Weekly Roundup: US-Iran Tensions and SCOTUS Rulings on Trans Rights
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In this weekly roundup, Dan begins with the escalating tensions between the U.S., Iran, and Israel, examining recent airstrikes and the Trump administration’s controversial military decisions.
Dan breaks down the fractured response within the MAGA coalition, uncovering the religious and ideological fault lines behind the debate.
The episode then turns to the Supreme Court’s latest rulings, including:
Gender-affirming care for minors
Deportation policy limits
The reach of nationwide injunctions
Parental rights around LGBTQ+ inclusive education
Dan highlights the Christian nationalist undertones shaping public discourse and judicial outcomes. He ends with a rare note of optimism, pointing to a surprising cross-ideological ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act as a sign that compromise is still possible.
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www.feyyaz.tv Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I am Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Pleased to be with you doing the weekly roundup this week, flying solo.
Brad has some things going on and needs the time to do that.
And I'm glad to give it to him and glad to join all of you.
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So let's dive in this week.
Tough episode, folks.
A lot of stuff going on.
We're going to talk about Iran, and we're going to talk about Iran and feeding the fires of end times frenzy that is still a driving force among parts of the MAGA coalition.
And then as I record on this day, last day of the Supreme Court term, dropping lots of decisions, lots of decisions have come down in the last week or so.
Going to run through some of those.
I do not pretend to have an exhaustive analysis.
I do not pretend that we're going to get to every case.
We're not.
But some of the big ones and what they mean and what they portend, and we'll take a look at those.
So let's start with Iran.
And unless you've been living under a rock or in a cave or something like that, you know about some of the things that are going on with the U.S. and Iran.
We know that Israel a little while back launched a series of strikes on Iran, called on the U.S. to help, in particular, to drop the so-called bunker buster bombs, the big bombs that can penetrate into the ground.
And they were hoping disrupt or destroy Tehran's nuclear capabilities as they are thought to be nearing completion of a nuclear weapon and so forth.
So this was going on after some initial hemming and hawing.
Donald Trump said he was going to wait two weeks and look for a diplomatic option and so forth before he made a decision about bombing.
But then they went ahead and bombed Iran less than two weeks later.
And this was particularly pleasing to Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, who had really been calling for this and of course who had sort of spearheaded this.
My view, it is not unique to me, is that Netanyahu benefits, among other things, from creating crises and conflict, whether it's in Gaza, whether it's with Iran.
It's part of what keeps him in power politically.
But Netanyahu had been warning of an imminent Iranian nuclear threat.
Sounds chilling, and we don't know exactly what Iran's nuclear capacity is.
That is regular people like you and I don't.
So it's fair to note that Netanyahu has been talking about Iran being an imminent threat for decades at this point.
But he called upon this to happen.
Of course, a huge, huge part of the American right is built around the notion of protecting Israel, standing by Israel, and so forth.
Donald Trump has long positioned himself as a champion of Israel and the greatest champion that Israel has ever had and so forth.
Regardless of sort of what the exact status of Iran's nuclear ambitions are, it was a crisis brought on in part by Trump in his first term.
Folks will remember that in 2008, he scrapped an accord that had been crafted under the Obama administration limiting Iran's nuclear ambitions.
There was no real rationale for that other than sticking it to the libs.
And so if Iran was moving forward on their nuclear program, which I'm sure that they were, I don't know how close they were, but I'm sure that they were advancing on that.
Most people would say this has part to do with decisions made in Trump's first turn.
So Trump makes the decision.
The U.S. drops a number of these destructive so-called bunker buster bombs and so forth.
The decision was divisive for Americans generally and for the MAGA coalition in particular.
And this is part of why Trump was reluctant to do this.
A majority of Americans opposed the move to bomb Iran, in part because of the sort of ongoing hangover, lingering hangover of the war in Iraq, what turned into, you know, as people say, a forever war, a war undertaken under false pretenses with bad intelligence and all of that.
If you're of a certain age, as I am, you'll remember those arguments.
And while there are always hawks on the American, there are always those who are pro- not just pro-military, but pro-use of military, who have long called for, you know, punching Iran in the mouth and going out and attacking them and so forth.
As you also know, if you listen to us, if you read the news, if you've paid attention to politics for the last number of years, there's a huge portion of that MAGA coalition that is, you know, we might call it the America First Wing, the isolationist wing, the wing that says the U.S. should avoid international entanglements and so forth.
And they opposed this.
They opposed it before Trump did it.
They opposed it after.
They've been calling to make sure that this doesn't escalate into something more.
And stalwarts like Marjorie Taylor Green and Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon came out in opposition to this.
So complex developments, complex if we're looking at the American right, complex if we're looking at broader American society.
