Tag: supreme court
Supreme Court

The Supreme Court Cruelly Condemns Trans Kids (And Families) To Suffering

The US Supreme Court just told American parents in red states that if they have a transgender child or teen, they have no right to make the best health care decisions for them.

Lawmakers in 27 Republican-controlled state legislatures have enacted bans on gender-affirming care for transgender youth, despite the fact that the American Academy of Pediatrics and numerous other major medical associations and world health authorities recommend this care. On June 18, the US Supreme Court gave these states the green light to enforce those prejudicial bans by upholding Tennessee’s law in the US v. Skrmetti case.

Samantha Williams, the heartbroken mom of one of the three transgender teenagers whose families challenged Tennessee’s ban, is devastated by the ruling. She called out the six conservative justices for being unmoved by her “heartfelt plea” to let parents, in consultation with medical experts, decide what treatment is best for their trans child.

“Let us do our job as parents. Let us love and care for our daughter in the best way we and our doctors know how,” she wrote in a brave op-ed in the New York Times on June 19.

But her pleas fell on deaf ears.

Instead, the six right-wing justices took a sledgehammer once again to the right to privacy and the liberty of individuals to make their own decisions about their bodies. Their ruling upholding Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors will now apply to every state with a similar ban.

This same Supreme Court erased a Constitutionally protected right for the first time in 2022, when these same six justices overturned Roe v. Wade and robbed American women of their 50-year right to decide whether and when to have children. Now, the John Roberts Court has snatched rights away from another group—trans teenagers and their supportive parents—to exercise personal liberty.

As the mother of a trans daughter—who, fortunately, is not a minor—I can’t help but feel the pain of these parents who love their children like you and I do, all the way “to the moon and back again.”

It’s terrifying that the Supreme Court and Republican lawmakers have turned into world-class busybodies, no different from the morality police in Iran who check that every Iranian woman is covering her hair (or else!), or the Taliban in Afghanistan, who have taken the rights to an education and to work outside the home away from the oppressed women of their country.

The American Taliban

Yes, we have a whole party and their carefully selected Supreme Court justices running their own morality squads, imposing their right-wing religious extremist beliefs over all 340 million of us.

From the party that says they hate “big government” and any interference in individual rights, we have lawmakers and Supreme Court justices poking their noses right up into women’s uteruses to “protect fertilized eggs”—and now they’re obsessed with examining and ruling on genitals under the guise of “protecting” young people from their parents and doctors.

Are you kidding me?

Unfortunately, no. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Republicans have spent the past several years championing “parental rights”—the right to object to books, vaccines, and school policies. Yet, when a loving parent listens to a child who trusts them enough to share that they are trans, and wants to help them express themselves, those same lawmakers deny them the right to do so. In these states, and now with the Supreme Court’s blessing, parents are told what they cannot do for their children.

It’s especially hypocritical given that Republicans have long accused Democrats of running an intrusive “nanny state.” Yet they are now the ones interfering in the most personal family and medical decisions. They’ve classified paid family leave, unpaid leave to attend children’s events, tax breaks to pay for childcare, and even the minimum wage “nanny legislation.”

Meanwhile, justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito accept massive gifts, like a $267,000 luxury RV, lavish yacht vacations, free homes, and college tuition from their own billionaire benefactors, while they insert their invasive rulings into our private lives.

The problem with busybody red state lawmakers is the cruelty they impose. Gender-affirming care is supported by every major medical pediatric and psychological association in the US, including the American Academy of Family Physicians. It’s evidence-based and essential for innocent trans teens who don’t want to be forced into living with the adult sex organs of a gender they don’t identify with.

As a mom who has listened to her own trans daughter, I admit that I have a heightened awareness of the heavy depression that a trans person feels when they are unable to even look in the mirror at a body that feels like a prison to them. But that’s where gender affirming care comes in. It covers everything from counseling by trained therapists to the provision of puberty blocker medications that delay the onset of adult gender characteristics during puberty. Puberty blockers are reversible, hormone therapy is rare, and surgery on minors is extremely rare. And all of this is done by experienced physicians and with the approval of a trans teen’s parents.

