The U.S. Ambassador to Israel also said that, if you do end up having a baby in nine months, he expects "that you will want to name the little bugger after me!” Hard pass!
Do Democrats have a real chance of winning a Senate seat in Texas this year? Probably not. But Tuesday night’s election results were the best possible outcome for the party, and they create the conditions for an upset. In the Democratic primary, state Representative James Talarico got over 50 percent of the vote, thereby defeating Representative Jasmine Crockett without a runoff. The Associated Press, CBS News, and other major news organizations have declared Talarico the winner, even though Crockett had not conceded as of early Wednesday morning. Avoiding the May 26 runoff is a coup for Democrats. The Talarico-Crockett race was becoming petty and testy, particularly between the candidates’ supporters. Another two months was likely to get worse and become very racial, since polls suggest that Talarico is dominant among white Texas Democrats and Crockett among African Americans.Also, Talarico is probably a better general election candidate than Crockett. I am always wary of “electability” conversations, because they often end up punishing candidates who aren’t white, male, and/or Christian. It is almost certainly the case that some Texas general election voters wouldn’t back Crockett because she is a Black woman. But Democratic primary voters shouldn’t discriminate against minority candidates in primaries because they expect other voters to discriminate against those candidates in general elections. Also, assumptions about electability are often wrong—as politicians such as Barack Obama and Raphael Warnock have shown. But Crockett would have had some specific challenges in a general election. She became one of the more famous politicians in America by leaning into being a hyperpartisan Democrat relentlessly attacking President Trump and Republicans. That’s what I appreciate about her. After the 2024 elections, when so many Democratic politicians seemed cowed by Trump’s victory, Crockett was describing Trump’s authoritarianism forthrightly and defending liberal values. It was such a relief to have Crockett in Washington in early 2025. I did not expect her to run for the U.S. Senate though. Being a vocal partisan Democrat isn’t the best way to position yourself for a statewide run in a Republican-leaning state like Texas. Talarico’s unifying rhetoric and style probably give the Democrats a better chance to win over some Trump voters, a necessity in the Lone Star State. The other good news is what happened on the Republican side. None of the candidates, incumbent Senator John Cornyn, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, or Representative Wesley Hunt, reached 50 percent. So the GOP primary will go on for another couple months, likely leading to more fractures in the party. Counting has not finished yet, but Cornyn is likely to finish a point ahead of Paxton. As of Wednesday morning, the senator was at 42 percent, Paxton at 41 percent. Hunt was third, ending his campaign. Cornyn and Paxton both have advantages in a runoff. Far-right activists are more enthused about Paxton, but the Republican establishment in Washington is likely to spend heavily to boost Cornyn, who party insiders view as the stronger general election candidate. Democrats should hope that Paxton wins. He’s the ideal opponent for Talarico. Calling the attorney general scandal-plagued would be way understating his issues. He has been indicted (but not convicted) for securities fraud; impeached by the Texas state legislature (but not removed from office) on bribery charges; divorced by his wife amid widespread rumors of extramarital affairs. If moderates and undecideds in Texas just vote based on partisanship, Paxton would still win, of course. But if they consider the candidates as individuals, a 36-year-old Bible-quoting former public school teacher against a philandering, corrupt 63-year-old career politician is about as ideal a contrast as Democrats could have wished for.Also, the broader political environment is ideal for Talarico. Trump’s poll numbers keep dipping, even in Texas. His approval there is now around 45 percent, while around half of voters disapprove. The Democratic base is very fired up, and swing voters are turning away from the GOP, which is why Democrats have done very well in virtually every race across the country since the 2024 election. Let me not oversell the Democrats’ chances in Texas. Democrats last won the presidential election there in 1976; their last Senate victory was in 1988. Even in 2018, when Democrats won basically everywhere, fairly unpopular Republican Senator Ted Cruz finished three percentage points ahead of then-Representative Beto O’Rourke, who generated the kind of liberal enthusiasm around the state that Talarico has. Trump won by 14 points over Kamala Harris in Texas in 2024. While Talarico seems moderate in tone, his policy positions are fairly liberal. So if most Texas voters just prefer conservative candidates (as election results for the last 50 years suggest), Talarico will lose and perhaps resoundingly. And if Cornyn wins the primary, Talarico would be an even bigger underdog. The clearer path for a Democratic Senate majority after this year’s elections is flipping seats in Alaska, Ohio, Maine, and North Carolina. But even if these primary results don’t portend Texas going blue in November, they provide important insights about each party. On the Democratic side, it’s striking that Talarico did not run in the mold of past Southern Democrats, such as Bill Clinton and Joe Manchin, who touted their pro-business bona fides and more conservative stands compared to other Democrats on issues like abortion. Instead, Talarico emphasized populist and pro-democracy ideas, such as banning super PACs and members of Congress trading individual