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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 1, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Conor Gallagher, May 28, 2025 [Naked Capitalism]

For all the talk of how incompetent our elites are, there’s one area where they show remarkable skill and determination: relentlessly creating conditions to shorten the lifespans of the disabled, poor, and working class.

Let’s look at just a few of the many examples before examining potential reasons it’s becoming so much more brazen.

In the US, policies to hurt the working poor and disabled are nothing new, but they’ve exploded in scope in recent years. Elites have collectively memory-holed an ongoing pandemic that has thus far officially killed more than 1.2 million (although that number is likely much higher), disabled many more, and fallen disproportionately on the working class and disabled….

The US official line is now openly that such weak people simply aren’t worth the investment….

In the telling of RFK Jr. and friends, public healthcare coddles the weak, which is real soft Nazi stuff. As Derek Beres puts it:

By avoiding discussion of education, employment, social support networks, economic status and geographic location – the social determinants that public health experts agree influence health outcomes – Kennedy, in lockstep with top wellness influencers, is practicing soft eugenics.

But let’s not forget that the Biden administration was in some cases outdoing the current one….

The cuts to disability benefits will decimate quality of life, erode services, and lead to earlier deaths, but that appears to be the point. Again, though, this is nothing new. A report published last year by the Institute of Health Equity at University College London, finds that between 2011 and 2019, 1,062,334 premature deaths were recorded among individuals living outside the wealthiest 10% of areas in England mostly due to poverty and austerity measures….

What is central to all these Western countries? Neoliberalism. Is it surprising that an ideology that says markets are more important than people would completely hand over social policy to the wealthiest and embrace eugenics?….

Republican Senator to Medicaid Cuts Protesters — ‘We’re All Going to Die’

[Newsweek, May 30, 2025]

During a tense exchange with protesters at a town hall, Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa responded to concerns over potential Medicaid cuts by declaring, “Well, we are all going to die.”

YouTube video

www.youtube.com/…

GOP’s Latest Pitch for Gutting Medicaid and Food Aid? ‘Well, We All Are Going to Die’

Jake Johnson, May 30, 2025 [CommonDreams]

“We’re at the point where a U.S. senator is saying healthcare and hunger don’t matter because we all die eventually.”

Musk’s Legacy of Death vs the Rising Movement for Life

William J. Barber, II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, May 30, 2025 [Our Moral Moment w/ Bishop William Barber & Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove]

…DOGE is a scam, but its consequences are real. According to research at Boston University, more than 300,000 people have died because of the careless cuts Musk made to the USAID program, decimating US investment in fighting hunger and disease around the world….

… we know every lie has its limits in a universe that is held together by truth. No lie can live forever, just as no tyrant can abuse power without eventually facing consequences. People can be deceived. We can be distracted. We can even be self-absorbed. But when death draws near enough to touch us, people also have an innate instinct to live.

This is what we see: life is rising up in people to cry out for life.

That’s what we hear in the graduation speeches that are calling young people to stand for truth and in the judicial decisions that are making clear that Trump’s abuse of power is illegal. Life is rising up to cry for life in protests and direct actions, in legal motions and in petitions to members of Congress. At Moral Mondays in DC, which will continue this coming Monday, June 2^nd, we’ve witnessed life welling up in people who refuse to accept the unnecessary death.

How do we stop the lie? This is the question we hear most these days. It’s at the center of our prayers. This is what we know: we stop the lie by standing with the people who are most directly harmed by it….

According to the Public Religion Research Institute’s Robert P. Jones, who publishes on Substack at White Too Long, “If you look at the population as a whole, only 30% of American adults cast a vote for Trump in 2024. There’s no legitimate way to read this election as a blank check for the destructive attacks on our nation’s basic values and institutions.”….

This dashboard visualizes the human impact of funding changes for aid and support organizations.

