The majority seems too trusting that the government will appeal its losses.
Strategically, the government could enact a policy affecting a million people, be sued, lose, provide relief to the named plaintiffs, and then not appeal the decision. The upper courts never get the opportunity to make binding precedent, the lower courts do not get to extend relief to non-plaintiffs, and the government gets to enforce its illegal policies on the vast majority of people who did not (likely could not) sue.
That said, the procedure here is to just use class action lawsuits to get nationwide injunctions. The opinion explicitly notes that it is an option. And today there was a big flurry of people amending their complaints to do just that.
I actually have some insider info on this. While it sounds like in theory all you have to do is take your existing lawsuit and add the additional step on certifying your class, that option isn't available for the vast majority of legal challenges. In the history of the ACLU they have had less than ten cases where they could have been converted into a class action. As a real life example the "trans women being moved to men's prisons" case isn't eligible to be made into a class action. Tangentially related if you want to see a painfully explicit example of "the cruelty is the point" read that EO. Even if you're someone who broadly agrees with the order it's a lot.
Unfortunately "the set of people who are affected by this law" doesn't define a class.
> “…the procedure here is to just use class action lawsuits to get nationwide injunctions.”
I recently learned my company’s Handbook has a passage which says I cannot participate in a class action lawsuit against the company. Sure, they can _just say_ I can’t eat green M&Ms, but what’s the twist?
Since we’re rendering people to El Salvador, there’s no reason some ICE bounty hunter can’t grab you in Massachusetts, and dump you in some Home Depot parking lot in the Carolinas.
IANAL but isn't any ruling by even a lower court precedent? Like if I sue the government for thing A and a lower court rules in my favor, doesn't that make the next plaintiff's case for sueing the government for thing A much easier? All it seems to do is make everything much less efficient.
So here's how the loophole works. There are 12 courts of appeals. You (ICE) does a bad thing. (renditions a US citizen to an El Salvador concentration camp without due process) You get sued, appeal it to that court of appeals. Let's say it's the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, let's say you lose. You take the L and move on. You never do the bad thing in the 9th circuit again: that decision is binding. Then you do it again in a different circuit. Let's say you do the bad thing in Texas, where the 9th circuit decision was not binding. Let's say you win this time. Now the 5th circuit is your playground.
From now on, every time you arrest someone in the 9th circuit, you put them on an express flight to anywhere in the 5th district within an hour or so of arresting them, before they can get a lawyer to talk to a judge. The precedent that matters is the 5th circuit precedent, where the detainee is right now, not the 9th district (or anywhere else) where they were detained.
Because the Supreme Court has now ruled that this is a lower court problem, they've effectively blocked anyone from ever getting justice ever again.
> IANAL but isn't any ruling by even a lower court precedent?
"Precedent" can include both binding authority and persuasive authority. Any ruling (and lots of things which aren't rulings, like scholarly treatises), can be persuasive precedent, but trial court decisions are not binding precedent, even in the district of the court that issued them.
Only appellate court decisions are binding precedent, and only (basically) on courts subordinate to court making the decision.
Universal injunctions are superfluous. If the law says the government cannot do X, then who is a judge to command that the government not do X? That’s the legislature’s job. Judges have no authority to create rules saying people shall and shall not do certain things. That’s called passing a law. Similarly, when a party violates an injunction, who is the Judge to enforce his command? If it within a case or controversy between litigants, then that is one thing. When the judge they’re going to proactively punish someone any time the law as against anyone… that’s a purely executive function.
In terms of efficiency, it’s more efficient. Those in favor of universal injunctions are saying there should be hundreds of judges all racing to rule over the government, and to have their opinions control in the abstract as to cases that aren’t even before them.
If the government forces the same issue over and over there are plenty of remedies at hand: 1983 civil penalties against officers, sanctions against attorneys for frivolous arguments, and ultimately the court can hand the legislature everything it needs to impeach and remove a president by ruling that he / she is intentionally failing to enforce the law.
This administration does not really care about the rule of law. It cares to some degree about public perception. The timing of this ruling is about revoking birthright citizenship, which is a huge Constitutional trampling. There were opportunities four years ago for the SC to step in and they refused to intercede. For example, why didn't they rule in favor of executive authority when President Biden he tried to forgive student loan debt and a Federal Judge in Texas deemed it "unlawful"?
