"Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.. opined that race can be considered along with other factors in forming reasonable suspicion to stop someone for an immigration check..."

"... such as where people are gathering and what jobs they are working. 'To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a "relevant factor" when considered along with other salient factors,’ Kavanaugh wrote. The court’s three liberal justices sharply dissented. 'We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job,' Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the dissent. 'Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.'"

From "Supreme Court lifts limits on immigration raids in the Los Angeles area/The raids sparked major protests in Southern California. President Donald Trump deployed troops from the California National Guard and Marines in response" (WaPo).

"The Supreme Court on Monday allowed President Donald Trump to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission despite a federal law..."

"... that is intended to restrict the White House’s power to control the agency.... Trump fired both Democratic commissioners on the five-person FTC in March, [Rebecca Kelly] Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya. Both challenged the move, although Bedoya later dropped out of the case. Slaughter is currently listed as a serving commissioner on the agency’s website, as the case has made its way through the courts. The firings are a direct challenge to a 1935 Supreme Court precedent called Humphrey's Executor v. United States that upheld limits on the president’s ability to fire FTC commissioners without cause, a restriction Congress imposed to protect the agency from political pressure. Under the 1914 law that set up the agency, members can only be removed for 'inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.'"

From "Supreme Court allows Trump to fire FTC commissioner/Trump's actions are in direct tension with a 1935 ruling that upheld restrictions on the president's ability to remove FTC commissioners without cause" (NBC News).

"Slaughter is currently listed as a serving commissioner on the agency’s website" — not anymore. 

ADDED: The fact that NBC News referred to the fired commissioners as "Democratic commissioners" gives away the game. According to Humphrey's Executor, the idea was that "The commission is to be nonpartisan; and it must, from the very nature of its duties, act with entire impartiality." And "It is charged with the enforcement of no policy except the policy of the law." 

Who even remembers to pretend that was supposed to be the idea these days?!

"I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations... This is something that cannot be forgotten!..."

"I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use the Federalist Society as a recommending source on judges. I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real ‘sleazebag’ named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions."

Wrote Donald Trump, quoted in "Trump, Bashing the Federalist Society, Asserts Autonomy on Judge Picks/The president has grown increasingly angry at court rulings blocking parts of his agenda, including by judges he appointed" (NYT). 

The article is by Charlie Savage, who says:

While Mr. Trump was out of power, a schism emerged between traditional legal conservatives and MAGA-style lawyers.... During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump had essentially made a deal with the conservative legal movement. In exchange for its support, he would outsource his judicial selections....

"Was it all bullshit?" — Trump asked, about Elon Musk's promise to cut $1 trillion from the federal budget.

We're told in "Inside Trump and Musk’s Complicated Relationship/The president and his aides have sometimes expressed frustration with Musk, but his advisers say the two remain close" (Wall Street Journal)(no paywall encountered).

We're also told Trump has called Musk "50% genius, 50% boy" or perhaps it was "90% genius, 10% boy."

More substantively:

Musk clashed with senior White House officials, as he made dramatic government cuts without consulting others, including White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and senior officials in the communications office, aides said. For several weeks, top Trump aides regularly learned from news reports or cabinet secretaries what DOGE was doing—even when the cost-cutting department laid off hundreds of people or sought sensitive data from agencies, according to the aides. He also clashed with personnel aides over vetting of some of his staff, some of the people said, believing the White House shouldn’t control his team at DOGE....

I assume that's a misplaced participle and that the phrase beginning with "believing" modifies "He." Don't they have AI to fix things like that?

Anyway, the person who could promise to cut $1 trillion was the person who envisioned himself with vast, unchecked power. Was it all bullshit? Not if you let him do it. Then it wouldn't be bullshit, though it might be crazy. Even on Trump's scale of sane to crazy.

Let me cherry-pick this:

Trump grew irritated in April when he learned Musk was getting a top-secret briefing at the Pentagon on China.... He said Musk getting the briefing was a conflict of interest, two administration officials said. Trump told aides that Musk, who has space contracts, shouldn’t be working at the Pentagon....

And here's some interesting material about the Wisconsin Supreme Court election:

White House aides were... dismayed at how involved Musk became in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race, because they believed Brad Schimel, who was backed by Musk and the state’s Republican party, wasn’t going to win, and the race was becoming a referendum on Musk and Trump. Musk was dismissive of those concerns, saying the polling he commissioned showed Schimel had a chance. Trump became annoyed after doing a town hall with Schimel, telling advisers that he was done with him because Schimel couldn’t answer questions cogently about abortion, according to people familiar with the matter....

Of course, Schimel lost.  

"Attorney General Pam Bondi actually seemed to lean into the idea that this was part of the larger pattern of judicial wrongs that the administration now seeks to right...."

