supreme court

'We're basically giving up': Republicans swoon after election lockout in this Trump state

Wisconsin Republicans appear distraught after their recent trouncing in state supreme court elections, which handed liberal justices a 5-to-2 majority.

"We're basically giving up on the court. Which is a horrible decision to make, because it's going to have huge ramifications, and it may not matter who's governor, or who controls the Legislature, if the court is controlled by liberals for the next 10 to 15 years," said Mark Graul, a longtime GOP operative who previously handled campaigns for Supreme Court Justice Annette Ziegler.

Graul said donors were unwilling to come off the cash for conservative judicial candidate Maria Lazar, appearing to think donations were a lost cause as the state’s voting public swings Democrat in the shadow of President Donald Trump.

This, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, is a colossal turn from 2017, when Democrats did not bother to field a candidate for that year's Wisconsin Supreme Court race after a string of harsh losses, “including one that cemented a robust conservative majority on the state's highest court.”

But a decade later, the tables have clearly turned.

“It is the Republicans who have lost control of the court and do not yet have a conservative candidate waiting in the wings to try to keep the liberals' 5-2 majority from expanding in 2027,” said the Journal.

Graul’s former employer, Ziegler, delivered a striking blow to Democrats in 2017, having run unopposed after a brutal Democrat beatdown in the state supreme Court, the U.S. Senate and the White House. Now, Ziegler is leaving an open race in 2027 with her decision not to seek re-election.

"You really did have, in addition to the gross imbalance of financial resources for the court race, you also had an especially negative national environment for Republicans," said Marquette University Law School’s Charles Franklin. "And I think that both held down Republican energy and turnout, but it also surely boosted Democratic turnout yesterday."

U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany is on the ballot in the state’s open governor's race, and he assures reporters that he is running a campaign "that can stand on its own" and won't need to depend on the weakened state GOP.

“Well, we got our butts kicked last night, right? There’s no doubt about it, and we should acknowledge that," Tiffany told reporters at a recent press conference. "But the election that’s coming up this fall, in November, is a new election, and … every election is unique, and I have built a campaign − money, manpower, messaging − we’re going to compete on all fronts.”

Democratic strategist Joe Zepecki told the Sentinel that Republicans have plenty of financial resources, saying “MAGA world is sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars." However, Republicans will have to get past “the disgust that independents and a growing number of Republicans have with an administration and a Congress that is incapable of delivering what they said they were going to.”

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The Supreme Court's final 'reckoning' may be right around the corner: legal experts

Slate Senior Editor Dahlia Lithwick and legal writer Mark Stern say there may be a reckoning underway among the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from moving forward with plans to deport roughly 6,000 Syrians and 350,000 Haitians who were granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) by Presidents Obama, Biden, and Trump himself in his first administration, which is a contradiction to conservatives’ apparent eagerness to give President Donald Trump his way on the shadow docket while the case plays itself out in court.

Stern said it was the right thing to do because federal statute “does not allow the secretary of homeland security to prematurely end a TPS designation before it expires.”

But, more directly, the court’s decision not to quietly give Trump his way as the case plays out “reflects that maybe the court could be conceding” to liberal Ketanji Brown Jackson’s arguments in past dissents when the court allowed Trump to do things like fire protected federal employees before a court decision was made.

In past dissents, Jackson argued that cases must also be considered on the base of who faces irreparable harm, and that immigrants are the ones who face irreparable injury and grievous harm if TPS is stripped, while the Trump administration couldn’t point to one single hardship it would face by keeping TPS in place for a few months.

“The previous two times around, the rest of the court — or at least the conservative justices — pretty much ignored her. But maybe this time they listened because they did exactly what she had counseled, which was to keep TPS in place and set this case for arguments and decision the right way so everybody’s claims will be deliberated on property,” said Stern.

Lithwick also noted that at a Monday event, attended by lower court judges and lawyers, Jackson called out conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh to his face, arguing that the “uptick in the court’s willingness to get involved with cases on the emergency docket is a real unfortunate problem.”

Kavanaugh argued that the rise in emergency cases was partly because presidents are eager to push policies thwarted by a gridlocked Congress, and called Brown’s criticism of the court’s emergency docket unfair, given that the court must rule one way or the other on whether to grant or deny those cases.

