Three blockbuster Supreme Court decisions, including the one that will change the legal landscape for generations; historic tech breakthroughs, purity spiral news, and a week-ending wrap-up.
https://substack.com/@coffeeandcovid
Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Turns out my predictions bore fruit, and today we dig into three blockbuster Supreme Court decisions, including the one that will change the legal landscape for generations. Plus, even more in the roundup: historic tech breakthroughs, purity spiral news, and a week-ending wrap-up.
WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY
It brings me terrific pleasure to say, once again: I told you so! We might soon need a new acronym (maybe, ITYS).
Do not doubt me, as Rush would always say. All that fretful waiting and wondering whether SCOTUS would do the right thing or keep letting judges savage Trump’s agenda ended yesterday in magnificent triumph. Let us bathe ourselves in liberal tears, starting at the New York Times: “
Supreme Court Limits National Injunctions, a Victory for President Trump.”
The stakes are massive. Since Trump signed his very first executive order, judges have been blasting back with their own pseudo-presidential orders promptly countermanding him. Conservative outrage rightly ensued. To calm folks down, I wrote at length about one of the most mind-numbing legal topics in the hornbook:
injunctions. I explained how these out-of-control judges were papering over basic essential requirements for the (normally) rarely granted types of orders.
Things got bad fast. There are currently over 40 national injunctions stopping that many Trump policies —a historic record— and nearly all of them were excreted from
five blue federal districts (out of 90+). People demanded Trump pack the court, or Congress start impeaching district judges in droves, or Judge Barrett resign in disgrace, or for Hegseth to drop bunker busters on SCOTUS.
Something!
Here, courtesy of Bloomberg News, is a
small sample of Trump policies currently frozen solid by so-called national injunctions:
Despite all the chaos, I advised (admittedly, it was hard advice to take):
be patient, Jedi, it’ll take a minute because the courts work ponderously, but processes exist to put rogue judges in their place.
And yesterday,
the Supreme Court dropped its own bunker-buster, in the form of one of the most irascible, testy, and scolding decisions that ever emitted from the Court’s dark bowels, delivered unsweetly in her Mom Voice by none other than one Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
The implications are vast; Trump’s entire agenda just received a mid-flight refueling.
Bloomberg gets it (even if the Times pretended not to notice):
“Judges entered nationwide preliminary orders halting Trump administration actions in at least four dozen of the 400 lawsuits filed since he took office in January,” Bloomberg coolly observed. At yesterday’s impromptu press conference, President Trump promised that the administration will “promptly file to proceed with numerous policies that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis.”
It’s on like Donkey Kong, as the kids used to say.
The majority’s core holding was crystalline, originalist, and nuclear: the Judiciary Act of 1789 does not authorize district courts to issue nationwide injunctions because such relief lacks any founding-era analogue. Barrett’s opinion was deliberately maximalist — not just reining in the practice, but burying it under two feet of British jurisprudence and one of Justice Story’s discarded wigs.
Congressional Democrats, who ten minutes ago were complaining about Biden-era national injunctions, called yesterday’s holding overthrowing them “deplorable” and “a vile betrayal of our Constitution.” Politico, yesterday:
If it weren’t for double standards, et cetera.
Unhinged BlueSkiers apoplectically tore loose from their last remaining hinges. For example, Yale Professor of Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Genetics and Neuroscience, Mike Nitabach, posted this decidedly non-professorial take:
Let history take note: the professional-managerial class’s first instinct after the Court clipped their nationwide-injunction wings was to profanely fantasize about an armed rebellion, re-open the Underground Railroad, and scream into the BlueSky about red-state kidnappings.
Alert readers will also recall that, earlier
this week, I wrote that I couldn’t shake a sense that we were teetering on the precipice of a
new phase, that the pace was about to accelerate. Well,
behold.
In yesterday’s order, the Supreme Court ended for all time one of the most abusive (or helpful, depending on your point of view) quasi-legal tools that district judges had in their judicial tool bags: the national injunction. National injunctions involve a finding that a presidential order or a new law is presumptively unconstitutional— and thus to be chucked in the legal freezer, becoming a spent force or dead letter, at least for a couple years, till the case wound and wended its way in slow motion through the court’s docket.
As Justice Barrett observed from the first sentence of her order, nothing in the Constitution or federal statute empowers district courts to override the Executive Branch in this particular way. In concurrence, Justice Thomas pointed out that, even in the same district, one judge’s orders are not binding on any other judge in that district— so how could national injunctions magically bind judges in other districts?