stocks. He has strongly defended abortion rights and was a leading figure in the state legislature opposing a provision mandating that the Ten Commandments be posted in every public school classroom in the state. During the primary, he didn’t distance himself from Black voters to signal moderation to whites, but instead worked hard to win over African Americans while conceding most of them would back Crockett. Crockett and Talarico differ in persona, but they are both liberal Democrats who speak frankly about the radicalism of today’s Republicans. That’s what the Democratic base is demanding, both in Texas and around the country. Talarico won this primary in part because of his similarities to Crockett, positioning himself as a Democrat who will fight hard against the GOP, as the congresswoman does.On the GOP side, that Cornyn could lose demonstrates how dramatically the Republican Party has shifted in Trump’s direction over the last decade. Cornyn is very conservative on policy, strongly favoring tax cuts for the rich and corporations. There is no real reason he should have a primary challenger. But he does not revel in mistreating people who live in cities, LGBTQ Americans, and other groups associated with the Democratic Party. Paxton does. He’s used the attorney general’s perch to sue out-of-state doctors for providing abortion pills to women and to try to restrict transgender minors from getting health care that they want. He was a leading figure in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, even showing up in Washington on January 6, 2021. And Paxton’s blatant disregard for ethics rules and traditional democratic norms is very Trumpian. In contrast, Cornyn is the quintessential Mitch McConnell Republican. That brand of conservatism is nearly dead. If Paxton defeats Cornyn in the May runoff, Democrats have one of their best chances in recent memory to win in Texas. The downside is that if Paxton defeats Cornyn, the most likely outcome is that the Senate gets a new member (Paxton) who is a bit more conservative than Cornyn and way, way more corrupt and unethical. Perhaps Democrats can’t ever win Texas. But James Talarico in 2026 could be the Democrats’ breakthrough in the Lone Star State.
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 4 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump undermined his own case for war with Iran in some odd comments to reporters on Tuesday. He admitted that the worst-case scenario is that Iran might be ruled by terrible leaders later, and acknowledged that the leaders the U.S. wants in charge are already dead. The casual nature of these comments accidentally revealed how poorly thought through all this truly is. And all that comes as MAGA opinion leaders have turned hard against Trump over the war. We think there’s a good reason to track MAGA opinion on this. Along with the markets tanking, the splitting of the MAGA base might be something that could get Trump to declare a victory and go home and put an end to all this. So how real is all that MAGA anger? We’re parsing all this with The Zeteo senior political correspondent Asawin Suebsaeng, who has written a lot over the years on MAGA’s supposed anti-interventionist tendencies. Swin, good to have you on.Asawin Suebsaeng: I wish you could once have me on to talk about something sunny and not fucking infuriating, but here we are every single time you invite me on your pod. How’s it going, Greg?Sargent: Good, but Swin, there will never be a day that you’re invited on to talk about good news. So let’s start with Trump. As of now, Iran’s Supreme Leader has been killed along with some other leaders in the regime. Trump was asked by a reporter what the worst-case outcome in Iran is. Listen.Trump (voiceover): I guess the worst case would be we do this and then somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person, right? That could happen. We don’t want that to happen. That would probably be the worst—go through this and then in five years you realize you put somebody in who is no better. So I’d like to see somebody in there that’s going to bring it back for the people.Sargent: Swin, you’d think he would have thought of that before. He suggests here that he doesn’t expect that to happen. But it seems to me that what he really revealed here is that he hasn’t even bothered to imagine what additionally could go wrong—badly undermining his case. What did you make of it?Suebsaeng: Look, American lives on the line, not to mention other people, but even just talking about Americans and American military personnel—have already perished completely unnecessarily in this thing. And President Trump and the rest of the gang running the federal government right now are going about this with the exact same level of nobility and care and solemn posture that you or I would take while flipping through Hulu trying to find something new to watch.For months, according to our reporting at Zeteo.com, in the run-up to Trump launching this illegal war on Iran, he was briefed repeatedly—in classified briefings, by senior intelligence personnel, other senior administration officials—about, look, we have spent time gaming out these different scenarios of what would likely happen if you took option A, B, C, D, whatever, on what kind of war you want to launch. A smaller-scale conflict lasting days or weeks, or maybe this spirals and goes protracted. Here are different potential U.S. casualty estimates; here are ways where things could go sideways, including the regime installing someone or something worse than the current Supreme Leader. These were all things that, if he cared to pay attention, were put in his ear and in front of him over and over again in the weeks or months leading up to this thing. And you know what? Donald J. Trump said and decided firmly: I’m the decider. I think it’s worth it—fuck all that noise that you’re putting in my ear