The Everything Bagel

An Overall Review of the 2025 Term

Dear Reader,

It took me a few weeks, but I completed my research of the 2025 Term of Supreme Court cases. My overall perspective is that the Roberts Court has unleashed a sort of Everything Bagel, like the one in the movie Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. Some decisions reaffirmed long standing principles, but, more often than not, the Supreme Court opted to throw the nation in to uncertainty and chaos by unsettling previous understandings of the law.

My specific findings and research are in my new three part series A Tale of Two Americas, available now in pre-published form on SSRN. During the process of creating this project, I discovered the arguments of St. George Tucker, a founding Virginian judge, against the unlimited common law. In these arguments, Tucker seemed to have anticipated the Everything Bagel the 2025 Court would unleash on America as far back as 1803 when he published the bulk of his legal commentary.

Specifically, Tucker targeted his fellow founder Justice Samuel Chase’s fatalistic decision in the Case of Fries to allow constructive treason suits to go forward. A few years later, Chase was impeached, in part, according to Tucker’s arguments. Thus, it may be valuable for modern impeachment efforts to observe the way Tucker inspired his step-son Representative John Randolph of Roanoke to prosecute Chase.

During his impeachment, Chase admitted that his nihilism got the better of him when he unleashed the Everything Bagel of his time in the form of overzealous Alien & Sedition Act prosecutions. Like Chase, many more Justices on the Roberts Court — especially Alito and Thomas — are letting nihilism dictate their actions today, so much so that it appears there is a majority of nihilists on the U.S. Supreme Court. A growing number of American judges have abandoned the idea that human beings each have natural rights that any legitimate court is duty bound to protect.

Nevertheless, Tucker’s analysis of how bad apples in the judiciary corrupt the common law to facilitate tyranny, as though natural human rights do not exist, needs to be reconsidered. In this term, the Roberts Court attacked the common law through the common law in many ways. It has expanded its invention of anti-precedent precedent, it destroyed a statutory system by upending secondary copyright liability, and it has used the Equal Protection Clause to invert sovereignty against individual voting rights.

The ways the Court held firm in Trump v. Barbara, Chatrie v. United States, Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, and Trump v. Cook were not enough to avoid catastrophe. But the Everything Bagel it unleashed is rooted in basic nihilism. It can be contested and undone according to Tucker’s original efforts, with the help of newer strategies. But Congress will need to awaken itself from its long slumber if the United States is to avoid falling under a tyranny invented by the Court’s nihilistic errors.

Perhaps the most disturbing development so far is how the Court unsettled Cooper v. Aaron in Louisiana v. Callais. The Cooper decision required lower courts to enforce the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, but Callais decided that some U.S. Supreme Court decisions will not be enforceable if enforcement is not a “compelling interest.” Thereby, the Court opened Pandora’s Box to reveal the Everything Bagel in a peculiar paradoxical interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause.

According to the Court itself, the Court is lost. Congress must act or Congress will also be lost according to the Court’s radical revisions of statutory terms and statute enforceability. The 2025 Term proved that the Court is a fiat machine with the equitable power to order compliance with its political fiats, while its members arbitrarily choose which past precedents it wants enforced at any given moment, while it allows other past precedents to go violated or ignored.

So far, the Court’s power has not been significantly challenged by the other branches. We continue, at present, to live as though Cooper v. Aaron remains settled law. Until America’s general delusion about the Court being the “least dangerous” branch is finally dispensed with, the Court will continue unconstitutionally misbehaving. Again, Tucker’s commentaries on the law demonstrated that not every founder thought the Court would be docile or harmless, and a sober look at his points should precede Congress’s renewed efforts to reform the Roberts Court’s apostasy.

Until then, we can try to develop a taste for this Everything Bagel the Court is serving these days. Maybe we can pretend to ourselves that Evelyn Quan Wang (played by Michelle Yeoh) is coming to save us. But Millennials know, the Boomer ship has sailed, and we are going to need to be Ms. Wang for younger generations.

We all know the Boomers did not fight off our Everything Bagels. If anything, we fought off theirs. So, perhaps, the 2025 Term is just power for the course — another round of Boomer nihilism for Millennials to fend off, as we always do.

Yours Cordially,

Joshua J. Schroeder, Esq.