Mark Joseph Stern

@mjsdc.bsky.social

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Senior writer at Slate covering courts and the law. There’s usually a parrot on my shoulder.

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Nobody is prepared for this jolt to the legal system. The Supreme Court has shifted an unfathomable amount of power from Congress and the executive brach toward unelected, unaccountable federal judges. This will fundamentally alter how government works. slate.com/news-and-pol...

The 16th Amendment was a landmark victory of progressive reform. It affirmed Congress' sweeping authority to tax the wealthy as it saw fit. Clarence Thomas wants to shrink it down to almost nothing—rewriting history to impose an oligarchical Constitution: slate.com/news-and-pol...

This Clarence Thomas Dissent Reveals His Favorite Tactic for Constitutional Mayhemslate.com Justice Clarence Thomas is a master at the art of bogus history.

It’s too soon to say with certainty that the Supreme Court’s conservatives are laying the groundwork to overturn Obergefell and abolish constitutional protections for same-sex couples. But IF that’s the plan, this is exactly what it would look like. slate.com/news-and-pol...

Sonia Sotomayor Just Sounded a Dire Warning About Marriage Equalityslate.com The majority wanted to cut back the constitutional right to marry, so it weaponized this case as a cudgel against that right.

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always read MJS. "By replacing Thomas’ hard-line views with a more malleable standard, SCOTUS has ended one battle over guns. But by remaining in this area, where it has no right to be in the first place, the court has invited a thousand more."

Rahimi stands as a repudiation of Clarence Thomas' chaotic and sloppy originalism—proof that the justice simply cannot be trusted to write an important majority opinion. His reign of chaos over the Second Amendment has come to an inglorious close. slate.com/news-and-pol...

The Supreme Court Walks Back Clarence Thomas’ Guns Extremismslate.com The Supreme Court upheld a federal law disarming domestic abusers on Friday, significantly narrowing a radical 2022 precedent in the process.

Moore v. U.S. is a fake case built on shameless misrepresentations that was designed to preemptively kill a "wealth tax"—but would have also blown up much of the federal tax code. SCOTUS couldn't stomach the trillion-dollar consequences of its many lies. slate.com/news-and-pol...

Why Brett Kavanaugh Shot Down a Fake Case That Would Have Blown Up the Tax Codeslate.com The plaintiffs made up the facts of this case, stretching the truth far past its breaking point.

To justify legalizing bump stocks, Clarence Thomas literally copied and pasted materials from an extremist pro-gun group whose violent rhetoric makes the NRA look moderate. This is who has the Supreme Court's ear these days. slate.com/news-and-pol...

The Group Helping the Supreme Court Rewrite America’s Gun Laws Is Worse Than the NRAslate.com I don’t think that’s anything you could imagine happening even 10 years ago.

NEW: The Supreme Court STRIKES DOWN the federal ban on bump stocks, holding that it is not authorized by existing statute. A 6–3 decision with all three liberals in dissent. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23p...

The Supreme Court does not get a gold star for refusing to bless a ludicrous legal theory that anti-abortion judges shamelessly embraced as part of their lawless rampage against women's health care. With @dahlialithwick.bsky.social: slate.com/news-and-pol...

The Supreme Court unanimously THROWS OUT anti-abortion activists' lawsuit against mifepristone, the first drug in medication abortion, holding that the plaintiffs never had standing to bring this case in the first place. An embarrassment for the 5th Circuit. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23p...

The Christianity-centered jurisprudence that Alito favors is increasingly dominant on the Trump-stacked lower courts, where far-right judges casually cite the Bible in opinions and infuse their rulings with theocratic conceptions of morality. slate.com/news-and-pol...

Those Secret Recordings of Alito and Roberts Revealed the True Stakes of the 2024 Electionslate.com If Trump wins in November, these Alito acolytes are the future of the Supreme Court.

Happy Pride everybody!!!

One interesting thing about these flags is that they appear to be customizable, like this version someone sent me to coincide with the occasion:

Texas' abortion ban prevented doctors from providing an abortion to a woman with a failing pregnancy—forcing her to instead pass the pregnancy on her own. She spent days in agony, vomiting and bleeding, until she passed out from blood loss and nearly died. www.dallasnews.com/news/public-...

How a couple found themselves tangled in Texas’ strict abortion laws after miscarriagewww.dallasnews.com A Texas woman needed help passing her incomplete miscarriage and wanted a surgical abortion. Her husband said that two medical centers denied or delayed a...

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3-3-3 implies left/center/right, but it’s more like left-center/far right/even more far right

Every year or so, a thinkpiece comes along that tries to convince people that, actually, the Supreme Court isn’t as out of control that those hysterical liberals make it out to be. With graphs and empirical tools and such. This is the latest version of that. www.politico.com/news/magazin...