right now. We’re doing it. Let’s just do it and be legends. And he pulled the trigger on it.Sargent: In fact, the New York Times has reported that his top general had misgivings about the war and all he did was tune it out—just closed his ears to all of it. And that’s why right now he looks surprised when he mulls this sort of stuff in public. And it gets even better. He was also asked who’s going to replace the current Iranian leaders who are getting killed. Listen to this.Trump (voiceover): Well, most of the people we had in mind are dead. So, you know, we had some in mind from that group that is dead. And now we have another group. They may be dead also, based on reports. So I guess you have a third wave coming in. Pretty sure we’re not going to know anybody, but we have—I mean, Venezuela was so incredible because we did the attack and we kept the government totally intact.Sargent: So a couple of things here, Swin. Again, he undermines his case by basically admitting to how poorly thought through the aftermath of this truly is. And then note how he says it’s a good thing that the leadership in Venezuela was left virtually intact. So does Trump want a change at the top in Iran or not? Does he want regime change or not? This is something they just can’t answer. What’s your reaction to that?Suebsaeng: He does want full-blown regime change in Tehran—in the same way that you or I would want to have a body that looks like Dave Bautista’s or Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s without doing an ounce, or barely an ounce, of the heavy lifting, literal heavy lifting, that it would require to get there. This is a MAGA imperialist, bloodthirsty wannabe God Emperor who wants all the things that a God Emperor would have if they were willing to throw 500,000 American lives at something to get it done—but he’s not willing to do that because he is very, very lazy. That was his position in all these other invasions and conflicts, including with Venezuela. And the reason that seemed “successful” to him in a way he could stomach is because he cut a corrupt deal with the Maduro regime—preserving the repressive, violent Maduro regime while just getting his man, getting his oil deal, and being able to say, ha ha, I have Maduro in handcuffs, but you leave the regime intact. That was never going to be the kind of option available to him if he launched a war as he’s doing right now with the Israeli government on the Islamic Republic.Sargent: Well, here’s where leading MAGA figures enter the chat. They’re turning pretty hard on Trump over the war. The Bulwark had a good roundup of different voices. First, let’s listen to Megyn Kelly, who’s a very big MAGA personality.Kelly (voiceover): I mean, I don’t know about you, but I have found the explanation lacking. I woke up on Saturday morning like the rest of you to his videotaped announcement where he was wearing the hat. Did not walk away with a clear understanding of what we’re doing. It was restatements of things we’ve known for years. Yeah, we hate Iran. They hate us too. We’ve known that. Why are we doing this now? What is the catalyst? Obviously, President Trump does not want to say we did it because of Israel. What he said instead was, our objective is to defend the American people. Okay, so far that sounds good. Why do we need defending? By eliminating imminent threats, he said, from the Iranian regime. Okay, we’re under imminent threat now—what is it? What’s the imminent threat from the Iranian regime?Sargent: So obviously a big part of this is that MAGA doesn’t want the U.S. to be doing Israel’s bidding, as she hints at there. And I want to get to that part in a bit, but let’s put that aside for now. First, Swin, note that she says directly there that the core rationale Trump has offered—that Iran posed an imminent threat—is bullshit. I think the idea that MAGA is anti-war or anti-interventionist is sort of generally nonsense, but here you do have a pretty direct questioning of Trump. What’s going on here?Suebsaeng: Well, because this particular engagement is already thoroughly unpopular. He launched this war while the concept of this war was polling fairly aggressively for a lengthy period of time—I believe in the 20s or low 30s—absolute shit-show disaster territory. And he did it anyway. Even after the war was launched, there was a hope, or more of an expectation within certain parts of the Trump world elite and within the White House, that maybe Republican support would pick up considerably for the war—because we saw that happen with the Venezuela-Maduro kidnapping, where support for it among Republicans at least skyrocketed after it happened. They’re opposed to things in concept, to the degree that any of them have a form of cohesive ideology or so-called principles. But once the wannabe God King Donald Trump does it, usually that inspires a calculus shift. This has not shown all that much in the polling, even with just Republicans—not even Democrats or independents. But now that the war is well underway, do you support it? Republicans are hovering at half. Do not support it. That is astounding for a major Trump initiative.When it comes to the people who have more flexibility—like the Megyn Kellys or the Tucker Carlsons out there—to criticize this war publicly, they know where the winds are headed on this, including with the MAGA orbit. Which is not at all anti-war, not at all anti-interventionist. It’s just that they are looking at this and diagnosing that the juice is not worth the squeeze. This could fuck up the U.S. economy. This could mess up gas prices. And this could get a lot of people killed, including U.S. service members. And for what? Sargent: And it could tank Trump’s presidency. They really don’t want that to happen, which is a real possibility. And I want to bring in the Israel angle here because it’s so big for MAGA. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, really stirred the pot here by saying that the U.S. knew Israel was going to attack Iran. And then he said: “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces. And we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.” MAGA jumped on that saying that it showed that we’re doing Israel’s bidding. The Hodge Twins, who are a pair of brothers and MAGA influencers, said: “We are at war for Israel. Thanks for confirming.” Here’s Tucker Carlson: “This happened because Israel wanted it to happen. This is Israel’s war.” Swin, can you explain what’s going on here? What’s the MAGA animus toward Israel? How does it really work?Suebsaeng: Well, there is a good amount of people in the MAGA coalition who still love the state of Israel and are okay with the Israeli government. But there is a growing contingent of people in the America First movement who—I would put it this way—would be willing to back, and have backed, a great deal of mass murder and mayhem that the Israeli government and Israeli military have perpetrated in recent months and years. They just do not like the perception—or reality, whatever you want to call it—that Benjamin Netanyahu is able to dog-walk the United States into major foreign policy entanglements and expensive activity, both in terms of blood and treasure, that is not directly in the America First interest. So if the Israeli government were just saying, okay, we just want to bombard Gaza as much as we want, can you please support us—that would get a lot more purchase in the MAGA orbit. But when they feel that Donald Trump and the U.S. military and the American government are being dragged into something for the benefit of someone like Benjamin Netanyahu—I mean, there are a lot of good non-MAGA reasons to be opposed to a concept like that. And more and more MAGA influencers are not impervious to not just feeling those emotions, but also noticing that their online audience—their bread and butter—really, really don’t like that. So they are chasing that, not all of them, but you really do get the sense of people like Megyn Kelly kind of chasing their audience on this. In fact, she has sort of admitted it when she’s talked to people in past months, like Tucker Carlson, about how she started to get more skeptical of the Israeli government.Sargent: Well, I will say that there is a major contingent of MAGA right now that’s pretty openly antisemitic. We’ve seen Nick Fuentes traffic in that, and sometimes Tucker dips his toe pretty deeply into it. That’s really roiling MAGA in a big way—it’s kind of tearing it apart. And I just think that’s an interesting dynamic. I think a lot of these guys have to walk a very careful line—the ones who don’t want to appear overtly antisemitic, yet they know that they’re dealing with a mass constituency out there that’s really trending in that direction pretty hard. They want to hold on to those people without making it too obvious what they’re doing.Suebsaeng: Right. They also have audiences, and they themselves—as influencers or as MAGA policymakers—are aware that the collapsing American empire has a resource-strain problem. They would much rather have the might of the Trump administration and the U.S. military and our armed forces aimed inward, particularly on immigrants, than on places like the Islamic Republic and Tehran. So what Donald Trump is doing right now is effectively taking a little bit of a break from invading certain parts of the mainland United States so he can focus for a while on bombing and going to war with Iran. There are a lot of people in MAGA who are thinking to themselves: wait a minute, that is not the resource allocation that we signed up for. You were supposed to be making war on the Twin Cities and Minnesota and Mexico. What are you doing with all of this bombing and potentially invading Iran bullshit?Sargent: Right, Swin. It’s basically: you know what, stick to the dark people in our hemisphere, go after them, they’re the real problem. That’s what they’re saying.Suebsaeng: Yes. And they had barely any problems with that. There were some—Tucker Carlson did not like the operation in the middle of last year when Donald Trump was bombing Iran, and there were MAGA figureheads and America First influencers who weren’t happy with that. But by and large, the Republican Party and MAGA were okay with that. And they are okay with potentially invading Mexico soon. What they do not like is what we can all see unfolding every minute of every day recently—that Donald Trump is dangerously close to plunging us into Iraq War 2.0 for barely any reason at all. He and his administration did not spend any time trying to sell this to the American people, to such a degree that even a good number of prominent Trump allies who I’ve spoken to in recent days—even they, who are acutely aware of what kind of personality Donald Trump is—were a little bit surprised that they spent such little time trying to sell the American people on this war and then just went ahead and immediately started it. So not every single invasion is the same. And this thing, which is looking more and more like a quagmire with every passing hour, is something that they do not want—because they don’t want it to make them look like a bunch of fucking losers. And that’s what Donald Trump is risking doing to them right now.Sargent: Yeah, it’s really interesting. And just to underscore your point, note that MAGA is absolutely over the moon every time Trump blows up a few people in a fishing boat. These are civilians—they’re alleged to be running drugs, but they’re not getting any kind of due process, of course. They’re just getting blown to bits by the U.S. military, and MAGA just loves that.I want to close out by reading something from Matt Walsh, who’s a big MAGA influencer. He said the following to his fellow conservatives—here addressing people who are supporting the operation in Iran: “I can’t