Hey everyone, Leonard French here, and welcome back to Lawful Masses. So. Pour yourself something. Get comfortable. This is going to be a long one, and that’s on purpose. I know a lot of you have been telling me you’re looking for something long, something organized, something you can put on while you fold laundry or stare at the ceiling and try to make the dread go somewhere else for a couple of hours. I get it. I really do. I am, as you may have noticed, not exactly living in a worry-free moment myself. None of us are.
So here’s what we’re going to do today. We are going to walk through, methodically and calmly, every significant piece of litigation involving Donald Trump and the second Trump administration from Inauguration Day 2025 up through this week, which is the first week of April 2026. That’s about fifteen months. And in those fifteen months, the federal courts have handled, by the most generous count, somewhere north of six hundred lawsuits arising from the actions of this administration. The Supreme Court has issued thirty-five emergency orders. There are over two thousand additional refund suits sitting in the Court of International Trade because of one ruling we’re going to talk about in detail. The president himself has filed lawsuits seeking, collectively, more than seventy-five billion dollars in damages. Billion. With a B.
It is, by any measure, the largest and fastest-moving body of litigation any American presidency has ever generated. And I don’t say that lightly. I have spent fifteen years as a copyright defense lawyer watching dockets, and I have never seen anything remotely like this.
Now I want to set expectations honestly. I am not going to be able to make you feel good about any of this. That is not what this video is. If you came here for hopium, I love you, but you are in the wrong place. What I can offer is something a little quieter than that. I can offer you organization. I can offer you the feeling of someone walking through a chaotic landscape with you, slowly, naming the things, putting them in their proper boxes, and saying, okay, here is what happened, here is what the court said, here is what is still pending. Sometimes that helps. Sometimes the dread gets a little smaller when you can look at it directly and say, all right, I see you. I know your name now.
Because here’s the thing about the world we are living in. Most of the news you encounter is not designed to inform you. It is designed to spike your cortisol. And I am increasingly of the view that the most radical thing a lawyer with a YouTube channel can do right now is be boring, on purpose, in a calming voice, for a long time. So that’s the deal. We’re going to be boring together. It’s going to be great.
Let’s get into it.
Part One: The Cases Where Donald Trump Is Personally a Party
We have to start here, because this is what most people think of when they think of Trump litigation. The personal stuff. The Carroll cases. The hush money. The fraud judgment. The appeals. And the truth is, if you stopped paying attention to these cases sometime in late 2024, a lot has happened, and almost none of it ended the way the headlines back then suggested it would. So let’s do a status check on each one.
The Four Criminal Cases Are All Resolved Now
All four. Done. And I want to pause on that for a second because I think it’s easy, in the constant noise of everything, to miss how remarkable that fact is. A year and a half ago, Donald Trump was a four-time criminal defendant facing 88 felony counts across four jurisdictions, two of them federal. Today he is a one-time convict serving an unconditional discharge with an appeal pending, and the other three cases simply do not exist anymore. They have been wound up. Closed. Filed away. The system that was supposed to hold him accountable for any of those alleged offenses ran into the rock of his re-election and, with very few exceptions, broke against it.
Let’s take them one at a time.
The Manhattan hush money case, formally People of the State of New York against Donald J. Trump, ended in a guilty verdict on May 30, 2024. Thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records. That conviction is still on the books, and it makes Trump the first former or sitting president ever convicted of a crime in the United States. That fact does not go away no matter what happens on appeal. It is now a permanent feature of the historical record.
On January 9, 2025, eleven days before inauguration, the Supreme Court declined to intervene to stop the sentencing. The vote was five to four. Roberts and Barrett joined the three liberal justices to let the sentencing proceed. The next day, January 10, Judge Juan Merchan sentenced Trump to an unconditional discharge. No prison. No probation. No fine. Nothing. He was, in the most literal sense, convicted of thirty-four felonies and walked out of the courtroom owing the state of New York absolutely nothing. Just the conviction itself, which under New York law is its own kind of penalty if you care about that sort of thing, and most people don’t.
Trump filed his notice of appeal on January 29, 2025. His full appellate brief, ninety-six pages, was filed on October 27. He’s challenging the jury instructions, several evidentiary rulings, and pressing presidential immunity arguments under the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Trump v. United States. Separately, on November 6 of last year, the Second Circuit remanded the federal removal question — that’s the issue of whether the case could have been moved to federal court because of acts taken while he was president — back to Judge Alvin Hellerstein for reconsideration in light of the immunity ruling. The Department of Justice, which is now Trump’s Department of Justice, has filed an amicus brief asking the appellate court to reverse the conviction. The DOJ is now an amicus in favor of the defendant in a state criminal case against the president of the United States. I want you to sit with that for a second. That is not a normal sentence in the English language. The appeal remains pending. There is no date for oral argument.
Case two: the federal January 6 prosecution, brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith in the District of Columbia. Dismissed without prejudice on November 25, 2024, by Judge Tanya Chutkan, in compliance with the Department of Justice’s longstanding policy against prosecuting a sitting president. Smith’s office wound down operations. The case, in theory, could be refiled when Trump leaves office, but I am not going to insult your intelligence by pretending that’s a real possibility worth speculating about.
Case three: the classified documents prosecution in the Southern District of Florida. That one had already been dismissed back in July 2024 by Judge Aileen Cannon, on the theory that Jack Smith’s appointment as Special Counsel violated the Appointments Clause. A novel theory. A theory at odds with how every other special counsel in modern history has been appointed. But a theory that found a sympathetic audience in Judge Cannon, and Smith’s appeal of that ruling was abandoned after Trump won the election.
And case four: the Georgia state racketeering case in Fulton County. This one took the longest to die, but it died. In December 2024, the Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified District Attorney Fani Willis from the prosecution because of her undisclosed romantic relationship with the lead prosecutor she had hired. The Georgia Supreme Court declined to hear her appeal in September 2025. A new prosecutor, a man named Pete Skandalakis, was appointed to evaluate whether to continue the case. On November 26, 2025, he filed a nolle prosequi, which is the legal term for “we have decided to stop prosecuting this case.” Judge Scott McAfee dismissed the entire case the same day. Eighteen co-defendants. Hundreds of overt acts alleged. RICO charges. All of it, gone.
So that’s where we are. One conviction, on appeal, with an unconditional discharge as the sentence. Three dismissals. The sum total of criminal accountability for Donald Trump after fifteen years of investigations and four indictments is: a felony record with no consequences attached to it. I’m not editorializing. I’m just describing the inventory.
The Carroll Verdicts Are Holding
Here is one place where the news is, by the standards of this video, almost cheerful. The two civil judgments E. Jean Carroll won against Trump in 2023 and 2024 have been affirmed on appeal.
Carroll II — that’s the eighty-three point three million dollar defamation verdict from January 2024 — was unanimously affirmed by the Second Circuit on September 8, 2025. The panel rejected every immunity argument Trump raised. They called his conduct, and I’m paraphrasing carefully here because I take the copyright limits seriously, they called the reprehensibility of his behavior remarkably high, perhaps unprecedented. Trump filed a petition for certiorari to the Supreme Court on November 10, 2025. The Court has scheduled and then rescheduled conference on the petition six separate times between January and March of this year, which is unusual. It either means somebody is writing a dissent from the denial of certiorari, or somebody is trying to gather four votes to grant. We don’t know yet.
Carroll I — the original five million dollar verdict for sexual abuse and defamation — was affirmed by the Second Circuit on December 30, 2024. Trump’s petition for cert is also pending.