Now we get to see Americans have their legitimacy removed so they can be sent to "Alligator Alcatraz", the new prison being built just for them in the Everglades.
>why didn't they rule in favor of executive authority when President Biden he tried to forgive student loan debt and a Federal Judge in Texas deemed it "unlawful"?
Because it is unlawful. Student loan forgiveness is not an entitlement. College isn’t an entitlement. These are the facts. Moreover, college is a privilege, and it’s a choice, and at its core it is an investment into your future. Having the government forgive it implies the taxpayer will pay for it. That means that essentially people who chose _not_ to go to college, by their own choice or due to their own circumstances, now have to pay for the investments of the people who chose to go. College educated people tend to make much more money too, so in essence you’ll literally be taking money from the less privileged and giving it to the more/rich. And this would be done by force. In what way would that be lawful? Why would others have to pay for yourpersonal investments? You took out a loan, you pay it off. Leave everyone else out of it.
> And if they never win, then the issue is more about legal resources than anything else, no?
Right. If the government wants to take a very broad action, it is happy to eat some individual losses here and there. Most people won't be able to sue.
High likelihood and even Mustice Thomas mentioned it being high.
Even then, it only affects those in the class. E.g., it wouldn’t stop across the board federal enforcement as unconstitutional. It would take take a better part of a decade for that class action to move forward.
Can you outline the argument as to how? It seems quite different according to the article. The courts still assert supremacy when it comes to interpreting and vetting the law, and Trump isn't allowed to overrule the legislature's lawmaking powers.
It creates imbalance of power: the executive can keep making orders which are clearly unlawful, but because of this they are still gonna be applied to most of the people (apart from ones who can afford going to court) until SC will reach the orders on merits meaning not soon. Meaning by that time executive can make new orders.
The "Enabling Act" described in the linked article allowed Hitler to legislate unilaterally. This decision concerns judicial review of executive orders, and every presidential executive order is still only valid if it derives its authority from a valid act of Congress, a treaty entered into, or a self-executing provision of the Constitution itself.
> Instead, the Government says, it should be able to apply the Citizenship Order (whose legality it does not defend) to everyone except the plaintiffs who filed this lawsuit.
If that’s the case, I’m curious if it could be fixed with a class action, so everyone (or everyone born in the US) is a plaintiff? If that’s legally a thing.
It may not be surprising to learn that over the past several decades conservative Congresses (through the so-called Class Action Fairness Act and its ilk) and Supreme Court decisions have all but eliminated class actions.
It could be fixed for the class with a class action. But the courts have also don't their damndest to make that hard too. Requiring a class action means that courts have the additional opportunity to say "nope that's not a valid class" (WalMart v Dukes being a rather famous example).
I read the Wikipedia article [0] and I would point out that a class defined by birth place would pass easily Scalia's test for commonality. So it seems that using a class action suit that includes every person born in US of un-documented parents would work. (But who knows what other tests the Supreme Court would come up now...)
I don't think class action lawsuit is needed here.
It's enough for one case to get to SCOTUS and then we will hear their opinion about how 14th amendment should be interpreted.
It will be an interesting case I think both 4-5 against and 5-4 in favor of changing the interpretation is possible (with 3-6 and 6-3 less likely outcomes).
The problem (which Sotomayor raises in her dissent, pages 94 and 95 of the PDF) is that it may never reach the supreme court:
> There is a serious question, moreover, whether this Court will ever get the chance to rule on the constitutionality of a policy like the Citizenship Order. Contra, ante, at 6 (opinion of KAVANAUGH, J.) (“[T]he losing parties in the courts of appeals will regularly come to this Court in matters involving major new federal statutes and executive actions”). In the ordinary course, parties who prevail in the lower courts generally cannot seek review from this Court, likely leaving it up to the Government’s discretion whether a petition will be filed here. These cases prove the point: Every court to consider the Citizenship Order’s merits has found that it is unconstitutional in preliminary rulings. Because respondents prevailed on the merits and received universal injunctions, they have no reason to file an appeal. The Government has no incentive to file a petition here either, because the outcome of such an appeal would be preordained. The Government recognizes as much, which is why its emergency applications challenged only the scope of the preliminary injunctions
CASA Inc. in Maryland is in fact refiling its broader lawsuit as a class action case, and has asked for a wider injunction on that basis. So we'll see.
