SCOTUS Sows More Chaos / Bessent announces Impotent D-Day for Iran / Washington Post Columnist Gets Her Job Back / Kagan says Iran Is Gulf’s Supreme Power / New Mexico Continues Funding for Gender Affirmation / Netanyahu Wants War With Turkey / Putin Re-nationalizes The Oil Business
SCOTUS Rules For Chaos
The Guardian and The Hill
Charles: In a wildly irresponsible opinion, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court lifted one injunction against Donald Trump’s outrageous executive order regulating mail in ballots, but left another one in place.
So the 6-3 majority guaranteed nothing but chaos less than one hundred days before the fall election.
The Court explicitly said nothing about the legality of what Trump is trying to do:
The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell.
Associate Justice Ketani Brown Jackson
The superb Ketanji Brown Jackson, who will be remembered as Joe Biden’s finest legacy, excoriated her conservative colleagues for needlessly injecting chaos into this year’s elections.
“It also lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges.”
Jackson said her colleagues lacked “situational awareness” in ruling that blue states needed to wait for the U.S. Postal Service to at least begin implementing Trump’s policy before challenging it. She called it a “catch-me-if-you-can” approach.
“When the Government’s obvious goal is to interfere with the Plaintiff States’ practices and prerogatives in a manner that the Constitution does not authorize, it is both a serious legal error and a grave misuse of our equitable emergency powers to let the Executive proceed even one step further.”
Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries echoed Jackson:
The sycophantic Supreme Court majority’s decision in the vote-by-mail case is sowing chaos in service to Donald Trump’s effort to undermine our free and fair elections. The Trump-aligned justices on the supreme court did not and cannot give the President the power to decide how states run elections or who gets to vote by mail. The legal fight against Donald Trump’s unlawful executive order is not over, the order does not override the Constitution and the power to regulate elections remains with states and the Congress.
Bessent Declares D-Day for Iran, World Laughs in Response
The Times
Scott: After threatening bombing attacks that would destroy Iran’s civilization forever and making leaks suggesting that he is discussing using nuclear weapons with his advisors, Trump has turned to Scott Bessent for the next volley. Bessent dramatically announced “D-Day for Iran,” and then proceeded to itemize a series of economic sanctions which are remarkably similar to those that were in place when Trump took office, and at which he scoffed.
But the bottom line is clear: unless China, Russia and India abide by these sanctions, few believe they will amount to much. And not one of Iran’s three allies is signalling its intent to do so.
The bigger question is whether the Trump bros and their crypto friends who have run up immense profits from sanctions evasion for the benefit of the IRGC will abide by them. I doubt that. Far more likely, they will see the sanctions as another opportunity for profitmaking with impunity.
The US has pledged the “economic asphyxiation” of the Iranian regime in an escalation of sanctions that would widen the conflict to all of Tehran’s trade partners, raising the prospect of a fresh clash with China.
Scott Bessent, the US Treasury secretary, said that all nations continuing to do business with Iran were being given timelines to cut ties in what he called D-Day for Operation Economic Outcast.
Bessent said the aim was to “sever every economic lifeline” for Iran in “the single greatest financial offensive ever marshalled against an adversary”. However, he declined to specify the time frame.
Tehran derided the economic offensive as “empty boasts” and said its trading partners, which include not only China but also Russia, India, Turkey and Iraq, would ignore Bessent’s threat to make them pariahs and exclude them from the US dollar system.
“In the Second World War, D-Day marked the historic beginning of a campaign with our allies to target and drive the enemy from its positions, including those in third countries,” Bessent said in a press conference at the US Treasury. “In that same spirit, we are launching an economic onslaught against Iran’s financial connections around the globe. Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone.”
When a reporter pointed out that D-Day was not the threat of an invasion nor the setting of a timeline for Germany, Bessent replied: “Well, we are giving everyone the opportunity to remedy bad behaviour … we believe that a warning shot and a level set of expectations is appropriate. If people do not want to meet our expectations, then we expect, and they should expect, that they will leave the dollar system.”
Bessent was asked repeatedly how his threat of a “zero leakage approach” would apply to China, after President Trump’s bruising tariff conflict that has resulted in an uneasy truce before a planned visit to the US by President Xi next month. “We want to make clear here today that no one is above the reach of US sanctions,” Bessent said. “That if they facilitate transactions and are part of the ecosystem that turns Iranian oil into money into repression, they will be targeted.”
A Little Good News (part 1)
Washington Post Ordered to Reinstate Fired Columnist
New York Times
Charles: A funny thing happened after a wave of firings of people who described Charlie Kirk accurately after he was murdered.
A lot of them got their jobs back and collected six figure settlements from their employers.
The latest victory for the First Amendment went to Karen Attiah, a veteran Washington Post columnist who was fired in September after her social media posts about Kirk.
Yesterday an arbitrator ordered her rehired with back pay.
The arbitrator found that the Post “did not have good and sufficient cause” to terminate Ms. Attiah and “violated” its labor agreement, “The Washington Post failed to establish the grievant engaged in gross misconduct.”
Washington Post Columnist Karen Attiah
The Post said yesterday “it respects the arbitration process.” The paper made no further comment.
The Post fired the columnist after Attiah posted on Bluesky, “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that exposed violence is not the same as violence..Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence.”
Yesterday Attiah posted on Substack, “My God. I fought the Washington Post—and won.”
As I reported here on June 24th, after being fired by the state of Iowa for her online comments about Kirk, Maria Ruttenberg got her job back and $125,000 in damages.
And Brittney Brown, formerly a biologist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, was fired after reposting a satirical account that pretended to be a whale: “they care exactly as much [about the shooting of Kirk] as charlie kirk cared about children being shot in their classrooms, which is to say, not at all.” She was fired a day after the right-wing influencer account Libs of TikTok, which was spearheaded by Chaya Raichik, highlighted Brown and called for her firing. She settled with the state for $485,000 and left the agency.
