Week 24: Nine Justices, One July 4th

Max: All right, so here's a question. When the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the courts all reach for the wheel at the same time, who actually drives? Blake: That's the question of the month. Welcome to the Common Thread. I'm Blake. Max: And I'm Max. And Blake, we're not speaking theoretically here. CNN reported this week the Supreme Court is racing to decide Twenty-three cases before the Fourth of July. Twenty-three! Blake: That number is not small, and several of them are cases the Trump administration is watching Closely. Max: Closely is an understatement. We're talking Presidential firing power, the Fourteenth Amendment, mail-in ballots—oh, and whether the President can fire a Fed governor. Like that's never happened in the Fed's one hundred and twelve year history. Blake: No President had moved to fire a Fed governor and the Court's conservative justices at oral argument signaled real unease about that, which is worth examining carefully. Max: Right, right. So we're going to walk through the Lisa Cook case, the legal fight, the economic stakes if the Fed's independence gets clipped, and then we're going to dig into eight words in the 14th Amendment that might redefine who gets to be an American. Blake: Eight words, subject to the jurisdiction thereof—that's the whole fight. Max: And then there's the mail ballot case, Watson v. RNC, Blake: Wow. Max: which could hit fourteen states and DC right before the midterms. Blake: The press is framing that one as a voting rights showdown. The actual legal question before the court is narrower than that. We'll pressure test both. Max: See, that's why we do this. Okay. Max opens the first segment and we're going straight to the court's extraordinary final month. First case up: Who gets fired and who decides? Twenty-three Supreme Court cases, birthright citizenship, presidential firing power, mail-in ballot deadlines—it all of it lands before the Fourth of July. So here's the question I want you sitting with before we go anywhere else: When all three branches are grabbing for more power at the same time, who actually wins? Blake: Welcome to The Common Thread. I'm Blake. Max: And I'm Max. And Blake, that question is not rhetorical. Blake: No, it is not. CNN reported this week the court has 23 cases left, Max: Wow. Blake: and the term ends, best case, right around the Fourth of July weekend. Max: RIGHT BEFORE THE TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DECLARATION. That timing is doing a lot of work. Blake: Walk me through that. You think the timing matters? Max: Dude, the country's about to throw a massive birthday party for itself, and simultaneously the court is rewriting who counts as a citizen, who can run the Fed, and whether a president can fire anyone he wants. That's not incidental. Blake: Birthright citizenship. Presidential firing power. Mail ballots: CBS News laid out the full list, and these are not separate fights: Max: That's the thing I keep coming back to: each one looks like its own case, but when you put them side by side... Blake: It's the same argument in three different courtrooms. Max: Exactly: who defines the boundaries? Congress wrote the rules, the executive says the rules don't apply to him, and the court gets to referee while the president tweets at the referees. Blake: CNN noted Trump publicly criticizes Justices. who rule against them while privately courting the conservative members. Max: Yeah, that's a fun dynamic. Real healthy institutional stuff. Blake: Classic. So twenty three works, Max: And Blake: four weeks, and three branches all leaning into the same contested space. Max: none of them are blinking. Blake: Which brings us back to your question, when every branch is pulling, the court decides, right? That's the answer? Max: Maybe. Or maybe the real question is, what happens when the... When the branch that's supposed to call the foul is the one that got fouled, which institution do you trust to hold the line when it's also the one under pressure? Blake: That's the one worth staying tuned for. Now! So the fire in question—Trump tried to remove Fed Governor Lisa Cook back in August twenty twenty-five via a Truth Social post citing mortgage fraud allegations. Max: Wow. Blake: Walk me through why that matters. Max: Dude, it's not really about Lisa Cook. It's about whether a president can reshape the Fed's board to get the interest rates he wants. That's the actual game. Blake: Right. And the legal fight lands on a nineteen thirty-five case called. called Humphreys Executor, which says Congress can shield certain agency heads from at-will removal. The president needs cause, specific, reviewable cause. Max: So Trump's team says the mortgage fraud allegations clear that bar. But, and here's where it gets legally interesting, they also argued no court should even be able to review whether that cause was sufficient. Blake: Yeah, that's the part that broke the oral arguments open. Because if no court reviews the cause standard, "for cause" doesn't mean anything. It's a blank check. Max: Exactly; and NBC News reported that both conservative and liberal justices seemed skeptical, spending two hours not debating whether Cook should win, but how quickly the court could rule for her. Blake: Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative, told the Solicitor General that economists filed briefs warning granting the stay could trigger a recession. That's not a small thing to walk past. Max: Walk me through the math on that, right? If a president can fire Fed governors over disagreements dressed up as cause, you've got a politicized board, and a politicized board means markets start pricing in political risk on every rate Blake: yield. Max: decision. Blake: Bond yields move