Absolutely, and they discussed this. The “problem” with that is the results of a class action are binding on the class, win or lose. So it’s possible that you’re a member of the # Million person class-action claiming to be exempt from deportation because of X (because you didn’t opt-out) and the class could lose.
The Universal Injunctions were a one-way rule. If the government lost any one case, the injunction would apply against the government in every other instance. However, if the government won, only that one person would be deported and the opposition would be free to try the same argument again with any of the other judges.
Heh. Corollary: By joining the class, one is setting themselves up as a target by feeding targeting data for ICE into the Court system. The government doesn't even have to look for you now, because you self-selected into the class.
Christ almighty. This is why we can't have nice things.
We’re in this mess because people are not interested enough, educated enough, or engaged enough politically to make their position explicit to drive the direction of legislation and executive action.
Citizens of The United States have every tool available to to work together to shape their communities. The reality is the overwhelming majority do not do that, and you can come up with a lot of reasons why, which are structural in many cases, but the fact remains that the majority of people are not involved in the political process at all, have no desire to be an actively reject any opportunity to be.
Assuming that citizens would all of a sudden become involved because it requires a lawsuit, means that there’s the capacity to do so, which does not exist, and all we need is a catalyst.
If the number of possible catalysts that have already happened in the last decade we’re not sufficient then nothing short of a literal terminator Skynet scenario is going to cause people to take action and I’m increasingly doubtful that even that would do it.
Based on my observation from my work position, people are ready to just roll over onto their backs and have robots slice them from the belly up, because it’s easier than actually doing something that would prevent it.
I think this often gets confused. Voting a president in doesn't give them a blank mandate to do whatever they want, such as break the law. And knowingly doing things that might not get approved by courts, but veiling it in a "novel legal theory" disguise is still breaking the law. Just because slow and thorough processes need to take place to adjudicate these actions doesn't mean that these actions aren't worth adjudicating. So while voting is important, keeping the voted-in president accountable is important too.
There is some compelling research from Princeton that for 90%+ of the American voting population, there opinions have zero impact on federal policy. It's all lobby driven money.
“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
It's so silly to blame the American people though, considering the vastly greater resources required to politically organize millions of people to counter the what a handful of people in the executive branch or a couple dozen people in the legislative branch can do with a flick of the wrist.
There is also the damage done by the Supreme Court ending the Voting Rights Act, had the act been in place in 2024, Kamalah would have won by a landslide. Millions of minority voters were targeted for disenfranchisement in 2024.
I vote but have little influence because I won't join a party and live in a state with closed primaries where the real selection process is carried out. If the remaining 30 closed states cared about civic engagement they'd switch to one of the established open primary models.
The problem is that Dems are just culturally irrelevant. Most people don't care about issues, policy or the economy, they just want to cheer for a team and will justify everything their team does regardless of efficacy or outcome. Trump is the fun underdog team that everyone is talking about, the Dems are the boring party-pooper team we all love to hate. During covid, that boring became a source of needed stability, but after boring stewarded us through the crisis, nobody wanted to be associated with them again.
What people don’t want to admit is that this is exactly what more then half the people wanted. Because of the way the electoral college works as far as the President, gerrymandering with the House and 2 seats per state in the Senate, more people voting who disagree wouldn’t do any good.
You can’t shape your community to overcome the power of the federal government.
A lot of our systems work because everyone at least half heartedly sort of goes by the rules. Yes, everyone sort of pretends to obey the rule and hence it works. In reality these systems are extremely fragile and a small committed minority can totally break years of precedent and systems. I think we are at that phase right now from the right side and soonish we will see the same from right left as well.
Makes me think of the latter part of this quotation:
"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist."
- Lysander Spooner (emphasis mine)
Resilient systems have to align incentives such that they work whether or not everybody has enough good will or agreeability to play along.
250 years isn't a bad run. Maybe the next Constitution can iterate and fix the incentive alignment.
Time! Time is the lever which a small group has used to make these changes.
It’s been ~40 years of Talk Radio in America and ~30 years of TV, which has sold entertainment as news and fine tuned the ability to have a captive voting bloc.
Producing accurate content is laborious, narratives are cheap. Facts are essentially luxury goods, and the left+center is selling them as public goods. This can never work, it takes too much to pay for and maintain the institutions which make this possible.
The right is on the other hand, being organized and “flooding the zone”, in an unending effort to reduce faith in institutions. On top of it, information from the center and left doesn’t get consumed on the right.