Both judgments remain uncollected. Both are accruing interest at nine percent annually under New York law. So if you do the math, Trump now owes E. Jean Carroll something north of ninety-five million dollars and growing. Whether she ever sees a dime of it is a separate question, but the legal liability is rock solid at this point and only getting larger with time.
The Half-Billion Dollar Fraud Judgment Got Cut Down
The big New York civil fraud case — the one Letitia James brought against Trump and the Trump Organization for years of inflating his property values — went up to the Appellate Division, First Department, in 2025. And on August 21, the appeals court did something interesting. They split the baby.
Four justices voted to uphold Trump’s liability for persistent fraud under Executive Law section 63(12). They sustained the injunctive relief, the part of the judgment that restricts Trump and his organization’s officers from certain business conduct in New York. So the finding that he committed fraud, that part is still good law. But the same panel voided the disgorgement penalty — the roughly half a billion dollars Judge Engoron had ordered him to pay — as an excessive fine in violation of the Eighth Amendment. Justice David Friedman dissented, arguing that the AG didn’t even have statutory authority to bring the case in the first place.
Both sides have appealed to the New York Court of Appeals. Letitia James wants the penalty reinstated. Trump wants the fraud finding wiped out. So this one is still alive. But the practical effect today is that Trump is not, at this moment, on the hook for half a billion dollars. He is on the hook for being legally adjudicated a fraudster, which, again, is its own kind of penalty if you care about that, and most people don’t.
Trump as Plaintiff: An Unprecedented Personal Litigation Offensive
Now here is where things get genuinely strange, even by the standards of this presidency. Donald Trump, while sitting in the Oval Office, has filed at least eight major lawsuits as a plaintiff during his second term, and he is seeking, collectively, more than seventy-five billion dollars in damages. From media companies. From banks. From the federal government. The federal government that he, technically, runs.
Let me walk you through these, because the pattern matters.
First, the settlements that set the table. In December 2024, just before he took office, Disney and ABC News settled a defamation suit Trump had brought over a George Stephanopoulos interview, paying fifteen million dollars to Trump’s presidential library plus another million in legal fees. Then in July 2025, CBS and Paramount settled a suit over alleged deceptive editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, paying sixteen million dollars, also to the presidential library, plus agreeing to release transcripts. Sixteen million for an editing dispute that, on the merits, would have been very hard to win in court. But Paramount was in the middle of a merger that needed FCC approval, and the calculus was apparently easier to write the check than to fight.
Those two settlements established something. They established that media companies could be made to pay. And once you establish that, the rational move, from Trump’s perspective, is to keep filing.
So in July of last year, he sued the Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch personally for twenty billion dollars over a story about a letter Trump allegedly sent to Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book. In October, he refiled a defamation suit against the New York Times for fifteen billion dollars over the book Lucky Loser and related coverage. The original complaint had been dismissed by a federal judge in Florida named Steven Merryday, who called it, in a published order, decidedly improper. He imposed a forty-page limit on any refiled complaint, which is a kind of judicial slap I have rarely seen in twenty years of practice.
In December, Trump sued the BBC for ten billion dollars over an edited Panorama documentary about January 6. The BBC had actually acknowledged the editing error themselves and the resulting scandal led to the resignation of the BBC’s director general and the head of BBC News. None of that stopped the lawsuit.
In January of this year, Trump sued JPMorgan Chase and Jamie Dimon personally for five billion dollars over alleged politically motivated debanking from 2021. The Trump Organization filed a parallel suit against Capital One. And then, also in January, Trump sued the IRS and the U.S. Treasury for ten billion dollars over the alleged negligent handling of his tax records, which had been leaked back in 2020 by an IRS contractor named Charles Littlejohn, who pleaded guilty and is currently serving five years in federal prison.
I want to walk you through what is structurally weird about that last lawsuit. Trump is suing his own executive branch agencies. Any settlement with the IRS would, by ordinary practice, require sign-off from the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, and the Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche. Both of whom were Trump’s personal defense lawyers. Both of whom now work for him in his capacity as president, and would, in the IRS suit, be authorizing a payment from the Treasury to him in his personal capacity. The conflict of interest is so total that there are essentially no analogues for it in the modern history of the executive branch. There is no one in the room without a personal financial relationship with the plaintiff.
And I want to say something gentle here, because I find myself getting agitated, and that’s not what this video is for. This is just… this is what is happening. The person who runs the executive branch is suing the executive branch for ten billion dollars, and the people who would decide whether to settle are people he personally hired and paid before he hired them again to do the deciding. It is what it is.
Part Two: The Birthright Citizenship Saga
Okay. Take a breath. We’re moving into the executive order litigation now, which is most of the volume and most of the constitutional drama. And we’re going to start with the case I think is the cleanest illustration of how this whole machine works: birthright citizenship.
On Inauguration Day 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14160, which purported to reinterpret the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Citizenship Clause says, and I am quoting from memory because the Constitution is in the public domain, that all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States. That language has been interpreted, since 1898, in the case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, to mean essentially what it sounds like it means: if you are born here, you are a citizen here, with very narrow exceptions for the children of foreign diplomats and members of invading armies.
Executive Order 14160 said, no, actually, it doesn’t mean that. It said that children born in the United States to parents who were undocumented or who were here on temporary visas were not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and therefore not citizens. By the order’s own terms, this would have stripped the protection of the Citizenship Clause from somewhere around 150,000 children born annually.
Within three weeks, four federal district courts had issued nationwide injunctions blocking the order. Judge John Coughenour in Seattle was first, on January 23. He used the phrase blatantly unconstitutional, which is not a phrase federal judges typically use about a sitting president’s executive orders. Judge Deborah Boardman in Maryland followed on February 5. Judge Joseph Laplante in New Hampshire on February 10. Judge Leo Sorokin in Massachusetts on February 13. Four district courts. Four nationwide injunctions. Reasoning: this order conflicts with the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment and with 125 years of binding Supreme Court precedent. Easy case. Not even close.
And here is where the interesting thing happens. The Trump administration did not appeal the merits ruling. They appealed the scope of the remedy. They went to the Supreme Court and said, our problem isn’t with whether the order is constitutional. Our problem is with whether one district judge in Seattle should be able to block it for everybody in the country. They asked the Court to limit nationwide injunctions to the actual parties before the court, which would have meant the order could be enforced against everyone except the specific plaintiffs in those four cases.
And on June 27, 2025, in Trump v. CASA, Inc., the Supreme Court ruled six to three for the administration. Justice Barrett wrote the opinion. She held that nationwide or universal injunctions generally exceed the equitable authority of federal district courts. The decision did not say one word about the constitutionality of the executive order itself. It only said that the lower courts had used the wrong remedy.
The practical result was that, for a couple of weeks, you had an executive order that every court that had looked at it had called blatantly unconstitutional, but which could legally be enforced against anyone who was not personally a plaintiff in one of the existing cases. Pregnant women in states where suits had not yet been filed were being told their children would not be citizens at birth. Hospitals were getting confusing guidance. It was a mess.
The ACLU adapted within hours. They filed a class action in New Hampshire called Barbara v. Trump, and they got a class certified and a class-wide injunction within two weeks. Class actions are not nationwide injunctions. They are something the Supreme Court has explicitly endorsed for decades. So the ACLU just used the tool the Court had not taken away.