CNN reports he also questioned the “short memories” of some of the court’s critics, noting that the Biden administration also regularly appealed cases when lower courts shut down its policies.

But that provoked Jackson to respond that “Brett will remember that when we clerked some 20 years ago, this was not the Supreme Court’s stance, that just because these motions were filed the court actually had to entertain and grant them on their merits.”

US District Judge Paul Friedman — who had broached the topic of the supreme court’s abuse of the emergency docket — then turned to Kavanaugh and asked him if he wanted to offer a rebuttal.

“Ketanji states it well,” Kavanaugh said, adding that “you have to have the same position, no matter who’s president.”

Stern noted there was applause in the room that day.

“It’s a fight over just how much disrespect the Supreme Court is going to show to the lower courts as they try to do their jobs under immense pressure and constant fierce criticism and slander from the leader of the country and many of the politicians in his party,” said Stern, arguing that every time the Supreme Court’s conservative majority quietly erases lower court’s decisions in the shadow docket they are disrespecting the lower courts that are the ones who are “actually on the front lines of these cases.”

“Shaming her colleagues into doing the right thing seems to be her MO, and, based on the court allowing TPS to remain in place so far, may suggest that it might be working and she should be keeping the pressure on,” Stern said.

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Expert says don't be fooled: Supreme Court isn't in 'Trump's pocket'

While popular opinion argues the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court is determined to empower President Donald Trump, SCOTUSblog Editor Sarah Isgur says she’s cracked the court’s motives and can better tell which direction it’s going.

That direction, Isgur claims in the Atlantic, is not necessarily into Trump’s pocket.

“By striking down President Trump’s tariffs, the Supreme Court has once again shown that it is no partisan instrument of Republican power,” said Isgur. “Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the decision, has a much more ambitious goal in mind.”

But the court has shown astounding willingness to buttress many of Trump’s more controversial policies through the wordless might of its shadow docket, such as when it upheld the administration’s push to fire members of the formerly independent National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board in an unsigned two-page decision (Trump v. Wilcox) last year.

But Isgur argues that Trump is actually losing at the Court more than winning.

“[I]n his first term, Trump had the lowest success rate at the Supreme Court of any president in at least a century. In fact, the first Trump administration was the first modern presidential administration more likely to lose than win before the Supreme Court, including in cases involving immigration and the census,” Isgur said.

The court also bounced his push to change the outcome of the 2020 election. And even though Trump had a good summer on the Court’s interim docket in his second term, “he has not only lost on the tariffs case; the Court also blocked him from federalizing the National Guard in Chicago and using the Alien Enemies Act to deport people without due process,” Isgur argued.

The bigger gambit the Roberts Court is indulging, said Isgur, appears to be “reining in the power of the presidency and making the president more politically accountable.”

This, said Isgur, is a trend they also applied to former president Joe Biden.

“Trump’s tariffs and Joe Biden’s student-loan-debt-forgiveness cases were both about whether a president could act without clear congressional authorization,” said Isgur. “The 2024 Loper Bright decision, which held that executive-branch agencies no longer get to define the scope of their own authority, also stripped power from the executive branch. So did the vaccine-mandate case (Biden) in 2022 and the tax-records case (Trump) in 2020. This is a through line across administrations.

The court appears to be giving the White House the power to fire members of so-called independent agencies, but Isgur said that’s only after the justices, in Loper Bright, “took power away from those agencies and handed it back to Congress, where it belonged,” essentially making Trump “a more powerful president over a weaker presidency.”

Isgur argued that the court’s 2024 criminal-immunity decision might also appear to run counter to Roberts’s motives because of how openly Trump is abusing the power of his office. But it still fits, said Isgur.

“… [I]t’s up to Congress to impeach a scofflaw president,” said Isgur. “Criminal prosecution, no matter how deserved it might seem, can’t be a substitute for political action by Congress — just as executive orders, no matter how desirable, can’t be a substitute for legislative action by Congress.”

By this argument, Isgur claimed the object of the court “is not to help one political party. It is to shrink the presidency back to size and force 535 people to figure out a lasting solution to our problems, one that everyone can live with.”

“This is no small thing: If the power of the legislative and executive branches were more equal — if Americans knew that every presidential election wasn’t “the most important election in our lifetime” — perhaps our politics wouldn’t be so broken.

