Supreme Court justices 'incandescently angry' at their colleagues' 'gaslighting': expert

A legal expert said on Thursday that a recent spate of decisions published by the Supreme Court made some of the liberal justices "incandescently angry" because the majority opinions read like "gaslighting."

The court published opinions on a range of cases, from one that protects chemical giant Monsanto from lawsuits over cancer-causing chemicals in some of its products to an opinion that ended Temporary Protected Status for Haitian immigrants. In each of the cases, Lithwick argued, the court's majority continued to "twist itself into pretzels" to give the Trump administration what it wanted, according to Dahlia Lithwick, a lawyer and journalist.

"The Court twisted itself into pretzels to say that the words that come out of Donald Trump's mouth have no significance," Lithwick argued during MS NOW's "Deadline: White House" with host Nicolle Wallace, referring to previous cases where the court ignored the president's words when determining the intent behind an immigration policy. "And this is the same problem on rocket fuel."

"To have Justice Alito in his majority just batted away so much so that he won't even acknowledge it, which forces, in some sense, Justice Kagan to read it into the record to create a dissent where she says, 'Here are the words that were said that are emblematic of what Donald Trump was trying to do.' It really tells you again the degree to which the gaslighting is truly the thing that is making the justices ... absolutely incandescently angry."