There's a draft opinion and one of the dissenters is leaking details of it, right?

There is a class of AI critics on this website, typically academics, that speak about the tools like it is early 2024. I'm not asking you to start liking AI. But you sound ridiculous because you're describing things that no one experiences anymore. Get updated.

Reviewing fast or slow: A theory of summary reversal in the judicial hierarchy by Alexander V. Hirsch, Jonathan P. Kastellec, and Anthony R. Taboni is now available in Early View. @jkastellec.bsky.social @anthonytaboni.bsky.social ajps.org/2026/01/09/r...

I can't describe how bad Minneapolis feels right now. My neighbors are pulling kids out of school. The public schools are offering remote learning until 2/12. We are having conversations in our alleys about how to protect ourselves. It feels like a military occupation with a blockade.

Ugh. I detest SCOTUS Theater. “We won’t tell you in advance what we’re releasing. We will call you in, make you wait a bated breath, and then slowly tease our sagacious answers out to you.” Nothing stops SCOTUS from sending an email the night before saying “we are releasing X, Y, and Z tomorrow.”

per my point about the mercator projection being the root of this whole thing

Folks doing public opinion research: I wrote an R package called `calibratedMRP` that implements methods to calibrate MRP estimates to known geographic-level ground truth (e.g. election results) github.com/wpmarble/cal...

Worth remembering, when you see passages like the one below, that this was not inevitable--the WPR mechanism does not allow for a presidential veto. It is only because of the Supreme Court's Chadha opinion that the president could veto the Venezuela resolution. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...

I need everyone in the political communications world who found the moral foundations reframing approach promising (which includes me) to read this paper It doesn't replicate in new research. It just doesn't work. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Trump v. Anderson was wrongly decided, is my hottest take. And obviously wrongly decided. There.

Professors publicly shaming a phd student at another university is bullshit. Write to their advisor - even to their IRB if you think there's a real issue. Don't post about it on Bluesky (or write about it in your APSA presidential address, but that's another story).

Haven't read the paper, but you can take most issues and find that the Republican justices are voting more conservatively over time and that the Court is increasingly polarized. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/u...

There's significant evidence from state legislative term limits that they do, in fact, empower both lobbyists and state executive branches. "Disagreeing" without offering any counter-evidence is just vibes.

Remarkable quote from David Mayhew, writing in 2005: "For the twentieth-first century, a good bet for the chief menace to the American institutional mix is the White House's continuing flexing of military muscle in imperial enterprises abroad... 1/3

But what if Maduro’s involvement in the drug trade was an “official act”?

Not only is this Supreme Court order making it harder for President Trump to send national guard into American cities welcome, Justice Kavanaugh seems to want to pull back from his earlier concurrence where he suggested race and ethnicity could be the basis for immigration checks. Now he says this:

Reading graduate papers and for the most part they are interested and well written. But pretty much all of them skip the step of just giving me descriptive statistics for their data and jump right into fancy modeling. Show me descriptives! I want to see the means and distributions!

I reviewed a paper where all three reviewers concluded that the theoretical/causal claims were overstated, yet all recommended an R&R with a more modest descriptive framing, and the editor gave it an R&R. Feels like progress.

Hello world, My little corner of the universe at Caltech HSS is hiring a two-year postdoc in political science / political economy - we hope you will consider applying! www.hss.caltech.edu/about/job-op...

This era will be remembered for a lot unpleasant things, but I sincerely believe that “boxy white houses with black trim” will be among them.

Journal article: “the data are available on request” The data:

This kind of reactionary response is, frankly, bananas.

I'm hiring a Postdoctoral Research Fellow! Applications due Feb 16. Please reach out to me with questions. apply.interfolio.com/178829

Hegseth. Patel. Bongino. And now Bhattacharya ("too busy podcasting"). When you hire people based on their social media profiles, you get.... content creators. But we need DOD, the FBI, and the NIH to *work*.

Claude pitches for other 90s/00s movie villains who people like Kelly might think are actually heroes. I like the contrarian angle on Sauron.

Just wanted to note a small scale bit of Trump corruption that y’all may have missed. There’s been a project to restore some historic golf courses in Washington DC, some of which were designed in the early golden age of golf /1

Everything's going great in the government of the most powerful country in the history of the world, why do you ask?

Given how amazing ChatGPT is, it's really funny that it can still make very basic mistakes like this.

Thanks to @johnholbein1.bsky.social I learned about this paper on rent control in Berlin. Because I was marking, I immediately downloaded the replication materials. bsky.app/profile/john...

it is also just hilarious to insist that eight months of rush job “scholarship” outweighs decades of settled history and 140 years of settled law

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...

Ahem. Political science is the *best* science. In all seriousness: Political scientists use the scientific method. And it's not like the political world is mystical/made-up. Assuming a closed physical universe, human behavior has some explanation - it's just hard to identify.* *In all senses

1/ A few thoughts about @williambaude.bsky.social’s comment in yesterday’s NYT chat that, “It’s amazing how many of our problems today could be solved by a Congress that was willing and able to legislate in response to national problems.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/o...

Some reading given the Court’s docket papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

"there's a new serif in town"

PoliSci Friends- I'm updating some MRP-based public opinion estimates. Anyone willing to share micro data from recent nationally representative surveys you've run (e.g., CES modules) that ask one or more batteries of binary questions about the American public's issue/policy preferences?

The idea that no one else, ever - including the people who wrote the Constitution - has properly understood what the document means or stands for is a rather stunning form of judicial arrogance.

I know it's very hard to advocate against a pre-determined majority, but why not just say your planning to overturn something Congress has done for over 100 years for fear of something it has never done in 250 years?

Right-wing justices as a bloc trying to counter the 'what about the Fed' fear by feigning concern about hypothetical super muscular removal protections - what if you could never fire anyone?! "Are there some cabinet departments that Congress could just take over?" Roberts asks. Super bad faith stuff

I don't find the single-member/multimember distinction Agarwal is being pressed on especially persuasive. The most principled answer IMO is that, yes, Congress could make the Commerce Secretary removable for cause, though it hasn't and wouldn't (and of course the president would veto that law).

the whole structure of this argument — independent agencies are politically unaccountable therefore the president must have removal power — treats congress as if it were a total nullity, or as if only the president truly represents the public.

Every political actor seeks to enhance its own power indeed, Justice Gorsuch.

Sauer saying something is unconstitutional because it "would be unconstitutional under Justice Scalia's dissent" is a remarkably cogent statement of the Roberts Court's approach to precedent.

That explains it: All of these SCOTUS decisions aggrandizing the President are actually a stealth campaign to empower and reinvigorate Congress. Yeah, that must be it. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/o...

it's funny that in the last window of Democratic rule the broadest horizon the president could imagine was commissioning a study on possible reforms to the Supreme Court, the same Court that ruled his insurrectionist rival could run again and had repeatedly overruled standing law to partisan end

@anthonytaboni.bsky.social and I have updated the Shadow Docket Database to include all orders through the end of the 2024 term. www.shadowdocketdata.com