When the tortured history of this period in our nation is written, the most crucial question hanging in the balance right now will have been answered: will six Supreme Court justices, who have been enabling virtually every step of national deconstruction, acknowledge and address the fact that our republic is being torn apart by a dictatorial coup?
On Monday, the Court’s latest of 22 shadow-docket grants to autocracy (no hearing, no briefs, no arguments, no reasoning — just a six-person political gut punch) allows masked ICE gunmen to grab people off the street without a court warrant or probable cause, imprisoning and then deporting them to some place in Africa or Latin America with no due process.
Anyone who understands the rule of law should now see the reality: the ultimate sworn protectors of the Constitution are enabling a piece-by-piece laceration of the document that was holding us together.
Why are the Roberts Court’s Sycophantic Six doing this? You can say it’s because that’s what they were specifically chosen to do. But what leads highly intelligent people with deep legal training to be willing to use their brains and sophistry to overturn a rule-of-law culture that had evolved over 225 years?
It’s certainly not “conservatism.” For several justices, it appears to be financial gain. For some, it may be a personal opposition to government regulation of business excesses. For some, it may be religious fervor; several of the Catholic justices reflect Opus Dei autocratic dogma. For one justice, Neil Gorsuch, it may be rancor against the system that accused (though it did not indict) his mother when she was cutting sweetheart deals as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Ronald Reagan. Or maybe the Six fear that if they turn against Trump, he’ll say, “You’re fired!” (That, too, would violate the Constitution, but what the hell?) Whatever their personal reasons, these Six are ultimately the fulcrum allowing the nation to spin downward.
Some of the German judges who helped overturn that nation’s culture in the 1930s came to realize how decisive their role was in the dictator’s rise. But it was too late. The courts were no longer independent or a check against government abuses of power. They quickly became just another mechanism for the Führer to consolidate his dictatorship.
Is it too much to hope that at least two of the six justices will realize that the Roberts Court will go down in history as the backstop that wasn’t, the critical societal protector of two centuries of democratic evolution that failed in the most destructive attack ever launched against the Constitution they were sworn to safeguard? If so, in the eyes of history the Roberts Court, like the Führer’s judges, will forever live in infamy, having brought a great nation to its knees.
Zygmunt J.B. Plater is a professor emeritus at Boston College Law School. He lives in Provincetown.
