“Yesterday, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Trump v. CASA, where it reviewed lower court decisions to stop President Trump from implementing his executive order on birthright citizenship pending a final ruling. The court did not say whether the administration’s executive order that withholds citizenship from those born in the country to mothers who are not lawfully present or only lawfully in the country on a temporary basis is unconstitutional and illegal under longstanding precedent. That fight will continue in the lower courts …. But the other big headline here is that the Supreme Court essentially destroyed so-called ‘universal injunctions.’ This will make it much harder to stop the government from abusing rights. It will also have all kinds of predictable and unpredictable consequences.” (06/28/25)
“The bombing of Guernica in 1937 unveiled weapons of mass destruction aimed at civilian populations. While Picasso’s famous painting depicting that event brought cubism and outrage together, Guernica marks a more critical narrative demarcation point – the beginning of current US military culture. Hitler and Mussolini’s targeting of a Basque town in 1937 to assist Generalissimo Francisco Franco in the quest to overthrow the republic employed the cutting edge of war technology. Saturation bombing of civilians would be a universal feature of the Second World War, but eventually the US would reinvent the psychology of warfare. Today the US runs a global empire founded almost exclusively on serial terrorism from the sky.” (06/27/25)
“Both scientists and the public are frustrated with the scientific enterprise. Scientists spend considerable amounts of time writing grants that are not funded. The publication process is tedious. There is a lack of open scientific discourse, leading to questionable medical and public health practices and an increasingly distrustful public. Change is needed, and this Perspective presents a blueprint for NIH reforms with the dual goal of ensuring scientific integrity and innovation, which is needed to restore trust among the American public who generously fund NIH through their taxes.” (06/27/25)
“The Trump administration announced an end to temporary legal protections for Haitian migrants in the United States, leaving hundreds of thousands of people at risk of deportation. The temporary protected status designation, or TPS, for Haitian nationals in the United States expires in early August and will terminate Sept. 2, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement Friday. … The statement did not elaborate on why it considered Haiti safe for citizens. Meanwhile, the U.S. government continues to advise Americans against all travel to Haiti, which has been under a state of emergency since March 2024 because of ‘kidnapping, crime, civil unrest, and limited health care.'” (06/28/25)
“One of the perennial questions of political philosophy is the relationship between man and nature. Is nature fundamentally hostile to life, or does it — instead — make all we cherish worthwhile? For all their disagreements, thinkers as different as Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau all saw man’s relationship with nature as a fundamental, perhaps the fundamental, problem of politics. But despite the ever-present character of this problem, contemporary American society has increasingly become uncomfortable with questions about it. The modern blockbuster — defined as it often is by stories of superheroes, fairy tales, and sci-fi universes — so often speaks to us not about the frequently uneasy relationship between man and nature but about the human capacity to transcend the limitations of our natures, to become whatever it is we want to be.” (06/27/25)
“There is nothing inherently wrong with using the doctrine of standing (that is, whether a case can legitimately be brought before the courts) and balance-of-power analytics to limit what courts can and should do. But when those doctrines are used so frequently to avoid providing remedies to blatant governmental misconduct, and when those decisions have the effect of unleashing the worst fever dreams of Donald Trump — who has already been favored by the Court with absolute immunity from prosecution for crimes committed in office — the independence of the Court necessarily comes into question. In less polite terms, the stink of political activism is all over this Court.” (06/27/25)
“President Trump says he’s ‘terminating all discussions on trade with Canada, effective immediately,’ after Canada announced a digital services tax on large foreign and domestic technology companies. Posting on Truth Social on Friday afternoon, the president said the U.S. will let Canada know what their tariff rate will be in the next week. The trade talks blowup comes only a week after the president met with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the Group of Seven economic summit in Alberta. … Canada is one of the United States’ biggest trading partners. The U.S. has imposed tariffs on most imports from Canada, and Canada has hit back with tariffs on U.S. exports to Canada.” (06/27/25)
