Would you be surprised to learn that a small group of plutocrats has plotted to perpetuate MAGA, subvert democracy, and maintain their control over our nation? I was not. I expected that this was happening, that Trump was the dummy manipulated by right-wing extremists who want to keep their taxes low while ignoring the welfare of the American people.

Elizabeth Dworkin of The Washington Post told the story recently. It’s as dangerous as I imagined.

Dwoskin reports:

In 2019, a small group of right-wing donors rented a resort outside the 100-person town of Rockbridge, Ohio, for a summit to secure the future of the MAGA movement. They aimed to turn a singular candidate — President Donald Trump — into an enduring political coalition, with a pipeline of voters, donors and candidates that would cement a radical transformation of the GOP.

Convened by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel and JD Vance, then an investor who had written a best-selling memoir, the meeting included hedge fund heiress Rebekah Mercer, then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson and economist Oren Cass, according to two people familiar with the meeting. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private gathering, details of which have not been previously reported.

But the person in the room who would solidify the group’s ambitions was someone with a decidedly lower profile: an Arizona insurance entrepreneur and conservative media figure named Chris Buskirk.

Today, Buskirk helms the Rockbridge Network, a secretive organization birthed out of the weekend gathering that has established itself as one of the most influential forces in GOP politics. Political strategists credit the close-knit network of businessmen-cum-donors with helping fuel the president’s reelection last year and propelling one of its own — Vance — into the vice presidency.

With significant funding from tech leaders, Rockbridge aims to equip MAGA to outlive Trump. The group has no website or public-facing entity, but it has assembled pollsters, data crunchers, online advertisers and even a documentary film arm. It is gearing up to deploy its arsenal in the 2026 midterms and in the 2028 presidential contest, in which many Rockbridge members hope Vance will be the nominee. The group has assembled a database with deep profiles of potential voters through nonpolitical memberships, including outdoors groups and churches, according to a person directly familiar with the organization.

Buskirk’s ties to Trump’s orbit go beyond Rockbridge. 1789 Capital, the venture capital firm he co-founded with investor Omeed Malik, focuses on what the partners call “patriotic capitalism” and now counts Donald Trump Jr. as a partner. The pair — along with administration officials and friends — recently launched Executive Branch, a $500,000-a-head membership club for Trump-supporting business leaders to hobnob in D.C.

These organizations have a collective ambition, according to Buskirk, which is to give the businesspeople he sees as vital to the country’s future a role shaping government and lasting political power.

Their efforts are grounded in a controversial theory of social progress: that a select group of elites are exactly the right people to move the country forward, a position Buskirk argues is not in defiance of MAGA’s populism. Putting industry leaders in positions of power is a hallmark of Trump’s presidency — from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to tech titan Elon Musk — and Buskirk says the MAGA movement has energized a new generation of stewards for the country.

His various projects echo what some on the right call “aristopopulism” and aim to build a bridge between wealthy capitalists and the working-class people they intend to represent, according to interviews with Buskirk and nine other people in his inner circle, profitably reindustrializing the country and tying their interests to that of their base.

“You either have an extractive elite — an oligarchy — or you have a productive elite — an aristocracy — in every society,” he said in an interview in his office in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Many innovative periods in history have been driven by such an aristocracy, Buskirk argues, a point he makes in his 2023 book, “America and the Art of the Possible.” “In the classic Greek sense,” the term isn’t pejorative, he says, but “a proper elite that takes care of the country and governs it well so that everyone prospers.”

As Buskirk sees it, he has approached the political market as a businessman, identifying a gap and taking deliberate steps to close it. The right had what he calls a “coordination problem” — voters who had unexpectedly elected Trump and a nascent group of wealthy people who had become alienated by the progressive left. But the sides lacked organizing infrastructure.

Buskirk uses a one-liner to describe his efforts: “Brains-plus-money-plus-base.”
Others describe his impact more forcefully. Though people still see Trump’s support as “a cult of personality,” said Cass, chief economist of the conservative think tank American Compass, a powerful ecosystem now backs the MAGA movement.

