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A single exchange in last Friday’s D.C. Circuit argument laid bare the Trump administration’s strategy in a series of recent cases: Push through deeply unpopular and frequently illegal measures, and make certain the public can’t do a thing about it.The exchange concerned Trump’s most cherished goal of remaking the White House—the people’s house—in his imperial and garish image.Recall how we got here. Last September, with no congressional authorization and no completed legal process, the administration simply got up one day and started taking a wrecking ball to the East Wing. It was only days until the structure was completely demolished. By the time the National Trust for Historic Preservation sued in December, the East Wing was gone, and large-scale excavation for the 90,000-square-foot ballroom was well underway.By the time of last Friday’s argument, three million pounds of steel rebar were in the ground, and the structure was beginning to rise above it.Let’s talk about that argument. The D.C. Circuit is commonly considered the second-most-powerful federal court in the nation. Given the court’s sophistication and the personal importance to Trump of the project, the administration sent its version of the A-team. Yaakov Roth is a senior official in DOJ’s Civil Division, with a résumé that includes a clerkship for Justice Antonin Scalia and extensive appellate experience.The most active questioner on the panel was Judge Patricia Millett. In the course of pressing Roth on the administration’s standing argument, Millett dropped the hypothetical bombshell that crystallized the administration’s position.“If this were the Statue of Liberty,” Millett asked, “the people whose ancestors—that was the first thing they saw coming to this country—but the government moved too fast; nothing can be done by them to challenge it?”Roth’s answer: “I think that’s right, yes.”Roth’s answer was not a mistake under pressure. He had thought through the implications of the administration’s position and understood that Millett would be quick to exploit any inconsistency and use it to unravel the administration’s case.Millett had simply followed the logic to its destination and asked him to confirm it. He did, as he had to. The only check, he allowed, would be Congress—which would have to pass a law that Trump could veto, requiring two-thirds to override.Millett then named this attitude that she had extracted from Roth: “Move fast and break things, and then nobody has standing.” Roth conceded that was essentially correct.That is the administration’s playbook for a series of recent high-handed moves: the $1.8 billion slush fund for January 6 defendants, the systematic destruction of presidential records, the collusive settlements with Mike Flynn and Steve Bannon, and now the ballroom rising on the demolished White House East Wing. Not that they acted lawfully, and not that they aren’t injuring the interests of the American people—but that nobody can do anything about it.In each of these examples, the administration follows the same two-step. First, neuter Congress: Anything requiring legislation to stop faces a certain presidential veto, and the two-thirds override is a mathematical fantasy as long as enough Republican members remain terrified of Trump’s one remaining real weapon, the threat to come after them. Second, neuter the courts: Argue that no one has legal standing to challenge what is being done, that the injury is too generalized, too abstract, too aesthetic to cross the Article 3 threshold pertaining to standing. Congress can’t act. Courts can’t hear it. The bulldozer rolls with no brakes.There is nothing inherently improper about an administration’s invocation of standing doctrine. The requirement that plaintiffs show a concrete, particularized injury before federal courts will take up their claim is a valid constraint, rooted in Article 3, and courts across the ideological spectrum have enforced it against litigants of every stripe. The constitutional design is that federal courts are not a substitute for legislative action.But the administration has taken its reliance on standing to a new low and used it to bypass legal accountability for a series of issues of intense popular concern. It has combined aggressive standing arguments with bare-knuckles intimidation of Republicans in Congress. The result is a pincer movement that leaves the public—the people who overwhelmingly object to a $1.8 billion giveaway to January 6 defendants, who feel in their bones that the White House belongs to all of them, who do not want their government shredding documents that belong to the people—with no branch to turn to and no courthouse door that will open.The White House is the most universally recognized symbol of the national government. Its relatively modest, neoclassical structure stands in harmony with the Capitol and the Supreme Court up the hill. It is the building that millions of schoolchildren visit, that Americans call “the people’s house.” It’s the antithesis of the gaudy ornateness of Trump’s imperial design.The power of the Millett hypothetical is that it smokes out where the administration’s argument leads. Can the executive lay waste to the Statue of Liberty? Damn right, says Roth—and even if it’s a rank violation of the executive duty to take care, nobody can stop it because nobody has standing.There is a profoundly un-American quality to Trump’s ballroom makeover. He is in effect trying to crown himself emperor—cowing Congress and parrying court action with aggressive standing arguments pressed all the way to the Supreme Court. It is a gesture of deep contempt for the country whose most beloved building he is trying to remake in his own image.An administration lawyer told the judges in the second-most-powerful court in the country that no court can stop a president who moves fast enough from destroying the White House or the Statue of Liberty. The administration is counting on paralyzing the courts and the Congress, and ultimately on the public’s apathy. The recent slush-fund debacle showed that’s a losable bet. The formula is public pressure, judicial accountability, and Republicans made to own it at the polls. The first part is up to us.

