I share Steve’s concerns. An observation:
The Court’s immense power, such as it is, is contingent upon its at least plausibly appearing to do law. This may seem like an academic debate, but it’s literally over whether the Court is doing law or something else. That matters.
Jamal is too nice to say "utter hypocrisy," but that's what this is.
Today's #SCOTUS treats *all* coercive relief against the executive branch as imposing irreparable harm on the government. For that proposition, they cite a 2014 opinion by ... Chief Justice Roberts.
Its absence here is deafening.
WOW: Jodi Kantor & Adam Liptak have the memos that describe the origins of SCOTUS shadow docket - the 2016 order halting Obama’s Clean Power Plan @jodikantor.bsky.social @adamliptak.bsky.social @nytimes.com
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...
I watched Eastman, in real time, testify to the Georgia General Assembly that it was their *duty* to overturn my vote in 2020. He lied about evidence. He misled his client about the law. Law profs who back wannabe coup leaders and authoritarians should retire because what’s the point of law at all?
looking forward to alito declaring that our grand colorblind constitution means that white voters can permanently gerrymander racial minorities out of political representation.
After almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X.
This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue. 🧵 (1/5)
www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...
saw that trailer the other day and immediately thought michael imperioli is available for work, as far as i know!
Victims have become more reluctant to pursue these visas, advocates told me, and lawyers are changing their guidance, adding layers of caution and caveats. From the spring to the summer of 2025, the number of U-visa petitions the government received dropped by more than 60 percent, according to data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The number of such applicants receiving a visa, meanwhile, dropped by more than 25 percent.
Courthouse arrests impede safety for survivors of violence, and they impede accountability for perpetrators.
If you wanted to promote gender-based violence, you would ratchet up arrests at courthouses and other places where people seek safety.
Federal agents tackled a rape survivor in the rain as she left court, threw her into a van, & deported her - all based on information from her assailant.
Gov. Spanberger @abigailspanberger.com has legislation on her desk RIGHT NOW to end this travesty in Va.
www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...
ICE agents came to a military base and grabbed the newlywed wife of a soldier who's about to deploy.
The wife came to the U.S. as a toddler.
She has no criminal record.
None of this is how it used to work.
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/05/u...
This was just my initial scan of Va arrest numbers. Deportation Data Project's data explorer allows you to break down the numbers by date, jurisdiction, and various other factors.
ice-arrests.apps.deportationdata.org
It's shocking that the Administration has used a $45B budget for ICE to focus *primarily* on people with no suspected criminality whatsoever.
This is the system that the #valeg and Gov. Spanberger have rightly said Va law enforcement shouldn't be absorbed into.
The newest data run through March 10, 2026. Previous data stopped at Oct. 2025.
In Virginia, the proportion of arrests unrelated to suspected crimes has remained steady at about 56%.
In prior administrations, the vast majority of apprehensions involved suspected crimes.
👀 Updated ICE arrest data has dropped (h/t Deportation Data Project)
ICE arrests in Virginia continue to focus on people *NOT* suspected of any crime.
This has been the trend since 2025 and directly contradicts the Admin's insistence that deportations are a public safety issue.
The vast majority of Americans are birthright citizens. Unless you naturalized or were born abroad to an American parent, you are a citizen because of the 14th Amendment. There is nothing constitutionally distinct about Americans born here to non-Americans. We are all literally equal citizens.
I started covering this last year, and I can't overstate how important this is: the Trump administration officially labeled some of the most commonly-used forms of birth control as 'abortion' jessica.substack.com/i/173447780/...
On some level you just have to dislike foreigners, per se just not want foreigners around, to get the decision making of various powerful people in this country. I think that's quite a common way to be! But it is entirely alien to me, I think it quite pathetic and contemptible really.
The foregoing considerations and authorities irresistibly lead us to these conclusions: the Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens, with the exceptions or qualifications (as old as the rule itself) of children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory, and with the single additional exception of children of members of the Indian tribes owing direct allegiance to their several tribes. The Amendment, in clear words and in manifest intent, includes the children born, within the territory of the United States, of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States. Every citizen or subject of another country, while domiciled here, is within the allegiance and the protection, and consequently subject to the jurisdiction, of the United States. His allegiance to the United States is direct and immediate, and, although but local and temporary, continuing only so long as he remains within our territory, is yet, in the words of Lord Coke in Calvin's Case, 7 Rep. 6a, "strong enough to make a natural subject, for if he hath issue here, that issue is a natural-born subject;" and his child, as said by Mr. Binney in his essay before quoted, "if born in the country, is as much a citizen as the natural-born child of a citizen, and by operation of the same principle." It can hardly be denied that an alien is completely subject to the political jurisdiction of the country in which he resides - seeing that, as said by Mr. Webster, when Secretary of State, in his Report to the President on Thrasher's Case in 1851, and since repeated by this court ...
