The world turned upside down

Victory or miscarriage of justice?

Well, let's get the big legal story—the one that most people have been following—out of the way. After a weeks-long trial, Sean "Diddy" Combs was acquitted of the most serious charges of sex trafficking and racketeering, even as he was convicted of transporting people for the purposes of prostitution. He was denied bail—which is, frankly, a BS, punitive decision made by a judge who appears to be very unhappy with the verdict—while he awaits sentencing on the lesser convictions.

The Internet reactions to the verdict have been wild. They've ranged from declaring Diddy's acquittal a "victory" (my all-time favorite rap song) for unfairly maligned Black men (it's… not) to declaring it the biggest miscarriage of justice since the last thing Donald Trump got away with.

I disagree with the verdict, but I understand it. Essentially, prosecutors did not prove that the women Diddy forced to perform at his sex parties were held against their will, either physically or mentally. The best explanation I've seen comes from the PhD criminologist Kimberly Mehlman-Orozco, who was quoted in the Associated Press: "Prosecutors argued that he controlled these women by buying them houses and expensive things, but Mehlman-Orozco said that's the polar opposite of what a trafficker typically does. Traffickers will deprive you of things and take your money, she said."

I used to work in Big Law. Trapping you by giving you money and an expensive lifestyle makes complete sense to me. I've seen it happen. But I can see why that would be hard to explain to a jury inclined to give rich, famous men the benefit of the doubt.

Moreover, the law itself just isn't designed well enough to handle most issues involving coercion of intimate partners. Mehlman-Orozco argues that the solution isn't to expand the definition of sex trafficking, it's to reform our domestic violence laws to punish abuse and exploitation of domestic partners.

I would agree with that, but holding men accountable for their sex crimes just doesn't seem to be a thing we're willing to do in this country. And, sadly, the wealthier you are, the more abuse you're able to get away with.

The Bad and The Ugly

The Supreme Court agreed to take up a case on whether states can ban transgender athletes from competing in girls' and women's school sports. It's teed up to make Democrats defend trans rights during an election year. Alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett will compete to see who can say the most offensive and bigoted thing during these arguments. Samuel Alito will win.
The Supreme Court has announced it will also hear a case about eliminating federal limits on coordinating campaign spending, which means that the court could allow "dark money" PACs to work directly with the candidates they support. To give you a sense of how bad this is going to be: The initial case was brought by now–Vice President JD Vance.
Trump is suing Los Angeles over its sanctuary city policies. This isn't the first time he's sued a city, either this term or during his last one. So far, he's lost every one. So far.
Brazil's Supreme Court ruled that tech companies and social media platforms can be held liable for third-party content posted on their apps. I think we should view this as a test case for how things might work if we eliminated Section 230 and held companies liable for user content.
Idaho passed a bill saying that flags or banners displaying "a political view" cannot be displayed in public schools. The Idaho attorney general, Raúl Labrador, best known for successfully challenging a Biden-era rule mandating emergency medical care to dying women in need of an abortion, said that the new law applies to a banner that reads "Everyone Is Welcome Here." To recap: It is illegal in Idaho to post a message saying "everyone is welcome" in a public school.

Inspired Takes

Ian Milhiser sums up the Supreme Court's just-completed term succinctly. The winners were: bigots and Trump. The losers: everybody else.
In The Atlantic, Duncan Hosie discovers something people who have been watching the courts have been trying to tell liberals for years: You're going to keep losing.
There is a lot of excellent coverage in The Nation about Trump's spending bill. I'm not writing any of that coverage, because I have resigned myself to the idea that whatever "the very worst thing" is, it will be in the bill. But here's a good write-up from Chris Lehmann.

Worst Argument of the Week

The upshot of the Supreme Court's birthright citizenship decision functionally banning nationwide injunctions is, as I wrote last week, that people will have to sue individually to protect their own personal constitutional rights. This will lead to an untenable situation where the question of whether or not a person is a citizen will depend on what state they happen to live in and what lawsuit they happen to join.

In the wake of the decision, I've seen many liberal-minded lawyers point to a "workaround" to the court's disastrous decision: the class action lawsuit. The thought is that people can come together as a class—say, a group of pregnant people whose children might be denied citizenship under Trump's executive orders—and sue collectively for all of their rights. The move would allow a small group of people to sue on behalf of a much larger group of similarly situated people. The ACLU has already filed one of these kinds of lawsuits.

Class action lawsuits are traditionally used against businesses or even entire industries that do great harm to consumers. Tobacco litigation usually proceeds through class action lawsuits, as does asbestos litigation and, more recently, litigation against Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family.

The problem with using this strategy to defend birthright citizenship is that the Republicans on the Supreme Court have spent the past two decades eviscerating class action lawsuits, making them harder to bring, harder to win, and harder to execute even when people do win. Class actions are the bane of big business, and there is nothing the Roberts court loves more than big business.

The Supreme Court reserves the right to "decertify" a class. That means that the court can say that a small group of people is not allowed to represent a larger group of people just like them. It's the Republican way of protecting businesses from accountability, and if the court does it for businesses, it will almost certainly do it for Trump.

Put simply, these lawsuits won't work. We'll be right back here, this time next year, talking about the Supreme Court's awful decision to decertify the class of people suing to protect their citizenship.

Again, the courts will not save us. Liberals simply have to start looking to other ways to defend our country from Trump than running to Trump's courts.

Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett greet President Donald Trump after his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, March 4, 2025. (Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

What I Wrote

The Supreme Court handed down three awful decisions on the last day of its term last Friday, including, as I mentioned, the birthright citizenship case.
This week, I circled back to the court's ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which allows bigoted parents to opt their children out of lessons in public schools if those lessons feature books that even mention LGBTQ "themes." At almost any other time, it would have been the court's worst decision of the year.
Finally, I addressed the Supreme Court's ruling against free speech and porn in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. This ruling will affect the day-to-day lives of more people than many of the other decisions… though most people won't want to admit it.

In News Unrelated to the Ongoing Chaos

Whenever anybody asks me in my professional capacity as "the Black guy they know" about the Fourth of July, I refer them back to Frederick Douglass's 1852 speech "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" It's as relevant now as it was then, which is an indictment of this whole damn country.

When I realized this newsletter would be hitting your inboxes near the Fourth, my plan was just to reprint it here, but then I remembered that The Nation (which, I like to remind people, was founded by abolitionists) republishes Douglass's speech every year. It's one of the reasons I like it here. And since I don't want to be a copycat, I'll tell you instead what I've done every Fourth for the past decade in my personal capacity as a Black dad just trying to keep it together in this world: Barbeque while listening to Hamilton.

I cannot emphasize enough how important that musical has been to my lived experience. Before it existed, I basically spent every Fourth at war, refusing to participate in the jingoistic celebration-with-fireworks of a country that enslaved my people. It wasn't restful or relaxing, because I was compelled to defend my lack of participation in this country's self-regard—and felt compelled to remind everybody why.

Now… I grill meats and listen to music while my children watch the fireworks all the way in Manhattan, which we can see from our balcony in the suburbs (which are more than you might think). Lin-Manuel Miranda gave me a way to access this holiday without buying into all the awful things this country has done. I can't explain it exactly, but… that's art for you. Singing to Black George Washington, versus celebrating the real-life white slaveholding one, just makes all the difference for me.

The world turned upside down, man. So I can say, without reservation, Happy Fourth.