Environment
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March 20, 2026
And other essential news of the week—including new legislation on prediction markets and a threat to the critically endangered Rice’s whale.
U.S. President Donald Trump.
(Win McNamee / Getty Images)
Late Sunday night, Donald Trump took to social media to go on an epic rant against the Supreme Court. Apparently, he’s still angry over the tariff decision. “The decision that mattered most to me was TARIFFS! The Court knew where I stood, how badly I wanted this Victory for our Country, and instead decided to, potentially, give away Trillions of Dollars to Countries and Companies who have been taking advantage of the United States for decades.”
After taking a detour to praise the dissenting justices, and once again acting like their dissent gave him the authority to do what the majority said he could not do, he got to his point (to the extent Trump ever has a point beyond “I’m a big strong man but everybody is mean to me”). He wrote:
The Democrats on the Court always “stick together,” no matter how strong a case is put before them — There is rarely even a minor “waver.” But Republicans do not do this. They openly disrespect the Presidents who nominate them to the highest position in the Land, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and go out of their way, with bad and wrongful rulings and intentions, to prove how “honest,” “independent,” and “legitimate” they are.
This narrative, that Democratic justices vote as a block but Republican justices don’t, is one that makes Republicans very happy. Trump doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get that he’s accidentally praising the Republican justices, because in his mind loyalty to the king is all that matters and an independent judiciary frustrates that project. But for other Republicans, including the ones running mainstream media these days, this narrative is their catnip. They want you to think that Republicans are independent arbiters, while Democrats are just Democrats.
Chief Justice John Roberts, speaking on Tuesday, didn’t directly mention Trump’s comments, but he certainly responded to them. Roberts warned that personal attacks on judges are dangerous, but then reaffirmed Trump’s claim, in a way, by saying that judges are not bound by any president’s agenda and do not “carry forward the views of the people that appointed us.”
The thing is, both Trump and Roberts are wrong. I’ve explained this before, but the key thing to understand is that since Republicans hold a supermajority on the Supreme Court, the only thing the court is ever fighting about is the Republican interpretation of the law. The only thing ever in play is how best to achieve the Republican political agenda. Democrats on the court do not even have the votes to get a case heard by the Supreme Court without Republican support. It takes four votes for the Supreme Court to “grant certiorari” and agree to hear a case. That means that literally every case argued in front of the court since Ruth Bader Ginsburg died has gotten there because Republicans wanted it there. Every question presented has been a question the Republicans wanted to answer, and every argument has been made with the intention of getting at least a couple of Republicans to go along.
Of course, in that kind of unbalanced situation, it’s likely that the Democrats on the court will end up on the same side in most cases. There is a huge difference between the legal postures of, say, Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—but when the question is always “Is Donald Trump a kaiju empowered by star gods sent to stomp the administrative state and murder fishermen?,” nobody is going to get to observe those differences.
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Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, every Trump-related case is going to revolve around the hair’s breadth of difference between Roberts’s theory of executive power for (Republican) presidents and Samuel Alito’s theory of executive power for (Republican) presidents.
Essentially, you have Republicans arguing among themselves over whether they should use a Bushmaster or a Remington to go hunting, while Democrats are saying, “OMG, don’t shoot Bambi’s mom!”
If the Supreme Court ever gets back to applying the law instead of shoving the Republican agenda down our throats, you’ll see a lot more legal disagreements among the Democrats.
The Bad and the Ugly
- Attorneys general from 16 states filed a lawsuit against the Department of Housing and Urban Development. They claim that the agency’s new anti-DEI guidance violates the Fair Housing Act. The Fair Housing Act is part of the trifecta of successes achieved by the Civil Rights movement under President Lyndon B. Johnson. Along with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, it is one of the laws that finally made good the promise of the Reconstruction Amendments. And as with those other two laws, the racists running the country hate it and are doing everything they can to get rid of it.
- New York’s Mass Transit Authority sued the federal government over the $60 million the Trump administration is withholding from it. That money, which has already been approved, is needed to complete the extension of the Second Avenue subway into East Harlem. Hmm… I wonder why the Trump administration doesn’t want to provide better subway service to Black and Latino people living in East Harlem? Actually, strike that, I do not wonder.
- A federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to cut Colorado’s SNAP funding. Trump was trying to use the cuts to bully Colorado into granting a pardon to election denier and fraudster Tina Peters.
- A federal judge is likely to block Trump’s White House ballroom. Unfortunately, this is a great example of a case where the damage will have already been done by the dictator long before the law can catch up.
- The Ninth Circuit threw out a case alleging that the state of Arizona violated the National Voter Registration Act. The case was brought by a pair of Republicans who argued that the state didn’t purge enough ineligible voters from the rolls in 2024, diluting the Republican vote. Meanwhile, next week will be a big week for voting rights: The Supreme Court is set to hear a case on whether ballots should be thrown away if they’re not received by Election Day, and the Senate will continue to debate Trump’s favorite voter-suppression act.
