House Democrats, to their credit, did not take the bait: Of the 206 of them who voted on the joint resolution, 205 voted no. I would encourage North Carolina Representative Don Davis, the lone Democrat who for some godforsaken reason felt compelled to align himself with the likes of Texas Senator Ted Cruz, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and President Donald Trump, to pay special attention to the rest of this post.

To be clear, no one (including Johnson) actually thought the amendment was going to pass. For one thing, Congress hasn’t passed a substantive amendment to the Constitution since the Nixon administration. For another, amending the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate, which Republicans control by margins of just five and six seats, respectively.

Instead, in a press conference on Tuesday, Johnson explained that he wanted to force Democrats who are not aligned with “communists and socialists” to “put their money where their mouth is.” This was, in other words, a rather hamfisted attempt at political intimidation: Johnson’s message was that Serious Democrats respect the Court and understand the importance of preserving its current form, and that Democrats who vote no are thus “communists and socialists” and cannot be taken seriously.

“We know that the nine justices of the Supreme Court has been the model that has served this country for many, many years, and it does not need to change,” Johnson said. “If we go down the road of packing the Supreme Court, it turns into a political palooza, and it would not serve the country.”

There are several reasons that Johnson’s argument is characteristically facile and stupid. The size of the Supreme Court is set by federal law, which Congress can change at any time. It has exercised this power on at least five previous occasions, and as a result, the Court has consisted of as few as six and as many as ten justices. The most recent legislative change did not even require a statute: After the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016, Senate Republicans’ decision to keep the seat vacant effectively reduced the size of the Court to eight justices for 14 months. There is nothing special or significant about the number nine, other than the fact that it has been working out pretty well for Mike Johnson of late.

Setting all that aside, there was an even simpler reason for Democratic lawmakers to tell Johnson to go to hell: Democratic voters despise the Supreme Court and have no interest in being represented by politicians who performatively defend it. In a July Washington Post-Ipsos poll, for example, 55 percent of respondents said they disapprove of the Court, including 75 percent of Democrats and 59 percent of independents. Almost half—46 percent—said that the Court is deciding its Trump-related cases based on the justices’ political views, and within that group, 66 percent said that those cases (wouldn’t you know it) usually come out his way.

As I wrote at the time, a different way of understanding this poll is that, on net, the share of people who perceive the Court as an explicitly pro-Trump body these days is 30 percent. For Democrats on the campaign trail, “The Supreme Court has been captured by pro-Trump Republicans who only care about the legal rights of evangelical Christians and Fortune 500 CEOs” is about as reliable an applause line as it gets.

Historically, expansion has polled less well than other Court reform proposals, which means that Democratic politicians have been skittish about backing it in public. But when the Court is this unpopular, there is good reason to believe that continuing to be cautious is both bad policy and bad politics. In February, a Strength In Numbers-Verasight poll found that 39 percent of respondents supported expansion, 32 percent opposed it, and 29 percent were not sure, and as G. Elliott Morris pointed out at Strength In Numbers, a big chunk of “don’t know” responses can indicate “soft support” for a given policy. Put differently, there are people—perhaps a lot of people—who are more intrigued than ever by the idea of Court expansion, and whose votes might be available to whichever politicians are savvy enough to endorse it first.

I concede that 200-plus no votes on a GOP stunt that had zero chance of passing is good and encouraging, yes, but not the same as 200-plus yes votes on a bill to actually expand the Supreme Court under a hypothetical future Democratic president. During the second half of the Biden administration, proposals to add justices to the Court never picked up more than 66 supporters in the House, largely because neither Biden nor Democratic leadership spent the time or energy making the case to voters when they had the chance.

As I’ve written before, the party cannot afford to make that mistake again. What Wednesday’s lopsided vote suggests is that at the very least, Democrats are (finally) starting to understand that dutifully propping up an institution their voters hate is more of a political liability than getting called a “communist and socialist” by Mike Johnson, a guy who might be out of a job in five months.

The caucus still has a long way to go to get where it needs to be. But the opportunity to expand the Court will be there. It will be on them to take advantage of it.

As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.

This Week In Balls & Strikes

Supreme Court Justices Are Afraid of Accountability Even After Their Deaths, Madiba Dennie

The papers of Supreme Court justices can help the public understand what the Court is doing and how the Court works. For John Roberts, that’s a real problem.

How the Supreme Court Helps Trump Run Out the Clock, Madiba Dennie

A president who loves breaking the law is very lucky to have a Supreme Court that gives him the time he needs to do it.

The Supreme Court Ballroom Decision Is Everything Trump Could Have Asked For, Jay Willis

The justices in the majority say they aren’t deciding on the “legality” of Trump’s ballroom. They also can’t wait to attend the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

How Anti-Abortion Activists Are Using a Child Custody Case to Attack Surrogacy, Madiba Dennie

The Alliance Defending Freedom has ulterior motives for getting involved in the fight for custody of Rumi Ali Ahmed.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

The Grim Implications of the Supreme Court’s Ballroom Ruling, Ankush Khardori, Open File

“Conservative lawyers and conservative judges are now practically insisting that the courts must take the Trump administration’s claims in court at face value — whatever they are, and without even bothering to question them.”

Trump Just Asked the Supreme Court to Back One of His Cruelest Policies, Robyn Nicole Sanders, Slate

“If the court takes Talbott, it could ultimately decide whether the government may bar transgender Americans from military service, including forcing out people who have served honorably, proved themselves willing and able to meet the military’s demands, and stand ready to fight for a country whose government now says they are unfit to serve.”

This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images

The legal fight began back in December 2025, when the Kennedy Center’s Trump-aligned board of trustees first tried to shoehorn the words “THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND” above existing Kennedy Center signage. A federal court ordered the removal of Trump’s name in June, but the board remains committed to fulfilling the president’s wishes. Its latest proposal would append a “RENOVATED AND RESTORED BY PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP” inscription to the side of the building, beneath the Kennedy Center signage this time around. The board also wants to name the grounds on which the Kennedy Center sits the “President Donald J. Trump Plaza,” like an enterprising NFL team selling a secondary set of stadium naming rights to whichever corporate behemoth is desperate enough to pay for it.

In a new court filing, the Trump Justice Department is warning about what might happen if its client does not get his way: According to Brantley T. Mayers, a lawyer in the Civil Division, prospective donors will not open their wallets unless the renovation plans include “prominent recognition” of Trump’s involvement. And without those renovations, Brantley says, the “dilapidated” and “crumbling” Kennedy Center will “deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure,” and may even have to be “taken down” in order to avoid “collapse or calamity.” In other words, the Justice Department’s official position is that without the addition of an (apparently load-bearing) “RENOVATED AND RESTORED” inscription, the Kennedy Center will be at risk of falling down and killing everyone inside.

“The Board recognizes that President Trump’s efforts and prestige provide the sole hope for the Center’s financial survival, and structural renewal,” Brantley writes. “The Trump Administration, and President Donald J. Trump, should, therefore, be given the respect and dignity of acknowledgement.” (All weird comma placements in original.)

It is true that like most government buildings that opened in the early 1970s, the Kennedy Center could probably use some work. But I want to stress here that Brantley’s filing is far more concerned with the president’s preferred naming conventions and the downstream consequences of failing to implement them. Asides that tout Trump’s “unrivaled expertise and experience in real estate and construction” and assert that “nobody had any idea” what the name of a recent Kennedy Center addition “even meant” sound like the work product of a lawyer who understands that his job is to focus on whatever his client yells loudest about.

Perhaps the brief’s silliest section comes when Brantley threatens the Kennedy Center in the time-honored manner of clumsy, low-level henchmen in Mafia movies. “There are many conflicts of interest having to do with the Kennedy Center,” he writes. “It would be a shame if those conflicts of interest would destroy the very thing that we are all trying to save.”

Setting aside the noxiousness of holding the Kennedy Center hostage over a petty dispute about branding, I am in awe of Brantley’s use of the “conflicts of interest” term of art—a relevant concept in many Trump-adjacent contexts, to be sure—to refer to the fact that the parties in this case have different real-world goals. If you are the law professor who taught Brantley’s professional responsibility course, this is a tough way to learn that you are not getting through.

All of this would be really funny if it were not so grim: the agency responsible for the enforcement of federal law spending its time and resources arguing that unless an addled octogenarian sees his name in as many places as he would like, a controlled demolition of the Kennedy Center might be necessary to prevent it from disintegrating into the Potomac River. If you are a law student or lawyer who aspires to work at the Justice Department someday, my advice is to find something else to do for a few years. The federal government will still be there. Don’t humiliate yourself by associating with this version of it.

As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.

This Week In Balls & Strikes

How the Trump White House Is Trying to Bring the Legal Profession to Heel, G.S. Hans

The administration’s attacks on the American Bar Association’s accreditation powers are part of a broader push to prevent law schools from teaching things conservatives do not like.

Donald Trump Really Wanted Your Concert Tickets to Be More Expensive, Madiba Dennie

The Biden Justice Department brought an antitrust case against America’s least favorite ticket platform. Then the billionaire president stepped in.

The Supreme Court Thinks You Are Stupid, Jay Willis

The conservative justices are reserving for themselves the power to decide whether Trump can hijack the 2026 midterms.

Federal Appeals Court Confirms It’s Still Legal To Talk About Abortion, Madiba Dennie

Anti-abortion activists claimed that overturning Roe would allow each state to regulate abortion “as its citizens wish.” Republican state lawmakers have been far more ambitious.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Clear-Eyed Solo Dissent Explains the Supreme Court’s Voting Assault, Alexis Romero, Slate

“Jackson rightly describes this ‘Catch-Me-If-You-Can approach’ to legal strategy as what it is: a cynical gotcha game designed to dodge legal accountability for as long as possible.”

The Supreme Court Isn’t interested In Facts, Duncan Hosie, The Atlantic

“Confronted with an imagined crisis of rampant voter fraud, the Court constructed an illusion of its own. It reimagined what the executive order did and glossed over the intentions of the man who signed it.”

This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images

A whistleblower complaint released by the Government Accountability Project sheds new light on this aspect of the Justice Department’s transformation into a glorified pro-Trump law firm. In the complaint, a career government lawyer named Haley Van Erem describes how she was pulled off her cases and (involuntarily) detailed to the White House’s “Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism,” a blunt instrument for bullying Ivy League universities that have not cracked down on Woke as much as Donald Trump, personally, would prefer. Once reassigned, Van Erem says that she and her team were pressured to conduct investigations with “little to no factual predicate justifying opening them”; forced to work on “compressed timelines” that made it impossible to “ensure that findings were justified and accurate”; and “admonished” when they had the gall to ask questions about the legitimacy of the enterprise.

In light of the “extraordinary procedural irregularities” they encountered and the “disregard” for the requirements of federal law they witnessed, Van Erem and company eventually drew the only reasonable conclusion: that “certain enforcement outcomes had been determined before the relevant evidence was collected and evaluated.” In other words, political appointees at the Justice Department decided who to punish, and tasked non-political appointees like Van Erem with cobbling together legal justifications for it.

When Trump took office in January 2025, Van Erem was serving as lead counsel on several Americans With Disabilities Act cases related to the provision of services for children with mental healthcare needs. But in March of that year, she was told that she had a more important job: to probe a series of ostensibly antisemitic incidents that occurred during medical school commencement ceremonies at Brown, Columbia, Cornell and Harvard. To give you a sense of how the nation’s top law enforcement officials are setting their priorities these days, her orientation materials included a background memo stating that the investigations were based on a single article published by the New York Post.

In her complaint, Van Erem says that at first, she tried her best to do what she thought her job was, and assumed the Justice Department wouldn’t bring down the hammer unless it could substantiate the allegations. Quickly, she found out how wrong this assumption was: After the team failed to unearth legal violations related to the medical schools, Justice Department leadership simply expanded the scope of the investigations to encompass entire universities, with a special focus on—prepare to be shocked—Muslim faculty members and professors in Middle East Studies departments. Their goal was to coerce skittish school administrators to cave; essentially, Van Erem says, she was instructed to “work backward from desired settlement terms,” and to “generate proposed findings” to support those terms.

At one point, after reading media reports that the White House was blocking a half-billion dollars in federal funding for Brown University, Van Erem and her colleagues sent an email seeking assurances that their investigation, which was just barely underway, wasn’t the basis for the decision to withhold all that money. In response, the acting general counsel for the Department of Health and Human Services, Sean Keveney, summoned them to a mandatory meeting and scolded them for attempting to provide legal advice, which raises the obvious question of what, exactly, the Trump administration believes lawyers at the Justice Department are supposed to do. Van Erem also says that Keveney kicked off the meeting by referring to himself as “Angry Sean,” and that he directed attendees not to take notes, which is generally not an instruction you give unless you are pretty nervous about what a written record might suggest.

Perhaps the most notable section of Van Erem’s complaint, which is partially redacted to protect the identities of other whistleblowers, consists (for now) of just a subsection header. Back in February, Josh Michtom argued in Balls & Strikes that Justice Department lawyers should quit their jobs rather than continue to participate in Trump’s efforts to abuse the legal system to punish his personal and political enemies. It appears that the experience of being repurposed as pawns in a handful of half-assed antisemitism investigations prompted at least some Justice Department lawyers to do exactly that.