take the gaslighting, guys. I really can’t. Conservatives are now running around saying Iran has been waging war on us for 47 years. Okay, then why didn’t any of you call for an attack on Iran at any point until now?” It’s a pretty good question. I’ve got to give it to him—he’s right about that one thing. And what I take from that is that you’re going to really see some very deep schisms open up here, because a chunk of the conservative movement is absolutely giddy with excitement over the blowing up of targets in Iran and the killing of people in Iran and so forth. And yet there is a contingent of MAGA that just won’t have it, for all the reasons that you’ve said—given that Trump’s own lines about all this, that we listened to earlier, show how unprepared they are for what’s about to come. Where does this go from here? It seems like we’re looking at a quagmire potentially, and we’re looking at MAGA getting even more pissed off at their fellow conservatives who are going to continue to support it no matter what happens, right?Suebsaeng: What Donald Trump wanted was a very successful, very quick, gangster-like drive-by shooting—something you may see in one of the Grand Theft Auto PlayStation games. That’s what he wanted, something like that is what he envisioned going into this. And now he is getting drawn into a protracted, costly, spiraling, bloody mob war with different factions in different countries, where he and his administration are not the only ones who control the timeline of how far this goes and when this stops. And that is what is really pissing off a lot of his supporters in the MAGA upper crust—because he is very clearly biting off way more than he can chew, and everybody both here and abroad knows it.Sargent: Well, I’d be saying that this is going to be a real fun thing to watch unfold as they kind of go at each other’s throats viciously—but unfortunately, this is all a potential catastrophe for the United States in all kinds of ways. Asawin Suebsaeng, always good to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.Suebsaeng: Peace out.
Just as the false claims of betrayal on January 3 are now easily disproved, so too are the claims of betrayal in the two months since.
After moving manufacturing to the developing world to save on labor, Nike and other apparel brands are shifting employment in their Indonesian supply chain away from high-wage parts of the country and into less-developed areas.
Ripping the US president’s “flagrant disregard for European sovereignty—and security,” co-general coordinator of Progressive International declared: “Close the bases. All of them.”
First the Iran War would be over in days. Then Trump said weeks. Now Pete Hegseth says it could be months. Sound familiar?
In the old days, it used to require actual work to show that the Supreme Court justices were driven by their personal beliefs instead of straightforwardly applying law, precedent, and procedure. You’d have to connect dots across multiple rulings and explain intricate legal doctrines. Even then, it might be too speculative to be truly persuasive.These days, I could probably convince my 2-year-old son of the high court’s shenanigans just based on a single day’s rulings. Such a day arose on Tuesday this week when the court handed down two major shadow-docket rulings. The two decisions are completely unrelated, save for the common flaws that they expose among the conservative justices’ approach to their jobs.The first case, Malliotakis v. Williams, is a challenge to the recently redrawn borders of New York’s 11th congressional district. The state redrew its boundaries to, among other reasons, make it harder for New York Representative Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican, to win reelection this fall. She is one of many incumbents who will likely lose their seats amid the nation’s gerrymandering wars over the last eight months.Malliotakis and a coalition of other litigants filed a lawsuit after the redrawn maps were issued, arguing that the Independent Redistricting Commission had impermissibly relied on race when it redrew her district’s boundaries. The state trial court in New York agreed, concluding that the commission had illegally moved groups of Black and Hispanic voters into her district, which would ultimately dilute their votes. It ordered the state to draw the district as a “crossover district,” meaning one where minority voters would have a decent chance of electing their own member of Congress.Racial gerrymandering is back in vogue these days after the Supreme Court signaled last year that it would strike down part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to allow states to engage in it more freely. According to the offending states, when legislative maps are redrawn to remedy racial gerrymandering, that action itself amounts to racial gerrymandering and is constitutionally impermissible. If the court accepts that argument in Louisiana v. Callais this term, it will destroy minority political representation in Congress in the long term.The court’s decision in Callais has yet to come out, however, which means that any interim case where the justices discuss the matter is destined to merit heightened attention. While the trial court sided with Malliotakis and her allies, it also effectively forbade the state from using its existing map by ordering the state’s redistricting commission to draw a completely new one. Malliotakis et al. opposed that move, arguing that the trial court had invented a new race-based standard while ruling in her favor.Their next step was to ask both New York’s intermediate appeals court and its highest appeals court at the same time to overturn the injunction. (I won’t use their actual names because the good people of the state of New York, for reasons known only to them, use confusingly different names for their state courts than the rest of the nation.) The