'Very much an earthquake': Legal analyst astounded as Alito sends shockwaves through US

A Slate legal analyst said Thursday the Supreme Court's conservative majority delivered a seismic blow to multiple areas of American law in a single morning, expanding President Donald Trump's power in the process.

Appearing on a panel Thursday, Mark Joseph Stern, co-host of Slate's Amicus podcast, walked through three 6-3 rulings the court handed down, all authored by Justice Samuel Alito and all splitting along ideological lines.

"They did quite a bit," Stern said. He explained that the justices allowed Trump to cancel Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians without judicial review, permitted the administration to physically turn away asylum seekers at the border, and struck down a Hawaii law that made it illegal to carry a gun onto private property without the owner's consent.

"This is very much an earthquake in several different realms of the law," Stern said, adding that the decisions award Trump "even more power, specifically over immigration, than he already held, and he already held a lot of it."

The TPS ruling alone could strip work authorization and deportation protections from about 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians. Writing for the majority, Alito held that the TPS statute bars courts from considering the challengers' non-constitutional claims.

Also on the panel, Vanderbilt law professor Brian Fitzpatrick, a former clerk for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, framed the day differently. He called the outcome a victory for "conservative judicial philosophy more than anyone," noting the justices were fighting on the originalist and textualist terrain Scalia laid out years ago.

The three liberal justices dissented in each immigration case. Justice Sonia Sotomayor read her asylum dissent from the bench, an unusual move that drew a pointed response from Alito, eliciting audible gasps. She warned that the consequences of the decision were predictable, writing, "More people will die."