Monday, June 30, 2025

Part I

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Ending the Term with Thunder: The Supreme Court Clarifies the Relationship Between the Executive and Judicial Branches

In the beginning of this term of the United States Supreme Court, many observers suggested that it might be a quiet year. It didn’t turn out that way. By the time the court ended its term just days ago, it ended with thunder and lightning. It ended with a series of decisions, and, of course, we look to June just about every year, because the court tends to hold its biggest decisions until the days just before it goes into its summer recess. Well, the court may now be in recess, but the reverberations of these decisions are going to be felt for a very long time.

Now, thinking of this last few-day period of the Supreme Court, I want to go back to United States versus Skrmetti. That was the decision we’ve already discussed in which the Supreme Court, along predictable lines, declared that the State of Tennessee does not violate the Constitution when it has prohibited transgender treatments for children and teenagers. So, what the court said, listen, remember, is not that the State of Tennessee must have such legislation, but that it is within the power of the State of Tennessee to adopt such legislation on the grounds and for the purposes that Tennessee had stated.

So, a major blow to the transgender ideologues, a major blow to the legal momentum that the LGBTQ+ movement have been claiming for a very long time. A reset, but a reset along lines that many of us did see coming when it comes to the transgender issue and teenagers, a controversy on both sides of the Atlantic, and frankly, a clarifying issue for many people who seem to be, well, quite apparently confused about the LGBTQ moral revolution. They seem to be less confused about male and female. They tend to be less confused when it comes to children and teenagers.

So, that was one of the claps of thunder as the court was going into the end of its current term, but there were at least three others to follow, and when we looked at what happened last week, let’s consider this. The biggest of all, the biggest thunderclap of all, was in the case known as Trump, President of the United States, versus CASA Incorporated. Now, this case is a little different because it came to the nation’s highest court as an application for a partial stay of a lower court’s ruling. The lower court’s ruling was one that put on hold, that basically nullified, at least for a time, the Trump administration’s policy on birthright citizenship.

So it was a showdown between the executive branch and a federal district court judge, or, actually, more than one federal district court judge. The point is that these federal district court judges went on to declare what they claimed would be a nationwide injunction against the president of the United States on this policy. Now, when it comes to the birthright citizenship issue, the court didn’t issue a specific ruling on that question at all. You can almost now count on the fact that it’s going to be back to the court in pretty short order, and folks are going to see that it gets there pretty fast. But what did happen, and this is incredibly significant, the Supreme Court came back and said that district court judges cannot, certainly in any routine way, issue an injunction that’s nationwide based upon their own interpretation of the law and the constitution.

Now, what we have had is a showdown between successive presidents and federal judges. That’s not particularly new, but it sure has become a hotter issue in the last, say, 50 or 60 years. Presidents of both parties, particularly in the last 30 years, have complained that you have district court judges, which are taking action to declare injunctions against presidential or executive branch actions. And so you have an imbalance here. You have the president of the United States elected in a national election. You have federal district court judges. The operational word there is district. There are 677 such district court judges according to the limit established by Congress. 677 versus one, the president of the United States.

Furthermore, as I said, the word district is the most important word in our consideration of that level of federal judges because they have a very, very important role. They are federal judges with what amounts to a lifetime appointment to the bench. They fulfill a very crucial role in our constitutional and legal system, but they are district court judges. There are two levels of appellate courts above the district courts.

Now, it can get more complicated than that, but the easiest way to understand it is that you have several districts put together in a circuit, and then you have the U.S. circuit courts of appeal, or the court of appeal for the blank circuit, depending upon its number. Those circuits, and indeed the word circuit, goes back to the fact that the appellate judges back in the earliest era were riding on horseback. They rode a circuit between the districts. So, it’s a little bit of history in the arcane nature of a circuit, but you get the point. It is a larger geographical area, a larger designation also approved by Congress.

And, of course, at the very top you have the Supreme Court of the United States. And so the Supreme Court of the United States has the power to make absolutely nationwide rulings, and frankly, whatever decisions or rulings are handed down by the Supreme Court, they basically all come with national importance, if not immediate national application.

But when we’re thinking about the separation of powers envisioned by our constitutional framers, you have the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judiciary. It really doesn’t make sense at all that one or multiple federal district court judges could, in effect, defy a president of the United States, and that means the entire executive branch as we think about this kind of authority.

