On the law, the rulings are correct. Article II, Section 2, cl. 1: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." QED. The contrary "precedents" were ginned up to support Woodrow Wilson's racist fever-dream of an executive run by "expert" civil servants instead of the elected President: https://ballotpedia.org/%22The_Study_of_Administration%22_by.... I remember sitting in Con Law class and reading these cases thinking how obviously wrong they all were. I couldn't even dream that we would ever be able to clean out this horse stable!
> preferring to instead punt the issue and allow the harm to continue, completely circumventing the merits of the cases.
That's because almost all of the rulings coming up to the Supreme Court were preliminary injunctions where the lower court made no determination of the merits.
> making the bizarre claim that enjoining the Executive Branch from doing whatever it wants pending a full trial harms it in greater proportion than the harms being actually inflicted on ordinary people.
Read Marbury v. Madison and look at how much ink Justice Marshall spends trying to avoid enjoining the Secretary of State to do something as ministerial as delivering an already-signed letter. He literally invented judicial review in an effort to avoid that result. Think about how Marshall's lengthy analysis of how courts can't enjoin discretionary actions of the President would apply to the sweeping injunctions being handed out these days.