And the effects of these attacks were unclear.
Trump, of course, proclaimed that Iran's nuclear capability had been obliterated.
Unqualified success of these attacks.
However, a day or so later, CNN broke a story that said that a number of analysts and intelligence estimates said that it only said Iran back by months.
There were satellite images of lines of trucks possibly removing material or equipment to protect it from these attacks and so forth.
The Trump administration has sought to counter this.
They've decried illegal leaks and so forth.
Pete Hegseth, defense secretary in particular, was tasked with presenting the case publicly.
He went out and he said both that a proper assessment would take time.
So there's reports like those on CNN and other places were wrong, that they were inaccurate.
It was too early to say that these attacks were not hugely successful, that Iran's nuclear capacities weren't obliterated and so forth.
Don't rush to judgment, said Pete Hegseth, as he also rushed to judgment and insisted that the attacks were absolutely successful, parroted everything Trump had said, because that's what you do if you're part of the Trump orbit, as we know, and offered no real evidence to back that up.
So the effects are unclear.
So that's where we are.
I mean, that's where we are in terms of like the overall status of this, the effects in the U.S., U.S. politics, and so forth.
If you watch the news, read the news, however you consume news and information, you know that.
But there's another dimension to this.
And if you've listened to Straightwide American Jesus for a while, if you are a scholar or somebody who has been within American conservative religion over the years, you'll know where this is going.
And that is that for those evangelicals and a number of the religious conservatives within the MAGA movement, the war drums are beating for the end times.
What does that mean?
It means that for a significant segment of the religious adherents within the MAGA movement, attacking Iran, going to war with Iran, defending Israel against Iran would fulfill biblical prophecy.
Now, we've talked about this before.
Again, if you've listened to Straight White American Jesus, we have been talking about eschatology and end times and prophecies of the end and how that ties in with geopolitical conflicts and support for Israel and so forth.
We've talked about this for years, okay?
But if you need a refresher of some pieces of this, there's a strain within conservative Christianity, and especially Protestantism, and it has, you know, within that sort of subdivisions as well.
But there's a strain within conservative Protestantism that predicts that certain geopolitical events need to occur and need to take place before the second coming of Christ.
That is before Jesus returns to earth to inaugurate God's kingdom and so forth.
Now, that strain of we could call it apocalypticism or eschatology or end times prophecy, that strain sits uneasily with other components of contemporary Christian nationalism.
Other components of contemporary Christian nationalism are not so focused on the so-called end times and God coming back in the person of Jesus and establishing God's kingdom on earth and so forth.
They have more of a notion that the call of Christians is to establish God's kingdom.
And so that's, you know, Christian Reconstructionists, people like Pete Hegseth and others.
And so there are these strains within the MAGA Christian coalition that don't sit easily together.
But the Iran events have sort of re-engaged that end times crowd.
They have sort of re-emerged and been re-energized by this as an element within the MA coalition.
And of course, this creates pressure on Trump and the Trump administration to get involved in foreign entanglements against countries like Iran, right?
So contemporary end times enthusiasts, those Christians who believe that there is a future date at which Jesus will return to earth and inaugurate God's kingdom.
And for that to happen, certain geopolitical events need to take place, aiding the state of Israel is always a central mechanism in fulfilling that prophecy for them.
Okay.
So in the aftermath of the Iran attacks and so forth and the run-up to them, Matt Hagee, so if that last name pings for you, Hagee, he is the son of the influential end times pastor John Hagee.
If you have followed American eschatology and end times preaching for decades, John Hagee is a central figure here.
It's been a central part of how he understands Christianity and Christian message.
But excuse me, Matt Hagee cited the book of Ezekiel in the Hebrew Bible.
And he said there, quote, God speaks of raining down fire and hail and brimstone.
That's a heavenly era salt, end quote.
Now, if you're not familiar with this discourse, you have these images in the Bible of like, you know, stars falling from the heavens and crashing into earth and fire and brimstone and destruction raining down.
And for a long time, especially in the Cold War period with the advent of nuclear weapons and so forth, you have this notion that what this is, is, you know, heavy bombing by powerful geopolitical forces.
When I was growing up, it was always nuclear conflict, nuclear warfare, because end times eschatology always reflects the time in which it's articulated.
We'll come back to that in a minute.
Well, that changes now, but now you have this vision of the U.S. raining down fire and hail and brimstone in the form of bunker-busting bombs and so forth.
And that's what Matt Hagee is pointing to.
He's saying, here's this prophecy, and it's, as he says, a heavenly air assault.
Okay.
Mike Evans, the founder of the evangelical group, Friends of Zion, pro-Israel group, on none other than Fox News.
So he goes on to Fox News, not a religious show, not preaching, not talking in a church, but on Fox News.
