The nation’s highest court recently let U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement resume aggressive immigration stops in Los Angeles based on criteria such as speaking Spanish or gathering at locations where day laborers often congregate — simply put, for being Latino and poor. This was the latest, and one of the most sinister, in a hailstorm of unexplained rulings paralyzing attempts of lower courts to rein in President Donald Trump.

Lawyers who comment publicly on the Supreme Court tend to do it politely. I think it’s time to stop pulling punches. If you took a secret poll of lower-court federal judges, I’d bet 90% would rate most or all of these rulings as wrong, if not lawless. So what’s going on?

Here are my educated guesses, as a lawyer of 52 years’ experience. Since the majority hasn’t yet explained any of these “shadow docket” rulings, and since they’ve all had immediate and crushing consequences, the justices can’t complain about people guessing why they made them.

I believe four of the justices are deeply influenced by resentment, if not hatred, of the Democrats. Clarence Thomas blames them for calling him out about Anita Hill and saying, correctly, that he’s indebted to affirmative action. Samuel Alito blames them because he thinks they’ve shafted ethnic white people in favor of Black and Latino people — witness his seething opinion in the 2009 New Haven firefighters case. Alito and Thomas suspect or outright believe that Democrats stole the 2020 election — witness the stop-the-steal flag Alito allowed to fly over his residence.

Neil Gorsuch likely blames the Democrats for roughing up his mother, Anne, in front of Congress when she was Environmental Protection Agency administrator. Brett Kavanaugh blames Democrats for revealing his behavior as a teenager — witness his confirmation hearing rant essentially calling Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony the result of a cabal of sore-loser Bill Clinton supporters.

Since the enemy of my enemy is my friend, these four are essentially all in for Trump, come what may.

But that doesn’t explain John Roberts or Amy Coney Barrett, who seem free of such resentments. I think other forces are at work on them, and on the four too.

First, they lack empathy. None of them seems bothered by the sadistic cruelty of Trump and his crew. There’s no sign they’re troubled that the overnight shuttering of the United States Agency for International Development is causing deaths and starvation from abruptly ending food and medical programs in Africa (foreign aid is a waste of money!) or that thousands of federal employees who served the public for decades lost their livelihoods, sometimes on an hour’s notice (we must let the government improve efficiency!). Or that masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents snatch people off the street and put them on planes for hellhole prisons in Uganda or El Salvador (these people entered our country illegally!) or that years, if not decades, of labor on medical research projects go down the drain when grants are yanked overnight by Elon Musk’s ignoramuses (go ask the court of claims for money damages!).

Second, I think all six of these justices have an authoritarian streak. They think the social and political orders need urgent reordering. That, they feel, demands a big man with largely unhampered power. Nothing else adequately explains their “unitary executive” doctrine (which likely has the Founders turning over in their graves) and their paranoia about the “deep state.”

Third, they invent doctrines to scrap things they hate and ignore those doctrines to uphold things they like. When Joe Biden was president, they concocted a “major questions” doctrine — which demands that Congress specifically authorize “major” executive actions — to kill his efforts to slow climate change and reduce student debt. And to expand gun rights, they decreed that the Constitution must be interpreted according to the Founders’ intent. But since Trump is doing things they like, they give him carte blanche, congressional authorization or the Founders’ intent be damned. To quote one example among many, they blessed his destroying or neutering entire agencies without a word about whether the Congress that created them would have authorized that.

In due course, I expect them to bless Trump’s military occupation of blue-voting cities without worrying whether the Founders, or the Congress that passed the statute limiting the use of the military in domestic policing, intended to allow such a thing (they didn’t). I similarly expect these justices to let him impose any tariff he pleases by deferring to his label of “emergency,” regardless of what the Congress that enacted the current tariff authorization scheme meant by that term. Maybe, and hopefully, they’ll surprise me, but I’m not holding my breath.

Fourth, they seem poor judges of character. They can’t deny that Trump promoted a failed coup in 2020, pardoned the Capitol rioters, sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll, uses his office to enrich himself and his family, slanders enemies in ways that make Joseph McCarthy look polite, changes policies on a whim because someone flatters him and repeatedly expresses the desire to be a dictator. But I think these justices somehow shrink from accepting his words and actions for what they prove him to be: a danger to the rule of law. Of course, smart and well-educated people across the political spectrum display similar denial and naivete when it comes to politics. But it’s gut-wrenching to find these qualities in Supreme Court justices who must judge a president.

And finally, I think Roberts and Barrett fear that if they rule against Trump, he’ll ignore the rulings. If I’m right about this fear, letting it dictate their votes is a reasonable definition of cowardice. Judges in dozens of countries have let themselves be cowed by authoritarians on the same rationale. It has never ended well, and it won’t end well this time.

Shame on them all.

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George F. Galland Jr. is a lawyer who is of counsel to the Chicago firm of Miner, Barnhill & Galland, P.C. The views expressed are his own.

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