It would also be an amazing political move but they’re so consumed by greed that they’re bad at the politics too.

If we were in a world where the political realities were such that this could become the law, then I think police power would be muted enough that your concern would be addressed too.

Of course we’re nowhere near that world so

17 Mollie reposted Sean Davis ~ @seanmdav X.com Elena Kagan is a psychopath. At the very moment conservative justices were at risk of being assassinated following the Dobbs leak (but before its official release), Kagan tried to delay the release of the opinion. Maybe in the hopes one of her colleagues would be murdered and the pro-life majority would evaporate. Kagan screamed so loudly at liberal ally after Dobbs leak th...

For book promo, Mollie Hemingway is boosting conservative influencers floating the idea that Elena Kagan’s pace of work was part of an elaborate plot to get Sam Alito murdered. This is the kind of poison the conservative justices’ media diets are pumping into their brains. Don’t care for it at all.

It bothers me so much. I would be able to travel so much more, but I waste a day each direction because LA is surprisingly far from everywhere and I basically can’t work on planes.

Opening text of a thread by Palantir from X Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief. 1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. 2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible. 3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. 4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

Palantir put out a 22-point summary of their CEO's book The Technological Republic. It's pitched as a defence of the West, but if you read it through the VDA framework, verification, deliberation, accountability, what it's actually doing looks rather different.
twitter-thread.com/t/2045574398...

I make this point specifically whenever I teach Transunion v. Ramirez (the FCRA standing case from 2021). Kavanaugh writes essentially that Congress can’t be trusted to just make up random laws based on no substance so they have to be reigned in. Which is…insane. And incredibly revealing.

That’s why he and the other Rs feel so free to play Calvinball. It’s not that they disagree with outcomes that aren’t conservative; it’s that they legitimately do not think nonconservative outcomes are *legitimate*. They have just forgotten that democracy means sometimes you lose.

I think the mockery of the law is worth emphasizing. The language that Roberts uses here—and that the Court frequently uses in its published opinions—reveals an absolute contempt for the political process, for the idea that political outcomes they disagree with can be legitimate choices.

Really gotta emphasize this: the targets & requirements in the Clean Power Plan were *so* modest, *so* conservative, *so* unambitious that *the power sector met them anyway, in the course of normal market operation*. The regs would have had basically no effect at all relative to the status quo.

Roberts said that Obama's Clean Power Plan would be "the most expensive regulation every imposed on the power sector." (Again, putting aside that whether it's expensive just isn't his fucking business, has nothing to do with the law.) And so he killed it -- put a stay on it until Trump was elected.

This bit right here. This is John Roberts basically admitting, explicitly, that he is dreaming up a legal doctrine out of nothing because he does not like or approve of Obama's policy:

*Roberts Court

Really, phone? “Ro Werts”?

Never give the govt credit for a good purpose, only ask if theyve overstepped some arbitrary line (because it hurts business or Republicans).

Don’t want to read too much into the liberals’ tepid response here bc they were blindsided, but I fear this one sided reasoning infects the Court as a whole

I was particularly struck by this point. Been working on First Amendment stuff lately and the main theory under which the Ro Werts Court operates is “negative theory”—a focus first and foremost on what the govt can’t do.

But this shows how pervasive the mindset is to them….

“Over just five days, the justices had decided the issue. Even as they debated the Obama plan’s possible burden on the power industry, in the entire chain of correspondence … not a single justice … mentioned the dangers of a warming planet as one of the possible harms the court should consider.”

The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court

There’s so much to say about the remarkable reporting from Jodi Kantor & Adam Liptak—and I’ll say a lot of it in Monday’s newsletter.

But the most striking thing about all of it is the role & behavior of Chief Justice Roberts. “Calling balls and strikes” this ain’t:

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...

Trite to say at this point, but this alone ends any other presidency in history.

i think folks might be unfamiliar with "the pharisees", so let's make it clear: he's saying the jews run the press, and that they are conspiring to undermine the military. it's not just antisemitism, it's indistinguishable from nazism.

"Those taxes you just paid? The money is going straight into Trump's pocket" would be good messaging

Voting on spy powers at 2am will definitely help with trust in the government!

fuck em up, professor

ballsandstrikes.org/legal-cultur...

this is part of why I particularly dislike the focus on the 25th. it makes it sound like the problem is in Trump's brain. but the problem is not in trump's brain, really. the problem is that there's a fascist party that loves fascism and supports the fascist (would-be) dictator).

And please remember, I quoted you once then it was all replies. You started up again today when I thought it was done. And at that point I even said it seemed like cool tool!

So skip the attempts to shame me and go find a little yourself.

I’m sorry that you feel slighted by being corrected in a public forum, but trying to shame me by suggesting a power dynamic that I had no reason to know existed is just another childish attempt to “score points.” Hopefully when you go to law school you’ll learn better how to temper your claims.

None of my students would confidently make such pronouncements about how law works because the first thing you learn in law school is that it’s human judgment all the way down. And if they did, they would know better than to try to lie about the statements they previously made when called on them.

As a future law student, I think it will be helpful for you to understand that it’s ok to admit you’re wrong and to learn from it. Humility is a welcome trait. It’s when you’re wrong and double down and attempt to gaslight people that you lose respect in professional situations.

No, you said it was “running” on people. Your meaning of “code” was software not rules. You changed the meaning after when people kept pointing out you said something dumb. And for some reason you’re too immature to just admit you misspoke.

I’m done with this conversation now. Have a nice day.

You insulted me and said you were done before even realized you were arguing with me. Why keep jumping in my mentions?

You also have no idea what you’re talking about. No one cares what the text was on X date for any practical purposes. They care what the *law* was. Your response is sophomoric.

And how irritating it can be when someone tries to switch meanings on the fly like they’re in some high school debate club trying to score points or something.