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Terrible Decisions Season [1]

['Aspiring Polymath', 'Greg Dworkin', 'The Marti']

Date: 2026-06-29  

Alex brandon/Getty Images

Presidential motorcade drives across the bottom of the Reflecting Pool, 7 May 2026 (image credit: Alex Brandon/Getty Images)

The last weeks of June are typically the time the Supreme Court releases its most controversial decisions. And they have a ton of them this year. Given the makeup of the current court, the decisions will most likely be terrible for America’s democracy and the world in general. But poor judgment is popping up all over, so I promise I’ll get back to the Supremes after a quick tour d’horizon.

A crisis fairly meaningless in itself but indicative of a lot of the problems with the Trump administration has been the saga of the Reflecting Pool. This is the shallow artificial lake between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument on the National Mall in Washington DC. The pool was built in the 1920s as part of the Lincoln Memorial complex. It has served as the backdrop to many important moments in American history, such as the 1963 March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech. It was originally filled with DC city water, at great expense, since it leaked. In 2009, it got a new bottom of somewhat less leaky concrete slabs and drew its water from the adjacent Potomac River. President Trump, who fancies himself a builder, decided that this solution was unacceptable, especially since that renovation was done during the presidency of his predecessor and great rival Barack Obama. So he decided to resurface the bottom of the lake with a plastic coating normally used for pipelines and then paint it blue, as a more patriotic color. While the paint job was being applied, Trump got a photo op with his super-heavy armored vehicle and accompanying security vehicles driving across the newly-applied base coat, as seen in the photo above. The the vehicles driving over the still-curing liner apparently damaged it, causing the paint to quickly peel off once the lake was refilled. Additionally, the paint color led to the lake retaining heat, and the warmer water during a heat wave in DC – very common this time of year – led to an algae bloom. The very dramatic bloom led to wildlife deaths and a lot of mocking of the administration.

Aaron Schwartz/Reuters

Dead duckling, Reflecting Pool, 26 June 2026 (image credit: Aaron Schwartz/Reuters)

Some of the mockers got arrested and blamed for sabotaging the project. The crisis is not meaningless for them, I should note; the guy the article refers to was held for hours and presumably has some legal bills and time in court ahead of him until the government admits the allegations are groundless, fails to get an indictment, or loses in court. And suing the federal government is very difficult even if it is clear that your arrest was in service of some official’s private political advantage.

The decision to do this renovation was made completely outside any of the normal mechanisms for repairing or modifying the ceremonial architecture of the capital. Much like the president’s much more destructive and expensive teardown of much of the federal government, he’s just doing stuff and daring the institutions to stop him. And mostly, they can’t or don’t want to use the power they theoretically have. Trump’s teardown of the East Wing of the White House was blocked by a lower court, and now that decision has gone to the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, where the administration argued that no court has the power to block the president’s decisions once construction has begun. In a hypothetical question, one of the judges asked if the president had ordered the demolition of the Statue of Liberty, would a court have the right to stop him, and the government’s lawyer answered no. One of the things about a “republican form of government” that the Constitution guarantees us is that no single individual should have unreviewable power to commit the country to anything.

A much more destructive bad decision, of course, was the president’s choice to put us into another Middle East war that is proving – who knew? – much easier to get into than to get out of. When Trump signed the surrender document in Versailles, one of the things the US agreed to was to get the Israelis to stop their assault on Lebanon. The Iranians cosplay a bit of concern for the Palestinians but their real goal in the region is to protect their Lebanese proxy Hezbollah. So when the Israelis, who weren’t a party to our climbdown, continued to attack, the Iranians declared the cease-fire broken and went back to shooting at ships in the Strait of Hormuz. The other provisions of the surrender are bad enough, of course: the US has to provide $300 billion in reparations, release the Iranian funds that we have held under sanctions since the 1980s, lift other sanctions, and we didn’t even get the restrictions on their nuclear program that Obama got at much lower cost in his JCPOA deal. And after 90 days the Iranians in cooperation with Oman, who controls the other side of the strait, will begin charging tolls, breaking a consistent principle of international law and American foreign policy of defense of the right to free navigation of international waters. Presumably, we’ll soon see Indonesian/Malaysian/Singapore tolls on the Straits of Malacca, Houthi tolls on the Strait of Bab el Mandeb, etcetera. Maybe Denmark will go back to charging tolls on the Oresund, as was the case until the 19th century. The US fought wars in our earlier history over freedom of navigation: the Barbary Wars with various North African states stand out, and at least the official casus belli for the War of 1812 was the British blockade of French-controlled ports interfering with American trade. Wilson’s declaration of war on Germany in World War One mostly cited German submarine attacks on American shipping, though there were other issues. But at least we are committed to protect Lebanese sovereignty, except we apparently aren’t living up to that part of the deal.

