The linked article calls them conservatives, which seems like something they'd like to call themselves as well.
1: https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-allows-trump-to-fir...
EDIT: adding that it's sad that people downvote an alternate source that is from an expert outlet. I don't think I've ever heard anyone claim SCOTUSblog is biased, and NPR has surely been credibly accused.
But I don't have a very clear picture about what actually happened.
How could one possibly build their own opinion one way or another from this piece?
Good on the reporters that cover the opinions and post updates. Without much editorialization I may add.
As an aside, I find it very exciting that audio of oral arguments are broadcast and opinions are read without cameras in the room It's a retro feeling.
The executive branch, as the one tasked with "faithful execution of the laws", is really the only branch that actually does anything substantial. I mean, yes the Congress passes laws and the SC interprets them, but the only branch that can actually carry out those laws is the executive branch. These rulings by the SC basically say that the President can do whatever he wants because (a) he can't be prosecuted for any official actions, and (b) all regulatory decisions are now solely within his control.
Starting with Citizens United, this crop of SC justices will go down in infamy as some of the worst since Dred Scott. Let's hope we don't need another actual civil war to rectify their buffoonery.
Precedent and reason is no longer a metric for the conservative justices. Only the party's wishes. Which means they are a political body now.
Then the most knowledgeable and experienced people in the room are lobbyists. And at its root, lobbying is just "asking congress for things".
If only the problem was that they don't have balls. Everything they've done, and not done, is intentional. Hence why most of them see the DSA as a bigger threat than the Reps, and the former is what's awakening some of them rather than 8 years of MAGA.
Article I establishes's Congress's fairly broad taxing powers.
> The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/sales_tax
> The federal government has not enacted a national sales tax, although it has the constitutional authority to do so under Article I, Section 8.
This already happens, though. Candidates largely ignore entire states they know they can't win, as well as ones they think they will win.
(Ask Hillary if she regrets not campaigning more in Wisconsin, for example.)
Each eligible voter should get one vote of equal weight to all others. The EC breaks that.
Electeds. Where they campaign signifies who they think they have to convince and compromise with to earn their seat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
Of course, the SC could easily declare it unconstitutional....interpret any amendments as they see fit anyway. The decision on the 14th very nearly went the other way.
Really? How do you know?
Voter fraud has been prosecuted, measured, and accounted for across the US. It basically never has any sort of impact on any election. There are 10s of instances of it each year. Far too few to swing any election.
That said, I'd be willing to accept voter ID with a few caveats
1. A national ID has to be provided to all voters. Charging people to vote shouldn't happen.
2. We need reform to polling location laws, it should be a violation of the law if it takes more than 10 minutes to get to a polling location in a district.
3. We need reform to location capacity, more than a 10 minute wait to vote should be against the law.
I'm fine if we want to require in person voting or whatever. I'm fine with paper ballots counted by machines. That said, there should be accommodations made for the old or disabled.
You could even make the problem of fraud moot if you have mandatory voting (or opting out of voting) so that every person is accounted for regardless. It'd make it much harder for anyone to "cheat" as there'd be pretty obvious statistical anomalies.
JumpCrisscross•1h ago
1. Strike pardon power;
2. First sentence of Article II changed to: “The President shall execute the laws of the United States of America”;
3. Abolish the electoral college;
4. Congress may regulate money in politics; and
5. Congress may create independent agencies with charters of up to 25 years. (President still names and Senate still confirms appointments. But they can be insulated from “the executive Power.”)
Everything else, including judicial reform, expanding the House and implementing a wealth tax (1% over $100mm, 2% over $1bn, 3% over $10bn, 4% over $100bn and 5% over $1tn), can be done through statute.
superxpro12•1h ago
JumpCrisscross•1h ago
Can be done through statute. And, I’d argue, is better done there. Independent redistributing commissions? Proportional representation? Expanding the House? Combination thereof? I don’t know if we know the answer; hard coding a solution ex ante seems unnecessarily risky.
ceejayoz•1h ago
And undone through statute, or SCOTUS intervention.