on Fed credibility; inflation expectations move; the dollar moves; it compounds fast. Max: And Jerome Powell actually showed up at the oral argument. Arguments, the Fed chair sitting in the room-that's not something you do if you think this is routine. Blake: No, you don't take a personal day for routine. Max: Right, right. So the ruling's still coming. This is one of those Twenty-three cases CNN flagged racing toward the end of June. Blake: And it connects directly to the next question the Court has to answer: a different kind of reach, not into an independent agency, but into the Constitution's text itself, the Fourteenth Amendment and who counts as an American at birth. Max: Different flavor of constitutional fight, but same underlying question about who gets to rewrite settled law. Blake: And this one lands before you're even born, practically speaking. Here's the real scenario: a child born Max: We are next week in the U.S. to parents on a temporary visa. Under Trump's day one executive order, that kid gets no passport, no social security number-legally invisible. Blake: No SSN before they even leave the hospital. Max: Right. The order has never actually gone into effect-every federal court to rule on the merits has blocked it-but the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in April in Trump v. Barber. Barber. SCOTUSblog reported after two hours of argument, "A majority seem likely to rule against the administration. Administration. Blake: Man, Trump himself showed up to watch, which I mean. Max: Not exactly a low stakes audience. Blake: So the whole fight hinges on eight words from eighteen sixty eight, subject to the jurisdiction thereof." That's it. The Administration says those words exclude kids whose parents weren't here lawfully. Max: And the challengers say, per the Ninth Circuit, the order contradicts the plain language of the Amendment, full stop. The eighteen ninety-eight Wong Kim Ark decision settled this. this six to two, born here, citizen; Blake: But wait, where does the Administration's read come from? Max: They trace it back to the original intent; the Amendment was passed in eighteen sixty-eight to guarantee citizenship to formerly enslaved people after Dred Scott; the argument is, it wasn't designed to cover temporary visa holders. Blake: Which is a real historical argument even if every court has rejected it so far. Max: Exactly; and CBS News flagged this: A ruling narrowing birthright citizenship would be the first meaningful limitation since Reconstruction—we're talking about hundreds of thousands of births per year potentially affected. Blake: Hundreds of thousands per year! Max: The procedural peace matters too: the Court already limited nationwide injunctions earlier in this case, even if Trump loses on the merits, that injunction ruling changed how courts can block executive action. Blake: So you can win the battle and lose the war, or the other way around. Max: That's the thing about this court's term; they're reshaping the tools, not just the outcomes. Blake: And from who gets to be a citizen the next question is who gets to vote like one. The mail ballot case is up, and the clock is already running for twenty twenty six. All right, from who counts as a citizen to who can practically cast a vote, Watson versus RNC. Max: And this one hits the midterms directly. The question is narrow: does a federal statute setting election day also set a hard receipt deadline for mail ballots? Mississippi says no. Blake: Right, and fourteen states plus DC have these grace periods: postmarked by election day, received a few days later. Mississippi's window is five business days. Max: The RNC says federal law preempts that. The Fifth Circuit already agreed and struck down Mississippi's grace period; that's why it's at the Supreme Court. Blake: Okay, but, Blake, watch how the press covers this. It's all voter suppression versus election integrity. That framing misses the actual case. Max: Completely. The legal question is statutory preemption under the Elections Clause. Congress set a day for elections and statutes going back to eighteen seventy five. Did those statutes also secretly set a ballot receipt deadline? That's what the Court has to answer. Blake: "Secretly" is doing a lot of work there. Max: Well, Mississippi's argument is that those laws coexisted with state grace periods since at least nineteen eighteen without anyone noticing a conflict. That's a century of practice. Blake: And during oral arguments in March, conservative justices Alito and Thomas specifically signaled skepticism toward the grace periods. CBS News reported that. Max: Right. So the legal winds look unfavorable for Mississippi, but here's what nobody's talking about. Blake: The operational nightmare. Max: Exactly. A ruling drops in late June. November is four months away. Blake: Dude, think about what a county clerk actually has to do. Fourteen states rewiring mail voting procedures, retraining poll workers, Max: Wow. Blake: redesigning voter instructions. Your instruction mailers, all of it between a late June opinion and November ballots going out. Max: The Bipartisan Policy Center flagged that rural voters feel this most: longer mail delivery times, fewer in person options. The squeeze is real and geographic. Blake: And you could end up with split deadlines-a voter's federal race selections invalid because the ballot arrived on day two while their local school board race still counts. Max: That is going to be an extremely fun thing to explain at the Speaker 3: polls. Max: ain't at the poles. Blake: Yeah, your congressional vote doesn't count, but congratulations on your water district. Max: The U.S. News noted this ruling could upend election processes ahead of the Midterms. That's the understatement of the