The myth that children are being “mutilated” is false. No parent has ever sent their child to school one day and seen them come home as a different gender. Genital surgeries for minors are exceedingly rare and are not part of standard gender-affirming care for youth. In fact, the most common “gender-affirming” surgery performed on minors in the US is chest reduction surgery for cisgender male youth—not transgender youth. The surgery is performed to treat gynecomastia, a condition where cisgender boys develop excess breast tissue during puberty.

Any news you are seeing about “mutilating” children is solely designed to sow outrage and increase media ratings.

Impact of the Ruling

Despite the constitutional guarantees that are supposed to protect every American equally under the law, the Supreme Court has decided that one special group—trans youths, who account for just 300,000 or 1.4 percent of all American teens aged 13-17—get to have their right to health care decisions obliterated, even when those decisions are made with their adult parents.

The majority in the court writes that it has thrown the decision about access to gender-affirming care for minors back to “the people, their elected representatives and the democratic process.” In other words, they are leaving the decision about whether to pass laws banning gender-affirming care in the hands of the states. However, the reality is that Republican-dominated states have become Republican-controlled through aggressive gerrymandering and voter suppression, ensuring that “the people” don’t get to democratically resolve anything.

The result is that real kids are punished, as Tennessee plaintiff Samantha Williams pointed out in her op-ed.

Her daughter, L.W., came out just before she turned 14, and four years later she is “thriving, healthy and happy after pursuing evidence-based gender-affirming care.”

“But the very care that is improving her life became a primary political target of the Republican supermajority in our home state, Tennessee.”

So how does it affect the Court and Republican state lawmakers anyway, if loving parents provide the health care—approved by 30 respected medical associations—that allows their children to live the full lives in the gender-aligned bodies that they are comfortable with?

Here’s how: Republicans and President Donald Trump have found a small, defenseless minority they can use to distract voters from getting involved with other issues that Republicans want to handle without voter input—such as wages, housing, and health care.

Parents Love Their Trans Kids

I have interviewed multiple parents of trans kids living in red states for stories I’ve written over the years. Like Samantha Williams and the other plaintiffs in US v. Skrmetti, they have done everything they can to protect their children from the “capricious, narrow-minded attacks” of their own state governments.

Their situation has only been made more emotionally and financially dire by the Court’s ruling. They will have to travel long distances regularly or move to blue states so their children can still receive the health care they need.

Put yourself in their shoes. This is no different from you potentially having to travel or move to another city or state for your child to receive vital treatment for cancer. You would do that. In both cases, the care is life saving.

“Data indicate that 82% of transgender individuals have considered killing themselves and 40% have attempted suicide, with suicidality highest among transgender youth,” reports the National Library of Medicine.

No matter what state they live in, trans kids are faced with a hostile national environment, in which our current president has made it his mission to distract his base by bullying trans people of every age, banning them from military service, from participating in school sports, from using bathrooms aligned with their gender identity, and from obtaining passports under their new names and identities.

Trump has even gone so far as to declare in an executive order that in the US there are only two biological sexes from birth: “These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality,” his order states.

The science behind the statement is laughable, considering 0.2 percent to 0.5 percent—or 1 in 1,000 to 4,000—babies are born with ambiguous genitalia which don’t align with typically male or female external genitals.

Sorry, lawmakers in Tennessee and other red states: Nature just doesn’t support your culture war issue.

As liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in her emphatic dissent: “The court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims.”

Like Sotomayor…. “In sadness, I dissent.”

Bonnie Fuller is the former CEO and editor-in-chief of HollywoodLife.com & former editor-in-chief of Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and USWeekly. She is now writing about reproductive freedom and politics.

Reprinted with permission from Courier Newsroom.

How Disastrous Is The Supreme Court's Nationwide Injunctions Decision?

How Disastrous Is The Supreme Court's Nationwide Injunctions Decision?

The Supreme Court’s decision last Friday on nationwide injunctions has generated an unusually intense reaction. Commentators are sharply divided on just how damaging it is. Two friends of mine—both excellent, sophisticated, and reasonable lawyers—got into the equivalent of a shouting match on MSNBC over whether the ruling was “no big deal” or “a disaster.” That split extended to newspaper coverage, with more than one national paper running opposing op-eds.

In the case itself, Justice Jackson, in dissent, called the Court’s opinion “an existential threat to the rule of law.” Justice Barrett, writing for the six-justice majority, responded in strikingly dismissive terms:

“We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”

How to explain such diametrically opposed views of the decision? And how bad is the decision, anyway?