[impactcounter.com, via Our Moral Moment]

Deaths caused by Funding Discontinuation

99,639 Adult Deaths

207,911 Child Deaths

Deaths Per Hour 103

A Storm in the West: The Liberal Intellectual Paradigm Is Broken

A. Crooke [Conference paper, via Naked Capitalism 05-25-2025]

…The real action in the US is not happening in seminars at Brookings or in op-eds in the New York Times. It is happening backstage, out of sight; beyond the reach of polite society, and mostly off-script. America is undergoing a transformation more akin to what befell Rome in the age of Augustus. Which is to say, the main happening is the collapse of a paralytic élite order, and the consequent unfolding of new political projects….

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]

By Calling More Than Half the Country ‘Scum,’ Trump Is Raising a Bright Red Flag

Thom Hartmann, May 27, 2025 [Common Dreams]

When political leaders use dehumanizing language to vilify their opponents, they’re in actuality laying the groundwork for authoritarianism, repression, and violence.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 25, 2025

By Tony Wikrent

On May 25, 2025

1 Comment

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 25, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution, Part 1

GOP Budget Would Make It Even Harder to Hold Trump Administration in Contempt

Shawn Musgrave, May 24 2025 [The Intercept]

…The looming showdown over the judiciary’s power to issue contempt orders stems from a single sentence tucked into the thousand-page budget bill, which passed the House of Representatives by a single vote on Thursday.

“This is a slap in the face to the concept of separation of powers,” said a spokesman for Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.).

If enacted, the provision — found on page 544 out of 1,082 — would restrict how federal judges can hold government officials or other litigants in contempt if they defy court-issued injunctions and restraining orders. Contempt is the primary enforcement mechanism available to courts, and in cases around the country judges have weighed whether to issue contempt findings against President Donald Trump’s deputies….

Although this is technically a budget bill, items in it from that wish list include a significant restriction on “the authority of federal courts to hold government officials in contempt when they violate court orders,” as Dean of Berkeley Law School Erwin Chemerinsky explained in Just Security Monday. “Without the contempt power,” he writes, “judicial orders are meaningless and can be ignored.”

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]

Debating Trump “Ambush” of South African President With “White Genocide’ Lies

Yves Smith, May 22, 2025 [Naked Capitalism]

Trump’s goals were clear. I wrote yesterday that he was pushing the phony “white genocide” narrative to:

Retaliate against South Africa for going to the ICJ regarding the actual genocide in Gaza, to get them to back off more.

Cheapen the public discourse over “genocide” — helping turn it into just another meaningless slur.

Make it seem like Trump is standing up for alleged oppressed white folks, to play to some white working-class voters who don’t perceive that it’s actually — again — for Israel (similar to how they repackaged Palestine protests as an immigration issue).

Push back against BRICS to the extent it’s challenging US establishment dominance, or appears to be doing so.

He lectured him on alleged abuses in South Africa and Ramaphosa was at best doing a diplomatic defense.

Trump orders the government to stop enforcing rules he doesn’t like

Maxine Joselow, Hannah Natanson and Ian Duncan [Washington Post, via downwithtyranny.com 5-19-2025]

At the Transportation Department, enforcement of pipeline safety rules has plunged to unprecedented lows since President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Trump recently ordered Energy Department staff to stop enforcing water conservation standards for showerheads and other household appliances. And at one Labor Department division, his appointees have instructed employees to halt most work related to antidiscrimination laws.

Across the government, the Trump administration is trying a new tactic for gutting federal rules and policies that the president dislikes: simply stop enforcing them.

“The conscious effort to slow down enforcement on such a broad scale is something we have never seen in previous administrations,” said Donald Kettl, a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. “It amounts to a dramatic assertion of presidential power and authority.”

This account of the Trump administration’s efforts to scale back application of many laws is based on interviews with more than a dozen federal employees across seven agencies, as well as a review of internal documents and federal data….

In some cases, Trump has personally ordered a halt to enforcement. The president on May 9 signed a memorandum directing the Energy Department “not to enforce” what he called “useless” water conservation standards for home appliances including bathtubs, faucets, showerheads and toilets….

