Sam Alito FURIOUS Other Supremes Won't Let Him Send People To El Salvador Prison, UNFAIR.

Sam's dickishness remains unflagging.

Photo by 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

We finally got a chance to sit down and read Samuel Alito’s latest FWD:FWD:FWD:RE:RE:RE:RE: email masquerading as a dissent that he published on Saturday in response to a majority of the Supreme Court telling the Trump administration to STOP FUCKING DEPORTING PEOPLE TO EL SALVADORAN SUPERMAX, DID YOU NOT HEAR US THE FIRST TIME WE SAID IT LIKE THREE DAYS AGO, YOU SMARMY CHUNDERFUCKS?????

The rest of the Supreme Court had felt so strongly about this, in fact, that it released its order halting deportations at 1 a.m. Saturday, before Alito finished writing his dissent. This is highly unusual if not unheard of with the Court. But it reflects the urgency with which the other justices apparently felt the need to act.

After all, detainees were being bused to an airport to be loaded onto flights to El Salvador that very evening, and a couple of dozen more people were about to disappear into President Nayib Bukele’s gulag. This made anywhere from two to four of even the conservative justices squeamish, so they didn’t wait for Alito to get his complaints down on paper.

You are probably wondering what constitutional questions had so vexed Alito that he needed a full day to come up with his rationalizations for why Donald Trump should be allowed to wave his kingly scepter and unilaterally decide the fate of these prisoners. Turns out it was the constitutional principle that always vexes Sam Alito: the principle of “how do I ignore evidence and history and everything else so I can torture the language of the law to get what I want, even if it is 180 degrees different from something I wrote last week in a different case.”

No, literally. Law professor Steve Vladeck wrote about this in his summary of Alito’s whine-fest:

[T]he Supreme Court just expanded the circumstances in which district court rulings on TROs can be immediately appealed—in a pair of rulings in which Justice Alito was … in the majority. Alito never explains why the TROs in the Department of Education and J.G.G. cases were immediately appealable, but the denial of a TRO in this case was not.

Well, that’s an easy one. The circumstances are that the TROs in those first two cases help advance Donald Trump’s policy agenda, and a TRO in this case did not. It’s yet another instance of that long-held legal precept SCOTUS has brought back with a vengeance in recent years called the doctrine of “Fuck you, that’s why.”

Elsewhere in the dissent, Alito made something of a gobsmacking point. At least it’s gobsmacking to anyone who knows literally anything about Donald Trump and the band of drooling, prevaricating twits that staff his administration. Namely, that the government had assured another court that deportations were not imminent, and that's good enough for Sam Alito. What’s the big rush, anyway?

Although this Court did not hear directly from the Government regarding any planned deportations under the Alien Enemies Act in this matter, an attorney representing the Government in a different matter, J. G. G. v. Trump, No. 1:25–cv–766 (DC), informed the District Court in that case during a hearing yesterday evening that no such deportations were then planned to occur either yesterday, April 18, or today, April 19.

The administration was already apparently flouting the Court’s initial order to give prisoners reasonable time and notice to contest these deportations, which is why the majority of Alito’s colleagues voted the way they did with this order. Yet here is Sam Alito pretending to be a naif who simply can’t imagine that a lawyer for the Trump administration, a group that includes some of the most incessant liars to ever slither out of America’s primordial swamp, would do something so base as lie about something so important. Why, if that don’t beat all!

Apparently on Planet Alito, the Court should have given the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt, or the “presumption of regularity,” as they call it in lawyer-speak. That’s a legal doctrine in which judges assume that government employees and officials acted lawfully while performing their duties. Under other presidents, this might have been a reasonable way to work. Under Donald Trump, it is a little bit like trusting an alligator not to bite your arm off if you surprise him and stick it down his throat.

Stop The Presses, The Supreme Court Told Trump NO, For A Change!

The rest of Alito’s bullet points (there are seven) boil down to him complaining that the Court is ignoring proper procedure for this or that, and therefore they should not have taken up the case before other courts rule or the lawyers rewrite the few documents they had submitted or the Earth drifts out of its orbit directly into the sun.

As Alito’s work goes, it wasn’t his best, lacking as it did his usual piss and vinegar. But it was dumb enough.

The only other justice to sign on to Alito’s dissent was Clarence Thomas, natch, because Thomas never met another human being he didn’t want to immiserate. We worry that the others will come around at some point. We hope we’re wrong, and that SCOTUS is having some second thoughts about what they have empowered.

[Steve Vladeck / SCOTUS]

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