More than two millennia ago, Chinese leaders discovered that, if barbarians want to engage in mutually destructive fights among themselves, the thing for China to do is to hold their beer and let them have at it.
Today, they are delighted to see us destroy ourselves.ย
After Trump moved to dismember the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which backed internationally oriented outlets such as Voice of America, Chinese state-made broadcasts took the place of U.S. programming on TV networks in countries as disparate as Indonesia and Nigeria. Trump, like a growing number of Republicans, viewed the media properties as suspicious fonts of โanti-Americanโ liberalism. But Chinese propagandists exulted at the demise of these U.S.-funded news operations, which had, to varying extents, chronicled the state of pro-democracy movements around the world and provided space for dissident voices in countries where political freedoms are curtailed.
โThe Chinese people are happy to see the U.S. anti-China ideological fortress breached from within,โ cheered Hu Xijin, former chief editor of the Global Times, a Chinese state-run, English-language newspaper, this year on social media.
In a video circulating this month, Victor Gao, a former Chinese diplomat and vice president of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization, mused whether Trump may come to be remembered as an American Mikhail Gorbachev. The comparison to the late Soviet leader and famous author of glasnost and perestroika was not meant to be flattering: Gorbachevโs attempt at reforms, Gao said, precipitated the collapse of the Soviet empire and unleashed a โtraumaโ still being felt today.
Gao suggested that by the end of the decade, Trumpโs own attempt at reforms will have โfundamentally changedโ both the United States and NATO, likely for the worse. Trump would not have made America โbigger, stronger, greater,โ Gao said, but rather may have โled it astray, like Gorbachev.โ
The fall of the Soviet Union isnโt the only historical parallel alive in Chinese discourse about the U.S. A host of Chinese commentators see in MAGA a whiff of Chinaโs own Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong, which saw myriad purges and the defenestration of ranks of the intellectual classes and political elites. โMao unleashed the Red Guards to โsmashโ the police, prosecutors, and courts, so that loyal revolutionaries could seize control of state machinery,โ Zhang Qianfan, a constitutional law professor in Beijing, recently told CNN. โTrump brought Elon Musk and six young Silicon Valley executives into the White House under the banner of eliminating corruption, waste, and inefficiency โ akin to the โCultural Revolution Leadership Groupโ entering the partyโs central leadership.โ โฆ
Various โinitiativesโ promulgated by Xion development, security and cultural harmony have put forward a rosy Chinese vision of global cooperation and prosperity stripped of liberal ideals around universal rights and democracy. Chinaโs position is gaining ground thanks to the shifts in Washington. โBeijingโs assessment right now is that the United States is dismantling, fairly systematically, the sources of its strength,โ Julian Gewirtz, a China scholar and former Biden administration official, said in a recent interview.
โThe United States, in their view, is dismantling its alliance relationships and alienating much of the world,โ Gewirtz told the Wire China. โIt is dismantling aspects of the U.S. science and technology ecosystem, cutting funding to some of our great universities, and making it very unappealing, if not outright impossible, for foreign talent to come do research in those universities. And it is eliminating arms of U.S. influence around the world, from USAID to Voice of America. Chinaโs view is that the United States is, in a sense, unilaterally disarming.โ
The two news articles are from this afternoon. The Chait opinion piece is from this morning.
So, hereโs my top list of things Iโd like to know.
Iโd like to see the whole 2003 Epstein birthday book. By the way, someone almost surely has the original. Who has it, how can we get it, whose messages does it contain, and what do the messages say? (And if, perchance, the original has been misplaced, there are bound to be copies of the book.)
There are said to be thousands of pages of investigative files. Do those thousands of pages enlighten us about who, if anyone, other than Jeffrey and Ghislaine were using the girls? And, were there blackmail materials on these other people, if there were other people? Was blackmail being paid, and, if so, by whom?ย
And was Trump among the customers, assuming there were any customers? (The FBI, we are told, has had a host of minions examine the files, marking references to Trump. What kind of work product did the minions produce? Just lists of references to specific documents and pages? Annotated lists? Memos? How can we get the work product, and what will we learn from it?)
In advance of knowing these things, I would like to know why, if Trump is not as guilty as homemade sin, why he is acting as if he were as guilty as homemade sin. Like a guilty thing surprised.
