As the national guard cases head to the Supreme Court, two passages from Ernst Frankel’s The Dual State stick with me:

There are a lot of horrifying and embarrassing things about Trump’s SLAPP against WSJ but the former paralegal in me finds it very funny that the firm he hired doesn’t know how to take a proper screenshot.

Of course, it seems not a single trans person will be allowed to speak during this workshop.

I will be thinking about this quote from the end of
@benjamincarterhett.bsky.social’s The Death of Democracy for a long time.

I would highly recommend the book.

(Apologies if the punctuation is wrong, I transcribed the quote from the audiobook)

If you know @bedoyaftc.bsky.social, you know he loves poetry--so I will close with a line that I have been thinking about lately from Carl Sandberg's "The People, Yes"

“Government efficiency.”

I was a federal government paralegal for 3 years. If you took away my Adobe Acrobat I would have been at least 30% less productive.

Growing up, I never believed this quote would apply so perfectly to my country. We are at the beginning but we know how authoritarians end things. We’ve seen it before, and we have promised not to forget.
encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/a...

Mitch McConnell got us here, now he gets to vote his conscience after it is too late.

Also fascinating from The Judicial Tug of War: a chart of how law school graduates have gotten more Liberal over time.

Fascinating graph from @adambonica.bsky.social & @mayasen.bsky.social. Conservative T14 grads much more likely are to become federal judges than Liberal T14 grads. It follows, of course, from their finding that the pool of liberal lawyers from T14s is much larger. www.cambridge.org/core/books/j...

Lowering the HHI thresholds in the 2023 Guidelines was an important step. It’s wonderful to see Judge Nelson relying on these new thresholds and find the FTC/DOJ’s reasons for updating them persuasive.

Folks are rightfully mocking the "ordinary man" quote in Thomas Goldstein's NYT piece. But this quote is at least as ridiculous. No matter what jurisprudential theory you follow, it is patiently absurd to assume the Constitution is not concerned with rampant criminality by the Executive.

An interesting antitrust wrinkle to the X exodus: Elon seems to still be throttling engagement for posts with @bsky.app links (if we trust Elon's engagement stats—a big if, I know). These two posts were sent 2hrs apart and the one without the BlueSky link already has more impressions

This article is a pretty good summary of what is wrong with how corporations operate today: management gets a windfall no matter what