The Night I Stopped Correcting
My wife said it quietly, the way she says most important things.
Just stop. Be kind.
We were early into this - my mother had moved in, and I was still in the phase where I thought the right response to confusion was clarity. She’d say something that wasn’t quite right and I’d gently, carefully, correct her. I thought I was helping. I thought accuracy was a form of respect.
My wife watched this for a while.
Then one evening she said it. Not as a rebuke. Just as the truth she’d already figured out that I hadn’t yet.
Just stop. Be kind.
I think about that moment a lot now. Especially on the mornings when my mother-in-law finds us in the kitchen and, matter-of-factly, with the particular calm of someone who has decided not to make things harder than they already are, tells my wife what happened the night before.
What she heard. Where my mother was headed. What she said.
My wife brings it to me the same way. Quietly. In the relay that our household has developed without anyone planning it - my mother-in-law handling the nights, my wife carrying the news to me in the mornings, both of them absorbing something I couldn’t be present for because we were downstairs and the house has a particular geography of care that none of us designed.
During the day, my mother asks to go home.
She is home. She has been home. But the home she’s asking for exists at a different coordinate - some earlier address her mind still holds as the real one, the true one, the one she keeps trying to navigate back to.
I used to explain this.
You are home. This is your room. You’ve been here for months.
I don’t do that anymore.
I redirect. I move us gently toward something else. A question, a task, a small reorientation that doesn’t require her to accept a reality that doesn’t match the one she’s living in.
My wife taught me that.
And I think about the Senate voting 47–53 to let an unauthorized war continue, and I think: someone needed to teach them the same thing.¹
Not correction.
Not clarity delivered like a verdict.
Just the harder, slower, more honest work of redirecting a system that has lost its way home.
The problem is - unlike my mother - the system knows exactly what it’s doing.
And no one is there to guide it back.
What Courts Are Supposed to Do
This is not an abstract civics complaint.
I want to be precise about what courts were supposed to do, because precision matters when you’re building the case for what states have to do now.
For most of American constitutional history, the judiciary functioned as a kind of institutional memory. Not fast. Not dramatic. Slow, deliberate, and grounded in the long argument about what the framers meant when they drew the lines between branches.
When a president overreached, the courts were supposed to say: not that far.
When Congress abdicated, the courts were supposed to say: you can’t hand that away.
When agencies weaponized their authority, the courts were supposed to say: show your work.
They were the ballast. The ship could pitch and roll in the political storms - and it always did - but the ballast held the keel level.
The ballast has shifted.
It didn’t disappear all at once. It was hollowed out slowly, doctrine by doctrine, year by year. The Supreme Court embraced the unitary executive theory - the idea that the president has total operational authority over the executive branch - in ways that the framers explicitly warned against.² That project accelerated: through Seila Law, through the presidential immunity ruling of 2024, through the Court’s willingness in the current term to revisit and potentially overturn Humphrey’s Executor, the 90-year-old precedent that allowed Congress to create independent agencies insulated from political control.³
If Humphrey’s Executor falls - and the Court’s questioning in Trump v. Slaughter suggests it might - the president gains sweeping removal power over the FTC, the NLRB, the FCC, and a range of other agencies that families depend on to function without partisan interference.
What we have now is a constitutional architecture where the executive acts first, Congress performs outrage for cameras, and the courts - when they show up at all -often arrive after the damage is done and call it legal.
What the Courts Have Normalized
Let me name it plainly.
Just last month, in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, the Supreme Court did strike down the administration’s sweeping tariff authority under IEEPA - a rare moment of the Court reasserting limits on executive economic power.⁴ Chief Justice Roberts authored the ruling. It was significant. It was also, as court watchers immediately noted, an exception in a long pattern of deference - one decision after two dozen that went the other way.⁵
The Brennan Center put it plainly: after repeatedly siding with the administration on immigration, military service, federal employment, and beyond, the Court “finally reached its limit” on tariffs - but the broader pattern of enabling executive overreach at a moment when checks and balances are “profoundly strained” remains.⁶
On foreign policy and military action, the courts have been effectively absent.
