SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
us constitution
No Kings, No Corporations: Rejecting Authoritarian and Corporate Rule
As we protest authoritarianism this Saturday—and legitimately condemn the many anti-democratic and unjust actions of Trump—let us also remember the tyranny of our corporate overlords who have been—perhaps more quietly but not less aggressively—eroding our democracy.
Jun 11, 2025
The “No Kings Day” mass rallies and marches this Saturday across the country will be, hopefully, a political and cultural affirmation of the democratic vision that we should be a self-governing people, a vision that has never been fully realized. The events must not only reject the reemergence and expansion of authoritarianism of Trump from his previous administration. They should also acknowledge the much longer tyranny and authoritarianism of corporate rule.
Speeches, signs, chants, and petitions will undoubtedly address the numerous authoritarian actions by the Trump administration since the election. These include pardons and immunities for loyalists, the use of federal agencies against political opponents, use of disinformation and threats against elected officials, mass deportations and family separation, executive orders that trump local and state governments, government loyalty purges, crackdown on the media and dissent, and militarized response to protests – such as the overreacting deployment of the Marines in response to the largely peaceful protests against ICE immigration raids in Los Angeles.
As we protest authoritarianism this Saturday—and legitimately condemn the many anti-democratic and unjust actions of Trump—let us also remember that tyranny has many symbols. One is a red hat. The other is a corporate logo.
The No Kings Day actions are just the latest and important public resistance to Trump’s tyrannical actions that have included other nationwide demonstrations and civil disobedience, legal challenges, whistleblowers and leaks, mutual aid, sanctuary networks, state and local government pushback, worker and union actions, and campus resistance.
Yet the reality is that Trump and his Project 2025 playbook represent one form of authoritarianism that, while distinct in some respects, intersects with another deeply entrenched form: corporate domination.
Unlike Trump’s style of blatant and unapologetic brute force, intimidation, and open defiance of the rule of law, corporate rule has been a slow, legalistic, never ending, and largely invisible seizure of power — not by individuals, but by artificial legal entities with little public accountability.
Corporations today define nearly every aspect of our lives:
- Our values: Consumerism and its emphasis on profit-first “logic” and primacy of property protection over human rights and the rights to a livable world.
- Our labor: Work hours, wages, and benefits are dictated by corporate interests.
- Our environment: Corporations control production, pollution, extraction, and destruction.
- Our food system: From seeds to supermarkets, agriculture is consolidated and chemically dependent.
- Our technology and data: AI, surveillance, and algorithms are driven by profit and privatization.
- Our politics: Elections, legislation, and regulation are shaped by lobbying and campaign contributions.
- Our culture and information: Entertainment, education, and news are filtered through corporate lenses.
How did this happen? The sword and shield of corporate rule is the U.S. Constitution. Despite corporate entities being originally created and defined by the government as a public tool to provide goods and services, the Supreme Court declared them to be private institutions, out of bounds to public definition and control. What had originally been the state providing mere “privileges” via the granting of charters or licences that could be withdrawn via the revoking of charters that violated the law became constitutional rights deemed beyond the reach of legislatures or individuals.
The Supremes have anointed corporations the constitutional rights of natural persons for more that a century, including:
- First Amendment rights — to spend unlimited money on elections (Citizens United v. FEC being the latest decision), to not to speak, to lie, and even to some extent religious rights
- Fourth Amendment rights — to block health, safety, and environmental inspections.
- Fifth Amendment takings rights — to challenge local and state regulations under the Takings Clause that affect profit.
- Fourteenth Amendment equal protection — to avoid differential treatment in the law, even when such laws protect local businesses and communities over chain stores and other businesses.
Corporate “personhood” is an absurdity, yet humanly, environmentally, and democratically lethal.
While there have been frequent mass actions over single corporate abuses, we don’t see mass protests in the streets about the totality of corporate rule. Why does corporate tyranny go unchallenged?
Corporate rule has been normalized. It is:
- Cultural: So embedded that we barely notice it — from Amazon to Apple to Exxon to BlackRock. Call it the “fish discover water last” syndrome in which it's so much a part of our daily lives that it’s hardly recognized..
- Gradual: It’s happened over a century, one Court decision at a time, which is challenging to understand given the legal complexity and, of course, rarely covered by the corporate press.
- Justified: We’re told corporations bring jobs, innovation, and prosperity — even as economic inequality soars and corporate entities are increasinbly able to shift capital where and when they want to other states or nations.