“Chris is the convener of that ecosystem,” he added.

He declined to comment on Rockbridge’s founding event. Thiel declined to comment. Mercer did not respond to a request for comment.
Relatively unknown outside his rarefied circle of business leaders and tacticians, Buskirk is an unusual figure to step into a role once dominated by the Koch brothers, the deep-pocketed Republican megadonors who have opposed many of Trump’s trade policies. He is not a meme-throwing MAGA firebrand; friends describe Buskirk as a dogged tactician who is fiercely perceptive. He was “the first mover” to recognize that there were going to be thousands of well-off people who “no longer felt at home in the Democratic Party,” said Malik, Buskirk’s partner and co-founder of 1789 Capital.

Vance told The Post in a statement that Buskirk is an “original thinker” who saw, “before almost anyone,” how the “right combination of ideas, organizing and funding can ensure lasting political success for the Republican Party.”
Outside of electoral politics, Buskirk’s projects aim to push unrestrained capitalism into American life. 1789 Capital, he says, serves as a testing ground for the idea that homegrown innovation can revive America’s industrial base, what the firm’s partners pitch on their website as “the next chapter of American exceptionalism.” The firm, which has invested in roughly 30 companies, has funded start-ups tied to “anti-woke” politics and to the Trump administration’s economic agenda, including companies that mine rare earth minerals, build AI factories for war or 3D-print rocket fuel.
As Buskirk’s network has become entwined with the Trump administration, the cohort has formed a party circuit for Washington’s new power broker class. Rockbridge’s semiannual conference, at the Ritz-Carlton on Key Biscayne, Florida, in April, which featured “Make America Healthy Again”-themed breath work and yoga sessions, included Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff. Buskirk’s friend, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., attended the opening of Executive Branch in June, which serves high-end wine and sushi but no seed oils.

Those in Buskirk’s network view their growing clout as evidence of government finally working to cheerlead rather than chastise society’s innovators — unleashing a pent-up economic engine that they say was suppressed during the Biden administration.

Yet in entities like Rockbridge and 1789, some critics see something more pernicious — the rise of a group of unelected American oligarchs who are undermining Trump’s promises to benefit working people. Since coming into office, the Trump White House has rolled out a raft of new policies that benefit tech entrepreneurs, including lifting export controls on AI technology and signing executive orders and legislation promoting cryptocurrency. “President Trump’s first and only focus is restoring prosperity for the working-class Americans who resoundingly re-elected him back to the White House,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement.
Since Trump Jr. joined 1789 as a partner last November, the firm has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and now has more than $1 billion in assets, according to two people familiar with the firm. This summer the government dropped two Biden-era federal investigations into Polymarket, a blockchain-based betting start-up that 1789 has invested in and where Trump Jr. now sits on an advisory board.
“It’s generally the case that what’s good for business is good for America, but I don’t think the people surrounding the president are representative of American business,” said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, which has received funding from the Kochs’ philanthropic network. “The government’s job is to advance the prosperity of the nation and not the prosperity of wealthy individuals, founders and executives.”
To Buskirk, these critiques miss the point. He says he is determined to bring the businesspeople who put Trump back in the White House to Washington, even if he doesn’t much like the city. He describes politics as “venal” and D.C. think tanks as “every cliché, squared,” saying the culture must be rebuilt from the ground up.

“So that’s not an attractive place to spend time, but it’s also really necessary,” he said. “Self-government means you have to actually be involved in something you don’t want to do.”
‘A coordination problem’
Ask Buskirk to rattle off where he is on any given day, and the 56-year-old father of four might name seven different cities. He splits his time between his Scottsdale family office; Palm Beach, Florida, where 1789 Capital is headquartered; Dallas; San Francisco; Austin; and, reluctantly, D.C. He says he is on the phone from the moment he wakes up until bedtime, always making time for Vance when the vice president’s schedule allows.
But Buskirk’s early life was spent almost entirely in Arizona. Though he was born on a military base in Germany, where his father was stationed in the Army during the Cold War, he grew up in Scottsdale. He spent weekends working at the family company, which insured homes and small businesses across the state. The household was “patriotic to the nth degree,” Buskirk recalls, and they were stalwart subscribers to the conservative magazine the National Review.

