If Supreme Court judge John Roberts wants to write federal amnesty policy, he should resign and compete for a legislative seat, said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark) June 18.
The taunt came after Roberts sided with four Democrats on June 17 to preserve the 2012 amnesty created by President Barack Obama.
“It cannot be the law that what Barack Obama has unlawfully done, no president may undo,” Cotton said in a statement. Cotton continued:
Yet John Roberts again postures as a Solomon who will save our institutions from political controversy and accountability. If the Chief Justice believes his political judgment is so exquisite, I invite him to resign, travel to Iowa, and get elected. I suspect voters will find his strange views no more compelling than do the principled justices on the Court.”
The decision by Roberts and the four Democrat-appointed justices said Trump’s deputies did not properly follow the Administrative Procedures Act when they stopped Obama’s amnesty in 2017.
The five justices made the decision despite that Attorney Gen. Jeff Sessions had first declared the amnesty to be illegal, and even though homeland security chief Kirstjen Nielsen later submitted a lengthy explanation in June 2018.
“Judicial review of agency action, however, is limited to ‘the grounds that the agency invoked when it took the action,'” the justices said.
Three of the GOP-nominated judges on the nine-person court also slammed Roberts’ decision as political:
Today’s decision must be recognized for what it is: an effort to avoid a politically controversial but legally correct decision. The Court could have made clear that the solution respondents seek must come from the Legislative Branch. Instead, the majority has decided to prolong DHS’ initial overreach by providing a stopgap measure of its own. In doing so, it has given the green light for future political battles to be fought in this Court rather than where they rightfully belong—the political branches. Such timidity forsakes the Court’s duty to apply the law according to neutral principles, and the ripple effects of the majority’s error will be felt throughout our system of self-government.