Van Hollen to Rubio: "Let's face it, Mr Secretary, the Trump foreign policy has become a dumpster fire"

🚨BREAKING: The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) said in a yet-to-be-published proposed rule Friday that it’s drawing up plans to radically crack down on mail voting by sending ballots only to voters who are registered with the federal government. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

Congress must investigate Trump regime’s malfeasance, incompetence, and dishonesty. If war crimes were committed, the officials responsible need to be held accountable. And finally, Congress needs to pass legis to prevent presidents from unilaterally blundering into unnecessary, ill-advised wars

Questions Grow Over Mystery Of Missing Legislative Branch

Extremely relevant today - our new report on the state of the rule of law in America brightlinewatch.org/erosion-of-t... Most notably, 91% of legal experts say Trump's DOJ provides favors or benefits to his allies, including 56% of legal conservatives. Findings thread below; please read & share.

I’ve been invited to testify on what the House calls “Court Packing: A Threat to SCOTUS’s Legitimacy.” Drawing on research w/ Daphna Renan for our book, Supremacy, Congress has the duty—and all the tools it needs—to protect our Constitution from judicial supremacy. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Steve's right....and we need a Congress that cares about its role as a coequal branch.

Breaking NOTUS: Trump pressed Senate Majority Leader John Thune to fire the Senate parliamentarian after she ruled Republicans could not include funding for the ballroom in a budget bill, two sources familiar with the request told NOTUS.

The more interesting point is that only in the mid-20th c. did the vice president come to be regarded as part of the executive. His sole constitutional duty was to preside over the Senate. Presidents pro tem were elected only when the VP was absent. A great example of living constitutionalism!

The big story is about the unappropriated, misappropriated funds being dumped into an account for the enrichment of (in some to-be-determined combination) Trump personally, his personal lawyers and political lieutenants, and his insurrectionist rioting henchmen. 1/

Super interesting research on AI and governments.

If you're worried about the November election, there's something important you can do to help: sign up to work at a voting location near you. You don't need experience; you'll get trained. Elections happen because thousands of ordinary people step up and help: www.eac.gov/help-america...

The 2026 primary election voter guide from Kentucky Public Radio is live. Here's a post about how we made it. www.lpm.org/news/2026-05...

Tonight’s dumb napkin cartoon…

D277,215 - issued to Lucasfilm, Ltd. in 1985 for a design for a "toy figure." #DesignPatents

i don't know man i think congress has granted approval to wars before

In its latest ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act, the Roberts Court has inverted the Reconstruction Amendments to justify the same racist devices and practices they were adopted to dismantle (🎁) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Justice Kagan: "I dissent. The Voting Rights Act is—or, now more accurately, was—'one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation's history.'

NEW: Sen. @durbin.senate.gov leads nine fellow Senate Democrats in proposing an amendment to the Constitution that would enshrine an explicit, individual right to vote www.durbin.senate.gov/imo/media/do...

🧵 The arguments behind landmark Supreme Court rulings have never been freely available… until now. More than 125,000 #SCOTUS records & briefs (1830–2019) are now open on the Internet Archive. Full announcement ⤵️ blog.archive.org/2026/04/20/u... @wolflawlibrary.bsky.social

I like SLJ's version better....

I've gone full old-man-yelling-at-cloud on AI

“Virginia joins a national effort to ensure only popular vote winners become president” electionlawblog.org?p=155426

Interested in a state supreme court clerkship? @statecourtreport.org has a database featuring clerkship opportunities from 25 states and more than 80 justices. We hope it's a good starting point for applicants! statecourtreport.org/state-judici...

CBS News has a bombshell interview with a U.S. soldier who survived the deadly attack in Kuwait on the first day of the way -- he says Pete Hegseth is lying about the attack and that the base "was unprepared to provide any defense for itself." www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-wa...

After Trump wrote, in reference to Iran, “A whole civilization will die tonight,” the entirety of the House Democratic leadership issued this joint statement:

Waiting for the Americans -- my notes on being here, out of control

💯 my sentiment today

"The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes... It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched." —Robert Jackson, Nuremberg

Cool cool cool cool cool

13 minutes 🤡 @nytimes.com

NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Directorate has awarded only 16 grants since October. No big budget cuts went through. No freeze. The courts have acted to keep funds flowing at every turn. The money just isn't going out. Why...? 1/x source: grant-witness.us/funding_curv... 🟦🧠 #academicsky

“.. More Republicans are retiring ahead of the midterms than at any point in nearly a century, according to an ABC News tally ..” abcnews.com/Politics/rec...

Social movement scholar here to comment on No King again. a 🧵: These protests are important b/c: 1.) as sustained image events, protests offer evidence of continued disapproval of the direction the country is going and disavowal of the country's leadership.

Alexandra Petri: "This is like asking a tarantula to watch your laptop. It won’t help, and now everyone is scared. No, I’m sorry. This is unfair to tarantulas, who are not known for their racial profiling."

1/2 This memo identifies absolutely no source of legal authority for paying TSA. It does not point to an appropriation that is available for this purpose, nor does it point to any legal authority to transfer some other appropriation to TSA. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

1/ It's not just that unilaterally paying TSA agents is illegal. It's that Trump has now repeatedly undermined the core of the congressional power of the purse. He's not spending money that has been appropriated by law (impoundments) and he's spending money that has not been appropriated.

Whenever a news story about something Trump is doing declares that it's "a first for a sitting president" or "a change from tradition," replace it with "yet another authoritarian move from the president," and see if it sounds more accurate.

Answer: it is a flagrant violation of federal law. Full stop. End of conversation (under 18 U.S.C. § 592, which bans armed federal forces from election sites). see @brennancenter.org info here: www.brennancenter.org/our-work/res...

Not sure whether you should show up on Saturday? @timothysnyder.bsky.social (an expert on authoritarianism) explains why historic protests like No Kings Day really matter.

"An American Problem" is now available for pre-order at online bookshops! The project traces the rise of the Voting Rights Act. And then we show all the ways that SCOTUS's Shelby County decision has been a disaster. As the Court considers attacking the VRA again this term, we hope it's insightful.

Same

When a federal judge (finally) put ICE officers under oath, they admitted that they are given daily detention quotas and rely heavily on a Palantir-supplied AI tool to select targets, without warrants and without enough evidence to obtain one. They simply go into neighborhoods and round people up.

The 2026 National Science Foundation budget is $8.75 Billion.

“Constitution destroyed in plane crash” feels like a VEEP joke that they scrapped for going too far.

Gorsuch also tries to conscript Kagan to the major questions camp in his concurrence, prompting Kagan to write this very funny footnote saying she is not, in fact, a convert to his cause. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

The 6-3 ruling is a major blow to the president's signature economic policy. n.pr/3OtEZ2E

Heads up, judicial peeps!

A very detailed explanation of how FBI bamboozled a magistrate into authorizing a raid on Fulton County’s election offices by omitting critical information that would have totally undermined any probable cause claim. Pretty clear-cut case of calculated deception of the courts.