The American judiciary still rules. Opinions are issued. Orders are entered. Dissents are filed with their familiar blend of rigor and lament. To casual observers, this appears to be continuity—business as usual in a system that prides itself on procedure. Yet power does not reside in parchment. It resides in whether rulings bind the conduct of those who would prefer not to be bound.

A court that speaks without being obeyed does not lack authority on paper; it lacks authority in practice. And a president—or an administration—that treats compliance as optional does not overthrow the judiciary. It renders it ornamental.

This judicial erosion is the quiet shift now underway. Not the smashing of the courts, not the formal suspension of review, but the normalization of conditional obedience: rulings that constrain when convenient, delay when inconvenient, and are narratively preempted when politically costly. The danger is not a wrong decision. The danger is the right decision that no longer compels behavior.

🎧 Listen to the narrated version of "When Courts Rule but Power Doesn't Listen" (10 minutes, 31 seconds).

The Illusion of Judicial Power

We have come to mistake decision-making for power. Because courts decide cases, they are powerful. But courts have no armies, no enforcement budgets, and no direct control over compliance. Their authority is relational. It depends on a political culture that treats judicial outcomes as binding even when they are unwelcome.

When that culture erodes, courts continue to function procedurally while failing substantively. Opinions become signals rather than constraints. Law becomes guidance rather than an obligation. The judiciary retains its rituals while losing its leverage.

This erosion is not dramatic. It proceeds by habituation. Each instance of delay is reframed as prudence; each instance of defiance recast as disagreement; each instance of selective compliance explained as necessity. Over time, what was once exceptional becomes ordinary. The judiciary still “exists,” but its teeth are blunted.

Selective Intervention and the Politics of Timing

Power is exercised not only through what courts decide, but through when and whether they choose to intervene. Emergency postures, shadow-docket decisions, and refusals to step in can shape outcomes as decisively as formal holdings. When the Supreme Court recently cleared the way for California’s new congressional map to proceed by declining to block it on an emergency basis, it demonstrated how judicial non-intervention can function as a consequential act in the electoral arena. Neutrality in posture is not neutrality in effect when timing determines political reality.

Public legitimacy turns on whether these patterns appear principled or predictable. The perception—fair or not—that a conservative majority increasingly aligns with Trump’s interests compounds the problem. A court perceived as legible to partisan aims does not merely risk reputational harm; it weakens the civic reflex of compliance. When outcomes feel pre-scripted, adverse rulings are easier to dismiss as politics by other means. The Court’s authority then becomes contingent on whether the losing side recognizes it as law rather than strategy.

The judiciary alone does not control this perception. Political leaders cultivate it. When adverse rulings are pre-framed as partisan attacks, compliance becomes a concession rather than a duty. The Court still rules; the culture of obedience frays.

The pattern is by now familiar: provocation, denial, deletion. When the president recently circulated a dehumanizing video and his press secretary dismissed public condemnation as “fake outrage,” the episode was later resolved not through accountability but through quiet removal. The offense disappeared; the framing remained. The lesson was not that boundaries exist, but that violations can be narratively neutralized and procedurally erased. This is how authority trains the public to forget what it has already decided not to defend.

Law That Speaks Late: Courts as Rear-Guard Action

Even when courts resist executive overreach, they often do so after harm has begun. The recent wave of habeas corpus litigation that has undercut aspects of the administration’s mass deportation campaign illustrates the point: federal courts can slow or disrupt overreach, but typically only after policies have been implemented, people detained, and families displaced. The law speaks—but too late.

This temporal lag changes the function of judicial review. Courts become friction rather than guardrails. They mitigate damage rather than prevent it. The state moves first; legality responds. That sequence teaches officials that speed will be rewarded and that any eventual correction can be absorbed as a cost of doing business.

For those subjected to policy, the lesson is harsher: Rights that exist only after injury are rights that fail when needed most. A system that arrives after the fact, albeit reliably, preserves its appearance of legality while surrendering its deterrent capacity.

The New Baseline: How Far Can the President Go?

The most telling shift in constitutional culture is not found in any single holding, but in the questions now treated as normal. Consider the arguments over whether the president may remove officials insulated by statutory protections, including a Federal Reserve governor. Reporting suggests that even skeptical justices framed the matter in terms of how far removal power extends, rather than whether the premise of unilateral presidential control should be constrained in the first place. The baseline has moved.