The Supreme Court granted certiorari in Barbara on December 5, 2025, and oral argument was held on April 1, 2026. Last week. And I want to mention something about that argument that I find just deeply, deeply weird. Donald Trump personally attended the oral argument. The president of the United States, the named defendant in the case, sitting in the front row of the Supreme Court while his Solicitor General argued that his executive order was constitutional. That has, to my knowledge, never happened before in the history of the United States. Not once. After the argument, Trump went on Truth Social and called the United States, quote, stupid, for having birthright citizenship.
By all accounts of the argument, Justices Barrett, Kagan, and Jackson were openly skeptical of the administration’s position. The reporters who were in the room came out saying it looked like a likely loss for the government. A decision is expected by late June or early July of this year. And if the Court rules the way most observers expect, it will be the first time in the second term that the Supreme Court has actually ruled, on the merits, that an executive order from this administration is unconstitutional. We’ll see.
Part Three: The Transgender Military Ban and the DEI Orders
Executive Order 14183, signed in late January 2025, reimposed a ban on transgender military service. It was broader than the version Trump implemented in his first term in 2019. It was challenged immediately in two federal district courts, and the administration lost both.
In Talbott v. Trump, Judge Ana Reyes in the District of Columbia issued a nationwide injunction on March 18, 2025. Her opinion contained the phrase soaked with animus and dripping with pretext, which is the kind of phrase a federal judge writes when she has read the underlying factual record very carefully and is very angry about what she found in it. In Shilling v. Trump, in the Western District of Washington, Judge Benjamin Settle issued a second nationwide injunction on March 27. Settle is a George W. Bush appointee. He is also a former Army captain. He found serious questions on equal protection and due process grounds. The Ninth Circuit declined to stay his order.
On May 6, 2025, the Supreme Court intervened on the emergency docket and stayed both injunctions, allowing the ban to take effect while litigation continues. So as we sit here today, transgender service members are being separated from the military. The merits litigation continues. The Ninth Circuit heard oral argument in the appeal on October 20 of last year. A decision is pending. And in the meantime, real human beings are being kicked out of jobs they were qualified for. The lower courts said this was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court said, well, maybe, but we’ll let it go forward in the meantime.
That pattern — lower courts find a violation, Supreme Court allows the violation to continue while everyone argues about it — is going to come up over and over again in this video, and I want you to start noticing it. It is the central dynamic of the second-term emergency docket.
On the DEI side, Executive Orders 14151 and 14173 terminated federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and required federal contractors to certify that they don’t operate such programs. In a case called NADOHE v. Trump in Maryland, Judge Adam Abelson issued a nationwide injunction in February finding the orders unconstitutionally vague and constituting viewpoint discrimination under the First Amendment. The Fourth Circuit stayed that injunction in March. And in a parallel case in the District of Columbia, Trump-appointed Judge Timothy Kelly denied a preliminary injunction in May, creating a split. So the DEI orders are, at the moment, in force, and the merits litigation is still grinding through the appellate process.
Separately, the Department of Education issued a Dear Colleague letter threatening school funding over DEI practices, and that one was permanently invalidated after the government essentially gave up and conceded the case. So a little win in there. A small one. Take it where you can.
Part Four: National Guard Deployments to American Cities
In October 2025, the administration federalized National Guard units and deployed them to Chicago. The stated justification was to address what the administration described as rebellion near ICE facilities. The actual situation on the ground was a series of protests outside an ICE processing center in Broadview, Illinois, which is a suburb of Chicago. Whatever you think of the protests, they were not a rebellion.
Illinois sued. The case is Illinois v. Trump in the Northern District of Illinois. Judge April Perry issued a temporary restraining order, calling the administration’s justification a flimsy pretext. The Seventh Circuit largely upheld her order. And on December 23, 2025, the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s emergency application six to three. The majority held that the government had failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois. Justices Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch dissented.
That is, by my count, the second time in the second term that the Supreme Court has actually ruled against the administration on a contested emergency application. It is also one of the very few times the Court has invoked anything resembling the Posse Comitatus tradition, which restricts the use of the military for domestic law enforcement. Similar deployments to Portland and Los Angeles were also blocked by federal courts in those cities. So this is, by the standards of this video, a bright spot. A small one. Don’t make it weird.
Part Five: DOGE, Federal Workers, and the Dismantlement of the Administrative State
All right. We’re about a third of the way through. How are you doing? Stretch. Get some water. We’re going to talk about DOGE now.
The Department of Government Efficiency, run for most of 2025 by Elon Musk before his very public falling out with Trump, generated something like sixty distinct lawsuits. I am going to walk through the most important ones, but please understand that I am sampling from a very large pool. There is no way to cover all of them in a single video, and if I tried, you would need to clear your weekend.
The Treasury Payment System Cases
Within days of inauguration, DOGE personnel began trying to access the Bureau of Fiscal Service payment systems at the Treasury Department. These are the systems that process essentially every payment the federal government makes — Social Security, Medicare, federal salaries, contractor payments, the works. Trillions of dollars a year. Highly sensitive. Tightly controlled by career civil servants. Until they weren’t.
New York and other states sued in the Southern District of New York. The case was assigned to Judge Paul Engelmayer, who issued a temporary restraining order on February 8, 2025, blocking DOGE from accessing the payment systems. Elon Musk responded on Twitter, or X, or whatever he’s calling it this week, by publicly demanding the judge be impeached. That did not work, but it set a tone. Judge Jeannette Vargas extended the block with a preliminary injunction on February 21, finding DOGE’s access had been chaotic and haphazard.
In a parallel case called Alliance for Retired Americans v. Bessent, the parties reached an agreed order that limited DOGE to two so-called special government employees with read-only access. One of those two, a man named Marko Elez, resigned the next day after some of his old social media posts surfaced, which contained, let’s say, content of an explicitly racist nature. And in AFSCME v. Social Security Administration, in Maryland, a court ordered DOGE to disgorge and delete personal data it had obtained from Social Security after it came out that there was a secret data-sharing agreement between SSA and a partisan organization.
So the Treasury and SSA cases are, on balance, wins. The data was, at least temporarily, protected. Whether it stays protected is another question. The litigation is ongoing in essentially every district court that has touched it.
The Federal Advisory Committee Act Cases
Multiple lawsuits filed within hours of inauguration argued that DOGE was an unlawful federal advisory committee. The cases were consolidated before Judge Jia Cobb in the District of Columbia. CREW, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, also sued separately to compel DOGE to comply with the Freedom of Information Act. Judge Christopher Cooper ruled on March 10, 2025, that DOGE is, quote, likely subject to FOIA, and ordered expedited processing of records requests.
The Supreme Court narrowed parts of Cooper’s discovery order, which is typical, but they left most of it intact. So DOGE has been forced to produce at least some records. The records that have come out have been, by all accounts of people who have read them, deeply embarrassing for the administration.
The Mass Firings of Probationary Employees
Now we get to the one that hurt. The Office of Personnel Management directed agencies, beginning in February 2025, to mass-terminate probationary employees using template letters that essentially every court that looked at them found to be a sham. The letters claimed the terminations were for performance reasons, but the performance evaluations cited had not actually been conducted. The real purpose was to circumvent the statutory reduction-in-force procedures that protect federal workers.
Approximately 25,000 probationary employees were fired in the initial wave. Probationary employees, just so we’re all on the same page, are people who are within their first year or two of federal service. They have fewer protections than career civil servants. And the administration knew that, which is why they went after them first.
