Week 75: A Reflecting Pool, a Supreme Court Reversal, and a Housing Bill Held Hostage

“`markdown This was a week in which a government agency could not keep a swimming pool clean, and the Supreme Court dismantled a precedent that had governed the presidency since 1935. Both stories ran in parallel for seven days, one absurd and one structural, and by Friday it was clear they belonged to the same account of how power was being exercised. Courts pushed back harder than almost any other institution, immigration protections for hundreds of thousands of people were finally and permanently stripped away, nine protesters were sentenced to decades in prison, and a bipartisan vote to limit a war collapsed within forty-eight hours under direct presidential pressure.

**The Weekend**

The weekend set the tone with a pair of Supreme Court rulings that would come to define the week’s second half. In twin 6-3 decisions, the Court allowed the administration to terminate Temporary Protected Status for roughly 350,000 Haitians and several thousand Syrians, and separately cleared the way for asylum seekers to be physically turned back at the border. Both rulings arrived despite Trump’s documented disparaging remarks about the countries in question, and both would be finalized later in the week with no further avenue for judicial review.

Alongside that, a cluster of federal courts pushed in the opposite direction on enforcement tactics. A judge ordered the release of a religious leader detained for pro-Palestinian speech; another barred most ICE courthouse arrests in New York; a Trump-appointed judge called ICE practices "abhorrent and illegal"; and Human Rights Watch documented unlawful killings and roughly 4,000 detentions tied to a Minnesota operation, where a separate investigation found that 93 percent of street arrests in New York and New Jersey targeted Latinos. The weekend also saw the Justice Department indict 15 Minnesota protest defendants while publicly emphasizing alleged Antifa ties — a framing that would matter more by midweek — and Trump installed William Pulte, a political loyalist with no intelligence background, as acting director of national intelligence. Within a day, Pulte ordered roughly 300 firings at the National Counterterrorism Center.

It was also over the weekend that the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool first became a national story, as Trump began blaming unspecified "vandals" for algae and peeling coating that were, by all available evidence, the product of a botched $14.2 million renovation.

**Monday**

The administration’s foreign policy took an abrupt turn. The Treasury Department issued a 60-day license permitting Iranian oil sales in U.S. dollars, following Vice President Vance’s announcement of a nuclear inspections agreement reached at a Switzerland summit. Iran almost immediately and publicly disputed the terms Vance had described, particularly around inspector access, leaving a major sanctions reversal resting on a diplomatic claim the other side denied.

The Justice Department also sued New York over its laws barring masked federal enforcement and local cooperation agreements with ICE, while New York filed its own suit over the administration’s noncompliance — a dispute over the basic boundary between state and federal authority. Public health policy absorbed further cuts: NIH froze HIV research funding in South Africa, a proposed 2027 budget would eliminate the CDC’s HIV-prevention budget entirely, and the House proposed stripping $225 million from the Ryan White program, compounding new Medicaid work requirements that threaten coverage for millions. Trump also renewed his push for a National Guard deployment in Chicago over Governor Pritzker’s objections.

Quietly, FEC filings revealed a Republican dark-money network funneling more than $4.3 million into ostensibly progressive PACs designed to boost weaker Democratic primary candidates, while AI industry super PACs spent over $24 million to influence a single New York primary centered on AI regulation — a story that would resolve later in the week.

**Tuesday**

Tuesday brought the sharpest split of the week between judicial restraint and executive escalation. Federal courts blocked the use of a flawed immigration database to purge voter rolls, ruled against the Justice Department in its ninth consecutive voter-file case, quashed subpoenas against Minnesota officials as politically motivated, and saw the Seventh Circuit order DOJ to slow its voter-roll actions in Wisconsin — a near-total judicial rebuff of the administration’s effort to centralize control over state voter data ahead of the midterms.

At the same time, nine Texas protesters convicted after a 2025 demonstration at an ICE detention center were sentenced to between 30 and 100 years, including one defendant who had not even been present at the protest. It was the first case to apply Trump’s "antifa" domestic terrorism declaration, and the sentences exceeded those handed down for January 6 defendants — an unprecedented use of terrorism statutes against political dissent.

Trump also turned on the press that day, calling New York Times reporters "corrupt and unethical cowards" and their Iran war coverage "TREASONOUS" after a story questioned the war’s achievements, announcing he would fold the reporting into an existing lawsuit against the paper. Separately, the Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation into a Brooklyn coffee shop that had briefly banned a pro-Israel congressman, raising its own questions about using federal power against ordinary political speech.

The reflecting pool story escalated in parallel: an Olympic canoeist was arrested for touching the peeling liner, National Guard troops and out-of-state police patrolled the site, and Trump threatened ten-year prison sentences while repeating unsubstantiated damage claims. And in a genuine break from the week’s pattern, the Senate passed a war-powers resolution requiring congressional authorization for continued Iran military action, 50-48, with four Republicans joining Democrats — the first time such a measure had cleared both chambers.

**Wednesday**

That bipartisan moment did not survive contact with the president. Trump confronted Senators Cassidy and others at a Capitol lunch, accusing them of disloyalty over the war-powers vote; Cassidy said he matched the president’s raised volume.

The same day delivered the week’s most consequential single ruling: in Trump v. Slaughter, the Supreme Court overturned Humphrey’s Executor, the 1935 precedent that had protected independent agency leaders from removal without cause, following Trump’s earlier firing of FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter. Legal experts warned the decision effectively installs a loyalty test for agency leadership across the federal government. The Court also ruled that border officials may deport lawful permanent residents suspected of crimes of "moral turpitude" without the clear-and-convincing evidence previously required, stripping an established due-process safeguard from green-card holders.

