The US Supreme Court recently made two major decisions seen as a rebuke to the Trump administration. The court affirmed that it is illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of sexual identity. It was a 6-3 decision with two conservatives, Chief Justice Roberts and Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, voting with the four liberals.

The American public has long been ahead of politicians on LGBTQ issues. It is remarkable that there are three conservative justices still OK with such discrimination in the labor market.

The second decision seen as a rebuke to President Trump is to block administration plans to dismantle an Obama-era program that has some 700,000 DREAMERS — named after the Development Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act — living in a state of limbo. The vote to block the administration’s efforts was 5-4 with conservative Chief Justice Roberts providing the swing vote to join the liberals, and write the majority opinion.

This opinion was surprising for the conservative court. Some media pundits see this as an optimistic sign that our institutions that provide checks and balances are working, and that the Supreme Court has a “new swing vote” and can be depended upon to act independently of the president.

This latest “surprising” court decision does not assure that the DREAMERS are safe from deportation, nor does it give liberals and moderates reason to take comfort that the court can be depended upon to refrain from pushing a hard-right agenda. After all, this is the court that gutted the Voting Rights Act, takes a forgiving view of partisan gerrymandering, and let participants of New Jersey Governor Christie’s bridge gate scandal off the hook.

DREAMERS are those immigrants who were illegally brought to this country as children, many of them infants. They have been raised, educated and employed in this country, and have no familiarity whatsoever with countries from which they were brought. Regardless of law, to now deport them as adults would be a deplorable act of cruelty. 

Recognizing this, over the last 18 years, at least 10 versions of a DREAM Act have been introduced in Congress. These various versions would have provided a pathway to citizenship for these undocumented immigrants brought to this country as children. Although these acts had bi-partisan support, there was not sufficient support for any of them to be enacted into law.

In 2012 President Obama, frustrated by a decade of congressional inaction, introduced by executive order the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program as a stopgap measure to shield from deportation those who were brought to the US as children. The protection lasts for two years at a time, is renewable subject to some qualifications, but does not provide a path to citizenship.

President Trump has opposed the DACA program. In 2017 Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared the program illegal, “an unconstitutional excess of authority by the executive branch.” This left DACA recipients, whose only home is the US, terrified that they would be deported back to what would be to them a foreign country. One can appreciate their terror when Trump’s opposition to DACA reached the conservative Supreme Court.

Much to everyone’s surprise, one conservative justice, Chief Justice Roberts no less, sided with the four liberals to reject abolishment of DACA. Some observers and media pundits are hailing the “successful functioning of American institutions,” the “success of checks and balances,” the “independence of the Supreme Court,” and even “the new swing vote” in the person of Justice Roberts. This unmerited happy talk is naive, and the DACA situation is far from resolved.

The court decision that pleased liberals and gave DACA recipients some breathing room for now, was on the narrowest basis. It did not weigh in on whether DACA, or its rescission, are sound policies. Roberts wrote, “The wisdom of those decisions is not of our concern. Here we address only whether the administration complied with the procedural requirements in the law…”

So we still have four conservative justices who have no qualms about deporting adults — brought here as children — back to what are for practical purposes to them, foreign countries. With another attempt, we don’t know how Roberts, having voted only on the basis of “procedural requirements,” would vote.

A permanent solution depends on congressional action. If Trump gets his way, that action would be to make DACA illegal, and send recipients of that program, the DREAMERS, away. The humane solution would be to enact a path to citizenship that, according to polling, a majority of American voters favor.

Some hard-core conservative politicians, still angered over the conservative court’s earlier failure to end Obamacare, are screaming about how this conservative court has let them down on the DACA decision. These conservative politicians are surely astute enough to realize, but will never publicly acknowledge, that those court decisions have taken them off the hook. They had nothing to offer the millions who would lose their health care had the court ended Obamacare. Similarly, had the court ended DACA, Republicans would face a tough choice: either support the court’s — and Trump’s — brazenly cruel decision to deport thousands of adults for whom America is home; or anger Trump by working with Democrats to create a path to citizenship.

Republicans can now have it both ways. They can support Trump and express — or feign — anger at the court, while not having to anger Trump by supporting a pragmatic and humane path to citizenship for DREAMERS.

DACA remains safe for a while. But those Americans, but not technically citizens, are left in limbo. They deserve a path to citizenship. Neither this administration, nor this congress, will do it. And that humane court decision was by the narrowest of margins. 

Meanwhile, some very important court decisions are imminent. The notion that Justice Roberts will be the new “swing vote” is Pollyannaish at best. He is a conservative. The court remains solidly conservative. We can expect its decisions to disappoint liberals and please conservatives once again. 

— John Waelti of Monroe, a retired professor of economics, can be reached at jjwaelti1@tds.net. His column appears Saturdays in the Monroe Times.