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As I write these words, for example, the United States is involved in delicate negotiations with the Taliban to ensure that US nationals and American allies can safely evacuate from Afghanistan. Despite initial chaos as the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, these negotiations are now bearing fruit. The US military successfully evacuated over 10,000 people from Afghanistan on Sunday alone.

Now imagine that some ideological judge — perhaps one who disagrees with President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan — orders the Biden administration to change its diplomatic stance with the Taliban. Even if that decision were reversed by a higher court, that process would likely take days — and those few days of confusion and mixed messages could permanently sour US relations with the Taliban and endanger thousands of lives.

For decades, the Supreme Court warned that such judicial interference with foreign relations is untenable. The question in Texas is whether the current Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, will exercise the same wisdom and forbearance.

Kacsmaryk’s decision is dead wrong

Texas would be a more difficult case if there were some legal basis for Kacsmaryk’s opinion. If Congress actually passed a law requiring Biden to implement Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy, then Biden would be bound by that law — although courts might sensibly give him more than a week to reinstate Trump’s policy given the diplomatic negotiations that must occur before such a policy can be implemented.

Kacsmaryk’s opinion rested on two separate arguments. First, federal agencies typically must offer a “reasoned analysis” explaining why they decided to implement a new policy before that policy can go into effect. Kacsmaryk claims that a memo by Secretary Mayorkas, which explains why the Biden administration ended the Remain in Mexico policy, did not provide an adequately reasoned explanation for why it did so.

There are good reasons to doubt this aspect of Kacsmaryk’s reasoning, and the Justice Department’s brief to the Supreme Court makes a persuasive case that Mayorkas’s memo is adequate. But if the Court agrees with this aspect of Kacsmaryk’s opinion, that’s not necessarily the end of the world.

Provided that the justices explain what, exactly, Mayorkas needs to put into a new memo in order to end Remain in Mexico, Mayorkas can always just issue a new memo. The Court could also temporarily stay a decision requiring Mayorkas to produce a second memo in order to give him enough time to comply with the Court’s order.

The bigger problem with Kacsmaryk’s opinion is his egregious misreading of federal immigration law.

Kacsmaryk claims that when an asylum seeker arrives at the US-Mexico border, federal law only gives the US government two options: “(1) mandatory detention; or (2) return to a contiguous territory.” But that’s just false. The law gives federal immigration officials a menu of options, including granting an asylum seeker parole “for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit,” or releasing the immigrant on bond.

Under a doctrine known as “prosecutorial discretion,” the executive branch also has broad discretion to decide not to bring enforcement actions against individual immigrants.

So if the Supreme Court decides to follow the law, Texas is an easy case. The Biden administration has a strong legal argument, rooted both in statutory text and in longstanding constitutional doctrines. And the foreign policy implications of allowing people like Kacsmaryk to interfere with American immigration policy could be disastrous.

The open question is whether the Supreme Court also has five votes to block Kacsmaryk’s order. Although the Court recognized the close relationship between immigration and foreign policy in its 2012 Arizona decision, Arizona was a 5-3 decision with conservatives Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Kennedy crossing over to vote with the liberal justices (minus Justice Elena Kagan, who was recused in Arizona).

Roberts is still on the Court, but Kennedy is not. And both Kennedy and the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg have since been replaced by conservative Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

To prevail in Texas, in other words, the Biden administration most likely needs to hold on to Roberts’s vote and secure the vote of either Kavanaugh or Barrett.

Netflix’s Someone Great is a forgotten film that just works, all tropes aside.

I watch no fewer than eight romantic comedies a month. The formula — a slightly outlandish meet-cute, some heady “will-they-or- won’t-they” moments, and conflict that never lasts for more than 20 minutes — makes my brain feel smooth, and I consume them as both workday background noise and an anxiety cure. The genre equivalent of The Comfy hoodie, the predictability of rom-coms is both cringeworthy and comforting.

