A coalition of 20 Democratic-led states filed two lawsuits on Tuesday seeking to block Donald Trump’s administration from forcing them to cooperate with immigration enforcement in order to receive billions of dollars in transportation, counter-terrorism and emergency preparedness grant funding.
The states in a pair of lawsuits filed in federal court in Rhode Island argue that the U.S. Department of Transportation and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security are unlawfully using federal funds to coerce them into adhering to the Republican president’s hardline immigration agenda.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat who is leading the litigation, called the move a “blatantly illegal” threat by Trump to yank funds used to improve roads and prepare for emergencies if states do not use their resources to support immigration enforcement.
The only thing that would have me worried, even given these examples, is the fact that the current supreme court seems to enjoy wiping their ass with precedent.
They haven’t been afraid to dismiss older rulings, or to say that this time is somehow different than before because it’d be more convenient.
Let’s go look at the numbers.
Here’s a list of all Supreme Court cases in which a precedent was overruled.
https://constitution.congress.gov/resources/decisions-overruled/
The first such case the Roberts court heard was Central Virginia Community College v. Katz.
That’s been 21 such cases in the 20 years since then. That is, the Roberts court has averaged 1.05 cases per year in which a precedent was overruled.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, there was a slower rate (probably in part because there wasn’t all that much case law in place, and prior to Marbury v. Madison and the decision that judicial review was in SCOTUS’s bailiwick, it wouldn’t have mattered much anyway). But by my count, since 1913, when the pace picked up, there have been 210 such precedent-overruling cases.
The average since 1913 has been 1.875 precedent-overruling cases per year. The Roberts court has overruled precedent at a significantly lower-rate, a bit over half the rate, than has been the average for SCOTUS since 1913.