SCOTUS Justice Sonia Sotomayor Blasts Court’s Conservative Shift In Public Charge Dissent
Richard Moorhead
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Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted the court’s conservative turn since the additions of new Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, claiming the court was losing its credibility in a dissent for a case approving the Trump’s new ‘public charge’ denying admittance for immigrants dependent on public benefits.
Sotomayor issued the dissent on Friday, when the court ruled in a 5-4 vote to uphold the public charge rule. The rule makes immigrants who are “likely at any time to become a public charge” ineligible to receive green cards. The rule in effect reserves assistance programs such as Medicaid and food stamps for U.S citizens.
Such a public charge rule has wide-ranging precedent in the history of American immigration policy, and the term was first used in law more than a hundred years ago in the Immigration Act of 1882. Yet to the Supreme Court’s liberal activist wing it’s always been a violation of the Constitution. Sotomayor claimed the court’s credibility was being threatened by its audacity to approve commonsense restrictions in immigration.
“That is because the Court—in this case, the New York cases, and many others—has been all too quick to grant the Government’s ‘reflexive’ requests. But make no mistake: Such a shift in the Court’s own behavior comes at a cost.”
Sotomayor was alluding to Trump administration victories in the Supreme Court. The administration has won a plethora of legal victories at the highest level of America’s justice system, often overturning dubious national injunctions from activist judges of liberal circuit courts.
“I fear that this disparity in treatment erodes the fair and balanced decisionmaking process that this Court must strive to protect.”
It’s quite unusual for a Supreme Court Justice to openly criticize the judgements of her own institution. The court has become increasingly unpopular on the Left, posing an unavoidable obstacle to attempts to enshrine leftist policy priorities through the court system.
Perhaps it turns out that unrestricted judicial activism isn’t the flawless political strategy the Left has imagined it to be.
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