Gotta love the “or stocks” part. Like Gemini realized its first answer was nuts so it tried to wedge in a better one.
Walter Olson
@walterolson.bsky.social
Writer on law etc.; Cato Institute. Election law, Maryland civic stuff, cooking. Blogged at Overlawyered back when. No kings, no tyrants.
Trump administration admits cancellation of Maryland energy grants was political
Trump administration admits it axed energy grants because Maryland voted against him
Department of Energy attorneys admitted in recent court filings that it cancelled grants, including over $80 million for Maryland projects, based on how states voted in the 2024 presidential election.
buff.ly
Well, at least it was for a completely lawless and pointless cause.
CNBC@cnbc.com · yesterdayU.S. has used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war: Reuters
Reuters finds that judges have ruled Trump abridged speech in 75 cases. www.reuters.com/legal/govern...
Trump vowed to 'bring free speech back.' Judges in 75 cases ruled that he has stifled it
President Donald Trump repeatedly campaigned for his second term as a champion of free expression, vowing in his January 2025 inaugural address to stop what he described as years of "government censor...
reuters.com
Kansas Flock Lawsuit: ALPRs Turn a License Plate Into the 'Functional Equivalent' of a 'GPS Tracking Device' - The Kansas Justice Institute argues that Wichita's "warrantless ALPR dragnet surveillance program" violates the state constitution's privacy protections reason.com/2026/07/31/k...
Kansas lawsuit: ALPRs turn a license plate into the 'functional equivalent' of a 'GPS tracking device'
The Kansas Justice Institute argues that Wichita's "warrantless ALPR dragnet surveillance program" violates the state constitution's privacy protections.
reason.com
NY police tricked a woman into drinking from a cup, then pulled her DNA and added it to a secret database. They have done this to thousands of people who were never charged with a crime. Cato filed a brief in this case, arguing that the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant. https://ow.ly/1mHL50ZvUlN
Leslie v. City of New York Brief: NYC's "Suspect Index" of Secretly Harvested DNA Is Unconstitutional
The NYPD routinely collects DNA samples in an orchestrated surreptitious manner through ruses involving straws, bottles, or even cigarettes, without the knowledge or consent of the searched individual and without a court order.
ow.ly
"Access to Ceuta does not give anyone automatic access to the rest of Europe. More to the point, nearly all of those who swam over the border had returned to Morocco by Sunday morning." @anneapplebaum.wsocial.eu on the latest Trump, Vance, and Farage migration panic.
The Far Right Is Distorting Ceuta
We’ve seen this before.
theatlantic.com
Excellent read @ordinarytimes.bsky.social today: "I spent the last two weeks of June working as an election judge in Larimer County for the Colorado primaries. This was the first time I had ever worked as a judge." ordinary-times.com/2026/07/17/e...
Election Judging - Ordinary Times
Democracy depends on volunteers doing mind-numbingly tedious stuff...someone has to do the scut work required to make it function.
ordinary-times.com
Why Bill Pulte's service last week was illegal: "While the administration was within its rights to delay Clayton’s swearing in as long as it wished, it could not extend Pulte’s acting service." [@thomasberry.bsky.social, Cato]
William Pulte Served Illegally as Acting Director of National Intelligence for Nearly a Week
William Pulte purported to act as the director of national intelligence for nearly a week after Jay Clayton was confirmed as his successor. That violates the plain text of the Vacancies Act.
cato.org
Disturbing thread and article from my colleague @pgeddington.bsky.social, including the possibility of deploying military force against domestic unrest. #FOIA @cato.org
Patrick G. Eddington@pgeddington.bsky.social · 2d agoA week after Trump issued his "national emergency" proclamation for the southern border, the military began planning for a potential invocation of the Insurrection Act & much more. Another major #FOIA get, out now. cc: @radleybalko.bsky.social @cjciaramella.bsky.social www.cato.org/blog/northco...
"Supplementary" voting, used in the Manchester mayoral election to replace Andy Burnham, is a sort of constrained version of ranked-choice voting that approximates a two-candidate-only instant runoff #RCV
A Form of Ranked-Choice Voting Used in Mayoral Elections in the UK #ELB
I just learned about a form of ranked-choice voting the UK uses, called the “supplementary vote,” for electing mayors where they are directly elected (an exception was the 2024 London mayoral election...
electionlawblog.org
“Crossing the line” between peaceful protest or impeding law enforcement agents? Article is a good primer on what is currently going on with our government’s reaction to protest and the use—and overuse—of an old Civil-War era law #DV1 www.npr.org/2026/08/03/n...