Cites Genesis 12, where God says, ostensibly to Israel, I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you.
Kind of a standard stock proof text for the eschatologists, for the end times crowd, that those states, including the U.S., that support Israel, that bless Israel, that support Israel, that stand with Israel will be blessed by God.
And so when Israel calls upon the Americans to attack Iran, we need to do this.
So to come to the aid of Israel is to gain divine favor.
And again, this is not something that's being preached in a church.
This is on Fox News.
Okay?
Now, I mentioned a few minutes ago that this end times vision of having to fulfill geopolitical events for the advent, the second advent of Jesus to happen is in theological tension with strains of Christian nationalism.
It can also connect with it in different ways.
So Pete Hegseth, whom I mentioned earlier, Secretary of Defense, but also an ardent Christian Reconstructionist, talked about this in the past.
I'd like you to go back, listen to other things we've talked about with Pete Hegseth.
Brad in particular has done really good work on this.
Pete Hegseth has advanced the idea of an American crusade, his language to, quote, push Islam back, end quote.
So you have this notion of a kind of crusader mentality to go and to push back against Islam.
Well, what do we have?
We have the Islamic Republic of Iran.
So even if you have this tension between the end times prophecy branch of American Christian nationalism and the more nationalist, we're going to establish the kingdom of God branch of Christian nationalism, there's still this overlap and they come together in opposition to Iran.
So you've got on one hand, a significant number of the MAGA coalition that believe that attacking Iran is part of seeking divine favor.
It's fulfilling a divine mandate to stand with Israel.
It is fulfilling prophetic requirements that will bring about the steps that need to happen before the second coming of Jesus of Nazareth.
And on the other side, you have the more nationalistic side that is in favor of America as a crusading nation, opposed to Islam and so forth.
So they come together in this attack on Iran.
So while you have the Marjorie Taylor Greens of the world and the Tucker Carlsons and the Steve Bannons of the world opposed to American intervention, you still have these Christian currents within the MAGA movement that exert significant pressure and beat the war drums for this kind of move.
So all of this has been going on in the past couple of weeks.
A couple takeaways from this.
One is I think it continues to show the ongoing significance of religious figures within the MAGA movement.
They're still there, folks.
And we could dive in and people attached, you know, friends of the show, our podcast have talked about this.
We've talked about this.
There are divergent strands of Christianity that come together in the religious component of the MAGA movement.
As I say, there are tensions within those, but there's also commonality.
There has been for years now in the MAGA movement, the emergence of, I think, a kind of new Christian identity within America that merges those things together.
And it's easy to lose sight of that in Trump 2.0 with executive orders and arguments at the Supreme Court and things like this, where a lot of that religious language and tonality can take a back seat.
It's still there.
It's still active.
Another piece of this is, you know, what to do with nuclear proliferation and states like Iran?
It's a complex question.
It's a hard question.
I think everybody would agree on that.
It's a high-stakes question.
Every action is a gamble.
Not doing something is a gamble.
Attacking is a gamble.
Negotiating is a gamble.
Everything is a gamble.
There is no clear playbook and so forth.
But what happens when you get this religious tonality to it is it just turns the volume up on that.
I use the analogy with clients I work with, religious trauma coaching clients, when I say that, you know, we all deal with these things that are going on in the world all the time or in our family or our lives, whatever.
And what often happens with religion is it's like a mixing board where you take one of the sliders and you just turn it way up.
That's what this does.
The stakes are higher because everything is infused with a divine or cosmic significance.
It becomes a literal, all or nothing, existential sort of issue.
And so we need to be aware of that as we encounter these different voices talking about Iran and U.S. involvement there and so forth.
And the final one, I said I would come back around to this, is that this emphasis on the end times, this vision that God will return through Jesus at the end of time and inaugurate his kingdom on earth and so forth, and that certain things have to happen to bring that about, this has always been ripe for political and ideological exploitation.
End times prophecy provides a mechanism for harnessing and keeping Christian conservatives in the fold.
And if you were to look at the history of, it's called millennialism, eschatology, end times prophecy, and so forth, you'll find that you have these prophecies and these predictions, but they get filled in in different ways.
I noted that when I was a kid, it was always about the Soviet Union.
Everything was about the Soviet Union versus the United States and so forth.
And then after the Cold War, that sort of goes away.
And as the right has cozied up to Putin, Russia disappears as a figure, but now it's Iran.
It has been Iraq.
It has been other countries in the past.
It becomes this very sort of fluid and malleable form that can be appropriated for political gain and has been for decades.
And folks, for those in political power, that's a feature, not a bug.
