Joey Fishkin

You don't need either of these things. There are more straightforward court reform strategies that affect either who is on the court or what it has appellate jurisdiction to consider.

One question I find interesting is: do the Justices in the majority understand this point?

Do they understand that they are, more and more, making themselves central to politics in ways that invite a future 1930s-style confrontation with the court?

Such a confrontation is not imminent, but...

I would not say that's a safe bet.

In the tug of war between lawyers who think law (and history) still matter, and political scientists who say no, you're not cynical enough, this Supreme Ct just sides with Trump, this Supreme Ct has MOSTLY made fools of the lawyers, over and over. But only mostly.

I don't know exactly how the new birthright citizenship case will come out, but I'd note that if it eviscerates §1 of the 14th Amendment, the remedy of "just pass a constitutional amendment" wouldn't apply. The 14th is already there.

The sole public remedy would be to reform the Supreme Court.

Wait, just to recap, the new facially neutral rule at OU is students are excused from class for all protests and counter-protests?

Students: take that email, save it, and print as needed! If penalized for protesting in some similar future protest, that’s viewpoint discrimination.

!

them "loving the west" but hating actual Europe is kinda just the macro version of how they're constantly tweeting pictures of New England towns where 90% of the population voted for Bernie

See also, the way so many of them recently converted to Catholicism AND now put on a big white pedestal the immigration restrictionists of a century ago whose politics was primarily about keeping out Catholics (and Jews) from Europe

What an interesting coincidence.

Absolutely. But so far it's short-attention-span McCarthyism, by people who can't even agree amongst themselves on exactly which wrongthink words to demand academics cease using when we speak.

But I completely understand administrators' desire to engage in soft violations of the First Amendment now, by making faculty delete wrongthink keywords from their syllabi, to pre-empt the hard violations of the First Amendment that would come later, when politicians demand the firing of faculty.

It's not a complete response.

Obviously, no institution of higher education can achieve its mission under the speech constraints that result from faculty knowing that tenure only lasts until a right-wing activist student records & posts a misleading snippet that "goes viral" in just the right way.

This is a fight in which the anti-"woke" side has lots of political power but low bandwidth and near-zero understanding of its opponents. The result: they ignore everything but the most eye-catching targets they hope may catch the eye of Sauron.

Renaming and rebranding is an inevitable response.

The executive order, which was immediately paused by courts without going into effect, would upend the commonly accepted view of American citizenship guaranteed since 1898: that citizenship should be extended to anyone born in the United States. It could throw into doubt the citizenship of hundreds of thousands of babies born each year.

*1868

They're citing the date of Kim Wong Ark but it should be the 14th Amendment itself. The Court didn't create it and that's not a nit-picky distinction here.

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/u...

Maybe parks could be kept open for "Confederate Heroes Day" even if they're closed for MLK day?

But no, that wouldn't be sufficiently performatively denigrating of MLK day.

Past, not dead, etc.

In Texas, "Confederate Heroes Day" is an optional paid holiday (day off from work for most state employees). It falls on January 19, sometimes the same day as MLK day.

So in Texas, this January 19, some employees will be taking a holiday and no one will know for sure which holiday they are taking.

The important thing to remember is that *there is a constituency that wants this*. There are people in this country who really enjoy performatively denigrating the holidays related to Black people.

(As to Trump's birthday, that has a constituency of one—plus those who hope it will anger the libs.)

One person who called Mr. Noonan asked if it was possible to escape city taxes by moving into an upstate vacation home while keeping a property in the city. After Mr. Noonan explained the rules, that person decided to stay. That happens often, he said. “I had a client tell me once, ‘In order to move to Florida, I actually have to move to Florida, right?’” he said. A challenge for a taxpayer is that an auditor’s decision about who owes New York taxes can be a subjective one. In the eyes of an auditor, someone’s true home is not determined as much by physical whereabouts as it is by intention: Did this person intend to make a new home elsewhere? If home is where the heart is, where is this person’s heart? To answer that question, auditors examine several areas of someone’s life, including the home itself, the person’s work, where they spend time and the location of family connections. If the new home is less expensive and smaller than the one a taxpayer kept in New York, that is a red flag to auditors. Likewise if someone’s day-to-day job is connected with a New York company.

NYC finances are going to be all right.

Yes, some rich people move to Florida to save on their taxes. But... most do not want to do this.

Moreover, high-tax places like NY and CA are where by far the most people BECOME rich... far less likely to happen in Florida.

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/n...

I appreciate @laywilliams.bsky.social's point about envy.

But any argument that begins with a model of 'A chooses to be a poet and has a lovely life with lots of leisure, while B works hard as an ER doc' has truly missed the entire topic of inequality. Not worthy of more engagement.

Again, any system in which these discrepancies exist simply is not a democracy.

"Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections"

We can't continue like this, where the rules, norms, media coverage, etc. are entirely different for one party than the other.

So it IS possible for the Speaker to swear in a new member just days after their election. The TN special election results have not even been certified yet.

ICE's messy hiring spree brings in unfit and illiterate recruits ICE recruits with no experience are being fast-tracked into the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia, where instructors are astounded at their incompetence.

must be pretty bad when the Daily Mail is running smashmouth exposes on a GOP admin www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...

Great thread laying out bombshell report—

Turning Public Money into Amazon’s Profits | Independent Business Amazon has quietly captured a growing share of government purchasing. This major report explains how, and what to do about it.

1. Amazon has become a major force in how cities, counties & schools buy basic supplies. Our new report finds Amazon is using opaque pricing algorithms to drive up costs and eliminate transparency—while harming competition by pushing out better-performing independent suppliers.

It seems that federal law enforcement is operating on the premise (when interrogating protesters) that “antifa” is an actual organization with money and leaders and a headquarters.

I guess nobody bothered to tell them that was political propaganda rather than a real topic to investigate?

Amazing.

There are people who will point out that paylines were not a perfect system. Sure, granted.

But that system decentralized power, giving peer reviewers—not political appointees—the ultimate authority to decide what's most worthwhile.

That is exactly why the government is dismantling that system.

This is a five-alarm fire:

The NIH is abandoning the transparency of deciding grantees based on peer-review scores ("paylines") in favor of a more opaque process in which those scores are just one factor.

This gives the gov't room to punish specific disfavored institutions, researchers, or topics.

Thanks, I linked the wrong link.

My point is not that there needs to be a menorah in the White House.

My point is that there is a constituency that _really_ wants this, that actively opposes the moderately ecumenical / "Judeo-Christian" norms of 50 years of mainstream U.S. politics.

We have a White House that's catering to them.

This Year, a Smaller Red-and-Green Christmas at the White House

I'm not really a politics-of-recognition kind of guy but in this holiday season, everyone should reflect on exactly how the conversation/debate went down that somehow resulted in the White House getting rid of the menorah this year—Christmas only. Right-wing Jews especially—give it some thought.

The most frustrating thing about American universities’ fragmented response to the Trump administration (shall each school capitulate with a “deal”?) is that it takes attention and focus away from the broad, destructive cuts to federally funded research that are an ongoing generational disaster.