This is not merely doctrinal evolution. It is cultural recalibration. Once the conversation centers on the permissible scope of unilateral power rather than on the necessity of institutional insulation, the judiciary becomes an arbiter of the extent of permissible consolidation. That is a role different from the one envisioned by the Constitution's design. Courts are asked not to defend limits as such, but to negotiate their erosion.

Negotiation invites conditional compliance. If the boundaries are portrayed as malleable, defiance becomes a bargaining position. The judiciary still speaks, and power listens selectively.

The Power the Court Could Use—But Often Will Not

This is not a story of judicial incapacity. It is a story of discretion. The Court retains doctrinal tools that could meaningfully reinforce democratic integrity. Even within existing precedent, scholars have outlined paths by which the Court could curtail the dominance of Super PACs and dark money without overturning Citizens United outright. Capacity exists.

What is lacking is not the instrument, but the will to wield it in defense of democratic health. Doctrinal minimalism can be principled. It can also be convenient. When restraint consistently favors concentrations of powers that corrode democratic participation, restraint ceases to be neutral. It becomes a choice with consequences.

The public draws lessons from these choices. If courts repeatedly decline to use their authority to shore up the conditions of democratic competition, citizens infer that those conditions are not the judiciary’s concern. Compliance becomes thinner when the Court appears indifferent to the erosion of the arena in which compliance is meant to matter.

Law Without Teeth

The common thread across these episodes is not error but conditionality. Courts intervene selectively; leaders pre-frame adverse rulings; enforcement arrives late; the scope of unilateral power is negotiated; available tools to protect democratic integrity go unused. The result is a system in which law persists formally while losing its constraining force.

The inability to command compliance hollows democracies without spectacle, not through the abolition of courts, but through the steady teaching of non-compliance. Each instance of delayed obedience becomes precedent for the next. Each reframing of adverse rulings as partisan aggression licenses further disregard. The judiciary’s rituals continue; its leverage wanes.

It is tempting to treat these developments as episodic: one case here, one emergency posture there. That temptation is itself part of the problem. Patterns are what govern. When patterns of conditional obedience take hold, institutions do not fail in a single moment. They lose their constraining force.

What Accountability Requires Now

The remedy is not rhetorical escalation. It is cultural repair. Judicial authority cannot be restored by courts alone. It must be sustained by leaders who treat adverse rulings as binding, by institutions that enforce promptly rather than perform belatedly, and by citizens who resist the seduction of partisan convenience when the law cuts against their preferences.

Courts, for their part, must recognize that legitimacy is not preserved by procedural correctness alone. Legitimacy is sustained when rulings shape conduct. Where timing, posture, and restraint consistently dilute that effect, the judiciary should confront the civic consequences of its choices. Authority that is not exercised to preserve the conditions of democratic contestation will not be recognized when it seeks to constrain power later.

The danger, again, is not that courts will err. Courts err by design; fallibility is built into the system. The danger is that correct rulings will arrive in a culture that no longer feels bound to follow them. At that point, the judiciary will still speak. The republic will simply stop listening.

A court does not fail when it errs. It fails when its rulings no longer constrain power.

~Dunneagin

🎧 Find Civics Unhinged on your favorite platform:

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🗣 Political satire that stings. Essays, mock memos, and podcasts chronicling the slow implosion of the American Republic — in English, French, and German.

💬 On Bluesky? Join the conversation at @dunneagin.bsky.social

📚 Support this work — and get three free eBooks!

Paid subscribers help keep this circus running without corporate ads, think tank donors, or truth-averse billionaires. Join them.

As a thank you, all yearly paid members receive:

📕 Trump’s Big Top: How Politics Became a 3-Ring Circus

📕 The Liar’s Guide to Autocracy

📕 Mr. Dunneagin Speaks, Volume 2

☕ Civics Unhinged mugs and merchandise are available at: https://f-p-dunneagin-shop.fourthwall.com

👉 Thank you for listening and for your support.

The American judiciary still rules. Opinions are issued. Orders are entered. Dissents are filed with their familiar blend of rigor and lament. To casual observers, this appears to be continuity—business as usual in a system that prides itself on procedure. Yet power does not reside in parchment. It resides in whether rulings bind the conduct of those who would prefer not to be bound.

