Fraught confirmation battles, FedSoc pipelines, billionaire-sponsored junkets, categorizing justices by ideology or by who nominated them, timed retirements, specially crafted cases, shadow docket — All of these are symptoms of a main flaw with SCOTUS: it’s known ahead of time who will hear cases.

Yep. If the test for birthright citizenship is the "domicile" of the parents, well, "domicile" is a subjective test (you can be a resident of one place and a domiciliary of another), determining who derived citizenship at birth might require complicated inquiries into the parents' hopes and dreams.

It should not be overlooked that the justiciability for gutting the FECA coordinated-contributions limits was established by the fiction that JD Vance may run for *Senate* in 2028. Laughable.

The solution to "birth tourism" is what it always been, which is due care in issuing visas to visitors reasonably suspected of it.

This is sad, and I’m glad he’s getting help, but this is really not an excuse for a sitting member of Congress to bugger off without notice for four months. If you are incapable of fulfilling your duties for health reasons, you need to step down.

Among other things, the story said he announced his retirement from the bench. But Alito ... wasn't in court today.

A decent society cannot survive if we abandon even the barest expectation of decency from the people in charge of it. Their lies and deceptions will always outrun whatever safeguards you put up to cabin those lies and deceptions

Stunning that 4 justices don't think the 14th amendment means what it states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

"a living constitution for me but not for thee" - Kavanaugh, J.

A shockingly close call on how to read plain English in the first sentence of a constitutional amendment.

The Emperor’s New Crowds

We need a Mandamus Court made up of a randomly selected panel of federal judges, one from each federal circuit, that is strictly limited to reviewing and overturning SCOTUS opinions for clear error: wrong or neglected facts, misconstrued statutes, overstepping, improvidently granted cert, etc.

As @joshchafetz.bsky.social keeps saying: keep your eye on the expansion of judicial, not only the expansion of executive, power. 4/4

RETRACTED

It'd be awkward which is why Congress hasn't done it, but they could create an Article III "court" for the sole purpose of appointing executive officers and give that court the power to appoint 99.9% of the executive branch, president cut out entirely. That's a plain text power they have.

Accepting the (wrong) premise, if Congress created agencies and officers structured unconstitutionally, then the rule of law result would be striking down their existence and powers entirely. Instead the Court treats it like a one-way ratchet: grants of power by Congress upheld, limits struck down.

The notion that the president has absolute power over creations of Congress is already nuts, with no basis in law, but it reaches utterly absurd when it includes an unwritten "but not when some Supreme Court Justices feel like he's messing with the money" exception.

Yeah, that is very wrong. The Constitution puts *Congress* in control of immigration. That the president can do a lot in the field is because Congress passed laws granting those powers. /there is *some* inherent executive authority to exclude, but that authority is largely regulated by Congress.

the revealed view of this SCOTUS is that the framers got things mixed up when they wrote the constitution and that actually, the president is the central figure of the national government and congress exists as a junior partner that really ought not get in his way

Slaughter belongs in the anti-canon, a decision so egregiously wrong it has zero precedential value and is self-discrediting. It is not a plausible reading of a constitutional ambiguity, it is constitutionalizing the structure of an autocracy.

To be quite blunt, the Court is undermining the legitimacy of the Constitution itself

the president can negotiate with congress. the president can offer proposals and suggestions. but the only direct control the president has over lawmaking is his ability to veto! once something is signed into law, he is constitutionally obligated to "faithfully execute" it!

this is absolutely wild. where does roberts think these agencies come from?!? who invested them with authority to act? whose mandate are they designed to execute? the president is the chief EXECUTive. his job is executing the will of Congress as it spells out in its duly-passed laws!

Justice Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench. It reads in part: "Today, this Court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of Government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time. Its conclusion is wrong."

