a powerful account of what’s happening in Minneapolis from Amna Akbar www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/fe...

Unmarked car, no lights or police insignia. Masked armed men leap out. Victim not in the act of committing any crime. This is not how a serious federal law enforcement agency acts in a free society. How is this not supposed to be a “right wing paramilitary force loyal to the regime”?

!!!

actually communicating “I’m here and I’m working for you and here’s how” is an aspect of governing that’s neglected by far too many people who think the work speaks for itself (or, frankly, don’t have the communication chops Zohran does) this is how you combat the forces that want to make you fail

TikTok coverage seems to have become somewhat numb to this, but worth remembering that the President simply refusing to enforce a *crystal-clear* law of Congress for over a year to instead broker a deal on his own terms, & Congress just shrugging, is very much not how this was supposed to work

Newly unsealed evidence makes it even clearer that Rubio and Noem knew they were targeting students based solely on their political speech and that they knew this policy was unconstitutional. They just didn’t care. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/u...

One year in, a helpful summary

you know this guy is a FOR REAL photographer because he's telling the story of his brutal, unconditional arrest by federal goons and can't help but slip in a gear review

From @jamellebouie.net: “All occupations resemble one another in some way, and it is striking to read descriptions and accounts of the occupation of Boston in light of events in Minnesota.”

Do you know why you've heard of the Boston Massacre? Because in 1768, when the British military began occupying Boston, Bostonians syndicated a "Journal of Occurrences" in newspapers around the country to help Americans understand what abuse of power looks like. By the 1770s, readers understood.

Fire and ICE

This is the sort of statement that was expected from every university president and law firm partner over the last year. That those statements weren’t made played a huge part in where we are now and people will remember.

Wrote a piece for @slate.com explaining that states have a long history of prosecuting federal officers when they allegedly use excessive force. Federal officers are only immune from such prosecutions when they act reasonably in carrying out lawful duties.

White House has filed its War Powers report for the attack on Venezuela. I used to help draft these reports and this is an unusual specimen. It promotes a number of political narratives, including about the attack being a "law enforcement operation" and framing Maduro as a "narco-terrorist." 1/n

Administrations have come up with lots of flimsy rationales for why their wars don't need congressional authorization over the years, but this might be the most transparently bad faith and facially absurd.

This is con artist constitutionalism. One weird trick they don’t want you to know about. As if no one until now has ever considered whether Congress can fund highways

Not content to win in court, Harvard apparently keeps trying to pay a $500m “work force investment proposal”—but the bribe isn’t explicit enough for Trump

There's a mind boggling irony here that some might miss - Whren is maybe THE WORST case for the proposition that law enforcement can't discriminatorily enforce. In Whren, SCOTUS held that the 4th amendment didn't bar pretextual stops actually based on race. supreme.justia.com/cases/federa... 1/

The Trump administration’s position is apparently it would be “war” to kill Venezuelans on land but not on ships. Famously, no US wars—not WWI, not WWII, not the Gulf of Tonkin or the USS Maine—began with attacks on US ships.

Conservative judges in 2025: "the founders did not understand the First Amendment to extend to aliens." James Madison, the author of the First Amendment, in 1800: "wtf are you talking about."

"It is a more democratic country, not 'nihilism,' that is the best replacement for a higher judiciary that has more and more deprived itself of any publicly accepted rationale for power."

The leading scholars of democratic decline say the US "has descended into competitive authoritarianism" - we "ceased to be a full democracy in the way that Canada, Germany, or even Argentina are democracies" - but caution that it can be contested and reversed www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

Murder: it's illegal.

The thesis of this piece is “the Court has been trying to revive congressional power” by striking down its laws, arbitrarily invalidating its delegations of authority, preventing Congress from putting “limitations on the president’s power,” and rebalancing the government as the Court sees fit. OK.

This man may be the most racist president this country has ever had, and twelve presidents owned slaves

"the combat decisions he has made" Hegseth is setting up Admiral Bradley to take the blame for killing the survivors--which is just the tip of an immense iceberg of illegal acts. U.S. military officials beware: Following orders is not a defense to murder or war crimes.

bluesky branding refresh unveiled

Let's not forget that the only reason we're not talking about Boston @mayorwu.boston.gov's victory tonight is because she won her preliminary election so decisively that her billionaire heir opponent dropped out. ✊

“No Kings” is a great message, but it’s sort of incredible how many things Trump is doing that the English deposed their king for trying to do

Apt that the East Wing housed the Office of Legislative Affairs

No Kings in Boston

“If the justices gut a key provision of the law, there could be a potential windfall for Republicans in Congress. . . . An analysis by The New York Times estimated that the loss . . . could place the House in Republican control for a generation.”

One of the most embarrassing opinions in recent Supreme Court history was Clarence Thomas insisting that when the post-slavery Congress protected “freedmen” they were protecting a “formally race-neutral category”

Honestly, this entire opinion is just jaw-dropping. The first postings I saw on Bluesky were about the first page, which is lovely in its own right and exemplifies one of the less-well-explored roles of a judge in a democracy: to explain what is going on legally to non-lawyers. There's way more.

Judge Young: "This case ... squarely presents the issue whether non-citizens lawfully present here in United States actually have the same free speech rights as the rest of us. The Court answers this Constitutional question unequivocally 'yes, they do.' 'No law' means 'no law.'"

BREAKING: WE WON!!! 💥 💥 💥 Federal Judge William G. Young ruled today in our lawsuit against the Trump administration that the policy of arresting, detaining, & deporting noncitizen students & faculty members for their pro-Palestinian advocacy violates the 1st Amendment. Full ruling here:

Our little AAUP chapter went 2/2 vs. Trump! Noem and Rubio…misused the sweeping powers of their offices to target non-citizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their 1st Am protected political speech. They did so in order to strike fear into similarly situated non-citizens…

Ironically, the print version of this oped switched the second column with the third column

Gal Beckerman’s The Quiet Before was a critique of Twitter when it came out in 2022. But it now reads like a defense of Bluesky and why “bubbles” are so valuable for incubating ideas.

We won!! “Defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities … Their actions have jeopardized decades of research and the welfare of all those who could stand to benefit from that research.”

AAUP-HARVARD, AAUP, & UAW WON THE HARVARD CASE!!!! storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

the DOJ atty (& 2x Harvard grad) who suggested Harvard showed "wanton indifference to antisemitism" once wrote a paper from the perspective of Hitler & expressed admiration for Mein Kampf stunning reporting from @hilaryburns.bsky.social @talkopan.bsky.social www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/02/m...

1/2 Trump should absolutely not be able to fire Lisa Cook. But this is because he should not be able to fire anyone with statutory tenure protections.

one sign that the “unitary executive” is less the restoration of an older constitutional order and more the imposition of a radical new one is that allowing the president to act untethered from most legal or congressional limits has largely just served to plunge the country into disorder

“We have committed our professional lives to learning and free inquiry, working together with students to advance truth for the collective benefit of society. Unlike our distant governing boards, we will not give up so easily — no matter what kind of deals are signed in our name.”

Trump’s attacks on Harvard are flagrantly illegal. If he’s so willing to defy the restrictions of federal law, it’s beyond me why he’d respect the restrictions of a “legal settlement.” www.nytimes.com/2025/08/11/u...

Congress passed the Respect for Marriage Act in 2022 anticipating this sort of move. Its cosponsors should be out there explaining why we need more laws like it.