Subject says most. What is the process by which Trump could be stopped for a blatantly unconstitutional order? This just all seems like a recipe for disaster but the legal blogs and stuff didn’t seem to think it was as disastrous as my intuition is telling me it is.
The United States Supreme court has plenary authority over all federal judicial districts and a challenge before them would be decided across all districts. Of course, that means a challenge would have to come before them (usually winding its way through the pertinent federal district court) and the Supreme Court would have to agree to hear motions and arguments rather than just pushing it back down to the district court of appeals.
In general, the Supreme Court is not a speedy remedy to blatantly unConstitutional laws and executive orders, and not (and was not intended to be) a check upon executive overreach, because it was assumed that Congress would jealously guard its legislative prerogative and not hand over to the President the power to effectively make new law, impose tariffs, or ratify treaties. The Supreme Court exists to adjudicate the application of laws passed by Congress, or in the case of a truly bad law that is not within the scope of the Constitution, strike it down completely. This is why the court nixed significant provisions of the Line Item Veto Act of 1996 which essentially allowed the President to craft new law out of parts of a bill passed by Congress.
This should be a wake up call to those peoples still insisting that the courts will save us from our collective self. In nations sliding into tyranny, courts are ignored, subverted, or disestablished and replaced by a system that superficially looks like a court of law but actually just serves the political apparatus, which happened in Napoleonic First French Empire, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and autocracies generally. There is, of course, a process by which intentional and persistent overreach by the executive can be stopped, and it is described in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution. That the majority of Congresspeople are too craven or cowardly to do their sworn duty to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” is an even more grave concern than an exec pushing the corners of the box to see just how far their authority will go.
Stranger
That’s the single biggest problem here. If Congress was doing its job instead of being spineless Trump sycophants, we’d have Congressional push-back on a whole LOT of stuff, if only because Trump is trying to do it, not because they necessarily disagree.
But they’re so afraid of the MAGA people that they’ll let him do anything they want, and therein lies the problem in the long term, which is not what Trump is doing in the moment, but rather how he’s going about it, and how Congress and SCOTUS are letting him get away with it.
Too many people get hung up on the sideshow stuff like ICE, trans rights or whatever (it’s the right-hand waving around), and are missing the truly important stuff that’s going on while he does it (the left hand doing the actual magic trick).
The move from public voting to the Australian ballot (secret, private voting) killed paid voting by the parties and started the decline of machine politics. There’s no reason to spend money on a voter, if the voter could just cast a vote for your opponent and you’d have no way to verify it.
Ending the voice vote in Congress, likely, caused the rise of political gridlock, yes-men politicians, and the push to centralize power in the Executive. Once we started naming them, the public could start shaming them. Monied interests can police and reward their politicians, knowing whether they followed through or shied away from doing precisely as they are told to do. Having the politicians on the rails just means that they can’t compromise and must maintain fealty to whoever or whatever group put them in power, no matter how ridiculous or counter-productive it might be.
The only thing blocking us from fixing the system is our willingness to let go of the right to backseat drive our politicians - ignoring that what’s driving the MAGA movement is the millions of people on the other side backseat driving their politicians.
Hire people you trust and entrust them with the power to make decisions, confidentially, without undue review nor critique from outside morons and cranks with billions of dollars. If, instead, you work to find people who will say that they’ll do what you want them to do - or even worse, who will actually do what you’re telling them to do, despite all evidence saying that it’s a bad move - just incentivizes the promotion of dishonest and narcissistic jerks who don’t really care about policy nor its effects, just that they’re in a seat of power, with the right to grant or deny as they will when people come to them asking for favors.
Making real decisions means doing real work and working in trade-offs. Those aren’t sexy, aren’t palatable, and don’t get you votes. But they’re what make for good, long-term decisions that help us all.
The sausage needs to be made. Stop trying to watch.
Moreover, if the US loses an XO in one jurisdiction, they can refuse to appeal to avoid getting a negative decision binding nationally. I guess you could have children born in CA automatically becoming citizens, but not those born in Texas.