I was in the courtroom today as Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order faced SCOTUS scrutiny. As Trump sat on watching, S.G. John Sauer faced skeptical questions from almost all of the justices — including all three justices Trump appointed to the high court. Here’s my Law Dork report:

This is unhinged. Trump just listed five conflicting plans for/status updates on Iran over the past 30 seconds.

Translation: i don’t care about your families I would rather start wars in the Middle East and Latin America

Just so you understand, this is as if you prepared for argument in front of a panel that included Cookie Monster, and Cookie Monster asked you a question about cookies, and you had not thought about cookies in advance.

Great speech, dude.

“How can I afford child support?”

JFC. Impeach and remove this lawless man, you fools.

Called our local animal control to reunite a family of Sandhill Cranes. So frickin adorable! Grateful ❤️

CNN put together a montage of the regime's incoherent talking points about Trump's war on Iran

Really masterful how he softens you up with a joke and then goes in for the gut punch

Oh good. What could possibly go wrong with putting a Deus Vult dork in charge of Defense. Who could have seen this coming.

"... the vast majority of Russians identified as Orthodox Christians, and most Germans in the 1930s were either Catholic or Protestant. These populations were, per capita, arguably more biblically literate than we are today."

I guess military-disqualifying bone abnormalities are hereditary

Good source of info on Iran albeit 2 days old. The straight of Hormuz is impassable. Note the list of cyberattacks we may be facing. But the state of siege the people are facing by their own government as well as ours weighs on my heart the most. chertoffgroup.com/situation-re... #iran

I can’t imagine that Trump’s daddy Putin is happy with his ally being attacked.

February 18, 2026

At least 115 people, most of them likely children, were killed in a strike on a girls’ elementary school in Iran on Saturday, health officials and state media said. It was not immediately clear which country hit the school. Our reporters are trying to confirm details of the attack. trib.al/HxXybV9

There have been plenty of muddled and at times outright false justifications offered by presidents for past American wars, but it's something different to have no coherent rationale at all, no comprehensible stated goal, and no meaningful attempt to rally public opinion.

A big part of the authoritarian playbook is war. War takes over the news. War blots out criticism. War divides a nation’s people, subjecting those against it to being called unpatriotic. War grants leaders all sorts of emergency powers. War consumes everything else. We mustn’t let this war do so.

Exactly. Blindly hooting for the Buffoon-in-Chief as he unlawfully orders airstrikes without a coherent plan isn't a foreign policy, and isn't patriotic; it's just stupid, and dangerous.

or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces."

or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization,

Here's the relevant section - it comes before the notice provisions. Section 2(c) of the War Powers Resolution (50 U.S.C. § 1541) states: "The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, ...

The notice provisions you cite only kick in if the President does not have that congressional consent - in the case of a response to an attack. The War Powers Act DOES NOT give the President a free pass to take military action from 60-90 days. That's insane and not true.

You have clearly not read the War Powers Act, Mike. Everything you've written is totally wrong. The War Powers Act SPECIFICALLY PROHIBITS military action unless: a/ there is a prior congressional authorization; or b/ it's a response to an attack against the U.S.

What? You're telling me the man with 34 felony convictions, a convicted rapist, stole top secret govt documents, sold state secrets to foreign nations, and raped children is doing something illegal! 😱

Donald Trump is planning to use his attack on Iran to justify a power grab over voting in the 2026 midterms. The fact that the attack violates the Constitution won’t stop him from trying. It is our job to expose this plot and ensure that it does not succeed. www.democracydocket.com/opinion/trum...

Sen Chris Murphy (D-CT) to Face the Nation: “I don't have any obligation to fund a Department of Homeland Security that is violating the law every day, just like I don't have any obligation to support this war that is illegal as well.”

But Benghazi ?

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." -Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953

The costs of this Iran war debacle will likely be more than the cost of extending the ACA health insurance subsidies. If you asked Americans, which do you want: another war in the Middle East or lower health care costs at home, is the margin 90 to 10? 95 to 5?

Mark Warner: "I saw no intelligence that Iran was on the verge of launching any kind of preemptive strike against the United States. None."

Chris Murphy: "We need to stand up for the American citizens that ICE is murdering, the kids they're terrorizing. They should stop this illegal war and they should stop ICE from terrorizing our communities. We should demand they do both things."

These guys were selling t-shirts until they needed a war to cover up the intentional damage they did to the economy and the president's involvement in a pedophilia scandal.

They went to war with Iran (which nobody in America was asking for) so they could conjure an excuse to allow ICE to keep murdering Americans and teargassing schools here at home with impunity (which nobody in America was asking for).

THIS.

Does this dude think that the ayatollah who we just killed is the same one who rose to power in 1979?

Khamenei’s death at the hand of a nation he worked very hard to kill is a hinge moment in the history of Iran’s revolution, Karim Sadjadpour argues.

So if he had received his coveted Nobel peace prize, would that have stopped him from attacking Iran? He’s such a petulant child. He’s Veruca Salt.

Wars can only be declared by Congress. Taxes can only be levied by Congress. Spending can only be appropriated by Congress. Laws can only be passed by Congress. Any President who refuses to work with Congress is an enemy of the Constitution and the rule of law.

"The Peace President." [Cartoon by Benjamin Slyngstad]

On Thanksgiving, the immigrant children held at the Dilley detention center gathered in the gym for what they thought was a holiday feast. The kids salivated over a spread of turkey, sandwiches, pastries and pies, a family told me. But the food wasn’t for detainees — it was for the staff.