Redburn Reads (June 29, 2025)

I guess Amy Comey Barrett isn't as open-minded as we might have hoped.

Photo by Tom Redburn, about to enter the Bar Harbor ferry to Nova Scotia. Canada, here we come — but just for a couple of weeks.

“Everyone, from the President on down,” Supreme Court Justice Amy Comey Barrett writes without a trace of irony, “is bound by law.”

But of course, this President, from the earliest days of his business career through his attempt to overturn the 2020 election and beyond, has never felt the need to follow the law. And now the Supreme Court, in its 6-3 decision written by Justice Barrett making it far more difficult for federal judges to even temporarily block clearly illegal actions by the White House, has only emboldened Donald Trump to defy every effort to constrain his power to break the law.

Writing in dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson showed just how naive and disingenuous Barrett is:

“I have no doubt that, if judges must allow the Executive to act unlawfully in some circumstances, as the Court concludes today, executive lawlessness will flourish, and from there, it is not difficult to predict how this all ends. Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, and our beloved constitutional Republic will be no more.”

The question now is whether there is any point at which the Supreme Court will gather the courage to carry out its responsibilities to protect our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Personally, I’m doubtful.

Yes, the Court may ultimately rule that Trump cannot abolish the birthright citizenship enshrined in the 14th Amendment. But that doesn’t change the fact that the way it framed its decision to prevent lower courts from adopting nationwide injunctions against executive orders and other actions of the White House only adds to the litany of Supreme Court decisions by the Republican majority that have treated Trump with kid gloves and allowed him to run riot.

Among the many excellent pieces decrying the Supreme Court opinion, consider this from Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times:

It still should be said here that this is a strange vehicle for the conservative majority to tackle the question of nationwide injunctions. There were ample opportunities under President Biden to do so, and the Biden White House even asked the court to consider the issue. It said no.

As far as I can tell from the outside, none of the nationwide injunctions issued under Biden seemed to test the court’s patience. The conservative majority seemed content to allow district courts to operate as normal. It is only now, under President Trump, that the conservatives have had a change of mind. And they’ve done so in the context of an executive order that exemplifies this president’s lawlessness and open contempt for the Constitution.

It is generally not polite, in writing about the court, to note thepartisan affiliations of the justices. But here I think it’s appropriate, since for as much as there are real merits to ending nationwide injunctions, it is also difficult to escape the conclusion that a Republican-appointed majority with an expansive view of executive power is working, again, to give as much freedom of action to a Republican president, in this case, the Republican president who secured their supermajority.

To return to Justice Jackson’s dissent, she notes that by ending the practice of nationwide injunctions in this particular circumstance, the majority has empowered a lawless president to violate the rights of American citizens, who then have no particular relief other than what they can get in a slow-moving judicial process. The majority, Jackson argues, is missing the forest for the trees. The nature of the Constitution, from the original document to its amendments, is that it is a brief against the exercise of arbitrary power. And here is the Supreme Court blessing a president’s exercise of arbitrary power as if the executive were the sovereign lord of the nation and not a mere servant of the Constitution.

I’m on a road trip to eastern Canada (Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick) for a couple of weeks with Lisa and our daughter Emily.

But I couldn’t disappear into vacation mode without at least noting the terrible decision by the Supreme Court and the awful GOP budget and policy bill that is likely to become law within the next few days. I’ve written before about the scheme Trump and House Republicans devised to rob from the poor to give the rich more, but now that the bill is being handled by the Senate it is getting even worse.

At a fundamental level, Jonathan Chait writes in The Atlantic, the Republican megabill combines the worst elements of the two factions competing for Trump’s ear.

When President Donald Trump won a second term, the question wasn’t whether his economic policy would be different from the first-term version, but how. Two factions have vied to steer the administration’s agenda: Conservative populists came with a plan to roll back globalization and empower the working class. And the tech right brought a vision of an accelerated future driven by innovation and disruption.

Vice President J. D. Vance announced in March that “as a proud member of both tribes,” he believed that “this idea that tech-forward people and the populists are somehow inevitably going to come to loggerheads is wrong.” Trump would blend the two visions into a new synthesis that would simultaneously lift up his downscale voting base and unleash technological progress.

Three months later, the product that has emerged is not a better iteration of the original Trumponomics, which consisted largely of conventional Republican policy, but a worse one, much worse. It has managed, amazingly, to abandon the two tribes’ most attractive proposals while retaining the least-appealing elements of each. It discards the futuristic ambition of the tech right while preserving its social Darwinism. It leans into the closed-off nostalgia of the populist right while ignoring populists’ impulse to help workers.

The latest example of that wrongheadedness is reflected in the version the Senate is now debating, which attempts to undermine the fast growing clean energy sector, which not only promised cheaper, more abundant renewable solar and wind power to support America’s tech sector, but also would have provided hundreds of thousands of jobs for America’s working class.

The Senate bill was only released in the dead of night on Friday, but already economist Noah Smith has very insightful Substack analysis on just how destructive the bill will be if it becomes law.

There are many things to despise about Trump’s deeply unpopular budget bill, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill, or BBB. It would expand the national debt to dangerous levels with irresponsible and unnecessary tax cuts. It would shift the distribution of income upward. But perhaps the most ridiculous, pointless, and downright insane feature of the BBB is its attack on American energy supply.

Previous versions of the BBB eliminated government subsidies for solar and wind energy. The new version now being debated in the Senate would actually add a tax on solar and wind energy.

Jesse Jenkins, a widely respected energy modeler and Princeton engineering prof, has estimated how much this GOP bill would raise taxes on solar energy, and it’s a lot:

Later in his thread, he explains how he arrived at these estimates.

But it gets worse! As Jenkins notes, the bill would also tax nuclear and geothermal energy and battery storage, and subsidize the coal industry:

The bill ALSO raises taxes on batteries, geothermal and nuclear projects that can't meet significant, burdensome requirements to prove not a drop of Chinese content as well.

The kicker: the bill raises taxes on the electricity technologies of the future while ALSO creating a new subsidy for coal used for steel making, coal that we…export to China so they can dump cheap dirty steel on the global market! THAT is the GOP's plan for energy dominance??…

And of course, it does that while murdering 100s of US manufacturing projects set to employ 100s of thousands of Americans in good paying jobs building the energy technologies of the future. . .

This is a recipe for national failure. Countries that turn their back on the march of technology — whose leaders insist on ignoring extant reality in favor of internecine status battles and feuds — have historically declined, while countries that embrace technological progress and bow to physical realities have dominated. Right now, the country that is embracing progress and bowing to physical realities in the energy space is China, not America.

Tomorrow is my 52nd wedding anniversary, and this has got to be just about the worst moment to celebrate. I can’t imagine a worse gift our Republican leaders in the Supreme Court, the Congress and the White House are offering future generations.