The Fate of Our Cities Is Now in the Supreme Court’s Hands

The question of whether Donald Trump has the authority to deploy federal troops in American cities—in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act—is heading to the Supreme Court. This week, Trump asked his complicit Supreme Court justices to overturn a restraining order barring him from waging war on Chicago. The appeal was placed on the court’s shadow docket, meaning the court can review the case and issue a ruling at any time, without a hearing and without the Republicans’ having to explain themselves. The court can give Trump the authority to “temporarily” attack American cities, pending a full hearing at a later date, by which point the devastation from his actions will already be complete.

Georgetown Law professor Steven Vladek calls the case a “make or break moment” for the Supreme Court. He writes: “For the Supreme Court to issue a ruling that allows the President to send troops into our cities based upon contrived (or even government-provoked) facts…would be a terrible precedent for the Court to set—not just for what it would allow President Trump to do now, but for the even more grossly tyrannical conduct it would allow him and future presidents (assuming we have any) to undertake later. If factually and legally unpersuasive domestic deployments of troops aren’t going to be a red line for the Supreme Court, what the heck will be?”

My guess is that there is no “red line” for the Christofascist extremists running the Supreme Court. They will give Trump what he wants, as they always do, and continue to let him trash the Constitution to satisfy his whims.

In a separate case, a three-judge panel, randomly stacked with two Trump judges from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, gave a preview of what the Supreme Court’s eventual argument will look like. That panel removed a restraining order imposed by a district court judge (who was also a Trump appointee, for what it’s worth) preventing Trump from sending troops into Portland. The panel took Trump’s lies about the situation on the ground in Portland at face value. The Ninth Circuit said that the district court did not give appropriate “deference” to Trump’s “assessment of the facts.” They further said that the district court placed too much emphasis on the words Trump used to justify his invasion of Portland.

I expect that the panel’s ruling will soon be overturned by the full Ninth Circuit, but it doesn’t matter. Their reasoning will be aped by the Supreme Court. This is the classic Republican judicial dance to justify anything that Trump does. First, the judges say that the president might be right, even in the face of demonstrable evidence that he’s wrong. Then, they say that we cannot use Trump’s own (illegal, unconstitutional, abhorrent) words against him, and have to pretend that he didn’t literally confess to his own illegal motivations for doing a thing. Lastly, they’ll say that their order authorizing Trump to do whatever violent thing he wants to do is “temporary” and promise a full hearing “on the merits” at some point in the future, by which time whoever it is Trump wanted to kill or deport will already be dead or gone.

Republican justices essentially tell us to ignore Trump when he’s telling the truth about himself, but listen to Trump when he’s lying about the rest of us. They will again. Chief Justice John Roberts and his Republican cabal first used this move way back in 2018 in Trump v. Hawaii, when Roberts authorized Trump’s Muslim ban, and since nobody ever punished Roberts for his legal vandalism, he’s been using the same playbook ever since.

Trump is a dictator. The Supreme Court is there to help him.

The Bad and the Ugly

• The federal government is still shut down. The judiciary is now operating on emergency backup funding. The judges are still there, and they’re still being paid, but most other people who are working for the courts are either being furloughed or asked to continue working for free. Cases will be delayed. Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley expressed surprise at how the shutdown is affecting the judiciary, saying he “hadn’t thought about” how it would impact people waiting for rulings from court. Chuck Grassley IS THE CHAIRMAN OF THE SENATE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE. Nice to know that he has no freaking clue what he’s doing.
• The fallout from the Supreme Court’s pending decision to gut the Voting Rights Act has already started, and the court hasn’t even issued its ruling yet: On Wednesday, North Carolina adopted a new, racist gerrymander aimed at taking away two majority-minority districts in the state.
• The Trump administration is murdering civilians on boats in the Caribbean. Reports indicate that 34 people have been killed in the past 50 days. Just thought you’d like to know.
• House Democrats have launched a probe into Trump’s attempt to extort $230 million from the Department of Justice.
• Bigoted functionary Kim Davis, who claims a religious right to refuse to click her little screen on marriage applications filed by gay couples, is trying to get her case heard by the Supreme Court. The court will consider whether to hear her appeal when it next meets, on November 7. I’m not sure if this is the case that the court will use to overturn marriage equality—Davis’s arguments are more stupid than most—but if it’s not this one, it’ll be some other one. This day is coming.

Inspired Takes

• Whenever I read The Nation’s Michael Klare, I get scared. His new post on Trump’s embrace of AI is, well, terrifying.
• Democrats who would like popular support from young Democrats need to get the memo on Gaza. Y.L. Al-Sheikh explains in The Nation.
• Adam Serwer explains how we’re all paying the “anti-woke” tax now.

