The Supreme Court Is Failing at Its Most Important Job

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/06/opinion/supreme-court-limits-failing-constitution.html

https://archive.ph/COuPv

The Supreme Court Is Failing at Its Most Important Job
Dec. 6, 2025, 7:00 a.m. ET
By The Editorial Board

...

Many lower courts have responded heroically to Mr. Trump’s ill-founded efforts to centralize power and weaken democracy. Judges on the district courts and courts of appeal have blocked his policies hundreds of times since he retook office in January. The judges stepped in to prevent the president from cutting off spending that Congress appropriated, dismantling departments it created, firing the heads of federal agencies and deporting people without due process.

In many of those instances, however, the Supreme Court later overruled the lower courts, allowing Mr. Trump’s power grabs. It did so almost entirely on its emergency docket, issuing rulings that are preliminary but often last for at least a year or two, with little or no explanation. The justices have wholly denied only one of Mr. Trump’s 32 emergency petitions in his second term (and even then, they effectively reversed themselves later).

The justices also seem friendlier to claims of executive power under Mr. Trump than they were under President Joe Biden. They blocked Mr. Biden’s efforts to use his authority to forgive student loans and manage the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, they are enabling a Republican president as he goes much further while relying on weaker rationales.

Just as important, the justices are ignoring the evidence that Mr. Trump is not acting in good faith. In the past, the government has enjoyed what legal scholars call the “presumption of regularity.” Judges assume they can rely on government officials to present facts accurately and give true reasons for their actions — and can defer to those officials at times as a result. The Trump administration does not deserve this presumption. As lower court judges appointed by presidents of both parties have noted, the administration’s actions have been “egregious,” “capricious,” “nonsensical,” “unconscionable,” “baseless,” “cringe-worthy,” “Kafkaesque,” “blatantly unconstitutional” and “a sham.” Judge Karin Immergut, whom Mr. Trump appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon, wrote that his professed reasons for deploying the National Guard in Portland were “untethered to the facts.”

...

[SamKnause]

1. It isn't failing.

Everything they are doing is intentional.

6 of them are Christian Nationalists.

6 of them are fascists.

6 of them are corrupt and accept bribes.

They are intentionally destroying this country and every institution in it.

[Fiendish Thingy]

2. Kill the filibuster, expand the court, neutralize the MAGA majority

Priority #1 once Dems regain the trifecta in 2029.

[The Roux Comes First]

3. Interesting to Have the Gray Lady Apparently Electro-shocked Out of Her Years-long Coma

Where was she when these cheap, chiseling, dishonest thugs were being shielded from important questions and interrogations during their hearings? I don't recall any meaningful actual journalism during that era. Sexual harassment and drunken rapes were just too indecorous to actually report on honestly.

[Mblaze]

4. It is now completely clear

That the "Conservative" side of SCOTUS is corrupt and blatantly political. Honest Justices who champion the "unitary executive" don't reserve it for Republicans only. "Originalists" don't invent Presidential immunity out of whole cloth.

[tanyev]

5. 6 of the 9 justices have a very different definition of their job.