This took decades to set up. Today Trump’s approval ratings are down overall, but Republican support for Trump remains at its March number - 88%.
Edit: If I could introduce another metaphor; it’s hard to sell your goods, where half the market is locked behind a monopoly that cuts corners, and sells junk food but can label it as health food. Oh, and they spend their profits, accusing health food of being spurious.
It's like imagine playing soccer with your buddies and one decides to pick up the ball and kick anyone in their path - but the goals still count. The game sort of breaks.
By accepting the frame that it is federal judges and not the law that is blocking trump, it means that we are analyzing based on a frame of Trump vs Judges rather than Trump vs Law.
If you accept that framing, you accept many of that frames implications without even consciously processing them. This is one of the ways that consent is manufactured.
This ruling is stating that federal judges cannot rule that the law is blocking Trump. By accepting and adopting the frame that it is Trump vs Judges you implicitly accept that the law itself is a weapon rather than a boundary. It argues that the law is subjective, based on the judge ruling, rather than objective. It argues that there is no objective truth. To say it is judges and not the law that stops trump is to say that judges are agents of themselves and not agents of the law.
Agreeing that it is Judges vs Trump is implicitly agreeing that the law is arbitrary based on the judge ruling. Arbitrary government is authoritarian government.
The court’s decision to permit the executive to violate the constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law,” Jackson wrote. “Given the critical role of the judiciary in maintaining the rule of law … it is odd, to say the least, that the court would grant the executive’s wish to be freed from the constraints of law by prohibiting district courts from ordering complete compliance with the constitution.
This feels about as grim as the Citizens United dissent, which has been proven more and more true every day:
A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold.
The supreme court didn't rule on the legal merits of the three lawsuits, the ruled on the scope of the authority of the judges of the lower courts.
As for interpretation: of course it is subjective. That's literally what they do in cases of federal and constitutional law: statutory interpretation. There's even named schools of thought for how it should be done, purposivism and textualism. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/statutory_interpretation
Is the constitution more protected or less protected?
Will trump have a harder time breaking the law or an easier time?
Many in this thread arguing about the legal minutiae of a system that only became problematic in the context of an anti-constitution anti-law president... and I just don't understand. I don't understand what reality you're living in where this is something to defend.
Legal settings (at least in the US), have always favored the wealthy who can find an army of lawyers to find loopholes.
I don’t agree with this, and hopefully what is currently happening raises awareness.
For example, the Patriot act post-9/11 famously gave law enforcement unconstitutional powers within 100 miles of a national border (I could be off, but this is how I remember it). If you really want to split hairs, the US has a LOT of borders if you include international airports.
Federal judges' can't block EOs indefinitely. The WH can appeal to a circuit court, and so on up to the Supreme Court. But it does prevent the Admin from implementing an unconstitutional EO while they wait to be challenged in all states/districts.
I'm not particularly happy about nationwide injunctions, but this is much worse if you have a president who is not shy to "break the law now and fight it in court later". And now that Trump has shown the way, you can be sure future presidents will follow.
Another terrible outcome is that you then have federal orders applied differently from state to state (or more accurately, federal district to district). If you're in Nevada you won't get citizenship, but in Oregon you will.
This is right up there with the Presidential Immunity in terms of terrible decisions by this SCOTUS.
> If you're in Nevada you won't get citizenship, but in Oregon you will.
They're 100% coming for Obergfell and it's clear now how. They'll arrest a legal US citizen who has naturalized citizenship from illegal parents, born in a state that received an injunction but residing in a state that has not.
The representative of that person will say that they by being a citizen in the other state, they must be respected as a citizen in the other. They will cite Obergfell.
The SCOTUS will revoke their ruling on Obergfell and say, no, you are not a citizen just because there's an injunction in that other state.
The astute reader may notice that this is literally a replay of Dread Scott.
Sorry just to clarify - you think they are going to cite and overturn a case about the legalization of same-sex marriage in their witch hunt of illegal immigrants?
2. Request an injunction type that's more appropriate
Given the number of babies being born every day it shouldn't be hard to do.
The thing is, the US doesn't issue citizenship papers. So I suppose they need to apply for an SSN and get denied (since the baby is a non-citizen), which will show immediate harm.
It also begs the question: if that baby is illegal can it be deported?
