Listen To This Story

Obviously, it didn’t sit well with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito (and his sidekick Clarence Thomas) that his colleagues temporarily prevented Donald Trump from the willy-nilly deportation of immigrants without due process while using the flimsy excuse that they are part of an invading force.

That is why the devout Catholic spent the beginning of his Easter weekend penning a dissent to the 7-2 decision that blocked the administration from sending more immigrants to an El Salvadoran gulag for now until it can be determined whether doing so is illegal under the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law.

While the actual order was very brief, Alito had some things to get off his chest.

The ethically challenged judge, who seems to be a firm believer that just about anything Trump does is good and legal, listed a litany of procedural reasons that, in his opinion, made the majority’s decision dubious.

“[Literally] in the middle of the night, the Court issued unprecedented and legally questionable relief without giving the lower courts a chance to rule, without hearing from the opposing party, within eight hours of receiving the application, with dubious factual support for its order, and without providing any explanation for its order,” he wrote in his dissent, which Thomas joined. “I refused to join the Court’s order because we had no good reason to think that, under the circumstances, issuing an order at midnight was necessary or appropriate.”

That last part seems a bit naïve… or very disingenuous.

In fact, the only reason why the Supreme Court, which is dominated by conservatives, acted is that it is quite clear that the White House does not feel as though it is bound by the rule of law and tries to defy court orders at every turn.

That is the only reason why the emergency petition was necessary in the first place. After all, the Supreme Court would not have had to act if the administration had not ignored an order last month that barred it from sending a couple of planes full of immigrants to the El Salvadoran prison.

Alito’s suggestion that the order was not necessary seems particularly ridiculous because a motorcade guarding buses full of immigrants was on the way to the airport before it turned around on Friday night, as NBC News reported.

That begs the question whether he and Thomas are loyal to the Constitution or to Trump’s right-wing ideology.

Sadly, the answer is probably the latter.

Last year, Alito was caught on tape indicating that he views the current political divide in the US as a fight between two sides that one side was “probably going to win,” and agreed that those who believe in God have to “keep fighting” to “return our country to a place of godliness.”

And that, apparently, means deporting people to a prison camp without due process.

What is especially troubling is that it will already be difficult to get this Supreme Court to curb Trump’s power. After a GOP-led Congress has already shown that it is happy with serving as a rubberstamp for the administration, the court plays a crucial role in slowing the president’s march toward turning the US into an authoritarian state.

Americans can clearly not count on Alito or Thomas in that effort.

However, Friday night’s decision gives some hope that there is a coalition of liberal and conservative justices who will not idly sit by as Trump dismantles the government and undermines American values.

In addition to the three liberals on the bench, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett seem most likely to rule against this administration, but it is also possible that Brett Kavanaugh will join them as well.

While this decision is an encouraging sign, we will need more data points to see whether the Roberts court will consistently thwart Trump or side with his lawless and anti-democratic schemes.  

In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.