The War Powers Act of 1973 was supposed to be the constitutional guardrail. It requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of committing forces to hostilities, and - absent congressional authorization - to remove those forces within 60 to 90 days.
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated military strikes against Iran - Operation Epic Fury - without a congressional authorization vote. The operation was announced via an eight-minute video posted to Truth Social at 2 a.m.⁷ The War Powers notification was filed. The Gang of Eight was briefed. No imminent threat to U.S. personnel was cited in the required legal language.⁸
Senator Tim Kaine introduced a War Powers Resolution. It failed 47–53, with Senator John Fetterman breaking Democratic ranks to vote against it.¹ The House version, introduced by Representatives Massie and Khanna, failed 212–219 — with only two Republicans crossing over.⁹
Speaker Johnson said afterward: “We are not at war. The president and the Department of Defense have made this very clear.”¹⁰
Six U.S. service members have been killed. A dignified transfer was held at Dover Air Force Base on Saturday.¹⁰
The courts have said nothing.
They have a long, consistent record of treating military action and foreign affairs as political questions - meaning, in practical terms, not our problem. And so the war continues, with no authorization vote, no formal declaration, and no judicial checkpoint between the president’s decision and its consequences.
This is not constitutional interpretation.
This is constitutional abandonment.
The Price Lands on Families First
Here is what the last seven days have produced in the actual world, while the constitutional debate plays out in courtrooms and committee rooms that most families will never enter:
The Strait of Hormuz - the narrow channel through which roughly 20% of the world’s daily oil supply passes - has effectively closed.²² Tanker traffic dropped from an average of 24 transits per day to near zero as Iranian forces attacked vessels and insurance companies withdrew coverage.²³ Over 150 tankers have dropped anchor in open Gulf waters, waiting.²⁴
Brent crude has risen more than 10% since the strikes began.²⁵ Goldman Sachs projects that if oil prices hold at current levels for several months, U.S. consumer price inflation could climb from 2.4% in January to 3% by year’s end - complicating Federal Reserve rate policy and putting further pressure on household budgets already stretched by the tariff-driven inflation of the last year.²⁸
Qatar has halted production at its two main LNG facilities after attacks on its industrial infrastructure. European natural gas futures doubled over 48 hours before pulling back slightly.²⁶ Fertilizer prices are spiking - Egyptian urea is up 35% this week - threatening to drive up food costs globally within weeks.²⁸
Every one of those numbers lands somewhere specific.
It lands on the family filling a gas tank on the way to a medical appointment.
It lands on the caregiver buying prescription medication that ships through disrupted supply chains.
It lands on the household already managing inflation from the last round of economic shock, now absorbing another one from a war that started without a vote.
The Brennan Center said it simply: “The courts, alone, will not save us.”⁶
And while all of this is happening, the Department of Homeland Security has been partially shut down since February 14 - entering its fourth week.³³ TSA workers are approaching their first missed paycheck. The Coast Guard has curtailed training and grounded aircraft. FEMA is struggling to make payments for long-term disaster recovery. CISA - the agency responsible for defending critical infrastructure from cyberattack - is operating at limited capacity at the precise moment that Iran’s demonstrated history of targeting U.S. infrastructure makes that capacity most needed.³⁴
The Secretary of Homeland Security has been replaced. The agency responsible for protecting the homeland during a war it didn’t authorize is being led in transition.³⁵
The courts were supposed to prevent the conditions under which all of this becomes possible.
Instead, they built the legal architecture that made it inevitable.
Why Caregivers Are the First to Feel It
Here is what I know from the morning kitchen relay, and from fourteen years of working in schools where 90,000 children’s family situations are the first evidence I see of what’s happening in the larger system:
Caregivers are the diagnostic class.