In AFGE v. Trump, in the Northern District of California, Judge William Alsup granted a preliminary injunction on March 13, 2025, ordering reinstatement of probationary employees at six agencies. He called the terminations unlawful and the underlying letters a sham. On April 8, 2025 — exactly one year ago today, as I record this — the Supreme Court blocked Alsup’s reinstatement order on standing grounds, holding that the nonprofit plaintiffs in the case did not have standing to seek the remedy. The case was sent back. Alsup issued a final decision on September 12, 2025, declaring the mass terminations unlawful but declining to order reinstatement, because, as he wrote, he expected the Supreme Court to overrule any such order. He read the room.
A parallel case brought by nineteen state attorneys general in Maryland achieved an emergency reinstatement order for the same approximately 25,000 employees. The Fourth Circuit dismissed the case in September 2025, ruling the states had not demonstrated cognizable injury. So both major paths to actual reinstatement were closed off, on standing grounds, without ever reaching the merits.
Then, in May, Alsup tried again. He issued an order barring reductions in force across twenty-two federal agencies. The Supreme Court stayed that one too, in July, allowing the firings to proceed.
Here is the pattern, and I want you to see it clearly because it repeats itself across this whole section. District courts find the conduct unlawful. Appeals courts and the Supreme Court find that the plaintiffs lack standing or that the equities favor letting the conduct continue. The result is a record of illegality with no remedy attached to it. The conduct was illegal. The conduct continued. And there is now a body of case law that says yes, it was illegal, but no, you can’t do anything about it. That is, in technical legal terms, what we sometimes call a vibe.
USAID and the Wood Chipper
USAID is a useful case study because it is the cleanest example of DOGE essentially destroying an agency before any court could stop it. The Agency for International Development was, on January 19, 2025, an organization with about ten thousand employees and roughly forty billion dollars in annual programming, much of it lifesaving humanitarian aid. By the end of February it was effectively gone. The buildings were being cleared out. Contractors were not being paid. Personnel were locked out of their email.
In a case called J. Doe 4 v. Musk in the District of Maryland, Judge Theodore Chuang issued a sixty-eight-page preliminary injunction finding that the shutdown likely violated the Constitution in multiple ways, and finding specifically that Musk had, quote, firm control over DOGE. He cited, among other things, Musk’s public social media post about feeding USAID into the wood chipper. The Fourth Circuit stayed the injunction. The damage was done by then anyway. You can’t put an agency back together once the institutional knowledge is gone.
There is, however, a small adjacent victory worth mentioning. On March 5, 2025, the Supreme Court, by a five-to-four vote, upheld a lower court order requiring the government to pay approximately two billion dollars to USAID contractors for completed work. Roberts and Barrett joined the liberals to make a majority. Justice Alito wrote a dissent that began with the words, I am stunned. I am quoting this carefully to stay within copyright limits, but Alito was, in fact, stunned. He was not happy about being stunned. He felt the Court should not have required the government to pay people for work they had already done.
So contractors got paid. The agency is gone.
The CFPB Is Hanging On by Its Fingernails
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been a target of conservative activists since the day it was created in 2010, and the second Trump administration moved to dismantle it within the first weeks of taking office. In a case called NTEU v. Vought in the District of Columbia, Judge Amy Berman Jackson issued a 112-page preliminary injunction on March 28, 2025, blocking the dismantlement. She found a substantial risk that the defendants would complete the destruction of the agency completely in violation of law. She specifically called the agency’s claimed resumption of work a charade for the court’s benefit. That is some of the most unsparing language a federal judge has used about an executive branch defendant in my professional lifetime.
A panel of the D.C. Circuit, with Judges Katsas and Rao in the majority and Judge Pillard dissenting, vacated Jackson’s injunction in August 2025. The full D.C. Circuit then vacated that panel decision and granted rehearing en banc on December 17. Jackson separately ordered the administration to continue funding the CFPB through the Federal Reserve. The en banc oral argument was held on February 24 of this year. A decision is pending.
So the CFPB still technically exists. It has staff. It is funded. But it has been so dramatically reduced in capacity that whether it functions as a regulator in any meaningful sense is an open question. The Federal Reserve continues to send it money, by court order. The dismantlement is paused, by court order. And the entire arrangement is held together by a single ongoing piece of litigation that could go either way at the en banc stage.
The Department of Education
In March 2025, the administration announced a reduction in force that would eliminate roughly half of the Department of Education’s workforce. The District of Massachusetts initially blocked it. The First Circuit declined to stay the injunction. On July 14, 2025, the Supreme Court intervened, granted the administration’s stay, and allowed the mass firings to proceed.
Justice Sotomayor, joined by Kagan and Jackson, wrote a dissent that contained the line — and I want to give this its due weight because it is one of the most consequential sentences any justice has written about the second Trump term — the dissent said that the Court’s decision hands the executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out.
Think about that. If you can’t repeal a statute through Congress, but you can fire everyone whose job it is to enforce the statute, then you have functionally achieved the same result without ever passing a law. That is the constitutional theory the Supreme Court signed off on in the Department of Education case. And it is not limited to the Department of Education. It applies, in principle, to any agency Congress has created. The amended complaint challenging the transfer of Department of Education functions to other agencies is still being litigated, but at this point, the agency exists mostly on paper.
Federal Employee Unions
Executive Order 14251, signed March 27, 2025, designated more than fifteen federal agencies as performing national security work and stripped collective bargaining rights from approximately 950,000 federal employees. Initial injunctions were obtained in the Northern District of California and the District of Columbia. Appellate courts stayed or vacated them. As we sit here today, almost a million federal workers have lost their union representation by executive fiat.
The notable exception is a case called AFGE v. Noem in the Western District of Washington, involving the rescission of a TSA collective bargaining agreement that covered about 47,000 transportation security officers. Two different district judges found the rescission to be impermissible retaliation. That case is proceeding to a bench trial, which is currently scheduled for September of this year. So if you are a TSA officer, you may yet have a union. If you work for any other agency that was covered by the executive order, you almost certainly do not.
Part Six: Immigration and Deportation
Okay. I want to brace you for this section. It is going to be the hardest part of the video to listen to, because it involves real people who have been hurt in concrete, irreversible ways. I am going to try to handle this with the kind of calm I have been trying to maintain throughout, but I want to acknowledge directly that what we are about to discuss is, in places, genuinely harrowing. If you need to skip ahead, the timestamps are in the description. Or just take a break. There is no rush. The cases will still be here when you come back.
The Alien Enemies Act
On March 15, 2025, Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The Alien Enemies Act is one of the four statutes that made up the original Alien and Sedition Acts. It is the only one that was never repealed. It has been used, in the entire history of the United States, three times prior to 2025: in the War of 1812, in World War I, and in World War II. Each time, it was used in connection with a declared war. There is no declared war right now.
Trump’s invocation declared that the Venezuelan transnational gang Tren de Aragua was conducting an, quote, invasion or predatory incursion of the United States, and that on that basis, Venezuelan nationals affiliated with Tren de Aragua could be deported without ordinary immigration proceedings to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison. CECOT, just so you know what we’re talking about, is a facility built by the government of Nayib Bukele to hold thousands of accused gang members in conditions that international human rights organizations have described as systematic torture. People do not generally come back from CECOT.
