https://talkingpointsmemo.com/

Josh Marshall and his doughty, delightful team are reporters and analysts I cant recommend highly enough. Here's a snippet from today:

So far — and it is early days — the judiciary has indeed started to throw sand into the Trump/Musk gears. 

A mix of federal judges appointed by Ronald Reagan, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have blocked Trump’s rollback of birthright citizenship, his executive order requiring incarcerated trans women to be transferred to male facilities, his federal funding freeze, DOGE’s breaching of the Treasury Department payment system and at least temporarily extended the deadline by which federal workers must decide whether to take the “buyout.” 

Additional lawsuits have been filed, including by FBI agents arguing that they’re at risk of being run out of their jobs for political reasons, and by labor groups arguing that Trump has illegally spun down USAID.  

The pessimistic take: This is all well and good, but the 6-3 hard-right Supreme Court looms. President Joe Biden was most successful at appointing liberal judges at the district court level, where these cases will begin; Trump got more of his extremist judges in at the appellate levels. That could be a recipe for only temporary relief. 

The optimistic take: It still matters, even if the Supreme Court hands down a reversal in the coming months. Part of revving up the opposition to Trump depends on having time to tell people what he and Musk are doing — and courts are a critical impediment there, slowing things down as Musk, in particular, tries to move very quickly. 

And while we shouldn’t be under any delusions about the conservative justices’ appetite to deliver losses for Trump (especially on big cases), he lost before many of these same justices a lot during his first term. It’s unlikely that they’ll greenlight all of this. 

But, lest I leave you on a positive note — the galaxy brain pessimistic case here is that the Supreme Court will shoot down one of Trump’s power grabs, and he’ll ignore it (as JD Vance has repeatedly urged). That would put us in uncharted, and very scary waters. 

For now, at least temporarily, the judiciary is pushing back. And its judges are not mincing words in the process. 

“No court in the country has ever endorsed the president’s interpretation,” U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman said of Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship. “This court will not be the first.”