The Cook and Slaughter opinions, released together, show just how political the Supreme Court is. As Kavanaugh's concurrence in Cook makes clear, the Court treats the Federal Reserve as special for no reason other than its own policy preference.

ah the 401K exception. i’ll have to read the slaughter opinion but it is worth saying that insulating operational control of the executive branch from congress is an instance of how “separation of powers” starkly undermines accountability and democracy

Alito’s standard for racial discrimination in the TPS ruling, that racism has to be the *sole* motivation to count as discriminatory, is so deranged that it could arguably cover neither Jim Crow nor slavery. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Getting rid of well-respected high ranking members of the military in order to install loyalists is what you do when you are planning to do the wrong thing and want to make sure the military complies with your orders.

When Republicans say "this is a Christian nation" what they are saying religious freedom for me, not for thee, and their intent to create the conditions necessary for suppressing religious freedom. They are doing that right now in fact. ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/lando...

completely incomprehensible

I was on a Zoom call with advocates from Springfield and elsewhere in Ohio yesterday afternoon, and it’s absolutely horrifying and inexcusable what this administration is doing to this community and the lie that Sam Alito told to OK this.

Let’s be clear: this is a coup against the Constitution’s system of checks and balances, and a violation of the Speaker’s oath of office. His duty under the Constitution is not to shield the executive from oversight or accountability, but to ensure the executive upholds the laws.

"I'll protect you from accountability." Is a hell of a message.

Speaker Johnson says his job is to 'protect' from Trump oversight and accountability.

Then Lin started feeling kinda gooey inside and he fell on his knees and he cried and cried and that’s when the security guards threw them out

Trump claimed that he was going to personally pay for the new polished African granite walkway carved in Italy he had installed at the WH. But in fact taxpayers paid all $689,232 for Trump’s vanity project.

A new granite walkway. Refinishing the wall to glue those hideous gold accents. Trump claimed he was paying for all of it. He lied. They’ve been looting the National Parks.

🧵🧵🧵 Take this quiz: Which of these quotes are Republicans talking about Somali immigrants and which are Nazis talking about Jews? 1/ They’re “garbage. These are people who do nothing but complain.” 2/ “Public pests … vermin … leeches.” 3/ “They’re all crooks.” 4/ They’re “criminal-minded people.”

Note the slip: “We control the…Supreme Court” Not even the Republicans can keep up the pretense that the Supreme Court majority are impartial arbiters of law. They are fellow partisans, and this fact constitutes a betrayal of their oath of office.

Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo apologizes for guest Kevin O'Leary accusing opponents of his Utah data center of being paid by China: www.mediamatters.org/artificial-i...

This is a fake image and story, promoted by the altNOAA account as if it were true, and the account has disabled quote skeets on it to prevent it from being called out as a fabrication. I’ve been suspicious of this account for a while now, but this is evidence they’re a bad actor. Now blocked.

It was a Republican Senator in the 1973 Watergate hearings that famously asked: "What did the president know and when did he know it?" Today's Republican Senators, including Utah’s Mike Lee and John Curtis, are enablers of Presidential corruption.

@kateshaw.bsky.social gets at something very important & correct here: In case after case (including yesterday's TPS case), the Court *hasn't* ruled that the Trump Administration acted lawfully--instead, it's held that courts can't enjoin or remedy *illegal* conduct. [1]

Enjoy this article from a Minnesota newspaper in 1882 noting that Scandinavians love their home countries so much that it will take them generations to assimilate into America. www.loc.gov/resource/sn8...

Imagine asking someone unfamiliar with the cases to read this side-by-side with Masterpiece Cakeshop & predict in which case the statements by official decisionmakers were sufficient to make the govt action invalid because of animus.

Alternate take: Elected officials in line for the presidency shouldn't consider using illegally raised funds to pay hush money to underlings who break the law for them, then try to cover it up by falsely invoking "national security", as "no big deal".

defending this stuff, pandering to it…it destroys the soul

Meanwhile, here’s how Ohio’s governor, a Republican, responded to today’s decision.

I think we need to be using the word “oppression” more to describe this administration’s policies and actions towards immigrants, prisoners, critics, and increasingly regular citizens. This is an oppressive regime, committing daily injustices and assaults on people’s liberties.

Area VP not making the point he thinks he's making