David Froomkin

An honorable and statesmanlike jurist like Sam Alito? Perish the thought!

U.S. circuit judge blasts ruling against Texas redistricting map, seeks Supreme Court review | Houston Public Media Judge Jerry E. Smith accused his two colleagues who issued the injunction of acting in bad faith, issuing a decision rife with errors, falsehoods, and judicial activism.

In which Josh Blackman and I disagree about the effects of Judge Smith's dissent.

My take: "the rhetoric of Judge Smith's dissenting opinion increases the likelihood that a stay from the Supreme Court would be understood as a partisan intervention."

www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/new...

I think it is hard to read the Smith dissent as anything other than sending a message that conservative judges will face consequences for following the law when it does not further conservative movement goals. How Roberts was treated for his vote in NFIB v. Sebelius but on steroids.

I dunno, man, if I began an opinion with a 3+ page "Preliminary Statement" complaining about disrespectful conduct by the other two judges on the panel, I would not immediately follow it up with this:

I think we are in a moment that historians will look back on as an important case study in the resilience of the rule of law (with the answer yet to be determined).

The different approaches taken in the Texas redistricting case by two Republican-appointed judges, Judge Brown (following the law) and Judge Smith (deranged conspiracy theorizing), provide a pretty good microcosm of our legal culture.

That's the Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act of 1966, 5 U.S.C. § 7342, under which Trump doesn't get to keep foreign gifts unless he buys them at fair market value. Do we think Trump doesn't know this? Or do we think he just steals them, and assume this is as dead a letter as so many other laws? 2/2

None of us should be pretending that the Constitution has not completely collapsed.

The main thing I want you to understand is that if you're like an unironic Bluesky liberal the people who control the heights of American culture and the intelligentsia genuinely despise you and would prefer the company of fascist pedophiles.

Kids taught to "read" without processing the words on the page. In a world of AI, the next step is being taught to "think" without processing any ideas.

‘You Are All Terrorists’: Four Months in a Salvadoran Prison

A horrifying read, based on NYT interviews with 40 people the Trump administration sent to an infamous prison in El Salvador. (Gift Link)

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/w...

Unlike you, I can read and that’s why I know what the constitution says.

Possibly the most horrifying explanation. If true, it means that Senate Dems are taking a big loss now in order to preserve their ability to take big losses in the future.

People are saying there's no upside to this deal. Wait a second. Isn't the end of Chuck Schumer's political career an upside?

reminder to any ambitious Dems waiting in the wings: announcing a primary challenge right now to a squishy Democrat who’s up in 2026, whether they voted tonight to shine Trump’s shoes or not, will almost instantaneously be awash in cash. fortune—and a primary challenge—favors the bold.

I don't understand what is even the conceivable upside of this deal. Is the collaboration the point?

Dems backed Trump into a corner where he’s advocating for starving Americans and hemorrhaging support. If they vote to let him off the hook in exchange for nothing it’s a cataclysmic failure. I know people are in pain but insulating Republicans from political consequences is not the answer.

It was great to meet you too!

The problem with urging triangulation as a political strategy is that it is myopic. If Democrats are relentlessly focused on chasing the median voter while Republicans are instead focused on moving the median voter further to the right, then there will be an inexorable rightward drift in politics.

Post-9/11 wars have contributed to some 4.5 million deaths, report suggests Researchers attempt to calculate the number of deaths attributable to the war on terrorism, across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

Not sure how many Cheney obits will mention this murderous legacy of his.

One could say the same thing about practically every Republican interviewed on TV. Why bother interviewing any of them? That time could instead be spent informing viewers.

Look, this is what any attention-seeking news outlet would do if they were honest and not captured by ref-working

Recently my brother in law explained what gerrymandering was to a coworker and they didn’t believe him because if that were really happening there would be riots in the street

What is happening is the consequence of failing to hold Trump accountable for his crimes. People cannot comprehend that someone who has done such awful things would not be in prison, so to reduce cognitive dissonance they infer that Trump cannot be as bad as Democrats say.

I use Claude (an AI) to scan my posts for spelling and grammar errors. On the most recent post (about the East Wing, link below), I got a really amazing addendum.
www.pbump.net/o/yes-most-a...

This is probably the single biggest problem with our constitutional design—worse even than the odious Senate and Electoral College.

That does seem like quite a parsimonious explanation.

It should go without saying that these mass internment camps will be much, much more expensive to operate than just giving the homeless free or subsidized housing would be.

I'll be teaching criminal law again next semester, and I've been thinking about the complicated sociology of crime in the US. OT1H, voters cite crime as a preeminent issue. OTOH, true crime is popular entertainment. OT1H we stigmatize people who commit crimes. OTOH, the President is a felon.

Most TV news is just nonstop stories about violent crime. No wonder we have a systematically misinformed electorate.