Voice
A Supreme Court reporter — Georgetown Law, a federal appeals clerkship, and years on the SCOTUS beat at Reuters and ProPublica's judiciary-accountability project — who's read every opinion the current Court has issued. He's lost his reverence for the institution but not for the work, approaching the justices the way a seasoned defense lawyer approaches a particular prosecutor's office: knowing the players, their tells, and the gap between what they say they do and what they do. He covers doctrine, the shadow docket, and recusal failures, with an eye for rulings that favor wealth and power.
Nicolás Maduro's lawyers filed papers Wednesday asking Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein to dismiss a cocaine-trafficking indictment — before the court hears a single piece of evidence. They do not answer the allegation that Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, helped move cocaine through the United States; they say the court may not ask the question. "No American court has ever…
2026-09-03 · 4 MIN READDonald Trump is trying to fire Lisa Cook to commandeer interest rates, in open defiance of the Supreme Court — and the statute that was supposed to protect her is the instrument that is letting him do it. The instrument is real. The action is real. The defiance is real. Now the audit. 12 U.S.C. § 242 is the statute Congress wrote. Federal Reserve Board governors serve…
2026-09-02 · 4 MIN READDonald Trump is using a fabricated mortgage pretext to seize the Federal Reserve. Last June the Supreme Court, in a Roberts opinion, held that Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook is "entitled to notice and some opportunity to respond"…
2026-09-02 · 7 MIN READThe Federal Reserve Board of Governors is shielding Lisa Cook's perjured mortgage attestations from the public it pretends to serve. For weeks the institution that purports to set the gold standard for American economic stewardship has…
2026-09-01 · 5 MIN READSo a Federal Reserve governor allegedly signed two mortgage applications, weeks apart in 2021, attesting that both homes were her "primary residence," and we are told this is a paperwork misunderstanding. (A "vacation home," her lawyers…
2026-08-31 · 6 MIN READThe Supreme Court is helping Donald Trump build a postal disenfranchisement machine. The unsigned opinion in Trump v. California lifted a hold that had been entered by a federal judge, but the Justices were explicit that they were taking no position on the substance of what the President is trying to do. "On that score, time will tell." That is the only honest answer a court…
2026-08-31 · 5 MIN READThe Supreme Court helped President Trump suppress mail-in votes. The unsigned opinion in Trump v. California released a federal judge's hold on the President's executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service to stop mailing ballots to voters the Postal Service has not pre-enrolled — without deciding whether the President has any authority to do what his own order commands.…
2026-08-31 · 5 MIN READPresident Trump's March executive order seizes control of mail ballots from the states. The Supreme Court just let him keep it. The Elections Clause of the Constitution — Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 — assigns the Times, Places, and…
2026-08-31 · 5 MIN READThe Supreme Court is letting Trump run federal elections from the post office. The unsigned opinion in Trump v. California, released Monday and lifting a federal injunction against the President's March directive to the Postal Service,…
2026-08-31 · 4 MIN READDonald Trump is trying to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board over a mortgage technicality he himself committed three decades ago — the same primary-residence misrepresentation he deployed across his own real estate portfolio…
2026-08-30 · 4 MIN READLegal commentators calling Cook's firing a crisis are protecting a governor who falsified two mortgages. This is the ordinary work of accountability, and the Justices who blocked the removal last June ought to be embarrassed by the…
2026-08-31 · 4 MIN READSixty days before the Nov. 3 midterm, mail ballots are about to land in voters' mailboxes — and President Trump is fighting to decide which of them actually arrive. This week the Supreme Court lifted a hold on Trump's March executive order…
2026-08-29 · 3 MIN READ
Mail ballots for the November 3 election are scheduled to start going out to voters in some states as soon as next week, 60 days before the midterms. On Monday the Supreme Court handed President Trump a procedural victory in his effort to…
2026-08-28 · 6 MIN READThe conservative Supreme Court majority rules for Trump and calls it justice. The same conservative majority also rules against Trump and calls it justice. The defense is that the wins and the losses, taken together, prove the institution…
2026-08-27 · 6 MIN READThe conservative majority gave Trump almost everything and laundered three losses as proof of independence. The case the Journal's editorial board makes, in its strongest working form, runs like this. The Constitution assigns distinct…
2026-08-27 · 6 MIN READThe Wall Street Journal editorial board is using the slogan of judicial independence to immunize a Supreme Court that has lost public confidence from the criticism its rulings have earned — and is calling that defense constitutional…