state’s highest court transferred the case to the intermediate court on jurisdictional grounds, while the intermediate court is still considering its options. From there, the plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to intervene.That sequence of events may seem normal at first glance, but it is actually highly unusual. The Supreme Court occasionally hears cases directly from the federal district courts without waiting for the federal circuit courts of appeal to weigh in. This process is known as certiorari before review, which uses the Latin term for the court’s usual petition process. One such case this term is Trump v. Barbara, the highly consequential case on Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship.When it comes to state court proceedings, however, the justices are supposed to wait until the state’s highest appellate court weighs in before reviewing the case. There are good practical reasons for this—many more state-level cases are filed and adjudicated each day than federal cases. There are good and principled reasons, as well: States are separate sovereigns in our constitutional order, and the Supreme Court typically defers to their internal court processes on federalism grounds before getting involved.That didn’t happen here. Instead, the conservative justices bypassed the other New York courts and issued a stay of the trial court’s injunction. They didn’t bother to explain their reasoning; their order simply uses the bare-bones formula for staying a lower court’s order. In other words, the court’s conservative members went out of their way to change their normal procedures in shadow-docket cases to benefit a Republican member of Congress as she tries to fend off a less favorable legislative map.Chief Justice John Roberts famously compared his job to that of an umpire who “only calls balls and strikes,” during his confirmation hearing more than two decades ago. Tuesday’s ruling is akin to allowing a batter who hits a single into deep center field to touch first base and then go straight back to home plate. “Why not?” the umpire might tell himself. “After all, he was probably going to reach home anyway, and we didn’t want to waste the crowd’s time with the rest of the base paths.”Justice Samuel Alito, who is a baseball fan himself, offered the only scintilla of explanation for the high court’s intervention. He argued that the trial court’s order “blatantly discriminates on the basis of race” because it ordered a new map to be drawn that would allow minority voters to elect their preferred candidate. “That is unadorned racial discrimination, an inherently ‘odious’ activity that violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause except in the most extraordinary cases,” he claimed.That all may well be good and true, but the procedural questions remain. Under federal law, the Supreme Court only has jurisdiction over “final judgment and decrees” from a state’s highest court. Alito argued that the current case fit that bill. New York’s intermediate appeals court “refused to issue a stay,” he claimed, “and by order issued on February 11, the [highest New York court] sent the appeal filed in that court to the [intermediate court] and dismissed applicants’ motions for a stay.”Justice Sonia Sotomayor and the court’s other two liberals didn’t buy it. “The Court’s 101-word unexplained order can be summarized in just 7: ‘Rules for thee, but not for me,’” she wrote. “Time and again, this Court has said that federal courts have limited jurisdiction. Time and again, this Court has said that federal courts should not interfere with state-court litigation. Time and again, this Court has said that federal courts should not meddle with state election laws ahead of an election. Today, the Court says: except for this one, except for this one, and except for this one.”To accept Alito’s reasoning, one must conclude that the transfer from New York’s highest court to its intermediate one amounted to a decision on the merits. (Note that none of the other five justices signed on to his concurring opinion.) It plainly did not. As Sotomayor explained, the state’s highest court did not itself have jurisdiction to hear an appeal directly from its trial court. Transferring it back to the intermediate court was its way of saying the plaintiffs had to touch second base before reaching third. The state’s highest court “did not resolve anything on the merits, much less finally, when it told defendants to seek relief from the [intermediate court] first,” Sotomayor explained.In doing this, the Supreme Court has effectively rewarded Malliotakis and her allies for their procedural deceit. Why bother running anything consequential by New York’s highest court—or any other state supreme court, for that matter—in the future when you can file a procedurally defective appeal with them, then use their transfer of it back to the intermediate court as a stepping stone to get to the Supreme Court? As long as the conservative justices are friendly to you, you don’t need to bother with hitting doubles or triples anymore. You can just run straight home.The other case, Mirabelli v. Bonta, involves a challenge by the parents of children who identify as transgender to a California law that forbids school officials from discussing a student’s gender transition with their parents unless that student consents to it. Some of the plaintiffs with religious objections argued that the law infringed upon their First Amendment rights to instill their own religious faith in their child, pointing to last year’s ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor. In that decision, the court’s conservatives expanded the First Amendment to allow parents to opt out of LGBTQ-friendly teaching materials.Unsurprisingly, the conservative justices apparently agreed with that view. The other parental plaintiffs, however, argued that the California law intruded