Biden Wants Same “Leeway” SCOTUS Gave Trump. He Won’t Get It

President Joe Biden wants an awful lot. For example, he wants people to not ask questions about whether we’re going to get everyone out of Afghanistan we’re supposed to.

However, even the President of the United States of America can’t get everything he wants. After all, he’s going to get that question time and time again until Afghanistan falls completely out of the news cycle.

Now, though, Biden wants the same “leeway” the Supreme Court supposedly gave President Donald Trump.

The Biden administration faces two major confrontations with the Supreme Court this week, as the justices weigh requests related to the Covid moratorium on evictions and the termination of a Trump practice that forced migrants seeking US asylum to stay in Mexico until their claims could be heard.

Late Tuesday night, it lost the latter, as a divided court refused a Biden request to lift a lower court order that requires the new administration to revive former President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers.

Dividing along familiar ideological lines, the justices denied President Joe Biden the regard that Trump’s immigration policies regularly received.

The case offers an early window into emerging conflicts between the conservative court under Chief Justice John Roberts and the Democratic Biden administration. The three liberal justices, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, said in the Tuesday night order that they would have granted the Biden request.

Now, I’m not getting into the whole immigration thing or talk about COVID. What I’m going to talk about is how a court that gives Biden the same leeway he feels Trump got will be bad for the Second Amendment.

Think about it for a moment. We’ve got the situation with Rare Breed Triggers, where the ATF just decided to redefine what makes something a machine gun without going through Congress, as an example. We also have plenty of gun control policies being pushed by the White House and by various state legislatures.

A complicit Supreme Court would be a disaster for the Second Amendment.

Yet there’s good news.

You see, while Biden wants that leeway, he’s not going to get it.

Whether or not it was intended that way, the bipartisan divide we see in Congress also exists within the Supreme Court. While our Founding Fathers wanted the court to be independent–the lifetime appointments are to prevent them from feeling the need to bow to public pressure in order to keep their jobs–people get appointed to the court based on their interpretation of the Constitution. Different sides pick their people because of that. Democrats aren’t going to pick an originalist, for example.

Right now, though, the Court has a decidedly rightward lean to it, even before Trump was able to nominate a third justice to the bench. Now, that difference is more pronounced.

While the Court has issued a lot of rulings that don’t go along partisan lines, though, that partisanship still exists based on their beliefs about the Constitution.

Trump got that leeway because most on the Court agreed with him, or they at least thought it was closer to being right than not. Biden won’t have that luxury. His proposals and policies are anathemas to the majority of the justices. They’re not going to just allow it to fly. Especially with regard to things like the Second Amendment.

Biden can want all day long. It isn’t going to change anything anywhere. He may be the president, but the Supreme Court exists in part as a check on the president’s power.

As my father used to tell me, want in one hand, take a dump in the other and see which one fills up quicker.

That applies to presidents as well.