Late Monday night, the Supreme Court issued two rulings that together connote such gratuitous cruelty that it is difficult to comprehend what could be going on in the minds of the far-right justices in the majority.
In the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, Chief Justice John Roberts halted the lower court’s order directing that the Trump administration bring back a man whom it admits to having erroneously sent to the brutal CECOT prison in El Salvador, where he remains confined.
And in Trump v. J.G.G., a 5-4 majority conceded that Trump must give people basic due process before snatching them off the streets under the guise of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. It nonetheless lifted another lower court order halting that practice, on the dubious technical theory that the plaintiffs should not have filed their class action case in Washington, DC. Each individual case, the Court reasoned, belongs instead in the courts located in the states in which they were detained. ….more