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- Here’s a piece in The Nation from Amber Husain that is trying to explain which foods and diets are MAGA-coded now. I’m fundamentally suspicious of all people, right or left, who have wild dietary requirements that aren’t tied to hard allergies. Eat what you want, of course, but if we go out to dinner and you start talking to me about how your order has been ordained by RFK Jr. or some tech bro who is trying to live to 175, I’m going to judge you. Luckily for you, I’ll be dead soon.
- This is a really beautiful story from Dave Zirin in The Nation about New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York Knick Mo Diawara breaking their Ramadan fast together. Yes, yes, I know I just wrote a very judgy paragraph about people and their food choices, but I’d like to think there is a huge difference between respecting and appreciating the breadth and beauty of different cultures as expressed through food—and being nice to vegans.
- On Balls and Strikes, my brother-from-a-different-mother Jay Willis goes much deeper into the myopic narcissism of Trump’s Supreme Court complaints.
Worst Argument of the Week
Sarah Palin made two lasting contributions to the Republican lexicon: “I can see Russia from my house” and “Drill baby drill.” The latter has somehow become the official policy of both the GOP and Donald Trump (though he can’t always remember the three-word catchphrase and so instead sometimes says “dig, we must.”)
Trump’s crude desires have led him to kidnap the President of Venezuela and start a war in Iran, so it might be easy to overlook the most unsurprising victim of this country’s rapacious addiction to oil: the environment.
Trump’s attempts to open up drilling in every ecologically vulnerable environment on Earth has led to an unusual event. On March 31, his Department of the Interior will hold a special meeting to consider granting an “exception” to the Endangered Species Act to allow for more efficient drilling in protected areas of the Gulf of Mexico. The last time such a meeting took place was in 1991, during the days of George H.W. Bush.
To be clear, granting an exception to the Endangered Species Act means that we are potentially going to condemn entire species to extinction because they happen to live near something we want. In this case, the species at most immediate risk is the Rice’s whale. This is the rarest whale (that we haven’t yet killed off). The population was devastated by the Deepwater Horizon oil drill disaster in 2010, and there are thought to be only 51 individuals left. They all live in the Gulf, where Trump wants to drill.
What’s amazing here is that the main reason the administration is seeking an exception to the Endangered Species Act isn’t directly about drilling. It’s about how fast the boats can drive while speeding toward the oil. We are literally talking about the extinction of an entire species so the oil industry can move a little bit faster.
The Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit trying to prevent what they’ve called the “extinction committee” from meeting. The center’s executive director, Kierán Suckling, issued a statement condemning the committee as “immoral, illegal and unnecessary” and blasting the entire effort: “There’s no emergency, no legal basis to convene the committee, and no legal way to approve the extinction of Rice’s whales. This sham is nothing more than [Secretary of the Interior] Burgum posturing for Trump and saving the fossil fuel industry a few dollars by allowing its boats to drive faster and more recklessly.”
I don’t know if there’s anything the Center for Biological Diversity, or anybody else, can do to stop this. When evil people run the government, evil things happen. But killing an entire species of whale to allow oil tankers to drive faster is truly one of the worst and most despicable arguments I’ve heard this year.
What I Wrote
Nothing digital from me this week. All print. But, speaking of print, a piece I wrote about the problem of the Supreme Court treating Trump as a “normal” president is now available on Al Gore’s Internet.
In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos
Democrats unveiled legislation aimed at preventing gambling sites that have branded themselves as “prediction markets” from taking wagers on government actions. They say it’s necessary to prevent insider trading.
This legislation makes sense to me. If websites like Polymarket and Kalshi can take bets on what the government is going to do next, then it’s very easy for powerful people within or adjacent to that government to make thousands of dollars betting on actions they know are coming. I mean, what’s to stop Pete Hegseth from betting on whether the US will start a war with Iran? Or to stop Stephen Miller from betting on how long Trump’s State of the Union will be?
I would, of course, go farther than the Democrats. It’s all well and good to prevent these websites from taking certain bets, but even if the legislation passes, those sites will do everything they can to get around the law and allow people to bet on the outcomes of government actions, if not the likelihood of those actions. Plus, there will be international sites that are not subject to US law that will pick up the slack.
So I would double down on this bill and prevent anybody working for the government, or anybody whose immediate family works for the government, from placing bets on these markets.
And while we’re at it, I would also prevent elected officials and their immediate staff from trading stocks because, while we pretend that’s very different from “gambling,” it’s not. And government officials should not be allowed to do it.
I know this is going to sound wild, but my position is that people who have been given the public trust should not be allowed to gamble. Gambling has always been the “gateway drug” to all sorts of corruption, and it would be better for the entire polity if public officials were not allowed to do it.
No gambling by the government. Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.
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