When federal systems fail - when the courts retreat, when Congress abandons its role, when the executive expands into the vacuum - the consequences don’t land on institutions first.
They land on families.
They land on the veteran whose disability claim is stalled because the agency processing it has been reorganized twice during a shutdown.
They land on the woman whose mother’s Medicaid renewal is delayed because the federal rule she depended on was vacated by a court applying a doctrine that changed without warning.
They land on the family absorbing a second or third deployment - because the war that started without a vote is continuing without an endgame, and somebody’s coming home different, and somebody at home is going to carry that difference.
They land on the employed caregiver who loses their job because their employer never had to accommodate them, because Congress never passed the law, because the courts never found the protection, because the system decided they were invisible.
Defense Secretary Hegseth has said the Iran operation could last up to eight weeks.²¹ Eight more weeks of Hormuz disruption. Eight more weeks of energy price pressure. Eight more weeks of supply chain strain passed on to the people at the end of the supply chain - which is always families.
When guardrails fail at the top, the fall lands at the bottom.
The bottom is us.
Colorado Cannot Fix the Supreme Court
I want to say that plainly, because I’ve been in enough legislative meetings to know that clarity matters.
Colorado cannot fix the Supreme Court.
We cannot restore constitutional war powers enforcement.
We cannot compel Congress to vote before a president acts.
We cannot install an independent judiciary where one has retreated.
We cannot prevent the next presidential immunity ruling, the next shadow docket order, the next quiet doctrine shift that erodes the rights families depend on.
What we can do is something more immediate, more durable, and more honest about how constitutional systems actually work when they’re under strain.
We can build the infrastructure the federal courts are no longer building.
We can use Colorado’s police powers - health, safety, and welfare - to construct state-level architecture that absorbs the shock when Washington fails, sustains the people doing the work the system ignores, and holds the line on rights that the federal courts have made unstable.
That is not defiance.
That is federalism.
That is exactly what the framers meant when they reserved powers to the states.
The CARE Act as Constitutional Architecture
The Colorado CARE Act does three things simultaneously, and understanding all three matters for understanding why it belongs in this conversation about courts and constitutional failure.
First: It is a shock absorber.
When unauthorized war drives energy prices toward $100 a barrel - and it might, if Hormuz stays disrupted - families absorb the cost.²⁵ When federal agencies shut down during a national security crisis, families absorb the instability. When global supply chains seize up and fertilizer prices spike 35% in a week, the cost shows up in grocery receipts within months.²⁸
The CARE Act doesn’t fix any of those upstream causes.
What it does is ensure that the people carrying the weight of those costs - the caregivers who are the last-mile infrastructure of every family in this state - don’t lose their jobs while they’re carrying it.
Workplace protection for caregivers is economic stabilization policy.
Full stop.
Second: It is caregiving infrastructure.
Every week of this war produces more casualties - six service members killed already, with an operation that may last two more months.²¹ More returning veterans with invisible injuries. More families navigating PTSD and traumatic brain injury and the particular loneliness of someone who came home but didn’t fully come back.
Every week of DHS dysfunction produces more instability in the agencies that families depend on - from disaster recovery to immigration processing to the cybersecurity infrastructure that protects hospitals and energy grids.³⁴
Caregivers are the infrastructure that never shuts down.
DHS can partially close. Courts can decline to act. Congress can deadlock for three weeks while 64,000 TSA workers approach their first missed paycheck.³⁵ Federal agencies can reorganize themselves into dysfunction.
The caregiver gets up in the morning anyway.
The CARE Act says: we see that work. We recognize it. We protect it. We build the navigation systems and the respite hours and the legal standing that makes it sustainable.
This is infrastructure investment.
Not social services.
Infrastructure.
Third: It is a constitutional guardrail.
This is the part I want legislators to hear clearly.
