Alitos right to warn: Courts knee-jerk habit of slapping Trump will cost it dearly

“A number of judges have seemingly adopted a constitutional meta-principle: what a past President did, President Trump may not undo.”So wrote Harvard Law professor and constitutional scholar Adrian Vermeule on Friday after a district-court judge issued yet another lawless nationwide injunction meant to handcuff Trump and halt his agenda.It’s a criticism the Supreme Court, and particularly Chief Justice John Roberts, must take to heart.One of the hallmarks of Roberts’ term has been an overweening desire to guard the judicial branch’s “legitimacy.” But Roberts seems oblivious to the fact that the biggest threat to the courts’ legitimacy come from the courts themselves — and his desire to preserve the judiciary’s standing with a small circle of Washington and academic insiders.We saw that as far back as 2012, when Roberts switched sides in the case against Obamacare at the last minute, for fear that striking down that unprecedented bill would upset the DC applecart and harm the court’s legitimacy.Instead, it was a self-inflicted wound. Nobody respects a trimmer.Roberts’ Obamacare decision wasn’t rooted in the Constitution, but an attempt to have it both ways, giving the Democrats enough of a victory to keep them from declaring war.And we’ve seen that sort of thing repeatedly in the years since. Roberts seems less concerned with preserving the court’s legitimacy in the eyes of America’s citizens, and more with the views of the editorial pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, plus some Ivy League law professors whose schools’ decaying reputations should give him pause.But now the flurry of lower-court interference is reaching crisis proportions, says Harvard’s Vermeule and others.The prime issue, among others, is the illegal — and yes, it was contrary to the statutes on the books — Biden administration policy to admit millions of unvetted migrants into the country, and to allow them to stay here. The “rule of la...