upon their rights as parents, which they said were guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause. The doctrine that the clause protects unenumerated rights through its reference to “liberty” is known as substantive due process. This argument too was apparently endorsed by the conservative justices without caveats.Wait, really? Justice Elena Kagan, writing for herself and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, couldn’t help but note that the conservative justices have been deeply hostile to substantive due process until now. That hostility is practically an article of faith in conservative legal circles, in no small part because it formed part of the reasoning behind Roe v. Wade. Or, at least, it was an article of faith until it became a convenient means to an anti-transgender end.To that end, Kagan quoted Thomas describing the doctrine as “particularly dangerous” because it allegedly allows judges to go “roaming at large in the constitutional field guided only by their personal views.” Gorsuch, she noted, has denounced the “judicial misuse of the so-called ‘substantive component’ of due process to dictate policy on matters that belonged to the people to decide.” And Kavanaugh, she observed, had criticized substantive due process by arguing that it had allowed “nine unelected members of this court the unilateral authority to write the Constitution.”So what changed? In a concurring opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said that the outcome was perfectly defensible under the court’s precedents. (Roberts and Kavanaugh joined her, but Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch conspicuously did not.) She pointed to the court’s 1997 ruling in Washington v. Glucksberg, which held that substantive due process only applied to unenumerated rights that are “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” The court simply applied Glucksberg to overturn Roe by concluding there was no “deeply rooted” right to obtain an abortion.That might be more defensible, given that the court’s long-standing precedents have recognized a parent’s right to raise their child since at least the 1920s. And Kagan acknowledged that the plaintiffs might ultimately prevail on the merits because of those precedents. But she still found fault with the court’s approach to substantive due process and transgender rights, dating back to before the court’s ruling in United States v. Skrmetti last year.Skrmetti involved a challenge to a Tennessee law that banned gender-affirming care for transgender youth, even with their parents’ support. The kids’ parents, suing on their behalf, argued in the lower courts that the law was unconstitutional on both equal protection clause grounds and substantive due process rights. They even invoked similar precedents to those invoked by the parents in Mirabelli.“But the Court, when deciding to grant certiorari in Skrmetti, limited its review to the equal protection issue: It would not even hear the parents out on their substantive due process claim,” Kagan noted. It would be interesting to learn how exactly that happened. The court has broad discretion to rework the questions presented, but it takes place behind closed doors in conferences that the justices do not discuss publicly.The net result is that parents can invoke substantive due process when they oppose their child’s gender transition, but not when they support it in the face of state-led efforts to suppress it. Barrett famously wrote a concurring opinion in Skrmetti where she argued that transgender Americans did not qualify for heightened protection under the equal protection clause. One prong in the court’s test for that protection is whether a group has faced a history of de jure discrimination.After reviewing the evidence provided by the litigants in that case, Barrett said it was “sparse but suggestive of relatively little de jure discrimination.” Ironically, she and her colleagues are apparently eager to build such a record on their own. Maybe that will help future transgender litigants at the Supreme Court someday. Unfortunately, it will only be useful when there is a majority of justices that is willing to consistently apply legal principles instead of zigzagging to reach preferred policy outcomes. That majority does not currently exist.
On Monday, two days after the United States and Israel launched their war on Iran, Megyn Kelly began her SiriusXM show by saying she was praying for American troops, as well as mourning the U.S. service members who already had been killed by retaliatory strikes. But she quickly shifted gears, questioning why soldiers have to “put their lives on the line … for whom, again?” “My own feeling is no one should have to die for a foreign country. I don’t think those four service members died for the United States,” she said. “I think they died for Iran or for Israel.… Our government’s job is not to look out for Iran or for Israel. It’s to look out for us.” Kelly is far from alone. Tucker Carlson on Saturday called the war “absolutely disgusting and evil,” and in a lengthy video on Monday said, “It’s hard to say this, but the United States didn’t make the decision here. [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu did.” (Well, it’s not that hard to say that. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson have said something similar, albeit as justification for President Trump’s decision.) In more extreme corners, the white supremacist and antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes urged his followers not to vote in the midterms over the war—or otherwise vote for Democrats. Steve Bannon, Trump’s svengali during his 2016 campaign and now a top MAGA podcaster, referred to the war as a “betrayal.” It’s tempting to call this a MAGA civil war, though that’s not quite right. Even though a huge majority of the country as a whole opposes the war with Iran, a CNN poll found 77 percent of Republicans support it—and there is little sign yet of Trump losing the support of congressional Republicans, in particular. Still, it is a crack-up and a serious one, especially given the GOP’s dire outlook for the midterm elections. It points to Trump’s diminishing grip on his own movement. “MAGA is Trump,” the president said when asked about Kelly’s and Carlson’s criticism. He’s not wrong, really—he still commands enormous influence over his movement and party. But we are seeing his hold over it truly slip for the first time since his emergence as a political force a decade ago. Kelly, Carlson, and Bannon have all criticized Trump before, and they’ve all gotten back in line later. But less than a week in, this war already threatens to drag on for weeks—if not months, or, as Trump floated on Monday, “forever.” If it does drag on, it will become even less popular, including among Republicans. Facing sustained criticism from the MAGA faithful who rightly see the war as a “betrayal,” Trump could well spiral into unprecedented territory. There are historical reasons for believing that Trump will survive this MAGA split largely unscathed. In 2016, much of the intellectual conservative establishment opposed his candidacy and failed miserably in its attempt to stop him. In January of that year, National Review published an entire issue, featuring essays from dozens of conservative figures, some whose criticism of Trump has grown more pointed (notably William Kristol) and many more who have since warmed up to the president, if not become outright admirers (like Ben Domenech and Erick Erickson). It didn’t work—and National Review slowly shifted from Never Trumpism to anti-anti-Trumpism to generally pro-Trumpism, even as he does many of the things they warned about back in 2016. So yes, Trump has beat back the conservative intelligentsia before. But that’s not really what he’s facing right now. One way Trump was able to defeat the eggheads at National Review was by empowering other figures who embraced him. In many cases, these people backfilled the intellectual void in the MAGA movement. Trump was anti-immigration, anti–free trade, and loosely anti-interventionist; people like Bannon and Carlson took those loose parameters and fleshed them out. Of course, most of the MAGA movement is still whatever Trump says it is. MAGA is Trump—not Carlson or Bannon and certainly not Megyn Kelly or lower-level critics of the Iran war like Matt Walsh, a loudmouth who makes Kelly look like Jürgen Habermas. But Trump’s resilience stems in part from his ability to craft alliances with disparate—and often contradictory—parts of the Republican coalition. His incoherence and stunning lack of command over policy basics made him attractive to both neoconservatives and isolationists. His seeming preference for extremely aggressive but limited military operations abroad—like the assassination of Iranian Quds Force leader Qasem Soleimani in 2020 or the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, could ostensibly satisfy people in every camp. These were bold, illegal, dangerous moves. But they weren’t accompanied by calls for regime change or the extended deployment of U.S. troops. Now Trump has planted a flag firmly in the interventionist camp. This has been a long evolution, one that began with the dropping of the “Mother of All Bombs” in Afghanistan in 2017 and has now peaked with the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the initial strikes on Saturday. We’re now witnessing what may be the beginning of a regional war. Whether U.S. troops will be deployed on the ground is anyone’s guess, but this war will hang over Trump’s presidency regardless. Trump and Netanyahu have made a mess of the entire Middle East in only a few days—Iran is bombing Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and several other Gulf States. The U.S. has instructed hundreds of thousands of civilians to leave the region, even though it has left them to fend for themselves as Iranian bombs fall on airports. It’s still not clear who will emerge to lead Iran in the wake of Khamenei’s death, nor what type of leader or government would be deemed acceptable to Israel or the United States. As I wrote over the weekend, it seems clear that the two countries prefer vastly different outcomes, with American leaders wanting relative stability—perhaps with a full takeover from the Revolutionary Guard Corps—and Israeli leaders seeking to turn Iran into a failed state. And the CIA’s reported decision on Tuesday to begin arming Iranian Kurds seems designed to jump-start a civil war.Trump, it’s worth saying, is doing all of this while he is historically unpopular and his party is facing what may turn out to be the biggest midterm massacre since 2006. But what happens when he is even more unpopular, overseeing a foreign war that’s out of control, and no longer has control of Congress? What happens when the subpoenas and investigations—and yes, impeachments—start? What happens if this becomes a regional war? What happens if U.S. civilians, stranded in a Gulf state, are taken hostage? What happens if U.S. ground forces start aiding one, or several, factions in an Iranian civil war? These are all plausible scenarios, given the state of play in this very moment: Republicans in Congress are holding onto control by a thread, Trump’s approval rating is plummeting to new depths, and this war is already spinning out of control. The administration has no plan for what comes next; hell, it doesn’t even have a plan for evacuating the hundreds of thousands of U.S. civilians who are stuck in the Middle East. But Trump is also unprepared politically—for the exodus of support from Republican voters and lawmakers alike if this war expands and ground troops are deployed. He says, “MAGA is Trump.” Before too long, that may be pretty much all that MAGA is.