It is of course good that lawyers who take their professional and moral obligations seriously are leaving Trump’s employment, and it is even better for them to blow the whistle on the vapid, mendacious losers who are calling the shots. Van Erem quit in May 2025 after deciding that she was “unwilling to be made vulnerable to further participation in politically motivated investigations unsupported by facts and contrary to law.”

That said, the disintegration of the Justice Department will continue to matter well after Trump leaves office. Effective civil rights enforcement depends on the availability of lawyers who understand how to do it; before resigning, Van Erem had been handling these cases for a decade, which, if you’re doing the math, means she’d held the job under Obama, Trump, Biden, and then Trump again. The departures of lawyers like her mean that even under future, less malevolent presidential administrations, the Justice Department will be less equipped to do the vital work that Trump is abandoning. Just the way he would like it.

As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.

This Week In Balls & Strikes

How Republican Politicians and Conservative Judges Work Together to Preserve Capital Punishment, Madiba Dennie

Public opposition to the death penalty is growing. But more people are being executed.

Federal Judges Split on Whether The Supreme Court Legalized Racism, Madiba Dennie

The Supreme Court greenlit Trump’s racism against Haitian immigrants. Now federal district judges are wondering if they have to condone racism, too.

The Judges Rejecting Trump’s Bad-Faith Arguments Are Just Doing Their Jobs, Denny Carter

Imagine a Supreme Court that took its responsibilities half as seriously as the lower court judges presiding over challenges to the White House’s lawlessness.

How the Supreme Court Kicked Off America’s Sports Betting Addiction Crisis, Madiba Dennie

Like many things in this country, the omnipresence of DraftKings and FanDuel is largely the Supreme Court’s fault.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

The Legal War Over Prediction Markets Is Getting Crazier, Matt Ford, The New Republic

“At stake is a vast market that seeks to extract billions of dollars from younger Americans under the guise of gamified investments. Its ultimate fate…will likely be decided by the institution that kicked off the sports betting craze eight years ago: the Supreme Court of the United States.”

In a Truth Social Post, Trump Posts Language as His Own That Comes From an April DOJ Brief That Sounded Like a Truth Social Post, Chris Geidner, Law Dork

“Either Trump is now plagiarizing from DOJ briefs that had sounded like him in Friday night Truth social posts or Trump (or White House staffers) had written the language used in a DOJ brief.”

This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images

If “enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority,” Brown wrote, that is “solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”

Given that the Court decided Plessy by a vote of 7 to 1, I am not sure that Brown deserves 100 percent of the blame for the screeching racism that permeates it. But to the extent that anyone remembers Brown today, more than a century after his death, it is because of his opinion in that case. As a general rule, when you are the Supreme Court justice who wrote sentences like “if one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane,” history is not going to remember you as any less of a vile bigot just because a majority of your colleagues were also willing to sign their names to it.

A lesser-known fact about Brown is that in the years after his 1906 retirement, he had a bit of a second act in reactionary politics, this time as an outspoken opponent of the women’s suffrage movement. If his diary is any indication, this had been a private hobbyhorse for Brown for decades, even before his appointment to the Court. “Came down after dinner to a woman’s suffrage convention and heard some viragoes talk,” he wrote on November 30, 1869, using an archaic term for a loud, overbearing woman. “Returned disgusted.”

After stepping down from the Court, though, Brown was at last able to pursue his passion project on a full-time basis. In 1910, he outlined his case against women’s suffrage at length in a speech delivered to the Ladies Congressional Club of Washington, D.C. (Talk about a failure to read the room.)

Other than the vocabulary, Brown’s speech could easily have been ripped from someone in the Andrew Tate extended universe. There are casual references to women as the “natural spenders” of their husbands’ money, and to “housekeeping” as their “natural vocation.” There are earnest discussions of men’s ability to maintain a “dispassionate view of important questions,” and the powerlessness of women to think critically “once an opinion is formed.” At one point, Brown argued that if women really wanted the franchise, the “natural chivalry of men would rally to their support” and “cheerfully concede.” The fact that women did not already possess the right to vote, he concluded, was thus proof that they were “generally content to leave the more serious questions of bread-winning and of government to the male sex.”

Brown wrapped by reassuring his audience that he was “still an admirer of the ideal woman of history and romance,” and encouraged them to emulate, among others, Andromache, the wife of Hector in Greek mythology. There is probably not a better illustration of the sexist brain than denying women rights while instructing them to try to be more like a fictional character.

In maybe the speech’s grimmest passage, Brown explained his philosophical opposition to extending the franchise not only to women, but to any “large classes who have not heretofore enjoyed it.” The gradual expansion of voting rights from white men who own property to white men who can read to all white men, he said, is “so near an absolute failure that the most important political question now confronting us is how to get rid of it without sacrificing the principle of self-government.”

Brown also pointed to the Fifteenth Amendment, which Congress ratified in 1870 to ban racial discrimination in voting, as an experiment gone awry. The fact that “the amendment has been generally disregarded in the South” was something of a relief, he said, since any “serious attempt to enforce it…would probably have resulted in another Civil War.”

Maybe it should not be any great surprise to learn that the author of Plessy v. Ferguson was not particularly enthusiastic about the Reconstruction Amendments. Even so, it absolutely sucks to read a Supreme Court justice—a person who was in theory responsible for safeguarding the rights the Reconstruction Amendments protect—publicly refer to the enfranchisement of Black Americans as “unwise” and “radical,” and to cite the government’s choice not to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment in the South as proof of the folly of extending the franchise any further.

Unfortunately for Brown, who died in 1913, all of his freelance misogyny went for naught, as women received the right to vote when Congress ratified the Nineteenth Amendment seven years later. Hopefully, Brown’s failure will serve as a cautionary tale for Samuel Alito, and persuade him to spend his eventual retirement puttering around the garden like everyone else.

As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.

This Week In Balls & Strikes

The Justice Department Is a Glorified Pro-Trump Law Firm Now, Jay Willis

The president is staffing the government with trusted lawyers who share a willingness to do anything for their favorite client.

The Supreme Court’s Recusal Rules Are Worthless, Madiba Dennie

Cases involving the oil and gas industry are great for Justice Samuel Alito, a noted investor in the oil and gas industry.

Trump’s New Birthright Citizenship Orders Create New Ways to Criminalize Women and Girls, Madiba Dennie

The Supreme Court turned away the president’s first attempt to limit birthright citizenship. He is trying again.

The Fifth Circuit’s Dangerous Obsession with DeRay Mckesson, G.S. Hans

The nation’s most conservative appeals court is ignoring decades of Supreme Court precedent to punish protest leaders for exercising their First Amendment rights.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

A Ballot Measure’s Defeat, and New Judicial Appointments, Foil Kansas Conservatives, Daniel Nichanian, Bolts

“We fought with strength and focus to defend abortion rights and we won.”

The Presumption of Irregularity, Chris Geidner, Law Dork

“It’s a new DOJ, and the first signs are no good.”

This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images

This is, to put it gently, not at all how attribution works. Please, if you take one thing from this newsletter, let it be this: “Off the record” is an agreement between a source and a journalist. It is not a series of magic words that renders journalists powerless to report whatever ill-advised things you say, or, for that matter, whatever ill-advised things you already said.

Further thwarting the White House’s harebrained bid for confidentiality is the fact that shortly after Blanche wrapped, Intercessors For America, a religious activist group, uploaded a recording of the event to its YouTube channel. That recording has since been removed, I assume at the behest of the first White House press staffer who typed “is YouTube off the record” into ChatGPT and realized that they had an opsec problem on their hands.

A recap of the call published by Politico makes clear why organizers hoped to keep the substance a secret. Blanche, a former member of Trump’s criminal defense team, acknowledged that the White House’s anti-abortion agenda is “taking longer than we want” to implement, but assured listeners that the goal remains the same: to make “the Dobbs decision…permanent in every single state.” With respect to abortion pills, which under federal law remain broadly available by mail even in states where Republicans have passed abortion bans, Blanche affirmed that the Justice Department was working on “putting practices and policies in place” to cut off that access, too.

“We don’t have complete victory yet, but we will have victory, and victory will be soon, and it will be permanent,” Blanche said, according to Politico.

Between his dubious qualifications, his involvement in Trump’s pro-January 6 “anti-weaponization” fund, and his alarmingly obsequious declarations of fealty to his most famous client, Blanche has a somewhat more challenging path to confirmation than one might expect for a Republican lawyer appointed by a Republican president subject to the consent of a Republican-controlled Senate. Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski’s announcement on Friday that she will vote no on Blanche—“I simply do not have confidence,” she wrote, that he would “check the worst impulses of this administration”—means that in order to get the job he covets, Blanche has to persuade outgoing Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy to vote yes, and without losing any more Republicans along the way.

For this reason, Republican senators have spent the last several weeks leveraging Blanche’s predicament by trying to extract various anti-abortion commitments from him in exchange for their support. Missouri’s Josh Hawley, for example, has suggested that if confirmed, Blanche should “resolve” an ongoing legal challenge to the FDA’s 2023 decision to allow telemedicine prescriptions of mifepristone, which is frequently used in medication abortions. As Susan Rinkunas noted in Balls & Strikes in June, this result would be a victory for Josh, who as 2028 approaches is positioning himself as Trump’s more anti-abortion, less charismatic successor, and for his wife Erin, a conservative activist who filed one of the lawsuits that her husband, hint-hint, really hopes Blanche settles at his earliest convenience.

In its report, Politico notes that Blanche did not specify whether his comments about abortion pills were confined to mifepristone litigation, or whether he is also planning to more aggressively enforce the Comstock Act, an 1873 federal law that conservatives hope to revive as a backdoor national abortion ban. That said, given that the conservative legal movement has been fueled by anti-abortion sentiment for five decades and counting, I do not think Blanche is entitled to the benefit of the doubt here. I also think, just practically speaking, that in the context of abortion restrictions, anyone who is promising a “complete,” “permanent” victory “in every single state” is probably not going to be content with half measures.

Blanche’s frank admissions during this so-secret-it-was-on-YouTube call are consistent with the rank opportunism that has defined his career. If he had not taken on Trump as a client during a brief period when the then-former president seemed like he might be (1) done in politics and (2) looking at federal prison time, Todd Blanche would be just another generic-looking ex-prosecutor turned New York City-area law firm partner whose name you would have no reason to learn or occasion to hear. But because loyalty is the only currency in the Trump White House, just a few years later, Blanche is a few votes away from one of the legal profession’s most prestigious jobs. He will promise anything in order to secure it.

As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.

This Week In Balls & Strikes

Susan Collins Reminds Maine Voters Just How Easily Brett Kavanaugh Duped Her, Susan Rinkunas

Collins claims to support abortion rights. Her voting record shows otherwise.

How the Supreme Court Uses Its Executive Power Cases to Reserve Power For Itself, Steve Kennedy

In its applications of the major questions doctrine and unitary executive theory, the Court has placed itself above its ostensibly co-equal branches of government.

Judges Shouldn’t Give States a Pass On Sexual Abuse, Steve Kennedy

Lawmakers create “revival windows” to hold abusers accountable. But by interpreting these laws narrowly, courts can lock survivors out of court.

The Push to Elect Kansas Supreme Court Justices Is a Cynical Anti-Abortion Power Grab, Jay Willis

In 2022, Kansas voters overwhelmingly rejected the GOP’s anti-abortion agenda. Four years later, state lawmakers are trying “another path.”

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

Trump Should Need a Warrant to See Your Phone, Adam Serwer, The Atlantic

“As it stands, border officials anywhere in the country can initiate a manual search of your device simply by stating that they are looking for such digital contraband.”

Kansas Voters Reject Constitutional Amendment on Judicial Selection By Wide Margin, Sherman Smith, Jacinda Hall, and Tim Carpenter, The Kansas Reflector

“Kansans have made their wishes known, and those wishes are noble. The Kansas Supreme Court must remain fair and impartial for every citizen. It cannot and will not be bought to give a few an unfair advantage.”

This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images

Sprinkled throughout the literally hundreds of emails like this one that I received, though, were some cool ideas from real people. Among them were this story from the journalist Sophia Laurenzi, about Tennessee’s crusade to execute Harold Wayne Nichols over the strenuous objections of both the sitting prosecutor and the jurors who voted to convict him, and this one from former immigration lawyer Auden Perino, about how ICE uses so-called gang databases—notoriously unreliable resources that occasionally label literal infants as “verified gang members”—in order to keep people in immigration detention. This is the best part of working in media in 2026, or anytime, really: meeting smart, thoughtful writers with compelling stories to tell, and working with them to make it happen.

Thus, with preemptive apologies to my overworked spam filters but also with excitement for the good stuff that will make it through, I am once again inviting you (or anyone you know) to pitch Balls & Strikes. If you have a story idea in our wheelhouse—the Supreme Court, the legal profession, the federal judiciary, the last batch of election-denying freaks whom Senate Republicans are trying to ram through the judicial confirmation process before the midterms, and so on—please email me at pitches@ballsandstrikes.org so that I can pay you money to write it.

Our submissions guidelines are here, but in this space I want to reiterate that you do not have to have a long, bullet-pointed list of clips from prestigious publications in order to write for Balls & Strikes. One of the reasons this website exists is that so many legacy outlets are spectacularly bad at legal journalism, and have little interest in publishing people who would be better at it. We at Balls & Strikes want to include new and more insightful voices in The Discourse, which has way too many “it’s actually a 3-3-3 Court” dead-enders already.