Heather Cox Richardson, May 20, 2025 [Letters from an American]

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee about the Department of Homeland Security’s budget for fiscal year 2026. When Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH) asked her to define “habeas corpus,” Noem’s response indicated she has no understanding of the nation’s fundamental law.

“Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country,” Noem said. Hassan corrected her: “Habeas corpus is the legal principle that requires that the government provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people. If not for that protection, the government could simply arrest people, including American citizens, and hold them indefinitely for no reason. Habeas corpus is the foundational right that separates free societies like America from police states like North Korea.”

Random Late Saturday/Early Sunday Quick Hits

By Sean Paul Kelley

On May 25, 2025

13 Comments

While researching a post I promised on why France collapsed so quickly in World War Two I came across this video on the Russo-German Reinsurance Treaty. Do yourself a favor and watch it. It will give you a much more balanced view of the man Bismarck–you’ll not be looking at him through the lens of World War Two or World War One for that matter.

Finally, I think all of us can agree that Disney Star Wars has been 90% joke. All except for Rogue One and the recently completed season two of Andor. As the Critical Drinker says, season two is “the kind of TV your sitting on the edge of your seat in complete silence knowing this is the kind of TV that comes along once every 5-10 years.”

I’ve re-evaluated my favorite Star Wars movies–not a single TV show, not even the silly Mandalorian makes the top five, except Andor. Obviously A New Hope is number one. Rogue One is number two, Empire Strikes Back is number three, Andor both seasons are number 4 and number five is a toss up between Return of the Jedi or Revenge of the Sith. What say you people?

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On May 24, 2025

12 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. No vax/anti-vax this week.

The Embassy Shooter’s Manifest

By Ian Welsh

On May 23, 2025

7 Comments

From Ken Klippenstein, written by Elias Rodriguez

The Embassy shooter’s manifesto is short, to the point and entirely sane. I won’t wring my hands and say I think he was wrong, I will merely note that it is illegal to kill Israelis, and that unlike the butchers of Gaza, he will be punished.

Explication

May 20, 2025

Halintar is a word that means something like thunder or lightning. In the wake of an act people look for a text to fix its meaning, so here’s an attempt. The atrocities committed by Israelis against Palestine defy description and defy quantification. Instead of reading descriptions mostly we watch them unfold on video, sometimes live. After a few months of rapidly mounting death tolls Israel had obliterated the capacity to even continue counting the dead, which has served its genocide well. At time of writing the Gaza health ministry records 53,000 killed by traumatic force, at least ten thousand lie under rubble, and who knows how many thousands more dead of preventable disease, hunger, with tens of thousands now at risk of imminent famine due to Israeli blockade, all enabled by Western and Arab government complicity. The Gaza information office includes the ten thousand under the rubble with the dead in their own count. In news reports there have been those “ten thousand” under the rubble for months now, despite the continual making of more rubble and repeated bombing of rubble again and again and the bombing of tents amid the rubble. Like the Yemen death toll which had been frozen at some few thousand for years under Saudi-UK-US bombardment before being belatedly revealed to stand at 500k dead, all of these figures are almost surely a criminal undercount. I have no trouble believing the estimates that put the toll at 100,000 or more. More have been murdered since March of this year than in “Protective Edge” and “Cast Lead” put together. What more at this point can one say about the proportion of mangled and burned and exploded human beings whom were children. We who let this happen will never deserve the Palestinians’ forgiveness. They’ve let us know as much.

