At the White House, Capitol and Supreme Court, Trump
goes on a spree of sabotage
Opinion by
Columnist
November 30, 2020 at 6:08 p.m. CST
Things
were not going well at Monday’s Supreme Court argument for the
Trump administration’s last-minute bid to boot undocumented
immigrants from the census for the first time in history. So Justice Samuel
Alito, a partisan who has seldom met a Trump power grab he doesn’t like,
decided to do something about it.
He
launched a filibuster.
“I have
two questions that are important to me; I hope I’m going to be able to squeeze
them both in in my time,” he began. He then wasted
one minute and seven seconds of the approximately two minutes each justice was
allotted on a preamble that included telling the woman arguing against the
Trump scheme: “I don’t really understand where your argument is going.”
Finally,
Alito asked her a question — then cut off the answer after less than 20 seconds
and dismissed her for relying on a “totally meaningless formality.”
He
asked his second question, and the exchange went 30 seconds over his allowed
time.
“Justice
Sotomayor?” said Chief Justice John Roberts.
Alito
ignored him. “If I can move on to my second — my second point,” he continued,
then announced that this point had “six categories.”
By part
three of his six-part third question, Alito had gone more than 90 seconds over
time.
“Justice
Sotomayor,” the chief justice said again.
“Uh,
Chief—” Alito objected.
“Justice
Sotomayor,” Roberts said, for a third time.
Alito
has been eye-rolling and mansplaining from
the bench for years, but this was odd even for him. Evidently he’s taking decorum
lessons from the founder of Trump
University.
He had
reason for his frustration, because it appeared Monday that even his colleagues
in the court’s right-wing supermajority weren’t inclined to go along with
Trump’s plan to shift congressional seats to Republicans by excluding
undocumented immigrants — even though the Constitution calls for
an “actual Enumeration” and a tally of the “whole number of persons” — not
citizens — “in each State” for apportionment purposes.
“A lot
of the historical evidence and longstanding practice really cuts against your
position,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the newest Trump appointee, told Trump’s
acting solicitor general, Jeffrey Wall. She asked him to concede that “illegal
aliens have never been excluded as a category from the census.”
“Yes,
and that’s the best argument on the other side,” Wall allowed.
Justice
Stephen Breyer told Wall that “this has never happened before — that you
excluded illegal aliens.” Unusually animated, Breyer challenged the Trump
lawyer:
“They’re
‘persons,’ aren’t they?”
Wall
didn’t directly answer. He must be taking cues from the boss, too.
And the
boss, at this moment, has set his sights on one thing: sabotage.
He’s
trying to sow doubts about the integrity of the election he lost by 6.3 million votes.
On
Sunday, Trump’s madness extended to suggesting his own
FBI and Justice Department may have conspired to commit election fraud against
him.
Trump’s
treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, is shutting down emergency
Federal Reserve lending programs that the Fed says “serve their important role
as a backstop for our still-strained and vulnerable economy.”
In the
Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, after busting up a
covid-relief deal between the White House and Democrats, is now entering his
seventh month of blocking pandemic relief, exposing millions to potential
hunger and eviction.
The
absence of covid relief could in turn lead to a government shutdown in December
— another potential shock to the economy — as Trump threatens to shoot down the
annual defense bill for the first time in 60
years so that military bases will continue to honor Confederate generals.
And
Trump just moved to strip job protections from hundreds of White House budget
analysts and other experts, The Post’s Lisa Rein reports, part of an
effort to make it easier to fire tens of thousands of civil servants.
The
census sabotage is just as clumsy. Lawyer Dale Ho, arguing against the Trump
plan, told the justices that the very dictionary the administration relies on
for the case, Webster’s 1828 edition, “defines residence as distinct from
nationality” — the exact opposite of Trump’s approach. Trump’s lawyer, Wall,
acknowledged the administration has no clue how it’s going to pull off its
identification and exclusion of undocumented immigrants.
Though
Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas sounded comfortable with jettisoning the
language of the Constitution to bless Trump’s political errand, the president’s
best hope seems to be that the justices might let him attempt the exclusion of
undocumented immigrants before the high court weighs in.
“But
isn’t that going to be like having to unscramble the eggs?” Roberts asked.
Replied
Wall: “I take the point that there is a bit of an omelet to unscramble.”
A bit?
All Trump has been doing on the way out is smashing eggs.
