89% – percentage of disaster aid requests Trump has approved for states with a Republican governor and two Republican senators 23% – percentage of disaster aid requests Trump has approved for states with a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators www.politico.com/news/2026/03...

New from me: we don’t really know how some major provisions of the Save America Act would work in practice. That’s on purpose: the bill would delegate key decisions on implementation to an obscure federal agency that would acquire dangerously broad powers.

Gift link: I'm not fond of the maneuver just pulled by the Maryland General Assembly, tacking an unrelated measure easing Congressional gerrymandering onto a worthwhile Senate-passed measure providing for special elections for legislative vacancies instead of party-insider selection.

Total loss for the Trump admin on its attack against Anthropic.

Utah Republicans reacted to the passage of Prop 4 (anti-gerrymandering) by making initiative petitions harder and now their petition to repeal Prop 4 failed to meet those harder requirements.

This is quite something from Singapore's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Vivian Balakrishnan, in an interview with Reuters. The end of the post-war order, diagnosed in technocratic language. www.mfa.gov.sg/newsroom/pre...

we are going to be scraping Donald Trump’s name off everything in this country for the rest of my lifetime

The SAVE America Act would give a blank check to an up-to-now obscure federal agency in the executive branch to tell states how to enforce many of the bill’s key provisions. That’s a lot of power that could be abused. New from me at Cato. /1

The structural aspects of the Constitution, including the Spending Clause, are boring. The sexy stuff is mostly in the amendments. But this is REALLY important. It was fundamental to the Framers & is indispensable to the government they created. The Brits beheaded their king over it.

This reminds me of my favorite district judge retirement speech, which began, "I've been doing this job so long that I can't remember when I didn't know how to make meth." You can't be good at criminal law if you don't understand the underlying crimes.

Texas Republican officials know what the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution has to say about religious liberty. "They have simply decided it does not apply to Muslims." [@stevechapman.bsky.social @theunpopulist.net]

It's okay to hate Meta and wish for its collapse and failure. But the two jury verdicts this week are not the vehicle for that. They're going to have widespread impact across the internet, and will do real damage to every other internet service.

People always assume content moderation is easy. Remove the bad stuff. Keep the good stuff. The reality is that it's all a series of tradeoffs where every decision has problems, and the decisions *you* think are obvious, often turn out to have really negative consequences.

After seemingly struggling to obtain enough signatures, Republicans submitted a huge batch right at the deadline. But opponents asked signatories—some of whom said they'd been duped into signing—to remove their names. A sufficient number did to knock the ballot measure below the minimum.

This isn't true. I wish people would stop saying this. Specifically the banned additives. The US actually bans slightly more additives than the EU, just different ones. The EU for example allows cyclamates the US doesn't

NEW: The FBI went down to Georgia, looking for some ballots to seize. Now, in an Atlanta courtroom tomorrow morning, the government must defend a search warrant built on recycled fraud claims & glaring omissions. My primer on Fulton County’s battle for ballots: www.lawfaremedia.org/article/fult...

Arresting a Reporter for Asking Questions Was a 'Blatant First Amendment Violation,' Sonia Sotomayor Says reason.com/2026/03/24/a...

Cato joins amicus brief arguing that federal prisons have misinterpreted the First Step Act to deny prisoners credits earned through rehabilitation programs, unlawfully extending their imprisonment and foiling the law’s aims of reducing federal prison costs and recidivism rates. [Matthew Cavedon]

I thought we had already won and didn't need help. That's what he told Britain, two weeks ago, when they offered to send an aircraft carrier.

The problem, as many economists view it, is that despite voters’ desires for relief from the rising cost of living, it’s fundamentally difficult to bring down prices. And when politicians try creative ways to do it, they often cause other problems. www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

Remaining silent about a deadly crackdown against protesters there. $30 million in funds. Inside how Cameroon and the U.S. struck a deal over third-country migrants. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/w...

Taking their time about refunding tax overpayments, Baltimore permitting delays, certificate of need expansion bill may be dead for this session, and more in my Maryland policy roundup.

