Bush hated them. Obama and Biden too. But as Congress became increasingly paralyzed and incapable of real bipartisanship to do the people’s work, president found themselves in the position of either filling the gap by Executive Order or sitting around in the Oval counting their toes in a government incapable of doing much of anything. And so presidents reacted as the most powerful man in the world was wont to do. They grabbed their pen and phone and ran a government.

And when their efforts exceeded their authority, they were smacked with an injunction by a district court judge when someone challenged their authority to act. They hated it. But they complied with it and appealed. No more. Continue reading →

To begin, my uncle served in Vietnam and my father-in-law is a retired Army Colonel. So this whole bit’s going to be very pro military. If that bothers you, go somewhere else today.

It is extremely impressive to me that our military took seven B2 stealth bombers in Missouri, had them fly over 30 hours to Iran, they dropped bombs on targets basically the size of exhaust ports on the Death Star and then flew back home with zero American casualties.

The fact that we dropped said bombs through exhaust ports at Fordo will never stop being funny to me because it means the Iranian “geniuses” who designed that place never saw Star Wars. GEORGE LUCAS DESIGNED THE DEATH STAR THAT WAY SO NO ONE WOULD DO THAT. Wake up, Iran. Continue reading →

On behalf of the United States, the Department of Justice has done the bizarre, incomprehensible and incoherent. In the District of Maryland, Trump has sued its political enemies, all 15 judges of the Maryland district court.

In a 22-page complaint, lawyers for the Justice Department noted — as many administration officials have in recent weeks — that courts across the country have issued an avalanche of injunctions against various parts of President Trump’s agenda almost from the moment that he returned to office.

The lawyers sought to set their suit against Judge Russell and his colleagues in that context, saying that the new standing rule intruded on the White House’s inherent powers to “enforce the nation’s immigration laws.”

District of Maryland Chief Judge George Russell III issued a standing order that directed the clerk to automatically enter an injunction in all habeas petitions prohibiting the government from removing aliens for a period of . . . one day.

This lawsuit involves yet another regrettable example of the unlawful use of equitable powers to restrain the Executive. Specifically, Defendants have instituted an avowedly automatic injunction against the federal government, issued outside the context of any particular case or controversy.

Continue reading →

The polls said it wasn’t going to happen. The polls were wrong. Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani took the primary and will be the candidate for Mayor of New York City. Was it his policies, free everything and tax the rich? Was it his position on Israel, which wasn’t at all antisemitic but supported globalizing the intifada, which totally didn’t mean kill Jews? Was it defunding the police and warehousing the homeless in the subways?

Was it the fact that he was a young, charismatic, well-spoken, good-looking millennial who knew how to use social media? Continue reading →

Far be it for me to argue that an assistant United States attorney wouldn’t lie. Some would. Some have. Some do. That said, the lies generally aren’t of the nature of making things up out of whole cloth. They are also not of the nature that could be readily disproven, whether by written evidence or the testimony of a room full of people with similar claims to credibility. Career AUSAs do not tend to lie, or even massage the truth, when there is a strong possibility that they will get nailed to the wall.

Career assistant Erez Reuveni had been on the job for almost 15 years, long before the current administration and throughout Trump 1.0. It wasn’t until he was given the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a matter of such significant profile that it wouldn’t be handed to the office goofball, that a problem arose. Reuveni did the one thing that his DoJ superiors found intolerable. He told Judge Paula Xinis the truth, that the rendition of Abrego Garcia was a mistake. The Trump DoJ doesn’t make mistakes. Or to be more precise, it doesn’t admit to the mistakes it makes. Continue reading →

Why? Who knows. It’s not as if the 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court explained its reasoning. In staying Boston District Judge Brian Murphy’s preliminary injunction against ICE removing aliens to third-party countries without notice or due process, those nifty/nasty details the Court previously admonished Kristi Noem to provide to Kilmar Abrego Garcia and others similarly situated, the Supreme Court did not consider it worthwhile to provide either explanation or guidance.

Or perhaps it did not because, well, there just wasn’t anything rational to say. Continue reading →

The first two sentences of Richard Fausset’s article in the New York Times leaves nothing to the imagination.

Preston Damsky is a law student at the University of Florida. He is also a white nationalist and antisemite.

Remember the old Checkov quote, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass”? Fuggedaboutit. Fausset leaves nothing to chance, lest you not realize who’s the bad dude in the story before you find out why he’s the bad dude. Damsky took a seminar taught by “Trump-nominated” (and, unmentioned, former federal defender) federal judge, John Badalamenti, which concluded with a paper worth  65% of the grade. Continue reading →

Not too long ago, many people believed the “predictions” of Nostradamus that the world would end in 2025, and that it would come from war in the middle east, where certain nations were bent on the destruction of the decadent west. Whether or not one was inclined to buy into the metaphysical, there was good reason to fear war in the middle east. One thing that was clear to all, at least then, was that Iran, now under the religious rule of an Ayatollah and the primary supporter of radical Islamic terrorism, could not be trusted to have nuclear weapons.

Was Iran on the verge of having nuclear weapons? Who knows? Bibi Netanyahu has been saying so for years. Whether he was right or wrong, and that Iran’s weapons program was set back by Israeli intervention, is unknown. Much of this, by its nature, is unknown, which is a huge issue following George W. Bush’s assurances that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Trust, once squandered, is lost and hard to find again. Continue reading →

Hello again, friends! Welcome back to the Friday Funny, where we dive into the absurd, the awkward, and the downright questionable with a smirk and a raised eyebrow. As kids, we were told there’s no such thing as a stupid question. Those people were liars. Stupid questions flood the universe every second—some whispered in boardrooms, others shouted in comment sections. But there’s another breed of question: the ones we avoid asking, not because they’re dumb, but because they’re… delicate. They tiptoe on the edge of decorum, threatening to topple into a social minefield.

Well, today, we’re throwing caution to the wind. This is a safe place, folks! Let’s unpack some of those questions I’ve been dodging, with a bit of wit and a lot of curiosity. Continue reading →

It’s a given in the legal academy that publication in the Harvard Law Review is prestigious. Whether it’s the most important law review is a matter of debate, but that it is important is beyond question. Law profs submit their articles to this student-run journal because it accomplishes two important things. First, it establishes their bona fides as a legal scholar. Second, it means their article is taken seriously, Given the desperate need of most prawfs to be taken seriously rather than fade into the universe of legal background noise, it’s one of the few places where they can “matter.”

But as Aaron Sibarium writes in the Washington Free Beacon, articles that make the cut at HLR might not reflect important legal thought, but rather that they checked the woke boxes of race, gender and sexuality. Continue reading →