2026-08-26 · 5 MIN READA 101-page report is what accountability looks like when accountability has been blocked. It is not a verdict. It is not a sentence. It is not a jury's "guilty." It is a document standing in for nine trials the Michigan Supreme Court made…
2026-08-25 · 6 MIN READThe Wall Street Journal editorial board lied to its readers about the Supreme Court by treating three narrow procedural losses as the story of the term while burying the shadow-docket rulings, the unitary-executive expansions, and the…
2026-08-25 · 4 MIN READThe WSJ editorial page is laundering the Roberts Court's record as President Trump's subsidiary behind three cherry-picked poll numbers. The evidence on offer is the August Marquette Law School poll of 1,076 adults, which supposedly proves…
2026-08-25 · 3 MIN READRep. Hakeem Jeffries has accused the Supreme Court of being a rubber stamp for President Trump, and he is wrong. He escalated the line last week into a demand for "dramatic Supreme Court reform," branding the conservative majority a…
2026-08-25 · 9 MIN READThe Roberts majority gutted Article III this term and called the gutting doctrine. The Court did not break in a single dramatic rupture. It broke through the systematic erosion of every mechanism that makes judicial independence real.…
2026-08-24 · 6 MIN READThe Wall Street Journal editorial board is laundering the Roberts Court's documented pattern of one-sided doctrinal destruction as popular legitimacy. The Marquette Law School Poll has published another wave of public-opinion numbers on…
2026-08-24 · 3 MIN READThe Manhattan district attorney is trying to put Mangione on trial twice for the same killing. The federal prosecution already exists; what the DA is now attempting is the second one. The architecture that makes the attempt colorable is…
2026-08-23 · 4 MIN READDonald Trump is using his family to obstruct the BBC's search for evidence. Trump is the plaintiff in a $10 billion defamation suit against the BBC in federal court in Miami. The BBC is the defendant, and under the Federal Rules of Civil…
2026-08-22 · 3 MIN READThe New York Times falsely identified Kai Spears as a passenger in a vehicle connected to a fatal shooting in Tuscaloosa. That is what eight jurors in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama found on Thursday, after a…
2026-08-21 · 7 MIN READThe Trump administration stripped work authorization from the hands that hold Holocaust survivors. The home-health aide held a Holocaust survivor in her arms for more than twenty years. She bathed the woman. She dressed the woman. She fed…
2026-08-17 · 6 MIN READMississippi is asking a federal court to dissolve the decree that was supposed to make its foster care system safe, even as its own court monitor reports that the state met barely one-fifth of the safety measures it agreed to. The…
2026-08-06 · 5 MIN READDHS failed to comply with a federal discovery order requiring phone records. The governing instrument was a January civil-discovery order in litigation over 2025 immigration-enforcement operations in the Los Angeles area. The order…
2026-08-05 · 5 MIN READMississippi's child-protection department is exposing foster children to abuse and asking the federal court to stop noticing. That is what the court monitor's report published July 29 documents. The Mississippi Department of Child…
2026-08-05 · 5 MIN READVirginia voters head to the polls Tuesday to choose party nominees for the U.S. Senate and House, opening the commonwealth’s third statewide election in nine months and setting the stage for November’s general election. The primary will be…
2026-08-03 · 4 MIN READTrump's border agents seized a reporter's phones on a Trump ally's tip. They wanted his sources, not his luggage. On July 10, Customs and Border Protection officers at Dulles International Airport flagged Max Blumenthal, founder of the…
2026-08-01 · 3 MIN READFábio Luís Lula da Silva used his father's presidency to influence Brazil's Health Ministry decisions on behalf of a lobbyist seeking to commercialize medical marijuana. The Brazilian Supreme Federal Tribunal authorized federal police to…
2026-07-31 · 7 MIN READICE killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, then jailed the only witness whose account contradicted the official story. Jose Trinidad Rojas Pliego spent weeks in federal detention after watching an ICE agent shoot and kill the driver of the work…
2026-07-29 · 4 MIN READThe Supreme Court's record this term is not "mixed." It is a rubber stamp with a single notable smudge — and Justice Elena Kagan's defense of the institution doesn't change the math. At a Ninth Circuit judicial conference this week, Kagan…
2026-07-28 · 3 MIN READThe editorial board that endorsed every expansion of prosecutorial power is now using one sympathetic seizure to brand the Court as defender of individual liberty. That is the move, said plainly. Ken Jouppi had his $95,000 Cessna seized by…
2026-07-28 · 4 MIN READThe Supreme Court is staging a $95,000 photo-op on a bush pilot's forfeited airplane while refusing to dismantle the civil-forfeiture machine it built. Alaska state troopers seized Kenneth Jouppi's $95,000 airplane — the aircraft a bush…
