This Day in Legal History: The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
On August 7, 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, one of the most consequential—and most cautionary—delegations of power in American history. The vote was overwhelming: unanimous in the House, and 88 to 2 in the Senate. The resolution authorized President Lyndon Johnson “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression” in Southeast Asia—and it became the legal foundation for the escalation of the Vietnam War, all without a formal declaration of war.
The resolution passed after Johnson told the public that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had made unprovoked attacks on two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. In the years that followed, serious doubts emerged about what had actually happened—particularly regarding the second reported attack, which may never have occurred at all. Congress, acting on the president’s account and in a moment of Cold War urgency, handed the executive branch what amounted to a blank check for war. At the time there were only about 25,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam; that number would eventually exceed half a million.
The significance of August 7, 1964 is that it became the defining lesson in the dangers of Congress ceding its war powers to the president. The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war precisely because the founders feared executive war-making, and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution showed what happens when the legislature abdicates that role. The backlash shaped a generation of law: Congress rescinded the resolution in 1970, and in 1973 passed the War Powers Resolution over President Nixon’s veto, trying to claw back some control over the commitment of American forces. It’s a permanent reminder—resonant on a day full of stories about the reach of executive power—that authority handed over in a crisis is very hard to take back.
The Trump administration’s campaign to force states to hand over their voter registration data has now lost twenty-one court cases in a row—an unbroken streak of defeats as the November midterms approach. According to a Reuters analysis, the Justice Department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia seeking their voter rolls, and it has gone zero for twenty-one, with federal courts from Pennsylvania to California to Michigan, plus the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, all rejecting the effort. Here’s the detail that really tells the story: seven of the fifteen district judges who ruled against the administration were appointed by Trump himself, and some Republican state officials—in Idaho, Kentucky, Utah, and West Virginia—have resisted the requests too. This isn’t a partisan split; it’s a near-consensus rejection. The legal problem is structural. Under the Constitution, the administration of elections is primarily the job of the states, and courts have repeatedly found the federal government lacks the authority to simply demand statewide voter data. We’ve tracked the pieces of this all summer—the SAVE database fights, the threats to prosecute election officials, the mail-in voting order—and this is the throughline: a coordinated push for federal control over election machinery running headlong into a judiciary, staffed partly by the president’s own appointees, that keeps saying no. The significance is that the courts are holding a hard line on the decentralized structure of American elections, and doing it unanimously enough that it’s hard to dismiss as politics. It’s a fitting counterpoint to yesterday’s Voting Rights Act anniversary: sixty years apart, the fights over who controls the ballot continue.
Analysis: Trump loses 21 straight court battles for state voter rolls as midterms near | Reuters
CBS News · Brennan Center
President Trump has signed two new executive orders attempting to narrow birthright citizenship—despite the fact that the Supreme Court rejected his last attempt just over a month ago. Recall that on June 30, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to nearly everyone born on U.S. soil, striking down his earlier order. These new orders are narrower. The White House is taking aim at “birth tourism”—foreigners traveling to the U.S. specifically to give birth—and at denying birthright citizenship to children of some foreign diplomatic staff, with the possibility of extending limits to U.S. territories later. It’s worth being precise here, because the two pieces are legally very different. The diplomatic-staff piece actually sits on firmer ground: the Fourteenth Amendment grants citizenship to those “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, and children of accredited foreign diplomats have long been recognized as a genuine exception. But the birth-tourism piece runs straight into the June ruling, which held that a child’s citizenship doesn’t depend on the immigration status or purpose of the parents. And crucially, these are executive orders—they set executive-branch policy, but they don’t carry the force of a statute or override a constitutional holding. After his June loss, Trump had called on Congress to act; instead he’s gone back to the executive-order well. The significance is a real test of what a president can do after the Supreme Court has ruled against him on constitutional grounds. Legal experts say it’s unclear what practical effect these orders can even have, and fresh legal challenges are all but certain. It’s an attempt to chip at the edges of a ruling the administration couldn’t overturn head-on.
Trump to sign orders on birthright citizenship, Axios reports | Reuters
CBS News · Al Jazeera
And finally, a New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a teen mental-health fund and to substantially overhaul how its platforms work for young users—one of the most significant rulings yet in the wave of litigation over social media and children. Judge Bryan Biedscheid in Santa Fe found that Meta created a “public nuisance” in New Mexico, siding with Attorney General Raúl Torrez—the same AG who, as we noted yesterday, is suing the Justice Department over the Epstein files. Torrez had accused Meta of designing its products to addict young users and failing to protect children from sexual exploitation on its platforms. The “public nuisance” theory is worth flagging, because it’s the same legal tool that drove the big opioid settlements: the idea that a company’s conduct created a widespread harm to the public that it can be forced to help abate. And the money is only part of it. The judge imposed a five-year decree requiring concrete design changes—monthly limits on teens’ time on Facebook and Instagram, restrictions on notifications, tighter controls on adult contact with minors, safeguards around AI chatbots, and enhanced review of child sexual abuse reports. This lands amid everything we’ve tracked: the Tennessee trial that just opened, the multistate penalty fight, the bellwether cases. Meta says it will appeal and that it’s been working to remove harmful content. The significance is that a court hasn’t just put a price on Meta’s conduct—it has ordered the company to redesign its products for kids, backed by the public-nuisance theory. If that approach holds up on appeal, it’s a template other states will follow, and it moves the social-media reckoning from damages into the far more consequential territory of forced design change.
New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567 mln teen mental health fund | Reuters
Washington Post · Yahoo Finance