Presidents of both parties have complained about this. It’s very interesting to see that this particular question came before this court at this time, and this was the ruling, again along predictable lines. The Republican-appointed justices one way and the Democratically-appointed justices the other way, but Democratic presidents, and conservatives should keep this in mind, Democratic presidents, in ways that will confound and frankly frustrate many conservatives, they will take advantage of this authority as well.

But this is what many conservatives, indeed the mainstream conservative tradition, has understood the power of the President to be. It is a unitary executive, and thus the Constitution invests this authority in the president of the United States, who is not only at the top of the executive branch, in one sense, he is the executive branch in terms of defining issues, even defining the law for his branch.

Now, that does not mean that the president’s power is unchecked. The president’s power can well come up against the Supreme Court of the United States. It can also come up, of course, even more routinely against the power of the legislature, against the power of Congress. Congress has enormous power and authority to act. But in the main, what we have seen over the course of the last several decades, is that Congress has receded, leaving more authority to presidents.

One issue here is that it appears two things are happening. Number one, congressional elections are being nationalized, and secondly, because of that, many members of Congress don’t want to touch some of the hottest issues. So this has created a vacuum. It has been a power that has fallen to the executive branch. The executive branch, in the case of President Trump, has exercised that authority “energetically,” another word from The Federalist discussion. And President Trump was tremendously frustrated by district court judges issuing injunctions against his actions, injunctions not only with a local effect, with a particular case-referenced effect, but with a national effect. This is largely corrective to that. The Supreme Court has spoken on this issue. It was a divided opinion. 

The majority opinion was written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and it really seems to be a very brilliant statement of the rightful understanding of the separation of powers, the power of the presidency and of the executive branch, and the definition of the powers of the courts.

So again, the president can be confronted by the power of the legislature. The president can be confronted by, or have to deal with, the power of the judicial branch, the Supreme Court of the United States. But a president cannot have his actions nullified by one federal district court judge, not with a nationwide application. So, it’s going to be very interesting to see where we go from here, but this is a change in one sense in the presidency. It is one of the signs that, over time, power does tend to become more and more concentrated in one branch of government.

Arguably, that’s what happened when the courts took more authority at the midpoint of the 20th century, and you’ve also had powers of a very energetic and legislatively active Congress, but in more recent decades that power has been flowing to the executive. This decision recognizes that, but also makes very clear there is an executive authority that has to be respected, and if anything, this appears to have put the relationship between the executive branch and the judicial branch back into a more proper frame.

Part II

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Big Wins for Parents at the Supreme Court: Nation’s Highest Court Defends Parental Authority in Two Crucial Cases

Two other decisions were big wins for parents, and, I think in the context, really big wins. The first one came having to do with Maryland. And in Maryland, the Montgomery County Public Schools, they had eliminated a policy that allowed parents to opt out their children when issues of LGBTQ nature, sexual morality nature were to arise. The parents were to be forewarned of such a thing and have the opportunity to opt their children out of those experiences if those experiences would violate the parents’ religious beliefs and the right of parents to raise their children in accordance with those religious beliefs.

Now, the background of this, of course, is LGBTQ materials, and it basically came down to something like a children’s story time. But of course, as in every case like this, it’s a little more complicated. So, it wasn’t just the books that were read to the children, it is also the teaching guides that the school board had adopted, the school system had adopted. The books were children’s books with titles like Uncle Bobby’s Wedding. Let’s just say it’s not to a woman, a book like Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope, a book entitled Prince & Knight, and, well, let’s just say that’s a fractured fairy tale, a book entitled Love Violet and Intersection Allies with a subhead We Make Room for All. So put a little critical theory, a little cultural Marxism in there, and of course illustrate for a children’s book. Read it to a class of unsuspecting children, and be guided by, in this case the teacher be guided by, a teaching guide that’s really clear about affirming LGBTQ, and you can put an exclamation point at the end of that series.

Now, I don’t know if you were paying attention to the oral arguments for this case when they came up now months ago, but there was something that took place in those oral arguments. Justice Neil Gorsuch referred to one of these books and to one of the situations, one of the drawings, and identified the person as a sex worker. Justice Amy Coney Barrett then corrected him, “No, that’s a drag queen.” Now, I don’t think that’s a situation that our founders would have envisioned. You have two justices of the Supreme Court basically looking at a book trying to decide if a character’s a sex worker or a drag queen. It turns out that Justice Barrett was probably right, it was a drag queen, but you get the point. Drag queen story hour, more or less.