Commentators Are Analyzing Different Aspects of the Case at Different Levels

I think that the sharp divergence among commentators stems from the different levels on which the opinion can be assessed.

At the level of legal doctrine, the Court addressed a real problem—but did so in a way that is both inefficient and under-enforcing of constitutional rights.

At the level of abstract practical impact, the new rule clearly disadvantages some litigants. But there are a couple of potential workarounds, the shape and effectiveness of which remain to be seen.

Where the decision is most troubling is in its immediate, practical impact—here and now, in July 2025—given this president, this Congress, this Supreme Court, and the lower courts that have been by far the most effective institutional brake on Trump’s authoritarian ambitions. On that front, the ruling is a train wreck.

Legal Doctrine and the “Kacsmaryk Problem”

Under the status quo, district court judges could impose nationwide injunctions at their discretion. That gave rise to what we might call the “Kacsmaryk problem.” In April 2023, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk issued a preliminary injunction that purported to suspend FDA approval of mifepristone nationwide.

A sweeping injunction on such shaky legal ground can tie the Justice Department in knots, forcing it to apply a contested ruling across the country. These rulings create serious headaches for DOJ—conflicting obligations, legal uncertainty, and disrupted national policy. That’s why the Biden Justice Department twice asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on the issue. The Court declined both times.

Barrett’s opinion does take up an issue crying out for judicial supervision. The problem is that her solution is inefficient and under-protective of constitutional rights.

The ruling effectively bars nationwide injunctions by district courts, with a few narrow exceptions.

It’s inefficient because prohibiting such injunctions will lead to duplicative litigation in dozens of judicial districts. Instead of resolving a question once, it must now be relitigated repeatedly.

It’s also under-protective. Even when a district court identifies a likely constitutional violation, its ruling won’t apply beyond the named plaintiffs. It could take months—or years—before others benefit from the same legal protection.

There are, however, a few potential avenues for tempering the damage.

First, the opinion allows district courts to issue broader relief when necessary to provide “complete relief” to the plaintiffs before them. That will be a major battleground. In cases like birthright citizenship, it may be impossible to provide complete relief without halting the broader policy at issue.

Second, litigants can attempt to bring nationwide class actions. A ruling for the class would bind the government nationwide, since class members reside in every district.

But that’s easier said than done. Class certification is complex and costly. The rules require legal and factual commonality among class members, and the Supreme Court has grown increasingly skeptical of such actions. If lower courts prove permissive in granting class status, the damage from this decision could be modest. That’s the view of those who say the opinion isn’t a disaster.

Still, the Court could have adopted a more nuanced solution. It could have allowed nationwide injunctions in cases involving constitutional rights, or required expedited review of broad orders. Congress, too, could have acted—by limiting forum-shopping or authorizing broader injunctions only in exceptional circumstances.

Instead, the Court has imposed a near-total ban, with only “complete relief” and class actions as narrow escape valves.

General Impact of the Ruling for the Separation of Powers

The practical upshot of the Court’s decision is that district courts can now only protect the plaintiffs before them. An administration unhappy with a ruling can simply ignore it and try again in a more favorable district. There’s no incentive to appeal; forum-shopping becomes standard operating procedure.

The decision enables not just forum-shopping but strategic exploitation of the judiciary. It fragments legal authority, weakens individual rulings, and invites conflicting injunctions—fueling chaos in the legal system and uncertainty for the public.

Perhaps the most significant effect is the shift in power to the Supreme Court—especially via its shadow docket. Readers of this Substack know how problematic that is. The Court has used its emergency docket to issue major, often opaque rulings, with limited explanation and no public deliberation.

Justice Kavanaugh, in his concurrence, embraced this shift. He emphasized that the Court is open “24/7/365” and has tools to make fast decisions. But that’s cold comfort for those who oppose Trump’s steady assault on constitutional norms. The emergency docket has become a venue for sweeping, unexplained rulings—almost always to the executive’s benefit.

Practical Impact Today for the Trump Authoritarian Campaign

That brings us to the heart of the matter. The alarm isn’t over legal theory—it’s about what this decision enables, right now.