Jonathan Chait would like to know these things, too. He writes,
Imagine you were an elected official who discovered that an old friend had been running a sex-trafficking operation without your knowledge. Youโd probably try very hard to make your innocence in the matter clear. Youโd demand full transparency and answer any questions about your own involvement straightforwardly.
Donald Trumpโs behavior regarding the Jeffrey Epstein case is โฆ not that.
The latest cycle of frantic evasions began last week, after TheWall Street Journalreportedthat Trump had submitted a suggestive message and drawing to a scrapbook celebrating Jeffrey Epsteinโs 50th birthday, in 2003. This fact alone added only incrementally to the public understanding of the two menโs friendship. Rather than brush the report off, however, Trump denied authorship. โI never wrote a picture in my life,โ he told the Journalโan oddly narrow defense for a man reported to have written โmay every day be another wonderful secretโ to a criminal whose secret was systematically abusing girls, and one that was instantly falsified by Trumpโs well-documented penchant for doodling.
On Truth Social, Trump complained that he had asked Rupert Murdoch, the Journalโs owner, to spike the story, and received an encouraging answer, only for the story to run. Under normal circumstances, a president confessing that he tried to kill an incriminating report would amount to a major scandal. But Trump has so deeply internalized his own critique of the media, according to which any organ beyond his control is โfake news,โ that he believed the episode reflected badly on Murdochโs ethics rather than his own.
Having failed to prevent the article from being published, Trump shifted into distraction mode. In a transparent attempt to offer his wavering loyalists the scent of fresh meat, Trump began to attack their standby list of enemies. On Friday, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, renewed charges that the Obama administration had ginned up the Russia scandal to damage Trump. None of the facts she provided supported this claim remotely. The entire sleight of hand relied on conflating the question of whether Russia had hacked into voting machines (the Obama administration said publicly and privately it hadnโt) with the very different question of whether Russia had attempted to influence voters by hacking and leaking Democratic emails (which the Obama administration, former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and a subsequent bipartisan Senate-committee investigation all concluded it had done).
Why did Gabbard suddenly pick this moment to release and misconstrue 2016 intelligence comprising facts that the Obama administration had already acknowledged in public? Trump made the answer perfectly clear when he used a press availability with the president of the Philippines to deflect questions about Epstein into a rant about the need to arrest Obama.
โI donโt really follow that too much,โ he said of the Epstein matter. โItโs sort of a witch hunt. Just a continuation of the witch hunt. The witch hunt you should be talking about is that they caught President Obama absolutely cold.โ Trump has yet to specify why the โwitch huntโ heโs been stewing over nonstop for nearly a decade remains fascinating, while the new โwitch huntโ he just revealed to the world is too tedious to address.
In fact, Trump himself suggested that the two matters were related. He described the Epstein witch hunt as part of a continuous plot that culminated in Joe Biden stealing the 2020 presidential election. (โAnd by the way, it morphed into the 2020 race. And the 2020 race was rigged.โ) You might think that this link would increase Trumpโs curiosity about the Epstein matter, given his inexhaustible interest in vindicating his claim to have won in 2020. Not this time!
By invoking 2020, Trump managed to make the Epstein conspiracy theory sound moreworld-historically importantโwhile attaching his protestations of innocence to claims that were hardly settled in his favor. Again, imagine you were in Trumpโs position and were completely innocent of any involvement with Epsteinโs crimes. You would probably not try to compare the Epstein case to the scandal in which eight of your associates were sentenced to prison, or to the other time when you tried to steal an election and then got impeached. Instead, Trump is leaning into the parallels between the Epstein case and his own long record of criminal associations and proven lies, arguing in essence that the Epstein witch hunt is as fake as the claim that Biden won the 2020 election (i.e., 100 percent real). โฆ
Perhaps Trump is simply so habituated to lying that he has no playbook for handling a matter in which he has nothing to hide. Or maybe, as seems more plausible by the day, he is acting guilty because he is.
I donโt know whether people still read Orwellโs 1984. But I expect most of my readers know it. Remember what Winston Smithโs job was, at the Ministry of Truth?
This feels as if Trump is ordering the Ministry of Truth to rewrite history, and itโs not going so well.ย
One of the common misunderstandings about President Donald Trump is that he created the culture of conspiracy and surreality in which the American right is now immersed. He didnโt. He simply leveraged it.
