Laurence Tribe, God, and the Roberts Court

Just imagine how surprised God must have been when He woke up to see what was on the internet this morning. The legal liberal lion Laurence Tribe is praising the Almighty for the high bench, posting on X “Thank God for the Supreme Court.” Those words were originally typed out in the New Yorker by Ruth Marcus in a piece entitled “The Supreme Court Finally Takes on Trump.” She and the Harvard sage are united in their praise of the Nine.What a turnaround. Ms. Marcus, recently of the Washington Post, acknowledges as much in her dispatch for the New Yorker. She writes that thanksgiving for the justices is “not a sentence that I have been accustomed to typing in recent years.” Now, though, she is heartened that the Supreme Court, over the weekend, froze deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. Ms. Marcus looks to the court to combat “Trump’s outrages against the Constitution.”Ms. Marcus’s relief “that at least one branch” — the federal judiciary — has spoken “with clarity and strength, in support of the rule of law” marks a 180 from, say, July. That’s when she wrote a column for the Post entitled “God Save Us From This Dishonorable Court.” The occasion was the landmark ruling on presidential immunity Trump v. United States. She called that ruling “bad beyond my wildest imaginings.”President Biden concurred with Ms. Marcus. The 46th president called Trump “dangerous” and moved to end life tenure and pass a constitutional amendment abrogating immunity. “Not normal” is how Mr. Biden described the Roberts Court. He reckoned that its “extreme opinions” have “undermined law.” In the wake of Trump Mr. Tribe accused the court of “assuming ultimate power over our entire legal and political system.” Now he’s offering hosannas. The point of hauling out these markers is not to play a game of gotcha. A pundit no less than a baseball fan is liable to jeer one day and cheer the next. The attacks on the court by the left, though, went beyond grousing over this or that opinion and instead took aim at the legitimacy of the court itself. In her New Yorker piece Ms. Marcus laments how Mr. Trump “engineered a six-Justice conservative super-majority.”That conservative bloc, formidable as it may be, has shown distinct signs of being anything but a monolith. Justice Amy Coney Barrett in particular has proven herself to be something of a swing vote, and our A.R. Hoffman has reported on an emerging alliance she may be forging with Chief Justice Roberts. The pair have repeatedly dealt Mr. Trump setbacks, much to the delight of Mr. Tribe and Ms. Marcus. Things were never as dire as they warned.Now Ms. Marcus lauds the federal judiciary’s “impressive speed and fortitude to Trump’s fusillade of executive orders and other actions” — even, she allows, from judges appointed by Mr. Trump himself. She muses that her current delight could be “overly optimistic” because the ruling in respect of the Alien Enemies Act, which was interim rather than final, could be “the high-water mark of the Supreme Court’s resistance.”Mr. Tribe called Trump a “betrayal of the Constitution,” but now the same majority that determined that the Framers intended a presumption of immunity for official presidential acts are parsing whether the Trump administration’s immigration policies run counter to due process. It could be said that it is not the justice but its critics who lost faith with the parchment, a turning away thrown into sharp relief by their newfangled warmth to the court.

Laurence Tribe, God, and the Roberts Court

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