I didn’t realize the Confederate States of America still had a Justice Department

Financial crisis hit at end of Bush. We elected Obama but people forgot to blame Bush.

Covid hit at end of Trump 1. We elected Biden but people forgot to blame Trump.

Great Depression hit at beginning of Hoover. He stuck around refusing to help for years, then Republicans lost for decades.

On the one hand, Trump has learned nothing from the past two months. But on the other hand, Trump has learned nothing from the past 40 years.

Splatoon as the #1 trending topic on bsky is a great venn diagram for me but can we do this when it's not 9am on a work day please

"It's going to happen," sighed managing partner Charles Winston

FinTwitter @fintwitter.bsky.social • 1m TRUMP SAYS US SHOULD ALWAYS HAVE LOWEST INTEREST RATE IN THE WORLD • • • FinTwitter @fintwitter.bsky.social • 1m TRUMP SAYS I'VE BEEN IN FAVOR OF RATE RISES TO FIGHT INFLATION ...

The best brain!

Plenty of criticism on the right of the #SCOTUS leaker and the Times’s reporting, but has anyone actually responded to the argument that Roberts’s assessment of “irreparable harm” and his refusal to balance the equities is completely inconsistent with his subsequent behavior in all the Trump cases?

We built a capital full of Roman temples and then forgot that Caesar was bad

“Symbolism…is how we affirm the values we care about, how we embed a reminder of the virtues we choose to aspire to. Despots do not adopt cultish, personalist symbolism out of simple egomania but because they know it is the basis of their regime. Republics must do the same”

“Some might argue that the symbolism is entirely beside the point…But this view relies on the mistaken idea that symbolism is merely decorative, when it is actually one of the primary ways regimes legitimate themselves… how citizens come to understand what kind of government they live under.”

“Every program that carries the president’s name sends a message that the benefits of government flow from him personally. Not from Congress, or the Constitution, or our collective project of self-governance.”

Thank you for writing this—such a great explanation of an issue that’s far more important than it gets credit for

🧵

The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court

You should read this in full, but in short, John Roberts and the other Koch plants on the Supreme Court blew up the Supreme Court to protect the fossil fuel industry from climate regulation.

public, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has cultivated a reputation for care and caution. The papers reveal a different side of him. At a critical moment for the country and the court, the papers show, he acted as a bulldozer in pushing to stop Mr. Obama’s plan to address the global climate crisis. When colleagues warned the chief justice that he was proposing an unprecedented move, he was dismissive. “I recognize that the posture of this stay request is not typical,” he wrote. But he argued that the Obama plan, which aimed to regulate coal-fired plants, was “the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector,” and too big, costly and consequential for to act.

John Roberts' media cultivation as Mr. Balls & Strikes has been astounding on how long it's been maintained.

This concern for cost really calls back to the Major Questions Doctrine. MQD now reads more like a constitutionalization of CJ Roberts' own preferences in retrospect.

Mr. Obama had been one of just 22 senators to vote against Chief Justice Roberts's confirmation in 2005, saying that the nominee had "far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak." Four years later, the

Senator Obama’s finest hour

INTRODUCTION United States v. Munsingwear.1 As Nina Totenberg has noted, “Munsingwear vacatur sounds like a disease.”2 Few scholars, even those immersed in the worlds of civil procedure and Supreme Court practice, can correctly define it. But this trend is changing. More and more Court watchers are starting to monitor Munsingwear,3 likely because, since 2017 and especially since 2021, the Court has been using it to vacate lower court decisions that favor progressives at an alarming rate.4 The Court is effectively removing precedent with one-line orders rather than choosing the more moderate path of denying certiorari. The political importance of this trend cannot be overstated. The merits of these cases go to the very heart of ideological battles. Relying on Munsingwear, the Court (or at least five Justices of the Court) has wiped away critically important decisions that counter key Republican objectives. Two lower court rulings granted standing to plaintiffs suing former President Donald J. Trump for violations of the Emoluments Clause.5 Gone. One ruling allowed the House Committee on the Judiciary to review grand jury materials in the Trump impeachment.6 Gone. Another ruling invalidated a Tennessee gubernatorial order that halted abortions during COVID.7

Gone. Two rulings invalidated work requirements to receive Medicaid imposed by the Trump Administration.8 Gone. One ruling held that President Trump could not ban followers from his Twitter account.9 Gone. One ruling allowed individuals to sue states directly pursuant to the Voting Rights Act.10 Gone. One ruling upheld the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision to extend mail ballot receipt deadlines during COVID.11 Gone. One ruling held that undated ballots could be counted during a Pennsylvania election.12 Gone. One ruling held that the House of Representatives had standing to sue the executive branch for violations of its appropriations power in connection with President Trump’s border wall.13 Gone. One ruling prohibited the Trump Administration from returning asylum seekers to Mexico under its “Migrant Protection Protocols.”14 Gone. All these appellate court decisions are now uncitable, and future actions previously held unlawful must be litigated anew. The Court vacated as many cases between 2017 and the winter of 2023 as it did between 1994 and 2016.15 In most of these recent cases, a party claimed that the case had become moot on appeal because (1) President Trump lost the 2020 election and the Biden Administration thereby abandoned the policies; (2) the policies expired by their own terms; or (3) the particular election at issue came and went. And