So if you have clips, great, send them. But if you don’t, please rest assured that you will not be penalized for it, unless your email wraps with a weird analogy about turning a long-dead civilization’s legal system into “human lightning,” in which case I am filing your email straight to the trash, and challenging you to mutual combat if I ever see you in public.

As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.

This Week In Balls & Strikes

Wi-Fi Fiasco Transforms Washington Bar Exam Into an Even Bigger Waste of Time Than Usual, Madiba Dennie

Yet another reason for states to move beyond the legal profession’s annual hazing ritual.

Kash Patel’s Ambitious Defamation Lawsuit Foiled By Basic Civil Procedure Doctrine, Jay Willis

The FBI director’s case against a blogger who called him a “blatantly incompetent chud” and a “googly-eyed Kremlin bitch” is no match for International Shoe.

District Court Judges Are Unimpressed By the Fifth Circuit’s “Precedential Stay Order” Stunt, Madiba Dennie

At the White House’s request, America’s Trumpiest appeals court attempts to issue an order that does not exist.

Republicans Senators Are Turning Todd Blanche’s Confirmation Fight Into an Anti-Abortion Free-For-All, Susan Rinkunas

Blanche needs the support of every Republican senator on the Judiciary Committee. They are taking full advantage.

A Brief Guide to “Mega Master” Hearings, the Engine Powering Trump’s Deportation Machine, Madiba Dennie

The White House keeps finding new ways to push immigrants’ due process rights further out of reach.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

The Real Logic Behind the GOP’S New Push For Judicial Elections, Steve Kennedy, TPM

“Once judges enter the electoral arena, the question of who chooses them can quickly become inseparable from the question of which party has the best chance of winning.”

Why Elena Kagan Is Defending the Roberts Court, Matt Ford, The New Republic

“None of this means that the Supreme Court is actually more liberal than it appears. Trump and his Justice Department team simply seem to have a good read on what the high court will and won’t allow.”

This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images

What I am saying here is that if you are presented with the opportunity to assist Senate Republicans in confirming one of President Donald Trump’s election-denying weirdos to a seat on the federal bench, it is very easy for you to not do so. Earlier this summer, though, three Democratic senators—Michigan’s Gary Peters and Elissa Slotkin and Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman—elected to return their “blue slips” for two of Trump’s nominees to district court judgeships in their states: Michael Martin in Michigan, and Antonio Pozos in Pennsylvania.

Blue slips are literal slips of paper that allow home-state senators to signal their approval of a nominee who appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee. By Senate tradition, unless the committee chair receives blue slips from both of a district court nominee’s senators, that nominee does not advance to the Senate floor for a confirmation vote. During the Biden administration, Senate Republicans made liberal use of this rule to preserve red-state judgeships for Trump and his incoming Senate Republican majority to fill instead.

In other words, simply by doing nothing, Peters, Slotkin, and Fetterman could have prevented Trump from filling these vacancies. Instead, they elected to take precious minutes out of their days in order to hustle Martin and Pozos along their paths to life-tenured judgeships. To date, Peters, Slotkin, and Fetterman are the only Democratic senators to return blue slips for any of Trump’s second-term nominees. Thanks to their generosity, the full Senate confirmed both Martin and Pozos earlier this week by votes of 62-36 and 49-44, respectively.

To be fair to Martin and Pozos—a courtesy they have not done a blessed thing to earn, but whatever—their résumés are marginally less offensive than those of some of their soon-to-be colleagues on the bench. Like Trump’s other nominees, neither Martin, a federal prosecutor, nor Pozos, a law firm partner, were capable of answering straightforwardly when asked during their hearings whether President Joe Biden won the 2020 election. At the same time, Martin and Pozos are not, for example, former members of Trump’s personal legal team who have written Breitbart blog posts railing against the evils of “woke ideology” and the “abortion industrial complex.” To the best of my knowledge, neither man has delivered a sermon weighing in on whether people with disabilities can participate in a “robust marriage,” or referred to President Barack Obama as a “Halfrican-American” in a college newspaper column.

Even if Martin and Pozos grade out somewhere above an F-minus on the most lenient curve imaginable, however, that does not answer the question of how Peters, Slotkin, and Fetterman could have possibly concluded that greenlighting these confirmations a scant four months before the 2026 midterms is a smart or prudent choice. Trump will still be president in January, sure. But if Democrats take the Senate—not a guarantee, but not a long shot—the politics of judicial confirmations over his final two years in the White House are going to look a lot different.

Every seat matters right now. Had Peters, Slotkin, and Fetterman taken the easiest path available to them—gently placing their blue slips in the nearest recycle bin—they could have held on to two vacancies for a time in the not-so-distant future when Democrats might have a lot more leverage. (Perhaps—just hear me out—Democrats will even be able to negotiate for nominees who don’t play footsie with demented voter-fraud conspiracy theories because they are too chickenshit to say anything that might make Trump upset.) Instead, all three lawmakers decided to give Trump what he wants, and right before the clock runs out.

As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.

This Week In Balls & Strikes

Unhoused People Are Paying the Price For the Supreme Court’s Cruelty, Madiba Dennie

Thanks to the Grants Pass decision, cities and states continue to impose criminal penalties for the offense of being poor in public.

State Court Judges Can Protect the Rights the Supreme Court Won’t, Madiba Dennie

The Court has spent decades hollowing out its decision in Miranda v. Arizona. But state courts don’t have to follow the justices’ lead.

Poll: No One Is Taking John Roberts Seriously Anymore, Jay Willis

Voters keep making clear that they do not like or trust the Supreme Court. The question is whether Democratic politicians are listening.

The Supreme Court Is Helping ICE Agents Get Away With Murder, Madiba Dennie

The legal system used to allow people to defend their legal rights. Then the conservative legal movement stepped in.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

How the Supreme Court Swiped the Constitution From We the People, Joy Milligan and Bertrall Ross, Slate

“Popular constitutionalism reflects a simple ideal: The Constitution belongs not just to the courts, but to all of us.”

Trump Invents the Corporate Pardon, Timothy Noah, The New Republic

“Trump has granted nine [pardons for corporations]. These were never a thing before Trump—not in the modern era, and possibly never.”

This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images

“I think we’re going to continue to see movement and allow the people’s voice to be heard, especially in some of those purple states,” Gaines told Politico last month, after the Supreme Court in West Virginia v. B.P.J. upheld state lawmakers’ power to bar trans girls from playing women’s sports. “Each major decision gives your ordinary person more cover to say something that…was the standard, like the default position to take, really not that long ago.”

In other words, B.P.J. is not (only) about keeping girls like 16-year-old Becky Pepper-Jackson from playing on the same team as her friends. It is about empowering people to feel more comfortable expressing rank bigotry in public.

I am bringing this up because a common refrain among defenders of these bans is that when it comes to “political” “debates” about legal protections for trans people, sports are just different. This premise is at the core of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s majority opinion in B.P.J., which goes on at length about the “enduring” physical differences between men and women, including “height, weight, strength, speed, endurance, and jumping ability.” Especially when it comes to contact sports, he writes, “forcing female athletes to compete against males can create significant safety risks” and “undermine competitive fairness.”

On this basis, Kavanaugh concludes that preventing trans girls from playing women’s sports is a reasonable policy choice, and that lawmakers may make it without running afoul of federal law or the Constitution. But he also tries to downplay the impact of B.P.J. by emphasizing the ostensibly unique nature of sports. For example, he distinguishes between discrimination against trans women athletes—in his view, fine—and discrimination against trans women in settings like classrooms or workplaces, where sex-based differences in, say, “jumping ability” are not relevant. The “factual contexts,” Kavanaugh explains, are “vastly different.”

For anti-trans crusaders within the conservative legal movement, this is a distinction without a difference. Activists pushing sports bans are not motivated by some earnest desire to protect girls’ lacrosse players from concussions. They are using sports as a transphobia gateway drug—a tool for persuading people who are not steeped in right-wing culture wars to see at least one form of discrimination against trans people as a matter of common sense. As the journalist Sydney Bauer wrote in Balls & Strikes last summer, cases like B.P.J. “are about more than just sports—they are about the ability of anti-trans lawmakers to freely discriminate against their constituents without fear of legal repercussions.”

Regular readers of this website understand how this works. But rarely do activists spell it out as plainly as Gaines did here. In her view, the real value of B.P.J. is not the particular state statute it upholds. It is B.P.J.’s place in an emerging canon of anti-trans jurisprudence that gives “ordinary” people “more cover” to support anti-trans policies in more places.

The Supreme Court does not decide a case like B.P.J. in a vacuum. It is playing a role in a reactionary feedback loop, in which anti-trans media personalities persuade voters to elect anti-trans politicians who pass anti-trans laws blessed by anti-trans judges and celebrated by anti-trans media personalities, who then whip voters into an anti-trans frenzy all over again. Sports bans are not the movement’s end goal. They are a framework for getting Kavanaugh and company to bless even more ambitious state-sanctioned discrimination in whichever “factual context” the movement turns to next.

As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.

This Week In Balls & Strikes

Todd Blanche Understands Exactly Who His Client Is, Jay Willis

Senators asked Trump’s attorney general nominee if he would run an “independent” Justice Department. The thought would never have occurred to him.

Todd Blanche: The January 6 Slush Fund I Approved Is Not My Fault, Madiba Dennie

Trump’s nominee for attorney general has backed off his $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund.” Kind of. Mostly.

Supreme Court Justices Ask Congress For More Money, Less Accountability, Madiba Dennie

If the Court wants more public resources, it should show some understanding of what it owes the public in return.

Judges Paved the Way For the Federal Government’s Deadly Occupation of Memphis, Madiba Dennie

The shooting death of Tyrin Johnson is the predictable consequence of the legal system letting Trump turn the American military against Americans.

Lindsey Graham Was Whatever Trump Asked Him to Be, Jay Willis

The Supreme Court’s six-justice conservative supermajority probably does not exist without Lindsey Graham, who would say and do anything for an attaboy tweet from the president.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

Nobody Even Expects the DOJ to Be Independent Anymore, Quinta Jurecic, The Atlantic

“Kennedy went on to point out that previous attorneys general had included the brother of one president and the former law partner of another. (The senator did not mention that John F. Kennedy’s appointment of Robert Kennedy was hugely controversial at the time, nor that the law partner in question—John Mitchell, appointed by Richard Nixon—would go on to be criminally charged and lose his law license for his involvement in Watergate.)”

Has the Right Found Their Next Roe v. Wade?, Peter Shamshiri, String In a Maze

“What’s actually happening is that the Justices are responding rationally to the incentives of their media bubble.”

This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images

The camera next cuts to DuPree, who made the Pro Bowl three times in the late 1970s. “Players have to work together for a football team to be successful,” he says, as teammates gather behind him in a ring like they are auditioning for bit parts in West Side Story. “It’s the same thing with jobs. Employers and employees must work towards the same goal.”

If you are wondering why professional athletes are reading what sound like proto-LinkedIn posts in a cadence most closely associated with HR training videos, the last guy to appear supplies the answer. “Equal employment opportunity is the law, and it will be enforced,” intones Clarence Thomas, then the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “But teamwork also pays off.” Thomas concludes by inviting viewers to call the EEOC for “further information.” He does not provide a phone number.

To understand what in heaven’s name is going on here, you have to go back to the early 1980s, when the Reagan White House was dealing with an increasingly embarrassing public relations problem: Black people did not want to work in it. As a result, more than a year after Reagan took office, the EEOC still did not have a Senate-confirmed chair. In their book Strange Justice, the journalists Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson write that the White House was “eager to the point of desperation” for Black candidates and had reached out to “ten or twelve” Black lawyers about taking the EEOC job, only to find that “none wanted to implement Reagan’s plan to dismantle well-established methods of fighting discrimination in the workplace.”

Eventually, the administration settled on 33-year-old Clarence Thomas, who had been confirmed by the Senate to a civil rights position in the Department of Education less than a year earlier. The promotion was huge, but the job was hard: As chair of the EEOC, Thomas was responsible for enforcing federal antidiscrimination law on behalf of a president who did not especially care about federal antidiscrimination law, unless the “discrimination” came in the form of Black people getting jobs to which white people believed they were entitled.

Hence, the substance of the 30-second spot above, in which Thomas tries to thread the needle by framing federal laws that prohibit employers from discriminating based on race as important, sure, but maybe not quite as important as an employee’s duty to be a team player, no matter how racist their workplace might be. Generally speaking, when the first word out of the EEOC chairman’s mouth after “equal employment opportunity is the law, and it will be enforced” is “but,” legal protections for civil rights are probably not in a great place.

Appearing alongside Cosbie and DuPree must have been a treat for Thomas, who during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings told Judiciary Committee Chair Joe Biden that he’d been rooting for the Cowboys for 25 years. In a city obsessed with the franchise now known as the Washington Commanders, this was borderline heresy, and Wyoming Republican Senator Alan Simpson joked that Thomas’s admission of his Cowboys fandom would “create more concern” about his nomination than “anything thus far.” (Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment against Thomas would not become public for several more weeks.)