This isnโt to say Trump hasnโt generated or amplified any conspiracy theories. He obviously has. It is simply meant to note that he emerged as a political figure a decade ago from an existing culture in which such claims were common currency. The central advantage Trump possessed in the 2016 Republican presidential primary was that he was willing to agree with false theories in a way that the established politicians against whom he was running were not. His most identifiable issue, immigration, was and is rooted in false claims about foreign powers shipping criminals to the U.S. where they are subverting traditional America. Itโs conspiracies all the way down.
The conspiracies that take hold of the right centrally rely on the idea that Elites Are Up To No Good. In any objective context, Trump himself would be considered an elite, given his billions of dollars and his power, even before being elected president. But Trump sided with The People, meaning those beside him in the conspiratorial swamps. Because he stood against The Elites, a loosely bounded group that ostensibly controls America โ meaning The People โ Trump was granted a seemingly irrevocable dispensation from elitism.
Now, that dispensation is suddenly looking rather wobbly.
The reason? Jeffrey Epstein, the man who encapsulated so many of the characteristics that the conspiratorial right attributes to The Elites: inconceivable wealth, access to powerful politicians and celebrities, a privileged lifestyle (including a private island!) and accusations of criminal sexual deviancy involving minors. All of that was attributable to Epstein even before his 2019 death in a Manhattan jail cell โ a suicide that was quickly presented by conspiracy theorists as something far more suspicious.
By the time Trump announced his presidential candidacy in mid-2015, Epstein was already a felon. The muckraking website Gawker had already published the contents of Epsteinโs address book, including more than a dozen phone numbers for Trump and Mar-a-Lago, where Epstein had once been a regular. The site also published logs from Epsteinโs private jet; Trump (and former president Bill Clinton) had been passengers multiple times.
But Epstein wasnโt really an issue in the 2016 election.
The salience of Epstein increased once Trump was president, and not only because it was during this period that the disgraced businessman was arrested and died. Trumpโs first term in office saw the emergence of a sweeping conspiracy theory about an undercover government employee who was helping Trump conduct a secret, global campaign to uproot a cabal of pedophiles whose membership included various celebrities and (Democratic) politicians.
This was QAnon, which helped explain (as one adherent explained to me at the time) why Trumpโs tumultuous, disorganized administration was actually a secret success. The pattern that Trump had leveraged since 2015 appeared again: What appeared to be, wasnโt; what was, was hidden from view.
QAnon caught on. In May 2021, PRRI found that nearly a quarter of Republicans believed in even its most extreme presentation, that โthe government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.โ QAnonโs adherents were a central element of the effort to overturn the 2020 election during the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. When Trump left power two weeks later, QAnon dissipated somewhat โ though that was in part because its precepts and themes were absorbed and adopted by various right-wing actors, including Trump.
Epstein became a cudgel for the right to use against Trumpโs replacement, Joe Biden. Itโs much easier to espouse and amplify conspiracy theories when you donโt have the power to rebut them. Allies of Trumpโs, like his son Donald Trump Jr. and then-Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) suggested that there was some nefarious reason that the government wasnโt sharing more information about Epstein, including a theorized set of clients or files in which various other Elites would be implicated.
The idea became so ingrained among Trumpโs supporters that the existence of this material was treated as established fact and its release an inevitable element of a second Trump term. He and his allies would be asked about the material and (with a few notable exceptions) would pledge that it would be made public.
And then Trump became president.
There were other places where Trumpโs return to the White House put him in a somewhat unsteady position. His advocacy for coronavirus vaccines in his first term had soured in the right-wing media universe since leaving office, for example, but that was easily remedied by tapping one of the countryโs foremost anti-vaccination advocates to run the governmentโs health agencies. Epstein, though? Much harder to circumnavigate.
It probably didnโt help that Trumpโs allies, like Attorney General Pam Bondi, werenโt interested in undercutting the right-wing narrative. Early on, she insisted that she was in possession of a client list that was being vetted. Then she โ or someone at the Justice Department โ attempted to put the whole thing to rest by inviting right-wing social media influencers to the White House and giving them mostly the stuff that had been published by Gawker a decade prior. The pro-Trump right wasnโt satisfied.
