A Return to Judicial Sanity
Nicholas Bagley is a law professor at the University of Michigan and former chief legal counsel to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D., Mich.). He writes in the Atlantic that the Court's ruling 'is not, as the dissenting Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson would have it, 'an existential threat to the rule of law.'' Mr. Bagley notes:
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Yahoo
20 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Howard Lutnick Steps in After Trump Appears Clueless on Latest Tariff Drama
President Donald Trump's commerce secretary had to step in after he appeared lost on the latest development in his sprawling trade war. Speaking to reporters in New Jersey on Sunday, Trump announced that the administration would be sending out about a dozen letters throughout the week warning other countries that tariffs will be reinstated if they don't close a trade deal soon. Treasury Scott Bessent said earlier in the day that the tariffs would come back into effect on Aug. 1, effectively extending the original July 9 deadline. When a reporter asked Trump when the tariff rates would change—if at all—the president didn't seem to have a clue. 'What are you talking about?' he said, prompting the reporter to repeat herself. 'They're going to be tariffs. The tariffs are going to be the tariffs. I think we'll have most countries done by July 9, either a letter or a deal.' Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick then swooped in to clarify: 'Tariffs go into effect Aug. 1, but the president is setting the rates and the deals right now.' The administration's 90-day pause on its tariff rollout is set to expire on Wednesday, meaning that countries may soon face levies of 10 to 70 percent, as announced in April. Bessent told CNN's State of the Union, however, that it remains to be seen what happens next. 'President Trump is going to be sending letters to some of our trading partners saying that if you don't move things along, then on Aug. 1st, you will be boomerang back to your April 2nd tariff level,' he said. 'I think we're gonna see a lot of deals very quickly.' The announcement postpones the original July 9 deadline, but Bessent refused to call it an extension. 'It's not a new deadline,' he argued. 'We are saying this is when it's happening. If you want to speed things up, have at it. If you want to go back to the old rate, that's your choice.' Asked whether the administration was expecting to sign any deals this week, Lutnick played it vague. 'Well, the president is right in the midst of discussing all sorts of deals with all sorts of countries,' he said. 'And I'm going to be with him when he makes that decision.' The first batch of letters is set to go out at noon Eastern Time on Monday, Trump said in a Truth Social post. The president also issued a veiled threat against any country that cozies up to BRICS, a group of countries composed of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. 'Any Country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS, will be charged an ADDITIONAL 10% Tariff. There will be no exceptions to this policy,' Trump wrote, without offering any further details. The on-again, off-again tariff rollout has earned the president a moniker among Wall Street brokers: TACO, which stands for Trump Always Chickens Out. The nickname angered Trump, who countered that 'it's called negotiation.' But an unnamed White House insider told Politico that the tariff chaos is all just part of a show. 'Trump knows the most interesting part of his presidency is the tariff conversation,' the insider said. 'It's all fake. There's no deadline. It's a self-imposed landmark in this theatrical show, and that's where we are.'
