RIP John Roberts's Summer Vacation
At 1:15am early Saturday, April 19, the Supreme Court ruled, in just a few lines of text..."The Government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this Court. See 28 U. S. C. §1651(a)."...
...one reason why it’s so unprecedented is because of the unprecedented lawlessness by the Trump Administration, which has led to a flood of litigation inundating the courts and now increasing questions of contempt as it seeks to avoid complying with orders...
But another major reason is because of how the Supreme Court has effectively rewritten appellate procedure, which has now also resulted in a flood of litigation inundating the appeals courts as the Trump Administration keeps seeking review of so many of the district court orders it dislikes, even those that did not used to be appealable -- a detail which the Supreme Court has now taught the appeals courts to themselves ignore...
... Even where the Court isn’t actually making a formal, final ruling, the practical effect of its shadow docket responses is often sea-changing and dispositive, and sometimes in ways it seems the Court may not have anticipated -- as perhaps was the case here, where it found itself now absolutely needing to step in. Worse, it is having this effect based on an incomplete record, which needs more time to develop at the lower courts before the case would ordinarily be ripe even for appellate, let alone Supreme Court, review....
It is a lot of work to look over every judge’s shoulder in all these cases, and, worse, it will be work that often needs to happen quickly. As this case illustrates, with a Trump Administration that will take a mile when only a millimeter has been given, act as lawlessly as it can until it is explicitly stopped, and respect no other authority than the Supreme Court, it will fall to the Supreme Court to do all that stopping. For everything. And fast.
The Roberts Supreme Court has set the stage for everything the Trump Administration does to be an emergency, and not just with its shadow docket practices but by its previous decisions that have removed any of the legal friction that might have slowed the administration down...
Don’t forget that Judge Boasberg in the DC District Court tried to stop the AEA being used at all anywhere in the country, at least until it could be properly determined whether the Trump Administration had the authority it claimed to render any of these people abroad.
But in response to the Trump Administration demand for shadow docket review the Court overruled Boasberg’s order and sua sponte, with little briefing, required the threatened expulsions to El Salvador to instead be challenged as habeas petitions wherever the detainees were.
In other words, instead of allowing one challenge to have dealt with the same fundamental issue at the heart of each case—whether the AEA allowed any of what Trump was doing—the Court invited a proliferation of already multitudinous litigation to be spawned in multiple courts... all of which may now soon land at the Court’s own door, along with all the other litigation that Trump’s lawless behavior has invited.
But the Trump Administration doesn’t take weekends off. These cases won’t take the summer off. They are going to demand attention, and fast, and every step on the way. “Cancel appointments, cancel vacations,” was not just an admonishment to the DOJ by a district court judge in Maryland seeking to do discovery on a related question of contempt by the Trump Administration; it’s an instruction for the nine justices at One First Street to get ready for what’s coming their way, and soon. Because if they’re going to weigh in on everything, then they’re going to need to weigh in on everything.
... if needing to be on call to keep Trump from wrecking the country, or people’s lives, wrecks their summer plans, too bad. They only have themselves to blame.
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/04/21/rip-john-robertss-summer-vacation/
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