In news that will surprise no one familiar with Thomas’s penchant for consorting with reactionary billionaires, he and Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who bought the franchise in 1989, have become close friends over the years. Thomas has flown on Jones’s plane, sat in Jones’s owner’s box, and attended Cowboys training camp. In 2023, The New York Times reported that after the Cowboys won Super Bowl XXVIII, Jones asked Thomas to present the players with their Super Bowl rings, and thanked the justice by presenting him with a ring of his own.

Sources close to Thomas responded to the Times report by telling conservative media outlets that the ring was a replica. In theory, a peek at Thomas’s ethics disclosure forms from 1994 would resolve this mystery once and for all. Alas, according to a 2023 Dallas Morning News story, the Supreme Court no longer has a copy of it.

My attempts to reach Cosbie for this story were unsuccessful, but I was able to get in touch with DuPree. When we spoke on the phone, he couldn’t immediately recall this particular PSA, which seems reasonable to me given that (1) it is four decades old and (2) he appears in it for all of eight seconds. But he did remember meeting Thomas in the early 1980s through Armstrong Williams, a Thomas aide at the EEOC, during one of Thomas’s trips to Dallas. DuPree, who told me he identifies as an independent, campaigned for President George H.W. Bush, and considered running for Congress after retiring from football, said he thought Thomas was “okay” at the time, but that their conversations were more “social” than “political.”

When I asked what he thinks about Thomas now, DuPree said the two men haven’t kept in touch over the years. But from afar, DuPree said, Thomas “seems to be going along with the program”—which, when he was considering running for office, is the sort of thing he decided he wouldn’t be able to do. “If you’re in the arena, you either play by the rules or risk not being there,” DuPree told me. “I didn’t think that I would have the patience.”

Before we hung up, I did ask DuPree to account for his terrible biceps curl form. He laughed. “I’m not a weightlifter,” he said. At the time, players were supposed to be able to bench-press their body weight; DuPree says he never played above 230 pounds, and saw no reason to spend more time in the gym than he needed to. “How many times am I going to pick up a 500-, 400-, 300-pound guy and move him to the side?” he said. “I don’t think so.”

As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.

This Week In Balls & Strikes

The Conservative Justices Are Itching to Create a Constitutional Right to Buy an AR-15, Madiba Dennie

The Trump White House joins the gun activists petitioning the Supreme Court to continue its rewrite of the Second Amendment.

There Is No “Ending” Citizens United Without Supreme Court Expansion, G.S. Hans

The conservative justices have spent years developing rules for campaign finance regulation that tilt in favor of billionaires every time.

The Conservative Justices Attached Some Major Strings to the Latest Decision On Presidential Power, Madiba Dennie

The Supreme Court is not only transferring political power from Congress to the executive branch. It is also reserving a ton of political power for itself.

Emil Bove’s Trump iPhone Wallpaper Might Be the Most Deranged Thing About Him, Jay Willis

The list of reasons Trump’s former lawyer is unfit to hold judicial office just got longer and weirder.

America’s Trumpiest Appeals Court Is About To Get a Little Trumpier, JP Collins

The Fifth Circuit is already the federal judiciary’s most aggressive incubator of MAGA legal activism. Kurt Engelhardt’s retirement has given President Donald Trump another opportunity to make it worse.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

A Voting Rights Promise, Betrayed For 156 Years, Alex Burness, Bolts

“This is how white supremacy operates. When there’s a breakthrough, it still finds a way.”

These Justices Are Not Impartial, Adam Serwer, The Atlantic

“The justices are elite lawyers with the ability to obfuscate this project and ignore its aims, but the rest of us need not pretend.”

This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images

As I wrote in Balls & Strikes this week, birthright citizenship was probably the term’s highest-profile case, in part because President Donald Trump cared so much about the result, and also because the relevance of an elderly social media addict’s gutter racism to the meaning of the Reconstruction Amendments was, to say the least, a novel legal question. The facts that the Court (1) left the case until the very last day and (2) did not give Trump everything he wanted lent themselves well to a time-honored, recency bias-inflected format for end-of-the-term recaps: Once again, the justices delivered some wins for Trump and some losses for Trump, thus wrapping another dramatic season of Supreme Court, that long-running reality show in which nine elite lawyers go behind closed doors to decide who gets rights and who does not.

I probably pay more attention than is reasonable or healthy to term recaps, because for the vast majority of Americans who do not follow the Court on a week-to-week basis, skimming a term recap is the most exposure they will get all year to the choices the justices make. And if you were just glancing at headlines this week, you could be forgiven for concluding that our principled, nonpartisan Court is as committed as ever to defending the rule of law, and that we all owe a debt of gratitude to Chief Justice John Roberts for his continued service.

Do not get me wrong: It is good that the Court managed to affirm the plain meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, as judges and politicians and scholars and everyone capable of reading at a fourth-grade level has understood it for more than a century. But two cases the Court decided last week—cases that earned less attention and yielded fewer breaking-news push alerts than birthright citizenship—paint a clearer picture of the Court’s disposition toward Trump halfway through his second term, and as the 2026 midterms approach.

In Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the Court by a 6-3 vote held that because federal immigration law allows refugees to seek asylum upon arrival “in” the United States, if Customs and Border Patrol officers physically block access to the border (so that refugees cannot get “in”), the government can reduce (or maybe even eliminate) asylum claims altogether. This practice, known as “metering,” has not been in effect since 2021. But the signal that Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Al Otro Lado sends to the White House is that when its resident xenophobes come up with creative methods for evading laws that confer rights on noncitizens, this six-justice conservative supermajority will have no problem finding reasons to deem those methods legitimate.

On the same morning, the Court decided Mullin v. Doe, a case about Trump’s efforts to cancel temporary protected status for some 350,000 Haitian people and 6,000 Syrian people living in the United States. In (another) majority opinion from Alito, the Court said that doing so was fine, and rejected the notion that the president’s history of describing Haitian people as “filthy,” “disgusting,” and “poisoning the blood” of America might be at all legally relevant. Alito instead described Trump’s comments as “heated language” and not “overtly racial,” which is roughly analogous to describing Petey Pablo’s 2003 hit single “Freek-a-Leek” as not “especially sexual” and “mostly just a list of women’s names, if you think about it.”

Each of these cases presents a version of the same basic question: how willing the Court is to allow Trump to use the law to harm people (especially nonwhite people) he does not like or want. Reading the cases together, the answer is “very.” Again, Mullin v. Doe strips some 350,000 people of their legal status, and places the status of an additional 300,000 people in immediate jeopardy. Al Otro Lado buttresses the administration’s efforts to functionally end asylum, which for the last six months has been limited to white South Africans anyway. Only in the birthright citizenship case did the Court finally decide to put a governor on Trump’s power, and only in the sense that it preserved the status quo, and only by the narrowest possible margin.

Mullin v. Doe and Mullin v. Al Otro Lado are disastrous for the real-world people whose rights the Court chose not to protect. “The consequences of today’s decision are predictable. More people will die,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her Al Otro Lado dissent. “More people will turn back and be subjected to violence because of something they cannot or should not have to change about themselves, such as their race, religion, nationality, or political opinion.”

Conservative pundits in particular are fond of defending the Supreme Court by talking about how it does not do everything Trump asks, and often lavish their favorite justices with praise for serving as models of judicial independence. Which, sure, it is true that Trump’s win rate is not literally 100 percent. But year after year and on issue after issue, the Court has been awfully comfortable giving him a whole lot. Most importantly, it always makes clear to him that when he comes back and asks for more, he is sure to have a friendly audience.

As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading. Enjoy the holiday weekend.

This Week In Balls & Strikes

Conservative Activists Know the Trans Sports Ban Case Isn’t Just About Sports, Madiba Dennie

Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s opinion emphasized that sports are “different.” But conservative activists are already celebrating what the case will allow them to do next.

The Supreme Court’s Latest Anti-Trans Decision Is Laced With Condescension For Women Athletes, Hila Keren

Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s descriptions of the benefits of girls’ sports reflect his own worldview—and leave out the experiences of cis and trans athletes alike.

The Roberts Court Will Take Any Excuse to Make Wealthy Corporations Wealthier, Steve Kennedy

A major pesticide manufacturer was getting hit with verdicts that required it to pay billions of dollars in damages. Then the Supreme Court stepped in.

The Supreme Court Is Going Where Anti-Trans Activists Are Leading It, Jay Willis

The conservative movement has spent years villainizing trans people. In West Virginia v. B.P.J., the conservative justices are simply doing their part to help.

The Conservative Justices Keep Selling Democracy To Highest Bidder, Madiba Dennie

No free speech rights are quite as important to Brett Kavanaugh as those of political parties and the billionaires who fund them.

The Supreme Court’s Big Birthright Citizenship Decision Is the Absolute Bare Minimum, Madiba Dennie

The justices had a simple task in Trump v. Barbara: uphold their oaths. Only five were willing to do so.

The Constitution Is On Life Support, Jay Willis

Four sitting justices are prepared to stuff the Fourteenth Amendment’s promises in the garbage because Mister Trump demands it.

Supreme Court Rules Trump Can Fire Any Agency Head Who Doesn’t Make John Roberts Wealthier, Madiba Dennie

The upshot of Slaughter and Cook is that it is very important for presidents to be able to fire agency heads at will, unless that agency is very important to John Roberts.

Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court’s Leading Voter Fraud Conspiracy Theorist, Jay Willis

The dissenting opinion in Watson v. Republican National Committee reveals just how deeply election denialism is now embedded in the conservative consciousness.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

Nina Totenberg’s Alito Retirement Error Reveals a Much Bigger Problem, Dahlia Lithwick and Sonja West, Slate

“This mistake reveals an institution that has repeatedly and systemically sidestepped public accountability by making itself impossible to cover by human reporters and, in so doing, has made itself vastly harder to understand by the very public it is meant to serve.”

Supreme Court Ruling on Trans Athletes Can’t Change My Daughter, Heather Jackson, USA Today

“I won’t pretend this outcome doesn’t hurt. But in my book, Becky had already won the moment she stepped onto the field, long before the courtroom was ever part of the story. She simply showed up to play. Taking on something bigger than herself just came with it.”

This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images

The police, however, had follow-up questions: The same officer asked Carter to hike up his pants, and when Carter did so, another officer noticed an L-shaped “bulge” in his shorts. Based on that observation, the cops frisked Carter and found a handgun. He was charged with an array of gun-related crimes, convicted, and sentenced to 14 months in prison.

Before his trial, Carter filed a motion to suppress the gun as evidence. His argument was that police had “seized” him within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, at the moment the officer told him to hike up his pants, since, as a young Black man, ignoring armed cops from a unit infamous for racial profiling wasn’t a viable option for Carter. And because the police had no reason to suspect him of anything at that time—again, he was just standing on the sidewalk, and had already shown that his waistband was empty—Carter argued that the officers had no grounds to search him.

The trial court rejected his argument, finding that Carter was not seized until after he hiked up his pants, and that the bulge the officer (allegedly) saw provided the reasonable suspicion necessary to frisk him. But in August 2025, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals threw out his conviction. As the court explained, the test for whether a defendant is “seized” is whether an “objective and reasonable person in the defendant’s shoes” would have felt free to end the conversation with police—an analysis that requires the court to consider, among many other factors, the “objective reality that people of color face during interactions with law enforcement.”

From there, the court engaged in a lengthy discussion of the myriad reasons that Black people in America are “especially cautious” around police and “more likely to comply” with their demands, even if they would be within their legal rights to decline to do so. In context, the court found that “an objective and reasonable Black man in Mr. Carter’s shoes” would “feel as though he had to comply with the officers’ demands rather than terminating the encounter.” The clear implication of the cops’ treatment of Carter, the court said, was that he would “continue to be suspected of criminal activity until the officers stopped asking questions.”

From the opinion:

The government, represented here by Solicitor General John Sauer, appealed, but on Monday, the Supreme Court declined to take the case in (as usual) an unexplained, one-sentence order. As a result, if prosecutors try Carter again, they will have to do so without the gun, since police were only able to obtain it by violating his Fourth Amendment rights.

Justice Samuel Alito, a man who is medically incapable of remaining silent when police face meaningful consequences for their conduct, wrote a short dissenting opinion joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. In it, Alito cited the Court’s decisions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (in which the six conservatives voted to ban affirmative action) and Louisiana v. Callais (in which the six conservatives gutted the Voting Rights Act) to reiterate his view that the Constitution is “color-blind,” and “almost never” allows the government to treat people differently based on race. Alito also highlighted the government’s claim that the lower court’s decision “will hamper legitimate and important police work,” and require cops to learn and apply “special rules” when interacting with members of different minority groups. (The horror!)

The hypothetical “reasonable person” comes up all the time in the law, and reflects the legal system’s need for objective standards of behavior that can be used to evaluate the real choices of real people. But the concept also recognizes that what counts as “reasonable” behavior can depend heavily on the circumstances, and on who decides. To that end, courts are supposed to consider context when making these determinations; again, the test is whether an “objective and reasonable person in the defendant’s shoes” would have felt free to refuse an officer’s request, not “what I, a judge, think I would have done if it had been me.”