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WSJ demands 'ugly' Trump apologize to the Supreme Court

The conservative learning Wall Street Journal blasted President Donald Trump for “smearing” members of the Supreme Court who overruled his unilateral tariff policy Friday.

“President Trump owes the Supreme Court an apology — to the individual Justices he smeared on Friday and the institution itself,” WSJ reported. “Mr. Trump doubtless won’t offer one, but his rant in response to his tariff defeat at the Court was arguably the worst moment of his Presidency.”

Where other presidents have criticized SCOTUS when they didn’t like a ruling, WSJ said Trump “lit into the Justices who voted against him as traitors bought by foreign interests.”

Trump called the liberals on the court a “disgrace to our nation,” but reserved even more hate for friendly justices he’d expected to side with him due to their nearly rubberstamp approval in past cases.

“[They] think they’re being ‘politically correct,’ which has happened before, far too often, with certain members of this Court, when, in fact, they’re just being fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats—and . . . they’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution,” Trump spat. “It’s my opinion that the Court has been swayed by foreign interests.”

“This is ugly even by Mr. Trump’s standards,” said the WSJ. “He’s accusing them of betraying the U.S. at the behest of nefarious interests he didn’t identify, no doubt because they don’t exist. Asked about Justices Gorsuch and Barrett, whom he appointed, Mr. Trump called them ‘an embarrassment to their families.’”

The WSJ editorial board pointed out that “this is the same Court that ruled Mr. Trump’s way on presidential immunity, which was more personally consequential for this President.”

“Mr. Trump shouldn’t have been surprised by the Court. We warned from the start that this would be the result of his unlawful resort to IEEPA. The fault doesn’t lie with the Justices but with his own tariff obsessions,” WSJ said.

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'Dark MAGA': White House dims lights after Trump's trouncing

Let it be said that President Donald Trump’s people know how to put on a show

New York Times reporter Chris Cameron noted that The White House “turned down the lights for President Trump’s news conference on Friday after the Supreme Court decision that struck down his sweeping tariffs,” as if in response to the president’s smoldering mood.

Cameron cited White House spokesman Steven Cheung saying in a social media post that “President Trump will not be stopped.” His post highlighted the shadowy lighting, which Cheung described as the tonal shift “Dark MAGA.”

The tactic might be a throwback to former President Joe Biden attempt to invoke an atmosphere of seriousness and warning, as he did when he sought to paint “a dark portrait of a democracy on the brink.”

Speaking outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Cameron recalled Biden’s stage and the hall being darkly lit, with Biden flanked by “Marine guards silhouetted in shadow against the building.”

“The dim stage lights were colored blue and red, invoking the American flag, but the lights surrounding Mr. Biden himself were a foreboding, shadowy red,” said Cameron. “The image was ominous. To Mr. Biden’s allies, it effectively conveyed a sense of urgency and signaled a deviation from Mr. Biden’s usual message encouraging bipartisanship and political compromise. To Mr. Biden’s critics, it was divisive, alarming, even authoritarian.”

Cameron said Trump’s lighting might also have been an attempt to invoke Biden’s “dark Brandon” motif.

“By the time of Mr. Biden’s speech in September 2022, the Biden White House had begun leaning into the meme, posting images of the president with glowing eyes that shoot laser beams. After the midterms, the president’s re-election campaign began selling ‘Dark Brandon’ coffee mugs,” said Cameron.

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White House aides nervous about Trump's 'fury' after court decision

NBC News reports “a visibly irritated President Donald Trump” blasted the Supreme Court on Friday for striking down unilateral tariffs he had imposed under an economic emergency law.

Before stalking off, Trump assailed the conservative justices of the court who he had apparently expected to rule in alignment with him — as they already have on many of Trump’s more controversial policies.

NBC reports “Trump's fury was evident in his expression and his voice” when speaking of the conservative justices who had sided against him. When asked if he regretted appointing Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch during his first term, Trump said their vote against him was “an embarrassment to their families.”

Trump’s venom was still apparently flaring after Trump returned to the White House.

"At this point, no one should be surprised that the courts are working against President Trump," said one Trump adviser speaking anonymously to NBC News. "To say everyone here is irate would be an understatement. But this is not over. We will be heard from again on this. I don’t know that there is a specific plan as of this moment, but it’s not over."

