Welcome to The Logoff. Today I’m focusing on the Trump administration’s string of court setbacks, which, for now, seem to be slowing down what once looked like a MAGA juggernaut.
Has Trump’s agenda stalled?
The courts keep pressing pause on the president’s grand designs.
Joey Sendaydiego for Vox
Patrick Reis was the senior politics and ideas editor at Vox. He previously worked at Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, Politico, National Journal, and Seattle’s Real Change News. As a reporter and editor, he has worked on coverage of campaign politics, economic policy, the federal death penalty, climate change, financial regulation, and homelessness.
What’s the latest? Several court rulings this week have stalled the Trump administration’s efforts to expand the president’s power. Those include:
- A federal judge on Monday froze Trump’s plans to cut $4 billion from health research grants.
- Another further delayed the deadline for federal workers to accept Elon Musk’s offer for a “deferred resignation.”
- Yet another judge ruled the administration was violating his previous order to unfreeze federal spending — threatening Trump officials with contempt if they didn’t comply.
Does this mean all these initiatives are dead? Not at all. Nearly all of these orders are judges saying “hold on a minute,” telling the Trump administration to wait to go through with its plans while the courts decide if they’re legal. And in nearly all of the cases, the Trump administration is asking higher courts to let them go forward during the judicial deliberations.
So why does just a freeze matter? Because the administration has shown the ability to take irreparable actions while the courts deliberate. Take the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which Trump’s team effectively dismantled during their first week. Courts have since put some of those actions on hold, but even if the agency survives, it’ll have suffered longstanding damage. Now, as the administration tries to repeat that process elsewhere in government, these judicial pauses are making the process far more difficult.
What’s the big picture? For weeks, it appeared the Trump administration was unstoppable, particularly as it took power that the Constitution reserves for Congress. But now the judicial branch is asserting itself, demanding the right to review many of Trump’s actions before they take full effect.
What if Trump simply ignores the courts? Simply put, we don’t know, because there’s very little precedent in US history. What we do know is that it would trigger a constitutional crisis whose resolution could redefine our system of government.
And with that, it’s time to log off ...
A looming constitutional crisis is not a particularly comforting note to end on. So I want to point you all to this great Mashable story of two people finding each other and falling in love. Without further ado, here’s “How one tweet led me to meet my partner.”
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