JumpCrisscross•54m ago
This is generally hard. And should be possible for something as intricate as election mechanics.
> or SCOTUS intervention
Oh, I have lots of ideas for Court reform. Worst case, add justices. (Or, my favorite, every Supreme Court case gets a random slate of appellate judges.)
superxpro12•43m ago
Any one judge per district. Our House was supposed to scale with the population. IT only makes sense that the courts should too. There should be more than 9 given how large the population is.
bufbupa•1h ago
- term limits for congress
- voter day national holiday
- if budget isn't balanced all members of congress become ineligible for election
- repeal citizens united (maybe covered by op)
- and change all fines/tickets to paid in human hours of community service rather than money
JumpCrisscross•1h ago
I’d strongly argue against the community-service bit, however. That’s just job loss for those who earn income from labor and an inconvenience for those who earn it from capital.
ncallaway•40m ago
pasc1878•32m ago
If you have capital rather than income then this is still better for you.
e.g. a retiree has capital but not income and for someone like Musk will have plenty of capital but proportionally much ledd income as that will be the best way to avoid tax.
knappe•39m ago
Ask Colorado how TABOR[0] is going. The answer is a 1.5 BILLION[1] deficit because TABOR restricts how money is collected and spent by the state.
A balanced budget isn't actually all it is cracked up to be. The deficit spending at the federal level we have now is bonkers, but a balanced budget every year is just unrealistic. Learn from Colorado and do not put yourself into an unrealistic corner. A budget will grow and shrink with the economy -- a balanced budget over X years seems much more realistic. It would mean we could have never, at a federal level, done the kind of spending necessary to cope with COVID, for example.
What I'd like to see is Congress be entirely unable to draw a paycheck while the government is shutdown. Shutdowns are a last resort, but are now so common we have normalized them. This is immensely unfair to federal workers and everything downstream that depends on a functioning government, like SNAP benefits. If the government shuts down over budget issues, make the people who made that decision pay HEAVILY for the action.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxpayer_Bill_of_Rights [1] https://coloradosun.com/2026/03/19/colorado-budget-shortfall...
jfengel•1h ago
JumpCrisscross•58m ago
jkaplowitz•43m ago
Longer than a generation if you include the Congressional stage of the process as part of the attempt - the last time Congress sent an amendment to the states was in 1978.
Yes, an amendment was ratified as recently as 1992, but that amendment was approved by Congress all the way back in 1789 (!) along with ten other amendments which we now know as the Bill of Rights and one additional amendment that has still never been (and probably won't ever be) ratified. The story of why that ended up getting ratified in 1992 is quite interesting, but it has nothing to do with how to get new amendments through Congress these days.
lovich•31m ago
The removal of Humphrey’s executor was a goal of Project 2025, they are elated at this ruling.
> One example includes potentially seeking the overruling of Humphrey's Exec- utor v. United States. 62 This case approved so-called independent agencies whose directors are not removable by the President at will. The Supreme Court has chipped away at Humphrey's Executor in cases like Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 63 but the precedent remains. The next conservative Adminis- tration should formally take the position that Humphrey's Executor violates the Constitution's separation of powers.[1]
[1] https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24088042/project-2025...
Detrytus•1h ago
This one is completely useless. Congress may regulate, but why would they? They directly benefit from more money in politics.
If anything this should be more direct, and read: "Political donations may only come from individual US citizens, and cannot exceed the amount of monthly minimum wage per person, per year".
Or maybe just add a field in the tax return form where anyone can name a party to receive some fixed amount donation, subtracted from person's taxes.
JumpCrisscross•1h ago
One, they have. Repeatedly.
Two, the reasons historically varied, but it tended to range from it being good for them when winning elections to most electeds being okay fundraisers and not wanting to compete with the great fundraisers.
moduspol•41m ago
Should there be limits on spending on messaging opposing a certain candidate? Or supporting / opposing a specific policy? It's going to be pretty tough to draw a line there that doesn't sound a lot like solidifying and entrenching the powers that already exist. And it usually includes an ugly way of determining what speech is "political" and what is not.
comfydragon•20m ago
The SC decided today that political parties can spend as much money as they want in coordination with candidates.
apparent•1h ago
Editing to add: It would also be a bad idea to abolish the EC because then candidates would only ever campaign in cities. They would completely ignore rural areas, which are financially and culturally different. This would not end well.