“It is a death sentence for us if larger nations continue to open new fossil fuel projects,” Feleti Teo, the prime minister of Tuvalu, said in 2024. Located roughly halfway between Australia and Hawaii, Tuvalu is a nation of extremely low-lying reef islands and atolls. Sea level rise—driven primarily by burning fossil fuels, which boosts global temperatures and melts polar ice sheets—threatens to put those islands and atolls underwater within the lifetimes of Tuvalu’s current inhabitants. No wonder Tuvalu, along with other Pacific island nations, will co-host a follow-up meeting to the landmark First Conference on Transitioning Away From Fossil Fuels held six weeks ago in Santa Marta, Colombia.So it comes as a shock to learn that Tuvalu’s government is heavily invested in fossil fuels, as revealed by an investigation published on May 28 by the global news agency Agence France-Presse. The Tuvalu Trust Fund, the nation’s largest financial asset, according to AFP, “has invested in coal mining, gas exploration and the world’s largest crude oil refinery,” reported correspondent Steven Trask, referring to the Jamnagar petrochemical complex in India.  Income from the fund helps pay for government programs in Tuvalu, but it’s unclear how aware government officials were about the investments. Since 2022, the Tuvalu Trust Fund, which was first established in 1987, has been operated by Mercer, a consulting firm based in New York, which told AFP it did not comment on its clients’ portfolios. Presented with AFP’s findings, a spokesperson for the trust said it would review the fund’s holdings and continue “to seek to minimize its exposure to fossil fuel reserves and carbon emissions.”AFP’s exposé points to a jaw-dropping conflict in an investment portfolio for a nation that is quite literally disappearing as a result of climate change. It is also public-minded journalism at its best. It holds power to account. It reveals surprising information about two vital, often overlooked issues: sea level rise and fossil fuel production. It notes the implications not only for Tuvalu but for the broader world. And it accomplishes all of this at a time when some news outlets, especially in the U.S., are retreating from the climate story, as a recent white paper by Covering Climate Now, or CCNow, shows. AFP is demonstrating the value of staying the course.In the U.S., National Public Radio also offered fine climate reporting recently, airing a 19-minute podcast on May 24 that challenged the notion that the Trump administration’s hostility to climate action makes progress impossible. Julia Simon, NPR’s climate solutions correspondent, shared audio from the Santa Marta conference to illustrate what’s happening outside the U.S. Then it was off to Denver to hear about a city program to heat and cool buildings more sustainably. Then to Massachusetts, where volunteers plant carbon-absorbing “pocket forests” on abandoned land. Citing one of the studies behind CCNow’s 89 Percent Project, Simon concluded by reporting that “80 percent of people worldwide … want stronger climate action from their governments.”That widespread public sentiment makes what happened next all the more head-scratching: Four days later, NPR fired its climate editor and disbanded its climate desk. “Today, I was laid off by NPR,” Neela Banerjee, the head of NPR’s climate desk, posted on LinkedIn. She added, “The climate desk no longer exists separately but has been folded into the National Desk.” In other words, NPR still plans to cover climate change but without the focus and expertise provided by a dedicated team. Simon remains on staff.NPR’s climate desk was shut as part of broader budget cuts management said were necessary after Congress voted last year to eliminate federal subsidies for public media. But NPR’s “commitment to climate journalism has not changed,” NPR spokesperson Juliet Barbara said, in a statement to the Climate-Colored Goggles newsletter. NPR “has not eliminated our Climate team,” she added, “we have reorganized our newsroom.” Nevertheless, it’s hard not to conclude that NPR saw dedicated climate expertise as nonessential.At a time much of the planet is broiling in unseasonable heat, with worse to come this summer, that is a grievous misreading not only of the climate crisis but of the public’s interest in tackling it. CCNow’s white paper identified a number of news outlets—AFP, along with The Guardian, The New York Times, CNN, AP, and more—that are bucking the trend of deprioritizing the climate story. Most of them employ a climate team because it makes for more informed, engaging coverage. But what’s more important, the white paper found, “is that top management conveys to the respective newsrooms that climate coverage matters.” NPR’s management has conveyed precisely the opposite message, a loss for its newsroom and for millions of listeners and readers who deserve better.This article is published as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

