The justices said no action should be taken to pursue the deportations of any alleged Venezuelan gang members in Texas under the rarely used wartime law.
The justices said no action should be taken to pursue the deportations of any alleged Venezuelan gang members in Texas under the rarely used wartime law.
All they did was uphold the injunction from the lower court. Boasberg would be the one to hold them in contempt for violating the injunction. They have no more room to appeal.
That’s kind of the problem I’m getting at.
If the Supreme Court isn’t stepping in and threatening real, immediate consequences laid out by themselves, Trump and friends are pretty much free to ignore it. They don’t respect lower courts, and they’re insulated from consequences handed out by lower courts anyway.
If Boasberg wants to hold them in contempt, what can actually be done? Consequences applied to them as a collective mean nothing (they’ll just ignore them again), so the only thing that can actually scare them is seeing personal consequences like asset seizure or jail time.
Suppose they are threatened with jail time, though. They have a complicit SCOTUS protecting them as individuals. The Supreme Court would step in and either take four years to decide whether that specific punishment is warranted/justified/allowed, say the lower court doesn’t have the authority to punish an individual member of the administration for the actions of the entire administration, or any other manner of bullshit excuse.
The punishment has to come from the Supreme Court, and it has to be something that the members of the administration are actually scared of. Anything other than that is all bark and no bite.
Edit: Bad explanation on my part.