Thanks so much for joining me today, I’m glad you’re here. Four federal courts ruled against Trump in the last seven days. That’s what today’s edition is focused on.
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Move It Fifteen Feet
There’s a canal in South Texas that’s been carrying water since 1909, delivering to around 8,000 acres of farms and supplying water to the towns of Alamo, Pharr, and San Juan. A local water board keeps it running.
On July 1, straw tubes started showing up along the bank—they’re mesh barriers contractors put next to water to keep construction runoff from spilling into it. No one had even alerted the owners about the work. The water board only found out because somebody spotted the straw tubes.
Only 12 days later, crews were putting up Trump’s border wall on the water board’s land. Heavy construction equipment was operating only 10 feet away from the water.
The folks who run the canal need at least 60 feet of clear ground on each side to be able to get a digging machine into the area. Without it, weeds will take over, the canal will clog, and the water will stop.
So the water board sued in county court, and at the end of July, a judge there shut the regime’s machines down. In August the government moved the case to federal court—and that’s where their manager, Anthony Stambaugh, said the fix out loud: move the wall fifteen feet south and the fight is over.
But no one moved it. On Thursday, Judge Juan Alanis kept the machines shut down, and said why.
Congress wrote a rule in a law that lets the government take your land—but they must sit down with you first and try to agree on a price. Alanis found that it simply never happened. The government’s own filing said it didn’t have to.
The contractor claimed that the shutdown cost $50,000 a day. But when asked to prove it to the court, they produced nothing. When a judge stops work like this, the side that asked for it has to put up money in case they’re wrong. Alanis set it at $1,000.
The same rule covers every landowner along the 34 miles this contractor is supposed to be building a wall on.
They had $46.5 billion, the whole United States government, and a bulldozer that had already been on the land. What they didn’t have was a phone call. Somewhere along those 34 miles there’s another landowner who never got a call either. Now there’s a judge on record saying the government has to ask first.
They Signed Anyway
If you apply for a federal job today, you might be asked which of Trump’s executive orders matter most to you—and how you’d help carry them out. The unions who sued call it a loyalty test. The judge noted it was asked of people applying to be crane operators and air traffic controllers. The unions say it ran on more than 70,000 job listings.
Someone who I can’t name landed their first federal job at Veterans Affairs two years ago. They had spent most of their career in state and local government. They enjoy the job, saying it lets them serve veterans and makes them feel useful.
Now they’re applying elsewhere because they want to be close to family. Many of the more than 10 jobs they applied to carried the question, but they never wanted to answer it. They don’t talk politics at work, even though they do disagree with most of what Trump is doing. They believe the question is illegal to ask.
All of that went into a four-page declaration they filed in federal court. Paragraph 10 is the whole case. They only answered because they assumed silence or the wrong answer would hurt their applications.
So they read through Trump’s executive orders to find just one they could discuss in positive terms. Then they signed it as Federal Worker 4, out of fear of retaliation.
On Friday, Judge George O’Toole stopped the question from being asked across the entire federal government. Three unions brought the suit, and the unnamed employee’s statement is what let them. The court found they had good reason to read that question as a demand for her politics. That’s what gave the unions their case.
The Office of Personnel Management now has seven days to tell every agency head to stop asking.
He Was Told To Obey. He Sued Instead.
Tim Bakken has been teaching at West Point since June of 2000, the longest-serving civilian law professor in the academy’s history. He’s written books and articles critical of the military.
In 2011 he reported that senior officers were hiring retired military into faculty jobs over better-qualified civilians and paying them more. He filed a complaint, and in 2012 a federal board ruled he was a whistleblower and made West Point undo it.
On January 27, 2025, Trump signed an order telling service academies to stop promoting ideas he called un-American, divisive, discriminatory, radical, extremist and irrational, and included that you can’t say America’s founding documents are racist or sexist.
Two weeks later, the dean’s office issued a two-page memo stating no professor could publish a paper, present at a conference, give a media interview, do a podcast, or post on social media without a department head’s approval first.
At a March 2025 faculty council meeting, Bakken stood up and said it was unconstitutional. A colonel told him to stop speaking. The next day he repeated it at his own department’s meeting. Bakken says the deputy department head turned red, pounded on the table, and ordered him to obey the regulation. He added that he should file a class action suit if he didn’t like it.
That’s exactly what he did—for himself and the hundred-plus civilian faculty members. According to Bakken, a lot of his colleagues stopped speaking to him. He says two senior officers told him later that it was to show the new regime “radical compliance,” to protect the dean and superintendent.
Judge Cathy Seibel was put on the bench by George W. Bush—she blocked both policies in May. She called the academy’s reasons a pretext for steering speech toward what Trump wanted to hear. The second policy had told faculty that cadets don’t need to know what their professors believe. Seibel wrote that cadets are smart, tough, and patriotic—“they are not snowflakes.”
On Tuesday, the case closed with a permanent injunction. The regime agreed, without admitting liability, so it can appeal.
For now, West Point’s civilian professors can say whatever they think. All because Bakken refused to sit down.
Your Power Bill Is Paying For A Photo Op
The state of Michigan was set to retire the J.H. Campbell coal plant on Lake Michigan at the end of May last year. They aimed to replace it with cheaper power. State regulators approved it, so did the grid operator.
Only eight days before the shutdown, the Energy Department ordered the plant to keep burning. They called it an emergency situation. Then they did it again, five more times—each running 90 days. The latest one runs through November 14, a year and a half after the plant was supposed to close.
By the third one, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office said the order was almost identical to the second. The regime basically copied and pasted an “emergency.”
Of course, there was no true emergency. Trump just wanted to say coal is back.
Burning coal nobody asked for costs money. The plant sold some of the power it was forced to make, but not nearly enough. The utility told the SEC it’s still $259 million in the hole, and it wants that back from customers across eleven states, by the environmental groups’ count.
Nessel challenged the Trump emergency 11 times, with six requests to the Energy Department and five petitions to the appeals court. No court ruled on any of them—until Friday.
The DC Circuit finally ruled on the very first challenge she ever filed. It threw Trump’s order out. The judges wrote that the regime’s position would let it pick its preferred power plants in Michigan, or presumably any other state.
The plant is still open. The court threw out the first order, but others came after it.
Nessel took away the regime’s “emergency” excuse. A federal court said that isn’t enough anymore. Every order keeping that plant open is built on that word. Nessel has five more to knock down.
This Part Should Make You Feel Good
There are only 50 days left until the midterm elections. Call it the home stretch or whatever you’d like. But it will be a long 50 days, and we will be here working hard for every single one of them—and for long after. Just like we have for the last decade.
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Onward!
Scott
What’s costing you more now than it did a year ago—and did anybody ever explain why? Let me know in the comments!
Three active fights where constituent pressure is moving the needle on Capitol Hill today. Take two minutes to send all three:
Ban uncontrollable AI:
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-pass-the-ban-on-ai-we-cant-control/
Stop the Yosemite giveaway:
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-stop-trumps-yosemite-giveaway
Subpoena the Epstein files:
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-demand-acting-ag-blanche-release-all-of-the-epstein-files-now/
Read the canal section twice. A local board found straw tubes on their own land, sued, and a judge told the richest government on earth to sit down first. That’s not a metaphor. That’s what winning looks like when nobody is watching cable. Restack it for the person who thinks courts only work one way.