As a young adult, Buskirk pursued a master’s degree in political theory and interned at the Claremont Institute, the right-wing think tank inspired by the political philosopher Leo Strauss.
But he quit both the think tank and the degree, judging academia too impractical. He returned home to Scottsdale to start an insurance firm, doing underwriting for ambulance vendors and other unconventional businesses. Over the next two decades, he built and sold four other insurance-related companies.
His family had become alienated from politics. The Buskirks canceled their National Review subscriptions in the mid-2000s, disgusted by a Republican establishment they believed had led the country astray. The Iraq War had become “a smoke screen,” Buskirk said, distracting from the stark economic problems emerging before his eyes.

Visiting close family in Michigan, he watched as entire “factories were literally just packed up, crated into 40-foot containers and sent to China” after the country joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, he said. Americans, he said, were going to work in low-paying service jobs: $8 an hour at McDonald’s vs. $25 at the Ford plant. Then illegal immigrants came and took those jobs too, he said.

He raged to friends that the American Dream, “that you don’t have to do anything extraordinary to live a dignified life,” was becoming harder, but he felt powerless. “I was just, like, some guy in Arizona,” he recalled. “What am I going to do?”
When President Barack Obama came on the scene in the late aughts, Buskirk watched as he electrified the culture. In contrast, he felt the GOP and its institutions had languished on autopilot.
During those years, Buskirk had sold off the last of the insurance businesses he had built with his father. By the time Trump came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower to announce his presidential candidacy in 2015, Buskirk had more time on his hands.
The Arizona entrepreneur was initially skeptical of the New York reality show host who he worried viewed the presidency as a publicity stunt. But when he watched old interviews with Trump, he heard a drumbeat about how American leaders were not putting Americans first.
“I’m like, he’s actually been saying the same thing for 40 years!” Buskirk recalled. “And that’s when I realized, okay, he’s for real. And the people that are saying he is not serious are lying.”

In July 2016, Buskirk founded an online magazine, American Greatness, which highlighted an “undeniable” need for a new articulation of conservatism. It received funding from Thiel, who had shocked liberal Silicon Valley with his million-dollar donation to Trump and had recently been introduced to Buskirk by a friend. “The soil of the conservative movement is exhausted,” the editors wrote in an opening manifesto. “It needs fertilization, resowing, and diligent cultivation if it is to thrive again.”
Thiel put Buskirk in touch with his protégé, “Hillbilly Elegy” author Vance. Vance and Buskirk became fast friends.
The men spent a year and a half “just nerding out,” with no particular end in mind, Buskirk recalls, just a feeling that “we should create something.”

Vice President-elect Mike Pence, left, and PayPal founder Peter Thiel listen to President-elect Donald Trump during a meeting with technology industry leaders at Trump Tower in New York in 2016. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
In 2019, Vance and Thiel summoned a dozen or so people to an inn in rural Ohio, located just outside the tiny town that would become the organization’s namesake. Some attendees were staunchly pro-Trump, like Buskirk. Others had their doubts. But all of them felt that any successes that took place during the Trump years could easily become a fluke if a Democrat retook the White House, said Blake Masters, an investor who met Buskirk that weekend.

“We spent so much time bemoaning the effectiveness of the left,” Masters adds. “They had a pretty terrible agenda … but they are very effective at organizing. … The right had just been coasting for a long time, and its institutions had just started to decay.”
It became clear to some of those present that MAGA had a network problem. While donors on the right, such as the Kochs, had spent years building their organizations, wealthy people who supported Trump and the emerging constellation of right-wing viewpoints he represented “didn’t really know each other,” Buskirk said. And people who had voted for Trump — including a working-class cohort — weren’t organized either.
“There’s no coordination. No management. No planning. It all just kind of happened,” he recalled. “What if we just said, okay, look, these are two problems that, if solved, would make everything else work better and be more effective. Let’s set about solving that.”
The making of a movement
Buskirk returned from the summit energized, and he became a student of political organizing. He started from first principles, reading “Roots to Power,” an influential left-wing organizing manual from the ’80s.