Over the past several months, Trump has issued a blizzard of executive orders, most of them brazen violations of constitutional limits. He’s tried to usurp Congress’s role, gut the federal bureaucracy, intimidate private institutions, trample civil rights, target opponents, and impose far-right policies by decree.

If even half of those orders had taken effect, the country would already look unrecognizable as a constitutional democracy.

Time and again, it’s been the lower federal courts who’ve stopped him.

They’ve had to. Congress, narrowly controlled by Republicans, has refused to act. Civic institutions have been cowed. And the Supreme Court has shown far more deference to Trump than the lower courts have.

Now, the Supreme Court is cutting those courts off at the knees.

There’s a palpable possessiveness—if not jealousy—on the part of the justices, as they assert their exclusive role in setting national legal policy. The danger is that they are increasingly siding with Trump, even when doing so empowers unreviewable executive authority.

Take birthright citizenship. What’s to stop the administration from shopping its legally baseless theory from district to district until it finds a sympathetic judge? It could quietly enforce that ruling, avoid appealing it, and never give the Supreme Court a chance to reject it.

At oral argument, the Solicitor General said they would seek certiorari. But given this administration’s routine dishonesty in court, taking that promise at face value is almost laughably naïve.

Which brings us to the uniquely Trumpian risk: a president who lies constantly, demands unreviewable authority, and now has a Supreme Court inclined to let him have it.

In a recent Ninth Circuit argument over Trump’s federalization of California’s National Guard, his lawyer argued that the president could invoke emergency powers for any or no reason—and that courts should not be allowed to question his good faith. The Supreme Court has not yet embraced that position, but Friday’s ruling makes clear that this battle is still very much alive.

The Supreme Court Remains a Clear and Present Danger

The conservative supermajority’s background matters. Five of the six justices came from Republican executive branch roles. All have expressed strong sympathies for executive power. Many believe Watergate gave Congress too much authority—and that it’s time to “rebalance.”

That might be a valid stance in a government of coequal branches. But we don’t have that. What we have is Trump, a Congress in retreat, and now a Supreme Court opinion that threatens to silence the only courtrooms where the rule of law was still holding the line.

Whether the workarounds—like class actions—can offer a meaningful check remains to be seen. Justice Alito, joined by Justice Thomas, warned lower courts not to let class certification become a backdoor to broad relief. Other justices may join that chorus. And once again, many of these battles will be fought through the shadow docket—where the Court has repeatedly sided with Trump and undermined the lower courts.

And most scandalously, we cannot count on Congress to act. The Framers assumed it would step in to check runaway executive power. But not this Congress.

With this opinion, the Supreme Court has just stripped the legal system—and the American people—of one of its most important tools for resisting lawless authoritarianism. It has handed Trump a vastly more powerful weapon for imposing unconstitutional policies, especially with a complacent Congress at his back.

There are strategies for fighting back. Lawyers across the country are already deploying them, and their work deserves support at every turn. We cannot afford despair—or distraction. The lies must be called out. The vision Trump seeks to impose must be resisted no less vigorously.

However, if Trump succeeds in suffocating democracy, Friday’s decision will be remembered as a turning point—the day the Supreme Court crippled the only branch still willing to say “no.”

We deserve better from the Highest Court in the land. But the only question that matters now is: can we still get just enough to keep democracy intact?

Harry Litman is a former United States Attorney and the executive producer and host of the Talking Feds podcast. He has taught law at UCLA, Berkeley, and Georgetown and served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Clinton Administration. Please consider subscribing to Talking Feds on Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Substack.

Leonard Leo

It's Just His Nature: Scorpion Trump Stings Frog Leo In Lawless Rage

Leonard Leo, the bête noire of liberals who curated Trump’s first-term judicial appointments, including his three Supreme Court justices, has gone from Trump's shortlist to his shit list. As is his wont, Trump turned on his loyal servant with particular savagery, calling him a “sleazebag” who had rendered bad advice on a series of judicial nominations.

Leo responded with comparative good grace, along with a pointed, if diplomatic, defense of his influential work: "I'm very grateful for President Trump transforming the Federal Courts…[T]he Federal Judiciary is better than it's ever been in modern history, and that will be President Trump's most important legacy."

The genesis of the fallout speaks volumes about Trump's view of the role of the federal judiciary, and of his own inner circle.

