The underlying case of Olympus Spas v. Armstrong, challenging the application of the Washington Law Against Discrimination is very much the culture war case that makes most people rightfully cringe.

In 2020, the HRC, the agency tasked with enforcing WLAD, received a complaint from a transgender woman. The complaint alleged that Olympus Spa “denied [her] services and stated that transgender women without surgery are not welcome because it could make other customers and staff uncomfortable.” Specifically, the Spa excluded preoperative transgender women who have not yet received gender confirmation surgery affecting their genitalia.

This isn’t about whether the spa (or the court) used the complainant’s chosen pronouns, but whether a Korean spa for women could prohibit a pre-op transgender woman from its services. Sound familiar? Continue reading →

The SAVE Act, which Trump prefers to call the SAVE America Act because it sounds better even if it’s wrong, a concern he doesn’t share even though he is “real smart” if he does say so himself, is bad law that does significant damage to a great many American citizens’ ability to vote. Had the bill merely required the showing of government issued identification by voters, it would be overwhelmingly popular, even if the fringe left would still argue it was too burdensome.

But that’s not all the bill requires. Beyond transgender prohibitions having nothing to do with voting, it would require voters to prove their citizenship with either a passport or birth certificate. That’s a grave burden for a lot of people, and an impossibility for others, even though they are very much Americans and have a right to vote. And it gets worse for people, like married women, whose current name on their government issued identification doesn’t match the name on their birth certificate. Continue reading →

Is the Iran war pretty much over or what?

After a day of conflicting signals about when the war against Iran might end, President Trump struck a belligerent tone Monday evening, warning of even more aggressive action if Iranian leaders tried to cut off the world’s energy supply.

“We will hit them so hard that it will not be possible for them or anybody else helping them to ever recover that section of the world,” Mr. Trump said, meeting with reporters.

Earlier in the day, the president suggested that the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran could be near an end. The war “is very complete, pretty much,” Mr. Trump said in a phone interview with a CBS reporter, Weijia Jiang. He said, “We’re very far ahead of schedule.”

Continue reading →

First, Judge Paul Crotty held that New York’s law prohibiting the unauthorized practice of law could not survive strict scrutiny in an action brought by Upsolve, a company dedicated to providing non-lawyer assistance to consumers sued for debt collection. The argument was that the law violated the First Amendment by prohibiting speech used to assist consumers to challenge debt collection suits. The Second Circuit then reversed, holding that intermediate scrutiny applied, as the law was content neutral.

The case then went back before Judge Lewis Kaplan, who held that New York’s UPL law easily survived intermediate scrutiny, holding that the state’s interest in prohibiting non-lawyers from the practice of law was “important” and “real,” and that the law did not burden speech any more than was necessary to achieve the state’s important interest. Fair enough. Continue reading →

As might be obvious, I like to write. Writing enables me to think things through, to come to grips with the errors of my views and the beliefs that cannot be justified or explained. In other words, I don’t know what I think until I see what I write. (Sorry, Bill.)

At Techdirt, Mike Masnick tells an apocryphal story about his child.

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about my kid’s experience with an AI checker tool that was pre-installed on a school-issued Chromebook. The assignment had been to write an essay about Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron—a story about a dystopian society that enforces “equality” by handicapping anyone who excels—and the AI detection tool flagged the essay as “18% AI written.” The culprit? Using the word “devoid.” When the word was swapped out for “without,” the score magically dropped to 0%. Continue reading →

The cost to the United States of the war against Iran is estimated to be $1 billion per day, not including the cost of Pete Hegseth’s hair gel for his daily pressers. Everett Dirksen once had something to say about this. If there was no choice in the matter, that would be one thing. But when it’s a war of choice, paying for it is an issue, especially after the indiscriminate evisceration of federal employees by DOGE, the wildly mounting federal deficit, the monumental increase in ICE funding, the ongoing rise in inflation and the cuts to Obamacare subsidies.

But hey, we’ve got hundreds of billions of free dollars from the tariffs that other countries are paying to the United States, we’ve been told. Except now that the tariffs have been held unconstitutional, as was almost certainly going to be the case (and will similarly be the case with the Section 122 tariffs as well), they’ve been ordered to be returned. Continue reading →

When Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, her string of deflections, non-responses and outright insults demonstrated her utter contempt for Congress. More to the point, it demonstrated Congress’ fecklessness when it came to forcing a cabinet secretary to explain her stunning failure to do her job or comply with the law. So naturally, the House is going for round two by subpoenaing Bondi to appear before the House Oversight Committee for a closed door deposition.

Over the objection of the panel’s Republican chairman, Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, five Republicans on the Oversight Committee joined Democrats to force approval of the subpoena, which was introduced by Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina.

Yes, that Nancy Mace. Continue reading →

The Trump administration has abandoned its efforts to use the power of the federal government to force law firms that had the audacity of hiring or representing Trump’s enemies to capitulate to his great and powerful will.

With a brief due this week, Justice Department lawyers told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that they were no longer interested in pursuing the cases and were voluntarily asking the court to dismiss them.

The decision is the White House’s most significant acknowledgment that the executive orders cannot be successfully defended in court. The move is particularly striking given that some firms opted to reach deals in a bid to head off executive orders that President Trump’s Justice Department said it would no longer stand behind.

Continue reading →

Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell called it the “Pottery Barn Rule.” You break it, you own it. President W owned Operation Iraqi Freedom because he broke it, learning too late that beating Saddam Hussein did not mean that democracy would fill the necessarily void. Trump never learned the lesson.

From the outset, Trump has been careful to declare limits around the U.S. attack, saying he wanted to overthrow the current regime, but telling Iranians it was up to them to seize the opportunity to write their country’s next chapter. His communication strategy has reinforced those limits by creating a bit of distance — at least in imagery — between the president and the fighting.

At the same time, however, Trump has adopted expansive rhetoric about the reasoning for his intervention that recalled the justifications used for earlier U.S. forays into the Middle East.

Continue reading →

United States Constitution

Article I, Section 8, Clause 11

The Congress shall have Power . . . To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

Over the past few decades, presidents have flexed their military muscle. Some in response to acts against the United States or its allies. Some in discrete, one-shot actions like Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities that obliterated its nuclear weapons capacity or his invasion of Venezuela to seize its president and rendition him back to America. Continue reading →