In this case, the D.C. court drew what is, in my view, a pretty straightforward and (sorry) reasonable conclusion: that in a country where “Black Americans are disproportionately likely to be victims of violence at the hands of police officers,” and more than twice as likely as white people to be “subject to force or threatened force” during ostensibly routine traffic stops, and more than twice as likely as white people to be shot and killed during these interactions, any fair analysis of the “reasonableness” of Carter’s belief that he was not free to walk away from the Gun Recovery Unit cops has to account for the fact that he is Black.

Alito’s dissent reveals just how broadly he believes a “color-blind Constitution” should sweep. In recent years, the conservative justices have often deployed the phrase to undermine formal legal tools that (attempt to) account for America’s history and tradition of racial discrimination—affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act, for example.

Here, Alito and Thomas are going a half-step further, suggesting that of all the different factors that judges and juries can and are supposed to consider when determining reasonableness, race cannot be among them, no matter how open or severe or pervasive police abuse of Black people might be. For Alito and Thomas, the purpose of the law is not to protect people from racist state violence. It is to propagate the lie that racist state violence no longer exists.

As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.

This Week In Balls & Strikes

Samuel Alito’s Jab at Hawaiian Culture Is Red Meat For Online Conservatives, Quinn Yeargain

The justice’s reference to the “spirit of Aloha” betrays his contempt for the very idea of taking Hawaii’s history and legal traditions seriously.

The Republican Justices Are Pretending They’ve Never Heard Donald Trump Speak, Madiba Dennie

No comment about “shithole countries” is too racist for this Supreme Court to decide that it might be legally significant.

The Supreme Court Is a Pro-Gun Activist Group, Jay Willis

In Wolford v. Lopez, the conservative justices have introduced a new Second Amendment test: Gun safety laws are probably illegal if Sam Alito thinks they would make gun owners feel upset.

The Supreme Court Just Made Green Card Holders a Lot More Vulnerable at the Border, Madiba Dennie

The Trump administration has repeatedly searched for ways to make it easier to deport noncitizens. This six-justice conservative supermajority just created another one.

The Supreme Court’s Opinion Day Ritual Helps Conceal the Justices’ Favorite Lie, Jay Willis

The justices could be more transparent about when they will decide which case. They just choose not to do it.

The Supreme Court Just Empowered Prison Guards to Violate Religious Rights With Impunity, Madiba Dennie

The conservatives on the Court often posture as great defenders of religious rights. In reality, they only care about the religious rights of some people.

Trump’s DOJ Spent Juneteenth Trying to Stop Black People From Getting Reparations, Madiba Dennie

Nothing gets the administration’s attention quite like efforts to make amends for discrimination against Black people.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

The Supreme Court Once Again Endorses Trump’s Racism, Elie Mystal, The Nation

“If you don’t want to reprint the comments from the guy you’re claiming is so not-racist, that guy might be a racist.”

The Supreme Court’s New Expansion of the Second Amendment Is Genuinely Deranged, Mark Joseph Stern, Slate

“There is no law to be found in Wolford. It reads not like the work of a court, but of a super-legislature imposing its ideological hostility to firearm regulations on a citizenry that never consented.”

This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images

“Many asked pointed questions unsubtly suggesting that they doubted I was as smart as my grades indicated,” Thomas wrote. “Now I knew what a law degree from Yale was worth when it bore the taint of racial preference.” After graduating, he said, he slapped the fifteen-cent price tag from a cigar package on his diploma so that he would never forget its value.

As is often the case when Thomas airs his various grievances in public, this narrative omits some context. As the journalists Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson write in their 1994 book Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, Thomas’s experience largely “reflected the still bigoted employment practices” of the time, when elite circles were enforcing the same unspoken rules that benefitted people who looked like Thomas’s interviewers and not like him.

Diversity at white-shoe law firms lagged well behind the diversity of student bodies, which is not saying much: Including him, Thomas’s class at Yale had all of 12 Black people in it. When it comes to elderly law firm partners’ reluctance to hire Thomas in 1974, old-fashioned racism is a far more straightforward explanation than skepticism about whether presumed beneficiaries of newfangled affirmative action programs would be able to hack it.

Thomas, though, has blamed affirmative action ever since. As a justice, he has said that such programs “stamp minorities with a badge of inferiority,” and has rejected the notion that schools have a legitimate interest in racial diversity. Three years ago this month, when the Supreme Court finally banned affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Thomas wrote a concurring opinion arguing that affirmative action taints the accomplishments of all students of color—both those who benefit from affirmative action, and those “who are the same race as those admitted as a result” of affirmative action, since, he wrote, “no one can distinguish those students from the ones whose race played a role in their admission.”

Set aside, for today, Thomas’s assertion that there is a bright-line distinction between students whose admission is the “result” of affirmative action and students whose race played no “role” in it. When he talks about the plight of the Black law student wrongly branded as unqualified for the position he seeks, it is not an abstraction. Thomas is talking about how he perceives himself, and how his memories of Yale shaped his policy preferences five decades later.

Sonia Sotomayor enrolled at Yale Law School two years after Thomas graduated, and like him, she had a memorably bad experience: At a law firm recruiting dinner in 1978, a white male partner helpfully introduced her to the culture of casual racism that would await her if she were to join his firm as a junior associate. “Do you believe law firms should practice affirmative action?” he asked her. “Don’t you think it’s a disservice to minorities, hiring them without the necessary credentials, knowing you’ll have to fire them a few years later?”

When Sotomayor, who graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, replied that affirmative action allowed students of color the opportunity to prove their qualifications just like anyone else, the partner cut to the chase. “Do you think you would have been admitted to Yale Law School if you were not Puerto Rican?” he asked.

Incredibly, this person did not seem to understand that Sotomayor might not want to bill hours alongside someone who asked such questions: In her 2013 memoir, My Beloved World, she says that when she confronted him the next day, he complimented her for not “making a scene” at dinner, and invited her to the firm’s office for further interviews. Sotomayor declined and filed a formal complaint with Yale, which eventually yielded an apology letter from the firm that was significant enough to merit coverage in The Washington Post.

As law students, Thomas and Sotomayor dealt with the same basic, bigoted assumption: that racial preferences put an asterisk on their accomplishments. But Thomas and Sotomayor learned very different lessons: In My Beloved World, Sotomayor said she felt “no need to apologize” for affirmative action, because its purpose was just to “create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run.” Although she had “more ground than most to make up” when she started at Princeton and Yale, she said, once she got her foot in the door, her achievements were “as real as those of anyone around me.”

As a Supreme Court justice, Sotomayor has continued to defend affirmative action against the conservative legal movement’s efforts to destroy it. In her dissent in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, she said that the decision rolled back decades of “momentous progress,” and “cements a superficial rule of colorblindness” in a “segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.” Getting rid of affirmative action, she warned, would “entrench racial segregation in higher education because racial inequality will persist so long as it is ignored.”

Again, for Sotomayor, the real-world implications of Students for Fair Admissions are not abstractions. She knows firsthand the importance of efforts to “equalize educational opportunities for all students of every race and background.” She also understands the devastating consequences of the conservative supermajority’s decision to deny those opportunities to so many students of color going forward.

The official position of the legal profession, and certainly of the nine lawyers who sit on the Supreme Court, is that none of this history matters—that it simply isn’t relevant to understanding how the Court divines what the Constitution means. Among the justices, there is no tradition quite as sacred as insisting in their public appearances that the work of interpreting the law is not “political,” and that judges “do law, not politics.”

In the context of their time at Yale, though, Thomas’s and Sotomayor’s opinions in the affirmative action cases function as a reminder that Supreme Court justices are real people who do not and cannot set aside their life experiences the moment they put on a robe. When the Court decided Students for Fair Admissions, both Sotomayor and Thomas considered the result important enough that they made a point of reading their opinions from the bench—in Thomas’s case, the first time in almost ten years that any justice read aloud from a concurrence, as opposed to a majority opinion or a dissent.

In Students for Fair Admissions, Thomas and Sotomayor are not only (or even principally) arguing about the law—about what the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment does and does not allow admissions offices to do when they put together an incoming class. They are outlining their competing visions for shaping a country shot through with racism into something resembling a multiracial democracy. Sotomayor’s solution is to acknowledge this history, and to allow schools to do their part to address it. Thomas, who cares about “fairness” in the law when it comes to elite college admissions and in no other circumstances, prefers to pretend as if this history did not exist.

I am not saying that Clarence Thomas’s fruitless job search or Sonia Sotomayor’s excruciating recruiting dinner are the only reasons they believe what they believe, and voted as they did all these years later. I am saying that these details matter, and that accounts of the death of affirmative action that omit them are incomplete, and are doing you a disservice.

As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.

This Week In Balls & Strikes

The Trump DOJ Is Trying to Do Elon Musk a Big Favor, Madiba Dennie

The government claims that it has the power to dismiss the NAACP’s lawsuit against one of the president’s political allies.

Republican Senators Can’t Wait to See What Todd Blanche Will Promise Them, Susan Rinkunas

Josh Hawley suggests that his vote for Trump’s nominee for attorney general could be contingent on Blanche doing Hawley—and his wife—an anti-abortion favor.

The Roberts Court Is Trying to Stop the Political Pendulum, Denny Carter

The Republican Party is getting nervous about the midterms. The Republican justices on the Supreme Court are doing what they can to help.

The Supreme Court’s Little Act Of Mercy Says a Lot About the Death Penalty, Madiba Dennie

Jeffrey Lee did not ask the Supreme Court to spare his life. He just asked to be killed by a less barbaric method of execution.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

The Supreme Court Might Fix Something For Once, Matt Ford, The New Republic

“The stage is now set for the Supreme Court to further strengthen one of the great bulwarks of American liberty—in the few states, at least, that have gotten away with diminishing it for so long.”

So Much for Leaving Abortion Up to the States, Adam Serwer, The Atlantic

“Anti-abortion advocates’ extraterritorial strategy has been tried before. They will keep trying to impose their will on pro-abortion-rights states, and where that does not succeed, they will demand that a sympathetic Supreme Court compel those states to submit. If that fails, they will seek to use the power of the federal government to ban or strictly limit abortion nationwide.”

This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images

Security footage of the incident, which took place on April 2, shows Nelson’s gigantic truck parked at an angle that anyone familiar with drivers of gigantic trucks will recognize, sprawled boldly across the white lines in a way that makes it impossible for anyone to use the adjacent spaces without initiating a chain reaction of mangled park jobs. As Nelson enters the frame, a man driving a white truck—the Journal is not naming him because he is the victim of an alleged crime, so I will refer to him as Bewildered Bald Guy—pulls up next to Nelson, cuts the engine, and tells Nelson to “learn to park.” This is both (1) admittedly kind of rude and also (2) based on the available evidence, not an unreasonable request for Bewildered Bald Guy to make.

Nelson—who is, again, a life-tenured federal judge—proceeds to immediately and completely lose his mind. “I’ve been here for two minutes!” he shouts. He snatches Bewildered Bald Guy’s sunglasses off his face and throws them across the lot; tries to grab Bewildered Bald Guy’s phone out of his hand; and then, for good measure, scurries after him and stomps on the sunglasses before Bewildered Bald Guy can pick them up. Although the audio is fuzzy, at about the 0:49 mark, you can pretty clearly hear Nelson asking Bewildered Bald Guy if he is “fucking crazy” and/or “wants to go,” in the classic style of men of a certain age who have no interest in fighting but desperately want others to perceive them as willing to fight.

Given the very real potential for scenes like this to escalate dramatically in a country stuffed to the gills with semiautomatic firearms, it is a minor miracle that this one resolved itself without further violence. Instead, after Bewildered Bald Guy recovers the remnants of his sunglasses, the two men engage in a rather unproductive debate about which one of them is the real asshole before Nelson gets in the truck and drives away.

According to the Journal, when contacted by police, Nelson admitted to “knocking” the glasses off Bewildered Bald Guy’s head and “stomping” on them, but denied “touching” him. Unfortunately for Nelson, his assurances that he possesses borderline superhuman fine motor skills did not deter prosecutors from charging him with battery and malicious injury to property, which in Idaho are misdemeanors punishable by fines of up to $1,000 and jail terms of 6 months and 12 months, respectively. Per Bloomberg, Nelson has pleaded not guilty, and a pretrial conference is set for June 18.

In a statement provided to David Lat at Original Jurisdiction, Nelson’s lawyer says that Nelson has since apologized to Bewildered Bald Guy, and that his behavior was “out of character.” Two former Nelson clerks echoed this sentiment: One described Nelson as “not an angry person,” and said that he must have been having a “bad day.” Another former clerk with especially well-ordered priorities told Lat that they felt “heartbroken” for Nelson, because “this one incident will now show up prominently whenever people Google him.”

Speaking of incidents that appear prominently whenever people Google him: According to this Wall Street Journal report from 2018, as of that year, Nelson had logged at least 28 traffic citations over the preceding two decades, including one from 2011 in which police clocked him driving a Hyundai Elantra on the freeway at 100 MPH. As a former Hyundai Elantra owner myself, I honestly did not think it was possible for one to attain such a speed without Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis driving it off a cliff first.

On Monday, Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Mary Murgia announced that the Judicial Council would open an investigation into Nelson’s conduct. But whatever that investigation yields, only Congress has the power to impeach and remove him from office, and as Chris Geidner points out at Law Dork, in the weeks since, Nelson has continued to hear oral argument and issue opinions as if nothing unusual had happened. So long as at least 34 senators decide that he is exhibiting sufficiently “good Behaviour,” Ryan Nelson’s job is safe, no matter how shoddily he parks, or how far he chucks the personal effects of strangers who make him upset.

