In the latest installment of “What Case Will Donald Trump Lose In Court Today,” it’s almost a foregone conclusion that Chief Justice John Roberts will get most of the credit for the defeat of Trump’s latest proclamation against immigrants on Friday in a 5–4 decision where Roberts sided with the more liberal members of the Supreme Court — Kagan, Sotomayor, Ginsburg, and Breyer — in upholding the block instituted by a lower court on Trump’s blanket ban on seeking asylum after entering the country illegally.
It’s not a surprise, since only an activist judge could interpret existing federal law that expressly provides the right for people to seek asylum in America no matter how they enter as anything other than settled case law.
You might remember this as the case where Trump dismissed the federal judge who ruled against his ban as an “Obama judge,” prompting the Chief Justice to take umbrage at the statement and issue a statement of his own:
We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”
Small wonder, then, that Roberts would get credit for upholding the ban on the ban, so to speak.
But if importance of vote were measured by how difficult it was to carry out that vote, the second-longest serving of all the justices would take the honor: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, affectionately known as “the Notorious RBG,” voted from her actual hospital bed to make sure that Trump wouldn’t be able to overturn existing law and turn back those fleeing the horrors and violence of their home countries because they didn’t line up their thousand-mile trek properly and wind up at an official port of entry.
The marginalized in this country owe a great debt of gratitude to the liberal members of the Supreme Court — because everyone knows the conservatives of the court hate minorities and women almost as a prerequisite for appointment to the bench.
But maybe nobody had done more good in our lifetimes than the oldest of the SCOTUS liberals, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Featured image via screen capture