Now, as you might expect, this case is a great deal larger than, say, a set of parents in one school system, even in one school system in Maryland. This is about a far larger principle. It’s the principle as to whether or not parents do have the right to raise their children according to their own religious convictions. And this means, let’s be really clear, that these parents still have the right to protect their children from being indoctrinated into an alternative religion.

And that is exactly what this story time was really all about, what these books are all about. You just look at them. They are books that I could just only describe as evangelistic for the LGBTQ cause for children. It’s almost like they’re tracts written for children. You look at this and you also recognize there’s something larger going on here, and it’s the larger subversion of parental authority. It’s the larger context in which increasingly over the course of the last several decades, the public schools have arrogated to themselves what children should know, what children should think, how children should believe on these issues, and parents are increasingly being cut out.

Now, there are other ways around this that require a lot of parental insight and supervision. And so for instance, in one state on the West Coast, you had an opt-out provision that was a matter of law, and so some of the school districts were redefining this kind of material as health education rather than sex education, because then they didn’t have to offer advanced notice or an opt-out provision for parents. In the case of Montgomery County, Maryland, the school system was pretty much just absolutely resolute and condescending simultaneously, just basically saying to parents, “We used to have this opt-out provision, but it was unworkable. Things got too complicated, so you’re out. You’re out of luck. Your children are ours from when they arrive at school to when they leave.”

The majority opinion in this case was written by Justice Samuel Alito, and his logic, as always characteristic of his opinions, is just incredibly clear. He made very clear that in this case, the public school district was not only leaving parents out of the equation but intentionally doing so and at the violation of religious liberty. And he took the issue apart piece by piece. But equally revealing is the response to Justice Alito’s majority opinion that came, for instance, from Justice Sonia Sotomayor. In her dissenting opinion, she said, “Today’s ruling threatens the very existence of public education.”

Well, of course, in one very real sense, it does, because the modern project of public education, unlike the originating project of public education, is largely now driven by leftist ideologies and is increasingly in the hands of education schools, liberal teacher unions, and all the rest. The average parent in the United States honestly has very little idea of exactly what is going on in these schools and exactly what is intended for the future.

The New York Times cited Justin Driver, a Yale law professor. He said, “This decision succeeds in opening Pandora’s box in countless classrooms located in our nation’s public schools.” He went on to say, “It unwisely grants parents and students the authority to, in effect, veto individual school lessons and assignments, thereby wreaking educational havoc.” Well, there’s a sense in which that just might be true. It might be the case. It might lead to educational havoc. Of course, you have to ask the question, what will be the cost of avoiding that educational havoc? And that will be simply handing over our children to the public schools and saying, “Have at them.”

Now, in the larger picture, I think Justice Sotomayor is right. I think this does raise the entire question as to the viability of the public schools. We are looking now at a cultural clash in this country that is so deep, and frankly so intractable, that it’s hard to imagine how, say, liberal parents would want their children in a conservative-dominated school, or conservatives would want their children in a liberal-dominated school.

But when it comes to public schools, we’re really talking about conservatives being frustrated at the liberal regime that starts, as I say, in political circles, it starts in intellectual circles, it starts in the educational schools. It is absolutely driven through the major teachers’ unions, and it is increasingly evident even in more rural districts where many parents thought “we’re protected from all of this.”

Given the federal mandates, given the influence of all these elites, quite honestly, given the standardization of the curriculum in so many cases, what you have is the fact that the schools are increasingly becoming alien territory. And the howling you hear from the public school establishment here just indicates the nature and scale of the problem.

It’s also interesting to know that the parents who brought the original action there in Maryland represented various faith convictions. They came from different religious convictions. The point is they had religious convictions. And what was in common is that those religious convictions were violated by the public schools there in Montgomery County by this policy.

Now, the court, in establishing the fact that the parents had a constitutional right that was being violated by the Montgomery County Public Schools, the court didn’t give exact guidelines as to how school systems are to think these issues through. And so you can pretty much count on the fact there’s going to be continued litigation, and a lot of this is going to turn into something like hand-to-hand combat in school board meetings. But conservative parents and conservative citizens at least need to know that a major win was scored by the Supreme Court in this decision, and it is now up to parents everywhere and school board members everywhere to bring moral sanity and constitutional respect, not to mention the sanity of surrendering to the LGBTQ ideologues.