Trump's ire was sparked by the Court of International Trade’s recent opinion striking down his broad tariffs because they unlawfully usurped Congress’s powers and relied on supposed “emergency” powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) that the Act does not provide.

This legal failing is a cross-cutting theme of Trump's indiscriminate power grabs. Similar to a number of modern would-be authoritarians, Trump has repeatedly tried to steamroll basic legislative authority by characterizing everyday political issues as emergencies requiring a strongman’s intervention.

The opinion was a unanimous per curiam (i.e., no single author was identified) by three members of the Court of International Trade: a Reagan appointee, an Obama appointee, and a first-term Trump appointee. Moreover, the Trump appointee, Timothy Reif, is—as Trump appointees go—unusually well qualified, having previously served as general counsel in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) in the Executive Office of the President and then senior counsellor to the U.S. Trade Representative.

The panel, including Reif, held that the IEEPA—the text of which doesn't even contain the word emergency—could not support Trump’s outlandish and all-too-familiar claims that the sky is falling. At the same time, the court noted the possibility of statutory sources of authority other than the one Trump invoked.

In response to the administration’s predictable motion for emergency relief, the Federal Circuit—the Court of Appeals for the specialized Court of International Trade—has imposed an administrative stay that tells us nothing about whether it will affirm the lower court on the merits.

Trump's temper tantrum is ironic, if not absurd, given Leonard Leo’s record as the administration’s judicial nominee whisperer. By any measure—on the left or the right, and whether provoking aversion or elation—Leo has compiled a phenomenally successful record in the service of Trump and the conservative judicial movement in general.

He follows in the footsteps of advisors to other Republican administrations since Reagan, who have adopted a single-minded focus on judicial appointees and have dramatically transformed the makeup of the federal judiciary. In Leo’s case, that includes Trump's three Supreme Court nominees: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

Conservative Trump supporters have generally taken those appointees—which have established an über-majority conservative Court likely to last for a generation or more—as back-to-back-to-back home runs.

Just for starters, all three of them voted to overrule Roe v. Wade, probably the number one goal of judicial conservatives for a generation, and a (dubious) achievement that for many years looked impossible. In terms of the personal bounty for Trump, all joined the outlandish 2024 immunity opinion that continues to provide him comfort on a regular basis—for example, just last week, with the pardon for Paul Walczak in the wake of a $1 million solicited donation by Walczak’s mother that fits the criminal elements of bribery to a T.

The larger lesson in Trump's excoriation of Leo is what it shows about Trump’s expectations of the purpose of screening his nominees.

Leo has served up a long series of candidates who talk the talk about conservative jurisprudence, including the newfangled articles of faith like robust Second Amendment interpretation, solicitude for religious-based intolerance, and the Supreme Court’s less-than-fully-coherent history-and-tradition test.

That doesn't cut it for Trump. One important opinion against him—plainly on the basis of well-established legal principles that any judicial conservative should embrace—and Leo gets moved to the other list, with a heavy dose of Trump’s obloquy for good measure. For Trump, there's only one test of judicial qualifications: ruling for Trump, whatever the law provides. Leo failed in his presumed duty to find absolute Trump toadies, or to quietly inculcate the potential toadies he did find.

Leo joins a very long list of former insiders whom Trump has abruptly cast out and vilified. Central advisers such as Mike Pence, Chris Christie, Anthony Scaramucci, Kayleigh McEnany, Mick Mulvaney, John Bolton, and many others have all tasted Trump’s poison, some for reasons that are minor or even mysterious. The fact is, there's no rhyme or reason to Trump's spurning of former close associates. It rather just seems to be a way of demonstrating domination and superiority to any advisor, however valuable.

Trump is like the scorpion in the fable of the scorpion and the frog. Not able to swim to cross the river, the scorpion asks a frog for a ride on his back. Knowing the scorpion’s dangerous sting, the frog hesitates: “How do I know you won’t sting me?” The scorpion replies, “Because if I sting you, we’ll both drown.” So, the frog agrees to ferry the scorpion across the river. Halfway there, the scorpion stings the frog, who with his dying words asks, “Why did you do that? Now we’re both going to die.”

“I couldn’t help it,” the scorpion replies. “It’s in my nature.”

