A Test For SCOTUS, A Test For POTUS

Two of the key questions of the second Trump administration could be days, if not hours, away from being answered: To what degree will the ultra-conservative Supreme Court stop Trump from doing what he wants? And will Trump flatly disregard an unfriendly court order, kicking off a five-alarm constitutional emergency?

Trump’s push to end foreign aid spending may yield answers on both fronts. A federal judge in Washington, D.C. temporarily blocked Trump’s sweeping ban, meaning that the administration should have continued sending out aid as usual in the meantime. The plaintiffs, led by the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, last week demanded that the restraining order be enforced and the government be held in contempt, as the administration had not turned the aid spigot back on to the extent it was supposed to. There was a flurry of back-and-forth.

Skipping ahead: The government asked Chief Justice John Roberts (in charge of the D.C. Circuit) to delay the deadline for complying with the D.C. district judge’s order. He did so Wednesday night, giving the plaintiffs a deadline of noon tomorrow to respond to the government’s attempt to pause the lower court order. This move sparked the righteous indignation of court watchers livid that aid was being blocked for even a couple more days, given that the administration was, plainly unlawfully, refusing to send money that Congress had already allocated.

Still, there are varying degrees of malice here. If Roberts granted the government a delay it doesn’t deserve, only to side with the administration tomorrow or in the next few days, it would not bode well — an early indication that the Court will not step in to block the desecration of the separation of powers that has become commonplace in Trump II, and will bless the administration’s wholesale theft of congressional power.

If, though, after a couple days, the Court affirms the lower court judge — and there are some knotty jurisdictional questions sprinkled on top of this case — even the most vehement Court critics could take a breath.

Just a shallow one, though, because such a ruling would tee up the big test for Trump: Is he willing to go further than halfhearted, foot-dragging semi-compliance with a lower court order to turn the aid back on? Would he reject a ruling from the highest court outright?

How craven is the Supreme Court? How tyrannical is Trump? These are defining questions of our time, and the next few days should shed some light on each.