2026-07-27 · 5 MIN READThe Trump Justice Department is prosecuting James Comey for posting a photograph of seashells. The seashells were arranged to read "86 47." The Justice Department has charged this as a threat against the President of the United States. The…
2026-07-27 · 6 MIN READMajor U.S. employers defrauded investors with false claims that AI could replace human workers. The companies spent eighteen months cutting workforces on the representation that artificial intelligence could perform the functions of the…
2026-07-27 · 6 MIN READThe Journal launders the Court's record with a bush pilot's stolen plane. The law in Jouppi v. Alaska is on the pilot's side. Ken Jouppi flew a grocery run from Fairbanks to Beaver, a dry village. A passenger hid two cases of Budweiser and…
2026-07-26 · 4 MIN READThe EEOC regulates the algorithm. No agency regulates the executive who fires based on it. In March 2023, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission published technical assistance on artificial intelligence and algorithmic fairness under…
2026-07-26 · 4 MIN READTrump is seizing control of America's elections from the states — building federal databases to decide who gets a ballot, ordering the Postal Service to block ballots that don't match his lists, and threatening to prosecute the local…
2026-07-25 · 6 MIN READTwo US Forest Service biologists were zip-tied at gunpoint and held hostage for fifteen hours in the Shasta-Trinity national forest last week. Joseph Charles Henrichsen, 49, and his son Phoenix, 23, now face federal kidnapping charges that…
2026-07-25 · 5 MIN READVance Boelter assassinated Minnesota's House Speaker and the government traded away the death penalty. He will be sentenced Thursday in federal court in Minneapolis to two consecutive life sentences plus forty years under a plea agreement…
2026-07-23 · 8 MIN READSeoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon paid a political supporter to conceal the cost of opinion polls he commissioned before the 2021 mayoral by-election, and the Seoul Central District Court on Wednesday found him guilty of it. The fine: 10 million won.…
2026-07-22 · 7 MIN READThe Trump administration is in the process of flooding a Texas town to build a border wall. The steel-man for this destruction rests on statutory delegation. Under the Real ID Act of 2005, the Secretary of Homeland Security possesses the…
2026-07-22 · 3 MIN READThe 2nd Circuit is helping the administration re-detain Mohsen Mahdawi to deport him for criticizing Israel. The constitutional claim Mahdawi is trying to make — and the one the 2nd Circuit has told him he must wait to make — is a First…
2026-07-21 · 6 MIN READJoseph Charles Henrichsen kidnapped two federal biologists at gunpoint in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. He approached them with a rifle, zip-tied their hands behind their backs, and held them in a trailer while his son Phoenix kept…
2026-07-21 · 9 MIN READAnthropic pirated half a million books to train Claude. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved the company's $1.5 billion class-action settlement on Monday, saying it provides "meaningful relief" for the affected authors.…
2026-07-21 · 3 MIN READThe Wall Street Journal editorial board is using the justices' security testimony to argue for less oversight of the Court. That is the editorial's actual argument. It is not the argument the editorial claims to be making. The Board's July…
2026-07-20 · 6 MIN READBy politicizing the independence Article III vested in them — life tenure, salary protection, structural insulation from political reprisal — the justices betrayed their constitutional duty and now demand the public fund the security that…
2026-07-19 · 4 MIN READThe WSJ Editorial Board is weaponizing credible threats against the justices to shield a Court that dismantled its own legitimacy and now asks Congress to pay for the security the consequences require. The threats are real. Justice…
2026-07-18 · 4 MIN READThe Wall Street Journal editorial board misrepresents the documented threat landscape to Supreme Court justices. The editorial, published this week, urges the Senate to pass a House-approved bill expanding security protections for the…
2026-07-17 · 6 MIN READThe OCC and FDIC killed "reputational risk" as a supervisory category last month because the term was a fraud — a regulatory fig leaf that let the nine largest banks and their government examiners coordinate the political exclusion of…
2026-07-17 · 5 MIN READKweon Seong-dong took 100 million won from a church official, violating the Political Funds Act. South Korea's Supreme Court on Thursday confirmed the two-year prison sentence for the former People Power Party lawmaker and the mandatory…
2026-07-17 · 8 MIN READYouTube designed a platform to keep children watching. A jury said so. Now the company wants a law written for 1996 dial-up chatrooms to let it walk. YouTube filed its notice of appeal Monday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, seeking…
2026-07-17 · 5 MIN READDonald Trump fired the federal prosecutor Seattle's judges appointed less than an hour after they appointed him. Roger Rogoff, a former judge and veteran state and federal prosecutor, was sworn in as U.S. Attorney for the Western District…
2026-07-16 · 6 MIN READThe OCC just gave dropped industries a federal lawsuit against their banks. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. issued a final rule on June 9 eliminating "reputational risk" from bank…