As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.

This Week In Balls & Strikes

The Trump White House Is Tackling America’s Most Urgent Crisis: Upwardly Mobile Black People, Madiba Dennie

Finally, this administration has identified a form of “disparate impact” it finds objectionable.

The Supreme Court Suggests Any Compassion For Criminal Defendants Is Too Much, Madiba Dennie

Congress gave judges the power to shorten a prison term if “extraordinary and compelling reasons” warrant relief. But the Republican justices on the Supreme Court won’t let judges use it.

The Supreme Court Hasn’t Ruled On Birthright Citizenship. Trump May Be Deporting Newborn Citizens Anyway, Madiba Dennie

The Trump administration is refusing to answer questions about the health and safety of undocumented young mothers—and their newborn U.S. citizens—in its custody.

The Delaney Hall Strike Is Exposing a Massive Thirteenth Amendment Crisis, Madiba Dennie

The Thirteenth Amendment prohibits slavery, except “as a punishment for crime.” But people in immigration detention haven’t been convicted of anything—and are still being forced to work for nothing.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

One of the Supreme Court’s Worst Decision Is About to Turn 50. It’s Past Time to Reverse It, Austin Sarat, Slate

“It is time to face the fact that Gregg failed to put the death penalty on a sound footing and that nothing can improve on Gregg’s frailties.”

The Supreme Court Has Invented a Right to Discriminate, Adam Serwer, The Atlantic

“The purpose of the Fifteenth Amendment was to ensure that Black voters could not again be denied their freedoms so that politicians did not have to heed their objections, to provide what Douglass called a ‘wall of fire for his protection.’ But the Constitution has few defenses against a majority of justices willing to ignore it or twist it to its exact opposite purpose.”

This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images

When Trump fired Bondi on April 2, I wrote that the next attorney general would almost certainly be worse, because Trump has always replaced the employees he fires with even more obedient little supplicants. I did not know how quickly Blanche would prove me right: When asked during an April 7 press conference if he hoped Trump would eventually nominate him as Bondi’s permanent successor, Blanche, like all probationary new hires, said that he was open to any outcome, and that even if the job were to go to someone else, his message to Trump would still be, “Thank you very much, I love you sir.”

I worry that some of you will read the preceding sentence and reasonably assume that I made up that quote, and that I am using hyperbole to convey the depth of Todd Blanche’s personal loyalty to the president. So I want to be clear here: Although I, too, at first thought it too ludicrous to be real, “Thank you very much, I love you sir” is something that the person in charge of the Department of Justice said out loud, on camera, about his boss. Watch for yourself:

At this point, I am running out of ways to convey how dangerous it is for a president to turn the nation’s top law enforcement agency into his personal law firm. The Justice Department spent decades cultivating a reputation for operating independently from presidents and their political agendas. Trump cheerfully vaporized that framework in less than 18 months, filling the leadership ranks with dead-eyed yes-men who used to literally be Trump’s personal lawyers, and who do not view their new job responsibilities as any different. An alarming proportion of those who remain are semiliterate scrubs, and what used to be among the profession’s most prestigious employers is now so desperate for bodies that it has to dangle cash bonuses to persuade anyone to associate with it.

Even setting aside the real-world consequences of Trump’s DOJ takeover, the fact that Blanche was able to keep a straight face while professing his undying affection for Donald Trump fills me with the sort of secondhand embarrassment that I otherwise associate with the episode of The Office where Michael tells the Black high school kids that he can’t pay for their college after all. Say what you will about Blanche’s qualifications (I certainly have), but that man is a grown adult. Fifty-one is simply too old to be prostrating yourself before a man who will absolutely replace you with Laura Ingraham as soon as he decides you are taking too long to put Rosie O’Donnell in federal prison.

Especially in light of Blanche’s involvement with the president’s “anti-weaponization fund,” a few Republican senators have suggested that his path to confirmation isn’t certain. Texas Senator John Cornyn, who is on his way out after getting smacked in the primary, told Politico that he wants to “make sure” that Blanche “understands the difference” between being attorney general and the president’s private lawyer. North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis, who is also retiring and also sits on the Judiciary Committee, has said he will not vote for any Trump nominee who expresses sympathy for January 6 rioters, which could be tricky for Blanche, since expressing sympathy for January 6 rioters is mandatory prerequisite for being a Trump nominee.

Given that the next time Republican senators disobey Donald Trump will be the first, I am not sure whether this (initial) bit of (professed) skepticism will be enough to sink Blanche’s nomination. When asked about Blanche’s odds, Senate Majority Leader John Thune observed that “most of our members are pretty deferential to who the president wants in some of these key positions,” which doubles as a pretty good summary of Thune’s legacy. But I do think that Blanche’s will be the last attorney general confirmation hearing in which a nominee might plausibly be asked questions about the time he told the president “I love you sir” on live TV. Or the second-to-last, depending on how soon Trump gets bored of Blanche and picks someone else.

As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.

This Week In Balls & Strikes

Antonin Scalia Believed He Was Entitled to Your Respect, Jay Willis

Long before Trump’s diatribes about the “fake news media,” Scalia was lashing out at journalists who wrote about him in ways he did not like.

Donald Trump Is Following John Roberts’s Very Bad Example, Madiba Dennie

The White House’s proposed nondisclosure agreement for federal employees places great weight on the fact that the Supreme Court also wants to keep you in the dark.

How Trump Is Making the Federal Judiciary White Again, Patrick McNeil

Many of the president’s second-term nominees share his commitment to resegregating institutions across the federal government.

The Virginia Supreme Court Has Been a Thorn In the Side of Working People For a Long Time, Molly Coleman & Elizabeth Wilkins

The court’s decision to strike down voter-approved district maps is not just a story about democracy. It’s a story of how state courts too often protect entrenched power.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

How the U.S. Supreme Court Erased a Key Voting Rights Win in Mississippi, Caleb Bedillion, Bolts

A legal victory for Black Mississippians was supposed to spark special elections for the state supreme court under fairer maps, but Callais wiped that away. Plaintiffs vow to forge ahead.

The Justices Will Decide This June Whether to Constrain Trump at All—Or to Give Up Completely, Chris Geidner, Law Dork

“The justices have 26 cases outstanding. Even the best-case scenario isn’t great.”

Supreme Court’s Takedown of Voting Rights Act Bolsters Case For Court Expansion, Robert E. Lehrer, Chicago Sun-Times

“Expanding the size of the court is best understood not as a response to any single decision, but to a sustained run of them—and to what that run suggests about those still to come.”

This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images

Apparently, it has not been enough for Trump to spend his second term commandeering the criminal legal system to harass the likes of Letita James, Tim Walz, Jerome Powell, Mark Kelly, Adam Schiff, Lisa Cook, John Bolton, John Brennan, and anyone else who has at any point in recent history made him, personally, feel upset. Now, he is also using it to retaliate against one of the few people who has ever forced him to face meaningful legal consequences for his actions, and who managed to do it twice.

All of these developments—an elderly megalomaniac tasking the nation’s top law enforcement agency with settling a decade’s worth of his accumulated grievances—are of course bad. But the reporting on the Carroll investigation is also rich with little details about just how much of a joke the Justice Department has become over the last 16 months. Under Trump, what used to be among the legal profession’s most prestigious careers is now a résumé line for which DOJ lawyers will be sheepishly apologizing in job interviews for decades to come.

For starters, the Carroll investigation has reportedly been assigned to Andrew Boutros, the Chicago-area federal prosecutor whose office recently made headlines for engaging in egregious misconduct in the case against the Broadview Six, who were indicted on federal conspiracy charges for protesting outside an ICE facility last year. To make matters worse, lawyers in Boutros’s office then strategically redacted transcripts from the grand jury proceedings to hide their misconduct from the presiding judge, April Perry.

After reviewing the full transcripts, Perry said she had “never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior” contained therein, and that Boutros’s office had “broken” her trust, which, as a lawyer, are generally not things you want a judge to say to you. As a result of these mistakes (?), Boutros was forced to drop all charges against the defendants earlier this month.

In a functioning legal system, a prosecutor who fucked up this many things this badly would have been fired already. In the American legal system, he is simply getting assigned to go after a different person whom Trump is eager to see punished.

On Thursday, Boutros issued a statement in which he asserted that “the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s Office” has never “opened” an investigation of Carroll. Savvy readers will note that this language carefully avoids making any assertions about steps short of “opening an investigation” that his office may have taken, or about investigations that may have been “opened” by offices other than his. More generally, it is very funny to issue an indignant denial of a story that multiple outlets have independently reported when you might be the least credible lawyer in America at this particular moment.

The Carroll investigation is hardly the first time that a criminal probe of someone Trump considers a political enemy has ended up in the hands of a prosecutor who, even in Trump-adjusted terms, stands out for their ethical flexibility. According to The New York Times, the Justice Department assigned its case against former CIA director John Brennan to a U.S. attorney in Florida specifically because officials viewed that U.S. attorney as “more willing to pursue a case viewed as questionable by other offices.”

Last year, over the course of just four months as the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., noted stolen-election conspiracy theorist Ed Martin was such an unabashed Trump hatchet man that even some Republican senators couldn’t get behind the effort to confirm him. Fortunately for Trump, Martin’s permanent replacement, the former daytime television personality Jeanine Pirro, picked up right where he left off.

Not long ago, working as a federal prosecutor was a gig that law students began planning for years in advance. Now, under the watchful eye of the conservative legal movement’s least employable doofuses, the Justice Department is functioning as a law firm that serves only the president’s personal interests while billing its time to you and me. One day, beleaguered junior associates might have the privilege of defending a $1.8 billion slush fund for literal January 6 rioters; the next, they might be begging the Supreme Court to let the DOJ litigate Trump’s appeal of the Carroll verdict—sorry, I should be more specific, the second Carroll verdict—because he really, really doesn’t want to pay what he owes her.

If you are an ambitious young lawyer and you think you might want to work for the Justice Department someday, my advice is to sit tight for a while. The federal government will always be there. But it won’t always be this embarrassing to represent the person in charge of it.

As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.

This Week In Balls & Strikes

The Supreme Court Keeps Pretending Trump Is a Normal President, Madiba Dennie

The justices are quietly helping Trump tighten his grip on federal immigration courts.

Clarence Thomas Ponders Whether Florida Could Start a War Over West Coast Driver Licenses, Jay Willis

With increasing frequency, the conservative justices are using language that is indistinguishable from a Tucker Carlson monologue.

Federal Judges Uninterested In Supreme Court’s Excuses For Alabama’s Racist Map, Madiba Dennie

A three-judge panel concludes that Alabama lawmakers discriminated against Black voters, and that the question is not a “particularly close call.”

The Supreme Court Never Cared About Keeping the Fifteenth Amendment’s Promises, Jamaal Lockings

Congress wrote the Reconstruction Amendments to protect the rights of Black people to participate in democracy. The Supreme Court had other ideas.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

There’s No Escaping the Rot In This Justice Department, Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times

“At a certain point, it may be impossible to serve both the cause of justice and an unjust government.”

DOJ’s Fight Against Trans Medical Care In Prison Is a Fight to Erase Trans People In the Law, Chris Geidner, Law Dork

“DOJ appears to be ready and willing to take all of the least coherent and defensible parts of Roberts’s Skrmetti opinion, expand them, and then apply them in new and varied areas of the law to pull back trans people’s rights.”

This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images

“Have you seen the contortions that these nominees have gone through when they’re asked the basic question, ‘Who won the election in 2020?’” Durbin asked at a hearing in April. “They can’t answer it because it’s an article of faith: If you’re loyal to Trump, you never accept the premise that he lost an election.” In March, Durbin warned that Trump was looking to “stack the courts” with “MAGA loyalists who will rule in his favor.” Earlier this week, while questioning one of Trump’s former defense attorneys who is now (surprise!) up for a seat on the Second Circuit, Durbin described Trump nominees as united by their willingness to “ignore the rule of law so long as they follow his agenda.”

I am telling you all of this because, as of today, no Democratic senator has cast more votes in support of more Trump nominees than Durbin, who has voted to confirm nine of them to life-tenured judgeships. Among Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse—the caucus’s most dogged chronicler of the symbiotic relationship between the Republican Party and the conservative legal movement—is somehow right behind Durbin, with six yes votes. No other Judiciary Committee Democrat has more than three, and among them, only Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, New Jersey’s Cory Booker, and California’s Alex Padilla have yet to cast a single vote to confirm a Trump judge.

Just this week, the full Senate confirmed former federal prosecutor Sheria Clarke to a district court judgeship in South Carolina thanks in large part to eight Democrats—Durbin and Whitehouse, plus Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman, Arizona’s Ruben Gallego, New Mexico’s Martin Heinrich, and New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan—who joined Republicans in voting yes. Like every other Trump nominee, Clarke would not denounce January 6 or acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 election. As Patrick McNeil points out at Nomination Notes, had Democrats remained united, they could have (at least temporarily) blocked her confirmation. Instead, they pushed it over the top.