The ACLU filed J.G.G. v. Trump in the District of Columbia within hours of the invocation. Chief Judge James Boasberg issued an oral temporary restraining order from the bench that morning, certified a class, and ordered the administration to halt the deportation flights. The flights took off anyway. The administration’s argument, when it later came back to court, was that the planes had already departed U.S. airspace by the time Boasberg’s order was, quote, clear. One hundred and thirty-seven Venezuelans were delivered to CECOT in defiance of the order, depending on how you read the timing.
The D.C. Circuit upheld Boasberg’s TRO two-to-one, with Judge Patricia Millett writing that the government’s scheme denied the plaintiffs even a gossamer thread of due process. That’s a beautiful sentence. The kind of sentence federal judges write maybe once or twice in a career, when they want the dissent to ring through history. It rang.
On April 7, 2025, the Supreme Court vacated Boasberg’s TRO in Trump v. J.G.G. The vacatur was on procedural grounds — the Court held that AEA detainees should bring their claims as habeas petitions in the districts where they are physically held, not as class actions in D.C. — but the Court also held, importantly, that AEA detainees are entitled to judicial review on questions of statutory interpretation and constitutionality. So the procedural victory for the administration came with a substantive concession that future detainees would be entitled to challenge the invocation.
And then, on the merits, every court that has ruled has found the AEA invocation unlawful. Trump-appointed Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. in the Southern District of Texas ruled in May 2025 that the government lacked authority under the Act. The Fifth Circuit, which is not exactly a hotbed of progressive jurisprudence, ruled two-to-one in September 2025 that the AEA was improperly invoked because the underlying findings did not support that an invasion or a predatory incursion had occurred. Judge Leslie Southwick wrote that opinion. Conservative judges, ruling against a Republican administration’s national security claim, on the basis of a careful reading of an eighteenth-century statute. That happens. It just doesn’t happen often.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia
If there is a single case from the second term that you should know by name, it is this one. Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a Salvadoran man who had been living legally in Maryland, with his wife and children, under a 2019 immigration court order that specifically prohibited his deportation to El Salvador because of credible fear of persecution by Salvadoran gangs. He had a job. He had no criminal record. He was, in every legally meaningful sense, lawfully present.
On March 12, 2025, ICE arrested him. On March 15, they put him on one of the planes to CECOT. The same flights, on the same day, as the J.G.G. plaintiffs. The government later admitted, in court filings, that this was an, quote, administrative error. They had deported a man to the one country in the world a federal court had specifically ordered them not to deport him to. By accident.
Abrego Garcia’s wife filed a habeas petition. The case is Abrego Garcia v. Noem, in the District of Maryland, before Judge Paula Xinis. Judge Xinis ordered the government to facilitate and effectuate his return by April 7, 2025. The Fourth Circuit denied the government’s emergency stay two-to-one. And on April 10, the Supreme Court, in a unanimous per curiam order, acknowledged that the removal had been illegal and affirmed the district court’s authority to order the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return. They removed Judge Xinis’s hard deadline and remanded for clarification, but the bottom line was that the entire Court — every single justice, including Thomas and Alito — agreed that the government had to bring this man back.
It took until June 6, 2025, for him to actually be returned to the United States. And the moment he landed, ICE tried to deport him again. To Uganda. Then to Eswatini. Then to Ghana. Then to Liberia. Judge Xinis described the government’s conduct as, in her words, one empty threat after another. As of today, Abrego Garcia is free, in Maryland, under habeas relief. The government separately filed criminal charges against him in Tennessee, which are still being litigated, and which Judge Xinis’s court has allowed to proceed on the theory that they may constitute vindictive prosecution.
That is the story of one man. And I want to be honest about why I’m spending so much time on it. It is because Kilmar Abrego Garcia is the case where the fiction breaks down. The administration’s position throughout the first half of 2025 was, essentially, that we have wide discretion over immigration enforcement and the courts should not second-guess us. The Abrego Garcia case forced even a deeply conservative Supreme Court to say, no, there are limits, and you crossed them, and you have to bring this man back. It is the floor. Whatever else is true, the floor is that you cannot deport a man, by accident, to the one country a court has ordered you not to deport him to, and just leave him there. The Supreme Court of the United States, unanimously, said that. It is very little. But it is something.
Third-Country Removals
The administration’s broader policy of deporting people to countries other than their country of origin was challenged in a class action before Judge Brian Murphy in the District of Massachusetts. We are talking here about deportations to South Sudan, to Eswatini, to Ghana, to Equatorial Guinea, to Rwanda. Judge Murphy found in May 2025 that the government had unquestionably violated his preliminary injunction by deporting detainees to South Sudan with less than twenty-four hours’ notice. The Supreme Court, in June, stayed Murphy’s injunction and allowed the policy to continue.
And then, in February of this year, Murphy issued an eighty-one-page final decision vacating the entire third-country removal policy as a violation of federal immigration law and due process. He wrote, simply, it’s not fine, nor is it legal. The case is on appeal. The policy is, for now, blocked. We’ll see how long that lasts.
Temporary Protected Status
The administration terminated Temporary Protected Status for more than eleven countries during the first year, affecting collectively over a million people. TPS is a statutory program that allows people from countries experiencing armed conflict, environmental disaster, or extraordinary conditions to remain in the United States temporarily. Some of the people affected by these terminations had been in TPS status for more than two decades.
In NAACP v. Trump, in the Northern District of California, Judge Trina Thompson granted summary judgment for the plaintiffs on December 31, 2025. She found that Secretary Noem had, quote, made a pre-ordained decision to end TPS and influenced the conditions review process to support that decision. The ruling protected approximately 60,000 people from Honduras, Nepal, and Nicaragua.
The Haiti TPS case, Miot v. Trump, involves around 352,000 people. Judge Ana Reyes in the District of Columbia stayed the termination on February 2, 2026. The D.C. Circuit denied the government’s emergency stay request. The Supreme Court granted certiorari before judgment in March, set expedited briefing, and oral argument is scheduled for later this month. There is a parallel case involving Syrian TPS that has been consolidated. Both terminations remain blocked. For now.
Sanctuary Cities and International Students
In San Francisco v. Trump, in the Northern District of California, Judge William Orrick issued progressively broader injunctions blocking the administration from stripping federal funding from sanctuary jurisdictions. The injunctions eventually covered more than fifty localities in fourteen states. The Department of Justice’s affirmative lawsuit against Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance was dismissed by a federal judge in July 2025.
The international student visa revocations affected somewhere between fifteen hundred and forty-seven hundred students, depending on whose count you trust. There were more than fifty TROs across sixteen federal districts. Judge Jeffrey White in the Northern District of California issued a nationwide preliminary injunction on May 23, 2025, which forced ICE to reverse course and begin restoring the SEVIS records that had been deleted. Many of those students had already left the country by then. Some did not return.
Part Seven: Tariffs, Or, How a Wine Importer Brought Down a Trade Policy
This is, by some distance, the biggest legal defeat the administration has suffered. It is also, structurally, the most interesting case of the entire second term, because it shows that this Supreme Court is willing to rule against the administration on the merits when the legal question is clean enough and the statutory text is unambiguous enough. Sometimes. Not always. But sometimes.
The administration’s tariff strategy was built on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, IEEPA, a 1977 statute that gives the president authority to regulate certain economic transactions in response to declared national emergencies. Beginning in February 2025, Trump invoked IEEPA to impose tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, citing the fentanyl crisis as the underlying emergency. The tariffs grew. By April 2, 2025, on what the administration called Liberation Day, IEEPA tariffs covered nearly every trading partner of the United States, ranging from ten percent to seventy-five percent.
