On the Border Wall, the Supreme Court Caves to Trump.by Linda Greenhouse
'Increasingly, the court risks becoming identified as the president’s lap dog.
Last February, in declaring a national emergency that he said authorized him to spend money that Congress had refused to give him on his border wall, President Trump predicted, “We will then be sued.” But not to worry, he went on: “And we will possibly get a bad ruling, and then we will get another bad ruling, and then we will end up in the Supreme Court, and hopefully we will get a fair shake and win in the Supreme Court, just like" the Muslim travel ban.
And guess what: he was right.
The news cycle moves at supersonic speed in the Age of Trump. It’s hard to remember, through the din of the president’s insulting the city of Baltimore and one of its members of Congress, Elijah Cummings, that not even a week ago, after the close of business last Friday, the Supreme Court permitted the Trump administration to violate a federal statute and quite likely the Constitution itself.
The court did this in response to a request the administration styled as an emergency. The court acted without a public hearing, without a signed opinion and over the dissenting votes of the four liberal justices. As a result, although the case is still on appeal to a federal appeals court, the administration can now sign contracts for 100 miles of a 30-foot-high steel wall in five locations where Congress prohibited construction, using money that Congress refused to allocate for that purpose.
To be sure, it was a victory for the president, as he promptly tweeted. But it was a cheap victory — and cheap doesn’t mean free. There will be a price to pay, if not by the administration in its relationship with Congress, then certainly by a Supreme Court moving closer to an identity as the administration’s lap dog.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/opinion/trump-supreme-court-border-wall.html?
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