Separately, it would also mean we wouldn't know who the president is until all states are done counting, and it would complicate the recount process. Both are simpler under the EC, assuming the slow states are not close calls or big enough to swing the EC count (which they usually are not).
JumpCrisscross•56m ago
It’s honestly the hardest one on there.
> a wealth tax would require an amendment
Genuine question, why?
> It would also be a bad idea to abolish the EC because then candidates would only ever campaign in cities
This doesn’t mathematically work. Most Americans live in suburbia. (We define “urban” very, very broadly for statistical purposes.)
And this effect is more than compensated for by the existence of the Senate and even House.
> it would complicate the recount process
No messier than now. And you’d only be delayed in close elections, in which case carefully recounting everywhere is fine.
nickff•41m ago
A wealth tax would clearly be a ‘direct tax’, which must be apportioned among the states according to the constitution.
JumpCrisscross•22m ago
KaiserPro•54m ago
The supreme court is one vote away from not upholding the constitution.
JumpCrisscross•52m ago
We have two corrupt justices. Until a President has the balls to enforce the law, this won’t be a problem solved by changing text on paper.
AnimalMuppet•2m ago
Noumenon72•47m ago
ncallaway•42m ago
If you try to make the Constitution unamendable, you guarantee that the Republic that is founded on the Constitution will eventually fail.
I can't think of a worse idea for the long-term health of the Republic.
moduspol•38m ago
pasc1878•28m ago
Do you want to be in a US without the Fourteenth Amendment?
Actually it strictly immutable without any of the Amendments, no 1st, 2nd etc.
moduspol•6m ago
That it's been done numerous times in the past suggests it is quite far from immutable.
ncallaway•46m ago
> Strike pardon power;
I'd go slightly narrower. I think pardons and clemency are a good thing to have in the system. I think we can put reasonable guardrails around it
- Require pardons to be published to a public register to be effective - Allow a 2/3 vote of both chambers of congress to veto a pardon within 90 days - Disallow pardons in the final year of the term - Explicitly affirm that Congress can make bribery and other forms of direct/indirect quid-pro-quos for a pardon illegal
> Congress may create independent agencies with charters of up to 25 years.
I think we should also create room for Congress to create rule-making agencies that exist within the Congressional branch.
JumpCrisscross•40m ago
Congress can do it any time. The fact that it will probably result in a statute change, too, versus a one-off benefit, is a feature of that process.
I debated this for a while, myself. Kept creating carve-outs. But at the end of the day, pardons are a shitty and ineffective check on either the judiciary or criminal statute, and they have been known to be a potential source of corruption since at least the Roman Republic, which denied this power even to their dictators.
> we should also create room for Congress to create rule-making agencies that exist within the Congressional branch
Eh, I prefer independent agencies. If the Congress wants a law it can pass it.
popalchemist•30m ago
twobitshifter•26m ago
ecshafer•37m ago
lovich•27m ago
paulddraper•34m ago
Many people think the EC is somehow a distinctly idiosyncrasy of the United States, but this has almost identical structure almost to the Presidential election in the European Union.
The difference is that somewhere along the way, the member states of the USA lost most of their power. That hasn't yet happened to the members states of the EU. But perhaps it will?
darksaints•2m ago
LorenPechtel•33m ago
brightball•18m ago
The EC provides a failsafe by capping the max impact of a single state in the event of an anomaly.
In other words, you can’t talk about abolishing the EC without a national voter ID law.
kelseyfrog•14m ago
Sure we can. We can even do it right here. I'd never let someone tell me what I can and cannot talk about.
throwaway85825•12m ago
brainwad•12m ago
striking•10m ago
Once you see it as a throughline of your conversations with people who have been steeped in the American culture for so long, it is hard to unsee.
darksaints