Oh my fucking god – this country gets dumber every single day. I know this is long – but I have a lot to say!
Have you heard about the Supreme Court decision today that just broke American democracy while everyone was focused on Trump’s birthright citizenship nonsense. The real story isn’t whether Trump’s executive order is constitutional – the Court punted on that question entirely. The real story is that six justices just handed every future president a roadmap to implement constitutionally questionable policies with impunity, and Trump was too stupid to realize he just made his own life infinitely harder.
Trump v. CASA looks like a boring procedural case about injunctions, which is exactly why it’s so dangerous. While everyone was arguing about the 14th Amendment, Amy Coney Barrett and her conservative colleagues quietly eliminated the most powerful tool federal courts have to stop presidential lawbreaking. They call it limiting “nationwide injunctions” but what they really did was create a system where constitutional violations can proceed in most of the country while civil rights groups play an expensive, impossible game of litigation whack-a-mole.
The thing that Trump apparently missed while celebrating his “amazing victory” is that by getting rid of nationwide injunctions, he just guaranteed himself exponentially more lawsuits in exponentially more places. Previously, one strategic lawsuit could shut down his policies everywhere – clean, efficient, done. Now he faces the legal equivalent of fighting a hydra where cutting off one challenge spawns ten more across different jurisdictions. Instead of one comprehensive defeat that at least provided clarity, Trump now gets to lose dozens of individual cases while dealing with the chaos of patchwork enforcement.
Trump’s legal team should have seen this coming. When you engage in rampant constitutional violations on a national scale, you can expect legal challenges on a national scale. The difference is that now, instead of facing one well-funded, expertly litigated case that could definitively resolve the issue, Trump faces an endless parade of smaller cases that will drain both side’s resources while creating maximum confusion about where his policies actually apply.
The practical impact is insane. We now have a country where your constitutional rights depend on your ZIP code. A pregnant woman in California might have her child’s citizenship recognized while an identical case in Florida gets denied – purely based on which federal courts happen to have active lawsuits pending. This isn’t federalism, it’s constitutional roulette, and Trump apparently thought this randomness would work in his favor.
Think about what this means for every area of federal law. Environmental regulations now apply differently depending on whether your region has successful court challenges. Healthcare protections vary by district. Civil rights enforcement becomes a state-by-state lottery where Trump’s policies get blocked in some places but proceed in others, creating the exact kind of administrative nightmare that competent administrations try to avoid.
https://rachelandthecity.threadless.com/
Trump’s team is already discovering why this was a strategic blunder. They’ve announced plans to proceed with “numerous policies that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis,” apparently not realizing they’re about to face litigation in all fifty states simultaneously. Environmental rollbacks, civil rights attacks, healthcare restrictions – instead of one coordinated legal challenge, they now face dozens of redundant lawsuits that will consume vastly more government resources to defend.
The resource burden works both ways, and Trump’s people apparently didn’t think this through. Sure, civil rights organizations now have to spread their limited resources across dozens of jurisdictions instead of concentrating expertise and funding on one strategic case. But the Trump administration also has to defend their policies in dozens of jurisdictions instead of making one comprehensive argument to one court. The Department of Justice lawyers who used to focus on crafting one excellent defense now get spread thin across multiple venues, often arguing the same constitutional questions repeatedly to different judges. They’ll win some and they’ll lose some. Insanity.
The forum shopping problem everyone worried about just got infinitely worse, and it cuts both ways. Trump’s lawyers now need to forum shop defensively, trying to get cases moved to friendly jurisdictions while plaintiffs forum shop offensively across the country. Instead of preventing strategic venue selection, the Court multiplied it exponentially. Both sides now need favorable rulings in multiple jurisdictions instead of just one, but the administration bears the burden of defending everywhere while plaintiffs get to pick their battles.
Legal scholars are calling this a constitutional crisis, and they’re not being dramatic. Justice Sotomayor literally delivered her dissent from the bench – something that happens maybe once a decade when the stakes are existential. She warned that the majority just created “open season on all our rights,” but she could have added that it also created open season on presidential administrations naive enough to celebrate this decision.
Barrett’s DUMBASS historical analysis about injunctions being “conspicuously nonexistent” in early America conveniently ignores why these remedies developed in the first place. The founding generation never imagined a federal administrative state that could affect millions of people simultaneously through executive orders. When the government can harm people coast-to-coast with the stroke of a pen, those people will find ways to fight back coast-to-coast, whether through one comprehensive lawsuit or fifty fragmentary ones.
The class action alternative the Court suggests doesn’t help Trump either. Class actions take longer to resolve, create more uncertainty during the litigation process, and often result in broader relief when they succeed. Rule 23 certification might be difficult, but when it works, it can bind the government to outcomes that affect even more people than the original nationwide injunctions did.
Trump called this an “amazing decision” and a “monumental victory for the Constitution,” apparently not realizing he just turned every policy dispute into a fifty-state legal marathon. He’s half right – it’s monumental. But it’s a monument to the systematic destruction of constitutional governance disguised as procedural reform, and Trump was too shortsighted to realize he’s the one who’s going to suffer most from the chaos he just unleashed.
We just turned the federal judiciary into a bystander in its own constitutional system, but we also turned the executive branch into a defendant in dozens of simultaneous lawsuits instead of one. Trump thought he was getting a free pass to ignore court orders. Instead, he guaranteed himself more court orders than any president in history. The constitutional crisis is real, but watching Trump discover he played himself might be the only entertaining part of this disaster.