Mark Joseph Stern
@mjsdc.bsky.social
Senior writer at Slate covering courts and the law. Co-host of the Amicus podcast. Dad.
At the park with my toddler and ATF is demonstrating its robot dog while Beyoncé plays as part of a violence intervention event
For Slate's summer series By the People, I wrote about how D.C. v. Heller is both a paragon of popular constitutionalism and its own dark mirror. Progressives can learn real lessons from how it was won—if they ignore its bogus originalism and look at what really went down. slate.com/news-and-pol...
Conservatives Perfected the Ideal Legal Tactic. It’s Time for Liberals to Use It.
While Heller was built on phony history, it reflected a genuine, hard-fought shift in public understanding.
slate.com
The Trump administration sued Yale for its admissions policies (alleging too much diversity). Yale is negotiating with DOJ, whereas Harvard fought Trump. The former dean of Yale Law School thinks he knows the real reason why. slate.com/news-and-pol...
Harvard Fought Trump’s Abuses. Yale May Fold. I Think I Know Why.
Seeking to set a new course for the conservative movement, J.D. Vance in 2021 declared war on institutions of American higher education.
slate.com
Great news; yet another court finds that ICE and the DOJ were wrong to declare that Congress secretly mandated detention of millions of noncitizens in 1996 (specifically, anyone who entered unlawfully at some point in the past, no matter how long ago), and that no one had noticed until now.
Gabriel Malor@gabrielmalor.bsky.social · 6d ago9th Cir., 2-1, joins the 2d, 6th, 10th, and 11th Cirs. in holding that DHS cannot detain unadmitted noncitizens found living inside the United States without the possibility of bond while their removal proceedings are pending. Circuits split with 5th and 8th. cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/op...
The Supreme Court invited exactly this when it held that the president's attempt to conduct "sham" "investigations" was a core executive power immune from all regulation, including criminal prosecution, in Trump v. United States.
Deborah Pearlstein@debpearlstein.bsky.social · last wk."Secret Service agents who questioned the former FBI director James B. Comey were told to send details of the interview to Air Force One so President Trump could review them....One government document said that 'POTUS was requesting a copy of the interview notes to use in his 6pm press conference.'"
This NYT article is just awful. We should judge Fauci based on his work, not his innermost musings to a diary he never intended to become public. Who cares that he enjoyed the admiration of celebrities? There's zero evidence here that it interfered with his job! www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/u...
The Doctor and His Diary: What Fauci’s Innermost Musings Reveal
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci seemed to be the life of the party, even in the midst of a deadly pandemic.
nytimes.com
Agree with @jamellebouie.net that it's pretty clear Elon Musk wanted to eviscerate USAID *for the purpose of killing as many African people as possible.* Mass death wasn't an accidental byproduct of his "deep state" paranoia; it was a key mission of DOGE. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/o...
"His for-profit company is seeking to wrap itself in the mantle of voting rights to make the case for a gambling activity that states have ample reasons to choose to discourage, while no one’s constitutional rights are being infringed. Freeman is not John Lewis."
Rick Hasen @rickhasen.bsky.social · last wk.My new one @slate.com: Kalshi Says It’s “Voter Suppression” to Ban Betting on Elections. LOL. gift link: slate.com/news-and-pol...
DoorDash, in damage control mode, now claims it supports D.C. home rule and denies lobbying against it. Here’s the letter their lobbyist wrote to Rep. Comer supporting his bill to ban D.C. from ever imposing or increasing a tax or fee without congressional approval. hillheat.com/files/492/DD...
In a footnote in a labor case, a senior Republican-appointed judge on the D.C. Circuit blasts the Supreme Court about an embarrassing error in its landmark ruling overturning the Chevron case, which unsettled four decades of administrative law precedent. media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/doc...
![Text of footnote:
There is an error in the Supreme Court's analysis in Loper Bright. Much of the Court's reasoning (and a part of Justice Gorsuch's concurrence) is devoted to criticizing the Chevron opinion for ignoring section 706 of the Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. § 706. See, e.g., 603 U.S. at 397-400, 411-12; id. at 428 (Gorsuch, J., concurring). The Court's critique is unfounded. It is unfounded because section 706 of the APA did not apply to judicial review of the EPA rule at issue in Chevron. Section 706 did not apply because Chevron was not an APA review case. The Clean Air Act superseded the APA: "The provisions of section 553 through 557 and section 706 of Title 5 [the APA] shall not, except as expressly provided in this subsection, apply to actions to which this subsection applies." 42 U.S.C. § 7607(d)(1). The problem the Court identified in Loper Bright was not with Chevron itself, but with courts, including the Supreme Court, indiscriminately adopting the Chevron formula in later cases in which section 706 of the APA did apply.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:jech7rem6vijss4euf4fijao/bafkreifkanop6tkhddyco4lfu2wvvo4mmb6zu7r5sqrtcuealgmlaleqdy)
Just canceled my DashPass and sent this email to DoorDash. I encourage you to do the same if you support D.C. home rule. press@doordash.com and ir@doordash.com
Here's a new one: ICE *prevented* a man from self-deporting by a June 11 deadline — he asked ICE to let him leave and had a one-way plane ticket for June 10. Then ICE re-detained him because he missed the deadline. Due process violation, judge rules. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
The 5th Circuit, sitting en banc, will decide whether §922(g)—the entire federal statute that prohibits violent offenders from possessing firearms—violates the Constitution's commerce clause. A vehicle to increase gun deaths while gutting congressional power. www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub...