Someone Great, the forgotten child of Netflix’s late 2010s bid to revitalize the romantic comedy, slots into the genre perfectly, despite working overtime to subvert the trope of slapdash romances. Namely, the love story happens in reverse. When music journalist Jenny (Gina Rodriguez) gets her dream job at the mythological San Francisco bureau of Rolling Stone, her boyfriend of nine years, Nate (Lakeith Stanfield), dumps her, leaving Jenny to enlist best friends Blair (Brittany Snow) and Erin (DeWanda Wise) on a quest for closure and concert tickets. Jenny and Nate’s relationship unwinds in neon-tinted flashbacks of passionate sex and arguments about ambition, bifurcating the film into a buddy comedy and a searing exploration of what it looks like to outgrow your partner without meaning to.

The latter plotline is what makes Someone Great the perfect late (or early, depending on who you ask) pandemic watch. If I had to guess, we’re all emerging from these last 17 months a little worse for wear. Co-quarantining killed relationships we thought would last forever, and the routine of work-sleep-repeat has us leaving careers we thought we’d have forever. In other words, life probably still feels shitty and uncertain to most people, and it’s reassuring to watch someone fictional come to terms with that as imperfectly as the rest of us.

The day after her relationship ends, Jenny melodramatically dives into singledom, binge-drinking and self-medicating with Molly (a.k.a. ecstasy) procured from RuPaul as she searches for tickets to a music festival. Jenny is endearing in her mood swings, with Rodriguez coming across light and airy when she shirks off her feelings and arresting while deep in them.

This messiness is what makes Someone Great so appealing. No one is looking for the perfect guy or a second chance or any of those other improbable rom-com asks. All Jenny wants is a few hours to get fucked up and forget about things, and that’s something even a rom-com skeptic can get behind.

Someone Great is really a film about trepidation and how it manifests differently in all of us. For Jenny, it comes out in grand displays of emotion, crying in the corner of a bodega to Selena’s “Dreaming of You.” For Erin, it’s in procrastination and denial as she avoids committing to the boutique owner she’s sleeping with, in a final bid to delay adulthood. As for Blair, she deals with her anxieties through lopsided confrontation by cheating on her doting boyfriend with a lanky creative-director type.

The takeaway from their coping mechanisms? Sudden change doesn’t require a sudden solution, even if it takes the film’s protagonists a mere 24 hours to reach that realization. It’s a refreshing lesson, especially as we’re inundated with tales of hot girl summers and clubbing itineraries and primers on how to combat your fear of going out. We don’t need to be okay with this new, awkward pace of life yet — and yes, I’m painfully aware of the irony of a film that celebrates hedonism teaching me that.

Someone Great is best watched casually, perhaps with a pile of laundry at your feet or while you complete some other mundane house chore. Like Set It Up and the rest of the Netflix rom-com set, it’s compulsively watchable, with a plot that gets better the less you think about it. Jenny, Blair, and Erin’s chemistry is breezy, and the film is at its best when it relies on their friendship for cheap laughs. Case in point: The clothing montage — a staple of early aughts rom-coms — feels like a natural extension of a night out as the trio takes shots and swaps outfits while rapping along to “The Jump Off” by Lil’ Kim.

The film’s soundtrack is both a welcome plot device and a crutch, with the song selections occasionally feeling a little too on the nose, like when Jenny scrolls through nearly a decade’s worth of texts and photos while Lorde’s “Supercut” plays. Writer-director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson started off as a music blogger for Pigeons and Planes, and much of the film’s identity comes from Spotify playlists containing well over 500 songs, with most of the score coming together during production. That symbiosis is best showcased in Someone Great’s final flashback, where Jenny and Nate have sex after a particularly incendiary argument. Mitski’s “Your Best American Girl” plays in the background, like some sort of warning bell as Jenny realizes the best parts of her relationship are over and that their differences aren’t something you can argue through.

Make no mistake: Someone Great isn’t earth-shattering cinema. It’s not even the best rom-com to come out of the past couple of years. But it is a soothing, easy film to return to when pandemic life feels a little too daunting.

Someone Great is streaming on Netflix.

For more recommendations from the world of culture, check out the One Good Thing archives.

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