Worst Argument of the Week

It turns out Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner has a Nazi tattoo. And has said horribly bigoted things on Reddit. He’s, uhh, since covered up his Nazi tattoo. And he’s totally very sorry about his past unhinged bigotry. He’s a better man now (he claims), which is nice, I guess. Yay? Let he who has not emblazoned a Nazi insignia on their chest or written homophobic rants on social media cast the first stone.

Luckily, as I have not done either of those things, I am in the morally superior position, and I have a lot of fucking rocks. The new revelations about Platner’s body art and past beliefs caused a lot of people, including me, to hastily retract support for his candidacy. But other liberals are still supporting this guy—I have only seen other white liberals continuing to defend him, but I don’t spend a lot of time in Black, blue MAGA spaces so my own bubble may be biased on that front.

The absolute worst version of this defense was penned by Jon Lovett, host of Pod Save America. He took to Twitter to say: “Only perfect candidates off the harvard law conveyor belt pls, highly disciplined, all boxes checked, well liked and humble, absolutely no spiritual connection to having a physical body except for severe IBS, volunteered at a soup kitchen in high school, signs email ‘cheers,’ etc.”

Nearly every word of this Tweet is an exceptional piece of trash, even when you adjust for its dog-whistle attempts at sarcasm. His overall point is that Democrats should not abandon candidates like Platner just because they’re imperfect in some way. His suggestion is that “perfect” candidates are inauthentic, as opposed to a guy like Platner who is a real guy, warts and all.

That’s the takeaway. But what’s truly wild about it is the implication that getting Nazi tattoos and spewing anti-gay garbage is just being “authentic,” while volunteering at soup kitchens and being disciplined in how you talk about other people is somehow woke BS from people with irritable sphincters. Lovett is acting like being generous, educated, and NOT GETTING NAZI SYMBOLS ETCHED ONTO YOUR BODY is somehow incongruous with being a red-blooded American guy and showing the voters your true self.

I reject Lovett’s bullshit at every conceivable level. I consider myself an “authentic” American cis-hetero male. The fact that I take my children to volunteer at a soup kitchen does not make me less of a man, nor does it make me fake. The fact that I can spell “cis-hetero” and use it appropriately does not make me weak. The fact that I went to Harvard Law School suggests I may be qualified to speak about how the laws of this country could be made to work better for all the people living here. But maybe I need to put this in “authentic” male language that Lovett can understand: Kiss my Black ass, punk.

In any event, my take on Platner is that he’s probably not a Nazi. And he probably has learned and grown over the course of years. But, as a voter, I probably cannot take the chance that I’m wrong about his best intentions.

Platner is an unproven, neophyte candidate with no public record (other than on Reddit) running for an office with a six-year term. He’s saying many of the right things now, but he’s asking people to trust that what he’s saying now is the truth and that he will stick to it once he’s ensconced in power for more than half a decade. Literally, anybody can talk a good game during a campaign. (See: Sinema, Kyrsten. See also: Fetterman, John.) Does anybody truly know what Platner, a literal [checks notes] former mercenary will do once Pfizer starts coming at him with money? I don’t.

I was willing to give Platner the benefit of the doubt before, but new information has come to light. I can no longer trust him. Updating one’s opinions based on new information is a sign of intelligence.

Then again, I learned that at Harvard. So, you know, my ability to process and integrate new information will never be authentic enough for Jon Lovett.

What I Wrote

The Supreme Court is taking up a major gun case. It involves disarming people who smoke weed, so a lot of people on the left want the court to reverse the law in question and expand gun “rights” to weed smokers. That would be a mistake. I explain why here.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

I’m a little late to the party, but I have recently been watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. The cartoon. Which last aired in 2005. So, OK, I’m a lot late to the party.

Avatar has essentially been my eldest child’s entire personality for a couple of years, so I am generally familiar with the story and its characters. I even dressed up as one of the protagonists for Halloween last year (Uncle Iroh). But I never really sat down and watched it.

Folks, this show is amazing. It’s surprisingly dark for a “kid’s show,” even though it’s full of light, funny moments. It’s deep. There’s a terrible father involved—voiced by Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill. (I kind of have a thing for shows with absolutely godawful fathers because they make me feel good by comparison.) But there are also great fathers involved—like Uncle Iroh. It’s a show about defeating an evil empire. It’s a show about kids defeating an evil empire. It feels incredibly on-point, given [gestures broadly] the world my kids find themselves in.

Not since I went through Steven Universe have I been this happy with a piece of media aimed at my children. If you’ve got some tweens in your house, and you haven’t seen it yet, give it a try. You won’t be disappointed.

Now, if only I could get the younger one off of Bluey.

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