Mark Joseph Stern

The Buckley court was right that threats to free speech and association, and the dangers of incumbency-protecting laws, mean that courts should closely scrutinize campaign money laws. But that should not doom all attempts to level the playing field or limit the risk of corruption from nine-figure campaign contributions, mostly to ostensibly independent groups. If Congress passed a law with generous contribution and spending limits, and strong disclosure rules, we could have ample breathing room for vigorous and competitive campaigns without the danger of the wealthy swamping our democracy. Because Buckley was a constitutional decision, there are only two paths to overturn it. One is to get a court majority to rethink the case’s fundamental mistakes. With the current makeup of the court, that seems unlikely. An even harder road is to amend the Constitution to allow for a better balance between the rights of free speech and the risks of corruption and oligarchy. We should not give up the struggle over our money-in-politics rules. But we must recognize that there will be fierce resistance from the moneyed interests who benefit from a system giving them outsize influence over who is elected and what politicians do once they are in office. A real democracy deserves better than Buckley.

My New One at @slate.com on the 50th Anniversary of the Buckley v. Valeo Decision: “One Supreme Court Case Is Most Responsible for Our Oligarchy. It’s Not the One You Think.” slate.com/news-and-pol...

The groups and individuals in California that are fighting to block more housing production—many of whom claim to be fighting for progressive values—seem intent on delivering the White House to JD Vance.

Instead, what they discovered in the frozen North was something different: a real resistance, broad and organized and overwhelmingly nonviolent, the kind of movement that emerges only under sustained attacks by an oppressive state. Tens of thousands of volunteers—at the very least—are risking their safety to defend their neighbors and their freedom. They aren’t looking for attention or likes on social media. Unless they are killed by federal agents, as Pretti and Renee Good were, other activists do not even necessarily know their names. Many use a handle or code name out of fear of government retaliation. Their concerns are justified: A number of people working as volunteers or observers told me that they had been trailed home by ICE agents, and some of their communications have already been infiltrated, screenshotted, and posted online, forcing them to use new text chains and code names. One urgent question among observers, as the videos of Pretti’s killing spread, was what his handle might have been.

No matter how many more armed men Trump sends to impose his will on the people of Minnesota, all he can do is accentuate their valor. No application of armed violence can make the men with guns as heroic as the people who choose to stand in their path with empty hands in defense of their neighbors. These agents, and the president who sent them, are no one’s heroes, no one’s saviors—just men with guns who have to hide their faces to shoot a mom in the face, and a nurse in the back.

A truly beautiful and moving piece by Adam Serwer in The Atlantic describing the everyday heroism of people in MN @adamserwer.bsky.social @theatlantic.com :

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Much more so than is widely known

To put it another way: Courageous jurists on the lower courts have held back Trump from inflicting even more damage on civil rights and liberties. This timeline sucks, but the one in which the judiciary doesn't even try to push back is FAR worse. We insult these judges when we dismiss their impact.

Trump-administration officials and MAGA influencers have repeatedly called these activists “violent” and said they are involved in “riots.” But the resistance in Minnesota is largely characterized by a conscious, strategic absence of physical confrontation. Activists have made the decision to emphasize protection, aid, and observation. When matters escalate, it is usually the choice of the federal agents. Of the three homicides in Minneapolis this year, two were committed by federal agents. “There’s been an incredible, incredible response from the community. I’ve seen our neighbors go straight from allies to family—more than family—checking in on each other, offering food and rides for kids and all kinds of support, alerting each other if there’s ICE or any kind of danger,” Malika Dahir, a local activist of Somali descent, told me. If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, you could call it “neighborism”—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from. The contrast with the philosophy guiding the Trump administration couldn’t be more extreme. Vice President Vance has said that “it is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next-door neighbors and say, ‘I want to live next to people who I have something in common with. I don’t want to live next to four families of strangers.’” Minnesotans are insisting that their neighbors are their neighbors whether they were born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu. That is, arguably, a deeply Christian philosophy, one apparently loathed by some of the most powerful Christians in America.

