Interesting to consider that if you were to go and deface the Kennedy center by removing Trump’s name, you’d be arrested and charged with a crime, but your act would be no more unlawful than what they’re doing right now.

New: The Supreme Court DENIES the Trump administration's request to halt further fact-finding in a legal dispute over speech restrictions that the Trump administration has imposed against immigration judges. Says the government hasn't shown irreparable harm yet.

A quick thread on Republicans packing state supreme courts in the past 10 years. They hate voters and democracy. 🧵

“The president doesn’t know and never will,” she told me. “He doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.” -Susie Wiles on the destruction of USAID, which has led to 600,000 deaths, including ~400,000 children, in the last year alone. www.vanityfair.com/news/story/t...

Really great piece. It's pretty revealing that the strongest defense of the term "interim docket" to describe the shadow docket is basically: Yeah, we know it's not descriptively accurate in a lot of cases, but we're annoyed by people who say "shadow docket." That's not even an argument!

I'm sorry but Judge Thapar's concurrence/dissent show one absolutely bonkers way to do constitutional law!

Very interesting: Washington Supreme Court Justice Mary Yu (who's retiring soon) won't apply equal protection to invalidate discrimination against the poor because she's afraid of giving SCOTUS an opportunity to further weaken the 14th Amendment. Remarkably candid. www.courts.wa.gov/opinions/pdf...

Today's "One First" explains why the "Annie Hall problem" (the idea that critics will never be satisfied by anything the subject of their criticism does) is an especially inapt charge against those who are independently critical of both *what* #SCOTUS is doing in its rulings and *how* it's doing it:

Beyond disrespect, many of those people were supposedly fired for the sin of implying Kirk contributed to his own death, which Trump is doing here with Reiner.

Just a reminder that at least 600 Americans were fired for failing to show sufficient respect after Charlie Kirk's murder.

The Supreme Court grants just one new case on its final (scheduled) orders list of 2025, about a defendant's ability to challenge allegedly racist peremptory strikes. No more (scheduled) conferences till 2026. www.supremecourt.gov/orders/court...

Good piece about some very bad editorials, which I find more depressing than enraging. They have no apparent audience (besides Bezos) and lack basic fluency in the legal concepts they discuss. Both asinine and utterly pointless. Can someone who understands the law at least write them?

While ICE continues to torment Kilmar Abrego Garcia in Maryland, federal prosecutors in Tennessee are trying to rig his forthcoming trial by suppressing any discussion of his unlawful deportation or the suspicious favors witnesses will get in exchange for their testimony. slate.com/news-and-pol...

Maybe this new blog can respond, in one of its first posts, to the argument that the term “interim docket” is a deliberately misleading attempt to minimize the (very permanent) doctrinal and real-world consequences of #SCOTUS’s rulings on emergency applications? www.stevevladeck.com/p/177-the-no...

Unfortunately, under our Kavanaugh Stops regime, it is entirely rational for anyone who appears Hispanic to carry proof of citizenship at all times. The worst part is that it might not be enough: ICE/CBP keep arresting people who have proof of citizenship, refusing to accept its validity.

This is really incredible. The government's battle to deport Abrego Garcia has apparently been based on a lie from the start. Not even the "gang affiliation" lie or the "human smuggling" lie, but the more basic assertion that he was ordered to be deported in the first place.

Is it worth pointing out the foundational legal errors in this editorial or should I simply disregard the rage-bait? www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

BREAKING: Judge Xinis orders ICE’s release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia “immediately.”

Excellent stuff from @sifill.bsky.social. "The assault on the 14th Amendment has not generated the kind of moral panic that politicians, journalists, and tech bros successfully created over their claims of First Amendment abuses several years ago..." sherrilyn.substack.com/p/is-it-too-...

NEW (but deja vu): Texas and Florida are suing the FDA over its approval and regulation of the abortion drug mifepristone. The states are asking Judge Reed O'Connor to declare the 25yo approval unlawful and yank mife from the market—but judges can't do that storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Judiciary watchdog group Fix the Court has filed a judicial misconduct complaint against Judge Emil Bove over his attendance at the Trump event last night. fixthecourt.com/wp-content/u...

Federal prosecutors tried to charge a guy with a felony because he closed a door a Border Patrol agent and it lightly scraped the agent's leg. (Grand jury said NOPE)

I think this is probably a new era of grand jury practice where there is communal awareness of abusive policing. The GJ just doesn't believe the state. I'm not an expert on the history of grand juries, but my sense is that this is the first time we are seeing that phenomenon at scale.

If we get through this, we’re gonna owe a lot of it to the mysterious alchemy of the grand jury process.

