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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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Yeah. On the upside, we also have Skrmetti dropping in the next couple weeks, it's near-certainly going to be a Roberts or Thomas opinion, and I'm sure they picked that case out of many available preliminary injunction cases just to affirm a denial of a preliminary injunction.

The cynical answer is the squishy center of the court is triangulating: a couple Trump cases and (maybe?) Skrmetti cost too many weirdness points, so sad, everyone else interested in vindicating their rights can go home. I find that particularly undesirable because my preferences don't exactly fall among Red Tribe Blue Tribe lines, but I'd bet someone like @WhiningCoil that does think trans minor laws are super-critical is going to see that sort of thing as 'look, we didn't vindicate their fake rights or your real ones, what do you mean blues keep coming up with new fake rights', not some even-handed application of justice.

But the even-less-optimistic one is that they just don't care. 2rafa lists ways that Barrett isn't a Red Triber, but it's not like she's been some exactly-by-the-book advocate of Catholic dogma, either. These things just don't matter to this court, and that's going to control how they apply the law. The FedSoc project insisted that they could mitigate or at least reduce the role of political currents in the judiciary in favor of a hard-hearted dedication to the raw text of the law, and the Litany of Tarksi tells us that no, they can't, and trying to find people who did gave us, 100% of the time, instead people who'd been drowned in Blue Tribe norms and expectations.