Along with Vance, he began creating case studies of political organizations on the left and right, documenting their failures and successes. The National Rifle Association stood out. The NRA, Buskirk and his partners concluded, had been very successful at organizing one of its two constituencies: Second Amendment advocates. But its other constituency, outdoorsmen who loved hunting, was not as well organized, and they were unlikely to register to vote.
But outdoorsmen, a Democratic coalition from the ’60s, had significant overlap with demographics that voted for Trump.
“This is actually going to be a hole that needs to be filled,” he said, if he could find something “that makes it worth their time to actually pay attention.”

Chris Buskirk took it upon himself to become a student of political organizing. (Ash Ponders/For The Washington Post)
Buskirk will not go into many details about Rockbridge operations, but he says that on a high level he devised a classic online sales funnel to entice people to join social media groups based on affiliations. This included small-business owners, outdoorsmen and church attendees.

This is the opposite of how political organizations tend to function, persuading people to come to your side by “brute force,” Buskirk said, blasting out ads right before an election. Rockbridge, by contrast, took a more gradual approach: “Build a trust relationship and give people some sort of benefit. Only then you can ask them to do something.”
By April 2022, Vance was making his first, long-shot bid for political office. Malik hosted a small fundraiser for him at a restaurant in Palm Beach. The investor had relocated from New York City the previous year, after defecting from the Democratic Party over coronavirus restrictions and tech platforms’ policing of speech about the coronavirus. Buskirk attended, along with Don Jr.
The group hopped over to Mar-a-Lago, where Buskirk was throwing a Rockbridge conference.
The men spent the week bonding over their rage about what they viewed as online censorship and a feeling that innovation was being stymied in favor of liberal priorities such as sustainability and diversity initiatives.

“A lot of us are also about the same age,” noted Malik, who said he feels the group is ushering in “a generational shift.”
Malik and Buskirk went into business together the following year, starting 1789 Capital, named after the year the Bill of Rights was proposed. It initially focused on what Malik had dubbed “anti-woke companies.” Their first investment was in Last Country Inc., a new media and entertainment company founded by Tucker Carlson, who had been pushed out of Fox News. The partners went on to invest in GrabAGun, an online gun marketplace; Enhanced Games, which allows athletes to take performance-enhancing drugs; and Hadrian, a start-up making AI factories for defense. (The partners have also taken positions in three of Elon Musk’s companies: SpaceX, Neuralink and xAI.)
Will Edwards, whose Dallas-based start-up Firehawk Aerospace specializes in 3D-printing solid rocket fuel to be used in missiles, said many Silicon Valley venture capitalists had rejected his pitches outright because they didn’t want to fund companies selling exclusively to the military.
“Chris thought that was absurd,” Edwards said.

Buskirk, who has since led a funding round that put $60 million into Firehawk, took a particular interest, traveling to Dallas to tour Edwards’s factory, where, he said, workers without college degrees can make six-figure incomes.
Buskirk believes Edwards’s company is economic proof of the investors’ political arguments: The United States is unlikely to make iPhones and Nike shoes again, he says. But it can revive its industrial base — particularly in national defense — and help restore the middle class.
This goal is one President Joe Biden also tried to accomplish when he signed the $52 billion Chips Act in 2022, which aimed to re-shore advanced manufacturing jobs with the largest support package for domestic chips manufacturing in a generation. Trump has criticized the grants as wasteful and clawed back some of the funds.
Strain, the American Enterprise Institute economist, said the political rhetoric of the MAGA movement misconstrues the nation’s actual economic picture. Technological innovation — and not outsourcing — has been the main driver of the loss of manufacturing jobs, he said, adding that many of those arguing that homegrown manufacturing will revive America are the same investors pushing major labor displacement through artificial intelligence.