Trump admitted that using tariffs as a social media-delivered political weapon against international trade partners will be "more complicated" because of the court’s 6-3 opinion. But he vowed to place a 10 percent global tariff on “all imports” indiscriminately under "Section 122" powers before marching back home.

Trump’s allies were similarly enraged.

Steve Bannon, longtime MAGA Trump adviser and the host of the “War Room” podcast, replied with a four character text message when asked what would come next on the tariff front.

"#War,” posted Bannon, an ally of convicted sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein who had even tried to revamp Epstein’s character up until his arrest.

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Trump may have gotten Insurrection Act idea from Brett Kavanaugh

President Donald Trump has entertained the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act as a means of cracking down on protesters in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He may have initially gotten the idea from one of his own appointed Supreme Court justices.

That's according to a Thursday article by the New York Times' Adam Liptak, who reported that Trump's recent flirtation with the 1792 law allowing presidents to deploy the military on U.S. soil may have come from the Supreme Court striking down his attempt to deploy federal troops in Chicago, Illinois. Liptak noted that a concurring opinion from Justice Brett Kavanaugh – who Trump nominated to the Court in 2018 — effectively characterized that loss as a "speed bump on the road to greater presidential power."

"[Kavanaugh] pointed to the possibility of Mr. Trump invoking a different law, the Insurrection Act, to send more conventional military troops to American cities, Liptak wrote.

The Times writer explained that when the Trump administration defended its federalization of National Guard troops in cities like Chicago, Portland, Oregon and Los Angeles, California, it primarily did so under an "obscure" early 20th century statute allowing for the use of troops if the federal government is unable to execute laws using "regular forces." The statute also allowed for deploying troops on American soil in the event of foreign invasion and in order to quell a rebellion.

While Kavanaugh was one of the five justices joined the majority opinion declining to let Trump deploy troops to U.S. cities, he notably didn't sign the actual opinion. He additionally observed: "As I read it, the Court’s opinion does not address the president’s authority under the Insurrection Act."

"The court’s opinion does not address or purport to disturb the president’s long-asserted Article II authority to use the U.S. military (as distinct from the National Guard) to protect federal personnel and property and thereby ensure the execution of federal law," Kavanaugh's concurring opinion read.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the Insurrection Act is "dangerously overbroad and ripe for abuse," and has not been updated in more than 150 years. It is effectively the lone exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the U.S. military from being used for domestic law enforcement purposes. However, in the event of a significant uprising against the government, a president can invoke the Insurrection Act to suspend the Posse Comitatus Act and suppress a rebellion using the military. The last time the Insurrection Act was invoked was in 1992, when Los Angeles was consumed by riots in the wake of a jury's acquittal of four police officers who beat Rodney King.

Click here to read Liptak's full report in the New York Times (subscription required).

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E. Jean Carroll demands Supreme Court intervene to stop Trump

Writer E. Jean Carroll is now urging the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) to halt President Donald Trump's last-ditch attempt to overturn a verdict in Carroll's favor.

Newsweek reported Wednesday that Carroll's attorney, Roberta Kaplan, recently submitted a filing to SCOTUS in opposition to a motion filed by Trump's legal team in November to overturn a verdict that ordered Trump to pay Carroll $88.3 million in damages. That amount stems from a $5 million judgment handed down in 2023 for sexual abuse, and $83.3 million for defamation.

Kaplan's 44-page filing accuses Trump of trying to re-litigate issues already decided at the district court level and upheld at the appellate court level. Kaplan recounted Trump's unsuccessful attempt to exclude the infamous 2016 Access Hollywood tape, in which the eventual president was heard telling host Billy Bush about how he routinely kissed and groped women without their consent. She then reminded justices of Carroll's key allegation against Trump — that he touched her between her legs in a New York City department store in 1996 before she pushed him away.

"Ms. Carroll testified that her encounter with [Trump] began when he asked her to go shopping with him 'for a friend,' ... but then led her into a dressing room, closed the door, and 'shoved [her] against the wall ... so hard [that her] head banged,'" Kaplan wrote in the filing. "In the Access Hollywood tape, [Trump] admitted to this same tactic: He invited Nancy O’Dell to go shopping and then 'moved on her like a b——.'"

