Injustice for All is a weekly series about how the Trump administration is trying to weaponize the justice system—and the people who are fighting back.
Of course a 90-year-old agency is unconstitutional, you rubes
It’s nice of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to give a helping hand to the ongoing destruction of a functioning administrative state and the complete collapse of protections for workers.
And it’s tough to think of a better way to do it than ruling that the structure of a 90-year-old congressionally created agency that forms the backbone of labor relations in America was probably just a ghost all along.
Yes, according to the worst federal appellate court, the structure of the National Labor Relations Board is likely unconstitutional.
The court agreed with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which had argued that the NLRB impermissibly limited the president’s ability to remove board members and the administrative law judges who handle labor cases.
The NLRB has been in the crosshairs of corporations like Amazon and SpaceX, which hate labor oversight and want it gone.
Lucky for them—though not for the rest of us—their interests dovetail with President Donald Trump’s goal of eliminating all restrictions on his power. And since the Supreme Court already let him illegally remove one of the appointed NLRB members months ago, the fix was pretty much in.
9th Circuit makes sure a week doesn’t go by without letting the administration kick more people out
On Wednesday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals swept aside a lower court ruling that was barring Trump from stripping Temporary Protected Status from over 60,000 people from Nepal, Nicaragua, and Honduras.
Congress created the program to allow undocumented immigrants to legally stay in the United States if the Department of Homeland Security determines that conditions in their home country are too dangerous to return to.
Trump and Vice President JD Vance spent the 2024 campaign whipping racists into a frenzy
over Haitians with TPS status and, once they took office, set about stripping the status from everyone their racist little hobgoblin minds could think of.
Related | Vance knew Haitian immigrants weren’t eating pets—and lied anyway
Of course, there has been no court ruling affirming that the administration can do this.
Instead, there are court rulings that they cannot, but since the Supreme Court allowed Trump to strip protected status from nearly 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants while litigation continues, the administration is just going to keep throwing more people out.
The administration’s argument here was the usual: It is extremely harmed if it can’t do what it wants when it wants, and the courts can’t even review their decision to remove TPS status. Sure seems like the greater harm would be to the people who are being deported en masse.
Farewell again, Ten Commandments—but also likely not for long
Two weeks ago, it was Arkansas getting slapped down for its unconstitutional law mandating the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. This week, it was Texas.
U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, with the patience of a saint, wrote a 55-page decision to try to painstakingly explain basic civics to the state of Texas, which has already appealed.
The Texas law would have required the display of the King James Version of the Ten Commandments in schools, and was basically identical to a Louisiana law the 5th Circuit struck down earlier this year.
The whole point of these cases is to get something to a theocratic Supreme Court in the hopes the right-wing majority will sign off on jamming conservative evangelical Protestantism into public schools, but at least for now, we have Biery’s objectively funny decision to bring us joy:
Even though the Ten Commandments would not be affirmatively taught, the captive audience of students likely would have questions, which teachers would feel compelled to answer. That is what they do. Teenage boys, being the curious hormonally driven creatures they are, might ask: “Mrs. Walker, I know about lying and I love my parents, but how do I do adultery?” Truly an awkward moment for overworked and underpaid educators, who already have to deal with sex education issues, … and a classic example of the law of unintended consequences in legislative edicts.
Yeah, unfortunately it’s legal for military attorneys to do civilian prosecutions
As the Trump administration continues its efforts to subdue the residents of the nation’s capital, there’s news that 20 members of the Judge Advocate General Corps, known as JAG, from the Department of Defense have been tapped to work as special assistant United States attorneys—aka federal prosecutors—and will prosecute civilian crimes.
This seems bad, and it probably is, but unlike so many other things the administration is doing, this one is actually legal. During the first Reagan administration, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel concluded this was unlawful, but then Congress passed a law authorizing it.
Presumably, this is also in part because Jeanine Pirro, Fox News host turned United States attorney for the District of Columbia, just whined about how her office was understaffed.
It is, indeed, thanks to the massive purge of prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases. There’s an additional benefit to using JAG attorneys as your temp agency: unlike civilians, they can’t just quit.
This is likely the first time we’ve seen “Calvinball” in a Supreme Court opinion, but it won’t be the last
In an absolute mess of a decision, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the administration can cancel $783 million in National Institute of Health grants.
Per the 5-4 conservative majority, the states and private plaintiffs being arbitrarily stripped of millions in public health do have recourse: They can go to the Court of Federal Claims, which is the court you go to for contractual disputes with the government.
Of course, this isn’t a contractual dispute. These are grants that have already been issued and approved.
Per a different 5-4 majority, however, the underlying reason the administration gave for the terminations—that they represented forbidden wokeness, basically—was likely unlawful. That weird result is because Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the majority in saying that the reason for the grant terminations is unlawful, but also joined the majority in saying they can go ahead and do it anyway. Got it.
“Calvinball” shows up in Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s blistering dissent: “This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”
Exactly that.