Cass, of American Compass, said the scale of investment required to rebuild working-class communities is far greater than what 1789 or other like-minded investors can spend. But the experiments Buskirk and his partners are funding are important, he said, because they “blaze a trail.”
The impact of Rockbridge and super PACs on the 2024 election is not well understood. Rockbridge’s affiliated super PAC, Turnout for America, was one of a handful of groups that canvassed swing states on behalf of the Trump campaign, including Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action. Turnout for America spent $34.5 million on the 2024 cycle, according to FEC records, far less than the $261 million from Elon Musk’s America PAC.
But internal Rockbridge data suggests some measure of effectiveness, which insiders attribute to its years-long voter profiling and mobilization efforts. The super PAC identified several million citizens — low-propensity voters in seven swing states — that they believed would vote for Trump if nudged to go to the polls. The group calculated that Trump would win those states if they could motivate 40 percent of those voters to go to the polls. In the end, Rockbridge’s 3,000 canvassers turned out 50 percent, said two people with direct knowledge of internal stats.
Today, the group’s vibe is euphoric. Interest has surged since the election, according to Buskirk, with roughly half of new members coming from the tech industry. Several of the group’s members are billionaires; prominent investors Marc Andreessen and David Sacks are already members.

Still, Firehawk founder Edwards, who joined Rockbridge with an invitation from Buskirk, said the events feel warm, “like a close group of people who enjoy each other’s company.” Edwards said he lives in a duplex and drives a Toyota. A wide age range is represented, including NextGen, an under-30 division that includes Buskirk’s son, Chris, a recent college graduate.
Richard Painter, a corporate law professor at the University of Minnesota who served as chief ethics lawyer in the Bush White House, said this influx of interest in Rockbridge, 1789 and Executive Branch creates the appearance of a “pay to play” network, of people who are paying to get access to administration officials or the Trump family. (He also said he would have advised administration officials not to attend these gatherings if they happened in his time.)
Buskirk declined to address this criticism.
In a text message sent while overseas on business, he said that American greatness will only be accomplished “by the intentional cultivation of talented, high-agency people working together in high-trust environments.”

His book lists historical moments when elite networks moved society forward, including Florence during the Renaissance, mid-century America, and the county of Lancashire, England, during the Industrial Revolution. The Scottish Enlightenment was actually “the work of a few dozen people,” he notes, who “developed long-term friendships” at a private social club called the Select Society.
Parallels to remarkably innovative historical periods were starting to happen, he said, but “the full flourishing of America’s latent potential” was not guaranteed.
“I pray that it is,” he said. “There is much to be done.”

Ian Millhiser of Vox wrote about the stunning decision by a Federal Appeals Court to throw out Texas’ gerrymander. At Trump’s insistence, the Governor and legislature districted the state’s Congressional districts, in hopes of producing five more Republican seats. Trump and Republican House leaders are terrified that they could lose their slim majority.

Millhiser points out the supreme irony that it was Trump’s own Justice Departnent that provided the grounds to toss the redistricting. The Supreme Ciurt recently ruled that it would not interfere with gerrymanders, a strictly political decision. But gerrymandering for the specific purpose of reducing racial representation is unconstitutional. Unless the Supreme Court abandons its recent precedent and do Trump a big favor.

Millhiser writes:

In a decision that could potentially reshape the 2026 midterm elections and cement the Democratic Party’s future control of the US House, a federal court just struck down the gerrymandered Texas maps that President Donald Trump pressured that state to enact. If the decision holds, it could cost Republicans as many as five House seats.

And that’s not all. The most remarkable thing about the three-judge panel’s decision in League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) v. Abbott is that it turns on an incompetent decision by Trump’s own administration. 

As Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, explains in the court’s opinion, Texas lawmakers initially “didn’t have much appetite to redistrict on purely partisan grounds” — even as Trump urged them to do so. But Texas Republicans appear to have changed their mind after the Justice Department sent a letter last July to Texas’s top officials, which demanded that the state redraw several districts to change their racial makeup.

