IMMIGRATION/SUPREME COURT/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “When President Donald Trump’s administration took its fight to end a controversial immigration program directly to the U.S. Supreme Court last month, skipping over a California federal appeals court in the process, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said it was a ‘rare step’ to ensure a quick and fair resolution.
But the fast trip to the nation’s highest judicial body was not the first time the administration took the unusual route of circumventing liberal-leaning lower courts and heading straight to the conservative-majority Supreme Court for relief from legal setbacks.
In the last year, the Justice Department sought to bypass lower courts four times using varying legal procedures in several high-profile cases, most recently to defend the administration’s right to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.
It also skipped the normal legal process in a fight over whether pregnant immigrant teens held in detention can obtain abortions. And it asked the Supreme Court to quickly intervene in its defense of the president’s travel bans, which primarily affected people from several Muslim-majority countries… While major, fast-moving cases often reach the Supreme Court quickly through expedited lower court rulings followed by appeals, skipping steps in the process is rare, many legal scholars said… A Justice Department official told Reuters in a statement that the government seeks emergency relief only when necessary. ‘The bottom line is we are careful in what we ask for,’ the official said.”
-Andrew Chung, “After legal setbacks, Trump administration races to Supreme Court,” Reuters, Feb. 1, 2018 03:03am