Critics of eschatology, including myself and including lots of people I talk to who, you know, they grew up in churches hearing about this, the imminent return of Jesus and looking at the news and seeing all these calls for the end of time.
And it's, well, yeah, but they always said it and it never happened.
Or the figures always changed.
Or maybe you study Christian history and you find that Christians have been accusing each other of being the Antichrist or been predicting the end for millennia at this point.
And it doesn't happen.
You would think that this would clue people into this is just maybe not a good way of reading the Bible or that I don't know if Jesus is going to come back at the end of time.
Maybe it's just not something we're in a position to predict and so forth.
On one of that could be seen as like a bug, something to be fixed.
But at the same time, if you want to harness the energy, you want to harness the religious energy of those who are looking for signs of the times, it's a feature.
That malleability, that lack of a fixed structure, the fact that you can name and rename the powers that be and the enemies of God and the ones that threaten us and so forth, that becomes a feature, not a bug.
And we're going to see that, I think, as we talk about foreign and international entanglements, especially for a Trump administration that has the America first side of the coalition and needs to counterbalance that.
If they can give a religious tonality to foreign entanglements, to the use of U.S. military force, it strengthens their hand.
And I think that that's something we'll see moving forward.
So some reflections on Iran.
We'll keep following this.
You will keep following this and we'll see where it goes.
Want to pause for a break?
Okay.
Let's shift from Iran and let's talk about SCODA.
Supreme Court of the United States had a spate of end-of-session decisions.
This often happens.
Some of the biggest decisions come right down to the end of the session.
As I say, I am recording this on the end of the Supreme Court session.
A number of these dropped today, before I recorded.
Some have dropped recently.
And as you know, if you follow this, they are generally as bad as we feared.
A lot of 6-3 decisions with the conservative supermajority siding against the liberal justices.
There's no pretense of nonpartisanship in most of these decisions.
Most of these decisions, in my view, are just patently partisan.
The veneer of legal rationality that is given for the decisions is very, very thin.
It is transparent.
And I think the cleavage between conservative and liberal justices is more and more evident.
Descriptions of, you know, as some of these decisions were read out in the court, especially the ones today, it would talk about like Samuel Alito leaning back and rolling his eyes when the liberal justices are reading or dissenting and liberal justices responding sort of bodily to conservative statements.
The dissenting opinions in particular have been scathing on these decisions.
And I think it really shows just how sharp the cleavages are between the liberal and conservative justices.
Still signs of overlap at times, and we'll come to that when we get to the reason for hope.
But I want to look at a number of decisions.
They weren't all this weak, but they're all relevant.
I think they all feel pressing.
And I think these are the ones that stand out to me as the most significant and the most, for lack of a better term, extraordinary, the most significant moving forward, the most extraordinary decisions that we're going to see out of this term.
The first one was a decision where SCOTUS upheld a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for minors.
Now, we've talked about gender-affirming care for minors a lot.
We've talked about state bans on gender-affirming care for minors.
And finally, one of the bans, the one in the state of Tennessee, made it before the court.
And SCOTUS affirmed that states could, in fact, ban gender-affirming care for minors.
This effectively clears the way for restricting access to medical care for trans youth.
And currently, I think it's 27 states that restrict this.
So over half of U.S. states that ban this.
And it counters best practices for trans health care affirmed by every major medical association in the United States.
There's no question about it.
That's just factual.
You can go and read those statements and so forth.
Okay.
And here's an interesting thing about this.
I talked about a thin veneer of rationality.
The majority ruled on the basis of what's called rational basis review.
Okay.
Now, I'm not a legal expert.
If you're listening to this, you're probably not a legal expert.
If you are, you can email me.
But I looked this up and good commentators who are legal experts look this up.
And rational basis review is basically a very lenient standard of legal review.
I've read that it's the most lenient standard of legal review, which requires only that a law be rationally related to a legitimate government interest to stand.
In other words, you say, does the government have an interest?
Can it serve some interest of the government?
Yes, we think it can.
Therefore, there's a rational basis for the law.
It's a very thin, it's one thing to say a law has a rational basis.
It's another to say it's constitutional or that that rational basis outweighs the violation of rights or desires of others or something like that.
It's a very, very thin justification, but this is the standard that was used by the court in deciding this.
And they found that the law discriminates on the basis of age and medical treatment.
So it's discriminating on the age of minors, the people under 18, and on the basis of particular medical treatments, but that there was a rational basis for the law.
So it does not violate the 14th Amendment.
It does not violate the notion that there needs to be equal protection under the law.
Notably, they sort of sidestep the issue, for example, of whether it was targeting people because of sex or gender, which would place it into like a protected status.
It sidesteps this.
And so Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, said this.
