Round 2 in the “Judges Citing New Supreme Court Rule” sweepstakes.
Judge Ada Brown found that the agency lacked the authority to issue the rule.
. . .
In reaching her decision, Brown found that the plaintiffs “are likely to succeed on the merits” of their case, which argues the FTC exceeded its statutory authority in issuing the rule. She also sided with the plaintiffs in finding that the FTC’s issuing of the rule was not reasonable.
With a nod to the Supreme Court’s wholly contrived major questions doctrine:
The Chamber [U.S. Chamber of Commerce] and other business groups sued to block the rule immediately after it was issued, arguing the FTC lacked the authority to issue a regulation with such sweeping implications for the economy.
They’re gonna drip-feed these cases over the whole summer, to keep America on its heels, so that judges don’t rebel against Roberts coup. It’s a distraction, and every week will feel seismic.
Here is something that could stop this thing:
Next week, all the federal circuit judges co-sign a new opinion that unanimously overturns Roberts’ opinion in Trump v US, on the grounds that it violates the plain and established meaning of the Constitution, and was very clearly written as a malicious attack on the United States. They overturn the verdict, and write a short opinion with no dissents or concurrences, sending the case back on its rightful way as though SCOTUS had not intervened, and explaining why the Constitution can never abide an interpretation that places anyone above the law. And they refer the names of all the justices who signed Trump to the DOJ and FBI for a corruption and espionage investigation, after acknowledging that the only plausible explanation for Roberts’ original opinion is a deliberate, malicious conspiracy hostile to the Constitution they’ve all sworn oaths to.
Something like that would utterly break the Roberts court, and it would literally undo Trump v US. This moment is a legitimacy crisis for the United States. The best way to win that is with more legitimacy. Right now, we’ve got all the legitimacy there is. Strike while the iron is hot.
I’m so old, I clearly remember Roberts “being concerned about his legacy and the reputation of the Court” and opposing “judicial activism” as being things.
I am still…perplexed at the lack of reaction from the nation’s lawyers about this astonishing Constitutional change from an unchecked branch of government. Now, either the scope of what has occurred still isn’t registering, or no one can be bothered right now because they’re on vacation.
Moreover, I see the same platitudes from Congressional Democrats about “what’s at stake this November”. Even if it may seem performative, why are there no moves to undo this damage on a legislative level, much less an explanation of what that looks like. God knows the Senate will take a dismissal from the Chief Justice to appear before a committee as “well, okay, we tried, whaddya gonna do?”, and the entire thing is dropped.
As I wrote on another thread, if someone knowingly drives a get-away car, taking the person that robbed a bank to escape from police officers, they would be a criminal in both the common understanding and by the code of law.
Donald Trump has been found guilty of 34 felonies, and is in legal jeopardy for many more. There are 6 SCOTUS justices that just drove that get-away car for Donald Trump. They are criminals by any lay understanding of a crime. By that I mean that the 6 are now as fully responsible as Donald Trump is for his crimes.
Now, I do not know this is criminal in the letter and verse of the criminal code. I don’t imagine that anyone thought we better write a law to cover this kind of total nonsense. And even if someone, somewhere, sometime thought about such a law, then that person also would rightfully think that the country would be pretty far gone at such a point and needed much more than a law or two, which is pretty obviously true.
I cannot know what the justices think but it would be a rare lawyer that did not consider their legal exposure. So, if they were going to issue such a ruling, they probably considered their legal and political exposure for taking on responsibility for Donald Trump’s crimes. I guessing they think the reward is greater than their exposures, probably lesser legal and greater political.
What would these justices want that this gives them a willingness to expose themselves? And I keep coming back to “removing the administrative state”, the wet dream of Heritage’s Project 2025 and Federalist Society. They are going after Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and ACA. Unlike a presidential or congressional politician, they do not have announce their policy, they just need a compliant Executive to follow through on their decisions. And that is where Donald Trump comes in.
I remember Species 8472 in the guise of Steve Bannon saying this phrase way back in 2015 and it came to mind again right after this horrible decision. It seems like he was right: we just did not know it would be the Supreme Court to undo everything that we thought was normal or, snort, “settled law”. They have undone so much in the last few years it’s mind-boggling.
Roberts just revealed the Supreme Court is dominated by a group of sleeper agents who lied to get in, and this has obviously been going on for years. The Court is no longer legitimate, and it must be repudiated to save the Constitution.