Trump is showing some signs of being ready to break with the Israelis. Vance did a presser the other day where he said, in essence, Israel should be careful about angering the only friend it has left in the world. There are a lot of Republicans angry about the decision to back Israel in its play against Iran. The Israelis have been pushing America to support an all out assault on Iran for years now, and American presidents have uniformly resisted. It should have been clear to the merest intellect why. Many people who supported Donald Trump because of his anti-interventionism are now asking themselves if this was another thing about him they didn’t understand. So in addition to damaging our country and the international legal order, something much more important to Trump, he’s damaged himself politically. I think he thought that Iran would go down like Venezuela; that blowing up the Supreme Leader and his family and a bunch of senior generals would suffice to make the replacements willing to make a favorable deal. And Iran, of course, has almost as much oil as Venezuela, giving Trump a chance to pad his family bank account. But Iranian resistance stiffened, their military are professionals and hardened by a decade-long struggle against Iraq and subsequent low-intensity conflicts across the region, and their people saw the strikes on civilian targets as a reason to rally behind their government. The asymmetric nature of the conflict made it easy for the Americans to surrender and very hard for the Iranians.

social media/Ukinform

A storage tank at a Moscow refinery explodes spectacularly, 18 June 2026 (image credit: social media/Ukinform)

Similarly, the Russian decision to launch their “special military operation” back in 2022 is looking increasingly terrible too. Ukraine’s domestic arms industry has really gotten its feet under it, and home-built missiles are striking strategic targets all over Russia while medium-range drones have isolated the battlefield and prevented Russia from supplying its soldiers. For the last several months, Ukraine has focused on suppression of Russian air defenses, permitting their not-too-sophisticated cruise missiles free rein to strike in the middle of what was once the most heavily defended airspace in the world. Long-range strikes on Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other strikes in the Russian heartland embarrassed the heck out of the Putin government, leading Russia to pull air defense resources out of Crimea. Crimea was the jewel in the crown of the Putin campaign to restore the Russian empire of old. When Putin’s “little green men” took the peninsula in 2014, it was pretty much the high point in Putin’s popularity. Russians loved to take vacations on Crimean beaches. Putin spent billions to build a bridge over the Kerch Strait connecting Crimea to the Russian mainland. Now, the Ukrainians can strike at will. They have pretty much isolated the peninsula, leading to draconian rationing of fuel and electricity. Tourists are waiting in miles-long queues to get on the few remaining bridges leading out. The remnants of the Russian Black Sea Fleet have had to rebase from Sevastopol to Novorossiysk, hundreds of kilometers from the war zone, and even there they get pounded by the Ukrainians. Ukraine has won a naval war despite not having a navy. Ukraine isn’t going to recapture Crimea anytime soon, but the Russian people have direct evidence that Putin’s war is not going well. Meanwhile, Russian losses at the front are heavy, thanks in part to their not having enough resources to launch concerted attacks. They are still recruiting volunteers through large bonuses, getting lots of foreign recruits, but they are having trouble maintaining their numbers and may have to resort to a draft. The last time they tried this, 700,000 Russians fled to neighboring countries to avoid having to serve. And national morale was a lot higher then. Ukraine has had a draft since the beginning of the war, of course, and it is not too popular there either, but most Ukrainians realize they are in a struggle for their survival as a people, while the price of defeat for most ordinary Russians would just be a change in a government that they might have liked once but now are probably souring on.