- Powerful: We’re told that the economic and political power of mega-corporations is inevitable and irreversible – so public focus should remain on elections, statutes, and regulations that merely manage corporate harms and impose minimal guardrails, keeping us perpetually on the defensive, opposing one corporate abuse or company at a time while censoring ourselves from demanding structural change.
- Feared: To criticize corporations is to risk being labeled “anti-American,” a “socialist,” a “Luddite” or worse.
Move to Amend exists to expose and abolish corporate constitutional rights and the doctrine of money as speech through the We the People Amendment (HJR54). This is not about regulating corporations better. It’s about breaking the illegitimate foundation of their power and declaring that we should have the power and right to define corporate actions.
As we protest authoritarianism this Saturday—and legitimately condemn the many anti-democratic and unjust actions of Trump—let us also remember that tyranny has many symbols. One is a red hat. The other is a corporate logo.
So let us all turn out on No Kings Day not only to oppose authoritarian rule, but also as an opportunity to oppose corporate rule, which will remain long after Trump is gone.Keep ReadingShow Less
The Right Is Risen: It's Time to Admit the US Constitution Has Failed
An 18th century white slaver’s rulebook has, unsurprisingly, failed to serve the interests of a modern, multi-racial democracy. We can do better.
Jun 01, 2025
People increasingly ask if we are in a Constitutional crisis, but we are past that. We have undergone a regime change, and are operating outside the bounds of what we have understood to be the U.S. Constitution. The President has asserted unilateral control not only of all institutions of the national government, but over institutions of civil society, too.
The Varieties of Democracy Institute, based at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, suggests that it might remove the U.S. from its list of nations designated as democracies. That seems right. In a democracy, after all, you do not fear speaking out against the government. But now, vulnerable individuals are not only afraid, some unknown number have been carted off to foreign labor camps as punishment for their political speech.
We knew some of what we’re facing was coming. Project 2025 was written by a broad coalition on the Far Right as a blueprint for the next Republican administration, as it has been since the Heritage Foundation published its first version for the incoming Reagan team. So far, according to one online tracker, of 313 discrete Project 2025 recommendations, 98 have been completed and another 66 are in progress.
But what’s happening is even more radical than what Project 2025 proposed, since what no one saw coming was Elon Musk, who has seized control of a broad range of executive agencies and their computers and payment systems. It’s a kind of techno-coup.
There are, in short, no formal institutions that consistently operate on behalf of the majority or that bind us together in common cause.
We also didn’t envision the Republican majority in Congress utterly abdicating its institutional role, or an inept Democratic Party acting mostly as if this was all business as usual. Then there’s the sheer number of elite institutions -- universities like Columbia, powerful law firms like Paul Weiss, or media organizations like ABC and CBS -- who have obeyed in advance.
As I write, there are 250 pending court cases challenging illegitimate Executive Orders (that many are nonetheless treating as law), illegal firings, funding cuts that violate Constitutional provisions and any number of statutes, extraordinary renditions (in which even legal residents and U.S. citizens have been seized by agents of the state and held without access to courts or lawyers), along with attacks on judges, opposition leaders, media, universities, law firms, nonprofits, unions, oversight and regulatory bodies, and student activists. Our courts were not built for this, and they are, even at their best, very slow (even if they are showing a bit more spine and a bit more speed than some of us anticipated).
We can be forgiven for being just a bit unnerved by the extravagant lawlessness of the second Trump Administration, even by its own historic standards. Its actions are the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes, and we should recognize that we are now living in one, even if it’s one still struggling to get its footing.
How did we get here?
We didn't exactly inhabit a paradise before Trump came on the scene. Along many dimensions of health and well-being, for many decades now people in the U.S. have fared worse than people in other rich democracies. We have had and continue to have the highest or near highest rates of poverty, child poverty, elderly poverty, income inequality, infant mortality, maternal mortality, gun violence, incarceration, substance use disorders, and death by preventable causes, while we have among the lowest rates of life expectancy, access to health care, intergenerational mobility, and, not coincidentally, of political participation.
Why have so many in the US fared so poorly compared to their peers in other countries, and why are we enduring this “democratic backsliding”?
Consider three possible explanations: Failures of the Constitution, failures of accountability, and failures of the media.
Let’s start by focusing on some specific (and long-standing) complaints about the Constitution itself.
