Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a severely critical dissent, lashed out at her conservative colleagues for being too willing to side with the Trump administration in permitting controversial policies to go into effect on an emergency basis, CNN reported.
The dissent, in response to the court’s decision on Friday to grant the government’s request to permit the "public charge" rule to go into effect in every state, stated that "It is hard to say what is more troubling, that the government would seek this extraordinary relief seemingly as a matter of course, or that the court would grant it."
The three other liberal justices on the court also dissented, but they did not join Sotomayor's decision.
Sotomayor pointed out that “the government has recently sought stays in an unprecedented number of cases [by] claiming one emergency after another," a process which often upends "the normal “appellate process" while "putting a thumb on the scale in favor of the party that won."
Sotomayor's remarks were made as the Supreme Court is considering such high-profile issues this term as abortion, LGBTQ rights, the Second Amendment, immigration and the president's attempts to shield his financial records.
The government has argued that emergency requests are needed, because lower courts are ordering broad preliminary injunctions much more frequently that cover states that weren't a party to the original lawsuit.
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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