The thing here is that instead of officially denying it, the administration will just "coincidentally" slow-walk everything indefinitely, then illegally exile the baby to Sudan when ICE notices they don't have proof of citizenship.
One upshot may be that the law will be drastically different in the several circuits and (unless SCOTUS plans to handle everything on the emergency docket — as it did here) it will stay that way so long as SCOTUS lets the issues percolate through them (using them as laboratories, as Justice O'Connor was fond of saying).
My understanding is that the administration's position is that at least one of the parents needs to be a citizen or a legal resident.
If that's the case the answer to your question is: yes - together with the parents.
"No right is safe in the new legal regime the court creates. Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship. The majority holds that, absent cumbersome class-action litigation, courts cannot completely enjoin even such plainly unlawful policies unless doing so is necessary to afford the formal parties complete relief. That holding renders constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit. Because I will not be complicit in so grave an attack on our system of law, I dissent."
Readit News
Strategically, the government could enact a policy affecting a million people, be sued, lose, provide relief to the named plaintiffs, and then not appeal the decision. The upper courts never get the opportunity to make binding precedent, the lower courts do not get to extend relief to non-plaintiffs, and the government gets to enforce its illegal policies on the vast majority of people who did not (likely could not) sue.
That said, the procedure here is to just use class action lawsuits to get nationwide injunctions. The opinion explicitly notes that it is an option. And today there was a big flurry of people amending their complaints to do just that.
Unfortunately "the set of people who are affected by this law" doesn't define a class.
I recently learned my company’s Handbook has a passage which says I cannot participate in a class action lawsuit against the company. Sure, they can _just say_ I can’t eat green M&Ms, but what’s the twist?
So here's how the loophole works. There are 12 courts of appeals. You (ICE) does a bad thing. (renditions a US citizen to an El Salvador concentration camp without due process) You get sued, appeal it to that court of appeals. Let's say it's the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, let's say you lose. You take the L and move on. You never do the bad thing in the 9th circuit again: that decision is binding. Then you do it again in a different circuit. Let's say you do the bad thing in Texas, where the 9th circuit decision was not binding. Let's say you win this time. Now the 5th circuit is your playground.
From now on, every time you arrest someone in the 9th circuit, you put them on an express flight to anywhere in the 5th district within an hour or so of arresting them, before they can get a lawyer to talk to a judge. The precedent that matters is the 5th circuit precedent, where the detainee is right now, not the 9th district (or anywhere else) where they were detained.
Because the Supreme Court has now ruled that this is a lower court problem, they've effectively blocked anyone from ever getting justice ever again.
"Precedent" can include both binding authority and persuasive authority. Any ruling (and lots of things which aren't rulings, like scholarly treatises), can be persuasive precedent, but trial court decisions are not binding precedent, even in the district of the court that issued them.
Only appellate court decisions are binding precedent, and only (basically) on courts subordinate to court making the decision.
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In terms of efficiency, it’s more efficient. Those in favor of universal injunctions are saying there should be hundreds of judges all racing to rule over the government, and to have their opinions control in the abstract as to cases that aren’t even before them.
If the government forces the same issue over and over there are plenty of remedies at hand: 1983 civil penalties against officers, sanctions against attorneys for frivolous arguments, and ultimately the court can hand the legislature everything it needs to impeach and remove a president by ruling that he / she is intentionally failing to enforce the law.
Now we get to see Americans have their legitimacy removed so they can be sent to "Alligator Alcatraz", the new prison being built just for them in the Everglades.
Because it is unlawful. Student loan forgiveness is not an entitlement. College isn’t an entitlement. These are the facts. Moreover, college is a privilege, and it’s a choice, and at its core it is an investment into your future. Having the government forgive it implies the taxpayer will pay for it. That means that essentially people who chose _not_ to go to college, by their own choice or due to their own circumstances, now have to pay for the investments of the people who chose to go. College educated people tend to make much more money too, so in essence you’ll literally be taking money from the less privileged and giving it to the more/rich. And this would be done by force. In what way would that be lawful? Why would others have to pay for your personal investments? You took out a loan, you pay it off. Leave everyone else out of it.
Dead Comment
Seems like all one would need is a case where the government won at a lower court, allowing the other party can appeal.
And if they never win, then the issue is more about legal resources than anything else, no?
Right. If the government wants to take a very broad action, it is happy to eat some individual losses here and there. Most people won't be able to sue.