Roberts said, quote, Tennessee concluded that there's an ongoing debate among medical experts regarding the risks and benefits associated with administering puberty blockers and hormones to treat gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, and gender incongruence.
The law's ban on such treatments responds directly to that uncertainty, end quote.
So he's saying that there's an ongoing debate.
There is, it's not all that widespread, very frankly, but there is debate, I guess, just as there is about things like global warming or vaccines or something like that.
You can always find dissenting opinions.
Talks about treating gender dysphoria.
Gender identity disorder is no longer recognized.
It's not the right language.
A gender incongruence.
It should be gender dysphoria, whatever.
Shows a lack of, in my view, appropriate medical knowledge, just even in the statement.
Says the laws ban on such treatments responds directly to that uncertainty.
There's your rational basis.
There's uncertainty about this.
We're worried about the effects of these things on children.
So the state has a rational basis, a rational interest in barring these practices and treatments.
And so they let the Tennessee statute, Tennessee ban, rather, I think it was an executive order by the governor, let the Tennessee ban stand.
Sony Sotomayor wrote in dissent.
She said, quote, the majority subjects a law that plainly discriminates on the basis of sex to mere rational basis review.
By retreating from meaningful judicial review exactly where it matters most, the court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims.
In sadness, I dissent, end quote.
Notice the points that she's raising there.
She says that they retreated from meaningful judicial review, and she notes that the law plainly discriminates on the basis of sex.
I think this is true.
And I'm going to remind folks that Neil Gorsuch, Conservative Justice, penned a decision some time ago that said that trans identity was an issue of sex and that trans discrimination was sex discrimination.
And that opens the way to say that if you are targeting people because they are trans or gender non-conforming, you're discriminating on the basis of sex.
So what she is saying is, this is what the court did.
They sidestepped that really substantive judicial issue by taking this much lower level of rational basis review so that they could let the Tennessee law stand.
And this for me, when I say that there's no pretense of nonpartisanship here, this is very clear to me.
The court worked, the conservative majority of the court worked very, very hard to find a way to let this stand, to give a veneer of rationality, and to let it stand on that basis and to sidestep the really significant issue.
So there's no way to sugarcoat this.
This is a huge setback for LGBTQ people.
It's a huge setback for the trans community.
Every organization knows this.
I think it was not surprising that the conservatives ruled this way, but now they have.
So that's the first, the first of the SCOTUS decisions I wanted to talk about.
A second one is kind of a lead up to an actual decision.
On Monday, SCOTUS lifted an order from a federal judge in Boston that restricted deportations of immigrants to countries where they have no previous ties.
So this is what had happened.
The Trump administration wants to deport immigrants to countries that are not their countries of origin, just countries where they may have no legal ties at all or familial ties, countries that they have no connection to at all, just third-party countries and all kinds of pretty problematic quid pro quo kinds of setups with those countries.
And a judge in Boston had restricted those deportations.
District Judge Brian Murphy had ruled that the administration couldn't do that, that they had to allow opportunity for immigrants to have, quote, meaningful advance notice of those deportations and a chance to raise objections.
In other words, to my reading, Brian Murphy had argued that those immigrants needed to have access to due process.
They could not just be deported to third-party countries.
The majority cited against this, and they offered no reason for this.
They didn't write a reason or a rationale for this.
They simply lifted the injunction.
However, Sony Sotomayor, again, wrote the dissent for the liberal justices.
She called the ruling an abuse of the court's power that amounts to, quote, rewarding lawlessness, end quote, on the part of the administration.
And lawyers for immigrants argue that the ruling will subject some to torture or death, that they will be sent to really, really bad, dangerous countries where they will be subject to torture and potentially even murder.
We're talking about countries like Libya and South Sudan are the places that the Trump administration is aiming to send these folks, especially immigrants with criminal records.
But as we have seen, the Trump administration is not real concerned about actually finding people with criminal records.
They're happy to send anybody they don't like and deport them.
They've talked about wanting to deport American citizens with criminal records and so forth.
So a really chilling decision.
So not a formal decision, just a sort of a response to an appeal lifting this injunction by a federal judge.
Why do I bring it up?
Because it brings up what is maybe the most significant and chilling decision of this legislative, or excuse me, not legislative term, judicial term for the Supreme Court.
And in this, the Supreme Court ruled, and this is just today, that lower courts do not have the authority to enforce nationwide injunctions on federal policies.
If you've been following the news, you know the context of this.
You've heard about this.
It comes in the context specifically of Trump's executive order banning birthright citizenship.
So Trump had said that birthright citizenship isn't a thing.
Almost every legal scholar said this is just clearly and patently a violation of the Constitution.
And you get federal courts that put injunctions on these.