An armed action is not necessarily a military action. It usually is not. Usually it is theater and spectacle, a quality it shares with many unarmed actions. Nonviolent protest in the opening weeks of the genocide seemed to signal some sort of turning point. Never before had so many tens of thousands joined the Palestinians in the streets across the West. Never before had so many American politicians been forced to concede that, rhetorically at least, the Palestinians were human beings, too. But thus far the rhetoric has not amounted to much. The Israelis themselves boast about their own shock at the free hand the Americans have given them to exterminate the Palestinians. Public opinion has shifted against the genocidal apartheid state, and the American government has simply shrugged, they’ll do without public opinion then, criminalize it where they can, suffocate it with bland reassurances that they’re doing all they can to restrain Israel where it cannot criminalize protest outright. Aaron Bushnell and others sacrificed themselves in the hopes of stopping the massacre and the state works to make us feel their sacrifice was made in vain, that there is no hope in escalating for Gaza and no point in bringing the war home. We can’t let them succeed. Their sacrifices were not made in vain.

The impunity that representatives of our government feel at abetting this slaughter should be revealed as an illusion, then. The impunity we see is the worst for those of us in immediate proximity to the genocidaires. A surgeon who treated victims of the Mayan genocide by the Guatemalan state recounts an instance in which he was operating on a patient who’d been critically injured during a massacre when, suddenly, armed gunmen entered the room and shot the patient to death on his operating table, laughing as they killed him. The physician said the worst part was seeing the killers, well known to him, openly swagger down local streets in the years after.

Elsewhere a man of conscience once attempted to throw Robert McNamara off a Martha’s Vineyard-bound ferry into the sea, incensed at the same impunity and arrogance he saw in that butcher of Vietnam as he sat in the ferry’s lounge laughing with friends. The man took issue with McNamara’s “very posture, telling you, ‘My history is fine, and I can be slumped over a bar like this with my good friend Ralph here and you’ll have to lump it.'” The man did not succeed in heaving McNamara off a catwalk into the water, the former secretary of state managed to cling to the railing and clamber back to his feet, but the assailant explicated the value of the attempt by saying “Well, I got him outside, just the two of us, and suddenly his history wasn’t so fine, was it?”

A word about the morality of armed demonstration. Those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators and abettors have forfeited their humanity. I sympathize with this viewpoint and understand its value in soothing the psyche which cannot bear to accept the atrocities it witnesses, even mediated through the screen. But inhumanity has long since shown itself to be shockingly common, mundane, prosaically human. A perpetrator may then be a loving parent, a filial child, a generous and charitable friend, an amiable stranger, capable of moral strength at times when it suits him and sometimes even when it does not, and yet be a monster all the same. Humanity doesn’t exempt one from accountability. The action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during Protective Edge, around the time I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine. But I think to most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane. I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.

I love you Mom, Dad, baby sis, the rest of my familia, including you, O*****

Free Palestine

-Elias Rodriguez

Treasury Bond Auction Is Extremely Weak

By Ian Welsh

On May 21, 2025

9 Comments

Whoa, Nelly!

•U.S. 20Y Yield: Spiked to 5.097%, up +10.7 bps intraday. •10Y Yield: Rose +11.1 bps to 4.592% •30Y Yield: Jumped +10 bps to 5.067%

This caused stocks to trend down and even the dollar. Simply put, the US is adding a lot of debt, reducing revenue by cutting taxes, and there’s wild amounts of uncertainties due to Trump’s tariff and trade policies. Bond traders are worried, Japan is reducing its Treasuries’ holdings, and everyone is looking imploringly at the Federal Reserve.

As a friend quipped, “the economy is perfectly healthy, as long as we keep it on life support.”

Which is to say the likely result is that the Federal Reserve will have to step up and start buying Treasuries again. The last time it did that was during Covid.

“Print more money to bail out elites.”

But here’s the problem. The US really is trouble. Yes, in principle the US can print as much money as it wants, like any sovereign that issues its own currency. But that’s not the issue. The question is, “What does the money being printed produce?”

QE has essentially produced richer elites, more monopolization, a poorer general population (a recent study found 60 percent of Americans cannot afford a “decent” lifestyle), and higher prices. You could also say it has funded a less competitive US that is falling further and further behind in technology.

