Last updated on June 30, 2025
District 6 City Councilor Ben Weber’s No Kings resolution wasn’t filed in time to recognize that our country is fighting for independence from monarchy on July 4, 2025, but that’s not stopping him from urging his colleagues to support the resolution at the next council meeting.
Weber tried filing it as a late file last week, but late files need to be approved unanimously, and for whatever reason, not every councilor supported the resolution should be admitted.
“We had drafted a No Kings resolution a week earlier but held onto it and filed the resolution on an ’emergency’ basis on Wednesday because we wanted to see how the situation in Iran developed,” Weber said.
As Weber noted in his weekly newsletter, “we celebrate our fight for independence from monarchy, despite the fact that we now have a President that is acting every bit the monarch.”
Weber said the resolution stressed the separation of powers between the three branches of government are an integral part of how our framers drafted the Constitution.
“As James Madison wrote in Federalist Paper No. 47, ‘The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny'” said Weber. “What we are seeing now, however, is a consolidation of authoritarian power in one person with both Congress and the Supreme Court helping the President every step of the way.”
Weber highlighted:
- The Supreme Court allowed Trump to keep control of the National Guard deployed to Los Angeles.
- In Trump v. CASA, the Supreme Court struck down the ability of courts to issue a nationwide injunction to stop the enforcement of the President’s birthright citizenship order, essentially gutting the power of judicial review, which is the foundational authority for the entire judicial branch of our government.
While the three SCOTUS liberal judges said three separate district courts found that the President’s ban on birthright citizenship was blatantly unconstitutional, the other six judges ruled, however, that while that finding could apply to the named plaintiffs in each case, applying the ruling to anyone not expressly appearing in the case would exceed judicial authority.
In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote: “No one disputes that the Executive has a duty to follow the law. But the Judiciary does not have unbridled authority to enforce this obligation—in fact, sometimes the law prohibits the Judiciary from doing so.”
That is, just, shocking. What role do the courts serve if not to require that the Executive Branch follows the law? The three dissenting judges wrote how the majority opinion simply erases the judicial branch’s role in preventing other branches of government from violating the Constitution. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, summed up the absurdity of the majority’s opinion in her dissent, writing: “As I understand the concern, in this clash over the respective powers of two coordinate branches of Government, the majority sees a power grab—but not by a presumably lawless Executive choosing to act in a manner that flouts the plain text of the Constitution. Instead, to the majority, the power-hungry actors are . . . (wait for it) . . . the district courts.”
Weber is filing the resolution (on time) for the Council’s next meeting on July 9, 2025, and he added, “I fear that the resolution will probably have to be revised further to include any new assaults on democracy that occur between now and then.”
You can read Weber’s resolution here.
