courts – Treehouse Writers

I have been following the current regime’s vicious attack on gender-affirming care for minors – a subset of its abuse of trans people in general – for Unbreaking.org, and this week I wrote a mini-briefing about it. After struggling to get a complex issue down to a few sentences, I realized I had a lot more to say.

The effort to block gender-affirming care for minors is an excellent example of why everyone in this country should fight back against the abusive actions of the extremists in power.

Starting in the summer of 2025, the Department of Justice began sending administrative subpoenas to hospitals and other medical offices that offered gender-affirming care to minors. The subpoenas sought extensive data on their patients.

They did this quietly, without fanfare. Only a few reporters noticed, most of them with LGBTQ+ publications.

Administrative subpoenas are issued by federal agencies and not approved in advance by a judge. They are supposed to be used to further an agency’s regulatory authority, but their use has been substantially expanded.

I suspect DOJ expected the recipients to be frightened and just send the documents. After all, at the time they first sent them, major media companies, wealthy universities, and big law firms were caving in the face of pressure by the regime.

But while a few hospitals shut down their gender-care facilities as a result and others tried to finesse the situation by “negotiating,” a number of institutions – starting with the medical practice QueerDoc in Seattle – went to court to “quash” (or shut down) the subpoena.

And they all won, because the subpoenas were, in fact, inappropriate (to put it nicely). In a couple of cases where the hospital didn’t take action, patients or family members of patients did, with the same results.

Which is to say: fighting back works.

Dithering, not so much. Continue reading “Just Say No”…

I keep seeing memes go by on social media that list changes we need to make once we get the fascists out of office. There are some good items on those lists and the people sharing them have good intentions, but at least two of the items drive me nuts: term limits for the Supreme Court and ending the electoral college.

It’s not that I disagree with those ideas – the electoral college should have been tossed out long ago and while I’m generally skeptical about term limits the lengths suggested are reasonable – but rather that they aren’t going to happen.

The Constitution provides for appointment for life for Supreme Court justices (and all federal judges) and it also sets up the electoral college. To get rid of those things, you need a constitutional amendment.

Getting a constitutional amendment is hard and in the current political climate probably impossible even if we throw all the bastards out in 2028.

However, there are things we can do that do not require amending the Constitution, and one of them would do a much better job of fixing the current disaster of the supreme court than term limits.

We need to expand the court.

There is no limit on the size of the court in the Constitution. The size of the court was set at nine members – eight associate justices and a chief justice – in 1869. At the time, the population of the United States was about 39 million, or roughly 10 percent of what it is now.

We actually need a larger court to get to all the issues the Supreme Court should handle. We need more judges on the federal district courts and the courts of appeal as well.

Further, term limits wouldn’t even apply to the current judges we need to get rid of, because any amendment would likely exempt them. We need to change the Supreme Court immediately and expansion would do that. Continue reading “The Changes We Need”…