In case you’ve been living under a rock without wifi (or are simply part of Cult45) the past four years, it’s pretty much settled that President Donald Trump’s primary agenda is to loot the treasury while dismantling every major government institution — and its members — if it’s not loyal to him.
Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor, an Obama-era liberal appointment who’s not bound to kiss the Orange one’s rings, blasted her court’s decision to enforce its “public charge” rule in the state of Illinois, limiting which non-citizens can obtain visas to enter the U.S.
Sotomayor is not just angry at the conservative justices, but with the court’s conservative majority for always siding with the Trump Administration when they seek to overturn 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 a recent dissent.
The issue at hand is in the case of Wolf v. Cook County, which deals with the Trump administration’s expansion of situations where the government can flatly deny visas to non-citizens looking to enter the U.S.
Under the law, officials can take into account whether an applicant is likely to become a “public charge,” which means someone “primarily dependent on the government for subsistence.” Moreover, Medicaid and some forms of assistance didn’t use to count until it was changed in 2019.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued scathing dissent in Supreme Court order that could reshape legal immigration https://t.co/Lt2aej7Nbw pic.twitter.com/unKBoiK1cB
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) February 24, 2020
It seems 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. This, however, perturbed Sotyimayor, and she expressed major concern over her colleagues having no problem with it:
“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.”
Just in case you forgot: Elections matter!