As we celebrate the victorious unleashing of scores of Trump’s pent-up policies, we must also count the cost. National injunctions halted most of Biden’s worst excesses, like covid mandates, student loan forgiveness, and so on. That’s ended, too. At least they got us through the pandemic.
Justice Alito, in his fine concurrence, correctly opined that, if Congress
wants courts to have this power, it could go ahead and expand judicial jurisdiction by passing an authorizing law. But it hasn’t (and almost certainly
won’t), so judges must work with what they have been given.
Justice Barrett and the 6-3 majority didn’t just throw shade on national injunctions; they put a lead-lined concrete containment dome over the whole practice. It’s finished.
Let’s discuss what this decision
is and what it isn’t.
It isn’t a ban on injunctions, per se. Activist lawyers can still haul their wife-beating illegal aliens into court and get temporary deportation relief
for that criminal. But they can no longer get midnight orders on behalf of all the
other illegal aliens around the country who
aren’t parties to their lawsuits. One wonders whether it will be worth the effort in most cases.
They can still litigate the
merits of their cases, seeking final decisions that a particular executive order or statute is unconstitutional— but they can’t get it frozen nationwide while the case unfolds. Just frozen as to the
specifically named parties.
Activists can also still seek to certify
class actions. If they can certify a class —and a slew of those types of emergency motions were filed yesterday in the wake of SCOTUS’s decision— then they can still get a national injunction for their certified
class, which in many ways is similar to a regular nationwide injunction.
The problem —and the reason why they haven’t tried it so far— is that class certification is much harder and more demanding even than getting a straight injunction.
In other words, certifying a class is
more than double the effort. Now, the activist lawyers must
both prove entitlement to an injunction
and meet strict requirements for class certification. It almost certainly rules out after-hours
temporary injunctions, since there’s no class yet at that early stage of the proceedings.
“This is going to make it more challenging, more complicated, potentially more expensive to seek orders that more broadly stop illegal government action,” Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, correctly said. “It is watering down the power of federal courts to check government misconduct.”
States can still bring cases seeking injunctive relief
for their states, limiting the effect to a patchwork legal quilt around the country. We saw that happen often during the pandemic, since conservative judges frequently refused to issue national injunctions. However, many times, if enough states get a stay, the federal government will just put the whole program on hold.
With all these other possible remedies, despite the lunatic ramblings of moronic Yale professors on BlueSky, yesterday’s decision did
not bestow imperial powers on the presidency.
But maybe the best part of yesterday’s majority decision was that six justices endorsed taking one of their comrades to the woodshed. Justice Barrett, writing for the majority, explained in painful detail that: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is a dum-dum.
Maybe Justice Jackson started it. She began her dissent by describing the majority opinion as essentially obsequious and calling the decision “an existential threat to the rule of law.”
Justice Barrett unloaded:
Justice Barrett wasn’t even close to being done:
Justice Jackson provided a vein of rich illogic for Justice Barrett to mine, and Amy didn’t waste the chance:
Having spent over two full pages tearing Justice Jackson a new alimentary canal, Justice Barrett primly summed it up in two sentences, saying she wouldn’t
dwell on Jackson’s silly logic:
The gloves are off.
I cannot recall ever seeing anything like it in a Supreme Court majority decision before. Remember — five
more justices signed on to Barrett’s opinion, silently but formally endorsing her smackdown of Justice Jackson. Even the two other liberal justices avoided joining or even mentioning Justice Jackson’s dissent. It’s just as ugly as it looks.
I’m running long. I’ll end with this: for readers concerned about Justice Barrett’s bona fides, it might be time to reconsider. There is no other single decision that SCOTUS could have handed President Trump to put jet fuel in his agenda.
Step aside, Wanda, the train is coming through.
Fast.
..
️ MEMENTO MORI ☙ Tuesday, April 22, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 
For jab watchers, it could not possibly be more obvious. The Pope’s health problems started within days of his first shot. And he went steadily, painfully downhill, as he continued with his second shot and then his special Fauci booster. And all his conditions reflect things we have learned to expect: systemic autoimmune, inflammatory, neurological, and cardiac conditions— followed by SADS.
But Trish’s affidavit, attached to the Petition, doesn’t say she is Adiel’s sister-in-law. She’s just a ‘friend.’ She’s only known Adiel for about a year. It doesn’t say how she knows him. Based on the emerging pattern, my guess is Adiel was living in her casita. From the affidavit (
Yesterday’s first story ran in the NYT under the headline, “
