Justice Is Winning In Court

On February 20, the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 ruling, determined that President Trump lacked the authority to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Trump’s tariffs were a cornerstone of his foreign policy and an attempt to manage the federal budget.

The majority included two Trump appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, and Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee. In his response to the decision, the president questioned their loyalty, referring to them as “our people” and calling them “fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and radical Left Democrats”.

In the majority opinion, Chief Justice Roberts wrote:

“Our task today is to decide only whether the power to ‘regulate . . . importation,’ as granted to the President in IEEPA, embraces the power to impose tariffs. It does not.”

The clarity of that three-word judgement – “It does not.” – echoed the opinion in a different case issued just four days earlier by US District Court Judge Cynthia Rufe, also a Bush appointee.

On February 16, Judge Rufe granted an injunction against the removal of an exhibit at the President’s House in Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park. Per Trump’s executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, which claimed to reverse “a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth”, the National Park Service removed an exhibit that referenced slavery and told the stories of enslaved people who had served George Washington while he occupied the President’s House. The city of Philadelphia filed a lawsuit challenging the exhibit’s removal.

Judge Rufe began her ruling with a quote from George Orwell’s “1984”, then wrote:

“As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims—to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not.”

The injunction required the Park Service to restore the exhibit. Three days later, the Park Service had already put back 21 of the 34 exhibit panels when, in response to an appeal by the Trump Justice Department, US Circuit Judge Thomas Hardiman “split the baby”, ordering the Park Service to stop its restoration while leaving the already-restored panels in place until a final ruling on the case is made later this spring.

In a scathing rebuke of Trump’s immigrant deportation practices, US District Judge Fred Biery on January 31 ordered that a father and his 5-year-old son be freed after 10 days in detention. The two had been taken during an ICE action in Minnesota and transported to a detention center in Texas. Two days after they were taken into custody without due process, a petition for a writ of habeas corpus was filed on their behalf. Such a writ requires that the detainees appear in court, where their detention must be justified.

Biery’s opinion began:

“Before the Court is the petition of asylum seeker Adrian Conejo Arias and his five-year-old son for protection of the Great Writ of habeas corpus. They seek nothing more than some modicum of due process and the rule of law….”

After calling the government’s pursuit of deportation quotas “ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented”, Biery, a Bill Clinton appointee, went on to provide a “civics lesson to the government” before declaring that “the Constitution of these United States trumps this administration’s detention of petitioner Adrian Conejo Arias and his minor son, L.C.R.”

The writ of habeas corpus is a fundamental right included in the Constitution. As early as May 2025, Trump’s Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, had floated the idea that Trump might suspend the writ of habeas corpus in order to accelerate immigrant deportations.

In an apparent acknowledgment of the Trump regime’s disregard for the Constitution, Biery concluded his 3-page opinion, “With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike, it is so ordered.”

The order does not preclude the government from pursuing the deportation of Arias and his son through proper legal channels.

Nearly a year after the American Federation of Teachers and other groups sued the Department of Education (ED) over the department’s “Dear Colleague” letter, the government agreed to drop its appeal. The letter required that colleagues and universities receiving ED funds end diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, intimating that this also included teaching what the government deemed was “the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’ and advanced discriminatory policies and practices.”

In August 2025, US District Judge Stephanie Gallagher, a Trump appointee, determined that the letter violated the Administrative Procedure Act and the First Amendment.

“This case illustrates why following procedures is so important… But, at this stage too, [the Court] must closely scrutinize whether the government went about creating and implementing them in the manner the law requires. Here, it did not. And by leapfrogging important procedural requirements, the government has unwittingly run headfirst into serious constitutional problems….”

Seventy pages later, Judge Gallagher concluded, “For the reasons stated above, the Letter and Certification Requirement are held unlawful ….”

In January, the government dropped its appeal and accepted the court’s finding, and on February 18, the court issued a final ruling that permanently invalidated the letter and prevents the government from enforcing, relying on, or reviving it.