One thing I found deeply moving about resistance in the Twin Cities was the universalism of loving your neighbor, the philosophy driving the opposition to the ICE/BP invasion. I couldn't help but notice the contrast with the blood and soil-ism of Miller and Vance. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Tweet from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum: "Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges."

The US Holocaust Museum being more outraged by Tim Walz saying that, like Anne Frank, children today are in hiding from armed agents of the state, than they are about the fact that children are in hiding from armed agents of the state, is why Holocaust remembrance culture is in crisis.

The testing ground for Bovino’s Operation At Large was Los Angeles. A California judge initially prohibited ICE/CBP’s most flagrant constitutional violations. SCOTUS overruled her 6–3, handing Bovino a blank check to inflict unspeakable brutality on Chicago and Minneapolis. The 6 bear so much blame.

Outside, Minneapolitans were cleaning up the gas canisters ICE had left behind and hugging each other. A man was trying to put up some trash bins that had been knocked over and restring police tape to form a perimeter. I started to help him, only then realizing that we were blocking off the site of Pretti’s shooting. He told me ICE had knocked over the police tape during one of their advances and no police or first responders remained. I wasn’t sure if it was a crime scene. We did our best to cordon off the area so no one would walk through.

DOJ told a federal judge that it contained and investigated the scene of Pretti's murder. But from this report, it looks like all federal agents left the scene completely unattended within a few hours—a major breach of protocol that contaminated potential evidence. slate.com/news-and-pol...

In Minnesota, the Fight Against ICE Is Also the Fight Against Authoritarianism The community is pulling together. It has been eye-opening.

Life on the ground in St. Paul right now, from Council Member @mollycoleman.bsky.social—including a dispatch from "day care patrol," now a feature of everyday life, when parents try to stop ICE agents from kidnapping toddlers and teachers.
slate.com/news-and-pol...

Bauer, who is 49, struggled to maintain her composure as she described the day early this month when ICE showed up in force outside her school. Agents had been circling the school since December, seemingly learning its routines, and they arrested some parents just before the winter break. But this time, agents leapt out in riot gear and began entering the apartments just across from the school, where many students live. “We had to lock down and keep the kids inside, and parents linked arms to block the school entrance,” Bauer said. “We had a student who was looking out the window and saw them break into his apartment and just sobbed, ‘That’s my house. That’s my home.’ And we shut the blinds, but it was too late.”

The terror that ICE and CBP have inflicted on the children of the Twin Cities is, by itself, a crime of scandalous proportions that will forever stain this country's moral fabric, and all those responsible should never know another day of peace. www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

Such a waste. The Post was hiring so aggressively for five or ten years that they had one of the very best stables of journalists in the country. Now hollowed out and about to get slashed completely

In light of all this evidence, a fairminded jurist could easily conclude that the disclosure of the forensic report on the computer would not have “undercut” the relevance or force of these “item[s] of the State’s case,” Kyles, 514 U. S., at 451, or “‘put the whole case in such a different light as to undermine confidence in the verdict,’” Strickler, 527 U. S., at 290.

By an apparent 8–1 vote, the Supreme Court says it is reasonable to assume—as a state court did—that the defendant would still be convicted if the jury HAD seen the report that he never researched homemade silencers on his laptop.

Only KBJ notes her dissent. www.supremecourt.gov/orders/court...

A witness claimed the defendant used a laptop to research homemade silencers. Her testimony tied the defendant to a homemade silencer used in a crime. Prosecutors concealed a forensic report showing no searches about silencers on that laptop. So lower court orders new trial.

Today SCOTUS reverses.

Absolutely reprehensible that AG Bondi is offering ICE stand down in exchange for access to voting rolls. Outrageous and disgusting. It shows ICE is in Minneapolis is not for law enforcement purposes. Instead it’s a way to stir up shit in blue states and extort them.

Strongly recommend this book for those interested in the historical parallels bsky.app/profile/mjsd...

Strongly recommend The War Before the War by Delbanco. Intense clashes between local and federal authorities over states’ rights to protect fugitive slaves and drive out bounty hunters helped set the stage for 1861.

