On Thursday, the Supreme Court issued a 5-4 decision against the Trump administration’s move to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the Obama-era program that gives legal protections to illegal alien children.
In a clear act of judicial activism, Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court’s Leftists, again, and said that Trump’s decision to rescind the program, which came from an unlawful Obama executive order in the first place, violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), the act that sets federal agencies’ procedures for rulemaking.
According to Fox News, the court said that the way the program was terminated was done in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner, without commenting on DACA itself. Roberts said that Trump does indeed have the power to rescind DACA, just not the way he did it apparently.
Roberts wrote in his opinion that, “[W]e do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies. ‘The wisdom’ of those decisions ‘is none of our concern. We address only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action.
Roberts continued that “[t]hat dual failure raises doubts about whether the agency appreciated the scope of its discretion or exercised that discretion in a reasonable manner. The appropriate recourse is therefore to remand to DHS so that it may consider the problem anew,” referring to how Roberts believes that the administration “failed to consider the conspicuous issues of whether to retain forbearance” and the impact the decision would have on current DACA recipients.
Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, along with Justices Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. Thomas wrote that Roberts and the other four Justices held the administration’s decision to repeal to “a higher standard than the order that established it in the first place.”
Thomas wrote, “[T]hese cases could—and should—have ended with a determination that his legal conclusion was correct. Instead, the majority today concludes that DHS was required to do far more.
“Without grounding its position in either the APA or precedent, the majority declares that DHS was required to overlook DACA’s obvious legal deficiencies and provide additional policy reasons and justifications before restoring the rule of law. This holding is incorrect, and it will hamstring all future agency attempts to undo actions that exceed statutory authority. I would therefore reverse the judgments below and remand with instructions to dissolve the nationwide injunctions.”
Shortly after the Court spoke, President Trump retweeted, from the Daily Caller, a part of Justice Thomas’s dissent, and possibly the most important part of Thomas’ writing:
In his dissent in the SCOTUS DACA case Justice Thomas says The decision is “An effort to avoid a politically controversial but legally correct decision.” pic.twitter.com/kFvWt4f2BH
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) June 18, 2020
Trump later tweeted:
It’s heartening to see that the President is on the side of common sense and it just shows how important it is to reelect him in November. But there is another aspect to what happened today, and that is that the courts have too much power and have too little pushback.
This itself is unconstitutional, in that Article III of the Constitution does not allow the Supreme Court to legislate, but merely to adjudicate cases. This certainly applies to lower courts that are created by Congress, which itself, according to Article I, is the only legislative body.
President Trump and the Department of Justice have the power to put the genie of judicial supremacy back in the bottle once and for all. They should strongly consider this by ignoring judicial opinions that are clearly unlawful and political. Judges are not kings and their whims are not the “law of the land.”
Only then will we restore our Constitutional republic.