It’s what you spend money on that matters. All QE has EVER done is make it so that current elites stay in power, keep getting richer, and are rewarded for driving Americans into the ground at very accelerating speeds.

The Fed can’t rescue the US from spending its money to do all the wrong things. That requires legislative and executive action. Those parts of the government, however, are even more fickle and stupid than the Fed, which is like saying that Mount Everest is taller than K2. Technically true, but both are so tall (stupid) that it beggars belief.

If there’s something the US can do wrong right now, it’s doing it wrong, and it if it isn’t, it’s a legacy policy they haven’t gotten around to fucking up yet.

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

The Attempt to Find a Democratic Joe Rogan or Beat the Right Online Will Fail

By Ian Welsh

On May 20, 2025

46 Comments

Open your wallets, donors:

At donor retreats and in pitch documents seen by The New York Times, liberal strategists are pushing the party’s rich backers to reopen their wallets for a cavalcade of projects to help Democrats, as the cliché now goes, “find the next Joe Rogan.”

Here’s the thing, Rogan could lean left (not centrist, left). Remember this?

Here’s the deal: There will never been a popular, centrist online presence which is stronger than the right-wing populist one. Centrists don’t do popular. They don’t have the instincts. It’s all about pandering to elite and PMC ideology — think Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and their ilk. They can run numbers, sure, but no one gets super worked up. No one who wasn’t going to vote Democratic no matter what loves them.

Rogan is a populist. He was willing to go left, he’s willing to go right. He’s not going to go Centrist. There will never be a centrist Joe Rogan.

This is a symptom of a larger problem.

Six months after the Democratic Party’s crushing 2024 defeat, the party’s megadonors are being inundated with overtures to spend tens of millions of dollars to develop an army of left-leaning online influencers.

If by “left-leaning” they meant left, this would be theoretically possible, but what they mean is centrist:

Democrats widely believe they must grow more creative in stoking online enthusiasm for their candidates, particularly in less outwardly political forms of media-like sports or lifestyle podcasts. Many now take it as gospel that Mr. Trump’s victory last year came in part because he cultivated an ecosystem of supporters on YouTube, TikTok and podcasts, in addition to the many Trump-friendly hosts on Fox News.

It’s been memory-holed, but there was a time when the left was stronger than the right online — vastly stronger. In the 2000’s, the days of the so-called Netroots or blogosphere, it wasn’t even close. The big names were left-wing, and the biggest right-wingers did numbers that were one-tenth of theirs.

This was widely acknowledged. There were mainstream press articles about the right-wing’s online problems.

Then Obama took power, and the word went out: If you’re a Democratic operative or donor, you should stop funding Netroots, and if you don’t, well, you will be frozen out of work as an operative, and if you’re donor, your interests will not be prioritized.

It was there, I was an insider, and I know. The combination of Google and Facebook systematically driving advertising revenues into the dirt, along with some other issues (basically related to Democratic core voters lack of any actual principles other than, “Our party is always right, the Republicans are always wrong, and the left owes us their votes and has nowhere to go”), Netroots died. It took a few years, but the job was done.

The Netroots’ mantra was, “more and better Democrats.” We fundraised for Democrats, but we also primaried Democrats we considered bad. This was unconscionsable to Democratic power brokers. We were supposed to be entirely an adjunct and not interfere in internal Democratic politics at all. So, they put Netroots down like a diseased dog.

Democrats want a cheering section. They don’t want anyone who will do anything but promote the candidates chosen by insiders.

That’s NOT how a popular online movement works. It isn’t how any of the movements which have been successful on the right worked. They all primaried Republicans they didn’t like and pushed policies they believed in — even if the party didn’t agree.

So donors can throw as much money as they like at the problem, but unless they’re willing to fund the actual left, and to understand that funding doesn’t mean they get complete control, they will fail.

It would be better to encourage already existing, left-wing populist figures and give them some funding, as opposed to trying to astroturf a new online movement.

But then, an already-existing figure might say, “Free Palestine” or “Biden is senile,” and they can’t have that.