And back home, our actual government decision-makers, the “justices” of the Supreme Court, have been making our country weaker, more dangerous, and more unjust in some profound ways. In a pair of tragic decisions, the court sharply limited the rights of immigrants who have followed the rules and applied for various types of legal immigration status. In Mullin v. Doe, the Supremesdecided that the government can cancel Temporary Protected Status for any reason or no reason and doesn’t have to abide by the procedures laid out in the TPS statute because unitary executive…separation of powers…yadda yadda. I’m not exaggerating – recent reporting showed that the government had not followed the statutory requirement that immigration had to consult with relevant agencies before making a TPS determination. This means that the government can cancel the legal immigration status of millions of people and kick them out overnight, sending them back to countries ruled by drug gangs – Haiti – or by Al Qaeda – Syria – despite the fact that TPS was established precisely for the purpose of preventing the US government from sending people to places where they would face imminent danger. This law was created in the aftermath of World War Two, when the US came face to face with the consequences of their policy in the 1930s of refusing asylum requests from Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. The court said the government’s failure to respect the legal process was immaterial, that the decision to cancel TPS was not something that courts could review. In another nonsensical decision, Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the court decided that the term “arrives in the United States” in the Immigration and Naturalization Act can apply to someone who arrived in the United States years ago and has been detained by ICE inside the border. Therefore, an expedited process the law establishes to consider the case of someone arrested while crossing the border or at the airport upon their arrival can now be used to push taxpaying law abiding residents onto planes and send them away, sometimes to countries they have never visited before. This will also apply to permanent residents, people with green cards, as they return to the country from visits abroad, despite the statue’s description of their “arrival in the United States” as being the date they first came as immigrants, not every single time they cross the frontier. Someone who has lived here for decades can’t logically be considered to be “arriving”, except in the wet dreams of Stephen Miller, who has suddenly gotten a lot farther towards his goal of 100,000,000 deportations.

The court further strengthened the power of the president by overruling a series of laws passed by Congress creating independent agencies with boards of governors who serve for fixed terms in Trump v. Slaughter. In long-standing precedent, dating from Humphrey’s Executor in 1935, Congress could limit the president’s authority over administrative bodies within the executive branch by preventing him from firing their leadership without cause. This was a key aspect of the progressive reforms from the first half of the 20th century, both the Progressive Era in the 1910s and the New Deal. The idea was to put some separation between the business of politics and that of governing, to empower impartial professionals to apply the laws while the politicians restrained themselves to making them. The court has now struck down Humphrey’s Executor and said the president can put whoever he likes in those bodies, even if Congress wanted them to be governed by nonpartisan boards. However, the Supremes stopped short of giving the president that authority over the Federal Reserve System in Trump v. Cook, saying that the Fed is unique because of the historical precedent of the independent Bank of the United States of the founding era. The difference is not clear to me, but it is to the justices with their presumably large retirement accounts that they didn’t want destroyed if they let Trump bring down the global financial order by appointing his usual collection of drunks and idiots to the Fed board. It’s okay, I guess, that the drunks and idiots be in charge of environmental regulation or rules about advertising.

In a continuation of their lamentable and dangerous gun rights decisions, the court decided in Wolford v. Lopez that a state law cannot give private property owners the right to prevent people from bringing guns onto their property if the property is generally open to the public. The state of Hawaii required affirmative consent from property owners allowing gun owners to enter their property while packing heat; the court said that this interfered with people’s individual right to possess guns for personal defense. This is a right that they found quite recently (in DC v. Heller, 2008) in the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution, incorporated against the states by the due process clause of the 14th Amendment (in McDonald v. Chicago, 2010). Conservatives generally like property rights, and don’t like the idea of “substantive due process”, that is, that the due process protected by the 14th Amendment extends beyond the right to fair procedural rights in court. But I guess they like guns more. The decision did stress the default nature of the law in question, that gun owners were prohibited from entering private property open to the public with weapons unless they had affirmative permission; perhaps a law that allowed property owners to affirmatively ban guns might pass muster. But probably not; these guys are dyed in the wool ammosexuals.

There have been a few good calls – even a clock that isn’t running is right twice a day. In Watson v. RNC, handed down this morning, the court upheld Mississippi’s mail-in voting law. This is good news for us here in Oregon, since we have a similar system. My son, who works in the county elections office, was not looking forward to having to change the entire system four months before the election if this thing had gone the other way. Still ahead of us is the birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara, testing the constitutionality of the executive order restricting US citizenship by birth to children born of parents who were in the US as legal permanent residents or citizens. The uniform precedent of the court going back to the 19th century’s Wong Kim Ark case, and immigration law, go against Trump’s argument and the court was pretty skeptical of the government’s case during oral argument. I hear they will hand this one down tomorrow; we’ll see how they manage to screw the country over with this one. It should have been resolved on day one.

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