A federal judge effectively ordered the U.S. government not to cover up evidence that it illegally executed a civilian, at the request of local prosecutors seeking to investigate federal agents for murder.

Don’t want to overstate things but it feels reminiscent of the run-up to the Civil War.

To that end, USCIS declared flatly that the children of immigrants who are "unlawfully present" will "no longer be U.S. citizens at birth." They will, instead, inherit the status of their parents, rendering them detainable and deportable as infants and throughout their lives. There is no indication that the government will provide some grace period before snatching up and imprisoning this new underclass of noncitizen babies; they are apparently subject to arrest from the moment of birth.

Reminder: If the Supreme Court upholds Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship, some of the ICE officers currently brutalizing Minnesotans may be reassigned to apprehend newborns from the hospital for immediate deportation. Just read the Trump administration’s own memo. slate.com/news-and-pol...

To put a finer point on it: Republicans have embraced the “insurrectionist theory” of the Second Amendment—the notion that you have a constitutional right to stage an armed rebellion against the government if it becomes tyrannical.

Now they’re lining up to say ICE can shoot any armed protester?

I have spent my entire adult life being lectured by Republican politicians and conservative legal movement types about how important it is to preserve the sacred constitutional right to self-defense of *specifically this person* and then secret police murdered him in the street

The Republican position now appears to be that you have a constitutional right to openly carry a gun in public, unless you do so while expressing a view that the government dislikes, in which case the secret police can shoot you to death on the spot.

Action Memo for Senior Bureau Official John Armstrong FROM: SUBJECT: CA/VO - Stuart Wilson, Deputy Assistant Secretary (SBU) Revocation of Fl Visa for Rumeysa OZTURK (SBU) Recommendation 1: That you approve the revocation of the Fl visa, effective immediately, for under section 221(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Due to ongoing ICE operational security, this revocation will be silent; the Department will not notify the subject. (Approve/Disapprove by 03/21/25) Decision: [Approved] (SBU) Recommendation 2: That you authorize the transmission of the attached notification to the Department of Homeland Security noting the, immediate revocation of OZTURK's visa. (Approve/Disapprove by 03/21/25) Decision: [Approved] Background (SBU} On March 21, 2025, the Assistant Director of the National Security Division of DHS/ICE's Homeland Security Investigations referred to CA information regarding Rumeysa OZTURK, a Turkish national, for a possible determination by the Secretary that the alien is deportable under INA section 237(a)(4)(C). As a nonimmigrant visa holder, such a determination is not necessary for OHS/ICE to pursue removal of OZTURK from the United States, as INA section 237(a}(1)(B) provides that an alien is deportable if their nonimmigrant visa has been revoked under INA section 221(i).

(SBU) Under INA section 221(i), the Secretary of State may at any time, in his discretion, revoke a visa.. This authority is delegated to you pursuant to Delegation of Authority 367-4. Department policy reflected in 9 FAM 403.ll~S(B) provides that a visa may be revoked in cases of a suspected ineligibility, when an individual would not meet requirements .for admission, or "in other situations where warranted." (SBU) OZTURK was issued an F-1 visa on December 14, 2020, valid until December 9, 2025. According to information provided by OHS/ICE/HSI OZTURK is a post doctorate degree candidate in Child Studies and Human Development at Tufts University. On March 21, 2025, OHS/ICE/HSI referred information to CA indicating that OZTURK co-authored an op-ed in Tufts' student newspaper. In this article, the authors wrote, "Graduate Students for Pal'estine joins Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine (TSJP), the Tufts Faculty and Staff Coalition for Ceasefire, .and Fletcher Students for Palestine to reject the ,University's response" {to a student government resolution). According to OHS/ICE/HSI, Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine was placed\\ on interim suspension 11 after it used images of weapons to promote a protest rally and urged members of the Tufts community to 'join the student intifada." OHS/ICE/HSI referral concluded that "OZTURK's involvement in these activities and associations with these groups may undermine U.S. foreign. policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization." (SBU) While OZTURK has been involved with the actions protesting Turfts' relationship with Israel, QHS/ICE/HSI has not, however, provided any evidence showing that OZTURK has engaged in any antisemitic activity or made any public statements indicating support for a terrorist organization or antisemitism generally. While the report implies a connection between OZTURK and the now-banned Tufts Student for Justice in Pa…

