Now the good kritarchs. SCOTUS has weighed in on the public charge issue and removed the nation wide injunctions against enforcement of the current law on welfare dependent legal immigrants, and, importantly, illegal aliens subject to removal.
A narrowly divided Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to begin enforcing a rule making it harder for poor immigrants to gain green cards.
The justices in a 5-4 vote along ideological lines said they would let the controversial immigration rules go forward even as lower courts wrestle with multiple legal challenges against them.
[Supreme Court Allows Trump To Enforce ‘Public Charge’ Immigration Rule, by Susannah Luthi, Politico, January 27, 2020]
Better yet, nation-wide injunctions in theory are hanging by a thread; Justices are increasingly angered at the kritarchs making policy, not legal cases.
Justice Neil Gorsuch in a blistering concurring opinion criticized federal judges who issue nationwide blocks on administration rules, potentially teeing up a wider challenge to the practice that has often stymied major parts of Trump’s agenda and drawn scorn from Attorney General William Barr.
Gorsuch, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote that the “real problem” in the case is the “increasingly common practice of trial courts ordering relief that transcends the cases before them.” In those situations, he wrote, “it is hard to see how the court could still be acting in the judicial role of resolving cases and controversies.”
The import of this decision cannot be underestimated. The full implementation of the public charge rule could result in a dramatic fall in legal immigration numbers.
Immigrant rights groups have predicted the new public charge policy will drastically curtail visas for immigrants. An analysis from the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation found applications for about 42 percent of legal immigrants could see their green card applications “weighed negatively” as a result, while 94 percent could face extra scrutiny after using at least one of the public programs targeted by the Trump policy.
The thing about the national injunction may be even bigger.
James Fulford wrote here earlier, in Democrat-Appointed Kritarchs Block Trump's Public Charge—For Now, that
The fact that one judge with one injunction can block the entire Federal government is wrong, and it's a fairly recent legal development. It's not just me that thinks that. Notre Dame Law Professor Samuel Bray has written a lot about the "National Injunction" on the Volokh Conspiracy blog.
In 2017, Jeff Sessions was attacked for saying he didn't think one judge "on an island in the Pacific," i. e. Hawaiian Judge Derrick Kahala Watson, should be able to endanger the whole country by blocking Trump's travel ban.
He defended himself ably, pointing out that
SESSIONS: Well, I think that was a perfectly correct statement. We have some 700 federal judges. One of them has now stopped the President of the United States, who is briefed daily from the Department of Defense, the CIA, the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, on the dangers and threats we face.
He's issued a perfectly reasonable executive order that delays six countries for 90 days from being brought -- immigrants coming here because we cannot vet them.
What Sessions said in 2017, the Supreme Court said in 2020.
