Supreme Court uses shadow docket to allow Trump to deport people to dangerous third countries without due process

Sotomayor’s dissent should be read in its entirety, but let’s start with the fact that this kind of relief — staying two lower court opinions — is only supposed to be granted in “extraordinary circumstances”:

It’s not hard to understand why in its first two bites at the apple the government failed to meet this standard:

The phrase “wholly without merit” is a very useful one when dealing with legal submissions from the Trump administration. I assume the chambers of the three non-authoritarian justices have this saved as a macro,

Once again, the idea that the balance of equities favors the government at all — let alone meeting the actual standard for issuing a stay — is farcical:

This is the apparent position of the Court’s Republicans: any [Republican] administration not getting to do something it wants immediately is “irreparable harm,” and essentially no countervailing interest is sufficient to, er, trump that.

After dismissing the extremely weak arguments offered by the government for why it can ignore statutory and constitutional protections, she concludes:

If you’re wondering what the majority’s response is, it is this: nothing. Not even a single pro forma sentence of reasoning. The shadow docket has become a tool to dissolve fundamental rights without even the form of legal reasoning.