One-hundred-and-twenty-eight years ago today.
United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649
Decided March 28, 1898
supreme.justia.com/cases/federa...
Organizers today are conscious of the danger of speaking the language of resistance without wielding any power to match. In a pamphlet published shortly after the 2024 election, Indivisible acknowledged, “Too often in Trump 1.0, we embraced the aesthetics of protests instead of using them as part of a strategy.” Theda Skocpol advised would-be Trump opponents in advance of his inauguration that the most effective aspects of the previous Resistance were not the showy marches, but what happened after the pink-hatted demonstrators went home and got to work: the “persistent, community-based efforts” that focused on building support for Democratic candidates and sharing information about the local effects of planned Trump policies. These activists were not concerned with ideological purity tests, but with the practical building of power. Even at the time, this organizing work received relatively little attention from commentators sneering at the overly earnest aesthetics of Resistance “wine moms.”
Since the summer, Trump’s strategy of shifting ICE and the National Guard from city to city magnified this localism. Each targeted jurisdiction has responded with its own character: Protesters gathered to confront ICE en masse in the middle of a Los Angeles freeway, or have danced in frog costumes in Portland, Oregon. With the notable exception of a protest held a month into the federal occupation of D.C., the District’s residents have opted against the large gatherings that the city saw during the Women’s March and the George Floyd protests. Instead, many of them focused on helping one another as neighbors—chasing away ICE agents and walking the children of immigrant parents to school in the morning. “The people getting food to families of migrant neighbors abducted by ICE is resistance,” the D.C. mutual-aid collective Remora House explained. In Chicago, David Black, a Presbyterian pastor whom ICE agents shot with pepper balls, described protests outside Illinois ICE facilities as not “resistance” but “world building”: “We are making ourselves into the world we want to give to the next seven generations.”
After Bob Mueller died, the renewed sneering about the "Mueller will save us" discourse ignored that the most effective resistance the first time around focused on the practical building of local power. That's exactly the work the Trump 2 opposition has focused on.
Because of course they did. Infrastructure to precisely target areas was there for the taking. Fundamentally, tools for targeting individuals can target individuals the original users never intended to become targets... Because that's what the tool does - it makes targets.
SO many questions from the Republican-appointed justices so far having little or nothing to do with the law—they're venting their evident frustrations about modern election laws that broadly authorize mail voting and fretting that they're spoiling elections with distrust and fraud. Really bad!
And in case there was any room for doubt, the Republican coauthor of KOSA explicitly said she expects and hopes the bill to make it harder for queer people to connect with each other and find out they're not alone (as Katelyn says she did here)
www.them.us/story/kosa-s...
Our discourse assumes that right-populist-coded policies are popular. But the last year has shown otherwise. Tariffs and deportations are widely despised. I think the same is likely true with Trump's threats to NATO and destruction of multilateralism. 5/
newrepublic.com/article/2080...
Post-pandemic, we (very briefly) had a strong labor market for early-20s workers, for the first time since the 1990s.
People, including Gen-Z, said they *hated* this, because this tight labor market raised prices on food delivery, ubers, fast food and other labor intensive, low-skill work.
"why should americans care about ___!?!?" prior to wwii we had this idea that we could just live away from the world. the war was a brutal reminder that despite the size of the atlantic and pacific, we do in fact live in the world. this is truer today than it's ever been.
I’ve been resistant to calling Americans/developed world more broadly politicans/voters “decadent”, but like if you keep knocking loadbearing pillars out of your economy for aesthetic reasons because you don’t care about the consequences - then there really isn’t any other word to use for it
My most succinct statement of why democracy is better than all other forms of government from a purely practical point of view (published January 3, 2025)
What happens when in your mind you replace the world with your simulacrum of it
read theory!
www.liberalcurrents.com/trans-panic-...
Among the conditions that the Administration will almost certainly view as unacceptable are:
“DHS won’t enter people’s homes without warrants.”
“DHS won’t interfere with state police investigating killings by federal agents.”
What they object to is being bound by the law. 🤷🏻♂️