Whatever the stubborn myths around it, the U.S. Constitution has been a disaster, corrupted from the start by its acceptance (and rewarding of) an exceptionally brutal form of chattel slavery. It’s always been a system intentionally designed to frustrate the ability of even a determined majority to exert its will. You don’t have to take my word for it. Read James Madison’s Federalist #10. Consider almost any issue that leads to our poor outcomes—access to health care, gun violence, income and wealth inequality—and large majorities in the U.S. have regularly supported reforms, often radical ones, that would improve well-being. It’s not the players that are the problem, it’s the game.
The separation of powers creates obstacles to effective governance, and our system has more veto points—places to stop action from being taken -- than any other comparable nation. In periods of divided government, when one of our polarized parties does not control all three branches, legislative action is almost impossible (although we have to account for the fact that even with the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, today’s Republican party in Trump’s first 100 days passed fewer Bills than any Congress in modern history). The public is rightly exasperated by what it sees as inaction and unresponsiveness.
Federalism exacerbates this dysfunction, making it even harder to enact and implement policies and difficult for people to know who to credit or blame. That’s more grounds for dissatisfaction and cynicism.
Our Senate is famously undemocratic. Take just the fact that California, with a population of some 39.4 million, has the same representation and votes—two Senators—as the 588 thousand people of Wyoming. Or that the filibuster allows a minority to prevent the majority from acting—40 percent (representing even fewer people than that) can obstruct everything. Minorities rule, not majorities. And because of simple geography, those governing minorities are disproportionately white and rural.
The electoral college reinscribes the imbalances of the Senate onto the Presidential election process, and creates a system, unlike any other, where the person who gets the most votes doesn’t necessarily win. That, of course, is how we got Trump the first time around, with this weird system that values land over people.
We have federal courts with much too much arbitrary power, regularly working against the majority will while made unaccountable by life tenure. They have privileged business interests over the public interest, granted money the same rights as votes, and more recently tried to strip away hard-fought victories for reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, principles of one-person-one vote and racial nondiscrimination, and the ability of federal agencies to ensure our access to clean air and water, or safe food and workplaces.
As if all that isn’t bad enough, we have what is literally the hardest constitution on the planet to amend. Because of that, we’ve only been able to change it a total of 17 times since the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791, and two of those times were the enactment and then repeal of Prohibition.
These anti-majoritarian features combine with elite lawlessness, undermining our faith that government cares about us or can function on our behalf, which helps create the space for authoritarians to emerge. This is the accountability explanation.
The first moment in the modern period that put us on this path (setting aside Gerald Ford’s ill-conceived pardon of Richard Nixon) was the 2000 presidential election, when the Supreme Court unnecessarily intervened in order to ensure that Republican George W. Bush ascended to the presidency over Democrat Al Gore—and Gore, instead of fighting, surrendered to a judicial coup.
This becomes a pattern—the ruthlessness of Republicans and the fecklessness of Democrats.
Then there’s the failure to prosecute the war criminals in the George W. Bush administration, who, aided and abetted by members of both parties and a complicit media, lied the nation into disastrous post-9/11 conflicts that killed close to one million people, and who tortured men it detained without trial in secret “black site” prisons throughout the world.
Or take the Obama administration’s unwillingness to prosecute the bankers who would have crashed the global economy in 2008 were it not for government intervention; as it was, they created the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression itself, one marked by an exceptionally slow recovery. But not content with his failure to hold accountable the institutions and individuals that were responsible, Obama rewarded them with leadership roles in his administration. That perversity helped bring about the rise of the Tea Party, upon which the MAGA movement was built.
Add in the widespread inability of almost all institutions to hold Trump himself to account for fomenting insurrection and attempting to subvert elections.
Our poorly designed system (which assumed it could prevent the formation of political parties and therefore didn't account for them in its design) is now being exploited by a revanchist Republican party demonstrating itself to have allegiance only to its members own personal ambitions and their opposition to multi-racial democracy. One way to make sense of the past 60 or so years is that after we started, however gingerly, finally affording meaningful rights to poor people, to women, to people of color, to gays and lesbians—rich, straight, white men lost their damn minds, and have been fighting to reverse those modest gains ever since.