And the Trump administration has been decrying these for weeks, months at this point, not just on this, but on other executive orders, that the courts don't have the right to limit what the executive does, that federal courts or district courts should not be able to initiate nationwide injunctions on these policies and so forth.
And the Supreme Court did not rule on the constitutionality of the issue of birthright citizenship.
Okay.
But the majority did rule that judges can only grant relief to individual groups bringing a particular lawsuit.
In other words, they agreed with the Trump administration and said district judges, federal judges, judges that are not the Supreme Court, basically, cannot issue nationwide injunctions, which means, as people have talked about this, it means that in places where this isn't challenged, you're going to have parts of the country where birthright citizenship is not considered a right and parts of the country where it is considered a right.
You're going to have a patchwork of legal decisions and so forth.
And basically what they decided is when somebody comes along and challenges a federal policy, even if the court finds in their favor, even if the court finds that it's a violation of the Constitution, they cannot extend that to everybody.
They basically can't say this applies to everybody in the U.S. They can't issue a nationwide injunction.
Now, there are two caveats to this, and defenders of the court's decision are going to point to these.
They will say that to have a decision apply nationally, it would have to be converted into a class action lawsuit.
So it's not just about the people who specifically brought it to court, but it needs to show that an entire class of individuals is threatened by this.
That can happen.
It's harder.
There are a lot more procedural hurdles, a higher bar to clear.
It's much more time consuming.
It's just going to make things a lot slower when it comes to slowing the sprawl of executive power.
Or the court also left open the possibility of nationwide relief in lawsuits brought by state governments, that if the lawsuit is not by an individual or a particular sort of private party, a group like maybe Planned Parenthood or something like that, if it's brought by a state and the court finds in their favor, a nationwide injunction may be permissible, although it's still the language of maybe.
That was basically tossed back down to the lower courts to decide.
What's the effect of this?
The effect is that it makes it much harder to challenge the constitutionality of executive actions.
And that's what the Trump administration had argued for.
That is why they advanced this argument.
They know that they cannot defend the constitutionality of a number of Trump's executive orders.
What they're trying to do is just basically make it so the courts can't stop them.
And that's effectively what the Supreme Court handed them.
It also, in my view, opens the enforcement of constitutionality to the whims of the states.
And this isn't just about the Trump administration.
This is ongoing.
In the future, every time a Democratic president puts forward executive orders, all the red states are going to file lawsuits against it.
And it may or may not be successful, may or may not lead to national injunctions.
And when somebody like the Trump administration does it, all the blue states are going to file lawsuits.
And it's just going to, it really opens things to the whims of the states of when they do and don't want to challenge the constitutionality of a presidential order.
And the state has to be on board for it to have a national effect.
It effectively guts judicial review of executive actions.
Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority.
This is what she said.
She said, federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the executive branch.
They resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them.
When a court concludes that the executive branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power to.
She also notes, quote, the universal injunction was conspicuously non-existent for most of our nation's history, end quote.
She gave the Trump administration everything they wanted.
Interestingly, and people have noted this, that she writes this decision after people in MAGA land and Trump himself had been grouchy about Barrett and her position on her findings on some other positions.
And so here she is now back in the good graces in a decision that Trump and Vance and Bondi and everybody else in the Trump administration is trumpeting as a huge win for the administration.
And it is.
It's a win for any presidential administration.
It does weaken judicial oversight of the executive branch substantially.
Okay?
Sodomayor, again, was scathing in her dissent when she wrote about this.
She said that the majority had shamefully played along with the administration's gamesmanship in the case, which she described as an attempt to enforce, quote, a patently unconstitutional policy, end quote, by not asking the justices to bless the policy, but to limit the power of federal judges around the country.
And she's exactly right.
That's exactly what they did.
They said, fine, cool.
Let's make it so federal judges can rule that we're acting unconstitutionally, but nothing happens because of that.
If one person says they acted unconstitutionally by trying to deport me, you say, okay, cool.
We can't deport you, but it has no effect on anybody else.
She warned that, quote, no one is safe in the new legal regime the court creates.
She goes on to say, 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.
With the stroke of a pen, she continues, the president has made a solemn mockery of our Constitution.
Rather than stand firm, the court gives way because such complicity should know no place in our system of law, I dissent.
End quote.
Justice Jackson wrote a solo dissent.
It was also scathing.
She accused her conservative colleagues of creating, quote, an existential threat to the rule of law by allowing Trump to violate the Constitution.
Eventually, she writes, executive power will become completely uncontainable and our beloved constitutional republic will be no more.
Folks, this is the same group, MAGA World, the Trump administration, that advances the unified executive theory.
And here is a Supreme Court justice saying executive power will become completely unattainable.
Perhaps, she writes, the degradation of our rule of law regime would happen anyway.
