Elie Mystal, The Nation: Pod Save Fire Lord Ozai

[Celerity]

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The question of whether Donald Trump has the authority to deploy federal troops in American cities—in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act—is heading to the Supreme Court. This week, Trump asked his complicit Supreme Court justices to overturn a restraining order barring him from waging war on Chicago. The appeal was placed on the court’s shadow docket, meaning the court can review the case and issue a ruling at any time, without a hearing and without the Republicans’ having to explain themselves. The court can give Trump the authority to “temporarily” attack American cities, pending a full hearing at a later date, by which point the devastation from his actions will already be complete.

Georgetown Law professor Steven Vladek calls the case a “make or break moment” for the Supreme Court. He writes: “For the Supreme Court to issue a ruling that allows the President to send troops into our cities based upon contrived (or even government-provoked) facts…would be a terrible precedent for the Court to set—not just for what it would allow President Trump to do now, but for the even more grossly tyrannical conduct it would allow him and future presidents (assuming we have any) to undertake later. If factually and legally unpersuasive domestic deployments of troops aren’t going to be a red line for the Supreme Court, what the heck will be?” My guess is that there is no “red line” for the Christofascist extremists running the Supreme Court. They will give Trump what he wants, as they always do, and continue to let him trash the Constitution to satisfy his whims.

In a separate case, a three-judge panel, randomly stacked with two Trump judges from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, gave a preview of what the Supreme Court’s eventual argument will look like. That panel removed a restraining order imposed by a district court judge (who was also a Trump appointee, for what it’s worth) preventing Trump from sending troops into Portland. The panel took Trump’s lies about the situation on the ground in Portland at face value. The Ninth Circuit said that the district court did not give appropriate “deference” to Trump’s “assessment of the facts.” They further said that the district court placed too much emphasis on the words Trump used to justify his invasion of Portland. I expect that the panel’s ruling will soon be overturned by the full Ninth Circuit, but it doesn’t matter. Their reasoning will be aped by the Supreme Court. This is the classic Republican judicial dance to justify anything that Trump does.

First, the judges say that the president might be right, even in the face of demonstrable evidence that he’s wrong. Then, they say that we cannot use Trump’s own (illegal, unconstitutional, abhorrent) words against him, and have to pretend that he didn’t literally confess to his own illegal motivations for doing a thing. Lastly, they’ll say that their order authorizing Trump to do whatever violent thing he wants to do is “temporary” and promise a full hearing “on the merits” at some point in the future, by which time whoever it is Trump wanted to kill or deport will already be dead or gone. Republican justices essentially tell us to ignore Trump when he’s telling the truth about himself, but listen to Trump when he’s lying about the rest of us. They will again. Chief Justice John Roberts and his Republican cabal first used this move way back in 2018 in Trump v. Hawaii, when Roberts authorized Trump’s Muslim ban, and since nobody ever punished Roberts for his legal vandalism, he’s been using the same playbook ever since. Trump is a dictator. The Supreme Court is there to help him.