I think this both overstates and understates the case. The evidence being weak does not invalidate the decision; as the court notes, the government gets substantial deference on matters of national security.
The invalidation comes from the fact that this is clearly retaliatory behavior for speech; and the evidence for this is fairly strong since the administration has made public statements to that effect.
The evidence being weak means that it is clear that there is no reasonable belief that the cause of action is anything but an attempt to apply a penalty for the use of protected speech.
Politics is frequently a game of semantic drift. The application of labels with unclear meaning to further dilute meaning or extend it for the purpose of engagement, legal reclassification... it's not engineering and you can't expect well defined terms from people who want power without accountability.
Politics doesn't work if a significant part of the leadership is constantly acting in bad faith, and behaving essentially sociopathically.
Voters' and citizens' (and some judges') willingness to support sociopathic behavior by leaders is a profound failing at their basic social duties, and is deeply shameful.
People always feel like that to a certain extent, but both quantitatively and qualitatively there have been very dramatic shifts in the past few decades in the USA.
No, this isn't just an overused rhetorical device like all politicians do, those examples are the flimsy legal argument the Trump Admin uses in court, frequently as justification to break the actual letter of the law.
I dislike it when people claim speech is violence. Like if you're trying to have a conversation on what should be or not - then people claim that it's a violent act to talk about.
"Speech is violence" is very popular with the campus groups that want to ban speakers they disagree with.
I'm not sure if it's still going on, but a few years ago the same crowd kept insisting that "silence is violence" which is even more ludicrous - if you're not parroting their critical race theory talking points at every opportunity, YOU are committing an act of violence.
I have noticed fads in rhetoric as I've gotten older and lived through many of these moments. The rhetorical fads are mostly about structuring an argument where to disagree makes you appear beyond the pale.
What fascinating about these is that they eventually turn on themselves, because rhetoric has no logical foundation and can be twisted to mean anything.
I wish the people down voting you would take a moment to explain why. Not because I agree with you, but because I don't know about this and I am curious and would appreciate a calm rational person to explain why they disagree with you.
At this point, it seems pretty obvious to me that every group in this conflict is willing to do basically whatever it takes to push through what it wants. Both sides do it so clumsily and stupidly that they only end up pissing off both observers and their opponents even more. Consensus can never really be reached, because the whole point of these theatrics is the fight itself.
I’m not American, so I’m not used to this kind of thing at all, which makes it even stranger for me to watch one group roleplaying as deeply religious while at the same time embodying arrogance, greed, and a lust for power, while on the other side you have people fighting for equality so hard that it eventually turns into plain old racism, sexism, and mental gymnastics, with definitions of words and concepts being constantly changed just to make them fit into an already flimsy theory meant to explain why the patriarchy or some similar nonsense is supposedly to blame for everything.
I’m genuinely curious to see how the conflict between these two groups develops from here. It just keeps getting more and more absurd.
In the 40s the government took control of the whole economy in the name of national security, in the 1860s the government suspended the constitution in the name of national security. None of this is new.
"In the 40s" and "in the 1860s" here are obfuscations of "during WWII" and "during the civil war". Extraordinary actions in the name of national security during a literal civil war or during a time of total war are to be expected. The comparison to other times is not meaningful.
Declaring war isn't... Really a thing. Since around WWII. Acknowledging a war has happened, is what the notification to Congress is, and that happened.
The context of what the nation was facing in the 1860's (the civil war) and 1940's (world war 2) were very materially different than what it faces now.
It's crazy how powerful trans people are. Given the response, they're as powerful as the Civil War and WW2.
There's 2.8M trans people in the US. Compared to the Axis powers who mobilized 25-30M personnel, each trans person has the equivalent strength of 9-10 Axis soldiers. Impressive.
Congress ceding it's authority to the executive branch is an issue of national concern, has been going on for decades, and is definitely not limited to one specific party [1], though I do agree that the current administration has been testing the limits of executive power more than any other that I can recall in my lifetime.
The current administration is the final nail in the coffin of presidential-style governments versus the parliamentary system.
Separating the legislature and the executive has no useful purpose: if the president is going to defacto enact law should be handled by the legislature, then there's no reason they shouldn't just be the head of the legislature and forced to actually whip the votes to do so.
I actually lean a little differently, though maybe it's the same thing in a different shape.