"Appearing on Fox News, Bondi discussed the Wisconsin case and another in which a local New Mexico judge resigned after a man the government has alleged is a member of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua was arrested at his home. But rather than just focus on those two cases, Bondi repeatedly talked as if they were part of a broader problem with the judiciary. 'What has happened to our judiciary is beyond me,' Bondi said.... When Fox host John Roberts asked about the perception created by arresting judges — 'They’ll say this is a government that is expanding the powers of the Article One of the Constitution, now they’re arresting judges,' he said — Bondi didn’t dispute that. 'No one is above the law, John,' she said...."

I'm reading "Pam Bondi’s striking comments on arresting judges/Amid criticisms that the administration is intimidating judges, the attorney general didn’t exactly downplay the idea that this was part of a larger crusade against the judiciary" by Aaron Blake (in WaPo).

No one is above the law is what Trump antagonists said when the authorities arrested him. Four times.

I don't like the use of government authority as a political weapon or as a means of personal revenge, but that WaPo article doesn't get into the meat of what is alleged in the Wisconsin-judge case. Here's Pam Bondi explaining it (on ABC News):

The failure to rip a child from its mother's arms.

I'm reading "2-Year-Old U.S. Citizen Deported 'With No Meaningful Process,' Judge Suspects/A federal judge in Louisiana said the deportation of the child to Honduras with her mother, even though her father had filed an emergency petition, appeared to be 'illegal and unconstitutional'" (NYT).

“The government contends that this is all OK because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” wrote Judge Doughty, a conservative Trump appointee. “But the court doesn’t know that.”

Asserting that “it is illegal and unconstitutional to deport” a U.S. citizen, Judge Doughty set a hearing for May 16 to explore his “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”

Facilitate and effectuate.

From the Supreme Court's statement in Noem v. Abrego Garcia:

On Friday, April 4, the United States District Court for the District of Maryland entered an order directing the Government to "facilitate and effectuate the return of [Abrego Garcia] to the United States by no later than 11:59 PM on Monday, April 7." ... 

The order properly requires the Government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador. The intended scope of the term “effectuate” in the District Court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority. The District Court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs....

That's what you call "minimalism." 

"The aim is clear: to stop the executive branch in its tracks and prevent the administration from changing direction on hundreds of billions of dollars of government largesse..."

"... that the executive branch considers contrary to the United States’ interests and fiscal health. Only this court can right the ship — and the time to do so is now."

Wrote Sarah M. Harris, the acting solicitor general, in an emergency application, quoted in "Supreme Court Lets Trump Suspend Grants to Teachers/In boilerplate letters, the administration told recipients that the grants supported diversity efforts and were wasteful." (NYT).

The Court's order was 5 to 4, with the Chief Justice voting with the 3 liberal Justices.

"Under what theory of the constitution does a single marxist judge in San Francisco have the same executive power as the Commander-in-Chief elected by the whole nation to lead the executive branch?"

Tweet Stephen Miller, quoted by David French in "Trump Is Coming for Every Pillar of the State" (NYT). 

French continues:

As Miller put it in a press briefing last month, “The whole will of democracy is imbued into the elected president.” He is the only elected official who represents the whole of the American people, and he embodies the people’s general will....  

Trump and his team are furious at the federal judiciary, but they’re to blame for their own legal struggles. Trump has issued a host of poorly drafted executive orders. Trump’s administration has snatched people off the streets without adequate due process. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency is unilaterally wrecking agencies that were established by Congress, usurping Congress’s primacy in America’s constitutional structure.

It is not the judiciary’s fault that Trump has chosen to attack the constitutional order, and it is hardly the case that he’s losing only to liberal judges....

"You have a President who has sworn to get tough on the border and get tough on crime expelling from the United States — by his description — hundreds of criminal gang members."

"And so that's an easy narrative to understand. You know, who in the world wouldn't want a bunch of criminal gang members kicked out of the country? And what kind of crazy liberal judge would order those gang members back into America? And if you watch conservative media, that's the argument they're putting out. You know, this judge wants these gang members roaming around the streets, attacking your family and loved ones. You know, obviously this is terrain the Trump administration chose carefully to fight on, and they believe in the court of public opinion, most people will be on their side of this issue."

Says Luke Broadwater, in "Trump’s Showdown With the Courts," the new episode of the NYT podcast "The Daily."

The court of public opinion is part of the system of checks and balances. In the long run, the courts need public support. The law needs public support. The Chief Justice can assert that judges are neutral arbiters, just doing their job in a meticulously professional way, but if people don't believe that, it's not going to work. And if it isn't true, should you hope that people will nevertheless believe, because without the courts carrying out their traditional rituals with solemnity we're lost?

