas certified the Alien Enemies Act deportees as a class and forbade hustling them out of the country. Conveniently, Judge James Hendrix of the Northern District of Texas refused to issue a restraining order for anyone other than the named plaintiffs in the habeas case A.A.R.P. v. Trump, and so the government began transporting Venezuelan migrants to Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson, just 30 miles from Abilene Airport.