No one will really trust an astroturfed “left-wing” figure, and they won’t grow to huge stars.

You can have effective, powerful left-wing online populists, or you can have court eunuchs who always back the party line.

Choose one.

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 18, 2025

By Tony Wikrent

On May 18, 2025

6 Comments

by Tony Wikrent

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

Trump in TROUBLE as Amy Coney Barrett SNAPS at Supreme Court (YouTube video)

[Legal AF, May 16, 2025]

[TW: Leah Litman, Michael Popok and Alex Aronson discuss the Supreme Court hearings on Friday 5-16-2025. This is ostensibly about birthright citizenship, but perhaps the more important issue is whether US District courts can impose injunctions nationwide. I do not recall ever before having linked to a discussion of Supreme Court hearings, but these were extraordinary in showing how (anti)Republicans and conservative are attempting to obliterate two and a half centuries of legal development and reasoning in the USA republic’s experiment in self government. Recall that the (anti)Republicans and conservatives / libertarians repeatedly sought and obtained injunctions to stop implementation of Biden policies they disliked. But now that Democrats and liberals are stopping Trump policies with court injunctions, (anti)Republicans and conservatives / libertarians are arguing that only the Supreme Court can impose nationwide injunctions.

[But it’s even worse: Trump’s former personal attorney, now serving as U.S. Solicitor General, D. John Sauer, actually argued that a court injunction can apply only to the particular case and the particular litigant. (This was the point in the hearings that Justice Amy Coney Barrett sputtered “Really?” with some incredulity.) In other words, according to Sauer, if you want to prevent Trump / Musk / DOGE from disposing of 12,351 workers from an agency, you would need 12,351 injunctions for each of the 12,351 agency workers to protect all of them. As Justice Sonya Sotomayor, pointedly asked Sauer, “You’re talking about the hundreds and thousands of people who weren’t part of the judgment of the court. They would all have to file individual actions?”

Litman, Popok and Aronson also discuss how (anti)Republicans and conservatives / libertarians are pushing for laws and legal decisions that would almost totally restrict the path for class action lawsuits, the only alternative to using court injunctions to legally protect large groups of people. With this, you see the outlines of the legal assault on American law and jurisprudence that has been developed during the past half century in the seminars and conferences by the Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, Mercatus Center, and the rest of the apparatus of plutocrat-funded conservatives and libertarian entities.

[As I have argued before, the “left’s” response to this assault on American law and jurisprudence has been crippled by the “left” rejecting the legitimacy of American history and institutions for being based on racism and misogyny. I firmly believe this is the primary reason the doctrines and ideas being developed by conservatives and libertarians were largely ignored for the past half century. The “left” has yet to deal with the question of why the plutocrats are expending so much to reinterpret and change American law and jurisprudence. What was there in place before the plutocratic assault that plutocrats want to obliterate, and the “left” has been ignoring?

[Especially frightening is that “Justices” Thomas and Alito appear to have accepted Sauer’s arguments.]

In Birthright Citizenship Case, Trump DOJ Asks Supreme Court Justices to Make Themselves Irrelevant

Garrett Epps, May 16, 2025 [Washington Monthly]

… Thursday’s argument had two aspects, which appeared and disappeared like the Katzenjammer Kids playing peekaboo throughout the nearly three hours of oral argument. The Court had formally assembled to hear the first: When is it okay for one federal district judge to block a government policy nationwide?

The second was: Has every Congress, every Court, and every administration for the past century and a half read the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause wrong, leaving Donald Trump, on his sole authority, to upend the rule that all babies born in the U.S., except the children of diplomatic families, are citizens at birth?

Though Sauer began his argument by boldly proclaiming the administration’s novel interpretation of the Amendment (it applied, he said, only to the children of free slaves in 1868 and has no effect on the children of immigrants today), he quickly moved to the administration’s real aim in bringing this “emergency docket” application before the Court.