Opinion | Using Math to Analyze the Supreme Court Reveals an Intriguing Patternwww.politico.com The conservative wing isn’t always aligned, and that leads to some surprising outcomes.

Do we have a live cam on Martha-Ann Alito's flagpole?

I deleted a post saying that Trump can no longer vote in Florida because of his felony conviction. He will likely (but not definitely) be able to cast a ballot in November. This explains it well. I regret the error! www.politifact.com/article/2024...

Trump faces the potential of a felony conviction in New York, raising questions about what it means for his voting rights in Florida. It appears unlikely he will lose his voting rights.www.politifact.com Former President Donald Trump can still run for the White House if he is convicted of a felony in New York. But as a Flo

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Anyway good luck to jurors, the judge, court staff, and prosecutors, and all their families, with not getting murdered, and thanks to FedSoc types for bringing us to the brink of fascism so you could weaken Chevron deference

Anyway the most recent former President of the United States has been found guilty of felonies and now there’s a substantial chance people are going to die because his followers are freaks and the so-called “mainstream” GOP will just shrug and blame woke or something.

Two professors at UT Austin, John Hatfield and Daniel Bonevac, are suing for the right to penalize their students who miss class because they are obtaining an abortion out-of-state. media.aflegal.org/wp-content/u...

NEW: Chief Justice John Roberts refuses to meet with Senate Democrats about Alito's ethics issues, citing "separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence." s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24...

Congratulations to Justice Samuel Alito on embracing the right to privacy for exactly one woman slate.com/news-and-pol...

Alito’s Aggrieved Letter to Congress Tips His Hand in the Jan. 6 Casesslate.com Looks like someone has suddenly found a use for the right to privacy!

Alito tells Congress he will NOT recuse from the Trump immunity case. He defends his wife's use of the two controversial flags, saying they had no connection to "Stop the Steal" or any other partisan movement. s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24...

Martha-Ann Alito allegedly harassed her anti-Trump neighbors so aggressively—including spitting at their car—that they called the cops and begged for legal intervention. www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/u...

Crisis pregnancy centers trick patients into thinking they'll receive real health care, then evangelize against abortion. The fake, negligent "services" they do provide can put patients in real danger. Here's the saga of one woman who's fighting back. slate.com/news-and-pol...

A Crisis Pregnancy Center Is Accusing a Former Patient of Domestic Terrorism. She’s Fighting Back.slate.com A high-stakes legal battle points toward a new stage in the effort to hold fraudulent anti-abortion clinics accountable.

Justice Sotomayor using her annual pre-June public talk to give a barely veiled warning that the Supreme Court is about to do some truly terrible things www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/u...

Clarence Thomas declares: •The 14th and 15th Amendments impose NO limit on states' ability to draw openly racist electoral districts that disfavor Black Americans because of their skin color. •Federal courts have no power to redraw such racist maps. slate.com/news-and-pol...

Clarence Thomas Makes a Full-Throated Case for Racial Gerrymanderingslate.com In a startling concurrence, the justice faulted Brown v. Board of Education for empowering the court to limit racist redistricting.

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The next Supreme Court appointee will share a jurisprudence with one of these two people and the 2024 election is largely about which one it’ll be

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LISTEN: I loved participating in this live conversation with the brilliant slate writers @mjs_dc and (my idol) @dahl_lith for their superb amicus podcast on How Originalism Captured the Court at Sixth & I in Washington, D.C. youtu.be/vmk2lj1UVY4?...

Amicus Live: How Originalism Captured the Court with Guest Sherrilyn Ifillyoutu.be Slate’s Amicus podcast is a show about the law and the nine Supreme Court justices who interpret it for the rest of America. At this live taping, Dahlia Lith...

Judge Carlton Reeves' latest vivisection of "qualified immunity"—which lets violent and corrupt cops escape accountability—is nested in a broader critique of the Supreme Court's cynical and selective reliance on "democracy" to nullify our civil rights. slate.com/news-and-pol...

A Federal Judge Delivers Another Urgent, Scathing Warning About the Supreme Courtslate.com If courts can’t protect women’s bodily autonomy, he asked, why should they do the bidding of police unions?

Judge Carlton Reeves has a new opinion out condemning qualified immunity as unlawful and egregiously unjust. He calls the doctrine a "perpetuation of racial inequality" and "an extra-constitutional affront to other cherished values of our democracy." s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24...

The smallest justice who ever lived slate.com/news-and-pol...

Alito’s Explanation for the Upside-Down American Flag Honestly Makes It Worseslate.com The sheer pettiness of these gripes is breathtaking.