Winners & Losers | When Red SCOTUS Wins, We all Lose

But there's a New Hope in New York.

Welcome back to Winners & Losers, your weekly authoritarian fit-check. This is the moment you get to stop and look around, take stock in what’s happening and who’s making it happen. And this is incredibly important.

Look. We all knew going into this administration that they were planning on flooding the zone with shit. We knew that there would be too much news, too many crises to keep up with. Too many villains. Too many outrages. It’s all too much. Too much.

But the last few weeks have been different. Our military hit the ground in an American city to fight off Americans. Millions of us hit the streets in protest. We went to war.

Mind-boggling.

The first 100 or so days of this administration felt like a disaster movie. But in the last three weeks, the movie has come to life and is swallowing us whole. A villain is trying to break down your door.

Let’s name them.

SCOTUS (6 Losers)

The fallout from Friday’s Supreme Court decision on birthright citizenship will likely be tremendous. By now, you’ve probably already read or heard all the hot takes, listened to the best lawfare pods, and worked your way through a few of the stages of grief.

But in case you were watching Andor episodes back-to-back all weekend and missed it, the decision didn’t actually address birthright citizenship directly. As you’ll recall, on Trump’s first day in office, he issued an Executive Order attempting to end birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the Constitution.

A group of states tried to stop this through the courts and were successful every step of the way. Except for that last step. Sort of. The six conservative Justices did not rule on whether or not Trump can end birthright citizenship. They just said, basically, that a single court cannot make a decision that impacts all of us — only those of us who complain.

There are a lot of ways to look at this. But at least one possible side effect is that every single bad thing Trump has done that has been stopped by the courts can no longer be stopped altogether.