That letter, as I’ll explain in more detail below, misread a federal appeals court opinion to mean that the state was required to remake its maps. According to Judge Brown’s opinion, “it’s challenging to unpack the DOJ Letter because it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors.” He added that “even attorneys employed by the Texas Attorney General — who professes to be a political ally of the Trump Administration — describe the DOJ Letter as ‘legally[] unsound,’ ‘baseless,’ ‘erroneous,’ ‘ham-fisted,’ and ‘a mess.’”

In reality, the Supreme Court has long held that “if a legislature gives race a predominant role in redistricting decisions, the resulting map” is subject to the most skeptical level of constitutional review and “may be held unconstitutional.” When the Justice Department told Texas to redraw several of its congressional districts to change their racial makeup, it ordered Texas to give “race a predominant role.” Oops.

Please open the link to finish the article.

Trump ordered U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Democrats who participated in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of girls and young women. Apparently, it’s ok for Republicans to mess around with girl victims, but not Democrats.

As Attorney General of Florida from 2011 to 2019, Bondi declared that finding and prosecuting sex traffickers was one of her top priorities.

Dean Obeidallah finds it strange that Pam Bondi never investigated Jeffrey Epstein, who resumed his predatory sex trade after serving a light sentence in 2008. By Bondi’s account today, Epstein had at least 1,000 victims.

Yet she ignored him.

Why?

Obeidallah writes:

What we truly need is an investigation into Pam Bondi. Specifically, why didn’t she investigate Jeffrey Epstein for the countless sex crimes he committed against children and women in Florida when she served as Florida’s Attorney General?!

Taking a step back, when Bondi served for eight years as Florida’s top law enforcement officer, she very publicly declared that investigating and prosecuting sexual predators—especially those who preyed on children–a top priority. Indeed, as Florida’s AG, she announced an initiative focused on “Making Florida a Zero-Tolerance state for Human trafficking.”

To that end, in 2013 she proudly boasted about the arrest of 15 child sex predators as part of a five-day investigation known as Operation e-Guardian. At the time, Bondi stated, “Sadly, sexual predators will use any means available to them, including the Internet, to lure children in order to exploit them. This operation was a great multi-agency collaboration that has brought down 15 child predators.”

And in 2018, Bondi launched a confidential tip website for people to report allegations of past child sex abuse by Catholic priests in Florida. She statedthen that any “priest that would exploit a position of power and trust to abuse a child is a disgrace to the church and a threat to society.” Bondi added, “I am calling on victims and anyone with information about potential abuse to please report it to my office.”

Yet despite this very public commitment to investigate and bring to justice people involved in sex crimes against children—even those committed years earlier–she never announced an investigation into or prosecuted Jeffrey Epstein. (At least no investigation that was publicly reported.)

How low can they go? MAGA television host Megyn Kelly denied yesterday that Jeffrey Epstein was actually a pedophile. People she knows told her that when a man has sexual relations with a 15-year-old, it’s not pedophilia. She seems to agree. After all, she says, a 15-year-old is way different from a 5-year-old.

Here’s the relevant portion of Megyn Kelly’s remarks from the November 12 episode of her show, as reported by multiple outlets:

“I know somebody very, very close to this case who is in a position to know virtually everything. And this person has told me, from the start—years and years ago—that Jeffrey Epstein, in this person’s view, was not a pedophile.

“He was into the barely-legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls. And I realise this is disgusting. I’m definitely not trying to make an excuse for this. I’m just giving you facts, that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passer-by.

“And that is what I believed, and that is what I reliably was told for many years. And it wasn’t until we heard from [Attorney General Pam Bondi] that they had tens of thousands of videos of alleged— forgive me, they used to call it ‘kiddie porn,’ now they call it child sexual abuse material — on his computer, that for the first time I thought, ‘Oh no, he was an actual pedophile.’

“Only a pedophile gets off on young-children-abuse videos. … We have yet to see anybody come forward and say, ‘I was under 10, I was under 14 when I first came within his purview.’ You can say that’s a distinction without a difference. I think there is a difference. There’s a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old, you know?”  

If I had a 15-year-old daughter, I would not approve of her having sexual relations with anyone, most certainly not a 40-year-old man.

If Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Alito or Justice Thomas had puta stay on the orders of lower federal courts to fully fund SNAP–the program that pays fo feed 42 million impoverished Americans, we could safely conclude that they are cruel and don’t care whether poor people can afford a meal.

But it was shocking on Friday night to learn that it was Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson–one of the most liberal members of the High Court–who ordered a 48-hour stay in the lower court’s order to fully fund SNAP.

How could this be?

Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University and noted Constitutional scholar, explains that Justice brown was acting strategically and hoped to outmaneuver the conservative majority.

Follow his reasoning. Open the link and finish reading his analysis.

He wrote:

A very quick explainer on what (and why) Justice Jackson issued an “administrative stay” in the SNAP case late on Friday night, and on what’s likely to happen next

STEVE VLADECK

Welcome back to “One First,” a (more-than) weekly newsletter that aims to make the U.S. Supreme Court more accessible to lawyers and non-lawyers alike. I’m grateful to all of you for your continued support, and I hope that you’ll consider sharing some of what we’re doing with your networks:

I wanted to put out a very brief post to try to provide a bit of context for Justice Jackson’s single-justice order, handed down shortly after 9 p.m. ET on Friday night, that imposed an “administrative stay” of a district court order that would’ve required the Trump administration to use various contingency funds to pay out critical benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

It may surprise folks that Justice Jackson, who has been one of the most vocal critics of the Court’s behavior on emergency applications from the Trump administration, acquiesced in even a temporary pause of the district court’s ruling in this case. But as I read the order, which says a lot more than a typical “administrative stay” from the Court, Jackson was stuck between a rock and a hard place—given the incredibly compressed timing that was created by the circumstances of the case.

In a world in which Justice Jackson either knew or suspected that at least five of the justices would grant temporary relief to the Trump administration if she didn’t, the way she structured the stay means that she was able to try to control timing of the Supreme Court’s (forthcoming) review—and to create pressure for it to happen faster than it otherwise might have. In other words, it’s a compromise—one with which not everyone will agree, but which strikes me as eminently defensible under these unique (and, let’s be clear, maddening and entirely f-ing avoidable) circumstances.

I. How We Got Here

Everyone agrees that, among the many increasingly painful results of the government shutdown, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) can no longer spend the funds Congress appropriated to cover SNAP—a program that helps to fund food purchases for one in eight (42 million!) Americans. Everyone also agrees that there are other sources of appropriated money that the President has the statutory authority to rely upon to at least partially fund SNAP benefits for the month of November. The two questions that have provoked the most legal debate is whether (1) he has the authority to fully fund SNAP; and (2) either way, whether federal courts can order him to use whatever authorities he has.

The dispute in the case that reached the Supreme Court on Friday involves a lawsuit that asked a federal court in Rhode Island to order the USDA first to partially fund SNAP for November, and then to fully fund it. Having already ordered the USDA to do the former, yesterday, Judge McConnell issued a TRO ordering it to do the latter (to fully fund SNAP for November)—and to do so by the end of the day today.

Even as the President seemed to be giving inconsistent public statements about what the federal government was going to do, the Justice Department appealed Judge McConnell’s ruling to the First Circuit—and also sought a stay of that ruling pending appeal. And given the urgency of the timing, it asked the First Circuit to issue an “administrative stay”—a temporary pause while the court of appeals decided whether to issue a more indefinite stay for the duration of the government’s appeal. (For a longer explainer of the difference between an “administrative” stay and a stay pending appeal, see this post.)

With the First Circuit not having ruled on the administrative stay by late Friday afternoon, the Justice Department went to the Supreme Court for both of the types of relief it had sought from the First Circuit—a stay pending appeal and an administrative stay while the Court considered the former. Shortly after that filing, at 6:08 p.m. ET, the First Circuit publicly declined to enter an administrative stay—issuing a two-page order explaining why. As the order concluded, “The government’s motion for a stay pending appeal remains pending, and we intend to issue a decision on that motion as quickly as possible.”

That kicked the ball squarely into the Supreme Court’s … court (sorry; it’s late).