Earlier this month, Delaware Senator and Judiciary Committee member Chris Coons hinted that Clarke might get some Democratic support when he voted to advance her out of committee on the grounds that, as he told HuffPo, he’d found her to be a “qualified candidate.” (Oddly, after all that, Coons did not vote to confirm her on the Senate floor.) But as a general rule, lawmakers rarely discuss their rationales for supporting or opposing nominees. In October 2025, after he voted to advance five (!) district court nominees out of committee, Durbin offered perhaps the most complete public explanation for his thinking: “To take an unequivocal position that I will oppose every nominee that comes out of this administration, I think, would destroy my credibility and any opportunity for bipartisanship,” he told Bloomberg Law.

I understand that Durbin, like many Democrats of a certain vintage, still imagines the Senate as an institution that runs on bipartisan comity, and believes it is just one earnest, West Wing-esque floor speech away from becoming so once again. And strictly as a matter of counting votes, occasional Democratic support for a stray nominee doesn’t make much of a difference: Republicans control the Senate and enjoy a 12-10 edge on the Judiciary Committee, which means that as long as they stick together, they do not need Democratic support to get what they want. In this context, if you are a Democratic senator who still believes you can buy some goodwill from Republicans, perhaps a casting throwaway vote for a judge who is getting confirmed anyway feels like an acceptable price to pay.

What is less clear to me, though, is the answer to the more basic question raised by Durbin’s rhetoric: If he really believes the White House is picking nominees who will “ignore the rule of law,” why is he giving any of them his stamp of approval? What, exactly, makes a nominee whom Durbin believes will faithfully serve Trump’s “agenda” nevertheless acceptable for him to support? Durbin has said he is worried about his “credibility,” but given that he is 81 years old and retiring in eight months, I am not sure that building relationships across the aisle should be his top priority right now. If we are talking about legacies, it is hard to see how voting to confirm “MAGA loyalists” inflicts more damage than simply opposing those MAGA loyalists instead.

It is frustrating anytime elected officials who cast Trump as an existential threat to democracy show so little interest in using the power of their offices to defend it. But in 2026, when his approval rating is at 35 percent and his top two agenda items are a disastrous war in Iran and a $1.8 billion slush fund for aggrieved insurrectionists, Durbin-style timidity is both bad policy and bad politics. Voters do not want politicians who condemn Trump nominees as dangerous and unqualified, and then turn around and vote for some of them anyway. Voters want politicians who will stop the wildly unpopular president from getting more of the dangerous and unqualified nominees confirmed—or, at the very least, politicians who are willing to try.

For as much as Democratic electeds care about being perceived as reasonable consensus-builders, they never seem as concerned that everyone who is not a Washington Post editorial board member will just clock them as feckless pushovers. If you are a Democratic senator, voting to confirm the likes of Sheria Clarke does not make you look savvy or sophisticated. It just shows voters that you don’t care enough to fight.

As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.

This Week In Balls & Strikes

Republicans Sound Like They’re Getting Nervous About Supreme Court Expansion, Madiba Dennie

After six years of a six-justice conservative supermajority, voters are tired of the Court and more supportive of reforms. Republican lawmakers have taken notice.

Time Is Running Out On Trump’s Efforts to Pack the Courts With Loyalists, JP Collins

As the midterm elections approach, the White House is still looking to nominate conservative stalwarts—but stalwarts with easier paths to Senate confirmation.

The Right’s Favorite District Court Judge Is Delivering For Trump’s Anti-Trans Agenda, Madiba Dennie

All the way from Fort Worth, Texas, Reed O’Connor has decided that he’s in charge of a federal probe of a Rhode Island hospital that provides gender-affirming care.

How the Conservative Legal Movement Became Obsessed With Killing the Voting Rights Act, Kaila Philo

For decades, Congress routinely reauthorized the Voting Rights Act on a bipartisan basis. But influential conservative lawyers had other ideas.

The Trump DOJ’s Latest Stunt Is Using Your Tax Dollars to Make January 6 Rioters Rich, Jay Willis

The president designed his settlement with the IRS to do something he could not otherwise accomplish—and to shield his actions from judicial review and congressional oversight.

Trump DOJ: Yale’s Medical School Has Way Too Many Black Students, Madiba Dennie

The administration’s view is that the mere presence of students of color at elite schools is incontrovertible proof of discrimination against white people.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

Democracy Is a Racial Entitlement Now, Adam Serwer, The Atlantic

“It is not surprising that the justice who wrote the opinion setting off a wave of racist voting changes across the South flew a flag outside his home that many have used to symbolize support for the January 6 insurrection.”

GOP-Backed Justices Prevail In Georgia In Unusually Spirited Supreme Court Elections, Alex Burness, Bolts

“I am a young woman that’s of child-bearing age still. My daughter is living in a world right now where she has less rights than what I was born into.”

This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images

I am saying all this because, as a journalist, I have to give credit where it is due. On Thursday, a Justice Department lawyer named Abhishek Kambli appeared before a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit to defend Trump’s executive orders that target various law firms by (among many other things) revoking the security clearances of lawyers who he believes have wronged him. And during oral argument, Kambli said something that is, to the best of my knowledge, absolutely true: that in this country’s 250-year history, the president’s power to determine “who gets to access classified information” has “never been circumcised by Congress.”

Evidently, no one on Kambli’s team had the presence of mind to slip him a note, because about two hours later, in the same context, he said it again:

Far be it from me, of course, to praise the Trump Justice Department, whose principals have focused on using the power of their offices to do things like “facilitate school resegregation in Louisiana” and “ensure that Black people in Alabama do not have access to modern sewer services.” In my view, these are legally wrong, morally bankrupt choices, and I condemn them in the strongest terms. But facts are facts, and whatever my policy disagreements with Kambli and his colleagues, I cannot deny that neither chamber of the United States Congress has ever applied a Gomco clamp to the foreskin of the president’s authority to revoke individual security clearances, and then used a scalpel to carefully remove it after waiting between three and five minutes.

Another casualty of the second Trump era has been the federal government’s interest in investigating cases of public corruption; according to NPR, since Trump took office in January 2025, the department’s once-vaunted Public Integrity Section, created in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, has gone from some 40 staffers to just two today. In recent months, the Justice Department has instead been far more preoccupied with offering lucrative, taxpayer-funded settlements to Trump allies who have sued the government. Among the myriad challenges that future presidents will have to tackle is rehabiliating the DOJ’s reputation for professionalism and independence, now that the least employable members of the conservative legal movement have frittered it away in roughly 12 months.

My opinion is that the nation’s top law enforcement agency should not (1) function as the president’s personal law firm or (2) use public resources to settle his petty grievances while enriching his personal friends. That said, I am not above conceding when those with whom I do not see eye to eye are objectively right about the facts. Simply put, I can offer no rebuttal to Kambli’s contention that U.S. lawmakers have never limited the scope of executive power by retaining the services of a mohel. Candidly, I am not sure that the average octogenarian member of Congress would have the slightest idea what to do if they were invited to attend a bris, let alone handed an izmel and a screaming infant and instructed to get to work.

For Kambli, who rose to prominence in right-wing circles litigating culture-war cases as a deputy in the office of the Kansas Attorney General, Thursday’s oral argument was something of a last hurrah in public service: According to Bloomberg, Kambli plans to leave his position effective May 31 for a to-be-announced role in the private sector. After accidentally invoking a penis-related surgical procedure in open court when he could have just used the word “limited” instead, perhaps selecting an earlier departure date would have been a prudent choice.

[h/t to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick on Bluesky]

As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.

This Week In Balls & Strikes

DOJ Used To Fight Public Corruption. Now, It’s Facilitating Public Corruption Instead, Madiba Dennie

The Justice Department keeps handing massive taxpayer-funded settlements to President Trump’s political allies.

Tony Carruthers Was Forced to Represent Himself at Trial. Tennessee Is About to Execute Him, Sophia Laurenzi

In the years since his 1996 conviction, the state’s case against Carruthers has collapsed. But courts have repeatedly rejected his requests for a new trial, leaving him with no recourse.

The Supreme Court Is Very Concerned About “Voter Confusion,” Except When It Helps Republicans, Madiba Dennie

A Court that claims to be skeptical of “judicial tinkering” with elections has no problem allowing Republican lawmakers to re-gerrymander their states—even when voting is already in progress.

Republican Congressman: This District Simply Has Too Many Black People In It, Jay Willis

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Callais allows Republicans to gerrymander Black people out of electoral existence, as long as they say they are doing so for partisan reasons. Ralph Norman didn’t take the hint.

There’s an Easy Way to Tell That Trump’s Judicial Nominees Don’t Belong On the Bench, Madiba Dennie

Previously, loyalty to Trump’s agenda was an implicit requirement for aspiring federal judges. On Sunday night, he decided to make it clearer than ever.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

Don’t Let The New York Times Fool You About GOP Gerrymandering, Drew Magary, SFGATE

“You and I [are] being subjected to a…disinformation campaign from the establishment media to posit this as just another political tussle. It is not. It is villainy, villainy of the crassest sort.”

Becoming Justice Gorsuch, Susan Matthews, Slate

“Some of this stuff is technical, and a lot of it is boring. Really, the conservative justices like Gorsuch are counting on this fact, hoping we just don’t spend much time thinking about it. That’s wrong, though. It is not too technical, and the justices do not have some magical power of insight.”

This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images

President Donald Trump, who has spent the last year tasking the Justice Department with settling his stupidest, pettiest grievances, has inverted the traditional prestige pyramid in a hurry. Across the country, federal prosecutors have been leaving their posts in droves, concluding that it is better for their careers and/or their souls not to spend their waking hours cranking out randomly capitalized court filings and then helping to disappear noncitizens in the dead of night. In March, the Justice Department quietly relaxed a requirement that newly hired prosecutors have at least one year of legal experience, much to the delight of the least employable dues-paying member of the Federalist Society chapter nearest you.

On Monday, May 4, the DOJ decided to try and juice its application volume with some timely Star Wars-themed content, tweeting out a recruitment ad that, as Joe Patrice points out at Above the Law, appears to have been made by someone who has never actually seen a Star Wars film.

In January, the staffing shortages apparently got dire enough that a former Trump DOJ official, Chad Mizelle, urged lawyers who “support President Trump’s anti-crime agenda” and are “interested in becoming an AUSA” to reach out to him, personally, on X. Just like that, what used to be one of the most sought-after jobs in the legal profession was accessible to anyone willing to DM a guy named Chad on a platform flooding the internet with nonconsensual pornography generated by an AI chatbot that occasionally goes by “MechaHitler.”

Alas, Mizelle’s social media overtures were not enough to solve the problem: Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that the DOJ is now advertising signing bonuses of up to $25,000 for new hires in a division that defends, among other things, the Trump administration’s anti-trans and anti-immigrant policy initiatives. Between now and Thanksgiving, lawyers in the Civil Division will also receive “retention incentive bonuses” ranging from $60 to $220 per pay period.

I invite you to consider, for a moment, the implications of the Justice Department’s determination that in order to continue to function (?), it has no choice but to attach five-figure bonuses to jobs for which thousands of lawyers would have crawled over broken glass just a few years ago. If you are a staff attorney at the Robert H. Bork Center For Bringing Back Jim Crow who aspires to make the jump to the public sector, your prospects for success have not been this good since, well, Jim Crow. When the applicant pool is this shallow, it should not be especially difficult for Chad to identify the remaining cohort of people who (1) have a law degree, (2) want a fancy job, and (3) abhor nonwhite people as much as the Big Boss does.

Now, though, the prospect of working as a Trump lawyer is so unappealing—even among those who would otherwise jump at the opportunity—that the administration has to offer the cash equivalent of a brand-new Toyota Corolla in order to (maybe) get butts in seats, and biweekly infusions of gas money in order to (possibly) keep them there, at least until after the November midterms are over.

Candidly, if the powers that be are this desperate, prospective applicants would be smart to hold out for even more money. In a profession that places such a premium on one’s reputation for competence and success, it is no small thing to take a job that entails getting your ass handed to you by annoyed federal judges on a near-daily basis. If Trump is going to ask his employees to publicly humiliate themselves for a living, he is going to have to compensate them for it.

As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.

This Week In Balls & Strikes

Virginia Supreme Court: To Protect Democracy, We Must Stop Voters From Participating In It, Madiba Dennie

The decision could cost Democrats four seats in the House, and ensures that the Supreme Court’s pro-gerrymandering jurisprudence protects only its preferred political party.

There’s an Obvious Reason Why The Republican Justices Sound So Nervous, Madiba Dennie

Persuading the public that a Republican-controlled Court issuing Republican-friendly decisions is not a Republican body has never been more difficult.

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw Has Seen This Movie Before, G.S. Hans

In her new memoir, Crenshaw, a pioneer of critical race theory, recounts a lifetime of “talking back” against “ignorance and forced compliance.”

A Black Man Won an Election In New Orleans. Republicans Are Trying to Abolish His Position Altogether, Madiba Dennie

The legislative response to Calvin Duncan’s landslide victory has a long, shameful history in Louisiana.

Samuel Alito Had No Answers For Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Latest Dissent, Jay Willis

The more transparently political the Court’s work becomes, the more fiercely the conservative justices insist that there is nothing political about the Court’s work.

How Trump Is Abusing the Legal System to Bypass Lawmakers and Enrich Himself, Steve Kennedy

Judges have the power to reject “settlements” that are not in the public interest. The question is whether they choose to exercise it.