A court that speaks without being obeyed does not lack authority on paper; it lacks authority in practice. And a president—or an administration—that treats compliance as optional does not overthrow the judiciary. It renders it ornamental.

This judicial erosion is the quiet shift now underway. Not the smashing of the courts, not the formal suspension of review, but the normalization of conditional obedience: rulings that constrain when convenient, delay when inconvenient, and are narratively preempted when politically costly. The danger is not a wrong decision. The danger is the right decision that no longer compels behavior.

🎧 Listen to the narrated version of "When Courts Rule but Power Doesn't Listen" (10 minutes, 31 seconds).

The Illusion of Judicial Power

We have come to mistake decision-making for power. Because courts decide cases, they are powerful. But courts have no armies, no enforcement budgets, and no direct control over compliance. Their authority is relational. It depends on a political culture that treats judicial outcomes as binding even when they are unwelcome.

When that culture erodes, courts continue to function procedurally while failing substantively. Opinions become signals rather than constraints. Law becomes guidance rather than an obligation. The judiciary retains its rituals while losing its leverage.

This erosion is not dramatic. It proceeds by habituation. Each instance of delay is reframed as prudence; each instance of defiance recast as disagreement; each instance of selective compliance explained as necessity. Over time, what was once exceptional becomes ordinary. The judiciary still “exists,” but its teeth are blunted.

Selective Intervention and the Politics of Timing

Power is exercised not only through what courts decide, but through when and whether they choose to intervene. Emergency postures, shadow-docket decisions, and refusals to step in can shape outcomes as decisively as formal holdings. When the Supreme Court recently cleared the way for California’s new congressional map to proceed by declining to block it on an emergency basis, it demonstrated how judicial non-intervention can function as a consequential act in the electoral arena. Neutrality in posture is not neutrality in effect when timing determines political reality.

Public legitimacy turns on whether these patterns appear principled or predictable. The perception—fair or not—that a conservative majority increasingly aligns with Trump’s interests compounds the problem. A court perceived as legible to partisan aims does not merely risk reputational harm; it weakens the civic reflex of compliance. When outcomes feel pre-scripted, adverse rulings are easier to dismiss as politics by other means. The Court’s authority then becomes contingent on whether the losing side recognizes it as law rather than strategy.

The judiciary alone does not control this perception. Political leaders cultivate it. When adverse rulings are pre-framed as partisan attacks, compliance becomes a concession rather than a duty. The Court still rules; the culture of obedience frays.

The pattern is by now familiar: provocation, denial, deletion. When the president recently circulated a dehumanizing video and his press secretary dismissed public condemnation as “fake outrage,” the episode was later resolved not through accountability but through quiet removal. The offense disappeared; the framing remained. The lesson was not that boundaries exist, but that violations can be narratively neutralized and procedurally erased. This is how authority trains the public to forget what it has already decided not to defend.

Law That Speaks Late: Courts as Rear-Guard Action

Even when courts resist executive overreach, they often do so after harm has begun. The recent wave of habeas corpus litigation that has undercut aspects of the administration’s mass deportation campaign illustrates the point: federal courts can slow or disrupt overreach, but typically only after policies have been implemented, people detained, and families displaced. The law speaks—but too late.

This temporal lag changes the function of judicial review. Courts become friction rather than guardrails. They mitigate damage rather than prevent it. The state moves first; legality responds. That sequence teaches officials that speed will be rewarded and that any eventual correction can be absorbed as a cost of doing business.

For those subjected to policy, the lesson is harsher: Rights that exist only after injury are rights that fail when needed most. A system that arrives after the fact, albeit reliably, preserves its appearance of legality while surrendering its deterrent capacity.

The New Baseline: How Far Can the President Go?

The most telling shift in constitutional culture is not found in any single holding, but in the questions now treated as normal. Consider the arguments over whether the president may remove officials insulated by statutory protections, including a Federal Reserve governor. Reporting suggests that even skeptical justices framed the matter in terms of how far removal power extends, rather than whether the premise of unilateral presidential control should be constrained in the first place. The baseline has moved.

