The Supreme Court and Trump’s anti-Muslim executive orders
1 July 2017
The Supreme Court’s decision on Monday permitting Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim ban to go into effect is one of the most significant cases in the history of the institution. After lower federal judges had blocked Trump’s flagrantly discriminatory executive orders from being enforced, the Supreme Court intervened to hand Trump a victory.
The written opinion of the court is significant not because it is distinguished by brilliant legal reasoning or profound affirmations of democratic principle. It is a dull, tepid document of a mere 13 pages. A political compromise was obviously reached and the legal “reasoning” of the decision is just a crude, half-hearted shuffle towards the pre-determined outcome.
Nothing recognizable as a democratic sentiment is expressed anywhere in the opinion. It is simply announced that “the balance tips in favor of the Government’s compelling need to provide for the Nation’s security.”
The Supreme Court’s decision is a signal that, after a protracted twilight, the sun is setting on anything that might be called American democracy. The historical association between the US political establishment and a certain democratic political culture, institutions and traditions, inherited from the American Revolution and Civil War, has long since passed over the horizon, no longer a reality.
Donald Trump, loud and ugly, proclaims the new reality. With his appeals to bigotry and prejudice, Trump expresses the rot at the heart of the American social system. Everything sick about American capitalism—including the criminality, ignorance, rapacity, narcissism and kleptomania of its ruling class—has been puked up in the form of this vulgar imbecile. Trump’s rise heralds a new…