Last week, the Justice Department took another approach, releasing a memo flatly rejecting the idea that there was any client list to share. When a reporter attempted to ask Bondi about the memo at a Cabinet meeting, Trump interjected.
โAre you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?โ he asked. โThis guyโs been talked about for years.โ
Rumors swirled that senior FBI officials disagreed with the approach โ officials whoโd often touted conspiracy theories in their prior careers as Trump-aligned right-wing commentators. On Saturday, Trump published a lengthy message on Truth Social defending Bondi and offering a novel explanation for what had happened with the Epstein material: The โclient listโ conspiracy theory was itself a function of a left-wing conspiracy.
โObama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 โIntelligenceโ Agents, โTHE LAPTOP FROM HELL,โ and more โฆ created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier,โ Trump wrote, invoking various other conspiracy theories he had helped establish as canon on the right.
There are three fundamental challenges for Trump here.
The first is that he doesnโt have the control over conspiratorial thinking that he thinks he has. Again, he piggybacked existing anti-elite theorizing to reach the White House. As the vaccine debate shows, heโs never fully controlled it.
The second is that he is now president. As an expert on conspiracy theories explained to me back in 2017, the powerful have a difficult time leveraging conspiracy theories because those theories are generally tools used to rebut power (like that of The Elites). Presidents could prove a conspiracy theory true, if it were, but cannot prove one false since they are part of a system enmeshed in the theory.
The third, and most important, is that there are unanswerable questions about Trumpโs relationship with Epstein. Trump was friends with Epstein. Trump and his family appear multiple times in Epsteinโs address book, the only โlistโ thatโs known to exist. Not only can the Justice Department never adequately dismiss a conspiracy theory that centers on government power; Trump is perhaps uniquely powerless to fully dismiss a conspiracy theory with which he is intertwined.
We can assume that the Epstein issue will soon fade from relevance in the national conversation, granting Trump a reprieve from the consternation of much of his base. (The replies to his post on the social media platform he owns have been broadly and unusually disparaging.) However, we can still recognize this moment for the exception that it is: Probably for the first time since he announced his candidacy in 2015, Trump has found himself on The Elites side of the divide against The People. Instead of leveraging the power of conspiratorial thinking, for at least a moment, he is seeing it being used against him.
Given how dependent his political power is on the grip with which he holds his base, even the loosening of one finger may be a weakness he canโt afford.
A Final Ray of Sunshine
Imagine how much worse things would be if Pam Bondi had any sense.
I was only able to download an audio file of the second podcastโby Sara Longwell and Will Sommer of the Bulwark. I recommend you give it a listen.The video may be behind a paywall, or you may be able to watch it here.
Why Did Trump Order the Coverup?
This weekend, lots of talking heads are postulating that MAGA minds are in deep distress, trying to figure out whether (1) Trump told Pam Bondi and the FBI to put the kibosh on Epsteingate because there is actually nothing to see, and Trump didnโt want to unwashed masses to realize they had been lied to, or (2) Trump told Pam Bondi and the FBI to put the kibosh on Epsteingate because Trump is as guilty as homemade sin, and he wanted to cover up his misdeeds.
Logically, thereโs a third possibility too: Trump told Pam Bondi and the FBI to put the kibosh on Epsteingate because Trump realized thereโs a load of blackmail material in the file, against a lot of people, and he wanted to preserve his ability to gain from those blackmail opportunities.
But, given all the facts and circumstances, I think the overwhelming probability is that Door Number Two is the right one: Trump put the kibosh on Epsteingate because Trump is guilty as sin.ย
A Big Fissure Within MAGA?
Apparently, despite all the talk of splits, fissures, and cognitive dissonance within MAGA resulting from Epsteingate, most of the MAGA folks have also lept to the conclusion that there is a Trump coverup. So, not much cognitive dissonance on the assumption that this is a coverup.
Contrary to the views of headline writers who did not go to law school and who suffer from chronic confirmation bias, in the recent case of Trump v. CASA, the Supreme Court opened the door to nationwide injunctions against Trump in cases where plaintiff classes have been certified according to Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
Today, the first such injunction was granted, by a federal district judge in New Hampshire, in a case spearheaded by the American Civil Liberties Union and its allies.