What's the chance that this could be addressed via class action?
Even then, it only affects those in the class. E.g., it wouldn’t stop across the board federal enforcement as unconstitutional. It would take take a better part of a decade for that class action to move forward.
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[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933
I think you’ll see this playing out very soon.
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Justice Sotomayor dissents:
> Instead, the Government says, it should be able to apply the Citizenship Order (whose legality it does not defend) to everyone except the plaintiffs who filed this lawsuit.
If that’s the case, I’m curious if it could be fixed with a class action, so everyone (or everyone born in the US) is a plaintiff? If that’s legally a thing.
I read the Wikipedia article [0] and I would point out that a class defined by birth place would pass easily Scalia's test for commonality. So it seems that using a class action suit that includes every person born in US of un-documented parents would work. (But who knows what other tests the Supreme Court would come up now...)
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wal-Mart_Stores,_Inc._v._Dukes
> There is a serious question, moreover, whether this Court will ever get the chance to rule on the constitutionality of a policy like the Citizenship Order. Contra, ante, at 6 (opinion of KAVANAUGH, J.) (“[T]he losing parties in the courts of appeals will regularly come to this Court in matters involving major new federal statutes and executive actions”). In the ordinary course, parties who prevail in the lower courts generally cannot seek review from this Court, likely leaving it up to the Government’s discretion whether a petition will be filed here. These cases prove the point: Every court to consider the Citizenship Order’s merits has found that it is unconstitutional in preliminary rulings. Because respondents prevailed on the merits and received universal injunctions, they have no reason to file an appeal. The Government has no incentive to file a petition here either, because the outcome of such an appeal would be preordained. The Government recognizes as much, which is why its emergency applications challenged only the scope of the preliminary injunctions
Indeed, this is one of the concerns of the dissenting opinions.
The Universal Injunctions were a one-way rule. If the government lost any one case, the injunction would apply against the government in every other instance. However, if the government won, only that one person would be deported and the opposition would be free to try the same argument again with any of the other judges.
Christ almighty. This is why we can't have nice things.
What you describe is voting
We’re in this mess because people are not interested enough, educated enough, or engaged enough politically to make their position explicit to drive the direction of legislation and executive action.
Citizens of The United States have every tool available to to work together to shape their communities. The reality is the overwhelming majority do not do that, and you can come up with a lot of reasons why, which are structural in many cases, but the fact remains that the majority of people are not involved in the political process at all, have no desire to be an actively reject any opportunity to be.
Assuming that citizens would all of a sudden become involved because it requires a lawsuit, means that there’s the capacity to do so, which does not exist, and all we need is a catalyst.
If the number of possible catalysts that have already happened in the last decade we’re not sufficient then nothing short of a literal terminator Skynet scenario is going to cause people to take action and I’m increasingly doubtful that even that would do it.
Based on my observation from my work position, people are ready to just roll over onto their backs and have robots slice them from the belly up, because it’s easier than actually doing something that would prevent it.
“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba
And they actively vote against the will of their constituents 35% of the time. http://promarket.org/2017/06/16/study-politicians-vote-will-...
Remember, force is out of the question because it will provide justification for the oppression and make people more willing to accept it.
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/26/nx-s1-5447450/trump-2024-elec...
The problem is that Dems are just culturally irrelevant. Most people don't care about issues, policy or the economy, they just want to cheer for a team and will justify everything their team does regardless of efficacy or outcome. Trump is the fun underdog team that everyone is talking about, the Dems are the boring party-pooper team we all love to hate. During covid, that boring became a source of needed stability, but after boring stewarded us through the crisis, nobody wanted to be associated with them again.
You can’t shape your community to overcome the power of the federal government.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist." - Lysander Spooner (emphasis mine)
Resilient systems have to align incentives such that they work whether or not everybody has enough good will or agreeability to play along.
250 years isn't a bad run. Maybe the next Constitution can iterate and fix the incentive alignment.
It’s been ~40 years of Talk Radio in America and ~30 years of TV, which has sold entertainment as news and fine tuned the ability to have a captive voting bloc.
Producing accurate content is laborious, narratives are cheap. Facts are essentially luxury goods, and the left+center is selling them as public goods. This can never work, it takes too much to pay for and maintain the institutions which make this possible.