This moment has also come to pass thanks to Fox News and its compatriots, a propaganda system that aids and abets these anti-democratic forces, along with a legacy media filled with too many people too hungry for clicks, access, and advancement and too few committed to ensuring that their work helps people make knowledgeable judgments about the political events of the day. We have underestimated the role that our fractured and polluted information environment has played in our decline into authoritarianism (and for what it’s worth, Jeanine Pirro’s appointment in May of 2025 marked the 23rd Fox News employee to join the Trump regime).
There are, in short, no formal institutions that consistently operate on behalf of the majority or that bind us together in common cause.
Thinking about this longer history helps us see that Trump is a symptom of a larger disease, rather than a cause. He’s the culmination of decades-long trends, and to assume that once he leaves the scene things will necessarily get better is to misunderstand the nature of the problem.
Thinking about this longer history helps us see that Trump is a symptom of a larger disease, rather than a cause.
There is another argument to be made for why, for most of our history, we have not functioned as a democracy, and it’s my final point about failures of accountability. Prior to the end of the Civil War, Black Americans, especially those in the South, lived under an explicitly authoritarian regime which maintained its power through violence, threats of violence, and the formal disenfranchisement of disfavored populations. With the exception of the brief period of Radical Reconstruction from 1865-1877, in which the Northern army enforced the outcome of the Civil War at the point of a gun, the United States still functioned as a brutal apartheid regime at least until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I was born in 1965. Anything we might even charitably characterize as "U.S. democracy" is only as old as I am.
Now the whole country is getting a taste of what it was like for many of our fellow Americans throughout most of our history. But here we are. Perhaps the South won the Civil War after all.
What should we build toward, and how?
In normal times, we could see what progressive policy reform might look like with items that are already on the agenda to one degree or another: Expand the Child Tax Credit; forgive certain categories of student loan debt; enact the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act; join the National Electoral Vote Compact; add a Public Option to the Affordable Care Act and work toward Medicare (or Medicaid) for All; pass the Women’s Health Protection Act; fully fund and expand Social Security; raises taxes on corporations and the rich; increase the minimum wage; forbid members of Congress from trading stocks; and fund robust public and local media.
But making a list does not address the political obstacles to such policy reforms or how one might overcome them. We need a new politics if we want to have any realistic hope of making new policy.
Besides, even if we could enact laws enshrining any of these goals as policy, so what? The MAGA regime has routinely ignored existing laws and norms and has, for all intents and purposes, destroyed the previous order. There is no policy system for us to work within. So we might as well seize the opportunity and build the nation we want, not the one the Constitution bequeathed us.
We have already established our right to do this. As Thomas Jefferson -- a slaver himself, we should note -- wrote in our first founding document:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [we would say “people” today] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.
If we accept that the Constitutional order has already been overthrown and that we inhabit a kind of lawless state ruled by brute power and the ghostly remnants of a withered system, and that there is a right to revolution, as Jefferson articulated it, then we can use this moment to imagine the world anew, unconstrained, if we wish, by the old rules.
We need a new politics if we want to have any realistic hope of making new policy.
There is precedent in our own history for this—the Constitution itself was created by ignoring the legal process for change set forth in its predecessor, the Articles of Confederation, because they were rightly deemed unsuitable to the needs of the new nation.
More to the point, why should we be bound by a document written 238 years ago by 55 white, propertied, disproportionately slaveholding, men (and signed by only 39 of them)? What right should those dead founders have to dictate to us how we organize power or govern ourselves? Why must we be bound by their understanding of who should have full rights, or what those rights should be?
Thomas Paine, among the more fulsomely democratic of that generation of leaders, wrote on this principle:
Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.
We are being governed from beyond the grave.
So, what lessons have we learned that should inform the construction of a new government, one that is actually of, by, and for the people? What's our ambitious, bold, 50-year plan? What’s the progressive, democratic, humanistic version of Project 2025?
What right should those dead founders have to dictate to us how we organize power or govern ourselves? Why must we be bound by their understanding of who should have full rights, or what those rights should be?
The first step must be to drive MAGA out of politics just as Germany drove the Nazis out after World War II, just as we should have tried the Confederates for treason and driven them permanently out of politics after our Civil War. Instead, President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis, after only two years in prison, was pardoned and later died peacefully in bed at age 81. That is: We must contemplate the destruction of the Republican Party as it is currently constituted—we need to learn from our failure to cast out the traitors after the Civil War (and our failure to hold Trump accountable for his first insurrection).