The reality is this is an ongoing challenge. Parents have to know that. But it is very encouraging to know that the Supreme Court of the United States, once again in a predictable pattern, liberal conservative justices, Republican appointed, Democratic appointed justices, they took the right action in this case. Honestly, when you look at the opinion, they took the right action for the right reasons. It was respect for the role and authority of parents. It was respect for religious liberty.

There was another big score for parents, for family, for sanity in a case that came from Texas, and in this case, known as Free Speech Coalition versus Paxton, that’s the reference to the attorney general there in Texas, an alliance came against the State of Texas for passing a law that requires pornographic sites to get age verification in a very systematic and structured way from users of those pornographic sites. Of course, this was to prevent minors from having access to pornography. In this case, when we’re talking about pornography, we are talking about just about anything you could classify as pornography.

You would think immediately that any sane parent would understand the necessity of preventing children and teenagers from getting access to that material. You would think that legislators would think that to be their responsibility, and thankfully in Texas they did. But almost immediately you had free speech advocates and the pornography industry and their fellow travelers come up and bring this challenge. I think many of them thought they were going to win this case precisely because similar cases have been decided in favor of the porn industry, or at least what was described as free expression and the freedom of speech, in recent decades.

But in this case, the Supreme Court said, “You’re not going to win this one.” Basically, the porn industry was handed a giant restriction, and now it’s up to every state to follow the example of Texas in requiring this age verification. It’s not enough when it comes to confronting the scourge of pornography, but it would be a significant start. The very fact that the porn industry, and not only that, several online libertarian groups, were arguing against this law, and as a matter of fact, it was very interesting. One of the arguments that came down was an argument in which some people said, “The right of free speech is more important.” The right of online access, as it’s described, was more important than the goal of preventing the injury that would come to young people by pornography.

Now, just think about that. I’m very thankful the Supreme Court wasn’t buying the argument. Parents won big on this one. I think children and teenagers won big on this one. The porn industry lost big on this one, and now, as I said, it’s up to other states to follow the example of Texas. We need to do this. We need to see this in every state immediately. It’s not enough, but it will be a significant start, and now you have a Supreme Court decision that’s of great assistance in that effort.

Part III

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A Landmark Case in the Defense of Human Life: SCOTUS Sides with South Carolina Against Planned Parenthood

Another big decision, this one came down with reference to the State of South Carolina, and it came down to the fact that in 2018, Governor Henry McMaster there in South Carolina, Republican governor, he issued an executive order that barred Planned Parenthood as an organization from receiving funds through the state’s Medicaid program. An interesting challenge came in. Clearly, what the governor was doing in that case, he was putting the power of the state government over against Planned Parenthood, and it was acknowledged at the time that there is legislation that, for the most part, bans Planned Parenthood from receiving federal funding, taxpayer funding for performing abortions.

But Planned Parenthood was in South Carolina before this action receiving Medicaid funds for “other services.” But here’s the deal. Those other services amount to millions and millions of dollars, and those other services, supposedly not abortion, they underline the fact that these funds, one way or another, directly or indirectly, were undergirding Planned Parenthood as the nation’s largest abortion provider.

And so I think Governor McMaster gave us a great example of a governor handing down his own executive action that prevented this. And frankly, the State of South Carolina prevailed in this. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the State of South Carolina did not violate any constitutional right. Technically, it ruled that individuals in the state did not have a right to appeal this issue, and challenge the governor’s decision in the courts.

In the language of the decision, the court ruled that patients do not have the right to sue when Medicaid funds are denied to a provider. This was, in essence, a landmark case in the defense of human life. And once again, as on the pornography issue, other states need to follow the example of Texas on the Planned Parenthood defunding. Emphatically, other states need to follow the example of South Carolina.

So, you may think that’s an awful lot of action at the end of the Supreme Court term, and that’s now often the case. But as I said, this term began with lower expectations about what would happen this June, and it came with very-high-impact decisions and decisions that remind us, just given the pattern so often in these cases, 6-3, 6-3, 6-3, elections have consequences. When you consider that only the president of the United States has the power to nominate individuals to the Supreme Court, you recognize how different it would be if you changed the six to the three and the three to the six. Elections have consequences. Don’t you know it?

Part IV

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Stigma is Just Dead? Celebrity Frenzy Reaches New Heights at Bezos Wedding and What the Lavish Venetian Wedding Reveals about (Re)Marriage in 2025

Well, all right, before leaving for today, I need to say that there were probably more people, this tells you something about human nature, interested in the Jeff Bezos, Lauren Sanchez wedding than were interested in the decisions handed down from the Supreme Court. That’s lamentable but true. It’s a symptom of a celebrity culture and a celebrity culture that is now reached insane proportions. You talk about conspicuous consumption, overspending, just lavishness beyond imagination in what amounts to a cartoon of a wedding among the mega rich. It is estimated that the expenses for this wedding will be in the tens of millions of dollars. When you look at all this going on, it could well be more.

We are also told by the New York Times that this is a new trend, a new trend of celebrity weddings, in particular big spending for second weddings. The argument is you’re older, you know more, you have better taste in your forties than you had in your twenties or in your fifties than you had in your thirties. And so the average of these upscale weddings is now about $4 million, we are told, among the mega rich. Now, that’s probably about 1% of what the Bezos-Sanchez wedding ran. 750 to 1,000 dollars catering per person.

But in terms of moral change, I think this is huge. Sarah Lyall wrote an article for The New York Times, but what’s really interesting is that there’s a moral point she thinks is minor that I think is actually major. The headline in her article that ran last Sunday was “Producing a Spectacle for a Sequel to ‘I Do.’” But here’s the subhead. “Absent Any Stigma These Days, a Second Wedding May Be Lavish.” Okay, hold onto that. She writes in the article, “It seems quaint to remember the days when second weddings are typically quiet and modest affairs, particularly after a bit of adultery. Perhaps there was a sense that everyone was allowed just one public spectacle style wedding in a lifetime.”She went on to say, maybe it was considered a crude “to declare ‘Til death to us part’ once again when death had clearly not parted you the first time you said it.”

But I think this is really a big story, and I don’t mean from the celebrity sensationalism. I think that’s just gauche. It’s an embarrassment. I think it says a great deal about the national media, by the way, that they talked about how gauche this was, how over the top this was, and how ridiculous it was, and how celebrity watching is insane, and yet they had their own motorboats in the Venetian canals following the wedding because they are making money out of this wedding pornography.

But let’s go back to that subhead, “Absent Any Stigma These Days, a Second Wedding May Be Lavish.” The key word there is stigma. What is that? That’s moral judgment, negative moral judgment. The point here is that, as a society, we’re over negative moral judgment when it comes to second weddings. And as the article makes clear, you could include adultery in that package too.

It’s an argument that society is just over making moral judgments about the fact that marriage vows should be truthful, and that marriage should be a permanent institution, and that there could be something wrong with adultery, something wrong with serial second marriages, and for that matter, something wrong with the fact that the second marriage is sometimes left back in the dust, or a third, or a fourth, Hollywood style, celebrity style. But increasingly, you see the breakdown of marriage in the entire culture.But what you need to know is that in this case, what happens in Venice doesn’t stay in Venice. The whole point of being a cultural style maker is to make the style of the culture. And make no mistake, the Bezos-Sanchez wedding is a big expensive attempt to do just that.

By the way, there’s a new book out entitled “The Haves and the Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich.” It’s by Evan Osnos, who writes a good deal for The New Yorker. It really is a very interesting book about the race for the biggest yacht. And by that I mean for the most expensive yacht. There are yachts, there are mega yachts, and then there are the yachts of people like Jeff Bezos. And it gets down to all kinds of interesting issues. The fact that there are people who are fleeing international justice, and so they’re just out there on the water on these super expensive boats. Some of them were the vessels owned by Russian oligarchs, but basically, you have to be an oligarch of one sort or another to have this kind of boat in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Osnos makes the point that if conspicuous consumption is your aim, you’re running out of the opportunity to build the biggest house. But when it comes to building the biggest boat, well, you can just sail it right in front of everybody and make them look at it. In essence, that’s exactly what this wedding represents, as an attempt to get attention. And the fact is, they got it. But if indeed the stigma is gone in this kind of situation, that’s the bigger story, bigger than the yacht, bigger than the wedding.