FIRE is suing on behalf of Monica Meeks, a veteran and Tennessee state employee who was fired for criticizing Charlie Kirk on Facebook following his murder. Argues that "her termination was unlawful retaliation for her protected expression" and demands reinstatement. www.thefire.org/research-lea...

Democrats—if they take back the House—already needed to launch an investigation into Bove’s egregious criminal conduct on Trump’s behalf before his confirmation to the 3rd Circuit. But they should also look into his brazen partisanship, which obviously violates the judicial Code of Conduct.

Bove, perhaps more than most of the recently appointed ideologues, seems to revel in giving the finger to the principle that judges ought to avoid both impropriety *and the appearance* of impropriety.

the first and only impeachment proceeding against a supreme court justice was over excessive partisanship fyi

NY allowed religious exemptions from school vaccine mandates. It spurred a measles outbreak, so the state passed a law ending the exemption. Parents + schools + 22 red states asked SCOTUS to strike down the law and restore the exemption. It appears … QUITE interested. slate.com/news-and-pol...

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments right now in a case engineered by the GOP to strike down a longstanding campaign finance law that prevents megadonors from bribing politicians for favors by laundering the money through political parties. Guess how it'll go. slate.com/news-and-pol...

The conviction that a "unitary executive" guarantees "democratic accountability" is more like a civic religion or folkloric superstition than a constitutional theory. Federalist Society true-believers drill it into their acolytes and teach them never to question it, but it's fundamentally nonsense.

Will be discussing this case more on @11thhourmsnow.bsky.social soon!

Trump's attempts to deploy the National Guard into California and Oregon are a bridge too far for THE GWB JUDGE WHO AUTHORED THE TORTURE MEMOS... ...to which baby Trump 2.0 judge, just weeks into the job, says nuh-uh! cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/op...

The best reading of this article: Trump is going to use FDA to restrict medication abortion, but he wants to wait until after the midterms so the Republicans don't experience blowback. But that just makes the midterms more important. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Who would ever voluntarily choose to live under the demented monarchical plutocracy our Supreme Court is creating for Trump? How is this a remotely rational way to structure a government? slate.com/news-and-pol...

This one is speaking to me today

Will be on MSNBC talking about this wretched case at 3 p.m.

Deepak Gupta has been defending independent agencies—their leaders, structure, and workforce—since the very start of this administration. Why he wasn’t asked to handle this seminal case is beyond me.

I assume Amit Agarwal was chosen to defend independent agencies at the Supreme Court today because he's a former Alito and Kavanaugh clerk with a conservative pedigree. But he is doing a very poor job, and I think a progressive advocate with subject matter expertise would've been far more effective.

It is really, really hard to get your head around the raw hubris of the majority. They really will be destabilizing the operating structure of the entire U.S. government. Why? Because they believe they have a better idea about how the past century should've been done.

I think legal filings should be automatically tossed out if there's a typo in your attempt at a sick burn at the end of the paragraph

The Supreme Court just set aside a 2nd Circuit decision upholding New York's requirement that all school students, public and private, obtain certain vaccinations, without any religious exemptions. It orders the 2nd Circuit to reconsider the ruling in light of SCOTUS' LGBTQ school books decision.

The Supreme Court asks Trump's Justice Department to weigh in on a pending challenge to New York's COVID vaccine mandate for health care workers, which lacks any exception for religious objections. Suggests that some justices are looking at this one closely. www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-f...

bad actors like wurman are why i think it is important to place the birthright clause in the full context of section 1 and section 1 in the context of both dred scott and the two decades of antislavery and abolitionist agitation and political thinking that proceeded it

During ratification of the 14th Amendment, senators discussed whether the Citizenship Clause would apply to the children of immigrants and resoundingly concluded that it did. The text and history all point in one direction and the counter-arguments are patently fraudulent. I am going to lose my mind

Will be discussing this case on MSNOW (formerly MSNBC) shortly!

We need to talk about the massive loophole that the Supreme Court just carved into election law over the shadow docket—giving states a free pass to enact patently unconstitutional voting rules within nearly *one year* of an election. A stunning new limit on judicial review. slate.com/news-and-pol...

NEW: The Supreme Court will once again consider the legality of Trump's attack on birthright citizenship, this time (likely) on the merits.

Next week the Supreme Court will hear another engineered case with fake plaintiffs, which presents another opportunity for the GOP justices to blow a hole through what remains of our campaign finance laws—this time, by turning political parties into a conduit for bribes. slate.com/news-and-pol...

Simply amazing that the Supreme Court declared an end to legal race discrimination in the affirmative action case two years ago and now allows overt racism in both immigration arrests and redistricting. Using race to help minorities? Bad. Using it to discriminate against them? Very, very good.