33 minutes ago
Supreme Court's expansive view of presidential power is 'solidly' pro-Trump: ANALYSIS
President Donald Trump may not have a perfect rubber stamp in the U.S. Supreme Court, but he is finding little willingness by the six-justice conservative majority to stand in his way. As the justices begin the traditional summer recess, the sweeping impact of their judgments from the recently concluded term -- in 56 cases argued and more than 100 matters from the emergency docket -- is coming into focus for the administration and the country. Despite the nation's narrow political divide, the court delivered rulings disproportionately advantageous to interests of the Republican political establishment in power. "Time and again, the Supreme Court came down on one side, and solidly so -- on the very conservative side," said Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional scholar and dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. Most notably, the court imposed dramatic new limits on the ability of federal judges to check presidential power, coming one year after it established sweeping, presumptive immunity for presidents engaged in "official acts." "Federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies," explained Justice Amy Coney Barrett in her historic opinion allowing Trump to move forward with plans to end birthright citizenship, which has been the law of the land for more than a century. In 14 other emergency appeals Trump brought to the high court, the justices granted his request -- at least in part -- on 12 occasions. The conservative majority gave the green light to the Trump administration's mass layoffs of federal workers, the removal of openly transgender service members from the U.S. military, deportation of noncitizens to third countries with little due process, and access for DOGE staffers to Americans' most sensitive information held by the Social Security Administration. The court did narrowly block Trump's request to continue a freeze of $2 billion in foreign aid money owed to nonprofit groups for services rendered and denied a bid to dismiss the legal case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland migrant and alleged gang member whom the administration deported to El Salvador in violation of a court order, and other alleged Venezuelan criminals. The successive decisions have increasingly incensed the court's liberals. "Other litigants must follow the rules, but the administration has the Supreme Court on speed dial," Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote bluntly Thursday in a dissent from the court's decision clearing the way for the government to send eight migrants to South Sudan. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in extraordinarily stark and impassioned language in dissent in the birthright citizenship case, accused her conservative colleagues of creating an "existential threat to the rule of law" by frequently overriding lower court judges. "This Court's complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts, their rulings, and the law (as they interpret it) will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise," she wrote. Many legal scholars don't share Jackson's ominous view, including several critical of Trump. "I'm pretty confident that within a matter of weeks … there's going to be basically nationwide coverage of declarations or injunctions making clear that the birthright citizenship contention of the government is just absolutely absurd, insane, and unlawful," said George Conway III, a prominent conservative lawyer who now leads a coalition of attorneys opposed to actions of the Trump administration. As for a broader fear about the erosion of judicial authority, Conway suggested fixation on the court system as a check on the president might be misplaced. "We can't expect the courts to save us. Even if every district judge in the country and every appellate court in the country, and every justice … on the Supreme Court agrees that this administration is violating the law, left and right," Conway said. "They can't save us. The people have to save themselves here." Still, the Supreme Court's expansive view of presidential power is giving Trump significant leeway -- with potentially more to come headed into the summer. The justices will soon decide whether to roll back a temporary nationwide injunction currently barring the Trump administration from moving forward with large-scale reductions of the federal workforce across 19 agencies and offices. They are also expected to weigh in on whether to let the president move forward with elimination of most employees at the Department of Education in an effort to dismantle the agency while litigation over its future continues in federal court. Many veteran court watchers have decried a lack of explanation from the justices for its decisions in these consequential cases. "This court not only militantly refuses to talk about the effect of their decisions, they kind of gaslight us into pretending that the effects of their decision won't be what they are," said Sherrilyn Ifill, Howard University law professor and former director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Chief Justice John Roberts -- who was the justice most often in the majority last term at 95% of the time -- was the first member of the court to speak out publicly after the flurry of controversial decisions. In rare televised remarks at a federal judicial conference in North Carolina, Roberts confronted what he called "some sharp adjectives" directed at the court amidst a wave of critical public opinion. "The idea that we're responsible for whatever somebody is angry about -- it just doesn't make any sense, and it's very dangerous," Roberts said of the critics. "What they're angry about or upset about is probably not that you applied the principle … It's that they lost whatever they were looking for." A judge's role, Roberts said, is to "interpret the law to the best of our ability," not to write the laws.
USA Today
35 minutes ago
- USA Today
To new and struggling teachers: Don't give up. America's kids need you.