The right is on the other hand, being organized and “flooding the zone”, in an unending effort to reduce faith in institutions. On top of it, information from the center and left doesn’t get consumed on the right.
This took decades to set up. Today Trump’s approval ratings are down overall, but Republican support for Trump remains at its March number - 88%.
Edit: If I could introduce another metaphor; it’s hard to sell your goods, where half the market is locked behind a monopoly that cuts corners, and sells junk food but can label it as health food. Oh, and they spend their profits, accusing health food of being spurious.
Either you can have watchers all the way down and nothing gets done, or there are limits.
If you accept that framing, you accept many of that frames implications without even consciously processing them. This is one of the ways that consent is manufactured.
This ruling is stating that federal judges cannot rule that the law is blocking Trump. By accepting and adopting the frame that it is Trump vs Judges you implicitly accept that the law itself is a weapon rather than a boundary. It argues that the law is subjective, based on the judge ruling, rather than objective. It argues that there is no objective truth. To say it is judges and not the law that stops trump is to say that judges are agents of themselves and not agents of the law.
Agreeing that it is Judges vs Trump is implicitly agreeing that the law is arbitrary based on the judge ruling. Arbitrary government is authoritarian government.
The court’s decision to permit the executive to violate the constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law,” Jackson wrote. “Given the critical role of the judiciary in maintaining the rule of law … it is odd, to say the least, that the court would grant the executive’s wish to be freed from the constraints of law by prohibiting district courts from ordering complete compliance with the constitution.
This feels about as grim as the Citizens United dissent, which has been proven more and more true every day:
A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold.
As for interpretation: of course it is subjective. That's literally what they do in cases of federal and constitutional law: statutory interpretation. There's even named schools of thought for how it should be done, purposivism and textualism. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/statutory_interpretation
Is the constitution more protected or less protected?
Will trump have a harder time breaking the law or an easier time?
Many in this thread arguing about the legal minutiae of a system that only became problematic in the context of an anti-constitution anti-law president... and I just don't understand. I don't understand what reality you're living in where this is something to defend.
The famous quote “give me the man and I will give you the case against him.” Comes to mind. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_me_the_man_and_I_will_g...
Legal settings (at least in the US), have always favored the wealthy who can find an army of lawyers to find loopholes.
I don’t agree with this, and hopefully what is currently happening raises awareness.
For example, the Patriot act post-9/11 famously gave law enforcement unconstitutional powers within 100 miles of a national border (I could be off, but this is how I remember it). If you really want to split hairs, the US has a LOT of borders if you include international airports.
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I'm not particularly happy about nationwide injunctions, but this is much worse if you have a president who is not shy to "break the law now and fight it in court later". And now that Trump has shown the way, you can be sure future presidents will follow.
Another terrible outcome is that you then have federal orders applied differently from state to state (or more accurately, federal district to district). If you're in Nevada you won't get citizenship, but in Oregon you will.
This is right up there with the Presidential Immunity in terms of terrible decisions by this SCOTUS.
They're 100% coming for Obergfell and it's clear now how. They'll arrest a legal US citizen who has naturalized citizenship from illegal parents, born in a state that received an injunction but residing in a state that has not.
The representative of that person will say that they by being a citizen in the other state, they must be respected as a citizen in the other. They will cite Obergfell.
The SCOTUS will revoke their ruling on Obergfell and say, no, you are not a citizen just because there's an injunction in that other state.
The astute reader may notice that this is literally a replay of Dread Scott.
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Every federal judicial district (that's one per state in smaller states, but more in larger states—California has four.)
North and South?
1. File a suit in every circuit
2. Request an injunction type that's more appropriate
Given the number of babies being born every day it shouldn't be hard to do.
The thing is, the US doesn't issue citizenship papers. So I suppose they need to apply for an SSN and get denied (since the baby is a non-citizen), which will show immediate harm.
It also begs the question: if that baby is illegal can it be deported?
The thing here is that instead of officially denying it, the administration will just "coincidentally" slow-walk everything indefinitely, then illegally exile the baby to Sudan when ICE notices they don't have proof of citizenship.
"No right is safe in the new legal regime the court creates. Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship. The majority holds that, absent cumbersome class-action litigation, courts cannot completely enjoin even such plainly unlawful policies unless doing so is necessary to afford the formal parties complete relief. That holding renders constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit. Because I will not be complicit in so grave an attack on our system of law, I dissent."
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