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Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social · 12h

KBJ’s blunt question today about the Supreme Court’s culture war hypocrisy kind of floored me, because it’s the kind of meta-criticism that we aren’t used to hearing from the justices.

It’s the second day of the term, and things are that dire already. slate.com/news-and-pol...

With One Damning Question, Ketanji Brown Jackson Defined the Supreme Court’s New Term

The justice stripped the veneer of constitutional principle from the court’s latest blatant culture war.

slate.com

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Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social · 14h

Going on MSNBC shortly to talk about the wretched oral arguments in today's conversion therapy case at the Supreme Court.

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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 1d

Back in the land of reality, here's what one of the Black people whose home was smashed into during the apartment raid last week said about his Venezuelan neighbors: "They were cool people."

Mr. Jones, a U.S. citizen, was dragged out in handcuffs and held outside for hours.

Jones, who lives on the fourth floor, said most of his neighbors were Venezuelan and often took turns cleaning the hallway because the property owners did little to maintain it.

“They were cool people,” Jones said as he looked into his next door neighbor’s unit. “They didn’t speak a lick of English, but we used translator apps to talk to each other.”

Jones wondered what would happen to his neighbor’s young children.

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Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social · 1d

Will be discussing the fresh hell of a new Supreme Court term on MSNBC shortly.

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Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social · 1d

I'm sorry but how does this person have standing to challenge Colorado's ban on LGBTQ conversion therapy when she has explicitly disclaimed any desire to change a patient's sexual orientation or gender identity? How is this a real case? slate.com/news-and-pol...

The Supreme Court’s First Blockbuster Case This Term Looks Pretty Fake

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Chiles v. Salazar, a case that seeks to undo a major triumph of the LGBTQ+ movement.

slate.com

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Lawrence Hurley @lawrencehurley.bsky.social · 1d

The new Supreme Court term starts today, meaning that -- in a novel twist -- the justices will hear oral arguments in some cases before they issue rulings that actually explain what they are doing.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 1d

perhaps the biggest story TFPever ran was a catastrophically shoddy argument that George Floyd ackshully died of an overdose. When confronted with irrefutable evidence that the piece was simply wrong, Weiss didn’t take it down, she asked her critic, @radleybalko.bsky.social, to come on a podcast.

max tani @maxtani.bsky.social · 1d

David Ellison’s note to staff on Paramount’s acquisition of the Free Press

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Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social · 1d

The Supreme Court also rejected another effort to block a copper mine on an Apache sacred site. Once again, Justice Gorsuch dissented. www.supremecourt.gov/orders/court...

APACHE STRONGHOLD V. UNITED STATES, ET AL.
The petition for rehearing is denied. Justice Gorsuch would
grant the petition for rehearing. Justice Alito took no part in
the consideration or decision of this petition.

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Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social · 1d

The Supreme Court just denied Ghislaine Maxwell's appeal with no noted dissents: www.supremecourt.gov/orders/court...

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Steve Vladeck @stevevladeck.bsky.social · 2d

The very first statute authorizing domestic use of the military during domestic emergencies, enacted in 1792 by a Congress full of the same folks who wrote and ratified the Constitution, expressly provided for judicial review in certain circumstances *before* the President could even send troops.

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Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social · 2d

When President AOC federalizes the National Guard in 2029 to protect abortion clinics, Ilan is going to magically discover an English treatise written in 1610 that proves Matthew Kacsmaryk can issue a nationwide injunction against her.

Pat Sobkowski @patsobkowski.com · 3d

We don’t have to carry water for dictators. Just my thought.

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Jay Willis @jaywillis.net · 2d

Last week, I wrote about the impact of the Alliance Defending Freedom's aggressive PR campaigns humanizing its anti-LGBTQ clients, so I appreciate the New York Times illustrating my point by immediately running a credulous, soft-focus profile of an anti-LGBTQ Alliance Defending Freedom client

The Story of This Supreme Court Term Is Already On YouTube

How conservative activists are building a shared cultural understanding about who deserves the law’s protections, and who does not.

ballsandstrikes.org

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Matthew Stiegler @matthewstiegler.bsky.social · 4d

I think KBJ still isn’t getting the full credit she deserves for spotlighting the Supreme Court majority’s abuses. At a time when so many elected officials are failing so disastrously to meet the moment, she’s doing it.

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Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social · 4d

I really appreciate Justice Jackson contrasting the lower courts' meticulous and responsible approach to judging—extensive deliberations, written opinions—with the Supreme Court's slapdash, unreasoned work over the shadow docket. www.documentcloud.org/documents/26...

They have done so in reasoned and thoughtful written opinions—opinions that, in the nor- ‘mal course, we would get to parse, assess, and embrace or reject, while fully explaining our reasoning.

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Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social · 4d

Sotomayor and Kagan also dissented, though they did not join KBJ's opinion. We can safely assume this was 6–3.

The majority did not explain its reasoning, but suggested that the government faces a "harm" by maintaining TPS—one greater than the harm to 300,000 Venezuelans who may soon be expelled.

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Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social · 4d

Justice Jackson's sharp dissent accuses her Republican-appointed colleagues of abusing the court's shadow docket "to allow this Administration to disrupt as many lives as possible, as quickly as possible." She also takes a dig at their refusal to write opinions explaining their actions.

exigency or any other pru dent threshold limitation on the exercise of our discretion— and wordlessly override the considered judgments of our colleagues. We once again use our equitable power (but not our opinion-writing capacity) to allow this Administration to disrupt as many lives as possible, as quickly as possible.