If I could talk to my younger self, I'd tell him about the thousands of students who were going to need him by the time they reached high school ‒ and why I'm glad I stayed. I began teaching in the midst of crisis ‒ a crack epidemic, gang violence, racial strife and police conduct that led to civil unrest. Now, at the close of my 34th year in the classroom, I find that my students, my colleagues and me in crisis again ‒ kids and their families in fear for their freedom as a president, unrestrained by Congress or the Supreme Court, wages war on immigration, much of it on the streets of our Los Angeles, against the Latino community. Those who don't get abducted on the streets by masked immigration agents still face an uncertain future with the recent Supreme Court decision not to reject President Donald Trump's executive order revoking automatic birthright citizenship for all. Trump's order is not retroactive ‒ not for now ‒ but the cruelties we have seen on our streets make it difficult to believe that anything is off the table. I keep asking myself ‒ as do so many educators and other Americans ‒ how things got to this point? A dysfunctional nation, a dysfunctional education system It is a complicated question with complicated answers, but for much of my teaching career, I have worried about the way our schools treat kids: Demanding compliance over excellence. I am afraid that we have raised too many Americans willing to vote for and bend to authoritarian-leaning leaders. And now here we are, with a president virulently expanding his power, coercing and silencing opposition, and militarizing the streets of our city. Much other dysfunction also persists in our education system, and it hurts our kids as much as ever. Politics, profiteering, narrow mindedness and laziness are a big part of the collective incompetence that many of us struggle against every day in classrooms across this country. We ought to keep demanding ‒ or pleading for ‒ systemic change and a greater investment of money and imagination in our schools, even at a time when the federal government seems intent on dismantling public education. For years now, I have been critiquing and complaining, here at USA TODAY and elsewhere, about the systemic rot in our public schools. Whatever the small impact of my words, I know that I've accomplished far more through the work of teaching and through the help I've been able to give new and struggling teachers. Opinion: LA isn't burning. ICE has terrorized many into an ominous silence. For the sake of the next generation of kids, we cannot wait for systemic change. For the sake of those kids, we have to find ways to be the effective and inspiring teachers our kids need and deserve. We have to keep pushing for change in the governance and priorities of our schools; change in the way that teachers are prepared, supported and compensated; and, in the meantime, rise as much as possible above everything that undermines us, that makes our job sometimes seem impossible, and that discourages so many young, idealistic, passionate educators. Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don't have the app? Download it for free from your app store. To frustrated new teachers, I was once like you Many new teachers don't last five years, and in many places it is not uncommon for demoralized new teachers to quit midsemester or even midday. I don't blame those frustrated young educators. I almost didn't make it past my first semester, and now I try to encourage as many struggling teachers as I can to believe in their students and themselves. Opinion: As a teacher, Supreme Court siding with parents' religious freedom concerns me Because when you see countless students grow up and some overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. When you hear their words of appreciation for your part in it. When you find yourself teaching multiple branches and generations of once distressed and now flourishing families. When you see students transform from selfishness or misery or self-destructiveness to become productive adults doing their small part to improve their community and the world and help others do the same ‒ then you know it was worth it. The problem is that too many educators are defeated before they can even imagine such successes, and we don't do enough to affirm the small successes that they themselves might not even recognize. If some tech innovator could create a time machine so I could go talk to my younger self as a discouraged new teacher, I would tell that frazzled young educator about the thousands of children who were going to need him by the time they reached high school ‒ and how glad I've been to be there for them, how sad that it won't last forever, and how much I hope to pass on what the students have taught me over the years. An army of dedicated, patient and talented educators may be the only hope for this new generation. In that regard, there is no greater gift to the world than making the sacrifices, braving the indignities, and enduring the uncertainties and failures to become a really good teacher. Which is why I've written "A Lasting Impact in the Classroom and Beyond: Wisdom and Advice for Brave Teachers." I did so on behalf of our kids, now and in the future, and for those courageous souls who want to help them all to find their brilliance, their voices, their idealism and their place in this crazy world. Perhaps they can help to steer us away from the dystopian nightmare we seem to be careening toward. Larry Strauss, a high school English teacher in South Los Angeles since 1992, is also the author of 'Students First and Other Lies: Straight Talk From a Veteran Teacher.' You can read diverse opinions from our USA TODAY columnists and other writers on the Opinion front page, on X, formerly Twitter, @usatodayopinion and in our Opinion newsletter.