The judge โruled from the benchโโmeaning that the formal text of most of his ruling isnโt available, at least currently. (The order certifying the class, however, is found here. As I predicted, Trumpโs own executive order does a fine job of defining the class that is being certified.)
The ACLUโs press release reads in part,
CONCORD, N.H. โ A federal court in New Hampshire today blocked President Trumpโs executive order restricting birthright citizenship and certified a nationwide class that protects the citizenship rights of all children born on U.S. soil. The case is Barbara v. Donald J. Trump.
The ruling stems from a nationwide class-action lawsuit filed June 27, immediately after a Supreme Court ruling that potentially opened the door for partial enforcement of the executive order.
The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of New Hampshire, ACLU of Maine, ACLU of Massachusetts, Legal Defense Fund, Asian Law Caucus, and Democracy Defenders Fund brought the challenge on behalf of a proposed class of babies subject to the executive order. It seeks to protect all impacted families in the country in the wake of the Supreme Courtโs recent decision in Trump v. CASA, which directed courts to consider narrowing nationwide protection that had been provided in the first round of challenges to the executive order attacking birthright citizenship.
The groups were in court today successfully arguing for a preliminary injunction and nationwide class certification. The ruling was made from the bench.
In granting the request, the court provided for a 7-day delay so that the government โ which argued to the Supreme Court that a nationwide class was the appropriate way to seek nationwide protection in the birthright cases โ could nevertheless try to get the First Circuit Court of Appeals to stay the relief, if it decides to pursue that option. Even with a 7-day delay, the ruling will go into effect well before July 27, when partial implementation of the unconstitutional order might otherwise have begun.
โThis ruling is a huge victory and will help protect the citizenship of all children born in the United States, as the Constitution intended,โ said Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLUโs Immigrantโs Rights Project, who argued the case.โWe are fighting to ensure President Trump doesnโt trample on the citizenship rights of one single child.โ
What Happens Next?
Team Trump could wait for more decisions along the same lines by district courts around the country, in order to forum shop for the best appellate court. More likely, I think, is that they will appeal to the federal appellate court in Boston, which will quickly rule in the ACLUโs favor, so that the Supreme Court will have to address the merits of birthright citizenship very soon.ย
And what will happen then?
Well, maybe Justices Thomas and/or Alito and/or Gorsuch will quibble with whether a class should have been certifiedโor raise some other arcane, pettifogging objection to jurisdiction. Or maybe one of them will receive a revelation from the Angel Moroni that all class actions are unconstitutional.
You never can tell. But I am confident that at least five of the justices will continue to adhere to language of the Fourteenth Amendment and to reject Trumpโs interpretation, just as the Supreme Court ruled back in 1898 in the Wong Kim Ark case.
And what will happen after that?
What will happen after that is that large pieces of shit will hit the fan.
This morning, on the Fourth of July, I watched an hourlong seminar on constitutional law. The host was Preet Bharara, fellow graduate of Columbia Law School, widely admired for his work as the U.S. Attorney for Manhattan, fired by Trump for doing his job with competence and integrity, and current partner of WilmerHale (one of the Big Law firms resisting Trumpโs illegal targeting).
Guest commentators were
Melissa Murray, the Stokes Professor at New York University School of Law, and the daughter of Jamaican immigrants,ย
Jack Goldsmith, the Learned Hand[1]ย Professor of Law at Harvard, andย
Trevor Morrison, professor and dean emeritus at New York University School of Law, and former attorney with the Office of Legal Counsel under President Obama.
Scrolling down, you will find several of my recent posts on Trump v. CASA, birthright citizenship, and โnationwideโ/universal injunctions. Unlike me, the four people in the video have spent their lives studying constitutional law and federal civil procedure. That is one reason why they bring many valuable insights to the โnationwideโ injunctions kerfuffleโand why, if the subject interests you, watching the video will richly repay your time.
And also why watching the video will provide valuable insights into how good constitutional law is done.
And why, moreover, good constitutional law reasoning is hardโan activity not best left to people whose thinking consists of bumper sticker slogans.
All that said, I am gratified that these people mostly agreed with my amateur understanding of the big legal issuesโthough they made their points will more precision and detail than I brought to bear.
With one exception. I think I missed the boat on a subtle but important point.