In Sauer’s view, the case was about a broader issue than the permissibility of “universal injunctions” (federal district court orders that block new executive policies nationwide). Article III of the Constitution, which created the federal judiciary and gives it its powers, he argued, does not permit any federal court, at any level, to issue such injunctions.

This raises the question: What if the government loses in the district court—and then loses again in the Court of Appeals? What if it loses in the Supreme Court? What court can order it to stop engaging in behavior that Article III courts have found to violate the Constitution?

Without quite saying so, Sauer let it be known that the answer is: None.

If plaintiffs won in the Supreme Court, he graciously conceded, they could take the judgment to the bank—for themselves, that is. But Sotomayor asked him, once the Court decided the constitutional issue, would its order bind the government to stop the unconstitutional action against anyone?

Well . . . said Sauer . . . Not so much.

The result of such a case, Sauer said, would not be a Supreme Court order binding everyone else, but instead a Supreme Court precedent. And of course, plaintiffs still being injured by a government policy (for example, by being rendered stateless by an executive order) could cite that precedent in their cases. “If there was a decision that violated the precedent of the Court, then the affected plaintiffs could get a separate judgment,” he said.

Responded Sotomayor, “You’re talking about the hundreds and thousands of people who weren’t part of the judgment of the court. They would all have to file individual actions?”

Maybe not, said Sauer—if the case could satisfy “the rigorous criteria of Rule 23,” to be certified as a class action.

But if not, said Sotomayor, “you are claiming that not just the Supreme Court—that both the Supreme Court—and no lower court can stop an executive from universally, from violating those holdings by this Court.”….

If a president can simply wave away that much adverse authority—and then only grudgingly apply his losses in court—then the role of the federal courts will be, from now on, quite different from the one they have played for the past 100 years. American-style judicial review would become something like the Mexican writ of amparo, by which parties can get a judgment blocking an unconstitutional law only as to their individual cases; others in the same situation must go to court to get their own amparo. In the atomized world envisioned by the administration, judicial review might be called the Writ of Sisyphus. No matter how often a court pushes the rock up the hill, it will face the same task over and over if the government so chooses.

The Visionary of Trump 2.0: Russell Vought is advancing a radical ideological project decades in the making.

McKay Coppins, May 16, 2025 [The Atlantic, via ownwithtyranny.com]

…Vought’s critics have warned that elements of his agenda— for example, unilaterally cutting off funding for congressionally established agencies such as USAID— are eroding checks and balances and pushing the country toward a constitutional crisis. But in interviews over the past several weeks, some of his allies told me that’s the whole point. The kind of revolutionary upending of the constitutional order that Vought envisions won’t happen without deliberate fights with Congress and the judiciary, they told me. If a crisis is coming, it’s because Vought is courting one.

Bannon told me that mainstream Republicans have long complained about runaway federal bureaucracy but have never had the stomach to take on the problem directly. Vought, by contrast, is strategically forcing confrontations with the other branches of government. “What Russ represents, and what the Romneys and McConnells don’t understand, is that the old politics is over,” he said. “There’s no compromise here. One side is going to win, one side is going to lose, so let’s get it on.”

… Vought himself has written that we are living in a “post-Constitutional time.” Progressives, he argues, have so thoroughly “perverted” the Founders’ vision by filling the ranks of government with unaccountable technocrats that undoing the damage will require a “radical” plan of attack. “The Right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years,” he wrote in an essay for The American Mind, a journal published by the Claremont Institute.

What exactly would such an approach look like in practice? Mike Davis, a Republican lawyer and a friend of Vought’s who helped steer judicial nominations in Trump’s first term, told me that he expects an escalating series of standoffs between the Trump administration and the judicial branch. He went so far as to say that if the Supreme Court issues a decision that constrains Trump’s executive power in a way the administration sees as unconstitutional, the president will have to defy it. “The reptiles will never drain the swamp,” Davis told me. “It’s going to take bold actions.”

The End of Rule of Law in America