This is not merely doctrinal evolution. It is cultural recalibration. Once the conversation centers on the permissible scope of unilateral power rather than on the necessity of institutional insulation, the judiciary becomes an arbiter of the extent of permissible consolidation. That is a role different from the one envisioned by the Constitution's design. Courts are asked not to defend limits as such, but to negotiate their erosion.

Negotiation invites conditional compliance. If the boundaries are portrayed as malleable, defiance becomes a bargaining position. The judiciary still speaks, and power listens selectively.

The Power the Court Could Use—But Often Will Not

This is not a story of judicial incapacity. It is a story of discretion. The Court retains doctrinal tools that could meaningfully reinforce democratic integrity. Even within existing precedent, scholars have outlined paths by which the Court could curtail the dominance of Super PACs and dark money without overturning Citizens United outright. Capacity exists.

What is lacking is not the instrument, but the will to wield it in defense of democratic health. Doctrinal minimalism can be principled. It can also be convenient. When restraint consistently favors concentrations of powers that corrode democratic participation, restraint ceases to be neutral. It becomes a choice with consequences.

The public draws lessons from these choices. If courts repeatedly decline to use their authority to shore up the conditions of democratic competition, citizens infer that those conditions are not the judiciary’s concern. Compliance becomes thinner when the Court appears indifferent to the erosion of the arena in which compliance is meant to matter.

Law Without Teeth

The common thread across these episodes is not error but conditionality. Courts intervene selectively; leaders pre-frame adverse rulings; enforcement arrives late; the scope of unilateral power is negotiated; available tools to protect democratic integrity go unused. The result is a system in which law persists formally while losing its constraining force.

The inability to command compliance hollows democracies without spectacle, not through the abolition of courts, but through the steady teaching of non-compliance. Each instance of delayed obedience becomes precedent for the next. Each reframing of adverse rulings as partisan aggression licenses further disregard. The judiciary’s rituals continue; its leverage wanes.

It is tempting to treat these developments as episodic: one case here, one emergency posture there. That temptation is itself part of the problem. Patterns are what govern. When patterns of conditional obedience take hold, institutions do not fail in a single moment. They lose their constraining force.

What Accountability Requires Now

The remedy is not rhetorical escalation. It is cultural repair. Judicial authority cannot be restored by courts alone. It must be sustained by leaders who treat adverse rulings as binding, by institutions that enforce promptly rather than perform belatedly, and by citizens who resist the seduction of partisan convenience when the law cuts against their preferences.

Courts, for their part, must recognize that legitimacy is not preserved by procedural correctness alone. Legitimacy is sustained when rulings shape conduct. Where timing, posture, and restraint consistently dilute that effect, the judiciary should confront the civic consequences of its choices. Authority that is not exercised to preserve the conditions of democratic contestation will not be recognized when it seeks to constrain power later.

The danger, again, is not that courts will err. Courts err by design; fallibility is built into the system. The danger is that correct rulings will arrive in a culture that no longer feels bound to follow them. At that point, the judiciary will still speak. The republic will simply stop listening.

A court does not fail when it errs. It fails when its rulings no longer constrain power.

~Dunneagin

🎧 Find Civics Unhinged on your favorite platform:

• Apple Podcasts (accepts PayPal if available in your country)

• Spotify (accepts PayPal if available in your country)

• Pocket Casts

• Prefer RSS feed? Copy and paste this URL (https://dunneagin.substack.com/feed/podcast) into your preferred RSS reader

• Prefer video, short-form excerpts, or visual essays? Copy and paste this URL (👉https://www.youtube.com/@civics_unhinged)

🗣 Political satire that stings. Essays, mock memos, and podcasts chronicling the slow implosion of the American Republic — in English, French, and German.

💬 On Bluesky? Join the conversation at @dunneagin.bsky.social

📚 Support this work — and get three free eBooks!

Paid subscribers help keep this circus running without corporate ads, think tank donors, or truth-averse billionaires. Join them.

As a thank you, all yearly paid members receive:

📕 Trump’s Big Top: How Politics Became a 3-Ring Circus

📕 The Liar’s Guide to Autocracy

📕 Mr. Dunneagin Speaks, Volume 2

☕ Civics Unhinged mugs and merchandise are available at: https://f-p-dunneagin-shop.fourthwall.com

👉 Thank you for listening and for your support.