Seven Goldfish

Ok, It's a Coup

More accurately we have traded Rule of law for Rule by law (July 9, 2025)

clear "constitutional crisis" items: Any federal agency refusing to comply with a court order Executive directives instructing officials to disregard certain judicial rulings Mass removal of career DOJ officials who insist on following court orders Actual Senate votes on judicial impeachments

I gave us a comforting 35 % chance we were still above the waterline. Things went sideways in a way that I didn't imagine. The SCOTUS has simply handed over backing to the administration with 24A884 Trump v. CASA, Inc.

On June 27 2025 the Supreme Court handed down Trump v. CASA and outlawed “universal” injunctions. These are also casually called Temporary Restraining Orders or TROs. Lower federal judges may now shield only the named plaintiffs; everyone else is fair game until they file their own suit. From July 27 on out, any Executive Order, no matter how barking-mad, runs while the courts play whac-a-mole. Six months before meaningful relief is a best case scenario timeline.

Sotomayor Sums it up pretty nicely in the dissent

No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates. 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

I want to be totally clear. The Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment that has just been stuck in limbo is ever bit as clear and unambiguous as the second amendment, or the first. The same logic that lets an EO put it on hold until it works it's way thru the court would just as easily suspend the first amendment, or for that matter, voting rights.

An Obedient SCOTUS

What totally blows my mind in this situation is the shape of the rulings from the majority. They in every way signal Obedience rather than actual adherence to the law. We basically hear them exactly parroting the administration line from February

If ANY judge ANYWHERE can block EVERY Presidential order EVERYWHERE, we do NOT have democracy, we have TYRANNY of the JUDICIARY.

The crazy legal gymnastics needed to justify ending TROs like this are beyond simply biased, and ranging over into the insane. The basic argument is that courts only have the remedies made available in 1789, and that all precedent since then should be ignored. if eighteenth-century England didn’t do it, neither can Article III courts today. Anyone taking bets on if the court applies that test to executive power?

This Court has held that the statutory grant encompasses only those sorts of equitable remedies “traditionally accorded by courts of equity” at our country’s inception. Universal injunctions are not sufficiently “analogous” to any relief available in the court of equity in England at the time of the founding.

This has veered out of the place where it feels like "that's a novel and politically motivated seeming position" and into "What kind of blackmail is being held over the court?" I had honestly, foolishly, assumed that if the courts broke it would be something that happened in front of the camera. This court was either pre-broken, or something behind the scenes broke it, but it's clear that it is entirely beholden to Trump.

In particular the administration already goes with machine-gun EOs. The White House was already trying to paper over its lack of legal coherence by simply producing more volume than could be challenged in court. With universal injunctions gone, rapid-fire directives become functionally unstoppable.

Rule By Law

I have started calling this a Coup, but that's still not technically true yet, in the same way that someone falling from a 10 story building hasn't died from being pushed yet. Right now what has technically happened is we have shifted to "rule by law". We are still under what is in theory a legitimately elected government. The thing is that rule by law is basically incompatible with actual democracy.

I'm expecting Election-season shenanigans. Picture a late-summer “Election Integrity” EO: mandatory ID + armed “observers” within 100 ft of polling sites. TROs protect the handful of plaintiffs; the rest of the county votes in midterms under watchful eyes until January. It's still got the fig-leaf of being "fair" but it tilts the elections meaningfully. There is nothing that the courts can do in a timely manner.

By the time we make it to the Presidential elections I would expect even more extreme EOs to be applied. It doesn't fit the "every shrinking fig leaf" format, but based on the current rulling they could just suspend elections entirely and pull an extra 6-12 months out of it. More realistically you just see some sort of hard core thumbs on scales: EOs reigning in "Campaign Finance" or "Advertising" in novel, obviously unconstitutional, and deeply lopsided ways. Or alternately there could be an EO requiring that there be no more than one polling station per 50k people, effectively choking out voting in densely populated regions. I don't want to try to guess the exact mechanism, but it's hard for me to see a Free and Fair election in the cards '28

Where that leaves this just-don’t-panic guy

I said, "Yeah, if they come for group X and then group Y, we definitely need to go, but so far it's been limited to irregular immigrants."

After a decade of hearing that every single thing the right (and the left) did was the end of the world, or at the very least the end of democracy, I basically stopped believing it. News tends to exagerate, and most of it was overblown. Lots of things that are terrible policy (like setting tarifs to foolishly high rates) or miserable but typical republican political agenda (like flipping roe-v-wade) were billed as the end of history, while it clearly wasn't true. I basically started treating the entire political discourse on both sides as "the boy who cried wolf"

Well I still hear the boy crying wolf, but now I also am seeing a mangled carcass on the trail. The parable differes in that neither I nor the villagers can kill the wolf. In fact almost half of the villagers are very happy with the wolf attacking things.

I'm well over my red line for "It's time to leave the country", but I find that I haven't really moved on it. That, however, is a discussion for another poste