The aggregate revenue collected from these tariffs, between February 2025 and February 2026, was somewhere between 160 and 179 billion dollars. That is real money. That is money that was paid by importers, passed through to consumers, and recorded in the federal government’s books as revenue.
The lead challenge was a case called V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. Trump, filed in the Court of International Trade in April 2025 by a wine importer, a plastics company, and three other small businesses. The plaintiffs were represented by the Liberty Justice Center, and were later joined by some genuinely heavyweight appellate counsel — Michael McConnell from Wilson Sonsini, Neal Katyal from Milbank. People who do not lose Supreme Court cases very often.
A three-judge panel of the CIT, led by Judge Jane Restani, granted summary judgment for the plaintiffs on May 28, 2025. Their reasoning was straightforward: IEEPA gives the president the authority to, quote, regulate, the importation of goods. It does not give the president the authority to impose tariffs. Tariffs are, in the language of the Constitution, a branch of the taxing power, which is reserved to Congress under Article I. The CIT issued a permanent injunction against enforcement of all IEEPA tariff orders.
The Federal Circuit, sitting en banc, affirmed seven-to-four on August 29, 2025. They found the IEEPA tariffs unbounded in scope, amount, and duration. The Supreme Court granted certiorari on September 9 and consolidated V.O.S. with a parallel case called Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, where Judge Rudolph Contreras in D.C. had independently struck down the tariffs.
Oral argument was on November 5, 2025. The decision came down on February 20, 2026. Six to three. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion. He was joined by Sotomayor, Kagan, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Jackson. Six justices, across the ideological spectrum of the Court, holding that IEEPA does not authorize tariffs. Roberts and Gorsuch reasoned through the major questions doctrine. Justice Kagan, in a concurrence joined by Sotomayor and Jackson, reached the same conclusion through ordinary statutory interpretation. Justices Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Alito dissented.
Now here is where it gets interesting in a procedural sense. After the Supreme Court ruled, the administration was suddenly facing a refund problem. Importers had paid 160-plus billion dollars in tariffs that the Court had just declared unlawful. Within weeks, more than two thousand refund lawsuits were filed at the Court of International Trade. Two thousand. By April of this year, that number is still climbing.
Trump signed an executive order on February 24, 2026, formally terminating all IEEPA tariffs. And in the same order, he invoked Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose replacement tariffs. Section 122 has, to my knowledge, never been used before in the history of American trade policy. It allows the president to impose temporary tariffs in response to balance-of-payments emergencies. Twenty-four state attorneys general immediately challenged the Section 122 tariffs in a new CIT case, Oregon v. Trump. Oral argument is scheduled for April 10. Two days from when I’m recording this. By the time you watch this, it may already have happened.
Section 232 tariffs — the ones on steel, aluminum, automobiles, and auto parts — rest on a separate statutory authority and are not affected by the IEEPA ruling. They are still in effect. So the trade war is not over. It has just, briefly, contracted, and is now being prosecuted under a different and even more legally untested statute.
I want to take a moment with the IEEPA case because I think it deserves it. This was a wine importer. Five small businesses. They went up against the entire trade policy of the executive branch and they won. At the Court of International Trade. At the Federal Circuit en banc. At the United States Supreme Court. Six to three. With three of the most conservative justices on the Court joining the majority. That is what good lawyering and a clean legal argument can still accomplish in 2026, in some cases, on some questions, when the statute is unambiguous enough and the overreach is obvious enough. It is not nothing. It is, in fact, the brightest spot in this entire video. Hold onto it. We’re going to need it.
Part Eight: First Amendment Cases — Law Firms, Universities, and the Press
The Law Firm Executive Orders
Beginning in March 2025, the administration issued a series of executive orders targeting individual law firms by name. The orders revoked the security clearances of the firms’ employees, barred the firms from federal contracts, and restricted their attorneys from accessing federal buildings. The targeted firms were Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Jenner and Block, and Susman Godfrey. Each had, in some way, represented Trump opponents or pursued investigations Trump objected to. The orders were, in essentially every legally relevant respect, naked retaliation against private lawyers for exercising the right to represent their clients.
All four firms sued. All four firms won.
Perkins Coie v. United States Department of Justice, in the District of Columbia, before Judge Beryl Howell. A 102-page permanent injunction, issued May 2, 2025. Howell called the order an unprecedented attack on foundational principles, and an overt attempt to suppress and punish certain viewpoints. She found violations of the First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. More than five hundred law firms, including a number of firms that have not historically been associated with progressive causes, signed an amicus brief in support of Perkins Coie. The amicus filing was, by itself, a remarkable institutional moment for the legal profession.
WilmerHale v. Executive Office of the President. Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee. Permanent injunction issued May 27, 2025. Leon’s opinion contained the line that to rule otherwise would be unfaithful to the judgment and vision of the Founding Fathers. Bush appointees do not write that sentence about Republican presidents. They write it when they think the Republican president has gone so far outside the constitutional tradition that the framers themselves would be troubled by it.
Jenner and Block v. DOJ, before Judge John Bates. Susman Godfrey v. EOP, before Judge Loren AliKhan. Same result in both cases. AliKhan called the Susman Godfrey order, quote, a shocking abuse of power based on a personal vendetta. She used those words. From the bench. About a sitting president’s executive order.
On March 2 and 3, 2026 — about a month ago — the Department of Justice voluntarily dismissed all four of its appeals. Just walked away. The district court rulings became final. The orders were, formally and definitively, declared unconstitutional, and the administration declined to defend them at the appellate level.
That looks like a clean win, and in a narrow legal sense, it is. But there is a coda. Nine other law firms — Paul Weiss, Skadden Arps, Willkie Farr, Milbank, Kirkland and Ellis, Latham and Watkins, and three others — chose not to litigate. They struck deals with the administration. The collective value of those deals, expressed as commitments to provide pro bono legal services on causes the administration supports, is approximately 940 million dollars. Paul Weiss’s settlement, which was negotiated personally with Trump at the White House in March 2025, is widely understood within the legal profession to have been the moment that broke the resistance. The firm has, by various reports, lost more than 260 lawyers in the year since.
So the law firm story is, in summary, this: every firm that sued, won. Many firms did not sue. The firms that did not sue paid, instead, in money and in dignity and in the slow erosion of their internal cultures. There are many ways to lose a fight without losing a court case. The Trump administration has been creative about all of them.
Harvard Won. Columbia Did Not.
In April 2025, the administration froze more than 2.7 billion dollars in federal research funding to Harvard University, ostensibly over antisemitism concerns following pro-Palestinian protests on campus. Harvard sued. The case is Harvard v. Department of Health and Human Services, in the District of Massachusetts, before Judge Allison Burroughs.
Burroughs granted sweeping summary judgment for Harvard on September 3, 2025, ordering restoration of the funding. Her opinion contained the line that it is difficult to conclude anything other than that the administration used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities. The First Circuit appeal is pending. There are reports of ongoing settlement talks, possibly involving a 500 million dollar payment from Harvard, but as of right now, the funding has been ordered restored and Harvard has, in the legal sense, won.
Columbia, the first university targeted, in March 2025, did not sue. Columbia chose to settle. The settlement, negotiated by Stephen Miller, included a 200 million dollar fine, an additional 21 million in EEOC settlements, adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, agreement to suspend or expel more than seventy students who had been involved in protests, and submission to ongoing oversight by an independent resolution monitor. The Knight First Amendment Institute described the settlement as, in their words, a significant surrender of autonomy. Northwestern, Cornell, and Brown subsequently entered smaller settlements.