term. Blake: Three cases in: citizenship, the Fed, now ballots-all landing before the Fourth of July-and that's exactly the moment to step back from the whiteboard and ask what these add up to together. So, pull back for a second. We've got firing power, birthright citizenship, mail ballots. Three separate cases, but Blake, what's the actual through line here? Max: It's one question, every time. When the constitutional order is under stress, who holds the residual power? The president, Congress, or the courts themselves? Blake: And the court is not giving a clean answer. CBS News noted they already struck down Trump's sweeping. weeping tariffs six to three, and weakened the Voting Rights Act this same term. That's not a rubber stamp. Max: But it's also not a firewall. Selective" is the word I'd use. The court blocks here, allows there, and that unpredictability is actually the story. Blake: Right, because it means nobody can map the rules in advance. Max: And then there's the procedural piece that most people miss entirely, according to the Constitution Center. Fifty-one significant emergency appeals were filed with the court this term alone-fifty-one! under limited briefing, minimal argument, sometimes no explanation at all. Blake: Dude, that's not a footnote, that's the main event. If you reshape policy through emergency orders, the normal guardrails-full briefing, oral argument, written reasoning-they never kick in. Max: And that procedural shift may matter more than any single merits ruling. coming this month. The ground rules are being rewritten, but they're being rewritten quietly. Blake: Which brings me to the July 4th framing. The founders built a system where power was supposed to be hard to concentrate, friction points everywhere, Senate confirmation, removal restrictions, citizenship guarantees. Three of this term's biggest cases are stress-testing exactly those friction points. Max: And the timing isn't incidental. CNN reported the court is racing to decide 2023 cases before the end of June, with Trump publicly criticizing justices who rule against him. So here's the uncomfortable part. Blake: The ground rules are being rewritten and most Americans don't even know So the game is being played, Max: that's the gap we're trying to close today. And there's actually something you can do about it, because the action step coming up is three specific things, and one of them takes about four minutes and 63 words. So three things before the ruling lands. Three things anybody can actually do this week. Blake: First one is embarrassingly simple. Max: Read the Fourteenth Amendment, Section One. The Citizenship Clause is forty-three words—forty-three! That's shorter than most terms and conditions you click through without reading! Blake: Right? Max: And the entire fight, And the entire fight, the one we've spent an hour on, hinges on eight of those words, subject to the jurisdiction thereof. Blake: Read it yourself before the court tells you what it means; form your own view first. Max: That's the move: primary source, zero spin. Blake: And here's the thing about reading primary documents: it's the one civic act that requires absolutely no political affiliation: you don't have to be left, right, anything; you just have to be literate. Max: Colloquially, which hopefully most of our listeners have covered. Blake: Fingers crossed. Max: Second thing, the Watson case, the mail ballot deadlines. Look up your state's current ballot receipt deadline, then go to your state's Secretary of State's website and see if they've said anything publicly about the case. Blake: Because if this ruling comes down in late June, fourteen states have maybe four months to retrain poll workers, redesign mailers, all of it, before November. Max: And most people don't know their own state's rules-like, at all. Blake: According to US News, several of these rulings could upend election processes ahead of the midterms. That's not speculation; that's the operational reality. Max: So knowing your state's current deadline is just baseline. Blake: Baseline, exactly. Max: And the third one's different: talk to your kids, or your grandkids, nieces, nephews, whoever, not about the legal fight. (Not about Section One word counts.) Blake: What do you mean then? Max: Ask them what citizenship means-not legally-morally. What does it mean that the country is having this argument right now, in twenty twenty-six, before the Fourth of July? Blake: That's a conversation most households aren't having. Max: And it's the one that actually matters twenty years from now-whether a kid understands that these questions are live; that the document is not self enforcing. Blake: The Constitution doesn't run on autopilot-never did. Someone has to care enough to read Speaker 4: Yeah. Blake: it. Max: Forty-three words, that's your homework before July Fourth. All right-that's a wrap on a big one. Blake: Yeah, we came in asking who wins when all three branches grab for power at once, and honestly we don't have a clean answer. We have a clock. Max: Right-the court has until the end of June to hand down decisions on birthright citizenship, the Fed firing case, mail ballots-all of it landing at once. Blake: And the thing that stuck with me-Blake's point that these aren't separate fights, they're one argument about how much- Much unchecked authority one branch can hold. Max: If you do nothing else this week, go read the forty three words of Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment-forty three words-then decide what you think. Blake: That's the homework. Max: That's the homework. Share this episode with someone who needs it. Subscribe so you don't miss the ruling breakdown when it drops. Blake: Thanks for being here. We'll see you next Saturday. Max: Stay in the room.