Kaplan also addressed Trump's arguments that the verdict should be overturned due to the 2024 Trump v. United States decision that allowed presidents to have absolute immunity for all official acts. Carroll's attorney asserted that the immunity decision does not apply to conduct Trump displayed in private.

Carroll's attorney further warned SCOTUS against taking up Trump's case, arguing that it would jeopardize decades of precedent governing defamation cases. Newsweek also reported that Kaplan cautioned the Court against further delaying accountability in a case tha has dragged on for years.

The Supreme Court has not yet granted a writ of certiorari to hear Trump's appeal. If the Court goes not hear the case, then the judgments against Trump would stand and the president would be compelled to pay the $88.3 million in judgments.

Click here to read Newsweek's full report.

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'Seismic events' may be about to end Trump's control of the US economy: analysis

A former White House economic advisor is warning that President Donald Trump is about to lose control of the U.S. economy.

“Remember 2025, when President Trump dictated bracing new rules for the economy? Impose sweeping tariffs! Dismantle government agencies! Lower taxes! Cut spending! The Federal Reserve remained independent, but almost everyone else fell in line. That may soon feel like ancient history,” former White House Council of Economic Advisors Jason Furman wrote Wednesday in the New York Times.

“Because in the first couple of months of this new year, the power shifts,” continued Furman. “The Supreme Court is expected to rule on both the Trump administration’s huge slew of tariffs and the president’s ability to control the Federal Reserve Board. In addition, a new nominee to lead the Fed will be handed over to the Senate for scrutiny. Meanwhile, Congress no longer seems to be listening to Mr. Trump on taxes and spending — and might even start enacting its own agenda.”

The Supreme Court’s upcoming tariff decision may be the first of major “seismic events,” said Furman. The Court is expected to rule in the coming days or weeks, possibly fully endorsing or rejecting the administration’s rationale, or at least paring down Trump’s disputed authority to levy new import taxes on Americans and U.S. business.

“If some tariffs stay in place, businesses that have so far absorbed much of the costs may no longer be able to shield consumers from higher prices,” warned Furman. “Trading partners may reconsider their agreements — or retaliate against U.S. products. And if any tariffs are struck down, the administration will almost certainly try to reimpose them using alternative legal authorities, which will set off still more litigation.”

And in August, the court will consider Trump’s claim of unilateral power to fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

Congress, itself, may finally be prepared to reclaim some power Republicans happily conceded to Trump. Resulting “affordability” issues caused by Republicans’ combined policies with Trump are driving the GOP to reconsider Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies Republicans let expire on January 1, forcing approximately 22 million people to pay higher health insurance premiums ahead of this fall's midterms.

“These questions come at a moment when the state of the economy is already unusually uncertain,” said Furman, with the risk of recession remaining elevated, lingering inflation an the possibility of the artificial intelligence industry collapsing.

“I find myself wishing for something like Mr. Trump’s decisiveness from 2025 — but only if it could be paired with something it fundamentally lacked: wisdom,” said Furman said. “Instead, we may get a messy, fragmented system in which power is shared among nine Supreme Court justices, 12 Federal Reserve voters, 535 members of Congress, and millions of businesses and households making their own decisions.”

“I would settle for that,” added Furman. “A stalemate, even an untidy one, is preferable to Mr. Trump wielding unilateral control over the economy."

Read Furman's New York Times op-ed at this link.

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'Put the court back in its place': Legal expert lays out 4 ways to rein in Supreme Court

Should Democrats retake the White House in 2028 and have majorities in both chambers of Congress, one legal expert is arguing there are numerous ways the six-member conservative majority on the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) could be brought to heel.

In a Monday essay for Slate, legal writer and attorney Mark Joseph Stern directly addressed a reader's concern that no matter what laws Democrats may try to pass under a potential new Democratic majority government, the Supreme Court could simply strike those laws down. Stern countered that there are several ways to re-establish Congress' powers and prevent SCOTUS from acting as an unelected super-legislature.

First, Stern argued that Congress should immediately grant statehood to both Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. as part of a "suite of structural reforms." He argued this was a necessary step to take in order to make sure that sparsely populated conservative states like South Dakota and Wyoming aren't over-represented in Congress (both territories have already passed statehood resolutions, meaning all Congress needs to do is pass a bill to admit them).

