The Supreme Court is finished with this year’s session but still making decisions. DDT’s White House trade adviser Peter Navarro again failed to get out of jail in Miami although Justice Neil Gorsuch took his plea to the entire high court. Navarro is serving his four months’ sentence for contempt in refusing a subpoena from the House January 6 investigative committee. Chief Justice John Roberts had denied the case in mid-March before Navarro went to jail, but Navarro used his arrest to advertise his book and ask for money.
Elon Musk also lost his case before the Supreme Court after he tried to back out of a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission after regulators alleged Musk’s tweets to be fraudulent. In 2018, he claimed he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at $420 a share, a statement the SEC called untrue, leading to the stock price’s wild swings. In a “Twitter sitter provision, a company lawyer must approve his social media posts about Tesla which Musk later decried as a violation of First Amendment rights. A district court and the 2nd Circuit Court earlier rejected Musk’s request.
As the Supreme Court ponders whether U.S. presidents have absolute immunity for any crimes they commit, the legal world discusses how conservative textual originalists have lost their philosophy. They frequently used the “history and tradition” test to rule against people’s rights such as refusing a charity drag show at West Texas A&M, permitting almost unlimited gun carrying, and overturning abortion rights in Roe v. Wade. They even allowed a football coach to gather a crowd to pray with him on the field after games despite separation of church and state. After creating new law with those cases, the conservative justices reversed their need for originalism, a focus on the past, in arguments on DDT’s request for absolute immunity.
Originalism has never consistently applied and ignored history because the belief is to apply the constitution only as it was written. DDT-appointed judge Matthew Kacsmaryk used originalism in the drag show case when he cited an 18th-century treatise about “licentiousness” and the 1873 ban on mailing “lascivious” materials to block the drag show. The judge also wrote that older rules set an “outer limit” on “sexualized ‘expressive conduct.’” The Supreme Court refused a repeal, and the case waits at the 5th Circuit Court.
The Constitution doesn’t allow immunity, which makes the history-and-tradition test appear laughable with conservative justices. Emily Bazelon wrote that “the legal standard has been recently adopted by the court’s conservative majority to allow judges to set aside modern developments in the law to restore the precedents of the distant past … a freewheeling survey of the 18th and 19th centuries.”
The 4th Circuit Court is the first appeals court to rule that state health-care plans must pay for gender-affirming surgeries. The majority opinion stated that the West Virginia policy restrictions were “obviously discriminatory” based on both sex and gender. Earlier this month, the appeals court decided that a federally funded middle school could not ban a trans 13-year-old from playing on the girls’ track and field team. The case will be appealed to the Supreme Court.
In 2018, North Carolina state employees challenged coverage of trans individuals objecting to the exclusion of surgical treatment for gender dysphoria, a clinical diagnosis of a disconnect between a person’s gender and birth sex. Both objecting states cited no bias, only cost concerns for what they called specialized care. North Carolina covered the treatment in 2017 but quit when the state elected a new treasurer. Twenty-one Republican-led states asked the court to rule against the plaintiffs, and 17 states supported the coverage.
Texas AG Ken Paxton has dropped his subpoena for information about transgender minors treated at Seattle Children’s Hospital, legal in Washington, in a settlement between his office and the Washington state hospital. The state hospital argued that Paxton’s offices doesn’t have jurisdiction over it. In a sworn affidavit, the hospital system’s chief medical operations officer said the hospital doesn’t employ staff in Texas who provide gender-affirming care or provide any care remotely to anyone outside Washington. Washington’s “shield law” blocks officials in the state from turning over records “related to protected health care services that are lawful in the state of Washington” to officials in other states in response to “a subpoena, warrant, court order, or other civil or criminal legal process.”
Paxton already demanded similar information from a Georgia-based telehealth clinic. In February, he also sent a civil investigation demand to PFLAG National requesting records related to the families of transgender young people in Texas seeking to maintain gender-affirming care. Last month, a Texas judge granted a temporary injunction blocking Paxton’s demand. Last week, a 10-page Democratic congressional report found that Paxton and other Republican AGs had used “abusive legal demands” to collect trans patients’ medical records in pursuit of “ideological and political goals.” Such investigations have contributed to hostile anti-LGBTQ+ social and political climates and have also worsened queer people’s mental health, leading to “suicidal ideation, severe depression, and intense anxiety,” the report added.
Texas has joined two other “law & order” states in the claim they will ignore President Joe Biden’s new Title IX guidelines protecting transgender students. Gov. Greg Abbott wrote a letter to Biden ranting about the revised rules. Wyoming, South Carolina, and Oklahoma have also complained about the new protections for LGTQ+ students.
Last Friday, Biden reinstated healthcare for LGBTQ+ people that DDT had rescinded, issuing a rule that the Affordable Care Act’s ban on sex-based discrimination in Section 1557 applies to LGBTQ+ people. DDT permitted anti-LGTBQ+ discrimination.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is continuing her hate campaign toward LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender youth. When the father of a ten-year-old transgender girl asked what she wanted from her life in ten years, she said she wanted to be on Netflix. Greene’s message for the girl, misgendering her, is that “he” will be an “anorgasmic 20-year-old … with no chance of ever having his own family,” using her vitriol to push her bill banning gender-affirming care for transgender minors at the federal level and create difficulties for gender-affirming care for adults.
Many of Greene’s vicious comments have been directed at Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, especially after he and his husband Chasteen adopted infant twins in August 2021. Buttigieg has always kept his cool, even managing to smile as he took the tiny toddlers on a city bus trip—very unlike Greene who has tried to trip an aide walking next to her and exhibited other rude, inappropriate behavior.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore has signed the Freedom to Read Act, prohibiting libraries that receive state funding from banning books and blocking censorship of books based on the creator’s background, origin, or viewpoints, as well as partisan disapproval. The bill also protects school and public library staff who adhere to the state library standards outlined in the bill, shielding them from retaliation. Last year, the 148 book challenges in public schools and libraries put the state among the 17 to exceed 100 contested titles. Moore also signed a bill requiring anti-bias training for all school employees.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has a contender on the GOP primary, former naval aviator Aaron Dimmock. With the typical ignorance about the definition of grammar, Gaetz said, “Our pronouns are USA and MAGA.”
Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) proposal for a bill to protect him with special security escorts at airports was blocked from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reauthorization because Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, objected. Cruz’s provision would have provided security escorts and special screenings for members of Congress, cabinets and judges along with their families. The bill would have addressed security only in where everyone had already been screened for weapons.
Absence apparently makes the heart grow fonder: today’s voters are far more positive about DDT than when he was in office, based on polling. CNN found that 55 percent of people view DDT’s time in the white House as a success, but in January 2021, the same percentage saw him as a failure. Sixty percent of voters in three swing states—Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—view DDT’s economy as good.
The sharp division between Biden and DDT comes from whether people follow political news. Those who ignore it view DDT and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. more positively than Biden. Their position is that they know who they are supporting and aren’t changing. The poll considered traditional and digital media (social media, digital websites and YouTube/Google). Among registered voters, 54 percent self-identify as primarily traditional news consumers whereas 40 percent see themselves as primarily digital media consumers. Biden is 11 points ahead among traditional news consumers; DDT is three points ahead of Biden among digital media consumers. More voters, 59 percent of those voting in both 2020 and 2022, primarily consume traditional media, 40 percent use digital media, and nine percent don’t follow political news.
For months, DDT bitterly complained about trials cutting into his campaigning time, statements that worsened since he started sitting in a courtroom three to four days a week. With no trial last Wednesday, DDT was back on the golf course at his Bedminster Golf Club—no campaign events.
Nel's New Day 
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