Courts

· ·2 min read

Pronoun roles are back by statute, and a judge takes aim at the executive-order test

The Court of Review holds EO 167-07 superseded by the Pro-Pronoun Act. In a concurrence, Judge Bete invites the Supreme Court to overrule its own rational-connection test.

An executive order that stripped pronoun roles from the SimDemocracy server has been declared spent, the Court of Review holding unanimously that legislation passed afterwards has superseded it. In re EO 167-07 [2026] SDCR 92

EO 167-07 removed the pronoun roles and the header they sat under. About a month later the Senate passed the Pro-Pronoun Act, amending the Sixth Discord Act to require that the server always carry a list of certain pronouns as optional roles. That Act entered into force on 27 June.

The court’s answer was short. Where the Senate legislates on the same ground after an order is made, the legislation supersedes the order. EO 167-07 is no longer in effect, and the roles it removed are now required by statute.

The order was lawful when it was made

Chief Judge Tech Support, who wrote the judgment, added a concurrence to answer a question raised in deliberation: was the order constitutional before the Act overtook it?

The reasoning turns on where the roles came from. In May 2024 the then President moved the pronoun roles into the server’s Channels and Roles section, which placed them under presidential authority. The Sixth Discord Act had prescribed where such a category sits on the server, but had not itself listed the roles — the Senate “simply provided the place”, and had it wanted to entrench the list it could have written one. The order therefore fell within the President’s authority, and was valid until the Senate said otherwise.

A judge asks the Supreme Court to think again

The longer opinion belongs to Judge Bete, who used the case to attack a test the Supreme Court laid down last year.

Executive orders come in two kinds: an exercise of authority granted by law, and a plain command to a subordinate. For the second kind, the Supreme Court held in In re Exec. Order 143-04 [2025] SDSC 24 — the Ice Cream Button case — that an order need only “bear a rational connection to the operations or functions of the executive branch”.

Bete’s objection is that this test has no basis in the constitutional text, which does nothing more than rename written orders to subordinates as executive orders, and that it cannot be applied consistently.

The concurrence argues the test collapses either way. Read narrowly, it produces the same answers as simply asking whether the superior may give the order and the subordinate may carry it out — in which case it is redundant. Read broadly, it lets government “backfill a supposed justification for issuing orders without apparent basis”. Authority, Bete writes, has no conceptual relation to the rational-connection question at all: “Courts find their authority in their authority.”

The invitation is explicit. In an appropriate future case, the Supreme Court should reconsider Ice Cream Button.

The Court of Review sat as Chief Judge Tech Support with Judges Zepz and Bete. It is currently a judge short: Ty resigned from the bench on Sunday to take a Senate seat, and gave that seat up the following day.