Unprecedented corruption

Labor behind bars is usually mandatory, and workers earn just pennies per hour. Nationwide, incarcerated people earn between $0.86 and $3.45 PER DAY for most prison jobs. And in some states, they earn nothing for their work.

"Better choices instead of excuses."

Would like to again congratulate John Roberts & co. for making this lunatic immune to criminal prosecution, immune to (mandatory!) electoral disqualification, and immune to Congressional limitations on his control over executive branch agencies. Going absolutely splendidly!

We are terrorizing an entire country. www.wsj.com/world/middle...

Ro Khanna (?!) is right

Whatever happens, this is a deeply shameful episode in American history that will leave a permanent stain on the country. Repeatedly vowing to commit war crimes against millions of innocent civilians is beyond the pale.

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Good to see a NYT opinion piece skewering Axios for whatever reason but this one is a doozy. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/o...

Constitutional lawyer here. I don't think it would violate the Constitution for the VP/Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment, but the intended constitutional remedy for this behavior is impeachment & removal. The fact that that remedy is politically impossible is a scandal and a crisis.

A Black pastor in Alabama has spent 4 years struggling to get justice after police arrested him for not producing an ID while he was watering his neighbor’s flowers and the Alabama Supreme Court just put another obstacle in his path, saying the arrest was a-okay ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics...

Here is my thread on Trump's budget request, which I'll update throughout the day. He calls to cut domestic discretionary funding to the lowest level in the modern era. Trump's budget reimagines Americans' relationship with our govt, and proposes a country that does less to help people get by.

He has a green card, but ICE is continuing a pattern of criminalizing criticism of US foreign policy and eviscerating the First Amendment. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

if you invented public libraries today, every opinion page in the country would be arguing for means tested subsidized Amazon Prime memberships

The MAGA project is in a very real sense about undoing the 14th Amendment. newrepublic.com/article/2084...

The Marina Is For Everybody is an incredible sign in its own right, but especially so when deployed in opposition to a new housing project in a census tract where the median household income is ~$250k/yr, and average home values are $2,000,000+

This is an absolute scandal; the United States government is deliberately consolidating all deportation cases of an ethnic minority that the President has called "garbage" in front of a handpicked group of judges and with dramatically accelerated timeline. A lawsuit was filed yesterday against it.

One indication of congressional atrophy is that people turn to SCOTUS for the thing we should but don't get from Congress: an actual public debate on an important policy issue. Which of course isn't supposed to be a legislative debate, but we've stopped having any actual legislative debates.

The fact that Trump is going to oral arguments to pressure the justices to acquiesce to his attempted nullification of a constitutional amendment and create a stateless class for the first time since the civil war, illustrates what is really at the core of the Trump project and it isn’t tariffs.

originalism, i am told, is supposed to respect popular sovereignty. but here we have two “originalists” who insist that their language games — and that is what this is, a language game meant to extract meaning where it does not exist — ought to control over a sovereign act of the people.

When I taught at a T14 school, I taught SCOTUS & Circuit pronouncements of law, but always asked the students to figure out what happened on remand. Even though my students were 2 and 3Ls I, was first the first prof to ask them that. Often, I had to teach them how to look it up.

“The task ahead for the president’s opponents is to recover the egalitarian substance of the 14th Amendment and wield it against his narrow and exclusive vision of American society. This is the work of history, it is the work of law and it is the work, as always, of politics.”

Employers should cover work-related travel and other expenses directly rather than require employees to float their employer an interest-free loan while subjecting them to a byzantine reimbursement process that will take at least a month and entail multiple rounds of paperwork.

We've got ourselves a genuine specimen of "gentrification began right after I moved here ten years ago"

Orban is so important to Trump and his global alliance of thugs because he’s proof of concept not only for how far they can take their retrograde policy agenda, but also for how far nominally liberal societies will allow them to go to stay in power before rejecting them. Keep your eye on Hungary.

There’s a Briffault for every state/local headline (this one remains a favorite): scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcont...