The larger project is, as I have tried to do here, to demystify and ultimately delegitimize the U.S. Constitution. An 18th century white slaver’s rulebook has, unsurprisingly, failed to serve the interests of a modern, multi-racial democracy. It’s time for it to go, and next year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence provides an excellent opportunity to reevaluate our history given the dire present it has led us to.
As part of that effort, we should reject the notion that courts are the final arbiter of the meaning of the Constitution or of the law. A constitution is an expression of our collective will, and we too have a right to say what it means. Federal courts should have limited jurisdiction, and members should have term limits. There are lots of good proposals for reform, but it is absurd to be governed by nine unelected wizards in black robes.
An 18th century white slaver’s rulebook has, unsurprisingly, failed to serve the interests of a modern, multi-racial democracy.
As we abandon the outdated structures of the Constitution, we must end our anomalous two-party regime. In no other system would Congresswoman Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders be in the same political party as Chuck Shumer and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. One way is to build something like a Parliamentary system, with multi-member districts and proportional representation, enabling there to be more parties for voters to choose from. Political scientist Lee Drutman has been thinking this through for years now. As part of that, we should expand the size of the House, perhaps by as much as twice or more its current size.
At the same time, abolish the Senate entirely—it’s irredeemable.
States have too much power in interpreting and implementing national legislation, and there is too much variation in your life chances or your access to, say, reproductive health care or your ability to vote, depending on nothing more than where you were born or where you happen to live. Mississippi, with a poverty rate three times that of New Hampshire, is in many respects an entirely separate country. There are surely other models for regional power sharing—Canadian Provinces? Swiss Cantons?—that would better equalize opportunity across the nation.
Short of that, if we are going to keep an upper chamber that serves as yet one more obstacle to a functioning government and retain something like states, then Washington, D.C. should have the same rights as other political entities, and all other occupied U.S. territories (Puerto Rico first among them) must have equal rights or be free from being under our colonial thumb. California is ungovernable in its current size and could be as many as three states; maybe New York City should be a state of its own; and why on earth do we need two Dakotas?
If we do adopt something like a parliamentary system, in which the majority party or majority coalition of the legislature then forms a government that administers the Executive Branch, we can abolish the electoral college and allow the party leader to become prime minister or president. No longer would divided government or vetoes be possible. That’s an obvious way to create some accountability to voters: Once elected, a party should actually be able to govern.
As with other systems, there should be a mechanism for No Confidence votes to quickly remove from power a failed or corrupt governing coalition, and we need to normalize that kind of turnover. One of the reasons that Trump retained office after two impeachment proceedings is that the threshold for conviction and removal is too high (and dependent upon that malapportioned Senate), and we have come to think of impeachment as an extraordinary, radical proposition rather than merely another routine means of addressing incompetence or malfeasance, which is how it was intended to function.
Since any new system that is genuinely democratic must be constructed from the ground up, it is useful, I think, for each of us to begin to open our imaginations to the world we want to see...
Elections should be funded with public money and equitable public media access. Perhaps we should consider mandatory voting, as in Australia, and look for new spaces for public input and involvement—democracy is a practice as much as anything, and we need to find ways to stitch together the deliberative decision-making that brings together communities in common cause and makes a habit of civic engagement. What’s the larger-scale equivalent of Vermont Town Meeting Day, for example?
We should simultaneously be dismantling our repressive systems of surveillance, policing, and prisons, including what Dorothy Roberts calls the family policing system, almost all of which have their roots in schemes to subjugate enslaved people, and replace them with local institutions that foster community and create conditions for actual safety and security. It is worth noting in this regard that the immigration abuses of the current administration would not be possible were it not for the racialized surveillance, policing, and hyper-incarceration apparatuses built over decades under Democratic and Republican administrations alike.
Finally, we might formally commit to a new Bill of Universal Human Rights: to food, housing, healthcare, education, and economic security, with a guaranteed minimum income or Universal Basic Income.
******
My list of potential reforms is meant merely to jump start our thinking and begin to move the Overton Window of acceptable discussion; I am under no delusion that such radical, revolutionary change is imminent (or that now would necessarily be a wise time to create new governing structures, given who holds power).
But since any new system that is genuinely democratic must be constructed from the ground up, it is useful, I think, for each of us to begin to open our imaginations to the world we want to see and to think about how to build the connections, the consensus, and the institutions that can help to get us there. If we acknowledge that, thanks to Trump, the old order is truly gone, then we have a tabula rasa, a clean slate. What should we inscribe upon it?