Trump is a legal ignoramus indifferent to the Constitution and the role of law. His only interest is domination. He turns on those who served him faithfully because it’s in his nature.

The general agenda of Trump 2.0—outlined by the long blueprint of Project 2025—is to put in place a series of measures that grossly, and unconstitutionally, aggrandize Trump's personal power, rejecting any vestiges of restraint and lawfulness that stymied him the first time around.

Transposed to the federal judiciary, that means a careful search for judges like Aileen Cannon or Matt Kacsmaryk who—not to put too fine a point on it—are utterly in the tank for the president who appointed them and who could yet elevate them to higher judicial service.

So far, the Trump 2.0 judicial nomination process has little to show for itself; the Senate has confirmed none of his 11 federal court nominees this year.

Leo’s casting out thus portends a series of nominees carefully chosen to cross fingers behind their backs when they swear, as the law requires, to “administer justice without respect to persons.” Call it the attempted Cannonization of the federal judiciary—and, to the extent Trump can secure Senate confirmations, one more sharp departure from the rule of law.

Harry Litman is a former United States Attorney and the executive producer and host of the Talking Feds podcast. He has taught law at UCLA, Berkeley, and Georgetown and served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Clinton Administration. Please consider subscribing to Talking Feds on Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Substack.

 January 6 insurrectionists

Presidential Immunity Plus Pardon Power Equals Absolute Despotism

Donald Trump’s pardons of January 6 insurrectionists on his first day as president in January of this year were an admission that he instigated the assault on the Capitol, and that he approved of the way the assault was carried out, including violent attacks on police officers resulting in at least one death and leaving others with career-ending injuries.

Looked at in a different way, Trump thus pardoned himself, even though such an action was not necessary due to the incredible law-busting fact that the Supreme Court, in United States v. Trump had given him blanket immunity for virtually anything he does or did that could be defined as an “official act.”

Trump has been using the toxic combination of immunity and the pardon power in a crescendo of lawlessness that was unforeseen by the founding fathers at the time they wrote the Constitution. It’s the biggest fuck you to our democracy since its founding. In his disassembly of whole departments of government that were established in laws written by the Congress, Trump is saying to the other two branches of government, “If you don’t like it, come and get me.”

The Republican Congress, at this point a wholly owned subsidiary of Donald Trump and the Trump Organization, has sat on its hands, and individual Republican members of Congress, including the speaker of the House, have endorsed Trump’s rape of the government. Congressional Republicans, as well as conservative members of the judiciary, adhere to a royalist theory of presidential power called the unitary executive, which holds that Trump, as president, has sole authority over the executive branch, including the right to fire all appointees and executive branch officers, with or without cause.

Since taking office for a second time, Trump has tested the limits of his executive power repeatedly, eliminating entire divisions of the government such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and firing directors of Congressionally created agencies that had previously been considered independent of the Executive.

Last week, the Supreme Court adopted Trump’s position on his powers by issuing an order allowing him to fire board members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merits Systems Protection Board. The top court paused lower court orders that had allowed the two board officials to continue to serve while a lawsuit they filed makes its way through the courts. The lower courts observed that under the congressional statute establishing the boards, its members could be fired only for “good cause,” and the administration had not provided such cause.

Trump’s unilateral moves in firing government employees and disestablishing government departments have been stymied by the courts multiple times. A report by Adam Bonica on his Substack, “On Data and Democracy,” found that during the month of May, “federal district courts ruled against the Trump administration in 26 of 27 cases—a stunning 96% loss rate.” Trump lost 76 percent of the cases against him in April, and 74 percent in March.

Yesterday, Trump added to his court losses when he suffered a stinging rebuke by a federal judge who found that his moves to punish the WilmerHale law firm were unconstitutional. Other judges have struck down Trump’s similar moves against Jenner & Block and Perkins Coie. Trump had issued orders against the law firms blocking their access to federal buildings and representing clients in lawsuits involving contracts with the federal government. Trump asserted his “right” to punish these law firms and several others because of his absolute control over the federal government.

What Donald Trump has done with his 140-plus executive orders and his attempts to punish law firms and other independent businesses such as CBS and entertainment companies has been to assert authoritarian control not only over the government, but over companies that do business with the government or are subject to government regulation. This is an unprecedented assertion of presidential power. So far, the only check on Trump has been lawsuits filed one after the other by individuals, businesses, and universities affected by Trump’s orders.

