Nothing good comes from this

I don’t mean to pick on Matt — normally a good courts writer — specifically, but since I saw numerous microblogs to this effect it’s worth noting how wrong it is:

We’ve already been through this with the universal injunctions case, and it’s even more applicable in a case like this where the Court does not provide any justification at all, let alone attempt to articulate some kind of rule like it was a court of law or something. Let us be very clear that nothing in these shadow docket decisions is “good news” for a future Democratic president. The whole point of creating these massive policy changes with unreasoned orders is that they don’t create any explicit doctrine. You don’t even need to have your clerks work extra hours to come up with tortured explanations for why the rule you’ve just created doesn’t apply to Democratic presidents. You can just allow injunctions issued by Republican judges to remain in effect without explanation. Even if one of the Alieens Cannon or Matthews Kacsmaryk issues a nationwide injunction that doesn’t seem compatible with the nominal rule you just announced, you can still let it stand without explanation! What is ordinarily understood as “law” has nothing to do with anything that’s happening here. And it’s not good news for anybody but reactionary authoritarians.

Paul’s remark about “watching somebody in a Prisoner’s Dilemma continue to cooperate after the other party defects 1000 times in a row” when some elite liberal legal academics were slobbering over the least intellectually distinguished of the 6 Republicans who put Article I of the Constitution into the wood chipper today remains more applicable than ever.