So, again, the pattern. The institutions that fought, won. The institutions that did not fight, paid. Harvard’s endowment is somewhere around fifty-three billion dollars, which is to say Harvard had the resources to pay outside counsel to litigate this for years if necessary. Most universities do not.
NPR and PBS
On May 1, 2025, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to cut off any and all funding to NPR and PBS, on the grounds that they exhibited what the order called left-wing bias. NPR sued. PBS joined. And on March 31, 2026 — eight days ago, as I record this — Judge Randolph Moss in the District of Columbia issued a permanent injunction. His opinion contained the line that the order was textbook unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination and retaliation. He noted that the government could not cite a single case in which a court had ever upheld a statute or executive action that barred a particular person or entity from participating in any federally funded activity based on that person or entity’s past speech.
So that is a win. A real one. A clean First Amendment ruling on a pure viewpoint discrimination claim. The injunction is in place. NPR and PBS will continue to receive federal funding for the present.
There is, of course, a catch. In summer 2025, while the executive order litigation was pending, Congress separately rescinded approximately 1.1 billion dollars in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in a party-line vote. That rescission is beyond judicial remedy. It is just an act of Congress. So while the executive order has been struck down, the underlying funding has, through a different mechanism, been substantially reduced. Both things are true.
Part Nine: Independent Agencies and the Slow Death of Humphrey’s Executor
Now we get to what I think is, on the merits, the most consequential constitutional question pending before the Supreme Court in this entire body of litigation. It does not have the emotional resonance of the deportation cases. It does not have the dollar figure of the tariff cases. But its implications, if it goes the way most observers expect it to go, will reshape the architecture of the federal government for at least a generation, and possibly forever.
Let me set the stage. In 1935, the Supreme Court decided a case called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. Franklin Roosevelt had fired a Federal Trade Commissioner named William Humphrey, and the Court held that Roosevelt didn’t have the authority to do so, because Congress had created the FTC as an independent agency and had specifically provided that commissioners could be removed only for cause — for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office. The Court held that Congress could constitutionally insulate certain expert agencies from direct presidential removal in this way. Humphrey’s Executor became the foundational decision for the modern administrative state. It is the reason the Federal Reserve, the SEC, the FCC, the FTC, the NLRB, and dozens of other agencies have been able to operate with some degree of independence from political pressure for the last ninety years.
In January 2025, the Trump administration began firing the heads and members of independent agencies without cause. The first case to reach the courts was Wilcox v. Trump, brought by Gwynne Wilcox, a member of the National Labor Relations Board who had been fired by email on January 27, 2025. Judge Beryl Howell ordered her reinstated, calling the firing a blatant violation of the law. The D.C. Circuit, sitting en banc, agreed seven-to-four and reinstated her.
On May 22, 2025, the Supreme Court issued a stay. Six to three. Their order included language that, if I’m being honest with you, kept me awake the night I read it. The Court said that the Constitution vests the executive power in the president, and that he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf, subject to narrow exceptions. The Court did not, in that order, formally overrule Humphrey’s Executor. But it explicitly carved out the Federal Reserve as a, quote, uniquely structured, quasi-private entity, which is the kind of carve-out you write when you are about to do something dramatic and you want to reassure financial markets that you are not also going to do the dramatic thing to monetary policy. Justice Kagan’s dissent accused the majority of effectively repealing Humphrey’s Executor by fiat via the emergency docket.
That’s the setup. Here’s the main event. The Supreme Court has now granted certiorari before judgment in a case called Trump v. Slaughter, arising from the firing of FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. Oral argument was held on December 8, 2025. It went for two and a half hours. Solicitor General John Sauer called Humphrey’s Executor an indefensible outlier and a decaying husk. Chief Justice Roberts, from the bench, used the phrase a dry husk. When the Chief Justice and the Solicitor General are both calling a precedent a husk, that precedent is in trouble.
A decision is expected by late June 2026. By the time most of you are watching this, it may already be out. I am not going to predict exactly what the Court will do. The most likely scenario, based on the oral argument, is some form of overruling — possibly total, possibly narrow — that strips for-cause removal protection from most independent agencies while preserving an exception for the Federal Reserve. If that happens, it will mean that the president of the United States, whoever that is, can fire the head of the SEC, the FCC, the FERC, the NLRB, the FTC, and so on, at will. They will become, in effect, ordinary executive branch agencies, no different in kind from the Department of Commerce. The independence that has defined American financial regulation, telecommunications policy, labor relations, and consumer protection for the last ninety years will be over. That is the stakes.
There is a parallel case, Trump v. Cook, involving the firing of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook on August 25, 2025. Judge Jia Cobb granted a preliminary injunction finding that Cook’s removal violated the Federal Reserve Act. The D.C. Circuit affirmed. And here is the interesting part: the Supreme Court, unlike in every other independent-agency removal case, declined to stay the lower court injunction. They scheduled oral argument instead. The argument was held on January 21, 2026. The Court’s reluctance to intervene on the emergency docket, combined with its explicit Federal Reserve carve-out in the Wilcox stay order, strongly suggests the Court intends to preserve Federal Reserve independence even while it dismantles Humphrey’s Executor for everything else. Three former Federal Reserve chairs — Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and Janet Yellen — filed amicus briefs in the case. So did dozens of economists and former Treasury Secretaries. The financial implications of getting this wrong are simply too large for anyone to want to find out the answer.
Part Ten: Impoundment, the Inspectors General, and the Limits of Judicial Remedy
Two more topics before we head to the close. I’m going to keep these tighter.
Impoundment is the practice of a president refusing to spend money that Congress has appropriated. It used to happen occasionally, before Watergate, and Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 to make clear that presidents could not just unilaterally refuse to spend appropriated funds. The second Trump administration has tested that statute more aggressively than any administration since it was passed.
On January 27, 2025, OMB issued a memorandum directing a, quote, temporary pause on essentially all federal financial assistance. The memo was challenged within hours. In National Council of Nonprofits v. OMB, Judge Loren AliKhan blocked the freeze within minutes of its effective time on January 28. She later granted a preliminary injunction holding that OMB had sought to run roughshod over a bulwark of the Constitution by interfering with Congress’s appropriation of federal funds. In a parallel case in Rhode Island, New York v. Trump, Chief Judge John McConnell issued a forty-five-page preliminary injunction with the line that the executive put itself above Congress and imposed a categorical mandate on the spending of congressionally appropriated funds without regard to Congress’s authority to control spending.
Both of those rulings were correct on the law and have been substantially upheld. The grants and contracts that the OMB memo had paused were, in most cases, eventually released. So that’s a win, of sorts.
But the foreign aid impoundment cases revealed a structural problem. The D.C. Circuit ruled, and the Supreme Court allowed to stand on September 26, 2025, the proposition that only the Comptroller General — a specific officer in the legislative branch — has standing to bring enforcement claims under the Impoundment Control Act. Private plaintiffs, including the contractors and recipients of foreign aid, do not have standing. The Court allowed the administration to withhold approximately four billion dollars in foreign aid on these grounds. The vote was six to three.