With the Supreme Court’s next slate of decisions for this term not coming until Thursday, it is worth looking ahead to some of the top cases that the justices will hear next term. One of them, St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, could significantly reshape the relationship between the government and religious organizations—as well as the high court’s precedents on religious pluralism.The case is a dispute between Colorado education officials on one side and the Archdiocese of Denver, local Catholic parishes, and Catholic parents on the other. (For simplicity’s sake, I’ll refer to them as the state and the plaintiffs, respectively.) Colorado is one of a growing number of states with a universal pre-K program, or UPK. Voters approved it on the ballot in 2020, state lawmakers enacted in 2021, and it went into effect in 2023. When lawmakers enacted the UPK program, they required the Colorado Department of Education to adopt an equal-opportunity rule for participating preschool providers. The rule adopted by the department requires them to “provide eligible children an equal opportunity to enroll and receive preschool services regardless of race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity, lack of housing, income level, or disability.”This requirement is problematic for some preschool providers in the state. Among them is the archdiocese, which oversees 34 Catholic preschools in Colorado. In 2023, the archdiocese formally requested a religious exemption from the equal-opportunity rule to allow it to “admit only families who agree with the Catholic Church’s teachings, including on gender and sexuality,” according to the parish’s petition for review. Colorado education officials denied that request, noting that the rule flowed from a state law requirement and that they had no power to override the state legislature.The plaintiffs have good reason to expect a favorable hearing at the high court. In recent years, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has greatly expanded access to public funds and programs for religious organizations. Most free exercise clause cases have historically involved discrimination against specific religious groups, such as the Amish or Jehovah’s Witnesses. The free exercise clause, the court’s conservatives have more recently claimed, also protects religious organizations from discrimination against religion in general terms.In the 2017 case Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer, for example, the justices ruled that denying an “otherwise available public benefit” to a religious organization because of its religious nature violated the free exercise clause. In 2019’s Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, the court held that states could also not block students from using state scholarships at private religious schools. And in 2022’s Carson v. Makin, the court applied similar reasoning when striking down a Maine law that restricted its tuition assistance program to “nonsectarian” schools.The plaintiffs argued that Colorado discriminated against them in this situation by declining to grant them an exemption from the state’s equal-opportunity rule. “Here, there is no question that the parish preschools are otherwise eligible for UPK funding,” they told the justices in their petition, quoting from Carson. “And there is no question that those preschools have been excluded from that benefit ‘because of their religious exercise’—namely, their religiously motivated policies related to sex and gender. So, under Carson, the exclusion should have been ‘subjected to the strictest scrutiny.’”Not so, says Colorado. In the lower courts, the state countered by claiming that there was no discrimination at all. “Carson does not apply to this case because UPK does not exclude religious schools,” they told the justices in their reply brief. “Indeed, UPK welcomes them in a program where public funding turns not on providers’ secular or religious character, but instead on providers’ compliance with UPK’s equal-opportunity requirements.”While the plaintiffs say that the rule is an affront to American religious pluralism, the state implicitly disagreed. “UPK’s equal-opportunity requirements,” Colorado explained, “ensure that all Colorado parents—Catholic parents as well as same-sex parents—know that their children will not be turned away, because of their protected-class status, from the publicly funded preschool that best meets their families’ needs.”Colorado also pointed to language in the court’s recent ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which involved religious parents’ opt-outs to LGBTQ-related materials, that explained that “the government is generally free to place incidental burdens on religious exercise so long as it does so pursuant to a neutral policy that is generally applicable.” That phrasing refers to the Supreme Court’s 1990 ruling in Employment Division v. Smith, which represents a major hurdle in this case for the plaintiffs.Smith involved two Native American men who alleged that the state of Oregon had infringed upon the First Amendment’s free exercise clause by denying them unemployment benefits for using peyote, which has spiritual significance for some tribal nations. The Supreme Court rejected their claim, instead holding that the free exercise clause could not be invoked by itself to challenge what the court described as “neutral laws of general applicability.”Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the court, noted that the state’s ban on illegal drug use was not aimed at punishing a specific religious act, but rather applied to all people equally. If Americans could invoke religious beliefs to exclude themselves from such laws, Scalia warned while quoting precedent, the effect “would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”The high court’s ruling prompted Congress to enact the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, or RFRA, which created a statutory pathway to challenge free exercise clause violations by the federal government in federal court. But the Supreme Court struck down provisions of RFRA that sought to extend its scope to actions by state governments on federalism grounds in a 1997 case, so RFRA does not affect Colorado’s actions here.As I’ve noted before, conservative judges and legal scholars have frequently criticized the Smith ruling for constraining free-exercise challenges. That makes it something of an outlier for the court’s conservative majority, who often invoke Scalia’s writings on statutory and constitutional interpretation as a lodestar.The closest that the court’s conservatives came to overturning Smith so far was in the 2021 case Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, which involved Catholic social services programs and adoptions to same-sex couples. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote a concurring opinion, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, that criticized Smith’s approach while also arguing against what would replace it, at least in the view of that case’s plaintiffs.“I am skeptical about swapping Smith’s categorical antidiscrimination approach for an equally categorical strict scrutiny regime,” Barrett explained, “particularly when this Court’s resolution of conflicts between generally applicable laws and other First Amendment rights—like speech and assembly—has been much more nuanced.” She suggested that there would be “a number of issues to work through if Smith were overruled,” and—crucially—concluded it was not necessary in Fulton because Smith did not actually apply.In their petition, the plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to revisit whether Smith should be overturned, but the court declined to do so when agreeing to hear the case. Instead, the justices limited the questions presented to two other ones raised: whether “proving a lack of general applicability under [Smith] requires showing unfettered discretion or categorical exemptions for identical secular conduct,” and whether “[Carson] displaces the rule of [Smith] only when the government explicitly excludes religious people and institutions.”The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, for its part, declined to apply Carson at all because the state did not make a practice of treating religious schools differently from secular ones. “The Department did not exclude faith-based preschools from participating in UPK,” the three-judge panel explained. “Indeed, they welcomed and actively solicited their participation. The only relevant limitation on any preschool’s participation is the nondiscrimination requirement, which applies to all preschools regardless of whether they are religious or secular.”More importantly, as the state noted, “Colorado’s law, as written and as implemented, does not allow for any exceptions from its equal-opportunity requirements.” Since there are no exceptions, the state continued, Smith applies because the law is neutral and generally applicable. The plaintiffs tried to circumvent that point by emphasizing a Colorado official’s testimony that the state might consider exemptions if a preschool requested a preference for “gender-nonconforming children” or “children of color from historically underserved areas.” That willingness, the plaintiffs claimed, meant that the law wasn’t as ironclad as the state had averred.But the Tenth Circuit put little stock in this argument or the official’s testimony. The official in question, the court noted, was responding to hypothetical questions and still noted that the preferences could only be given “as long as there wasn’t discrimination that was aligned to the [non]discrimination provision.” No such exemptions had ever been given, the panel noted, and concluding otherwise “would require that we invert a clear reading of the Department’s regulations based not on their language or operation, but a series of hypotheticals posed unexpectedly to one witness at trial.”It is no surprise that the court’s conservative majority agreed to hear this case. The justices have a long history of second-guessing Colorado’s antidiscrimination laws and policies, dating back to the Masterpiece Cakeshop dispute over a baker’s refusal to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple in 2012. In 2018, the court concluded that the state’s Civil Rights Commission had abandoned neutrality when some of its members criticized the baker’s religious beliefs. Three years ago, in 303 Creative v. Elenis, the court also ruled in favor of a Christian web designer who sued the commission so she could deny services to hypothetical same-sex couples on free speech grounds.Indeed, the plaintiffs’ filings play into the conservative justices’ preconceived notions about allegedly defiant lower courts and allegedly bigoted state officials. They describe Colorado’s approach to the equal-opportunity rule as a “thumbing of its nose at the rule of Trinity Lutheran, Espinoza, and Carson” and claim the state is intentionally excluding “those with traditional religious beliefs about marriage,” which will likely resonate with at least some of the court’s conservative justices.“This Court promised in Obergefell that religious groups would be protected when they dissent from secular orthodoxies about marriage and sexuality,” the plaintiffs argued in their petition, referring to the landmark 2015 ruling on marriage equality. “The Free Exercise Clause simply cannot do that important work—which this Court has described as ‘at the heart of our pluralistic society’—if it can be so easily evaded.”There is a certain amount of irony in these appeals to American pluralism. To rule in the plaintiffs’ favor, the justices would have to conclude that a state cannot require UPK providers to provide their services to all Coloradoans equally, even when it requires providers to each operate according to the same rules. What could be more hostile to a pluralistic society than that?

At Monday’s NBA Finals, Trump was as much of a good luck charm to the Knicks as a fork is to a toaster.

As all theater kids know, the more dramatic the showmance, the more surely it will come to an end.

The US trade representative will tour manufacturing facilities.

“Democrats are not going to vote to pass [a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act extension] until he's withdrawn,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.

Democrats need to revamp their message if they want to capitalize on voter angst over the war in Iran, the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way writes.

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