But this court's complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts, their rulings, and the law, as they interpret it, will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise.
She goes on to say, the court's decision to permit the executive to violate the Constitution.
Again, this is what she's saying.
This is what Sotomayor is saying.
And I agree with them.
This is basically a court decision that says the executive is not beholden to the Constitution.
I don't know how you make a constitutional argument for the executive not being beholden to the Constitution, but they've now put this forward.
She says 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.
Republican Party, party of law and order, party of the rule of law.
Not anymore.
Not for a while.
We've talked about this.
We've talked about the radical traditionalist Catholic pieces of this.
We've talked about the Christian Reconstructionist pieces of this.
We've talked how they feed into the unified executive theory.
The Supreme Court handed a huge gift to Trump and any future president in advancing that theory with this decision.
Let's take a break and we'll be right back.
Let's continue on.
Just a couple more.
Smaller scale decisions, I think.
Again, not terribly surprising, but significant in how they'll play out.
Another Supreme Court decision involved LGBTQ plus issues.
There was a group of parents in a D.C. suburb.
There were books being used in the classroom that held LGBTQ plus affirming themes, stories, what have you.
The parents wanted to opt out, will opt their children out from encountering these books or using these books on religious grounds, and they were not permitted to do so.
The Supreme Court majority decided that the school district had burdened the parents' First Amendment rights to freedom of religion and freedom of speech by not allowing them to opt out.
And here we have Samuel Alito for the majority reading, quote, the board's introduction of the LGBTQ plus inclusive storybooks, along with its decision to withhold opt-outs, places an unconstitutional burden on the parents' rights to the free exercise of their religion.
The parents have therefore shown that they are likely to succeed in their free exercise claims.
End quote.
Again, this is not surprising, and this echoes so many things that we've seen about fights over school boards and school curriculum and laws and regulations restricting school curriculum and book bans and libraries and so many different kinds of things, especially since kind of the COVID era.
And here we have Samuel Alito, no surprise, taking this position.
What I think it shows, because it's not surprising, I think it's not unexpected that the court rules this way.
Talked a couple of weeks ago about parents opting out of curriculum in the state of Oklahoma.
Conservative curriculum and so more liberal parents opting out of curriculum using the same mechanisms that the right and Republicans have put in place in various places.
So this is not surprising.
But it is significant.
Part of what it reflects is the ongoing move of the court to the right on issues of church and state.
There is still a move underfoot that is moving away from a notion of state neutrality with regard to religion or the non-establishment of religion, the notion that the state can't enforce a religion on somebody, from an emphasis on a separation of religion and state, to the view that government discriminates against Christians.
And we've read in other SCOTUS cases, we've read decisions penned by, say, Brett Kavanaugh, who talks about this.
It feeds into this notion that I think, first of all, the presumption that America is a Christian nation and that those in the secular world, those on the left, those who are just not Christian are in fact anti-Christian, that they're out to get Christians and that so that policies like the one in this DC suburb are targeting Christians.
Christians are being treated unfairly.
They're being denied of their rights.
And SCO disagreed with them here.
And this is a shift.
This is a shift that says, that plays into this broader narrative that in America, Christians are under siege.
Christians are being attacked.
Especially white Christians are under threat from all sides.
And again, I think it does away with any notion of nonpartisanship on the part of the court.
There was some ambiguity about exactly how these texts were being used in the classroom in D.C. and what the purported purpose was.
And this is part of why a lower court had ruled that this didn't violate the rights of the parents.
Supreme Court ruled on this and said that it did.
Another hit to LGBTQ people.
It is part of the emphasis and the desire on the political right to simply pretend that queer folk don't exist.
So that they're going to send their kids even to a public school, even to a school where there are kids there who are queer, where there are kids who have queer parents and queer family members, that they can be exempted from having to learn anything about queer folk, having to understand the existence of queer folk, having to understand the experience of queer folk, anything that would normalize that as part of American life, they can be insulated from that.
And that is what's going under the guise of religious freedom.
Final decision I want to just mention very briefly is that the court upheld a Texas law requiring porn sites to verify that visitors are over 18.
This is another 6-3 decision, another decision where the conservatives sided against the liberals.
The majority rejected the argument that age verification laws violated the First Amendment free speech rights.
That was the argument, is that it violated free speech.
They ruled that protecting children from sexually explicit material online justified the burden.
Clarence Thomas wrote that opinion.
Big surprise there.
This is another one of those issues that has been there.
I will admit, I've got children.
I've got children who are underage.
I don't want them going online and accessing explicit content.
I think that that is a concern.
I think it's a concern for every parent out there.
I think it's concerns that parents need to make how they approach issues of specifically pornography and sexually explicit material and how they're going to raise their kids and so forth.
