How in the tank for Trump is the Roberts Court?
The near-certain forthcoming decision to upholdTrump’s rescission of DACA would be bad because there are legally sound arguments that allow one to reach a better substantive result, and political in the sense that had the Democrats retained the Senate in 2016 the decision would have almost certainly come out the other way. But as a solely legal matter such a judgment wouldn’t be outrageous. This is another story:
A full federal appeals court on Wednesday let stand an earlier ruling that President Trump’s accounting firm must turn over eight years of his financial records to Congress, bringing the case to the threshold of a likely Supreme Court battle.
In the latest of a string of court losses for Mr. Trump over his uncompromising vow to fight “all” subpoenas from Congress, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected his request that it rehear a case in which he challenged the subpoena to the firm, Mazars USA. A panel of the court had sided with lawmakers in that earlier ruling.
The president will now appeal to the Supreme Court, said a lawyer for Mr. Trump, Jay Sekulow. If the justices take the case, as seems likely, it would add another blockbuster case over separation of powers to the court’s current term, which ends in June — in the middle of the presidential election campaign.
[…]
A three-judge appeals court panel in October rejected that sweeping argument and upheld Congress’s authority to issue the subpoena by a 2-to-1 vote. But Mr. Trump petitioned the full court to erase that ruling and reconsider the case. The court on Wednesday rejected his request, 8 to 3.
Neomi Rao filed a dissent reiterating the “arguments” made in her dissent on the original panel, which was I think was originally rejected by the Daily Caller as not meeting their standards for legal arguments.
Anyway, if the Supreme Court goes the full Rao on this, they’re just straightforwardly ignoring black letter law to help Trump. And it could certainly happen.