It Turns Out, Playing Defense Matters

In the courts as well as in the National Football League

Author

Matt Davis
February 10, 2025

Morning! I really appreciate you reading this newsletter so that I can read the newspaper, so that you don’t have to. If you share the link with a friend, they can subscribe here. I’m at your service! Let’s do this…

Today’s newspaper is buried under a copy of the New York Post (which is obviously not a newspaper, lol), although I’ll admit I read it first because I almost couldn’t face the actual newspaper myself, either, this morning. Our kid is also at home sick and got my wife out of bed at 4 a.m., then he stole the turkey bacon from my everything bagel with egg whites and turkey bacon. Thanks a lot, kid. We are now watching videos of Pete the Cat talking about his buttons and shoes, as I write this. I think we have just watched the “I love my white shoes” video for the 50th time, in fact.

The Philadelphia Eagles made a mockery of the Kansas City Chiefs in last night’s Super Bowl. Their defense crowded the Chiefs’ quarterback and made him look “more like a goat than a GOAT,” in the words of the New York Post. It was such a drubbing that the commentators didn’t even sound like they could take themselves seriously by the third quarter. “The Eagles might be trailing by a thousand points but all it takes is a couple of stops and a score and they could be RIGHT BACK IN THIS.”

I was also struck by President Trump’s authoritarian appearance at the game — he saluted the National Anthem, of course — and by the revenge’y feel of the whole affair, particularly when the crowd booed Taylor Swift’s appearance on the Jumbotron. You’ll remember she endorsed Trump’s rival, Kamala Harris, last year. God forbid a person should speak their mind and go against a would-be authoritarian. Then there was Kendrick Lamar dissing rival rapper Drake and Serena Williams — whom Time Magazine tells me Drake was not very nice to, in the past — crip-walking at half-time. She looked really cool, doing it, too:

But, yes. It seems revenge is a public theme in American life now. The best commercial also had a revenge-ish vibe, assuming living well is the best one. “They say you can’t win,” it said, after rounding up all the sexist things said to women in sports. “So win.”

If only it was as easy for women to win in politics as it is for them to win in commercials to sell sneakers for a company whose stock price is down 35% over the last year.

Anwyay. Today’s lead story on page one of the New York Times is written by a journalist I’ve actually had dinner with, Matthathias Schwartz. You can read the story here. The headline is that the “Front Line to Resist Trump Coalesces in Federal Court.”

Here’s the lede:

“More than 40 lawsuits filed in recent days by state attorneys general, unions and nonprofits seek to erect a bulwark in the federal courts against President Trump’s blitzkrieg of executive actions that have upended much of the federal government and challenged the Constitution’s system of checks and balances.”

And it turns out, lawsuits have indeed tied Trump’s hands over recent days on a number of fronts:

“Judicial orders in nine federal court cases will, for a time, partially bind the administration’s hands on its goals. Those include ending automatic citizenship for babies born to undocumented immigrants on U.S. soil; transferring transgender female inmates to male-only prisons; potentially exposing the identities of F.B.I. personnel who investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol; coaxing federal workers to accept “deferred resignation” under a tight deadline; and freezing as much as $3 trillion in domestic spending.”

The story is well reported. I’m not sure one can ever over-report a story but I do have a vision of the lead reporter banging a table and screaming at his less senior colleagues to go and “get me everything you can from the states on legal challenges to the Trump administration.”

In addition to Mattathias’s glowing byline above the fold (which I’m sure he will bask in, based on our dinner encounter — hi, Mattathias! 👋🏻), I noted on page A10 that “Jenna Russell, Laurel Rosenhall, Charlie Savage, Chris Cameron, Jacey Fortin and Hurubie Meko contributed reporting. Seamus Hughes contributed research.”

Those folks are the real heroes of this story, I’d suggest, and not just the attorneys general of various states, grandstanding to bolster their own careers by jostling to sue the administration:

“Last night I was eating dinner with my family with an earpiece in my ear listening to a conference call and trying to be a dad at the same time,” Attorney General Rob Bonta of California said in an interview on Friday. “It’s hard work, but we’re not asking anyone to feel sorry for us. This is what we signed up to do.”

It is literally your job, Rob! Just as it was the jobs of all those poor reporters to set up interviews with you so that you could say inane stuff like this and be quoted on it. Seriously, that was the best you had to say? Get some media training! Say something pithier!

The piece takes a leap half way through, veering into the theory behind all this.

It quotes a Yale Law Professor (for international readers, being a professor at Yale Law School is as close as the American imagination gets to England’s theory of the divine right of kings), saying the “deliberate” goal of the Trump administration could be to overwhelm opposition and “eventually win some precedent-shattering decisions from the conservative Supreme Court.”

My question is whether the administration could ever be said to be entirely deliberate about anything. Legally, are they perhaps more engaged in throwing as many fascist positions against the wall as they can, to see what sticks?

The story also covers the Trump administration’s efforts to intimidate federal judges. Vice President Mike Pence, author of Hillbilly Elegy, which is number one on the New York Times nonfiction best seller list this week, tweeted yesterday that…

That’s potentially dangerous, according to another legal scholar quoted in the story:

“Mr. Vance’s post “opens the door to a potentially dangerous path,” said Quinta Jurecic, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a senior editor at Lawfare. “What Vance’s wording suggests here, without directly saying it, is that the executive could potentially respond to a court order by saying to the court, ‘You’re unconstitutionally intruding on my authority and I’m not going to do what you say.’”

"At that point,” Ms. Jurecic said, “The Constitution falls apart.” “

Then the story quotes the White House as saying that any efforts made to challenge actions taken by the Trump administration are an attempt to “undermine the will of the American people.”

It talks about Elon Musk then rounds out with the Yale Law Professor again, saying that “unchecked power is the antithesis of the constitution.”

It needed an editor. I think they could have lost, say, 350 words. But what I took from the story is that the court system is likely to prevent the Trump administration from doing a lot of its worst bidding over the coming months. In many ways the story makes a case that you can’t take anything the Trump administration says or does too seriously. But that’s only because like the Philadelphia Eagles, somebody is finally ready to play defense.