Think about what that means. If only the Comptroller General can enforce the Impoundment Control Act, and the Comptroller General is a single appointed official with limited resources and limited political appetite for direct confrontation with the executive branch, then in practice the Impoundment Control Act may be unenforceable. The president can simply decline to spend money, and unless one specific officer in Washington decides to file a lawsuit, no one else has the standing to compel him to spend it. The closest we have come to a Supreme Court ruling on whether the Impoundment Control Act is constitutional has been a procedural ruling that effectively neutralizes it.
Now the inspectors general. On January 24, 2025, the administration fired more than seventeen inspectors general by email, citing, quote, changing priorities. The inspectors general are the people whose job it is to investigate fraud, waste, and abuse within federal agencies. Congress amended the Inspector General Act in 2022 to require that any IG removal be preceded by thirty days of notice to Congress and a substantive rationale. Trump did neither.
Eight of the fired IGs sued. Judge Ana Reyes, in the District of Columbia, ruled on September 24, 2025, that the firings were unlawful. Her opinion contained the sentence, quote, President Trump violated the IGA. That much is obvious. Direct. Unambiguous. The president broke the law.
And then she declined to order the inspectors general reinstated. Her reasoning was that the president could simply re-fire them, this time providing the proper thirty days’ notice, and so reinstatement would accomplish nothing of practical value. The illegality was established on the record. The remedy was withheld as futile. That is the second-term federal judiciary in microcosm. They will tell you what is true. They will write it in published opinions. They will not, in many cases, do anything about it.
Part Eleven: The Supreme Court at Mid-Term
Let me put some numbers in front of you, because I think the aggregate picture matters more than any individual case.
The Trump Justice Department filed twenty-nine emergency applications to the Supreme Court in the first year of the second term. Twenty-nine. The Biden administration filed nineteen emergency applications across all four years of its single term. The Bush and Obama administrations, combined, across sixteen years, filed eight. So the Trump administration in one year has filed more emergency applications than every other administration of this century combined, and more than three times as many as Biden filed across four years. Stephen Vladeck, the Georgetown law professor who has been tracking this for years, has written that the second Trump administration made as many shadow docket applications in twenty weeks as the Biden administration did in four years. The shadow docket has been transformed.
Of the roughly twenty-five emergency docket decisions the Court has issued in administration cases, the administration has prevailed at least partially in about twenty of them. About five have gone the other way. Seven of the rulings included no written explanation at all. Just orders. The Brennan Center maintains a tracker if you want to follow this in real time.
On the merits docket, where the Court does write opinions, the picture is more mixed. Trump v. CASA, the nationwide injunction case, was a procedural win for the administration in June 2025. Learning Resources, the tariff case, was a devastating loss for the administration in February 2026. Three more major decisions are pending: Trump v. Slaughter on independent agencies, Trump v. Cook on the Federal Reserve, and Trump v. Barbara on birthright citizenship. Each of those is expected by the end of June or early July of this year. By the time you are watching this, one or more of them may already have been decided.
There is one quote from Justice Jackson that I want to share with you, because I think it captures the mood of the dissenters at this stage of the term. It comes from her dissent in an emergency stay decision involving the National Institutes of Health, called NIH v. American Public Health Association. She wrote that what the Court was doing looked like Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball, as you may remember from Calvin and Hobbes, has only one rule: there are no fixed rules. Justice Jackson said the Court seemed to have two rules. The Calvinball rule, and a second rule, which was that the administration always wins. I am paraphrasing carefully to stay within copyright limits, but that is the substance of what she wrote, in a published Supreme Court dissent, about her own colleagues. Twelve months in. We are twelve months in.
Part Twelve: The Closing Inventory
Let me give you some final numbers, and then I’m going to let you go.
The Just Security litigation tracker at NYU is currently cataloguing 734 lawsuits challenging second-term administration actions. The Associated Press counted 358 through January 3 of this year, of which 149 had been at least partially blocked by the courts. Bloomberg Law documented courts halting policies in 128 cases, with more than two hundred separate orders, and that was just through May 2025. The NYU Institute for Policy Integrity, which tracks regulatory and Administrative Procedure Act litigation specifically, found that the administration lost seventy-nine of eighty-five cases on those grounds. That’s a 93 percent loss rate on regulatory challenges in the lower courts.
And the Washington Post, in a story published in mid-2025, reported that the administration had defied or ignored court orders in roughly one-third of cases. One-third. That number may be different now. It may be higher. It is almost certainly not lower.
If you wanted to make a single sentence summary of the second-term litigation landscape, it would go something like this. The administration has lost most of its cases in the lower courts. The Supreme Court has, on the emergency docket, allowed the administration to continue doing most of the things the lower courts found unlawful. The merits decisions, when they come down, have been split. And the administration has, with some frequency, simply ignored the orders that did go against it. The result is a body of case law in which a great deal has been declared illegal and a much smaller portion of it has actually been stopped.
Closing
All right. I want to wrap this up, and I want to do it without lying to you.
I have been a copyright lawyer for fifteen years. I have a YouTube channel about the law. I love the law. I love the structure of it, the way the briefs build on each other, the way a good appellate opinion will walk you through a problem and leave you understanding something you didn’t understand before. I love the craft. I love the people who do it well. I love the moments — and there have been moments, even in this video — when a federal judge writes a sentence so clear and so brave that it reaches across years and changes how we understand the Constitution.
I also have to be honest with you. The system as I understood it, when I started practicing law, is not the system I am describing in this video. The system I started in had nationwide injunctions when they were warranted. It had inspectors general who could not be fired by email. It had independent agencies with for-cause protection. It had a Department of Justice that did not file amicus briefs in support of overturning convictions of the sitting president, who used to be its boss’s personal lawyer. It had a Supreme Court that issued opinions on questions of importance, with reasoning, on the regular merits docket, in due course. Some of that system is still intact. A lot of it is not.
And I don’t want to dress that up. I don’t want to tell you it’s going to be okay, because I don’t know if it’s going to be okay. I want to tell you that I have spent the last three hours, or however long this video has run, walking through what is true, in the most organized way I know how to do, because I think there is a kind of dignity in just naming the things. Calling them by their right names. Not pretending the docket is something other than what it is. Not pretending the Supreme Court is doing something other than what it is doing. Just looking at it. Saying, here is what happened in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Here is what the Court said in V.O.S. Selections. Here is what Justice Sotomayor wrote about the Department of Education. Here is what Justice Jackson wrote about Calvinball.
These things happened. They are in the United States Reports, or they will be soon. They will be there a hundred years from now, when we are all gone, and when the people who come after us are trying to figure out what was done in this period and who tried to stop it. The judges who wrote the opinions I quoted in this video — Howell, Boasberg, Murphy, Xinis, Burroughs, Jackson, Reyes, Coughenour, Boardman, Restani, Moss, Alsup — they will be in the books. Their names will be in the footnotes. Their reasoning will be quoted in law review articles by people who haven’t been born yet. The fact that some of their orders were stayed or vacated or ignored does not change the fact that they wrote the orders. The record is the record.
I find a small amount of comfort in that. Not a lot. A small amount. And small amounts are, increasingly, what is on offer. Take what you can get. Pour another drink. Stretch your back. Pet your dog. We will be here next week, and the week after, and the week after that, until we aren’t. The cases will still be in the books. So will we, for as long as there’s a we to be in them.
Thanks for watching. I’m Leonard French, your favorite copyright attorney. I look forward to reading your thoughts in the comments below.
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I’m also working on a web app that lets people send a quick postcard to their Congresspersons. You can find the site at postcardstocongress.org. I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback at support@postcardstocongress.org.
Until next time, I love you all. Have a great day. Bye.