Did the Supreme Court Reserve to Itself the Power to Issue โNationwideโ InjunctionsโAll the While Denying that Power to the Lower Courts?
Justice Barrettโs majority opinion makes a big bloody deal of the claim that, in the Judiciary Act of 1789, Congress did not grant the courts any general power to issue โnationwideโ injunctions. (If I were writing for fellow shysters, I would say that the justiceโs interpretation of the Judiciary Act was theย ratio decidendiโthe rationale for her decision. But since Iโm not writing for other shysters, Iโll just say โbig bloody deal.โ)
Now, if Congress gave no such power to the district courts or to the courts of appeal, then it must follow, as the night the day, that Congress did not give any such power to the Supreme Court, either. For that reason, I was puzzled by certain commentatorsโ claim that the Supreme Court reserved for itself the power to issue universal injunctions in cases where there had been no class certification.
My mistake.
As one of the speakers in the videoโProf. Goldsmith, I thinkโpointed out, theย very last sentence of the majority opinion is in fact a โnationwideโ/universal injunction!ย That sentence reads, โConsistent with the Solicitor Generalโs representation [that Team Trump wonโt play games with the Supreme Court], ยง2 of the Executive Order shall not take effect until 30 days after the date of this opinion.โย
For context, note that Section 2 is the operative language of the executive orderโthe part that claims to declare the policy of the United States government about who is, and who isnโt, a birthright citizen.ย
The Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard did not know what authority the Court might claim to justify writing that sentence and issuing that order.
And if he doesnโt know, then neither do I.
[1]ย For anyone who might wonder, โLearned Handโ does not refer to Prof. Goldsmithโs penmanship, but rather to Judge Learned Hand, a distinguished jurisprude and federal appellate judge who died in 1961.ย
I discussed the executive order on birthright citizenship in the preceding post.
What is a โNationwide Injunctionโ?
The term โnationwide injunctionโ is inapt and misleading, but lots of people want to use it anyway. So letโs define it for present purposes. For present purposes, a โnationwide injunctionโ is an injunction issued in a case brought by one or more persons (either two-legged persons or juridical persons such as corporations) that protects not only the individual plaintiff(s) but also everyone else in a similar legal position, even though there is no certified โclass actionโ in accordance with Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
As so defined, a nationwide injunction is an end run around the normal requirements for class certification under Rule 23.[1]
To illustrate and explain the point: Plaintiffs in the CASA case include four new mothers and their babies, one pregnant woman and her unborn child, and three undocumented immigrant women who might become pregnant. If the plaintiffs wanted to secure a ruling protecting not only their children but alsoย all children whom Trump threatened to deprive of citizenship, then the normal/traditional route would be to ask the district court to โcertifyโ such a โclassโ of similarly situated mothers. That class certification process involves a number of inquiries about whether it would be advisable for the litigation to go forward on a class basis, not an individual basis. But Liza, Andrea, and the other expectant mothers asked for nationwide/universal relief, without going through the certification exercise.
Before Trump v. CASA, Was There a Legitimate Legal Controversy about Whether Courts Could Issue โNationwide Injunctionsโ?
Yes. Long story. But yes.
In fact, the Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to impose severe limitations on โnationwide injunctions.โ
Some Say it was Oddโand Inadvisableโfor the Court to Rule on the โNationwide Injunctionโ Question but Kick the Can Down the Road on the Substantive Issue of Birthright Citizenship. Do You Agree?
Yes, I do agree. And if anyone reading this post wants to delve deeper, many of the sources cited above will be useful.
But I think the much more interesting question is whether plaintiff can represent a class of similarly situated mothers, babies, and unborn children.
And whether, by so complying with Rule 23, they can find effective legal relief against Trumpโs illegal position on birthright citizenship.
Whatโs Going to Happen Next in the Birthright Citizenship Cases?
Iโll write about that in my next post, which will appear immediately above this one, because the posts on my blog appear in reverse chronological order.
[1] Related, but distinct, issues are raised by lawsuits with plaintiffs claiming to represent a category of other peopleโfor example, a suit brought by a state government on behalf of all its citizen or a suit brought by a trade association on behalf of all its members. Team Trump challenged the โstandingโ of states and associations to bring such cases, but the Court decided to kick this can down the road.
Facing MAGA 