Good News in the Long Wait

Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕

As the Supreme Court’s term ticks down, some major cases conspicuously linger in the ether: affirmative action, student debt, the independent state legislature theory.

The early summer is hallmarked with this anxiety, and opinion day mornings are tense.

But the past couple weeks have also held a very different emotion: pleasant surprise.

On Friday, the Court batted down an attempt by Texas and Louisiana to let courts essentially usurp federal law enforcement authority, based on a very sketchy theory of standing. Resistance lib Brett Kavanaugh (on the heels of his side switching in a major VRA case which preserved the law) again sided with the liberals and Chief Justice John Roberts to give the administration a win (Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Clarence Thomas also joined in the majority judgment, but broke with Kavanagh’s reasoning that would keep scores of states from challenging a huge swath of federal actions).

The Court’s willingness to preserve the Department of Homeland Security’s enforcement discretion was not at all a given, based on its general hostility to executive branch agencies.

After the Court delivered two shockers earlier this month — the voting rights victory and preservation of Medicaid — many distrustful observes insist that maliciousness must still be at the core of the good news. Perhaps the Court is just trying to soften the ground before dropping some real devastation in the outlying decisions.

Like all things Supreme Court, all we really have to go on is speculation. The justices usually seek to finish their work by late June or early July. Over the next couple of weeks, with trepidation in our hearts, the long wait will end one way or another.

More on other news below. Let’s dig in. 

— Kate Riga

Sam ‘The Wine Wasn’t Even That Good’ Alito

Justice Clarence Thomas got a breather this week as Justice Sam Alito tapped in to be the most corrupt justice of the news cycle.

ProPublica broke the news of Alito’s never-reported 2008 luxury Alaskan fishing trip, bankrolled by a bajillionaire GOP donor who has had multiple cases before the Court, from which Alito has never recused himself.

Similar to real estate titan Harlan Crow’s seemingly endless largesse to Thomas, hedge fund manager Paul Singer bankrolled the trip, including the private jet commute.

In a most Alito-esque turn, the justice penned a waspish op-ed in the Wall Street Journal to prebut the report after refusing to answer ProPublica’s questions directly.

Humorously, he seemed to find that the best way to turn back the accusations of corruption was to argue that his luxury vacation in the pristine Alaskan wilderness was not, really, that great.

“I stayed for three nights in a modest one-room unit at the King Salmon Lodge, which was a comfortable but rustic facility,” he seethes. One-room! Rustic! The humanity!

“As I recall, the meals were homestyle fare,” he zings. My condolences to the chef.

“I cannot recall whether the group at the lodge, about 20 people, was served wine, but if there was wine it was certainly not wine that costs $1,000,” he huffs. And as the saying goes, $900 wine makes life simply not worth living.

The Court has virtually no ethical checks except those it imposes upon itself. In a colossal shock, that complete lack of accountability and oversight has let corruption fester.

In a perfect encapsulation of today’s right-wing judicial movement, one figure keeps cropping up in these reports: the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo. Like a bespeckled spider, he sits at the center of his web, waiting to dangle a private jet ride or a yacht trip or a ludicrously massive salmon before anyone who has the power and amenability to help craft his world order.

— Kate Riga

Cannon Nada 

It may sound somewhat naive to ask, but was Judge Aileen Cannon misled by Trump? Last year, she presided over a civil case that Trump filed against the DOJ in what initially seemed like a longshot bid to have the federal criminal investigation halted. Judge Cannon, to the shock of the legal community, granted that request, before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals curtly overruled her.

So, this isn’t to say that Cannon was necessarily “fooled” by Trump. But rather, its worth thinking about things from her perspective: in that lawsuit, Trump made a series of claims about the FBI investigation, his cooperation with it, and the documents themselves which have now been seriously contested by Special Counsel Jack Smith in his indictment. Trump said in the civil suit that he was cooperating fully; now he’s charged with several obstruction counts. He said the records were in a storage unit; prosecutors showed photos of them on a ballroom stage and in a bathroom. The list goes on. For Cannon, it could be humiliating, a reason potentially to further distrust Trump-the-litigant. Or, just another annoying fact to ignore on the road to full partisanship.

— Josh Kovensky

“I’ve donated to you, I’ve defended you. But you’ve been nothing but a little bitch to me.”

That’s reportedly what the MAGA-aligned conspiracy theorist congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) told Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) as they’ve been quarreling over their competing resolutions to impeach President Joe Biden. These two have exchanged words before but this might be a new low for things said on the House floor. 

The House bathrooms are another story. 

— Emine Yücel