It is grimly hilarious how much of Kavanaugh’s dissen-currence is just absolutely free-floating Framer telepathy citing to nothing but Ouija v. Board. Like five sentence in a row of “presumably the Framers would not have wanted…”. Textualism!

Reminder to Colorado journalists: if you’re interviewing a winning candidate who usually claims that elections are rigged, ask them why this election was rigged in their favor.

That Thomas was able to refer to scholarship made up out of whole cloth by Wurman, Barnett, and a few others points to a stark failure in the construction of the legal academy; there’s no real peer review of which to speak, and the tenure system limits consequences for bad faith arguments.

Here’s a member of the Texas State Board of Education openly bragging that they excluded “false religions” when they k-12 overhauled curricula last week.

"It's over, right?" a journo asked me this morning about the birthright citizenship case. No. No legal or political result is final unless the losing side gives up fighting. They will try again. New prez, new judges. There's a social movement based on racial grievance + scapegoating immigrants.

Tom Kean Jr. was healthy enough to authorize stock transactions up to $190,000 during his nearly 4-month absence from the House. There’s more to this story than he’s saying.

if you don’t think some asshole softball dad will humiliate a cisgender girl for hitting an oppo bomb off their daughter by challenging their gender you have never met a youth sports parent in your life.

a heart congrats once again to Jared Polis

Still cannot fucking believe some people think codifying Roe in legislation would have made it past these robed scoundrels. They destroyed a law passed unanimously (the VRA). The Conservatives on the Court voted 4-2 (!!!!!) to destroy a Constitutional amendment via Trump memo.

Do people who've never lived in Washington have a sense of how titanic a labor it is to get the Mall this empty, especially near the Fourth of July? Normally the monuments and Smithsonian would look _carpeted_ with tourists right now. Even 'Gigli' didn't chase people off like this.

personally I think we should immediately impeach supreme court justices who are willing to lie about the plain meaning of the 14th amendment

The legal arguments for Trump's birthright citizenship executive order are vapid and embarrassing. Multiple lower court judges legit laughed DOJ lawyers out of the room. The fact that four Supreme Court justices twisted themselves into logical pretzels to buy it is a constitutional emergency.

you're the director of the office of management and budget, *knowing* the answer to this — not what you "heard", not what you guess, actually knowing it — is very literally your job

we are one john roberts heart attack away from the complete dissolution of the reconstruction amendments and instantiation of a formalized caste system

i expect that 1) will be the modal outcome.

People, for the love of God, please stop treating birthright as some kind of sweeping victory. It was 5-4 on the constitutional issue. The dissent laid out a fucking ROADMAP for what Trump should do next. The court always gives Trump multiple bites at the apple WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU HAPPY ABOUT?

Guaranteed: 1) Black girls will be harassed and demanded to be tested over and over again regardless of how competitive they are. 2) Winners from public schools will be relentlessly hounded by the parents and coaches of losers at private schools, with the goal of making them quit the sport.

Serenity now...

Jackson.

folks said it couldn't be done, but they did it, they invented anti-woke living constitutionalism

Summary for non-lawyers: this week is the capstone of a project to undue EVERY important institution, norm, freedom, and right that we have been relying on (and taking for granted) for the last 80 years. We have only barely begun to feel the repercussions; I suspect we will regret it dearly.

really cannot be emphasized enough that the drafters of the birthright clause very much considered cases analogous to undocumented immigrants and *included them too*

prepare to have your daughter accused of being a boy and face demands that her gentials be inspected if the dad on the other team thinks that she fouled his special snowflake too hard

Our democracy only works when we have a non-partisan Supreme Court we can trust. It's past time to make major reforms to the way this court operates - and what it looks like.

This is essentially doing PR for the court and is unnecessary and strategically foolish. Baffling

one thing we touch on a bit here is that the argument that racism was essentially solved and therefore required no further intervention was popular among reactionaries as early as the 1870s

Yeah, the message should be something like: Today, the Court reached the right result, but it is beyond scandalous that four justices broke their oaths to support the Constitution and faithfully perform their duties under it by rewriting the Fourteenth Amendment to serve racist, partisan ends.

Here's the Eichmann of Minnesota, Ilan Wurman, arguing that the Trump administration has the right to indefinitely lock up every single undocumented immigrant in the United States. Upwards of 11 million people. morninganswerchicago.com/ilan-wurman-...

My read on the birthright citizenship cert grant was that the court, and particularly Roberts, wanted to use it as a fig leaf—an easy way to buck Trump & distract the public from their cooperation with him. The razor-thin margin of today’s ruling makes me think even that view was too optimistic.

the anti-birthright idea didn’t circulate for long enough in conservative legal circles. If it had circulated for another three years it would’ve been a majority opinion. I really do not think this fight is over

Kavanaugh’s originalism is so infinitely malleable. The Second Amendment applies to semi-automatic handguns *even though* those didn’t exist at in 1791 or 1868, but the Citizenship Clause doesn’t apply to illegal immigrants *because* those didn’t exist in 1868.

two things. first, always an irony that alito recapitulates the exact same arguments made against his immigrant forbearers. second, if this is all the 14th amendment did it would not have repudiated dred scott

I am low-key obsessed with this pair of Chinese designers, in no small part because the model guy is SERVING.

expand the court. no more half measures. this is intolerable.

Basically the Supreme Court is 5-4 on whether America is white man's country

I hope today is a stark reminder why "I will follow the law" was an absolutely horrible way to respond to a question about trans rights.

celebrating the supreme court and promoting the fiction that they are standing up against Trump is an insane rhetorical stance for someone in Schumer's position. The Supreme Court Gang of Six is the leading vanguard of the plot to enslave our country, you don't have to hand it to them.

this framing, the court standing up to trump, is precisely why this withered old piece of shit is unfit to even hold office, let alone lead the caucus

Klein: "Rufo is a very smart and often quite honest analyst of his own side. One thing I appreciate about him is he always says what he is doing clearly and in public." The old George-Wallace-is-at-least-open-about-his-racism trope,an attempt to justify this journalistic horror.

Yeah this is not the tone of alarm I’m looking for, try again.

The trans sports ban are almost completely an invention of the media, conservative and mainstream. it has been years of lies, of shoddy fact checking on just completely false conservative claims, years of phony concern trolling.

The fever swamps are cooking up mandatory surveillance of every woman for signs of pregnancy to enforce immigration law.

I think Lord Collins should start his global mission championing LGBT+ rights by talking to the regressive government of this little known nation called the UK.

I keep seeing people thinking this is a bluesky problem. If you're seeing this it thinks you're in a state or country with age verification laws. This is what every social media site will do if KOSA and the KIDS Act succeeds. Running to another socmed won't fix it, we have to fight the source.

We don’t get here without the unrestrained transphobia of outlets like The Atlantic and The New York Times or the utter failure of messaging from the Democratic Party. The liberal establishment kicked trans people to the curb and looked away as the bus ran us over.

i have run out of things i can legally say about the supreme court

Frankly U of MN alumni should refuse to donate to the school until Wurman is gone

fixing the court is table stakes for any Dem running for national office, you are not a serious candidate if you can’t get on board with this and refusing to do so is disqualifying in a primary because it doesn’t matter what your policy positions are if SCOTUS will just overrule them

if your 'defence' of women involves invasive and scientifically unfounded testing to determine who qualifies, you're not defending women, you're defending the patriarchy