The federal courts have allowed rights to become unstable. Sotomayor said it in her dissent after the universal injunction ruling: “No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates.”⁶ The legal architecture that was supposed to prevent discrimination against caregivers has never been fully built at the federal level - and what pieces existed are now less certain than they were five years ago.
Colorado can build what the federal courts haven’t.
When the state recognizes caregiver status as a protected class under the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, we are not waiting for a Supreme Court that has issued more than 20 shadow docket orders in this term alone,⁹ that has repeatedly found ways to let executive action proceed before its consequences can be stopped.
We are creating stable, enforceable rights at the state level that do not depend on a federal judiciary that has demonstrated, in case after case, that it will not reliably show up when families need it.
That is a guardrail.
What Repair Actually Looks Like
“Repair the courts” sounds like a federal argument.
It isn’t - or rather, it isn’t only.
Repair means restoring the function the courts were supposed to perform: stabilizing the constitutional order when other branches overreach. That function is currently underperformed at the federal level. Which means the question shifts to where legitimate authority still exists to perform it.
Colorado has that authority.
The CARE Act is built at exactly that level - state police powers, CADA framework, zero general fund appropriation, Medicaid savings projections that make the fiscal case without asking for a dollar of new spending.
It is designed to function regardless of what Washington does next.
That’s not a bug.
That’s the architecture.
When I learned to stop correcting my mother and start redirecting her - when my wife’s four words became a different kind of practice for me - I wasn’t giving up on reality.
I was accepting that the path back to where she needed to be didn’t run through argument.
It ran through patience.
Through presence.
Through building small moments of stability she could stand on.
That’s what the CARE Act asks Colorado to do.
The federal courts won’t build this.
Congress won’t build this.
The war that started last Saturday without a vote won’t pause while we wait for Washington to remember its constitutional role.
So we build it ourselves.
In the morning relay. In the redirect. In the quiet work of holding a household together while the larger system sorts itself out.
That’s what states are for.
That’s what caregivers already know.
Take Action
The Colorado CARE Act creates stable, enforceable caregiver protections that don’t depend on a federal judiciary that has repeatedly failed to show up for families.
If you believe caregivers deserve constitutional-level protection at the state level:
Sign the petition: https://chng.it/DLWncS9wtT
Current: 673 supporters, 751 signatures | Goal: 1,000
Share your story: mark_fukae@casiadvocacy.org
Join the movement:
Professionals Who Care:
https://professionalswhocare.org
CASI:
Contact your Colorado legislators: https://leg.colorado.gov/find-my-legislator
Subscribe to 21st Century Guardrails: [https://therevenueneutralcaregiver.substack.com/podcast]
Share this essay
References
¹ Breaking Defense, “Iran war powers resolution fails in Senate,” March 4, 2026. Senate vote: 47–53. Stars and Stripes, “House rejects bid to curb Trump’s Iran war powers,” March 5, 2026. House vote: 212–219.
² SCOTUSblog, “A return to the separation of powers,” February 2026. On the unitary executive doctrine and its acceleration through Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (2020).
³ Washington Post, “Major Supreme Court 2025–2026 case decisions,” updated February 2026. Trump v. Slaughter: Court considering whether to overturn Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935).
⁴ Supreme Court of the United States, Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, 607 U.S. ___ (2026), decided February 20, 2026. Roberts, C.J., for the Court: president lacks inherent peacetime tariff authority under IEEPA.
⁵ Washington Post / Spokesman-Review, “With tariffs ruling, Supreme Court reasserts its power to check executive,” February 21, 2026. The Court had sided with the administration in approximately two dozen cases prior to this ruling.
⁶ Brennan Center for Justice, “The Wrong Moment to Reduce Judicial Power,” 2026. Quoting Justice Sotomayor’s dissent in Trump v. CASA: “No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates.”
⁷ Defense Update / Wikipedia, “Operation Epic Fury / Roaring Lion,” March 3–4, 2026. Operation launched February 28, 2026, announced via eight-minute Truth Social video at 2 a.m. EST, executed without a formal congressional authorization vote.
