Morning Report

September 18, 2025 — Morning Report

Sep 18, 2025

918 AM TT·918 AM YT

Yesterday was the filing deadline for expedited discovery motions in the National Guard case. There was also a flurry of amicus briefs — red state coalitions, blue state coalitions, the NAACP, law enforcement — everybody with an opinion on how DC residents should live. The hearing on the motions was today.

DC v. Trump challenges the administration's use of National Guard troops in the District of Columbia and broader federal control over DC governance. Filing deadline for discovery motions was September 17; hearing was September 18. Amicus briefs poured in from across the political spectrum. Bryan flags the structural irony: many of these challenges are over presidential power to override congressional legislation, but Congress itself is moving to change the rules governing DC — minimizing the District's own lawmaking power. Bryan: "I would like to remind you that democracy and self-government is intended as one of the underlying tenets of our constitutional republic — eroding these ideals tends to lead to more erosion."

Separation of powers

Constitutional question: The District of Columbia's unusual constitutional status — it has no senators, no voting representatives, and Congress holds plenary authority over it — means the usual federalism protections don't apply. Cases about federal imposition on DC governance raise the question of whether residents of the capital city have constitutionally cognizable interests in self-government that federal courts can protect, even when Congress hasn't explicitly granted them.

AFL-CIO v. S.S.A. · 25-cv-00596

The AFL-CIO just withdrew their entire discovery request in the DOGE/Social Security case. Not because it's going away — because it turns out the case is way worse than anyone thought, and they need a new list.

This is the DOGE access to SSA sensitive data case. About a month before the episode, AFL-CIO filed their discovery requests (lists of evidence they want from the government). While procedural fighting over the list was still pending, two things happened: (1) On August 26, Chuck Borges — the Chief Data Officer at SSA — made a whistleblower disclosure to Congress about serious data lapses orchestrated by DOGE officials, including copying data to unsecured cloud storage, unmonitored access by DOGE affiliates outside the systems access management process, and apparent violation of the court's existing TRO. (2) On September 8, ProPublica published an article confirming this and more. The AFL-CIO concluded that their original discovery requests were too narrow for what was now known to have happened. Rather than keep fighting over a list designed for the old understanding of the case, they withdrew it entirely so they can write better ones once the new evidence is digested. Bryan: "The DOGE mystery machine just gets smokier every day."

Administrative lawseparation of powersprivacy

Constitutional question: Executive branch access to personal data held by federal agencies — whether a presidential advisory body (DOGE) can access and relocate SSA data outside normal security protocols, and whether courts can order discovery into that access over executive branch objections. The TRO-violation allegation raises the separate question of whether executive officials can defy court orders with impunity when their activities are politically sensitive.

LULAC v. E.O.P. · 25-cv-00946

Trump issued an executive order requiring all states to use a single federal system to verify voter citizenship — but under the Constitution, states (not the federal government) decide who qualifies to vote. LULAC moved for partial summary judgment to get at least that part ruled unconstitutional now.

Executive Order 14248 imposes federal requirements on how states must confirm, record, and report voter citizenship status. The constitutional baseline: both the Elections Clause and the longstanding interpretation of the voter qualifications clause give states the power to determine who votes — including the power to verify that qualifications are met. Bryan, unusually, quotes Thomas (dissenting but on a point both sides agreed with): "The voter qualifications clause gives states the authority not only to set the qualifications but also the power to verify whether those qualifications are satisfied." Bryan did his own state-by-state research (a spreadsheet of every state's voter laws) and found every state already requires some form of citizenship verification — it's just embedded at different points in the registration process (motor voter, DMV documentation, in-person clerk). His argument: the problem the EO claims to solve doesn't actually exist — states already do this, just in ways that aren't visible to voters who went through it. LULAC's motion for partial summary judgment aims to settle the constitutional question now rather than wait for full trial.

Voter qualifications clause (Art. I14th Amendment)separation of powers between federal and state authority over elections

Constitutional question: The federalism-elections intersection: the Constitution explicitly reserves voter qualification decisions to the states, but the Elections Clause also gives Congress (not the president) some authority over the manner of federal elections. An executive order that attempts to standardize what states must do to validate voter citizenship sits in this gap — arguably outside both the president's Article II power and the scope of delegated authority under any statute, making it a pure separation-of-powers question.

N.Y. v. McMahon · 25-cv-10601

The Supreme Court stayed the injunction that would have blocked the Department of Education firings. While everyone waited a year for the appeal, the employees got fired. Now the appeal is about a question nobody needs answered anymore — so the plaintiffs asked the court to drop the stay, withdraw the injunction, and start the actual case.

NY v. McMahon was filed to stop the Trump administration's RIF of ~1,000 Department of Education employees. The district court issued a preliminary injunction; SCOTUS stayed that injunction pending appeal. While the case was frozen at the appellate level, the RIF was executed and the employees were let go. The appeal — which was always going to take about a year given court backlogs — is now an appeal of an injunction to keep employees from being fired, when those employees are already fired. The relief is moot. Rather than wait a year for a decision that changes nothing, plaintiffs asked the D.C. Circuit to voluntarily lift the stay so the district court could withdraw the now-irrelevant injunction and start the underlying merits case. The circuit court complied. Bryan's broader observation: this is the second case in the same week where the damage happened faster than any court could prevent it, making the equitable remedy irrelevant by the time it could take effect. He flags a SCOTUS pattern: the Court has become "real funny about the overuse of equitable remedies lately" (they're supposed to be rare) — but equitable remedies are also supposed to prevent irreparable harm. When SCOTUS stays injunctions and the harm happens in the interim, the court is enforcing one rule while ignoring the other. Justice Sotomayor has raised this tension repeatedly.

Preliminary injunction standardirreparable harmmootness

Constitutional question: The structural tension in SCOTUS's equitable-remedy jurisprudence: the Court applies a strict "rarity" principle to broad injunctions (limiting their use, raising the bar for stays, etc.) while simultaneously allowing executive actions to proceed during appeals — producing a pattern where by the time courts reach the merits, the harm is already done and irreversible. Bryan flags this as a trend worth watching as SCOTUS opens its fall term.

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