Supreme Court solidifies Trump First legal theory

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The news, in brief …

• Trump is over questions about Epstein

  As his base continues to freak out over the DOJ’s findings on Jeffrey Epstein, the president made it clear he’s past the whole discussion. “Are people still talking about this creep?” he asked on Tuesday. Read more.

• Cruz pushed NOAA funding cuts ahead of flash floods

  Ted Cruz was on vacation in Greece when terrible floods killed over 100 in his home state. There’s no getting away from the fact that he advocated for gutting weather forecasting initiatives via Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill. Read more.

• Jon Stewart pokes fun at Trump DOJ’s Epstein memo

  “There was no list,” Stewart said, waving his hands like a hypnotist. “There never was a list.” Read more. 

• James Gunn doesn’t have time for “Superman” backlash

  The director refused to engage with the conservative tizzy over his comments about the Kryptonian being an immigrant. Read more.

• Netanyahu nominates Trump for Nobel Peace Prize

  Critics bashed the move as “pathetic a**-kissing” and obvious flattery. Read more.

Make me smarter …

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Johnny Johnny, Yes Papa

It took them two terms to do it, but the conservative justices of the Supreme Court have finally found a legal theory with less substance than Originalism.

A brief overview might be in order for those of you who value your time too much to read the opinions of Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. Originalism was birthed from the dankest parts of Robert Bork’s brain in the 1970s. In the age of how-to books on astral projection, Bork wagered that you could push back against a lot of liberal legal wins if you claimed to be speaking from inside the minds of the Founding Fathers.

The idea was quickly championed as a way to roll back all the good that the United States ever did. Any case you learned about in U.S. History class, meant to show the country’s steady march toward progress, could fall before the faux-complexity of pretending you knew what James Madison was on about.

Conservatives on the Supreme Court have spent the last several decades tossing chicken bones, sheep’s guts and tea leaves all over chambers, claiming that they’re divining the will of the framers of the Constitution. (And, wouldn’t you know it? It happens to line up exactly with what conservatives want.)

Court conservatives’ latest gambit under Chief Justice John Roberts is much simpler, in part because the person they’re speaking for is still alive. They don’t have to imagine themselves living in a time before the invention of doorknobs. To determine whether or not a law is constitutional now, they merely have to ask what Donald Trump wants.

SCOTUS previewed Trump’s second term by giving the president an unbelievable amount of immunity. The court has spent his first few months in office building up the case law for a Trump First-reading of the Constitution, tossing out precedents and clear prohibitions if they get in the way of just about anything the president wants to do.

The court has ruled repeatedly that nothing should stand in the way of Trump’s cruelest impulses, whether that’s deporting people to countries they’ve never set foot in or attacking trans people.

In the last several days, the court has carried on its streak of astounding reversals of lower court consensus. They’ve stayed injunctions halting massive federal layoff programs that would decimate agencies created by Congress. They’ve lifted orders to keep birthright citizenship in place, wagering that there’s no irreparable harm in being born stateless.

The court’s actions are unjustifiable under any previously understood reading of the Constitution. Luckily, the conservatives on the court have given up on reading it. If they want to know what to think, they’ll check Truth Social.

What do you think? Is there a way to push back against a rogue judiciary? Will the Democrats be able to undo this level of damage? Is stuffing the court still looking silly? Sound off in the comments.

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