The brilliant and always direct, Adam Serwer of the Atlantic makes it very clear: we are in a constitutional crisis right now. Trump is openly shrugging at ¯_(ツ)/¯ a decision from the Supreme Court, but in the most unserious and contemptful way:
Last week, the Supreme Court instructed the Trump administrationto follow a lower court’s directive to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return...the Trump administration has chosen a third way: pretending it is complying while refusing to do so.
A character that nobody thought would become a central villain in the descend to madness, is Secretary of State Marco Rubio. As a senator he often was the most miserable person in the chamber. He never looked like he enjoyed the job. And when running for president, he was constantly humiliated by President Trump. Adam Serwer again:
During the Oval Office meeting, Rubio chimed in to say that “no court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States.
I hope when we are the other side of this, these folks face justice at the Hague. Secretary Rubio does not have any place in history besides standing next to Castro and Pinochet.
Trump is definitely planning on rounding up citizens on fake criminal charges, with no trial or legal recourse. He has found his secret police and gulag in ICE and El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT). The Supreme Court is acutely aware of the dangers of such a plan:
As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a statement joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson accompanying the Supreme Court’s order last week, which was issued with no public dissents, “The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.” More broadly, this matter is no longer just about deportations or undocumented immigrants. The Trump administration’s defiance of a Supreme Court order is a new step into presidential lawlessness, in that it suggests that the administration will not abide by any court orders it does not feel like complying with.
The Supreme Court is now faced with a real decision.
The Roberts Court will now have to decide whether to side with the Constitution or with a lawless president asserting the power to disappear people at will. This is not a power that any person, much less an American president, is meant to have.
I don't believe Chief Justice Roberts can save the nation from stomach flopping into the abyss. The fall is infinite. Looking up is to bare witness to the light shrinking into darkness. There is no going back.