Glad you went. The point is that the biggest possible numbers on the streets is visual confirmation that the regime isn’t in control and people do not fear it. That matters for opposing an authoritarian consolidation; the perception of weakness is weakness. Maxing crowd numbers is a valid goal

really can't be said enough that this case was decided by the same court that decided plessy v. ferguson. if they could have found a plausible rationale to limit birthright citizenship they would have done it. but there is none! the text is as clear as constitutional language can be.

I've been warning about the rising attacks on pro-choice speech for months. Just this week, South Dakota banned ads for abortion with language so broad that even providing *information* about how to get abortion could be prosecutable jessica.substack.com/p/south-dako...

6:49am: sudden spike in oil futures trading. no news. no announcement. nothing public. 7:05am: trump announces a pause on iran strikes. markets move. someone knew. 16 minutes early. $580 million in contracts. the corruption is staggering.

“A good number of Republicans flat-out support attacks on Iran, and have been pushing for it for years. Indeed, that’s an important point to remember: When Members of Congress and the president agree on something, we should never automatically assume that it’s the latter driving the former.”

This is pretty exemplary of how electeds fetishize hyper-localism. The more localized and smaller the group, the more authentic and virtuous. A dozen homeowners from a single neighborhood are valorized as "community voices," worthy of sabotaging a regional transit project.

"the decline in [academic freedom in] the United States has been more rapid and pronounced, particularly in the last year. It has deteriorated by 50% from 2015 to 2025 and is now evaluated as moderate autonomy by country experts" academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

I know this is an obvious thing to say but we should talk more about what a racist this guy is. He’s as racist as George Wallace or Strom Thurmond but unlike them he often escapes having racism mentioned as a leading cause for all his decisions.

When Kansas experimented with the Brownback state economy this is pretty much exactly what happened. They kept knocking over load-bearing things & then people scrambled to put them back. Yet even now those guys will insist that they didn't fail, they just didn't get enough buy-in to succeed.

Spain's renewables build-out has structurally decoupled its electricity prices from gas markets. Gas now sets the price in only 15% of hours, compared to 90% in Italy. Countries that invested early in clean power are far less exposed to fossil fuel price shocks. Those that didn't now pay the price.

At a time when America is learning, yet again, how vulnerable fossil-fuel dependence makes us, an all Democrat elected body should not be hobbling us for generations just to placate idiots living in a neighborhood that had to be forcibly integrated and where the median home price is $1.2 million.

"You do not have local control" is exactly the type of one-sided conversation California needs to have with segregationist cities like Los Angeles if our state is ever going to cease losing residents to Texas and serving as the unsheltered homelessness capital of the planet.

oh look at that www.pew.org/en/research-...

“I told him, ‘I’m a U.S. citizen!’ He told me, ‘I don’t care.’” Everyone should read this account of an ICE raid on a home in Vermont. This is what secret police do. Great reporting from @sevendaysvt.bsky.social: www.sevendaysvt.com/news/teen-sh...

Every couple of months or so, someone puts out a piece of bad social science meant to undermine the case for more housing. For Roosevelt Institute, I wrote a blog post responding to the two most recent specimens. rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/there-i...

I have seen very few movies this year so I can't really judge the oscars, but one of the movies I did see was Sinners, and its portrayal of the Jim Crow economy is the film's driving force, even more than its supernatural elements www.theatlantic.com/culture/arch...

critics say

Declaring that no quarter will be given unequivocally violates international humanitarian law. Indeed, ordering that no quarter will be given, threatening an adversary therewith or conducting hostilities on this basis is prohibited and constitutes a war crime.

“What are the lessons from the Parisian revolution? First, pushing out cars improves life for most inhabitants. Lesson 2 is that banishing cars doesn’t hurt an urban economy. Lesson 3: car-free cities must offer people good alternative ways to travel. Paris itself does.” @simonkuper.bsky.social

Personally, I think people who are between the third and fourth quintile of income-earners in California should probably pay some income tax.

This is the way.