Who, precisely, is primus inter pares? It has long been the overwhelming US legal consensus that it's SCOTUS. but,
"HOW MANY REGIMENTS DOES
CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS HAVE?"
CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS HAVE?"
Paraphrasing a reported musing of Josef Stalin (?) regarding the Pope—"how many Divisions does the Pope have?"
"Separation of Powers?" "Checks and Balances?" "Co-equal Branches?"
Our "Originalists / Textualists" might have a few surprises in store.
I am no lawyer, nor a Constitutional historian, but I have been through every word of it multiple times. The 4th Amendment was a particular focus of my 1998 graduate thesis. The foregoing summation is from the output of a text analyzer I used on the complete Constitution. Below, the top 25 words sorted by decreasing frequency.
Unsurprising that the word “shall“ is right near the top (3). The old programmer in me couldn’t help but also notice the and / or / not frequently “boolean” operators (conjunctive, disjunctive, negation). More on that stuff later. It’s also germane that the combinatorial collections of the individual words are what really count linguistically to derive the prescriptions and proscriptions comprising constitutional governance language. Syntax that begets rational and clear meaning.
UPDATES
Trump Signals He Might Ignore the Courts
Yesterday, the president said that no judge “should be allowed” to rule against the changes his administration is making.
By Jonathan Chait
The United States is sleepwalking into a constitutional crisis. Not only has the Trump administration seized for itself extraconstitutional powers, but yesterday, it raised the specter that, should the courts apply the text of the Constitution and negate its plans, it will simply ignore them.
The Spanish political scientist Juan Linz once theorized that presidential systems are more likely than parliamentary systems to undergo constitutional crises or coup attempts, because they create dueling centers of power. The president and Congress both enjoy popular elections, creating a clash of popular mandates when opposing parties win simultaneous control. “Who has the stronger claim to speak on behalf of the people,” Linz asked, “the president or the legislative majority that opposes his policies?” Presidential systems would teeter and fall, he argued, when the president and Congress could not resolve their competing claims to legitimacy.
A dozen years ago, when Republicans in Congress presented their majorities as having negated Barack Obama’s electoral mandate and began threatening to precipitate a debt crisis to force him to accept their domestic economic plan, Linz’s ideas began attracting renewed attention among liberal intellectuals. And indeed, the system is teetering. But the source of the emergency is nearly the opposite of what Linz predicted. The Trump administration is not refusing to share power with an opposing party. It is refusing to follow the constitutional limits of a government that its own party controls completely.
Donald Trump is unilaterally declaring the right to ignore spending levels set by Congress, and to eliminate agencies that Congress voted to create. What makes this demand so astonishing is that Trump could persuade Congress, which he commands in personality-cult style, to follow his demands. Republicans presently control both houses of Congress, and any agency that Congress established, it can also cut or eliminate.
Yet Trump refuses to even try to pass his plan democratically. And as courts have stepped in to halt his efforts to ignore the law, he is now threatening to ignore them too. “If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” Vice President J. D. Vance posted on X yesterday morning. “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.”...
SCOTUS has now ruled (Trump v US) that an incumbent President is immune from both civil suits and criminal indictment should they stem from any "official acts." It would not be much of a distant further stretch for the "conservative" majority to soon declare that, given that SCOTUS has no independent armed enforcement entity, to simply find unequivocally (they would only need 5 votes) that the only extant "remedy" is House impeachment and Senate conviction & removal.
Impeachment / conviction / ousting ain’t gonna happen in this judico-political climate. Recall, we've already been down that path twice. How did that work out?
…Trump’s record of legal success in the Supreme Court is a mixed one. But he presumably thinks it a good bet either that the legal challenges to his scorched-earth tactics will be too slow to stop him or that, if they reach the Supreme Court, that body’s right-wing supermajority will continue to improvise on behalf of de facto executive supremacy. Eyeing the latter possibility, the newly confirmed Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought has affirmed the administration’s position that Congress lacks authority to force the spending of appropriated funds—a position the Supreme Court has never endorsed, and which is constitutionally unfounded. But a majority that would proceed as vigorously and creatively as it did to protect Trump from prosecution might be willing to improvise some more. [Peter M. Shane]
Yeah. What have I been arguing?
…The agency responsible for judicial enforcement is the U.S. Marshals, which is under the control of the Justice Department. By statute, marshals are required to carry out court orders. But while we’re spinning out hypotheticals, what would happen if Attorney General Pam Bondi, or Trump himself, ordered them not to comply?
The answer to that question lies outside the courtroom. It is located instead in the halls of Congress, the pages of newspapers, the boardrooms of businesses and civil-society organizations, and finally the streets. It’s not a struggle that can be resolved by law itself, but rather by whether Americans care enough to demonstrate as a polity that the rule of law matters to them and that they will defend it.
How can we prevent our suicidal patients from killing themselves? That’s an important question for a primary-care physician like me. I am often in the position of trying to assess—in 15 minutes or less—which patients need urgent treatment. The type of guidance that might help me can be found in a paper that was published in 2022 on PSNet, the Patient Safety Network, a federally funded initiative. “Few considerations are more critical,” the authors wrote, “than identifying a person at risk for taking their own life.”Infuriating. Dr. Ofri is one our most eminent physicians. I have cited her many times.
On January 31, however, the authors of that paper received a notice that their peer-reviewed article had been struck from the PSNet website. Apparently, it violated Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” signed by Donald Trump on his first day in office.
In addition to being a physician, I happen to be a woman, so I was curious why women needed defending from an analysis of how health professionals might better help suicidal patients. In the paper, the authors reminded clinicians to keep in mind which patient groups are known to be at higher risk, citing peer-reviewed data: “High risk groups include male sex, being young, veterans, Indigenous tribes, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (LGBTQ).” The acknowledgment of transgender people, however peripheral, was apparently enough to invite the ax.
The memo came out on a Wednesday, and agencies had until 5 p.m. on Friday to scrub their websites—as well as their agencies, grants, contracts, and personnel—of anything that might “promote or inculcate gender ideology.” As a result, hundreds of government websites were shorn of articles, pages, and data sets about transgender issues, along with information on contraception, HIV, and abortion.
Much of the information that was stripped came from the CDC website, but even pages on the Census Bureau and the National Park Service sites came down. The tech-news publication 404 Media has estimated that more than 2,000 data sets have disappeared from government websites since Trump took office…
ERRATUM
I’m not making that up
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