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Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social · 4d

NEW: By a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court allows the Trump administration to cancel Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelan migrants.

KBJ, dissenting, says she "cannot abide our repeated, gratuitous, and harmful interference" while "lives hang in the balance."
www.documentcloud.org/documents/26...

I view today's decision as yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket. This Court should have stayed its hand. Having opted instead to join the fray, the Court plainly mis- judges the irreparable harm and balance-of-the-equities factors by privileging the bald assertion of unconstrained executive power over countless families’ pleas for the sta- bility our Government has promised them. Because, re- spectfully, I cannot abide our repeated, gratuitous, and harmful interference with cases pending in the lower courts while lives hang in the balance, I dissent.

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Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social · 4d

One of these, Wolford v. Lopez, is a BIG Second Amendment case that asks whether states may presumptively ban concealed carry on private property unless/until the property owner gives express permission. www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-f...

(1) Whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit erred in holding that Hawaii may presumptively prohibit the carry of handguns by licensed concealed carry permit holders on private property open to the public unless the property owner affirmatively gives express permission to the handgun carrier;

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Steve Vladeck @stevevladeck.bsky.social · 5d

It's worth asking how differently things might look on the ground right now if #SCOTUS hadn't eviscerated Bivens—and made it all-but impossible to bring damages suits against federal officers (like ICE agents) who violate our constitutional rights.

This is from my rebuttal in Hernández v. Mesa:

I do want to go back to putting this case in the broader context because I think it's important to understand how we got here. Historically, the whole way that the tort liability regime worked for government misconduct was that this Court and state courts

looked to existing common law causes of action and focused on immunity defenses as the way of calibrating the harm that citizens and others faced when injured by government officers against the need to protect officers acting in good faith, back to Judge Hand in Gregoire
versus Biddle.

The Court struck this balance by fashioning immunity defenses where the fight would be over whether the officer was entitled to immunity or not. And for law enforcement officers specifically, this Court has long
rejected the argument that there should be any context in which law enforcement officers, because of the frequency with which they
interact with average individuals, because of the nature of their interactions, because of the powers they have to search, to seize, to arrest in this context, to use lethal force, did not justify absolute immunity and instead justified a more narrower, qualified kind of immunity for those most likely to come face-to-face with private citizens.

Distilled to its simplest, the government's position in this case is that

officers in what is self-described as the nation's largest law enforcement agency should have a functional absolute immunity at least where foreign nationals are concerned.

And our submission is that that is not consistent with how this Court has always understood the relationship between causes of action and immunity defenses in this context. It is not required by any of this Court's Bivens decisions. It does not abide by this Court's suggestion in Abbasi that there are strong reasons and powerful reasons to retain Bivens in this context.

And it would eliminate the one deterrence that is meaningfully available to ensure that officers in the nation's largest law enforcement agency are complying with the law.

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nilay patel @reckless.bsky.social · 6d

“Kavanaugh stops” is a tremendous term term for cops racially profiling people and someone should start a crowdfunding effort to pay a bunch of SEC sorority influencers to popularize it on TikTok. We must fight fire with devastating trending topics slate.com/news-and-pol...

There’s a New Lawsuit Against “Kavanaugh Stops.” It’s Absolutely Devastating.

These detentions, far from the “brief” inconvenience the justice described, are often lengthy, violent, and dangerous.

slate.com

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Lawrence Hurley @lawrencehurley.bsky.social · 5d

It's kind of wild that in this shutdown fight, if you follow the logic of what Republicans are saying, they are basically arguing that if a person shows up at an ER bleeding out from a gun wound or suffering from a cardiac arrest, they should be turned away if they can't show their papers.

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Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social · 5d

I used to think RBG cited it in NFIB to troll him, but now I think it provided the clearest framework to explain why the individual mandate was constitutional.

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Steve Vladeck @stevevladeck.bsky.social · 5d

Next Monday's "One First" was going to be about how we should stop covering new #SCOTUS terms through the "big" cases the Court will hear; and instead focus on how the Court is behaving.

Fortunately for me (and you), @dahlialithwick.bsky.social and @mjsdc.bsky.social did it first—and *way* better:

The Supreme Court Will Do Four Things This Term That Tell You Everything You Need to Know

In the week before the October 2025 Supreme Court term opens, the impulse among court watchers will again be to do what we always do.

slate.com

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Chris Lombardi @chrisblue.bsky.social · 5d

"Consider these ordinary factors, which all lawyers learn after one week of law school and all federal judges profess to abide by the week of their confirmation hearings, and contemplate how the Supreme Court has in recent sessions obliterated them to dust—and will do so again this term."

Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social · 5d

As the Supreme Court begins a new term, please do not let its props and stagecraft obscure the reality that it's passing off political power grabs as Just Doing Law. slate.com/news-and-pol...

There will be a hundred pieces this week attempting to pick through the “big cases” to be decided in the approaching term—although, to be sure, most of the big cases will be added in the months to come. But focusing on a handful of “big cases” relies on your predicate agreement as a reader that the court that will decide them, with all the oyez and the gravitas, is still behaving, in the main, like a court. The challenge will be to seek out that which the court is obscuring in this performance of business as usual this term, and to understand that the red curtains and the black robes have very rapidly come to serve as props in a performance of judicial legitimacy that is no longer worth the price of admission.

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Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social · 5d

As the Supreme Court begins a new term, please do not let its props and stagecraft obscure the reality that it's passing off political power grabs as Just Doing Law. slate.com/news-and-pol...

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