Trump Wins While Appeals Continue
The big breaking news is at The Hill: Supreme Court allows Trump to enforce 'Remain in Mexico' policy . Here's the key:
The Supreme Court announced on Wednesday that the Trump administration may enforce a policy that requires asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico.
The justices will allow the “Remain in Mexico” policy to continue while the administration appeals a lower court ruling which deemed the program illegal and ordered a suspension that was scheduled to take effect tomorrow.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor was the only justice to publicly dissent from the decision to allow the policy to continue.
...
A federal district court in California last April ruled that the policy violates U.S. immigration law and contravenes international human rights norms. The court ordered the administration to stop the practice along the entire U.S. border.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upheld the lower court’s legal ruling, but the appellate court narrowed the injunction to apply to California and Arizona, the two border states under its jurisdiction.
The injunction, that was scheduled to take effect tomorrow, would have affected those two states, but would not have applied to New Mexico or Texas.
Interestingly, I read this within a minute or two of making this comment on another thread:
The state of the judicial branch is a huge problem for our constitutional order that has finally reached critical mass--a real threat to our body politic.
Read Article III of the Constitution, which establishes the Judicial Branch--this is basically it:
"The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish."
The only court established by the ratification of the Constitution was the SCOTUS. I suspect the system of "inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish" has grown far beyond what the Founders ever imagined. It's an unwieldy structure in which justice is routinely delayed and denied by expense and overload. And there is no real way to impose discipline on the inferior courts in a truly effective way--as we're seeing now.
With this action, the SCOTUS is taking the one step it can take, but the situation is a bit like the coronavirus. The SCOTUS is the ICU for the Constitution, and the actions of liberal judges are swamping and overloading the SCOTUS with acts that require remedial action that shouldn't be occupying their time and keeping them from attending to legitimate matters.