II. Why It Was Justice Jackson’s Problem

All emergency applications are filed in the first instance with the “Circuit Justice” assigned to that particular court of appeals/geographic area. For the Boston-based First Circuit, that’s Justice Jackson. And with one equivocal exception, every “administrative” stay of which I’m aware has come from the Circuit Justice, not the full Court. Thus, the onus was on Justice Jackson to either enter the administrative stay herself, or risk being overruled by the full Court.

In an order circulated to the Court’s press corps at 9:17 p.m. ET, Jackson issued the administrative stay sought by the Trump administration. But her order says a lot more than the typical administrative stay—which usually contains nothing other than boilerplate. As Jackson wrote, “Given the First Circuit’s representations, an administrative stay is required to facilitate the First Circuit’s expeditious resolution of the pending stay motion.” Thus, she stayed the two orders from Judge McConnell “pending disposition of the motion for a stay pending appeal” in the First Circuit, “or further order of Justice Jackson or of the Court.” And as the order concludes, “This administrative stay will terminate forty-eight hours after the First Circuit’s resolution of the pending motion, which the First Circuit is expected to issue with dispatch.”

The first thing to say about this order is that I’ve never seen anything quite like it before. Circuit Justices don’t usually explain administrative stays, and certainly not with this much detail about the timing. Here, Justice Jackson is clearly telling the First Circuit to hustle—a message I am sure the court of appeals will receive and act upon.

As for why Justice Jackson did it, to me, the clue is the last sentence. Had Jackson refused to issue an administrative stay, it’s entirely possible (indeed, she may already have known) that a majority of her colleagues were ready to do it themselves. I still think that this is what happened back in April when the full Court intervened shortly before 1 a.m., without explaining why Justice Alito hadn’t, in the A.A.R.P. Alien Enemies Act case. And from Jackson’s perspective, an administrative stay from the full Court would’ve been worse—almost certainly because it would have been open-ended (that is, it would not have had a deadline). The upshot would’ve been that Judge McConnell’s order could’ve remained frozen indefinitely while the full Court took its time. Yesterday’s grant of a stay in Trump v. Orr, for instance, came 48 days after the Justice Department first sought emergency relief.

Instead, by keeping the case for herself and granting the same relief, in contrast, Justice Jackson was able to directly influence the timing in both the First Circuit and the Supreme Court, at least for now. She nudged the First Circuit (which I expect to rule by the end of the weekend, Monday at the latest); and, assuming that court rules against the Trump administration, she also tied her colleagues’ hands—by having her administrative stay expire 48 hours after the First Circuit rules. Of course, the full Court can extend the administrative stay (and Jackson can do it herself). But this way, at least, she’s putting pressure on everyone—the First Circuit and the full Court—to move very quickly in deciding whether or not Judge McConnell’s orders should be allowed to go into effect. From where I’m sitting, that’s why Justice Jackson, the most vocal critic among the justices of the Court’s behavior in Trump-related emergency applications, ruled herself here—rather than allowing the full Court to overrule her. It drastically increases the odds of the full Supreme Court resolving this issue by the end of next week—one way or the other.

I am, of course, just speculating. But if so, I think it’s both a savvy move from Justice Jackson and a pretty powerful rejoinder to the increasingly noisy (and ugly) criticisms of her behavior from the right. Given the gravity of this issue, it makes all the sense in the world for a justice in Jackson’s position to do whatever she could to ensure that the underlying question (must the USDA fully fund SNAP for November?) is resolved as quickly as possible—even if that first means pausing Judge McConnell’s rulings for a couple of days. If the alternative was a longer pause of McConnell’s rulings, then this was the best-case scenario, at least for now. And regardless, imposing this compromise herself, rather than forcing her colleagues to overrule her, is, to me, a sign of a justice who takes her institutional responsibilities quite seriously, indeed—even when they lead away from the result she might otherwise have preferred if it were entirely up to her.

III. What Comes Next?

Open the link now to find out what is likely to happen to the funds that feel 42 million low-income Americans.