Sonia Sotomayor lets her judicial activism show with unprecedented attack on high court’s alleged ‘bias’ in favor of Trump

By Tank Murdoch

(TNS) What do you do if you’re a Left-wing Supreme Court justice who has recently realized that your tenure is going to be marked with a string of dissents against a rational, constitutional majority?

Answer: You lash out like a whiner and accuse your GOP-appointed colleagues of being brainless, mindless robots who are controlled by President Donald Trump.

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In a ‘blistering dissent’ — and one that is practically unprecedented — Justice Sonia Sotomayor, an Obama appointee who was nominated by him because she is a like-minded Leftist, blasted the court’s recent decision to allow the Trump administration to enforce its “public charge” rule in the state of Illinois, limiting which non-citizens can obtain visas to enter the U.S.

Fox News reports:

Sotomayor’s problems with the conservative majority’s ruling went far beyond this case, claiming that it was symptomatic of the court’s habit of siding with the government when they seek emergency stays of rulings against them.

“It is hard to say what is more troubling: that the Government would seek this extraordinary relief seemingly as a matter of course, or that the Court would grant it,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent.

Translation: She’s angry that she’s been relegated to a permanent minority and isn’t going to get her way much for the remainder of her career.

And who was it that said there are no “Obama judges” or “Trump judges” on the high court? Oh, that’s right: Chief Justice John Roberts. Hmmm.

Fox News noted further:

This particular case, Wolf v. Cook County, deals with the Trump administration’s expansion of situations where the government can deny visas to non-citizens looking to enter the U.S. Federal law already says that officials can take into account whether an applicant is likely to become a “public charge,” which government guidance has said refers to someone “primarily dependent on the government for subsistence.”

In the past, non-cash benefits such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), forms of Medicaid, and certain housing assistance did not count, but the Department of Homeland Security issued its new public charge rule in 2019 which did include these benefits.

The new rule was already blocked with a nationwide injunction in a separate case, so the Supreme Court’s granting of a stay in the Cook County case only lets the government enforce the rule in the state of Illinois while litigation continues.

Now, mind you, what U.S. law actually says means very little to Democrat-appointed judges and justices, as we’ve seen time and again in federal circuits where they dominate. But to judges being appointed by President Trump and, to a large degree those appointed by Presidents Bush and Reagan, the rule of law and the Constitution do mean something. They understand the Judicial Branch’s role isn’t to make policy or help Leftists implement policy, the law be damned, it is to ‘judge’ whether laws and policies comport with the Constitution and constitutionally-passed laws.

In this case, Sotomayor’s dissent obviously has nothing to do with the letter of the law but rather her offended sensibilities: Who could do such a thing to a poor, helpless non-citizen?

Interestingly, she also has a beef with the high court’s increasing frequency in issuing emergency stays against nationwide injunctions.

“Claiming one emergency after another, the Government has recently sought stays in an unprecedented number of cases, demanding immediate attention and consuming limited Court resources in each,” she wrote. “And with each successive application, of course, its cries of urgency ring increasingly hollow. Indeed, its behavior relating to the public-charge rule in particular shows how much its own definition of irreparable harm has shifted.”

Yet, she has no problem, obviously, with the increasing frequency of nationwide injunctions — that is, a single federal judge in a single U.S. district blocking the Executive Branch from implementing policies simply because the court has a political disagreement with the current White House occupant.

You know who does have a problem with nationwide injunctions? The attorney general of the United States.

“When a federal court issues an order against enforcement of a government policy, the ruling traditionally applies only to the plaintiff in that case. Over the past several decades, however, some lower court federal judges have increasingly resorted to a procedural device—the ‘nationwide injunction’—to prevent the government from enforcing a policy against anyone in the country,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal in September.

“Shrewd lawyers have learned to ‘shop’ for a sympathetic judge willing to issue such an injunction. These days, virtually every significant congressional or presidential initiative is enjoined—often within hours—threatening our democratic system and undermining the rule of law,” he added. “Proponents of nationwide injunctions argue that they are necessary to ensure that the law is uniform throughout the country. But the federal judiciary wasn’t made to produce instant legal uniformity. To the contrary, the system—in which local district courts are supervised by regional courts of appeal—was constructed to allow a diversity of initial rulings until a single, national rule could be decided by the Supreme Court.”

“It is indeed well past time for our judiciary to re-examine a practice that embitters the political life of the nation, flouts constitutional principles, and stultifies sound judicial administration, all at the cost of public confidence in our institutions,” Barr concluded.

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Barr is correct, and historical precedence, along with the wise words of our founders, bears that out.

So, in the end, what Sotomayor is really upset about is that Hillary Clinton didn’t win in 2016 and thus ensure that she could spend the rest of her career using her position to remake America in the vision of the president who nominated her.

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