⁸ Stars and Stripes, “House rejects bid to curb Trump’s Iran war powers,” March 5, 2026. Rep. Jim Himes: “I can tell you with authority that in the last 10 years, Iran’s ability to create mayhem, while still very substantial, is at an ebb. If the argument is imminence, that’s absurd.”
⁹ Ballotpedia, “Supreme Court emergency orders related to the Trump administration, 2025–2026,” updated March 2026. More than 20 shadow docket decisions issued this term.
¹⁰ NBC News live blog, “Iran vows revenge after U.S. sinks warship,” updated March 6, 2026. Speaker Johnson post-vote remarks; six service members killed, dignified transfer at Dover, Saturday March 7, 2026.
²¹ Stars and Stripes, “House rejects bid to curb Trump’s Iran war powers,” March 5, 2026. Defense Secretary Hegseth predicted conflict could extend for up to eight weeks.
²² Wikipedia, “2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis,” updated March 6, 2026. Roughly 20% of the world’s oil and natural gas passes through the strait; tanker traffic dropped to near zero following February 28 strikes.
²³ Euronews, “Passage denied: Oil and gas prices swing wildly as Hormuz crisis drags on,” March 4, 2026. Crude tanker transits dropped to four vessels on March 1, compared with a daily average of 24.
²⁴ Al Jazeera, “Shutdown of Hormuz Strait raises fears of soaring oil prices,” March 3, 2026. At least five tankers damaged; approximately 150 ships stranded.
²⁵ Stimson Center, “Global Markets and the Strait of Hormuz: The Economic Shockwaves of the Iran War,” March 2026. Brent crude rose approximately 10% after initial strikes; analysts warn of possible $100/barrel if disruption persists.
²⁶ TIME, “Strait of Hormuz Global Oil, Gas Trade Disrupted Amid Iran War,” March 2026. Qatar halted LNG production at Ras Laffan and Mesaieed industrial facilities following attacks. European natural gas futures jumped approximately 30%.
²⁸ CNN Business, “Surging energy prices and threats to shipping: How the Middle East war could hurt the global economy,” March 5, 2026. Goldman Sachs: U.S. consumer price inflation could rise from 2.4% to 3% by year-end if oil prices hold. Egyptian urea prices up 35% in one week.
³³ Wikipedia, “2026 United States federal government shutdowns,” updated March 2026. DHS shutdown began February 14, 2026; TSA PreCheck and Global Entry suspended February 22; TSA workers approaching first missed paycheck in mid-March.
³⁴ Government Executive, “Congress searches for shutdown off-ramp as DHS employees start missing pay,” March 2, 2026. Coast Guard curtailed training, grounded aircraft; FEMA struggling with long-term recovery payments; CISA operating at limited capacity.
³⁵ NPR, “Travel industry pushes Congress to end DHS shutdown,” March 5, 2026. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem replaced; Sen. Markwayne Mullin nominated as successor, effective end of March. Approximately 64,000 TSA workers facing missed paychecks.
About the Author
Mark Fukae is the founder of CASI (Caregiver Advocacy & Support Initiative), Director of Advocacy for Professionals Who Care, and a registered Colorado volunteer lobbyist developing the Colorado CARE Act for the 2027 legislative session. He writes the 21st Century Guardrails series examining governance reform through a caregiver lens.
Part V: Repair the Legislature - coming next week.
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#Caregivers #ColoradoCAREAct #COleg #SupremeCourt #JudicialReform #WarPowers #ConstitutionalGuardrails #Federalism #StatesPowers #IranWar #OperationEpicFury #DHSShutdown #CaregiversAreInfrastructure #WorkplaceProtections #21stCenturyGuardrails #CADA #StraitOfHormuz #EconomicStabilization #CaregivingPolicy #SystemicSolutions