"Just hours after President Trump called for the impeachment of a judge who sought to pause the removal of more than 200 migrants to El Salvador, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. issued a rare public statement."

"'For more than two centuries,' the chief justice said, 'it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.' Mr. Trump had called the judge, James E. Boasberg, a 'Radical Left Lunatic' in a social media post and said he should be impeached."

Writes Adam Liptak, at the NYT.

Liptak was reminded of something the Chief said in 2018, "after Mr. Trump called a judge who had ruled against his administration’s asylum policy 'an Obama judge'": "We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.... What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for."

Of course, that doesn't stop the NYT from telling us the name of the President who appointed the federal judges whose names arise in the news.

"The Trump administration on Monday repeatedly stonewalled a federal judge seeking answers about whether the government had violated his order barring the deportation..."

"...of more than 200 noncitizens without due process, escalating a conflict that threatened to become a constitutional crisis.... Judge James E. Boasberg... said, he wanted only to figure out the timeline of the flights to determine whether they were in violation of his ruling. But [Justice Department lawyer, Abhishek Kambli] repeatedly refused to say anything about the flights, citing 'national security.' He simply reiterated the government’s position that it had done nothing to violate Judge Boasberg’s order..."

The NYT reports.

Meanwhile, Tom Homan said "We’re not stopping.... I don’t care what the judges think — I don’t care what the left thinks. We’re coming."

"Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on Wednesday night handed the Trump administration a victory for now..."

"... in saying that the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department did not need to immediately pay for more than $1.5 billion in already completed aid work. A federal judge had set a midnight deadline for the agencies to release funds for the foreign aid work.... The Trump administration [made] an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court just hours before the deadline.... Chief Justice Roberts issued an 'administrative stay,' an interim measure meant to preserve the status quo while the justices consider the matter in a more deliberate fashion.... However tentative, the stay was nonetheless the first victory for the administration in a deluge of cases that the justices could hear over President Trump’s blitz of executive actions...."

The NYT reports.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: Do you think this is a mixed metaphor: "a deluge of cases about a blitz of executive actions"? And: Would George Orwell have a problem with this dead metaphor?

Anyway, Trump's victory in the Supreme Court isn't much... just preserving the status quo (as Trump disrupts the status quo), but it may feel awfully auspicious.

"At some point, presumably, the justices will draw the line...."

"In any consequential ruling, Chief Justice Roberts will likely be tempted to narrow his reasoning, soften his tone.... For Chief Justice Roberts, unanimity will be hard — even impossible — to achieve in most cases concerning Mr. Trump’s actions as president... Of course, Mr. Trump might defy the court.... Without the support of federal marshals, who answer to Mr. Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, the court cannot enforce its order.... The court will stand alone, abandoned; and Chief Justice Roberts, it is safe to assume, will not escalate a conflict his institution has already lost. He will, however, have one last tool in his arsenal: his voice.... If Mr. Trump flouts a court ruling, the nation will need its chief justice to explain what is happening — and why the executive branch, for all its prerogatives, must be bound by the Constitution...."

Writes Jeff Shesol, in "John Roberts Is on a Collision Course With Trump" (NYT).

"In our constitutional system, the executive power belongs to the president, and that power generally includes the ability to supervise and remove the agents who wield executive power in his stead."

"While we have previously upheld limits on the president's removal authority in certain contexts, we decline to do so when it comes to principal officers who, acting alone, wield significant executive power."

Wrote Chief Justice John Roberts, 5 years ago, quoted in "Trump's firings of independent agency heads put 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent in crosshairs" (CBS News).

In what is likely to be the Trump administration's first Supreme Court emergency appeal of his second term, the solicitor general is expected to ask the high court to permit Dellinger's firing, according to documents obtained Sunday.

Dellinger = Hampton Dellinger, "who oversees the office that investigates whistleblower complaints"

The 90-year-old case =  Humphrey's Executor. Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Neil Gorsuch, called Humphrey's Executor "a direct threat to our constitutional structure and, as a result, the liberty of the American people," and said he "would repudiate what is left of this erroneous precedent."

(It's Humphrey's Executor because the man, who was fired by FDR, had died, and the family was suing for back pay.)

"The Democrats... they're just yelling wolf... they're yelling wolf... they're screaming and yelling that there's a constitutional crisis..."

