🗣️ Nebraska runs its own elections... not the feds! Common Cause just filed a lawsuit to ensure Nebraskans' voter data stays with Nebraska election officials, not meddling Washington bureaucrats! www.commoncause.org/nebraska/pre...

I've been teaching Admin Law this semester. I think we're now just at the "thoughts and prayers" stage.

Uuuugh. You can pitch "AI for nose hair removal" and have a billion dollars dumped on your head overnight, but perhaps the most important civic function in democratic politics is starving to death.

We are (still) more powerful than we realize.

The subhead of this piece is "The Underpants Gnomes Are Coming For Our Elections." I couldn't think of a better way to convey the magical thinking that imagines Trump to be in charge of the elections process ... or a better way to dispel that illusion.

Former counselor to RFK Jr’s predecessor:

AI’s just choosing which laws are real and which are fictional now. No notes.

“We all especially know” bsky.app/profile/kati...

Just because he says the crime and corruption out loud does not make it less criminal or corrupt.

If I were writing a law school exam hypothetical about a government official engaging in coercion, I would literally have the official tell the regulated entity, "We can do this the easy way or the hard way." It's a little on the nose actually.

Boy the DOJ’s latest lawsuit sure seems like it’s showing that _DOJ_ is actually violating federal law. electionlawblog.org?p=152107

it is very hard to violate rule 8. so this one's heading to civ pro classes nationwide

This is a Rule 8 dismissal, which is not common when you’re represented by a lawyer, but is very common when you’re a sovereign citizen suing without a lawyer. This judge is treating the president of the United States as a pro se litigant.

The doomerism also ignores reality, from the other side. Yeah, it’s true that SCOTUS has gone off the rails too often. But for every one of those, there are 20 trial courts doing the right thing. A world where law doesn’t matter at all looks a whole lot worse (still) than the one we live in.

Disney learned nothing from Andor.

The reality show imperative is to keep upping the stakes, because it’s the only way to keep the viewers engaged. bsky.app/profile/kenw...

Far more dangerous than Trump, I think, is how quickly the last eight months have pulled back the curtain on America's elites and shown everyone how venal, how cowardly and how utterly mediocre the foundation of our society has been.

Remembering something of a fuss a few years ago about alleged government interference with speech, and thinking about this piece, for no reason in particular. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/it-d...

Chicago federal judges, time to issue the same it-takes-more-than-being-brown order Judge Frimpong did in LA. Because despite Justice Kavanaugh’s hallucination, Judge Frimpong’s order still reflects the law. bsky.app/profile/john...

“The Trump administration is ordering the removal of information on slavery at multiple national parks in an effort to scrub them of ‘corrosive ideology.’”

“My idiot henchmen keep screwing this up. I keep telling DHS to throw you in miserable basement cells in shackles AFTER we’re done exploiting your technical expertise and trade secrets. If we promise to get the order right going forward, you’ll still come, right?”

More on the shooting at the Naval Academy, per NBC News

It is wildly unusual for lower-court judges to so publicly express frustration with the Supreme Court’s *behavior* (versus, say, a confusing ruling in a specific case). But the number of *different* examples is completely unprecedented—and pretty powerful evidence that something is seriously wrong.

In the midst of an awful stretch, I loved this conversation with @the-downballot.com bsky.app/profile/the-...

To mourn Kirk’s horrific killing as a wound to democracy is right. To recast him as democracy’s patron saint is dangerous delusion.

if you are in line to dunk on ezra klein STAY in line to dunk on ezra klein

On Wednesday, the GOP-controlled House Appropriations Committee voted 34-28 along party lines to advance a funding bill that calls for excluding people living in the states without legal status from #2030Census results that the 14th Amendment says must include “whole number of persons in each state”

This is pretty fucked up in lots of ways.

smart analysis from @sifill.bsky.social on why the Supreme Court has "all but declared war" on district courts: Trial judges are closest to the facts, and those facts pose obstacles to the GOP justices' preferred outcomes "Inconvenient facts expose the game" sherrilyn.substack.com/p/scotus-ice...

In the minds of most Americans, we’ve tended to mythologize the Warren Court as most representative of the Supreme Court, when in truth, for most of our history the Court has ruled against minority rights, upheld the power of wealthy white men, and rarely protected the most vulnerable.

SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in a college applicant's file is blatantly unconstitutional ALSO SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in targeting whom to detain and deport is cool cool cool

#SCOTUS all-but overruled a unanimous, 90-year-old precedent through an unexplained "administrative" stay this morning, and that's only the second-most-problematic thing it did before lunchtime.

This order is power, not law. There are no principles here at all. (I don’t mean good or bad principles: I mean literally none.) What this does - on its own terms - is pause a specific July 11 order in a specific 2:25-cv-5605 case. Which means judges in other cases should keep doing law.

I understand this isn’t the primary problem here. But “Chipocalypse Now” is just bursting with “Chili’s loaded nacho plate inflicting historic intestinal distress” energy.

This is gibberish. Trying it as a Mad Libs makes just as much sense. Trump may try to declare a [noun] crisis to claim “[imposing adjective] powers” over [noun] and override [collective noun]

Amazing, unusually direct rebuke to Gorsuch and Kavanaugh from Judge Burroughs. She is, of course, entirely correct.

holy shit dude using a fake deployment for wildland fire crews from a fire that’s only 13% contained during peak western US fire season to detain multiple firefighters and remove the crews from the fire is a scale of evil & dangerous I can’t fully communicate to people not from wildfire regions

“I just want to note how extraordinary it is to have 3 veteran Justice Department watchers of diverse politics—none of us alarmists, all of us believers in the institutional continuity of the DOJ across time—tripping over each other to describe the magnitude of the earthquake that has struck it.”

These problems are even bigger. As a constitutional matter, the deployment of unfederalized Guard personnel into a nonconsenting state can never happen. Never.

I know, I know, but: The president of the US saying, literally, "we're going in" in reference to sending the military to an American city for no reason beyond terrorizing the local population should be the most immediately impeachable shit imaginable

Thread: this is Russ Vought giving himself permission to ignore Congress and the constitution

“Trump says he will sign executive order mandating that you rename your oldest child ‘Trump’”

“We’re not even a voting rights advocacy organization, but we’ve had to become one.” That refrain’s going to be awfully familiar over this next stretch.

The camouflage fatigues combined with the high-visibility vests is just *chef's kiss*. It screams "wtf am I doing here"???

Mid-howl. Full body. The right way to do it.

Adam Raine, 16, died from suicide in April after months on ChatGPT discussing plans to end his life. His parents have filed the first known case against OpenAI for wrongful death. Overwhelming at times to work on this story, but here it is. My latest on AI chatbots: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...

The Adam Raine complaint is forcing people to wake up to the fact that AI interfaces can be designed with the manipulative charm, ethical core, and reliability of a grade-A psychopath. Will users realize that they’re talking to the _same_ psychopath even when they’re not discussing self-harm?

Last week's SCOTUS order on NIH grants shows how "understanding the Supreme Court is going to be — and must be — a fundamentally different undertaking from learning law for the near-term future." New from me today at Law Dork:

Give the @aflcio.org comms team a raise