The News You Need, Tuesday, June 30, 2026
SCOTUS grants Trump power, Antifa in Germany, Trump's birthday party for America, the dehumanization of Palestinians, and the Cigar Galaxy
SCOTUS Grants Trump The Unbridled Power to Fire Formerly Independent Regulators
The New York Times
Scott: European scholars of democratic decay and the rise of authoritarianism have consistently singled out the United States in the second Trump administration as the modern democracy experiencing the steepest and most rapid deterioration of all imperiled democracies in the world. Why? It seems to boil down to this: in other states, the judiciary and the supreme or constitutional court always seem to exercise as a brake on assaults on democratic order—in every country save one, the United States. There the Supreme Court is expressing unprecedented enthusiasm for authoritarian rule, giving the president powers he never before wielded, and subordinating hitherto independent regulators to his control in a manner resembling the German Gleichschaltung of the 1930s. Today, SCOTUS overturned the rule in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a 1935 decision by an arch-conservative court, that upheld Congress’ right to impose severe limitations on the president’s ability to remove from office regulatory officers who had been confirmed by Congress. Generations of law students learned that this decision was intended by a bulwark against partisan hackery to insure that key regulators acted with a measure of independence, and that a newly arrived president could not willy-nilly oust all the confirmed regulatory appointees of his predecessor.
But whereas the Supreme Court of 1935 was genuinely conservative, SCOTUS today is not conservative in the least. Conservatism embraces a notion of restraint on the powers of the executive. And today’s SCOTUS believes in robust and unchecked exercise of presidential power—provided that the president is a Republican (their view is radically different if another party is in power). In the presidential immunity decision, they imported the medieval European legal norms of arcana imperii into US constitutional doctrine. And today they have imported something equally alien, the Führerprinzip, and its notion that all government actors are no more than extensions of the Leader and his will. A well-known legal principle, and very much the opposite of the view of the Founding Fathers. As July 4th approaches for the 250th time, it serves to remind us that our democracy is withering from within and SCOTUS is a leading agent of decline.
In a major expansion of presidential authority, the Supreme Court cleared the way on Monday for President Trump to fire independent government regulators despite federal laws meant to protect their jobs. But the justices carved out an exception for the Federal Reserve, preventing the president from immediately removing Lisa D. Cook from the powerful central bank.
The court’s 6-to-3 ruling to broadly allow the firings, with the three liberal justices dissenting, represented a significant shift in power from Congress to the president, and could drastically change the federal government’s structure by giving the president more control over independent agencies.
Krugman: We Have To Disempower SCOTUS
Charles: Paul Krugman identifies the Supreme Court decision Scott describes above as an existential threat to America’s future. Imagine a world in which all
decisions are made by political appointees who are loyalists to the president, who basically do whatever the president wants, whatever the people around the president want…
Well, this cannot go on. This is a clear argument that says we have to one way or another disempower the Supreme Court. I don’t know enough to tell you what is the best route to do that but court packing or something else is going to have to happen. Because this has been the clearest signal yet that we have six people (there are three who are not part of it, but we have six people) who are fundamentally hostile to democracy, fundamentally hostile to the modern world and determined to put the catastrophically bad leader that we currently have sitting in the White House in charge of everything, which is a nightmare scenario on every level.
Paul Krugman
I have been advocating for more Justices for the Court since 2019. The fact that it didn’t work for FDR during the New Deal is not an argument for never doing it again. The size of the Court can be expanded by a simple statute. No constitutional amendment is required. This court’s proven hostility to democracy means a new majority is necessary to preserve the republic.
As Pete Buttigieg said earlier this month at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition convention, “It’s time to think big.” The likely presidential contender in 2028 favors an expansion of the court to 15 justices.
The Horton-Kaiser Report Is Independent, Different From Other US Media.
Scott: On the issue of the journalist and the journalist’s responsibility, I’m really quite struck by something that Pope Leo said. That the moral, ethical and professional responsibility of journalists is not to be regurgitating the views of people in power—like political figures and wealthy corporate interests that control commercial media—but to be an independent voice.
To assess carefully whether the things that are claimed as facts really are facts, and to discover what the facts are.
Charles: Scott Horton and I first bonded 20 years ago when we were each blogging about the horrendous torture being carried out by the second Bush administration during the so-called War on Terror. The New York Times news department never called torture torture. They always called it ‘enhanced interrogation.’
We both thought it was a terrible thing.
Subscribe to The Horton-Kaiser Report for a review of the day’s latest news from US and foreign media, free for two weeks.
Antifa Reemerges in Germany… as a Voice for Conservatives
Der Spiegel
Knock, knock: We’re from Antifa and we’d like to have a chat: Antifa activists going door-to-door in Erfurt, opposing the AfD
Scott: In the mind of Todd Blanche, Antifa is a group of black-clad anarchists who use pranks and mayhem to oppose Trump and attempt to thwart his will. For historians and as the FBI itself noted, however, Antifa is a movement led by German Catholics who opposed the Nazis and later merged into Germany’s main conservative party, the Christian-Democratic Union. What do these two Antifas have to do with one another? Opposition to fascism. But now Antifa is back in Germany, launching a door-to-door campaign to expose the fascist roots and proclivities of the Neo Nazi Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). But who do they support? That’s less clear, but often enough it’s the conservatives.
Some 70 activists are out this weekend talking to Erfurt residents about the upcoming federal party convention to be held in the city by the right-wing extremist party Alternative for Germany (AfD). On the first weekend of July, the party will be gathering at the city’s convention center. Officials in Thuringia, the eastern state where Erfurt is located, are preparing what they say will be one of the largest police deployments since German reunification.