OZTURK was involved in any of the activities which resulted in TJSP being suspended from Tufts. (SBU) Through a search on March 21, 2025, on available USG interagency databases, CA/VO identified no reporting specific to OZTURK, and interagency vetting partners did not provide any response to OZTURK's 2024 visa application indicating the existence of derogatory terrorism-related information. (SBU) OHS did not identify any alternative grounds of removability that would be applicable to OZTURK, including the ground of removability for aliens who have provided material support to a foreign terrorist organization or terrorist activity, and have not indicated whether it plans to consider termination of OZTURK's SEVIS registration. Although information provided by OHS/HSI/ICE does not establish any potential ineligibility for OZTURK, you may, in your discretion and in accordance with Department policy in 9 FAM 403.11-5(8), approve revocation of her F-1 visa effective immediately based on the totality of the circumstances presented indicating that revocation may be warranted.

Here is the newly-unsealed State Department memo confirming -- finally -- that the detention of Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk was based on an op-ed.

No antisemitic activity. No support of terrorism.

An op-ed in a student newspaper.

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

You observed on Wednesday that a lot of the justices sounded pissed. They were like: How did we get to this point? And it’s their own fault! They gave Trump so much leeway in all of these earlier cases to break the law. Then they seemed irked when he crossed the line that they had tried to draw in the sand over the Federal Reserve. They seemed to wonder: How could this happen? Well, look in the mirror. When you capitulate, you empower Trump to push further past your limits. That’s the lesson that the international community seems to have learned, and that our more courageous judges in the lower courts have learned. Let’s just hope that John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett are learning it now, because it’s one of the few things that could turn around this catastrophe. With Trump, you’ve got to hold the line, or else you just get bowled over. That is what everyone out in the streets in Minnesota is doing right now, and we are seeing the results. The average protester blowing a whistle on the streets of the Twin Cities has shown more courage than John Roberts has in maybe his entire career.

Trump is weak, Bondi is weak, Miller is weak. The administration is filled with cartoon bullies who crumple when they face real opposition. Minnesotans get it. Denmark gets it. Lower court judges get it, and the best have moved into DGAF mode. When will SCOTUS get it? slate.com/news-and-pol...

What happens when SCOTUS disempowers lowers courts from enforcing basic constitutional rights at the behest of an authoritarian president committed to implementing white nationalism.

Don't forget the Supreme Court's role facilitating ICE's brutality and racism in Minneapolis. SCOTUS lifted an injunction that limited racial profiling in immigration enforcement on Sept. 8. The federal assault on Chicago began the next day. Then came the Twin Cities. SCOTUS greenlit these horrors.

nine years old

“Biblical Justice, Equal Justice, for All”: How North Carolina’s Chief Justice Transformed His State and America Paul Newby, a born-again Christian, has turned his perch atop North Carolina’s Supreme Court into an instrument of political power. Over two decades, he’s driven changes that have reverberated well be...

I've covered federal and state courts for more than a decade, and even I have been shocked by the North Carolina Supreme Court's conduct since Trump-aligned extremists took it over. This article gives you a taste of the corruption. Justice Earls must keep her seat. www.propublica.org/article/paul...

Saving the North Carolina Supreme Court from the current MAGA majority—which is dead-set on ending free and fair elections in the state—starts with Justice Earls holding onto her seat in November. Very glad @billycorriher.bsky.social is getting her incredible story out there now.

Remember, the current North Carolina Supreme Court tried to overturn a fellow justice's victory in 2024 just because she was a Democrat. It sabotaged early voting in the state by removing RFK Jr. from the ballot at the eleventh hour, creating chaos for election officials. It's a menace to democracy.