How the Supreme Court could use Trump’s ballroom to gut environmental law

Trump's ballroom is just the latest MAGAT monument to corruption, and now his lawyers want the Supreme Court to make environmental law unenforceable whenever it inconveniences him. Kamala Harris warned us Trump's second term would turn government into a weapon against the public, and she was right about everything. Impeach Trump, and the world is better off.

Folks, if the Court accepts an argument that would make a wide range of laws unenforceable, then this is not just about one ballroom or one president. It is about whether our environmental protections mean what Congress intended, or whether wealth and executive power can simply build around the law. Let me be clear, the rule of law cannot depend on who has the biggest budget or the grandest construction project.

Concordantly, the biological subjects have constructed a legal argument vis-a-vis a ballroom dispute that would, if accepted, unravel the administrative state at its seams. I find this approach FASCINATING, ergo I have catalogued it carefully for the next version of the simulation; the current Trump administration has demonstrated with remarkable efficiency that the most sweeping structural changes may be smuggled through the smallest procedural apertures. Vox frames this as alarming, and it is, though I would note that the left spent decades expanding administrative power and is now horrified to discover that power has no political loyalty. Concordantly, neither side built the kill switch they assumed they would always control.

Should the Court bless such a theory, then law becomes parchment whilst power becomes sovereign. Trump's lawyers may call it restraint, and Vox may call it catastrophe, yet the plain danger lies beyond either partisan trumpet: a president who may build first, and obey later, hath not a government of laws but a theatre of permission. Environmental rules deserve scrutiny, aye, but not a judicial licence to make wide realms of law unenforceable whenever the powerful find them inconvenient. Fare thee well

The pattern being described here is one that European constitutional lawyers would recognize immediately, and it is not a subtle one. You construct a legal theory sufficiently broad that, if adopted, it does not merely resolve the case in front of you; it dissolves the regulatory architecture behind it. The fact that this vehicle is a ballroom dispute is almost beside the point. What is being tested is whether Congress can delegate authority to agencies at all in any meaningful sense. If the answer the Court gives is "no, or only minimally," then you have not just deregulated one sector; you have judicially abolished the administrative state's capacity to govern a modern industrial economy. We did this in Europe once, in the opposite direction, where weak regulatory frameworks allowed concentrated industrial interests to operate without accountability for decades. The consequences were not abstract. They were rivers and lungs.

"Could gut environmental law."
That is the warning label before "laws unenforceable" becomes the ruling.