"States Are Gaming SNAP Error Rates to Avoid Federal Penalties" [Romina Boccia, Cato]

"Why the Afroman ‘pound cake’ police saga is so delectable" www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202... "A country doesn’t become free just because a law says it should be. A country is free when a citizen mocks the state actors who harmed him and the system defends his right to do it." 🔥

"One in every 85 CDL drivers who completed the federal return-to-duty process and were cleared to operate a commercial vehicle may have been cleared by a truck driver from North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, who was pretending to be a self-certified SAP and registered as one." 😲

Trade expert Colin Grabow thinks we should just be able to buy and use ships from our allies. cbsn.ws/4rLGuqQ

Jan. 6er loses defamation suit against broadcaster that called Capitol riot an "insurrection"; also, the court says, "dismissal of charges based on a presidential pardon is not, as plaintiff claims, an 'acquittal' and is not a dismissal on the ground that the charges are 'baseless.'" [Volokh]

How do you fix a situation where a corrupt president can have his allies make bogus lawsuits against our own government, and then direct his corrupted "Justice Department" to settle and shell out taxpayer money to his corrupt friends? We need to start thinking about writing laws around this *now*.

Just to be very clear: The Trump DOJ is stealing $1.2 million of your money to gift one of Trump’s cronies, who pled guilty to the crimes he was charged with, and whose suit against the government had already been tossed by a judge.

Some folks think I'm overreacting. Do the math. The wrong user encountering the wrong kind of content at the wrong time can now result in million dollar verdicts and settlements. Hosting user generated content in any form, algorithmically or otherwise, is not legally tenable. Hope they appeal!

It was only a matter of time before Trump officially weighed in on #FISA Section 702 reauthorization. He did today, and here's my response.

Maryland's highest court declines to stretch the state's common law of nuisance to cover a benefit plan's licensed dispensing of controlled substances. That should spell an end to a county recoupment suit. (The correct ruling, in my opinion.)

Congress Should Create a Private Right of Action for Those Hurt by ICE open.substack.com/pub/chkbal/p...

Is the Court in retreat from Justice Scalia's methods? [@richardre.bsky.social]

To help restore and expand civics learning, Wesleyan University is offering a new course for high school students nationwide. With a heavy emphasis on youth leadership, it also explores contemporary challenges such as voter engagement, media literacy, and political polarization. #highered #education

Oh Florida simply doesn't allow fraud, why haven't other states tried that.

Legal scholars researching ancient texts often run into language barriers. Can AI help? On @reason.com, Hoover's @orinkerr.bsky.social explains how the latest generation of AI tools, though not absent of pitfalls, can help expand access to historic texts.

Large data center projects are meeting with stiff opposition in many parts of the country. How did one come to be approved in Joliet, Ill., by a wide margin? [John Anthony]

Every bit of this thread is fun.

Republicans have a ten point registration edge in the district.

Thanks to FactCheck's Lori Robertson for writing this deep dive into the details of the Save America Act and for generously quoting my analysis on several important provisions in the bill.

Much has been said about the SAVE ACT, which is unlikely to pass. NOT easy to determine its actual effect if it passes; MOST of what I have seen fails to explain the nuances! The best explanation I can find, please share it: www.factcheck.org/2026/03/comp... Please do NOT SHARE what others say!!!

Techdirt Podcast Episode 447: The Future Of Section 230 Support us on Patreon » Last month, Mike participated in the Cato Institute's Section 230 at 30 event to mark the 30th anniversary of the passage of Section 230. The event featured a series of fireside chats and panels that went deep on the…

I'm not a lawyer does lack of evidence impede your case www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

"60 Minutes" interviews my colleague Colin Grabow on the Jones Act and self-defeating shipping protectionism.

The most promising potential for a genuine policy issue realignment has been for Dems—across the board including progressives—to unapologetically embrace international free trade. Negatively polarized into it, sure. But the right result and a natural fit going forward even after Trump is gone.

"In his book The Stalin Cult, the historian Jan Plamper described a group of students, including some World War II veterans, who flipped the Stalin poster in their dorm to face the wall before talking candidly about their wartime experience."

Kilmar Abrego Garcia has agreed to go to Costa Rica, which has agreed to take him. The Trump admin's arguments for why it supposedly has to deport him to Africa instead are kind of pathetic, e.g. it's already cut a Liberia deal and U.S. "diplomatic reliability" is at stake. [Joe Lancaster, Reason]