Roberts just proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Supreme Court intends to help Trump take power. They will give Trump the election, and they will let him get away with whatever crimes or treasons he finds expedient to win. Roberts also knows that he has shown his own hand in this coup, whether or not the frog has twigged to the heat yet, so he’s definitely going to get his man in, to make good his bloodless coup.
All this can yet be stopped. But judges must act, quickly and publicly.
Lower courts must immediately band together to publicly and formally reject all of the corrupt decisions that were just issued this term. Declare the Supreme Court illegitimate as constituted, and remove the Federalist justices extra-legally (now-King Biden can have them arrested and detained comfortably).
Now, you don’t have a corrupt Supreme Court deciding if their mobbed-up accomplice wins the 2024 election.
Gotta do it fast, because this coup is all-but-accomplished. If our judges are complacent in this moment, we’re all going to wear the yoke of workhouse America because our judges thought they didn’t hear John Roberts right when he said “put 'em up!”
Elites are wrong if they think that going along with Roberts & Trump in this coup will help them escape the bad things coming our way.
Unchecked climate change will lead to ecological collapse. When that starts kicking in, society will get a lot smaller, and dictators like Trump will start slitting throats to make the doomsday bunkers last longer.
Organized Money is counting on “natural disasters” to kill off a lot of the society that might otherwise oppose them, and the predators will no longer be outnumbered by the prey they’ve yet to slaughter.
Earth doesn’t have another hundred years to fellate fossil barons. Humanity can’t afford the luxury of indulging in a few decades of dictatorship.
Judges must stand up and reject the Roberts Constitution immediately if we’re to have a shot at resisting this coup.
I’ve been thinking about your insightful analysis, and it finally came to me: this is how dogmatic wars are waged within churches, isn’t it? E.g, if you adhere to a novel sect of Catholicism and you want to overhaul reform the Church, you set up a long-term program to cultivate sleeper agents to drift into leadership positions and stand ready to seize the helm and reorient the Church by fiat should opportunity present. Elites within that world have been developing that skill-set for millennia.
They know that Trump will try to steal this election, and spend his next term helping them dismantle honest elections throughout the United States. They know they will still be poised to execute this plan in 2028 if Trump loses. They believe that democracy is now powerless to free itself of Leonard Leo’s corruption.
They believe they have already won for all time.
I believe it, too. The only way to stop it now is for federal judges to band together in an unprecedented union and declare the Supreme Court’s immunity opinion as decisive proof the Court is corrupt and no longer legitimate.
It would work. But the judges are instead spinning their wheels wondering if somehow “presumptive immunity” can be sorted out in a way that makes the whole opinion less than utterly fatal poison. It can’t be. They are easily distracted fools to not see that. But many are looking for excuses to sit this one out: Project 2025 has announced it is taking names, and Kavanaugh has legalized taking kickbacks, so many of them are doubtless entertaining fantasies about “resisting from the bench during Trump’s term,” deluding themselves they will be more useful to the nation if they “sneak” into the Trump admin.
It is a foolish and ahistorical hope. But many will allow themselves to fall for it, because it is comforting and less effort than putting their credibility on the line by co-signing an open letter of resistance this summer, when it would actually solve the problem. They will rue this moment of willful blindness in the coming post-Constitutional regime. Banana republics and failing states tend to murder their way through a lot of judges, for a variety of reasons that were well-documented by the U.S. in the latter half of the 20th century.
A couple years ago, I ran across a delightfully chilling anecdote to that effect from Putin’s corner of the world. I think it was on the Lawfare podcast, but I don’t have the cite handy.
In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, a lot of American lawyers were involved exporting Western models of markets and law to former Soviet states. One such state had started imprisoning a lot of their judges, because they weren’t ruling as the new government liked. So, one of our lawyers says to them, “you can’t imprison judges for making rulings you don’t like.” So they started executing the judges instead.
John Roberts is so blinded by the “perfect” opportunity for domination that his pals engineered, that he has failed to notice that Trump is preparing to slip out of his leash the moment he’s back in the door. Trump tricked Roberts into granting him enough immunity that Trump can boil even Leonard Leo’s frogs.
Shocking is my realization that the Supreme Court has a corrupt majority that would have found a way to rule in Trump’s favor had Congressional Republicans (such as Senator Grassley) stopped the certification vote on January 6th of Biden’s selection as the next President.