Samuel Alito Gutted More Than Just the Voting Rights Act. He Rewrote the Constitution, Too, Madiba Dennie

The Court’s decision in Callais will make it more challenging for Congress to pass laws designed to protect multiracial democracy.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

John Roberts Believes In an America That Doesn’t Exist, Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times

“It may be that the first step in truly reining in the court is to remember that the Republic—and the Constitution that brought it to life—is meant for us. It is ours to interpret and ours to transform.”

Who Will Stand Up to the Supreme Court Justices?, Niko Bowie and Daphna Renan, The New York Times

“The court’s alleged authority to defy and second-guess acts of Congress has been sustained only because the American public has so far been willing to tolerate this judicial rule — a choice that can be unmade.”

This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images

Callais is the culmination of the life’s work of not only Alito, but also of Chief Justice John Roberts. As a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, Roberts was a strident critic of the Voting Rights Act, arguing that violations should not be “too easy to prove.” Some 40 years later, Roberts got to cast one of six votes to make that task more or less impossible, thus gutting a statute that he thinks Congress never should have passed in the first place.

On Balls & Strikes, I wrote that voters in most states would probably not feel the impact of Callais right away: Many states have already held their 2026 primaries, and even in states that haven’t, drawing maps doesn’t happen overnight. But the logistical hurdles have not dissuaded some ambitious Republican-controlled states from trying to clear them: On Wednesday, hours after Callais came down, Republicans in Florida approved a new congressional map that could help the party win four more seats in the November midterms. On X, Governor Ron DeSantis asserted that under Callais, District 20—the only majority-Black district in Florida—is an unconstitutional “racial gerrymander” that Republicans have a solemn duty to eliminate.

Other states followed suit. In Mississippi, Republican Governor Tate Reeves said he would call a special legislative session to draw new district lines for the state’s judicial elections, which Black voters had successfully challenged under the Voting Rights Act. In Louisiana, Republican Governor Jeff Landry suspended the state’s May 16 congressional primaries, just two days before early voting was set to begin. His order will give state lawmakers, now armed with Alito’s get-out-of-racism-free card, the chance to create a new map with either one or, in their ideal world, zero districts in which Black voters can “elect representatives of their choice.”

On Thursday, President Donald Trump, who has been urging leaders in Republican states to gerrymander Democrats out of existence, posted on Truth Social that Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee, too, was prepared to “correct the unconstitutional flaw” in Tennessee’s map, which already gives Republicans an 8-1 advantage. The proposed “fix” would entail cracking the city of Memphis, which is about two-thirds Black, across several GOP-friendly districts, thus handing Republicans a clean sweep of the state’s congressional delegation.

Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn, the leading contender to replace the term-limited Lee in 2026, has reassured voters that she, too, plans to “keep Tennessee a red state,” just in case Lee and company can’t get the job done before November 3.

If any of this feels familiar, it is because it is exactly what happened in 2013, when the conservative justices in Shelby County v. Holder began the task of dismantling the Voting Rights Act that they completed on Wednesday. Hours after Shelby County, which made it easier for Republicans to implement voter suppression laws, jubilant Texas lawmakers announced that the state would begin enforcing a strict voter ID law that the Voting Rights Act had blocked from taking effect. Mississippi and Alabama, which had been subject to the same statutory provisions that the Court hollowed out in Shelby County, did the same.

For all the effort that Supreme Court justices put into insisting they are not “partisan hacks,” when the Court resolves awful democracy cases, elected Republicans have remarkably little trouble understanding what they are supposed to do, and how quickly they are supposed to act. Typically, the Court leaves its biggest cases until the end of the term, in late June or early July. In context, it is hard not to see the timing of Callais as the conservative justices doing their best to give DeSantis and Reeves and Landry and Lee as much time as possible to capitalize on it.

None of these post-Callais redistricting efforts are guaranteed to succeed. Even if they do, once it is time for voters who are really fucking sick of Donald Trump to actually cast ballots, there is no guarantee that these changes yield the real-world election outcomes for which Donald Trump desperately hopes. But the all-out sprint to make the 2026 maps at once redder and whiter lays bare the real project of the Callais majority: The Republican justices are trying to help their fellow Republicans win more elections in more places. Every seat counts.

As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.

This Week In Balls & Strikes

The Supreme Court Did Not Want to Talk About Trump’s Long History of Gutter Racism, Madiba Dennie

The president has never been shy about why he wants to deport Haitian people. The justices are pretending to have never heard any of it.

Six Conservative Activists Killed the Voting Rights Act, Jay Willis

The Supreme Court rewrote the Voting Rights Act to say what the conservative justices think Congress ought to have said.

The Justice Department Is Now Reformatting Trump Truth Social Posts as Court Filings, Madiba Dennie

Working at the Justice Department used to be a prestigious gig in the legal profession. Now, its filings read like Trump wrote them on the toilet.

Trump’s Latest Judicial Corruption Scandal Sounds Oddly Familiar, Jay Willis

Jeffrey Kuntz knew exactly how to get a federal district court nomination. His former colleague showed him the way.

This Supreme Court Case Will Put the Justices’ Anti-Immigrant Shadow Docket Orders to the Test, Madiba Dennie

The Trump White House argues that unexplained Supreme Court orders give it permission to deport hundreds of thousands people to countries it has deemed too dangerous for American citizens to visit.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

Voters Can Be Disenfranchised Now, Adam Serwer, The Atlantic

“I can’t think of a greater perversion of the VRA than concluding that it is acceptable for white people to try to disenfranchise Black voters for political advantage.”

Supreme Court Deals a Death Blow to the Voting Rights Act, Ari Berman, Mother Jones

“The Voting Rights Act of 1965 made America a multiracial democracy. It ended an authoritarian regime in the Jim Crow South that prevented millions of people from enjoying the fundamental promise of equal citizenship under the law. With an authoritarian president now in the White House and the Voting Rights Act a dead letter, America may become a democracy in name only once again.”

The Supreme Court’s Conservatives Just Issued the Worst Ruling in a Century, Rick Hasen, Slate

“If and when Democrats retake control of the political branches…they will also have to consider reform of the Supreme Court itself, a conclusion I had been resisting until the court made this unavoidable.”

Blow to Voting Rights Act Amplifies Stakes of Georgia’s Supreme Court Elections, Alex Burness, Bolts

“No justice on the Georgia Supreme Court has lost an election in more than 100 years. That is in part the product of an election system that shields judges from competition, limits voter turnout, and, today, has left this swing state with a high court dominated by GOP appointees.”

This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images

On Reddit, Texas teachers who felt understandably uncomfortable serving as conscripted clergy members began brainstorming strategies to try to minimize the law’s impact on their classroom environments. Perhaps in an effort to preempt malicious compliance, Attorney General Ken Paxton issued an advisory document clarifying that in order to pass legal muster, Ten Commandments displays must also use a font that is “clearly legible to a person of average vision from anywhere in the classroom.” Teachers planning to make creative use of Wingdings, in other words, would have to come up with something else.

On Etsy, enterprising sellers helpfully advertise copies of the Ten Commandments that meet the exacting parameters of S.B. 10. They look like this:

If you are a normal person, you probably perceive a tension between the requirements of S.B. 10 and the First Amendment’s prohibition against laws “respecting an establishment of religion.” But earlier this week, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that S.B. 10 is perfectly legal, actually, and that you would be an idiot for thinking anything different.

Writing for the majority in Nathan v. Alamo Heights Independent School District is Judge Kyle Duncan, who before Trump put him on the bench in 2018 was one of the legal profession’s more prominent right-wing culture warriors, specializing in cases that seek to vindicate the rights of Christians (especially conservative Christians) to ignore laws (especially antidiscrimination laws) they disagree with. In his opinion in Nathan, Duncan applies the Supreme Court’s recently invented “history and tradition” test to determine that the phrase “establishment of religion” only contemplates Founding-era laws that applied “pressure to engage in religious worship”—to attend a particular church, for example. Because S.B. 10 “does not compel any student to engage in formal religious exercise,” Duncan writes, it poses no constitutional issue.

Much of Duncan’s opinion consists of what he describes as his own “sketch” of the history of the First Amendment, which reads a lot like the work product of a conservative activist with a clear policy agenda and access to ChatGPT. Throughout, he emphasizes that although some people may have “serious religious disagreements” with S.B. 10, the law does not explicitly require those people to do anything. Students need not “recite” the Ten Commandments, or “adopt” them as their own, he says; if students “disagree” or “ignore” or “laugh at” them, he argues, S.B. 10 “imposes neither penalty nor sanction.”

In their complaint, the challengers also assert that S.B. 10 violates their First Amendment right to freely exercise their (non-Christian) religious beliefs, since, as they point out, the law subjects children to “scripture nearly every hour they are in school.” Yet Duncan breezily disposes of this problem, too: S.B. 10 “creates no religious curriculum designed to shape children’s beliefs,” he says, but instead requires only “a poster on a classroom wall”—no different than the bell schedule, the lunch menu, and the emergency evacuation plan, I guess.

Supporters of S.B. 10 were not shy about what they sought to accomplish: In his advisory bulletin, for example, Attorney General Paxton celebrated that the law would ensure that “Texas children see, each day, the timeless truths upon which our laws and liberties were built.” On the Texas House floor, one Republican lawmaker, Candy Noble, declared it “incumbent on all of us to follow God’s law,” and opined that “we would all be better off if we did.”

Again, Duncan made a name for himself in the conservative legal movement by litigating cases exactly like this one; he has spent his career making abundantly clear that he, too, believes Christianity is the One True Religion, both in this country and in general. But unlike Paxton or Noble, as a judge, Duncan now has the power to imbue Christianity with a sort of preferred legal status. He does not care if students find displays of the Ten Commandments to be “coercive,” because he, personally, hopes students feel coerced by the Ten Commandments. I suspect that if some extremely cool state legislature were to mandate clearly legible 16-by-20-inch displays of, say, the Quran’s Throne Verse in every public school classroom, Duncan would have little trouble deciding that such a law is “designed to shape children’s religious beliefs,” and would be proud to protect them from “pressure” to participate in a religion he does not like.

Nathan is almost certainly going to end up before the Supreme Court, whose members will once again treat this case as one that only an exhaustive examination of this country’s history and tradition can resolve. In the minds of originalists, as practiced by this six-justice conservative supermajority, it is only judges—only originalist judges, really—who are capable of doing the work of divining what a constitutional provision really means. The fact that this methodology inexorably leads to real-world results that align with Kyle Duncan’s policy preferences is just a coincidence, and in Kyle Duncan’s view, it would be very rude of you to point it out.

As I have written before, this is wrong. There is not a single correct way to interpret the Constitution, a jumble of aspirational vagaries, clumsy compromises, and hamfisted revisions that has frustrated lawmakers and baffled lawyers since ratification. Even if it were possible to determine what the Framers believed the First Amendment prohibited and protected in 1789, you are allowed to have an opinion about what the First Amendment prohibits and protects today, in 2026. Frankly, if anything, your opinion should matter more than theirs. Everyone who helped draft the Establishment Clause has been dead for centuries. All of them were white guys, all of them were Christians, and none of them were parents who had to send their kids to public schools in Texas.

You do not need to be a lawyer to understand that when the government mandates displays of a particular faith’s core tenets to some 5.5 million children, that law is an “establishment of religion” in any meaningful sense of the phrase. You do not need to be a historian to understand that by exposing impressionable children to a particular conception of God’s law in every classroom, five days a week, from their first day of kindergarten through the end of their senior year, S.B. 10 sends unambiguous messages about the correctness of that conception of God’s law, the illegitimacy of alternatives, and a student’s obligation to follow the rules hanging on the wall. Only a mind as sharp as Kyle Duncan’s could consider a list of things that are literally called “commandments” and conclude that there is nothing “coercive” about it.

For adherents, the beauty of originalism is that it ostensibly yields objectively correct answers to difficult legal questions. In reality, it allows nine federal judges to eyeball a mandatory classroom fixture beginning with “I AM the LORD thy God” and assert with a straight face that your freedoms of religion and from religion are as strong as they have ever been. This is the true purpose of originalism: When the Constitution does not say what conservatives wish it said, they can simply declare that the Constitution means and has always meant something else.

As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.

This Week In Balls & Strikes

Oklahoma Republicans Are Trying to Give Themselves Total Power Over Judicial Nominations, Steve Kennedy

For decades, a state judicial nominating commission has maintained some semblance of balance in Oklahoma’s courts. Republicans are furious—and ready to make some changes.

Trump Is Asking the Supreme Court For More Help With His Anti-Immigrant Agenda, Madiba Dennie

Green card holders enjoy broad protections from removal under federal law. The administration is looking for ways around it.

John Roberts Is Always a Republican First, Jay Willis

In public, the chief justice loves talking about how the Supreme Court’s work is not political. Memos published by The New York Times show just how political the Supreme Court’s work actually is.

There Is Nothing “Qualified” About Qualified Immunity, Madiba Dennie

Once again, the Supreme Court twists itself into knots to extend legal protections to cops who kill.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

Your State-by-State Guide to the 2026 Supreme Court Elections, Daniel Nichanian, Bolts

More than 60 seats in 32 states are up for grabs this year. Here’s what you should know about them

What Happens When “Your Honor” Is a Robot?”, Elie Mystal, The Nation

Things that are bad, probably!

This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images