Since modern government seems to require a large bureaucratic apparatus to function, I think it should be its own branch with no single head - or put another way, all bodies established by the legislature should be independent from each other, the executive, and the legislature. This way, all power the legislature grants to a body doesn't acrue to the presidency, and the collective powers of these bodies don't acrue to a single person or group. The president would still have a suite of powers, but they wouldn't automatically expand - the president would only have whatever control over these bodies the legislature chooses to grant. Of course, if the legislature wants to exercise any power over these bodies once they've established them, they would have to do so through the usual legislative process, and it would still be subject to presidential veto.
The US president was always designed to be like this. It's like people are deliberately forgetting anti-federalists were not only a thing, they warned about these exact same problems over 200 years ago.
Impeachment that has to be done in a house of congress that was designed to have minimal accountability and is deeply anti-democratic? Maybe it "broke" down because there were no real checks and balances to begin with.
I'd recommend reading the Federalist Papers. A large number of them are more or less explicit warnings that Trump-style actions and attitudes should not be tolerated, and explanations about how they should be prevented and countered.
The Federalists were extremely familiar with the way monarchies functioned, spent a lot of time thinking about government strucutre, and the US presidency was quite explicitly set up to be something else.
If the leaders of all of our institutions decide to shrug when the president treats national powers as a tool for organized crime, and voters don't do anything about it, that's a people problem, not a problem of institutional structure. Any institution is only as powerful as our collective willingness to support and protect it.
And built the system as it is anyway: with no practical way to prevent this from happening. And we see it over and over again in other presidential style systems, the US is just the largest one left to fall.
You say no practical way, I say system working exactly as designed. Many people who wrote the constitution were actively disdainful of "the democracy" problem. They openly hated that citizens were practicing local politics in towns across Massachusetts while thinking that plantation slave owners in Virginia, that were equivalent to oligarchs (and ruled as such too), were a more "noble" form of government.
They used Shays' Rebellion as a pretext to push for constitutional reform.
The constitution is explicitly written to prevent change. It's why change is so hard to implement and requires actual courage (see America's second founding).
One of the first official acts George Washington did was sign the fugitive slave act then tried to deputize his nephew in the treasury department to kidnap a free woman who was his former slave, Ona Judge, because Washington didn't want to argue in a public court why she was his property. Great video on the topic:
Many of the founders were rotten ghouls (Alexander Hamilton's favorite form of government was a monarchy), you need to read what they exactly think because they designed a government where about less than 2% of the US population could vote and design a system where the only house that commoner's could be elected into would be the weakest. They openly wrote about all of this too, it's not anything new.
When they wrote about freedom they weren't talking about 95% of society, they were talking about a very specific type of people that excluded many.
The rot has always been there, it's why there is an allure of truth when conservatives say they just want to return to the founding. Look at what the founding actually entails, there is nothing unamerican about white national colonialism. That's why we mustn't look to the past to build a better future.
GP already explicitly called it bipartisan, and it was bipartisan well before Obama (though if we're pointing fingers at a modern president for accelerating the abuse of "national security", it really should be Dubya).
A prime example is that the Trump regime overthrew all California environmental regulations regarding oil drilling by Sable in the name of national security:
Remember covid? We all fell into lockstep with great eagerness. Suddenly everybody agreed on what's good and bad, who's good and bad. And why. So don't go pointing fingers. Attend to the 2x4 in your own eye because it's happening to you right now.
Restriction on the movement of people, animals, and goods which is intended to prevent the spread of disease or pests is much older then COVID.
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The word quarantine comes from quarantena or quarantaine, meaning "forty days", used in the Venetian language in the 14th and 15th centuries and also in France. The word is designated in the period during which all ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore during the Black Death plague."
The legal short-hand saying that "corporations are people" is terrible PR. Non-legal-experts look at that and logically and correctly conclude "no, they're not", and think it's a ridiculous statement.
The underlying legal principle is that groups of individuals banding together don't lose their fundamental rights. That applies to unions, non-profits, clubs, churches, political parties, small businesses, and yes, corporations.
Courts do allow more government control over "commercial speech" than, say, political speech. But that discriminates based on the type of speech, not the type of speaker.
The invalidation comes from the fact that this is clearly retaliatory behavior for speech; and the evidence for this is fairly strong since the administration has made public statements to that effect.
The evidence being weak means that it is clear that there is no reasonable belief that the cause of action is anything but an attempt to apply a penalty for the use of protected speech.