Appeals courts continued resisting the administration’s voter-roll efforts — the Sixth Circuit rejected a DOJ suit against Michigan — extending an unbroken losing streak across 30 states and the District of Columbia. And the Texas protester sentences were finalized in full: eight defendants received 50 to 100 years and a ninth received 30 years for possessing political materials, with legal experts calling the outcome a direct attack on protest and ideological expression. Separately, ICE and CBP surveillance contract spending reached a record $513 million, and the $24 million tech-industry fight over New York’s 12th district primary concluded with the AI-safety-aligned candidate’s defeat.

**Thursday**

By Thursday, the war-powers resolution had collapsed entirely. After Trump called Cassidy a "lunatic" and summoned him to a White House briefing, the Senate reversed itself, voting 50-47 against the same measure it had passed two days earlier — a bipartisan check on war powers dismantled within 48 hours through direct presidential pressure on individual senators.

Congress absorbed a second blow to its independence the same day: minutes before a scheduled signing ceremony, Trump canceled his signature on a bipartisan housing bill that had passed 85-5 in the Senate and 358-32 in the House, demanding the Senate first pass the SAVE Act, a voting-restriction measure. He separately conditioned renewal of FISA surveillance authority on the same demand, prompting Rep. Luna to shut down the House floor and triggering a 19-day Senate adjournment.

Courts, meanwhile, kept striking at the underlying premise of those demands: Judge Casper permanently blocked the administration’s proof-of-citizenship voter registration order, and Judge Talwani ruled unconstitutional an executive order tying mail-ballot delivery to federal voter-roll submission, both finding that the Constitution grants the president no specific authority over elections.

The Supreme Court’s TPS and asylum rulings were finalized the same day in Mullin v. Doe and related cases, barring judicial review of the TPS terminations and upholding the border "metering" policy; Justice Kagan’s dissent described the president’s statements about the affected countries as "repellent and racially inflected." Judges also kept pressing the administration on transparency, ordering further disclosure in the Epstein files matter and demanding explanation for a tarp obscuring the Kennedy Center facade after a court-ordered name change.

Away from the courts, Trump commissioned a 250-foot triumphal arch he said would be privately funded, even as a New York Times analysis found his 18 major second-term construction projects carried more than $1 billion in potential taxpayer cost. He also announced on social media that he had directed the Justice Department to investigate oil companies over gas prices. In California, a one-time 5 percent billionaire wealth tax qualified for the November ballot after gathering double the required signatures, prompting tech billionaires to begin funding competing measures to block it. And Senator Wyden warned that HHS was preparing to deport more than 500 unaccompanied migrant children using a legal framework without statutory authority, ahead of a June 30 court deadline.

**Friday**

The week closed with the TPS and asylum rulings fully in effect and the administration treating them as a political victory: a White House fact sheet celebrated the decisions and listed 60 immigration enforcement actions as the "largest and most aggressive" crackdown in American history, even as advocates warned the Court’s reasoning put 1.3 million people across more than a dozen TPS-covered countries at risk.

Trump, addressing the Faith & Freedom Coalition, called Democratic opponents "godless communists" and "animals" following a wave of progressive primary wins, falsely linking them to violent communism; Speaker Johnson echoed the rhetoric and separately pledged to shield the administration from oversight if Republicans retained Congress in the midterms. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller stated plainly that the country "doesn’t have a future" without ending birthright citizenship, an explicit statement of intent to dismantle a 14th Amendment guarantee.

Civil liberties concerns deepened further: at least half of roughly 90 people arrested protesting an ICE detention center in New Jersey were contacted by FBI agents seeking to recruit them as informants, and Justice Department data showed that 57 percent of more than 750,000 children facing deportation hearings lacked legal representation — a higher rate than for unrepresented adults. In smaller but telling episodes, an anonymous, fabricated child-abuse report briefly separated former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s family, and Representative Tom Emmer told a political audience that Somalis "don’t assimilate" and should "go the hell back," a sharp reversal from his earlier public praise of Somali immigrants.

**Through the Week**

Threaded through all six days was the reflecting pool, which never stopped being both ridiculous and revealing. A government contractor’s failure became, in the president’s telling, a conspiracy of leftist saboteurs; an elderly Olympic canoeist was detained for touching the pool’s peeling liner; out-of-state police and National Guard troops patrolled a public monument against a threat no evidence supported; and the National Park Service ultimately awarded at least $1.7 million in repair work without competitive bidding to a company owned by a major Trump donor. None of this rose to the constitutional stakes of the week’s Supreme Court rulings, but it followed the same pattern seen elsewhere — unverified claims used to justify disproportionate force, and public contracts flowing toward the politically connected.

Taken as a whole, the week showed two institutions moving in opposite directions. The judiciary, from district courts up through the circuit level, repeatedly blocked or narrowed administration efforts to purge voter rolls, restrict mail ballots, and compel state cooperation with federal subpoenas, maintaining what by week’s end was a near-unbroken record of resistance on election-related questions. The Supreme Court, by contrast, used the same week to remove a 90-year safeguard on the president’s power to fire independent agency leaders and to close off judicial review of major immigration decisions affecting hundreds of thousands of people. Congress, briefly asserting itself through the war-powers vote, folded within two days under direct presidential confrontation, and a housing bill with overwhelming bipartisan support was held hostage to force passage of a voting-restriction measure. Sentences of thirty to one hundred years for protesters, handed down under a newly invoked terrorism framework, sat alongside a reflecting pool controlled by fencing and National Guard troops — different in scale, but part of a single week in which claims of threat, whether to national security or to public property, were repeatedly used to justify the concentration and exercise of power with diminishing institutional resistance outside the courts. “`