But what stands out for me, again, especially if we tie this in with the emphasis on trans care, if we talk about the decision on opting out of books, is the way that appeals to protecting children have been weaponized by the right to target different groups.
So here, I think there is a legitimate interest.
I don't know if that means that there needs to be age verification and so forth.
I don't know all the nuances of that.
But I think that this is the rhetorical move.
This is the sleight of hand that happens as you take something that is a concern.
Again, I think any parent is going to say, look, yeah, of course, there's content online that is not age appropriate for young children and so forth.
A legitimate concern, and using that legitimate concern rather, to let it slide into the kind of defamatory arguments that are made about queer people, right?
That if children are exposed to material about queer people, that they're being groomed or that queer folk are pedophilic or whatever that is, to the argument that banning trans health care for minors, which is going to harm minors, actively will harm them, that this is somehow for their good and their protection, that's the sleight of hand that takes place.
And this is why every time I hear the conservatives on the court aligning behind some decision that is ostensibly aimed at protecting children, I think that that's code.
I think it's code oftentimes for anti-LGBTQ plus policies.
It is also code oftentimes for policies that would, you know, so-called DEI initiatives and so forth, follows on the footsteps of policies in different states that don't allow us to teach about, you know, the history of slavery or racism, if it can make somebody in the class feel uncomfortable and so forth.
So I think that's the connective tissue there is this emphasis on children.
So a number of SCOTUS decisions, as I say, not, I mean, not uplifting news.
It's depressing.
It's hard.
It's what most of us feared.
Again, it's not surprising.
I came to terms a while back that these decisions were going to come down basically as they have come Down.
It's disheartening.
It's not surprising.
I think that those on the left and those who oppose these are also not surprised.
We'll continue recalibrating.
States that oppose the Trump administration will keep recalibrating, but it's a hard day.
Which brings me to my reason for hope.
I'm going to stick with SCOTUS, another SCOTUS case that preserved the provision of the ACA, the Affordable Care Act, so-called Obamacare.
It preserved the provision requiring insurance companies to cover preventive health services like colonoscopies, HIV prevention drugs, and different things like that that are free to patients.
This has been challenged.
And this is one that, here's why it's reason for hope.
It was a six to three decision, but it was across ideological grounds.
Justice Kavanaugh, conservative, wrote the majority decision with which the liberals concurred.
Three conservatives dissented, Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch.
But Roberts was with the majority decision as well.
And this is the fourth time that the court has rejected significant challenges to the ACA in 13 years.
And I'm a fan of the ACA.
It's not perfect.
Way back when it was first passed and the Democrats controlled all the mechanisms of legislation in the White House.
I argued then, well, I didn't have a podcast then, so none of you get to go fact-check me on this.
But I did, in fact, argue that the Obama administration tried way too hard to make that bipartisan, to get support from Republicans, to make the ACA much more moderate than it should have been.
And so it was kind of weak when it came out.
But it has withstood the test of time.
I take hope in that.
I take hope in the fact that not every decision on the court breaks down among liberals and conservatives.
There are other decisions I haven't talked about, FCC rulings and so forth.
There are decisions that have come out this year that have been unanimous by the court.
There are decisions that have been divided like this.
Those decisions do happen.
And I think on a day when the SCOTUS decisions feel apocalyptic, if we want to talk about apocalypticism, that can feel legally apocalyptic, I think there is reason to hope that occasionally the stars align, the court does what it feels like maybe it should be doing.
And when it feels like that maybe a decision that works for everybody is a decision where people have different perspectives and different ideologues can come together in different ways.
So that's my reason for hope.
Want to thank you for listening.
As always, thank you for joining me in this time.
Folks, whatever it looks like for you, fight the good fight.
And I've talked about this since the election.
Keep reaching for joy.
Whatever those things are in your world that bring you joy, that bring you pleasure, that bring you happiness, that make you feel good, that make the world more bearable, hold on to those.
Reach out for those.
Grab onto those because we need those.
I've used this analogy before that I think we need to focus on replenishing those joy reserves in our lives as much as we plan on like, I don't know, eating the right foods or getting our daily workout in or whatever it is.
Please do that.
Please take care of yourselves.
Don't lose yourself in doom scrolling.
There is plenty going on in the world.
Attend to what you can.
Fight in the small ways you're able, but please take care of yourselves.
Thank you for listening.
Again, in particular, thank you to the subscribers.
If you're not a subscriber and that's something you'd be willing to consider, would invite you to do so.
As always, we'd love to hear from you.
You keep us going.
Please, as I say with It's in the code, please be well until we have a chance to talk again.
Be back next week with all the regular things we do at the Roundup.
