I’ve been following SCOTUSblog lately because, given Trump’s total disregard for the law and Congress’ inability to do anything about it, I think that the judiciary is our last hope of avoiding tyrany.

There’s a case in North Dakota about gerrymandering away the Native American vote.  A federal district court ruled that a map drawn by the state legislature couldn’t be used and had to be redrawn; and when the state didn’t do it, ordered the use of a map drawn by the plaintiffs.  The circuit court reversed that on the grounds that the people affected by the map don’t have standing to sue (or something); and SCOTUS have put the reversal on hold pending review by the Supreme Court in its emergency docket.  Only three of the Gang of Six dissented, so maybe there’s still hope.

As expected, Amy Howe has the latest news and has more information about the issue in an earlier post.

In a “shadow docket” case, the Supreme Court have paused a lower court injunction that would have blocked Trump from unilaterally gutting the Department of Education.  It was an unsigned ruling, but we know how each justice voted beause Sotomayor wrote a scathing dissent that Kagan and Jackson joined.  If the Six like rule by executive decree so much, I can think of a few countries where the might be happier.

Amy Howe has the facts (without my editorializing).

Update:  HHS, too.

Oh, oh.  SCOTUS could decide some time next year that there are no limits on election campaign money at all.

Keeping our democracy depends on at least two of the gang of six being not entirely shameless.  There was some indication of that this last term, but not on any of the really big cases.

Update, 14:30−5:  Another SCOTUSblog post.

John Roberts is speaking to 4th circuit judges and saying that judges should care only about where the law leads, not about what the effects of the decision are.  Given that each justice’s vote on the really big cases that make the news can be predicted with a high degree of accuracy, I have trouble believing that he’s telling the truth.

St. Louis’ No Kings march seems to have gone well.  Our NPR station has a much better description than anything I could write.

Our MAGAt governor called out the National Guard and nothing happened.  One of my senators actually “blamed” the protest on George Soros.  (I couldn’t make that up.)  I’m laughing at both of them.

Trump has a really stupid idea (OK, he has lots of stupid ideas, but one in particular) about giving all the grants currently going to Harvard to tech. schools instead.

Now, money for vocational training is a Good Thing, and Robert Reich has a good take on that.  I was a really crappy student (mostly because I was lazy…I’m not proud of that, but facts are facts), and my highest academic credential is an Associate Degree in Electronic Technology from a proprietary technical school.  It was during my time there that I discovered computer programming, and I still remember the PDP-8 machine language. 😎

But that’s not anything that Trump cares about.  He’s just lashing out like a 2-year-old because Harvard told him “no”.  There are some signs that folks are beginning to see that, and we can hope that that’ll make a difference in the mid-terms next year—if we still have elections by then.

I thought I’d check out SCOTUSblog and, just by chance, got into a live blog of the court releasing opinions.

There were two opinions released, and one might be interesting to folks who read FtB.  In the matter of the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling that you can’t have explicitly religious charter schools¹, with Justice Barrett recused², the SCOTUS vote was 4-4, so the Oklahoma ruling was not overturned.

This doesn’t set a precedent anywhere except Oklahoma, so it can come back to the Supreme Count.  It was just one of those one-sentence statements that doesn’t say who voted which way; but there was some speculation on the live blog that maybe it was Roberts who voted with the liberals to just kick the can down the road yet again.

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¹“Charter schools” are public schools supported by our tax money.

²Apparently, she’s a very close friend of a woman who’s a big proponent of using public funds for religious schools.

The one big ugly bill contains:

No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued…

If Robert Reich is correct, that gives Trump license to continue to ignore the judiciary—probably the one sentence in the bill that Trump actually cares about.

Is there a lawyer out there who can explain to me what the phrase that begins “if no security was given” means?