In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas said the majority had done something extraordinary. “For the first time ever,” he wrote, “the court invalidates an agency action solely because it questions the sincerity of the agency’s otherwise adequate rationale.”

Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh joined Justice Thomas’s partial dissent.

Justice Thomas said the courts should give executive branch officials the benefit of the doubt. “I do not deny,” he wrote, “that a judge predisposed to distrust the secretary or the administration could arrange those facts on a corkboard and — with a jar of pins and a spool of string — create an eye- catching conspiracy web.”

He said the consequences of the majority decision would be far-reaching. “Now that the court has opened up this avenue of attack,” he wrote, “opponents of executive actions have strong incentives to craft narratives that would derail them.”

Poster Comment:

Here we have it sports fans, - a majority of the supremes have joined the “opponents of executive action “. ——- Using.’pins and string’ to arrange their predispositions..... Only in America..