"Let me be very clear as a historian of the Constitution there has been one — one! — O-N-E — one! — count it:  one — one constitutional crisis in our history that our Constitution was incapable of solving and that, of course, was slavery...  The Constitution was not capable of resolving that issue without a war so we had indeed a constitutional crisis.... Compare that to what's going on today. If you listen to... Chuck Schumer you think we're going have a civil war. No! Listen to Donald Trump.... He said I will comply with every court order and then I will appeal it. And he didn't say this but obviously his lawyers... will seek a stay.... You can't allow hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of federal judges sitting in obscure parts of the country somewhere... in Rhode Island or somewhere in the south of  California to issue an injunction that covers everybody in the United States.... Democrats! Democrats! Don't yell wolf!... Don't tell us that there is no political recourse..... We have  three independent branches of the government — not a fourth. The bureaucracy is not in the Constitution.... It's very complicated. And president Trump for the first time has said let's look hard at these bureaucracies.... If you want to complain about what the administration is doing, that's your right...  but don't exaggerate...."

Says Alan Dershowitz in his excellent new podcast.

And Dershowitz thinks Trump is not necessarily wrong on the birthright citizenship question. He said "I'd love to argue it in front of the United States Supreme Court. I don't know how it would come out." That willingness has a limitation:

"Judges often invoke the separation of powers to limit their own authority, to put certain classes of executive action off-limits from judicial review, or..."

"... to shape and constrain the remedies they provide. That has been true for as long as we have had courts and judicial review.... As a matter of separation of powers, the courts may themselves decide that courts ought not to be the ones to decide a given issue.... To date, all the Trump administration’s responses in court have embodied appeals to these principles. In response to a recent temporary restraining order that seemingly barred all political appointees at the Treasury Department from access to certain internal information, the administration argued in a filing that the work of executive agencies is overseen by the president, and 'a federal court, consistent with the separation of powers, cannot insulate any portion of this work from the specter of political accountability.' That was a straightforward legal appeal to the limits of judicial authority, made within a judicial proceeding as an argument under applicable law. Even where courts have jurisdiction to decide, it is always legally valid to argue that their decisions ought to respect the separation of powers...."

Writes lawprof Adrian Vermeule, in "JD Vance’s Tweet Is No Crisis/Judges also have an obligation to respect the separation of powers. Usually they do so" (Wall Street Journal, no paywall).

"What’s unspoken in Vance’s tweet is the well-established power of courts to police the limits of that discretion, i.e., to decide which exercises of power by the executive branch are, in fact, 'legitimate.'"

"Thus, there are examples of courts interfering in military operations—granting habeas petitions to individuals in military custody; blocking military commission prosecutions; and even, during the Biden administration, blocking the military’s COVID vaccination mandate as applied to certain active-duty troops. There’s even a single example of a federal judge blocking an active military operation—Judge Judd’s July 1973 injunction against President Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia.... That ruling might have been wrong; it certainly wasn’t 'illegal.'... calling a judicial decision 'illegal' certainly sounds like a basis for refusing to abide by it—especially if one believes... that such rulings are 'a violation of the separation of powers.' The proper remedy, of course, is to appeal a decision you believe is wrong. And if the Supreme Court, the federal court of last resort, reaches the 'wrong' decision, there are legal ways to seek to overturn it; refusing to follow it isn’t one of them. But the reality is that there is no history or tradition in this country of presidents ignoring judicial rulings on the ground that they are 'illegal.'..."

Writes lawprof Steve Vladek in "What Vice President Vance Did—and Didn't—Say About Judicial Power" (Substack).

Here's the JD Vance tweet under discussion:

If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal.

If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that's also illegal.

Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.

"A federal judge early Saturday temporarily restricted access by Elon Musk’s government efficiency program to the Treasury Department’s payment and data systems..."

"... saying there was a risk of 'irreparable harm.' The Trump administration’s new policy of allowing political appointees and 'special government employees' access to these systems, which contain highly sensitive information such as bank details, heightens the risk of leaks and of the systems becoming more vulnerable than before to hacking, U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer said in an emergency order.... The order came in response to a lawsuit filed on Friday by Letitia James of New York along with 18 other Democratic state attorneys general, charging that when Mr. Trump had given Mr. Musk the run of government computer systems, he had breached protections enshrined in the Constitution and 'failed to faithfully execute the laws enacted by Congress.'... The Constitution says that a president 'shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.'"

From "Judge Halts Access to Treasury Payment Systems by Elon Musk’s Team/The order came in response to a lawsuit filed by 19 attorneys general accusing the president of failing to faithfully execute the nation’s laws when he let DOGE comb through federal computer systems" (NYT).

Is the federal judge taking the position that in the name of enforcing the Take Care Clause, it is the role of the judiciary to oversee whatever the President does with the executive power that the Constitution vests in him?

Is there some extra-legal notion that the federal judge should seize the power to put on the brakes when a President with questionable judgment is moving too fast? (I'm hearing some lawprofs singing that tune.)

ADDED: Here is the request for a temporary restraining order, and here is the judge's order.

Biden agrees with Trump that Trump gets credit for the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Just like he said: he did it. https://t.co/A0DbnecLuN

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) January 11, 2024