admittedly, COVID and the Trump Administration spawned many lawsuits that pertained solely to those (temporary) conditions. Nevertheless, the uptick in Munsingwear vacatur appears to almost entirely favor one set of ideological interests over another—a claim that we empirically test in this Article. In only one of the Munsingwear GVRs—“grant, vacate, remand”—that we identified since 2021 did liberal interests associated with the Democratic Party lose in the court below.16 In that same period, the Court’s orders nullified liberal victories below in eleven cases.17 And the vacation of these decisions is not merely important because the decisions themselves have been wiped off the books. Their elimination is noteworthy because no law is left in their stead; precedent has literally been erased. The same issues are now ripe for relitigation, perhaps before different judges, perhaps with different results that will set different precedent, and now without prior precedent or circuit split in the vacuum. Litigants who watch the Court have begun to perceive the Court’s signals that, if a lower court case does not turn out as anticipated or desired, there may well be a second bite at the apple. This pernicious turn of procedure may seem minor until examined in light of the big picture of issues such as voting rights, immigration rights, and executive power, in which the butterfly effect of one vacated case could lead to entirely new and different branches of law made for generations. Some may ask what harm comes from these vacaturs given that the same judges granting them might likely reverse them on the merits. First, the lack of transparency and deliberation is a harm in itself both to the system and the gaming it invites. Second, the Court is unlikely to grant certiorari and review every single case, and, even if it did, it may well uphold some of the clearer cases on the merits upon full briefing. Third, if the Court simply denied cert, it would allow the circuit courts e…

to lower courts. We lay out an empirical analysis of the Court’s current Munsingwear practice, in which we show that the Court has long disfavored vacated liberal cases at a higher rate, that it is doing so much more often now, and that it is not treating like circumstances alike. This Article contains six parts. In Part I, we explain the procedure the Supreme Court uses to GVR in cases that have become moot on their way to the Court. We then explain Munsingwear and U.S. Bancorp v. Bonner Mall,18 the two cases that comprise the heart of the doctrine. In Part II, we describe one of the most recent cases in which the Court has granted Munsingwear vacatur, a fascinating toe-to-toe about voters’ rights. This case provides a helpful vehicle for understanding the detrimental impact of Munsingwear vacatur on lower court precedent. In Part III, we review the scant literature on the Court’s use of Munsingwear vacatur. In Part IV, we introduce our empirical study, lay out our study methodology, and provide a qualitative review of our results. In Part V, we report our results and explain why they are significant in terms of understanding the Court’s current practice and hidden agendas. In Part VI, we discuss implications and questions raised by our findings.

Here's the intro to the Tucker/Risch piece on the Roberts Court and Munsingwear vacatur, which won the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers' annual prize for article of the year. You'll want to read the whole thing to learn about this *other* procedural maneuver they're using. 2/2

The rise of the shadow docket in 2016 was followed in 2017 by another procedural trick from the Roberts Court, known as "Munsingwear vacatur," which they weaponized to wipe out progressive precedent without having to explain why. Profs. Lisa Tucker (my wife) and Michael Risch (he's not) explain. 1/2

The reason it looks like he applies different rules to cases involving Republicans from cases involving Democrats is that he does that, because he is a partisan Republican and allows that to override his oath of office

John G. Roberts, Chief Justice of these United States, does with regularity, and in a manner inconsistent with the rule of law and unbecoming of his office, purport to decide cases according to rules which he knows he will not actually apply, generally and neutrally, to all cases within their logic

There's a *lot* going on here, but I'm struck by the irony of Roberts taking umbrage at EPA officials' public statements.

Just 2 years later, in upholding Trump's Muslim travel ban in Trump v Hawaii, Roberts wrote that Trump's bigoted public statements weren't relevant to the rule's validity.

Learn whatever you want about "law," it doesn't matter because GOP Justices blew up the entire process of deciding cases based on chats with rich friends and stuff they watched on TV. That was the entire basis on which SCOTUS switched to the shadow docket.

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 obtained by The Times, not a single justice, conservative or liberal, mentioned the dangers of a warming planet as one of the possible harms the court should consider.

Another data point in “originalism is a fraud.” So much for the law is the law we can’t think about the impact. They rail against “results oriented judging” in public but when their corporate clients make requests they know exactly what to do. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...

A lot of black humor in this passage, but let's call out the idea that what Congress intended matters

I thought we weren't doing legislative history anymore, I thought statutes have no intention other than what was reduced to text

Exactly my reaction. This is extremely significant historically, politically, legally. It also radically understates the hypocrisy & naked political motives of what the Republican justices on the court did

Yeah, their “concerns” about Obama’s use of executive power sure make all this unitary executive bullshit seem like a transparently partisan double standard

All that said, it’s excellent and critical reporting and everyone should read it

The litigation continued but became a ghost ship of a case after Mr. Trump replaced it with his own regulation. In 2022, this time following normal procedures, the Supreme Court concluded that the Clean Air Act did not authorize the E.P.A. to issue sweeping regulations across the power sector to address climate change.

Missing from this:

(1) unconstitutional for SCOTUS to rule on the Obama regulation when it was no longer in place

(2) Rs invented a totally lawless “major questions doctrine” to give themselves the power to veto any agency action they don’t like

(3) look what Major Questions they let Trump decide

The article frequently mentions the Republican justices’ urgency to protect the fossil fuel industry…without ever mentioning that multiple Republican justices have deep ties to the fossil fuel industry

Its legal basis was open to question. The agency said it was authorized by a seldom-used provision of an old law, the Clean Air Act of 1970. Critics responded that it was unlikely that Congress would have authorized a sweeping overhaul of the nation's power supply in such an obscure provision.

The Clean Air Act is one of the most important and most frequently used laws in America, a country where centuries-old laws are still important, and where these same Justices pretend to read the minds of people who lived in the 1780s