Transcript
Dr. Horton (0:00)
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Anonymous Black Woman in Recovery (0:32)
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National Council for Mental Wellbeing Representative (0:52)
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Jen Psaki (1:01)
Council Today, the weak and unpopular conservative Supreme Court surrendered some key powers from the judicial branch over to King Donald and the executive branch. I'm going to get into all of that with a lot of smart people and what it all means in just a moment. But first I want to take a little bit of a step back and look at why the Supreme Court found itself on the road to enabling Trump's MAGA agenda in the first place. I mean, how'd they even get here? And the latest Quinnipiac poll, believe it or not, released just yesterday, is a pretty good starting point because Trump's policies are widely unpopular and I mean across the board. Just take immigration. That was Lynch's strength. Now today, yesterday, the American public disapproves of Trump's actions by a 16 point margin. You can see it on the screen on deportation, specifically, which he's done. A whole lot of the American public disapproves of Trump's actions by a 20 point margin. On his decision to send the National Guard into Los Angeles, he's underwater by 12 points. And on his decision to send the US Marines into LA, it's even worse. The American public disapproves of that by a 23 point margin. And it keeps going on. I'll give you a few more. On the economy, Trump is underwater by 17 points. Goes the same for trade, he's underwater there by 17 points. 2. So my point is this. Every single part of Donald Trump's agenda is deeply unpopular and yet he's barreled ahead with it anyway, thanks in large part to his absolute obsession with executive orders. Now, I'm not suggesting he's the first president to use them. He's not at all. But often the reason a president turns to executive orders, especially once they get past the first couple weeks of their term, is because they've calculated that they can't get Congress to pass their policies into law. And sure, I mean, even with the MAGA lemmings in the Republican House and Senate, maybe that is a factor with some of Trump's agenda. Maybe that is not entirely why Trump uses executive orders. That's not his motivation. He uses them because he has no interest in building consensus, no interest in forming coalitions, no real interest in winning people over beyond the MAGA core base. I mean, he really hasn't even tried to push the bulk of his agenda through Congress at all, aside from the big ugly bill that's not going so well currently. The thing is, he doesn't like the hard work the governing requires because he prefers to rule like a strongman demanding with a version of a magawan that his orders be carried out by the stroke of a pen. And at this point, he knows he can get away with it because the Republican Party surrendered its power to Donald Trump a very long time ago. And the institution of Congress, another branch of government under Republican control, has surrendered much of its power, too. So the only institutional bulwark against Trump's autocratic impulses has been the third branch of government, the courts. And as Trump has pushed the limits of his power, the courts have had to check him over and over and over again, largely the lower courts issuing nationwide injunctions to halt his executive orders as they decide to what authority he actually has under the Constitution. In fact, Trump's actions have been so extreme, the courts have had to use that power to stop him more than any other president in modern history. Any other president. And that's something that even Trump himself admits. We've been hit with more nationwide injunctions than were issued in the entire 20th century together. Think of it. More than the entire 20th century. Me? Yes, you. The courts have had to stop you. Donald Trump, more than any other president. It's not the brag you think it is either, by the way. That all brings us to today, when the conservative majority on the Supreme Court decided that it too would surrender some of its power to Donald Trump. In a 6:3 decision split along ideological lines, the Supreme Court significantly curtailed the power of its own federal courts to stop a lawless president. Now, at the core of the case was one of Trump's most egregious executive orders, his decision to unilaterally end the long standing precedent that Anyone born on U.S. soil is an American citizen. Democratic attorneys general in 22 states, two of whom we're going to talk to shortly, sued the Trump administration, saying that order was blatantly unconstitutional. And several federal judges agreed, issuing nationwide injunctions to put that order on pause while the courts considered the case. But the question before the Supreme Court was not whether Trump's effort to end birthright citizenship was itself constitutional. They may consider that in the future. They sort of indicated they might next term, we'll see. Rather, the question before them was whether those judges should even have the power to pause Trump's order across the entire country. Well, today, the court's conservative majority effectively said that those lower court judges did not have that power, that they could not pause Trump's order nationwide. They ruled that the pause would only apply to the 22 states that actually sued. It's part of creating the two Americas that we've seen repeatedly. But here's the thing. The court's decision went much further than just the issue of birthright citizenship, which is a very important one, but it went farther than that. They essentially made it much harder for courts to put a nationwide pause on any of Trump's policies. They basically said that the people challenging these orders will have to go state by state, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, to stop any of Trump's unlawful agenda. And there are a whole bunch of Trump's policies, from his federal funding freeze to his new voting restrictions to his attacks on diversity, policies that are currently being blocked by nationwide injunctions. Now, in a chilling dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the three liberal justices, wrote, 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 rule of law is not a given in this nation or any other. It is a precept of our democracy that will endure only if those brave enough in every branch fight for its survival in every branch. That's a key part. Today, the Court abdicates its vital role in that effort. In a separate concurring dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made it crystal clear what this ruling will mean in the very near term. Here's. Here's what she had to say. What it means to have a system of government that is bounded by law is that everyone is constrained by the law and no exceptions. And for that to actually happen, courts must have the power to order everyone, including the executive, to follow the law full stop. To Conclude otherwise is to endorse the creation of a zone of lawlessness within which the executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes, and where individuals who would otherwise be entitled to the law's protection and become subject to the executive's whims instead. As sobering as those dissents are, and they're very sobering. And there's more. The truth is that we have always known how Donald Trump thinks about power and his power. We have long known what the court's conservative majority thinks about their role in constraining him. After all, this court did grant him broad immunity from prosecution just a year ago. The big question, one of them is, what happens next? Well, this decision significantly hamstrings the federal courts. It did not entirely shut the door on their ability to block Trump's agenda. We're going to dig into that. Specifically, plaintiffs can ask a court to award preliminary class wide relief that may, for example, be statewide, region wide, or even nationwide. In his concurring opinion, Justice Kavanaugh leaves the door open for people to bring cases as a large graboric class and get courts to issue rulings that apply to every member of that group nationwide. In other words, people can still ask the courts to block Trump's policies across the entire country if they can manage to do the hard organizing work of finding big groups of people who will be negatively impacted by them and getting them to come out. And if there's one thing we've learned in the second Trump administration, the six months of it that we're into here, it's that people standing up to Trump know how to do that kind of dedicated, on the ground organizing all across the country, in every state, nearly. We've seen them do it in protests everywhere. We've seen them do it in courthouses where ICE agents try to round up immigrants who are just showing up for their immigration hearings. We've seen them do it at town halls in deep red Republican districts. It is possible that we will look back on today's ruling as the day when the fight against Trump in the courts and the fight against Trump in the streets became one and the same. And I am not saying it's going to be easy. It's going to be hard. But we always knew this was going to be hard. It just got a little harder. Two of the attorneys general who brought this case and will lead this fight going forward join me here in just 90 seconds.