We (the people) need this wakeup call.
Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc.bsky.social · 2w agoNEW SERIES! By the People: How to reclaim the Constitution from an imperious Supreme Court and an imperial presidency. A primer on popular constitutionalism and a toolkit if you're as fed up as we are. The opening batch of essays, and the first podcast episode, are here: slate.com/news-and-pol...
NEW SERIES! By the People: How to reclaim the Constitution from an imperious Supreme Court and an imperial presidency. A primer on popular constitutionalism and a toolkit if you're as fed up as we are. The opening batch of essays, and the first podcast episode, are here: slate.com/news-and-pol...
By the People
As a thought experiment, we bring you popular constitutionalism—local, organic farm-to-table making of legal meaning.
slate.com
Very important piece by Cerin Lindgrensavage and @davidasuper.bsky.social. This behavior by the administration is not only illegal, it is anti-constitutional. thehill.com/opinion/cong...
Congress rejected some of Trump’s proposed budget cuts. OMB is making them anyway.
President Trump and the Office of Management and Budget are accused of violating the separation of powers by attempting to unilaterally withhold funds that Congress specifically appropriated.
thehill.com
The Supreme Court just took up a case (Jouppi v. Alaska) that asks whether prosecutors violated the 8th Amendment's bar against excessive fines when they confiscated a pilot's private plane (worth $95,000) after he unknowingly flew a passenger's beer into a dry town. ij.org/case/alaska-...
Jouppi v. Alaska - Institute for Justice
Ken Jouppi, a longtime Alaska bush pilot, is fighting the forfeiture of his plane over a six-pack of beer.
ij.org
New Series "By the People". For the better part of two centuries of U.S. history, the American people understood that they—and not the Supreme Court—were the final arbiters of the Constitution.
By the People | Who Owns the Constitution? | Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
The Supreme Court would have us believe it alone decides what the Constitution means. That’s not true. It never was.
shows.acast.com
Lots of important stuff, but these two stood out from the analysis: 1) Americans are not helpless. 2) No ideology or authoritarian state is self-executing. You facilitate it by insisting you have no choice and you halt it by refusing to lend it the legitimacy and weight of your participation.
Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc.bsky.social · 3w agoGift link with no paywall because everybody needs to read this one after the June we just had slate.com/news-and-pol...
Watching the massive right-wing freak-out over this excellent opinion on X has been a highlight of my summer so far. Read it yourself to see why it makes these greasy FedSoc losers flip their shit. slate.com/news-and-pol...
A Sitting Judge Just Delivered the Most Scathing Critique of This Supreme Court Term
The Supreme Court has veered so far off track that even the harshest language can feel inadequate to capture the damage wrought by its most recent term.
slate.com
As expected, the 3rd Circuit has struck down New Jersey's assault weapons ban, becoming the first federal appeals court to find that the Second Amendment protects AR-15s. But SCOTUS will settle this issue next term, making the decision anticlimactic. www2.ca3.uscourts.gov/opinarch/242...
This is a really good explainer about the mortality estimates around USAID. One big point is that dismantling USAID also dismantled one of the main sources of mortality data in some of these regions. Early indicators of mortality are very worrying.
The New Yorker@newyorker.com · 3w agoElon Musk’s cuts to U.S.A.I.D. led to some 700,000 deaths, Atul Gawande says. www.newyorker.com/news/the-new...
I’ll put a finer point on it: The actual solution to our birth rate “problem” is substantially increasing immigration. Lyman Stone is a virulent racist and nativist bigot, so he rejects or ignores this solution in favor of pushing heterosexual Christian couples to reproduce more. That’s my response.
Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc.bsky.social · 4w agoAgain. This is the author. What are we doing here?
Again. This is the author. What are we doing here?
New York Times Opinion@nytopinion.nytimes.com · 4w ago“Birthrates have fallen almost continuously for nearly 20 years,” Lyman Stone writes. “They have fallen through good economies and bad, through Republican administrations and Democratic ones, through every tax credit and child-care subsidy.”
Lyman stone is a christofascist freak and it is insane that people pay attention to any of the nonsense he says
Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc.bsky.social · 4w agoInteresting choice by NYT to publish an op-ed bemoaning America’s projected population decline by a guy who’s massively racist against immigrants and compares IVF to “Nazi eugenics.” The “pronatalists” only want more of a very specific kind of person in this country. It gives the game away.