We have urgent work to do in the short term before we can get to this project of what we might think of as a Third Reconstruction, of course. But maybe, ironically enough, this perilous time is the moment to start thinking seriously about how we might make a better world.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Youth Sue Over Trump Executive Orders That 'Escalate' Climate Crisis
"He's waging war on us with fossil fuels as his weapon, and we're fighting back with the Constitution," said one of the 22 plaintiffs.
May 29, 2025
Nearly two dozen American children and young adults sued U.S. President Donald Trump, leaders in his administration, and various agencies in federal court on Thursday over a trio of executive orders they argue "escalate" the climate emergency that imperils their futures.
Lighthiser v. Trump, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana, challenges executive orders (EOs) 14156, 14154, and 14261—which, respectively, declared a "national energy emergency," directed agencies to "unleash" American energy by accelerating fossil fuel development, and called for boosting the country's coal industry.
"Trump's fossil fuel orders are a death sentence for my generation," said named plaintiff Eva Lighthiser in a statement. "I'm not suing because I want to—I'm suing because I have to. My health, my future, and my right to speak the truth are all on the line. He's waging war on us with fossil fuels as his weapon, and we're fighting back with the Constitution."
Specifically, the complaint argues that "the EOs violate the Fifth Amendment substantive due process clause on their face by depriving plaintiffs of their fundamental rights to life and liberty." The filing also states that the orders are ultra vires—meaning they go beyond Trump's presidential authority "in assuming powers reserved to and exercised by Congress through Article I" of the U.S. Constitution.
"From day one of the current administration, President Trump has issued directives to increase fossil fuel use and production, and block an energy transition to wind, solar, battery storage, energy efficiency, and electric vehicles," the complaint reads. "President Trump's EOs falsely claim an energy emergency, while the true emergency is that fossil fuel pollution is destroying the foundation of plaintiffs' lives."
"These unconstitutional directives have the immediate effect of (a) slowing the buildout of U.S. energy infrastructure that eliminates planet-heating fossil fuel greenhouse gas pollution... and (b) increasing the use of fossil fuels that pollute the air, water, lands, and climate on which plaintiffs' lives depend," the filing stresses.
🚨 Youth from Montana and four other states are suing the Trump administration for violating their constitutional rights with executive orders that fast-track fossil fuel projects, worsen the climate crisis, and suppress climate science. PR: bit.ly/youthsuetrump-pr #YouthvGov
[image or embed]
— Our Children’s Trust (@youthvgov.bsky.social) May 29, 2025 at 10:11 AM
The youth are asking the district court to declare Trump's EOs and related executive actions "unlawful, unconstitutional, ultra vires, and invalid," and to issue a permanent injunction blocking the long list of defendants from implementing or enforcing them.
Lighthiser is a 19-year-old from Livingston, Montana. She and 24-year-old Rikki Held are among 10 of 22 plaintiffs in this case who were also part of Held v. State of Montana, in which a judge in 2023 agreed with young residents who argued that Montana violated their state constitutional rights by promoting fossil fuel extraction. The Montana Supreme Court upheld that decision last December.
Both groups of young plaintiffs are represented by Our Children's Trust, known for several youth climate lawsuits, including Juliana v. United States, the landmark constitutional case that the U.S. Supreme Court ended in March.
Lead attorney Julia Olson of Our Children's Trust said Thursday that "these executive orders are an overt abuse of power. The president is knowingly putting young people's lives in danger to serve fossil fuel interests, while silencing scientists and defying laws passed by Congress."
"These young plaintiffs refuse to be collateral damage in a fossil fuel war on their future," Olson continued. "They are demanding accountability where it still matters—in a court of law. The executive branch is not above the Constitution, and these young people are here to prove it."
For Lighthiser v. Trump, Our Children's Trust has partnered with Gregory Law Group, McGarvey Law, and Public Justice.
"The government's actions irreparably harm our nation's most important asset: our children," said Dan Snyder, director of the Environmental Enforcement Project for Public Justice. "The science is irrefutable that humans and their pollution are causing climate change, and that a changing climate will result in a growing list of injuries that are uniquely felt by America's youngest population."
"Our children enjoy the same constitutional rights to life and liberty as adults, yet have been tasked with shouldering the impact of a destabilized climate system without ever having a say in the matter," he added. "President Trump's executive orders are unlawful and intolerable, and these youth plaintiffs shall put an end to it."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular