But what if we take him at his word that all he meant was after four more years of Trump they’ll be so happy they won’t need anything more? What does a world that makes the “beautiful Christians” that attend these kind of summits say “Yup, that’s pretty much everything I wanted” look like?

What has been clear since Dobbs is now undeniable: the majority wants to force their own religious and ideological view on the rest of us, and they’re perfectly willing to start with their desired conclusion and then work backwards to come up with some fig-leaf reasoning if that’s what it takes. After all, Republicans didn’t spend years bribing Justice Thomas to remain on the court, stonewall all of Obama’s nominations eight months before the election, abolish the filibuster for Supreme Court confirmations, court Justice Kennedy to resign, stand by a nominee credibly accused of sexual assault, and ram through a third confirmation literally weeks before the next election just to watch their shiny new majority make slightly more conservative rulings. The incoherence is just a side effect — it turns out it’s surprisingly hard to maintain a coherent legal doctrine when you’re hell-bound determined to shoe-horn whatever argument you can to fit the conclusion you’ve already reached.

Roberts and the rest of the Federalist-Society-approved majority claim they are simply overturning centuries of badly-reasoned law, but there’s no reason the rest of us have to buy into this gaslighting. Call it what it is: a demand by a rogue court in active revolt. In essence the Court is saying “we’re calling the shots now and if you don’t like it, sue us!”

Alexander Hamilton famously called the judiciary the weakest of the three branches because it has “no influence over either the sword or the purse.” But he then goes on to say “liberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone, but would have every thing to fear from its union with either of the other departments.” Unfortunately the unconstitutional leanings of the rogue majority is shared by the MAGA-owned Republican Party that currently runs the House, leadership in almost half the states, and possibly the Presidency come next year. The flag adopted by both Christian Nationalists and the January 6th insurrection has recently been flown by both Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito. We’re dangerously close to the tipping point, and honestly I think if Trump wins the presidency then the Republic will be damaged in ways that can’t simply be reverted. And this court is going to help Trump become president any way it can. Count on it.

But if the Republic does survive then this reframing has two implications.

First, lawmakers should have no compunction about taking any legal means to clip the wings of this rogue court, including doing away with the filibuster if necessary. There are many proposals out there: undoing their worst rulings through legislation, term limits, jurisdiction stripping, impeachment and removal of some of the most corrupt justices, and increasing the size of the court to name a few. None of these are easy — most require at least a simple majority in both houses and the presidency, which is not happening immediately and in the meantime this court and state legislatures are actively working to thwart it. But Democrats, and Republicans if the party ever becomes sane again, should run on fixing the courts and should ignore the howls from those who have already proven themselves bad-faith actors.

Second, our legal scholars and lawmakers need to internalize that this is not a normal court. We really do need the stability that stare decisis gives, but at the same time we can’t simply reward bad actors by locking in years of the fruits of corruption. My dream is that some day we can reach a consensus that every last decision from the last few years (and possibly even the entire Roberts court) has a little virtual asterisk next to it indicating that it needs revisiting.

I kept flashing back to that story as I was watching last night’s presidential debate. In one hand we had Trump spewing a firehose of bald-faced lies, in the other we had a clearly flustered Biden trying to keep up.

In Trump world Nanci Pelosi is responsible for the January 6th insurrection, for 51 years “everybody” has wanted Roe vs. Wade to be overturned, Democrats want to be able to kill babies after birth, food costs under Biden have “doubled and tripled and quadrupled“, Trump’s claim that there were “good people on both sides” of the alt-right protest in Charlottesville has been “debunked”, his former chief-of-staff is lying when he says Trump called veterans who died for their country “suckers and losers”, he never had sex with a porn star, it was Trump and not Biden who capped insulin at $35, and it was Biden and not Trump who was rated worst president in history. Honestly it was exhausting to listen to all this crap when he was president and I’m annoyed I have to keep listening to it now.

Here in the real world, Trump has been impeached twice, once for withholding aid to Ukraine to get them to make up dirt on Biden and a second time for instigating a violent attack on the capitol to keep himself in power after losing the 2020 election. He has been convicted of 34 felonies for covering up hush-money payments to a porn star he had sex with while his wife was nursing their first child. He has been found by court of law to have raped (excuse me, “digitally and forcibly penetrated”) Jean Carroll in the mid 1990s and required to pay $88.3 million in damages for subsequent defamation against her. He is responsible for the repeal of Roe v. Wade and the resulting health risks to women now forced to bring a non-viable fetus to term. He has threatened to leave NATO and told allies that if they didn’t pay their bills he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want.” And don’t even get me started on Project 2025.

Meanwhile, Biden has accomplished a great deal in his 3.5 years as president (in addition to simply being sane / not Trump, which honestly I consider job one). His successful rallying of allies against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was breathtaking to see, the vaccine roll-out was smooth, and the economic plans he pushed through congress have helped the US economy recover from the pandemic much faster than the rest of the world. I was even impressed with how smoothly the pull-out from Afghanistan went, despite some chaos in the first few days. His administration has also tackled some issues I’d almost given up on, like pushing back against monopolies, increasing funding for IRS audits, allowing Medicare to negotiate with drug companies, and re-instituting net neutrality.

Just 129 days until the election, and current polls put the outcome at essentially a toss-up (and that’s based on polls before last night’s debate). I’m worried, but I still have hope that we all eventually realize we can just hang up and walk away — and then with luck we’ll never haver to listen to Trump again.

The authors make it clear in the very first paragraph that they are studying gender non-contentedness (the desire to be the opposite sex, for whatever reason) and not gender dysphoria (incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender):

There’s obviously a world of difference between “I wish I had been born a boy” and “I am a boy, my body got it wrong.” Unfortunately this distinction seems to be getting lost in translation. Kevin Drum (who is usually more careful) seemed to miss the distinction completely, summarizing the paper in a blog post titled Raw data: Gender dysphoria in teens, with similarly mislabeled graphs. I expect Drum’s misunderstanding is accidental, but it’s unfortunate because such a misunderstanding can be used to further the argument that teens should be denied gender-affirming hormones and/or hormone blockers.

And right on cue, within hours Wesley Smith at the National Review writes Study: Most Gender-Confused Children become Gender-Conforming Adults. He uses the term “gender confused“, a non-clinical term that is usually synonymous with gender dysphoria but also used by assholes people skeptical of transgenderism to refer to general issues around trans identity. Regardless of Smith’s intended meaning he quickly gets to his main point:

Smith’s argument against puberty blockers would be non-sensical even if they were being prescribed for gender non-contentedness. After all, the whole point of blockers is to delay puberty (and the permanent physical changes that come with it) to give a child, parents and care team time to decide the best course of action — which is exactly what you want if there’s a chance you might “grow out of it.” But puberty blockers aren’t recommended after the age of 14 or so (the body needs puberty to promote bone density), so at that point there needs to be a decision: stop blockers and let the body’s natural hormones start to surge or start taking hormones of the appropriate sex (testosterone for trans-male, estrogen for trans-female). Either decision leads to permanent body changes so it’s not like doing nothing is the “safe” choice, and in the end the child, parents and care team will need to make a decision.

The fact that a lot of children grow out of gender non-contentedness certainly weighs against deciding to take permanent action for children who aren’t suffering from gender dysphoria — which is presumably why doctors don’t do it. As described in this 2022 paper on gender affirming care:

Hopefully this study won’t become the latest cause célèbre of folks who want to discredit gender-affirming care, but if it does then you heard it here first: it doesn’t say what they say it says.

EmptyWheel has a nice write-up on how what we know so far lines up with the Espionage Act.

Conservatives say, “Abortion isn’t mentioned anywhere in the Constitution and it was illegal almost everywhere before 1973.” In response, liberals stutter and stammer and reel off a few hundred incomprehensible words about a complicated and unintuitive legal doctrine.

Look, it’s not that hard to understand. There is no way in hell that that the document that enshrines our most fundamental liberties would nevertheless allow a state to force someone to undergo a procedure that permanently changes the shape of their body, costs tens of thousands of dollars, culminates in what has been described as “one of the most severe pains which has ever [been] evaluated,” and when it goes wrong can lead to permanent damage, infertility or death. If your favorite method of constitutional interpretation comes up with a different answer then that’s a good indication that your method is either flawed or, more likely, was chosen to get the answer you wanted.

Edit 7/7: I just wanted to add that this kind analysis isn’t new. At just 4,400 words long, the U.S. Constitution is the shortest written constitution of any major government in the world. It’s not a piece of legislation, it’s an outline. As Chief Justice Marshall put it in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), “Its nature, therefore, requires that only its great outlines should be marked, its important objects designated, and the minor ingredients which compose those objects be deduced from the nature of the objects themselves.” (Check out Alan Brownstein’s op-ed in The Hill for more on the limits of textualism.)

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