Marking its 250th birthday, the U.S. is almost back to being a monarchy
The Supreme Court has crowned the president a king. And that’s why Democrats’ number one goal must be reforming the court.
The No Kings movement couldn’t be more prescient as we near the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding and its liberation from the British monarchy. Donald Trump has operated as a monarch, and has even amassed the colossal wealth of royalty, using his position to rake in over $2 billion in 2025 according to financial disclosures released this week.
The Supreme Court this term gave Trump more extraordinary powers—in addition to having made him immune from prosecution just two years ago—even if it didn’t give him everything he wanted right now. Remember, Project 2025 is an ongoing project. If they don’t get everything now, they’ll come back again and get more later.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Chief Justice John Roberts, and, to a lesser degree, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, didn’t have to stomach to rip up birthright citizenship. But it’s nonetheless startling how close it came, with four justices willing to give Trump his wish. Kavanaugh only concurred in part with the majority (thus the reports of a 6-3 loss for Trump when it’s more like a 5-4), still not believing birthright citizen is enshrined in the 14th amendment of the Constitution but rather that Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship was unlawful under a federal law.
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As Mark Joseph Stern of Slate explains, Kavanaugh actually offered a road map to ending birthright citizenship in the future:
Kavanaugh found that Donald Trump’s executive order violated a federal statute that, in his view, grants citizenship to immigrants’ offspring. At the same time, the justice all but invited Congress to “amend” that statute “or otherwise enact new legislation” that strips automatic citizenship from the children of “those unlawfully or temporarily in the country.”
While that issue might have given some of the extremist justices pause for now, none of the six conservative justices had any problem with handing Trump the ability to fire dozens of heads of executive branch independent agencies and commissions, in a ruling that will radically reshape our government, handing enormous power to the president.
These agencies had been mandated by Congress to have Congressional oversight rather than have the president decide their agenda by having the power to replace their leaders. This was affirmed by the Supreme Court 90 years ago in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. But the current Trump-packed Supreme Court overturned 90 years of precedent in Trump v. Slaughter this week.
Roberts and Kavanaugh, however, didn’t have the guts to hand Trump the power to reorder the leadership of the Federal Reserve and thus cause chaos for big business—and Republican mega donors—and for their own stock portfolios. So they joined the liberals, thus carving out an exception, refusing to allow Trump to fire Fed Board member Lisa Cook. Both Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Barrett, from opposite ends of the court’s political spectrum, pointed to the pure opportunism and hypocrisy here.
It was great that the court denied Trump’s appeal of a lower ruling that affirmed he has to pay E. Jean Carroll, who sued him for defamation and sexual assault. But the court’s ruling on transgender women in sports—upholding laws in states that ban them from competing against cisgender women—was another ignorant act of bigotry—and yet another fulfillment of Project 2025. I’m glad for the forceful dissent by the three liberal justices.
We all should be relieved that it wasn’t worse this week—winning on birthright citizenship, even if narrowly, is surely better than losing—and, as I’ve stated several times, the Supreme Court has now given a lot of power to the next Democratic president as well. I expect that that Democratic president will fire all the agency heads Trump put in place—and we had all better demand it. But remember: the extremists are not done. They’ll come back for more, and this court will have no problem reigning in a Democratic president even if it’s completely transparent that it’s a political move.
And even if the court doesn’t do so, this is not the way the system is supposed to work. The court has caused much damage to our democracy and how it will function. More and more, it will cease being a democracy in which Congress, representing the people, is a co-equal branch of government, and will rather be a form of government in which the president is authoritarian and the courts rubber-stamp his wishes.
That means that after we do everything we can to stop the bleeding, winning back Congress and ultimately the presidency, we must, as so many of us have said many times, reform the Supreme Court. That may seem difficult, but expanding the court and putting in place other reforms must be the goal if we’d like to see our democracy last 250 years—or even 25 years—more.
In the meantime, don’t let Trump and MAGA steal the 250th birthday and July 4th. Celebrate everything we’ve accomplished as a nation over these two and a half centuries—what they’re doing is in fact a reaction to the enormous success we’ve had at winning freedom and equality—and vow to fight to protect Americans’ rights in the future. Happy Fourth of July to everyone.
Just got through listening to Bob Cesca on the Stephany Miller show and liberals fucking themselves and voters like me with the insane idea we shouldn't vote at all if we don't like the Democratic candidate. If you think trashing any Dems is a good idea then you need to explain how that helps us. Not voting because there is no democratic socialist on the ticket could hurt us in November and looking at nonvoters track record isn't at all encouraging when they seem to think once things get bad enough even the GOP will vote blue. The fantasy of a forever liberal America and sweeping reform with no resistance as inevitable does not bring out voters who think we can always recover. Too much confidence is killing us if it leads to ignoring elections. I know we talk about Trumpers voting against their own interests then what do you call not voting for our own interests on the left? Fear and hate brings out GOP voters while we on the left seem not to have any fear of losing at all. I definitely think the left is not immune from the hate tactics the right uses against Democrats. One thing indisputably is not voting lose elections every single time. I see even AOC supports Jeffries as speaker because she can see how politics in America works and how desperate our situation is. Elect the Dems, give them power and then make the changes we need instead of "biting ourselves in the ass" as my father would say by rolling over for the GOP and not voting.
I was 25 during the Bicentennial Celebration in 1976. I remember a summer of ubiquitous Bicentennial mania. A kitschy, rolling museum called the “Freedom Train” was traveling around the nation filled with replicas of the Constitution, Declaration of Independence and all manner of other counterfeit tidbits from our first 200 years. Disco was hot and so was the weather. Pintos were exploding, disaster movies were thrilling us in mall cineplexes, George Lucas was filming some kind of space movie in North Africa, and people were still edgy about going into the water after Jaws terrorized us the summer before. Gerald Ford was issuing “Whip Inflation Now” WIN buttons as a balm for the country’s financial situation, and pardoning Richard Nixon for crimes that wouldn’t last one news cycle in today’s peak-corruption environment. And a peanut farmer from Georgia was campaigning for the White House in November.
Yeah. Crazy times, as usual, but you know what? The one thing we DIDN’T worry about was our country descending into fascism. Even the Republican party of that era had convinced a corrupt president to step down two years earlier. We knew that whatever needed fixing, we were going to vote in November, our votes would be counted, and our democracy would go on.
Now, 50 years later, with a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, pedophilic, breathtakingly corrupt Russian asset destroying our country to a degree that would trigger a declaration of war if another nation were attacking us in the same way, we are expected to celebrate our country’s first 250 years. Forget it. That we have such a monster in charge with a gutless, cultish GOP running Congress and the most corrupt SCOTUS since Plessey versus Ferguson, will be a stain on this country’s history for all time. I will not be a party to the “celebration.” There is paint drying somewhere that I need to watch on Saturday.