Courts have rejected the great majority of Trump’s attempts at absolute control, but as the lawsuits make their way through the courts, they all have one ultimate destination: the Supreme Court. Trump appointed three arch-conservative justices to a court already dominated by Republican-appointed justices. The Supreme Court has gone back and forth with its recent orders on its “emergency docket,” ordering that migrants have rights under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment and ordering the return of at least one migrant who was wrongfully deported by Trump’s Department of Homeland Security.

But the court has so far failed to enforce its own order to return the mistakenly deported migrant KIlmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador. So far, no court has found the Trump administration in contempt of court, but legal experts predict that such an order is inevitable in multiple cases because of the Trump administration’s refusal or inability to provide legal justification for many of the moves they have made.

If and when such a contempt order is issued against one or more of Trump’s departments, we have been told that the United States will be in the first real constitutional crisis of its history. In the past, as in the Pentagon Papers case, and in the Watergate case in which Nixon was ordered by a federal judge to produce the White House tapes, the president then in power capitulated to the court orders and a crisis was avoided.

But this time, the president in office enjoys something Nixon and other presidents never had: absolute immunity from prosecution from his acts as president. Trump also enjoys the power given him under the Constitution to pardon anyone for committing any crime. Last Friday, Trump issued a full and unconditional pardon to a man who had been convicted of several tax crimes that charged him with using his unpaid taxes to finance a lavish lifestyle and buy luxury goods, including a $2 million yacht.

The pardon was issued after the man’s mother attended a $1 million-a-head Mar a Lago fund raiser at which she spoke to Trump personally. She had been a major Republican fund raiser in the past and had contributed to Trump’s election effort in 2024, co-hosting at least three fund-raisers for Trump. In a very real sense, the mother of this tax-cheat bought a pardon for her son by paying Donald Trump directly.

Yesterday, Trump pardoned a Virginia sheriff who had been convicted on multiple counts of bribery for accepting “cash-stuffed envelopes” from wealthy people he provided with badges. appointing them as bogus “auxiliary sheriffs,” that allowed them to break the law. Along with other sheriffs, he had formed a “Protect America Now PAC” to support Trump. The sheriff was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for his crimes. The pardon was overseen by Ed Martin, newly appointed as Trump’s “pardon attorney” in the Department of Justice in addition to being put in charge of the DOJ office of “weaponization,” intended to undo actions by the Biden administration the DOJ sees as unfairly punishing MAGA supporters of Trump.

Pardoning random MAGA supporters and people Trump wants to reward for giving him money is the least of it. The real problem is Trump’s ability to pardon anyone he orders to commit a crime in his name. For example, if a judge ends up finding an assistant U.S. Attorney in contempt of court and orders him or her fined, Trump can issue a pardon and negate the contempt finding. This will allow the Trump DOJ to go into court and lie to judges with impunity, knowing that they will suffer no consequences as long as the lies they tell are in support of Trump’s illegal actions being challenged in court.

The same would go for anyone working for Trump in his administration. If Trump orders one of his cabinet secretaries to defy a court order, or to execute an illegal act such as administratively fining a government employee for some imagined crime such as signing a document refusing to carry out an illegal order, he can simply order Pam Bondi and his DOJ not to prosecute whoever is involved. At the end of his administration, Trump can issue blanket pardons that will prevent a new administration from prosecuting crimes carried out under Trump’s orders today.

Trump’s pardons are being called “get out of jail free” cards, but they’re worse than that. By preemptively ordering that certain people not be prosecuted, they will never be charged, much less come to trial and be convicted. As he has shown with his two most recent pardons, Trump can nullify prosecutions which predated his return to office, turning the Department of Justice into an office of revenge and retribution unseen before in American history and certainly not contemplated by the signers of the Declaration of Independence, who asserted in the name of the 13 colonies and their citizens that the corruption of royal rule was being thrown off in contemplation of something better.

Speaking of the rights of “the people,” the signers declared that “When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

We have entered into a new age of “absolute Despotism.” Whether we will throw off those who would impose upon us such “abuses and usurpations” as we have endured for the last four months remains to be seen.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

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