What Happened on Friday?
Another deplorable week in review.
On Friday, the US Supreme Court joined the Congress in ceding more power to the presidency by weakening yet another check that we thought we had on an out-of-control executive. The senate seems poised to vote on a massive BBB that no one has actually read and will add $4 trillion to the national debt.; while the rich, beautiful surgically-enhanced, and obnoxious stars of our Gilded Age threw a lavish party in Venice. And you weren’t invited.
In the immortal words of the character played by Lloyd Bridges in Airplane, we picked a bad week to stop sniffing glue.
Happy Saturday.
What did the Supreme Court do on Friday?
Let’s acknowledge a bit of confusion here: The Court did not rule on the merits of Trump’s attempts to end birthright citizenship. Instead, the court made a ruling on the jurisdiction and powers of federal courts to block unconstitutional presidential actions. The decision sharply limits (but does not completely eliminate) the ability of district judges to issue nationwide injunctions.
There is also a good deal of hair-on-fire hyperbole and about the ruling. But however you parse it, the Court has just weakened a check on Donald Trump at the moment he is blasting and bumbling through one guardrail after another. The whole system of “Checks and balances” was already withered, weak, infirm, and dilapidated. By a 6-3 vote, the Court made it even more feeble.
Via the NYT: “How the Supreme Court’s Injunction Ruling Expands Trump’s Power.”
The Supreme Court ruling barring judges from swiftly blocking government actions, even when they may be illegal, is yet another way that checks on executive authority have eroded as President Trump pushes to amass more power.
The decision on Friday, by a vote of 6 to 3, could allow Mr. Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship to take effect in some parts of the country — even though every court that has looked at the directive has ruled it unconstitutional. That means some infants born to undocumented immigrants or foreign visitors without green cards could be denied citizenship-affirming documentation like Social Security numbers.
But the diminishing of judicial authority as a potential counterweight to exercises of presidential power carries implications far beyond the issue of citizenship. The Supreme Court is effectively tying the hands of lower-court judges at a time when they are trying to respond to a steady geyser of aggressive executive branch orders and policies.
Steve Vladeck’s initial verdict?
There’s no question, in my mind, that today’s ruling dramatically restructures the relationship between federal courts and other government institutions (and between the Supreme Court and lower federal courts)—in ways both big and small. How deleterious those changes are to the ability of courts to hold the President accountable depends, in my view, on how three questions are answered—questions raised by today’s ruling, but very much not answered by it:
When will parties (especially states) need a universal injunction in order to obtain “complete” relief?
If lower courts start certifying more nationwide classes in suits challenging federal policies, will the Supreme Court approve?
To what extent is Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence (and the normalization of emergency relief for which it argues), speaking for a majority?
Totally normal and not at all deranged
From DJT’s Day of Rage.
ICYMI: A week of commentary
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
![Trump's Mission [Not] Accomplished](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!yVrB!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7a9619ba-886c-4da5-8b1b-b63cc284aa04_1024x682.jpeg)
Thursday
Nota Bene
Nearly two-thirds of voters (64 percent) say they prefer giving most undocumented immigrants in the United States a pathway to legal status, while 31 percent say they prefer deporting most undocumented immigrants in the United States, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll of registered voters released today.
This is a change from roughly six months ago. In Quinnipiac University's December 18, 2024 poll, 55 percent of voters said they preferred giving most undocumented immigrants a pathway to legal status and 36 percent said they preferred deporting most undocumented immigrants in the United States.
In today's poll, 31 percent of Republicans say they prefer giving most undocumented immigrants in the U.S. a pathway to legal status, while 61 percent say they prefer deporting them.
Among Democrats, 89 percent say they prefer giving most undocumented immigrants in the U.S. a pathway to legal status, while 8 percent say they prefer deporting them.
Among independents, 71 percent say they prefer giving most undocumented immigrants in the U.S. a pathway to legal status, while 24 percent say they prefer deporting them.
**
The Mamdani Mirage - by Garry Kasparov - The Next Move
As a Russian expat of a certain generation, I have argued with Americans about socialism many times before. It was entertaining to see some people try (and fail) to lay the same old rhetorical traps—social welfare, the Nordic countries, and so on. My friends, I’m quite familiar with these arguments. But I’ll indulge you.
Let’s start with Paul Stone, who commented within minutes of my column on Mamdani going live (I do hope you actually read the piece!):
If Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid didn’t already exist, would you oppose them as fringe, radical ideas?
You are putting words in my mouth. I am not an advocate of socialism. I am also not a fan of unrestrained capitalism. I have seen the excesses of the former in the Soviet Union and the latter in modern-day Russia. A social safety net is a good thing. Some government regulation of business is necessary and important. My north star here is not Karl Marx, but Theodore Roosevelt, who said:
Both the preachers of an unrestricted individualism, and the preachers of an oppression which would deny to able men of business the just reward of their initiative and business sagacity, are advocating policies that would be fraught with the gravest harm to the whole country.
— President Theodore Roosevelt, message to Congress, 1908
Calling social security “socialism” is a rhetorical sleight of hand employed by partisans on both right and left. The left uses it to swindle people into accepting fringe ideas alongside common sense policies. The right uses it to get people to reject those common sense policies as fringe ideas.
**
In terms of worldview, however, US socialists like Zohran Mamdani are more in line with their Soviet forebears than their Western European social democratic cousins. Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (a misnomer in more than one regard), which regurgitates Russian propaganda on Ukraine, affirms the Iranian theocratic dictatorship’s “right to self-defense,” and takes a hardline anti-Zionist stance on Israel that would make Leonid Brezhnev blush.
Saturday dogs
Not dogs. Boys. The French invasion has begun.
Charlie Sykes: you are the only person besides me that likes to quote Lloyd Bridges from Airplane! I feel redeemed.
“Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.” - Thomas Jefferson
So let’s devour them first.