Attention to the Unseen

Mark Joseph Stern writes: The Supreme Court expanded Donald Trump’s power yet again on Wednesday, granting him the authority to fire Democratic members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission in direct violation of federal law. Over the liberal justices’ dissent, the conservative supermajority greenlit the first step of Trump’s systematic destruction of the agency—a plan that collides with many other federal statutes. The court’s action imperils the CPSC’s ability to ban products that may maim or kill consumers, including children,…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: When Justice Department officials reviewed what Attorney General Pam Bondi called a “truckload” of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein earlier this year, they discovered that Donald Trump’s name appeared multiple times, according to senior administration officials. In May, Bondi and her deputy informed the president at a meeting in the White House that his name was in the Epstein files, the officials said. Many other high-profile figures were also named, Trump was told. Being mentioned…

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The New York Times reports: The Trump administration’s recent decision to backtrack on releasing new details about the investigation into the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has prompted something exceedingly rare: Republican voters have begun to break with the president. Mr. Trump has long engendered unwavering loyalty from his followers, who tend to shrug off even his most extreme controversies. But recent public polling suggests even such fervent support may have a limit. While 40 percent of Republicans approve of…

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The New York Times reports: President Trump’s executive orders seeking to punish big law firms have led some of them to acquiesce to him and left others reluctant to take on pro bono cases that could put them at odds with the administration. But as opponents of the White House’s policies organized to fight Mr. Trump in court on a vast range of actions and policies, they quickly found that they did not need to rely on Big Law. Instead,…

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Peter M. Shane writes: No one on the Supreme Court has gone further to enable Donald Trump’s extreme exercise of presidential power than the chief justice of the United States, John Roberts. Associate justices have also written some important opinions shaping executive power, and the Court has issued ever more important unsigned orders, but the most transformative opinions—the opinions that directly legitimize Trump’s unprecedented uses of power—are Roberts’s handiwork. This is not happenstance. Under Supreme Court practice, the most senior…

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The Washington Post reports: President Donald Trump and his appointees have been accused of flouting courts in a third of the more than 160 lawsuits against the administration in which a judge has issued a substantive ruling, a Washington Post analysis has found, suggesting widespread noncompliance with America’s legal system. Plaintiffs say Justice Department lawyers and the agencies they represent are snubbing rulings, providing false information, failing to turn over evidence, quietly working around court orders and inventing pretexts to…

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Cristian Farias writes: In April, U.S. District Judge William Young, who sits in Boston, made a procedural ruling from the bench that seemed to catch the lawyers in the courtroom by surprise. Like many other judges these days, Young had convened a hearing to consider whether to grant a preliminary injunction—which, in the normal course, would put a quick stop to an illegal or otherwise unconstitutional government policy. By one count, in the first seventy days of Donald Trump’s presidency,…

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Chris Feliciano Arnold writes: Because I was naturalized as a child, I didn’t have to take the famous civics test—I was still learning that stuff in school. I just rolled my fingertips in wet ink and held still for a three-quarter-profile photograph that revealed my nose shape, ear placement, jawline, and forehead contour. My parents sat beside me for an interview with an immigration officer who asked me my name, where I lived, and who took care of me. But…

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