"Remember, the senators who voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court represented fewer people than the senators who voted to oppose him," Stern wrote. "That is a huge structural problem that Congress can fix."

Second, Stern proposed that Congress pass a law that would require the Supreme Court to have a 7-2 supermajority to strike down any legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by the president. He noted that the Nebraska and North Dakota state constitutions already have amendments requiring a supreme court supermajority in order to toss out any laws, and called on a potential future Democratic government to "put it in there that the law cannot be struck down unless seven justices agree that it’s unconstitutional."

Stern also advocated for imposing a strict time limit on the judicial review process, calling the Supreme Court to no longer be able to evaluate the constitutionality of any new laws more than one calendar year after their passage. He observed that the Supreme Court's 2012 review of the Affordable Care Act took place after Democrats had already lost their majority in the House of Representatives in 2010, and that a one-year limit would mean that Congress' partisan makeup would still be the same if the Court threw out any laws passed by that Congress and lawmakers wanted to try passing the law again.

The Slate author described these proposed reforms as a "good-faith effort by Democrats to recalibrate the balance of power by reestablishing Congress’ primacy and diminishing the Supreme Court’s untouchable supremacy." However, he allowed for the possibility that these reforms may fall short. In that event, he called on Democrats to "add four seats" and pack the Supreme Court with new Democratic appointees.

"The current Republican justices have already shredded adherence to precedent. A future liberal majority should say no to unilateral disarmament and apply the same rules," Stern wrote. "That is how Democrats put the court back in its place: by undoing its attacks on democracy and restoring the constitutional settlement the Roberts court has spent years dismantling."

Click here to read Stern's full article in Slate (subscription required).

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'Give Republicans a taste': Legal experts propose next Democratic president's Day 1 agenda

The first year of President Donald Trump's second term has been rife with examples of the president doing something previously believed to be illegal until it was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). Now, two legal experts are arguing that the next Democratic president should take advantage of the new vastly expanded presidential powers sanctioned by the nation's highest court.

In a Friday article for Slate, legal journalists Mark Joseph Stern and Dahlia Lithwick laid out how the next Democrat to be elected president of the United States should govern in their first 24 hours, under the new legal boundaries SCOTUS granted the White House under the Trump administration. Stern argued that because SCOTUS has blessed the "unitary executive" theory that all powers delegated to the executive branch and federal agencies can be unilaterally exercised by the president, the next president — he named Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) as a stand-in example — should take after Trump's example and "wield those powers aggressively."

"How does that cash out? First, let’s remember that the Supreme Court has now effectively granted the president authority to impound federal funds duly appropriated by Congress and to abolish federal agencies established and funded by Congress," Stern wrote. "I think that is terrible and anti-constitutional. But thanks to the Supreme Court, that is now the law. So let’s talk about what President AOC can do with those powers in 2029."

"On Day 1, she needs to impound ICE’s budget. She needs to refuse to spend the billions of dollars that Congress has appropriated to the agency and fire tens of thousands of immigration agents immediately, starting with those who committed acts of violence and discrimination — which, by that point, may be almost all of them," he continued. "Close as many immigrant detention facilities as possible and free the detainees."

Stern then argued that a Democratic president could then repurpose ICE's budget as a reparations fund for families of immigrants who were improperly deported or denied due process, release the names of all agents who broke the law and prosecute every lawbreaking agent for crimes who wasn't preemptively pardoned by Trump. He reminded readers that all of this would be "100 percent legal under the precedent established by Trump and the Supreme Court."

"Take these powers and use them to undo Trump’s legacy and really flood the zone," he added. "Blitz the country with these executive orders on Day 1 and dare anybody to stop you."

Lithwick agreed with Stern's points, and noted that while many Americans would like to see a return to "norms" that were violated during the Trump administration, Democrats constraining their own powers to adhere to norms after a norm-breaking Republican presidency would only cement the idea that Republicans are free to violate norms whenever they're in power. Stern agreed, and asserted that the only way norms can be restored is if Democrats demonstrate to Republicans what happens under a Democratic administration when they bulldoze all institutional guardrails.

"It can only work if Democrats give Republicans a taste of their own medicine and remind them why the norms were there in the first place," he said.

Click here to read Lithwick and Stern's full conversation.

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