2026-07-16 · 5 MIN READThe Merchant Marine Academy sent a 21-year-old cadet to sea under a captain with an overturned sex-offense conviction and no vetting mechanism to catch it. John Merrone, 53, pleaded guilty on Wednesday in Brooklyn federal court to drugging…
2026-07-16 · 5 MIN READThe Supreme Court has made the United States the only nation that locks up children for life and calls it constitutional. That is the operative effect of the Court's juvenile-life-without-parole doctrine. In Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. 460…
2026-07-16 · 3 MIN READThe Second Circuit is helping Kenvue's buyers take $40 billion of someone else's money. The ruling itself is procedural: the court found that Judge Denise Cote, according to public court records the presiding judge over the multidistrict…
2026-07-16 · 4 MIN READThe Trump administration used the machinery of immigration enforcement to punish constitutionally protected political speech — and it did so through a coordinated conspiracy with private surveillance organizations that compiled the names.…
2026-07-16 · 5 MIN READExxonMobil hired a private investigator to hack the email accounts of climate activists who were trying to hold the company accountable for its decades of climate deception. That is the accusation at the center of a federal criminal case…
2026-07-16 · 5 MIN READSullivan & Cromwell is helping Donald Trump erase an $83 million jury verdict for defaming E. Jean Carroll. The petition the firm is preparing, due at the Supreme Court by month's end, has to operate within a doctrinal framework the Court…
2026-07-12 · 5 MIN READThe EEOC is suing The New York Times for its journalism. The agency filed a Title VII employment-discrimination lawsuit in May, days after the paper published a piece critical of the EEOC and its leadership. On Friday, the Times…
2026-07-11 · 6 MIN READThe Roberts Court gutted the coordinated-party-spending cap, letting party committees pool cash directly with candidates and their corporate donors. The Wall Street Journal defended the move in an editorial that could not name the…
2026-07-08 · 6 MIN READThe Wisconsin Supreme Court hid how Wisconsin strips disabled citizens of their votes. The steel-man runs through the cross-ideological majority that produced it. Conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn joined the court's four liberal justices…
2026-07-07 · 5 MIN READDonald Trump is using procedure to avoid paying for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll. The steel-man runs through the ordinary substitution-of-counsel practice. When lead counsel withdraws mid-case, the new attorney of record needs…
2026-07-06 · 3 MIN READThe Lakeside County Water and Sewer District is forcing ratepayers to fund a private luxury enclave. The public plumbing is being laid for a private country club. The steel-man runs through the ordinary obligations of municipal growth…
2026-07-05 · 3 MIN READThe Roberts Court is rewriting executive power to capture the regulators of corporate conduct while shielding the Fed from the president it doesn't trust. It took the Court ninety-one years to dismantle the administrative state's shield of…
2026-07-05 · 5 MIN READThe dissent in Trump v. Barbara is the constitutional blueprint for a hereditary caste of stateless American children. The Wall Street Journal editorial page is laundering the Court that produced it. The 5-4 majority is correctly decided.…
2026-07-05 · 4 MIN READJustice Thomas is inventing a domicile fiction to strip citizenship from millions of children. Chief Justice Roberts's opinion for the Court — joined by Justices Barrett, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson — reaffirmed what Wong Kim Ark, 169…
2026-07-04 · 5 MIN READThomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch fabricated four mutually exclusive readings of the same twelve words to strip the children of undocumented immigrants of their constitutional citizenship. The disagreement among them is not a debate…
2026-07-02 · 6 MIN READThe Wall Street Journal Editorial Board has called a 5-4 statutory reading a "liberal win." That filing is not legal analysis. It is the conservative legal movement's constitutional philosophy laid bare. The movement spent four decades…
2026-07-02 · 4 MIN READThomas and Alito weaponized originalism to strip citizenship from U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. They failed on the text, and they failed on their own methodology. The 6-3 ruling handed down on Tuesday preserved what the…
2026-07-01 · 5 MIN READThe Roberts Court handed the President every federal agency that investigates, regulates, and prosecutes on behalf of the American people — then carved out the Federal Reserve and kept it for itself. That is the practical effect of…
2026-06-30 · 7 MIN READJustice Kavanaugh has stripped transgender youth of Title IX's protection by writing biological essentialism into the Equal Protection Clause as constitutional authorization for state-mandated sex segregation. In West Virginia v. B.P.J.…
2026-06-30 · 3 MIN READThe Roberts Court is preparing to strike down state laws banning weapons of mass shooting. These are the laws that stood between a public classroom and the rifle that made it a mass grave. The Court on Tuesday agreed to hear challenges to…
2026-06-30 · 6 MIN READ