She protested ICE raids. Then agents showed up at her door
The Justice Department is using federal conspiracy charges to sweep up ICE protesters. Some legal experts worry the agency is casting too wide a net to prosecute political activists.
npr.org
Questioning intel declassification on purported Chinese election meddling, Maryland gerrymander returns, Callais defended, Patel's Georgia EGO squad and more in my latest Cato election policy roundup
Election Policy Roundup #28: China Data Concerns, Voting Rights, and Maryland's Redistricting Battle
Roundup on election law and policy includes links on Louisiana v. Callais, Chinese gathering of U.S. voter data, FBI surge to investigate 2020 Georgia presidential election, and uncompetitive House ra...
cato.org
Trump happily damages the economy in pursuit of his war on immigration while, of course, ignoring any consideration of morality or decency. reason.com/2026/07/30/t...
The real cost of turning away foreign talent
Researchers estimate that discouraging just one-third of international STEM graduates could leave the American economy 0.7 percent to 1.3 percent smaller—equivalent to losing the entire economy of Uta...
reason.com
The slump in tourism to the U.S. -- an important foreign exchange earner as well as a contributor to local economies -- should be reckoned as one of the costs of Trump's reckless and belligerent trade war [Alfredo Carrillo Obregon, @cato.org]
How “Liberation Day” Cost America Its Tourists
Amid a lack of tariff retaliation by foreign governments, private individuals abroad are pushing back against Trump’s trade policies by limiting their consumption of American goods and services—most n...
cato.org
NEW: Jeanine Pirro's motion to dismiss the Reflecting Pool case is going to have ripple effects. The decision to end the case against former Olympian David Hearn is already making a big splash — and this is likely just the beginning, not the end, of the matter. Tonight, at Law Dork:
Jeanine Pirro's motion to dismiss the Reflecting Pool case is going to have ripple effects
The decision to end the case against former Olympian David Hearn is already making a big splash — and this is likely just the beginning, not the end, of the matter.
lawdork.com
In this post, I discuss inherent contradictions of socialist prison abolitionism. You can't abolish prisons and ALSO make wide range of "capitalist" economic activity illegal. The way to curb imprisonment is to reduce the number of banned activities, not increase it: reason.com/volokh/2026/...
Contradictions of Socialist Prison Abolitionism
NA "Democratic socialists" are a growing movement on the political left. And many of them are also prison abolitionists. But…
reason.com
The movie wasn’t an instruction manual 🤦♂️ “The FBI office in charge of maintaining the terrorist watch list is seeking an artificial intelligence system for pre-crime policing, according to procurement documents obtained by Reason.” reason.com/2026/07/28/m... #USpol #crime #scifi #law #dystopia
Minority Report Looking
Alt: Minority Report - looking through precognition sights
static.klipy.com
NYPD not only harvests DNA from adults charged with crimes, but surreptitiously gathers it from those merely being questioned, even choosing to trick children. Second Circuit should protect privacy rights by requiring a warrant. [Matthew Cavedon on Cato amicus brief in Leslie v. City of New York]
Leslie v. City of New York Brief: NYC's "Suspect Index" of Secretly Harvested DNA Is Unconstitutional
The NYPD routinely collects DNA samples in an orchestrated surreptitious manner through ruses involving straws, bottles, or even cigarettes, without the knowledge or consent of the searched individual...
cato.org
"The policy thicket that slowed the Forest Service’s action in Grizzly Flats was partly budgetary and partly administrative, but its core was regulatory, and it’s the same core behind nearly every stalled wildfire-prevention project in the country: the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)."
Pass The Fix Our Forests Act
Voters Want Congress to Solve Problems. Shocking.
therebuild.pub
Trump “came up with a completely false quote saying I acknowledged things I never said. “My god." — Brad Karp, then the chairman of the law firm 2/2
RFK told Dana Bash that Lyme disease “almost certainly” came from gain of function research. Which is utterly false. www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdi...
Lyme Disease Did Not Come From a Secret Military Lab, Contrary to FDA Chief's Claim
Bacterium that causes it circulated long before the lab opened, decades of evidence show
medpagetoday.com
I suspect cruelty is motivated less by feeling evil than by feeling just.
Last October, Leo Feler hired contractors to work on his Chicago home. When he was gone on a work trip, CBP agents stormed his property without a warrant and chased the workers. They caused $30K in damage to the property. Today, Leo teamed up with @ij.org to sue CBP over the warrantless raid.
Economist David Hebert shows Trump's tariffs damage US reputation/credibility with trading partners. In this post, I outline steps courts and Congress could take to mitigate this problem: reason.com/volokh/2026/...
How Trump's Tariffs Undermine US Trustworthiness and Credibility - and What can be Done to Stop it
I have previously written about how Trump's new Section 301 tariffs are illegal and harmful. The same goes for…
reason.com