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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🚨Rainbow over Capitol!

Programming note: I’m going back on parental leave until September! While I’m not *totally* unplugging this time—you can hear me on NPR tomorrow, for instance—I won’t be writing or podcasting for Slate. Our baby juuust started crawling so the timing seems auspicious. See ya! 👋

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Mark Joseph Stern

My new one @Slate: Democrats Sure Aren’t Acting as if Trump Beating Biden Is an Existential Threat to Democracy slate.com/news-and-pol...

Looking forward to moderating a lively discussion about the Supreme Court term for the American Constitution Society today at 3 p.m. Register to join here! getinvolved.acslaw.org/component/ev...

ACS National Supreme Court Review (2023-2024)getinvolved.acslaw.org The ACS National Supreme Court Review will feature leading scholars and advocates examining some of the most consequential cases of the 2023-2024 Term.

Chatting about the Supreme Court's momentous term at the 92Y tonight with some brilliant SCOTUS-watchers. It's at 7 p.m. and you can watch online if you're not in NYC! www.92ny.org/event/newmar...

Still marveling at Gorsuch's Ohio v. EPA opinion, in which he confused nitrogen oxide (a pollutant) with nitrous oxide (laughing gas). He did this five times, never once getting it right—in an opinion overruling the EPA's own expert scientific analysis! s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24...

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.

Thomas' dissent shamelessly misrepresents the historical record in service of plutocratic aims, whitewashing the original Constitution's accommodation of slavery while writing off the 16th Amendment as a mere "narrow" tweak. His narrative is just not true! 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.

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...

Today's Supreme Court decision means that bump stocks—which allow AR-15-style rifles to fire automatically, like a machine gun—are no longer prohibited under federal law. The Trump administration first imposed the ban after the Las Vegas massacre. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23p...

Bump stocks increase an AR-15's rate of fire from 180 rounds per minute to 400-800 rounds per minute. They inflict mass carnage by allowing the gunman to shoot automatically, without pulling the trigger. Yet the Supreme Court declares that they do not create a "machinegun."

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:

Any Texas doctor who provides an emergency abortion subjects themselves to investigation and potential prosecution, which would force them to prove to a jury that they acted within the law's incredibly narrow exception. If they fail, they face a 99-year prison sentence.

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...

This victim of Texas' abortion ban already had a nine-month-old baby. The state's draconian laws almost killed that child's mother. www.dallasnews.com/news/public-...

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Mark Joseph Stern

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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Mark Joseph Stern

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.

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Mark Joseph Stern

Here's the declaration from UT Austin's Daniel Bonevac demanding a right to penalize students who miss class for an abortion: s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24...

And here's the near-identical declaration from UT Austin's John Hatfield—who, like Bonevac, also demands the right to discriminate against "transvestites," and refuses to use "they" as a singular pronoun. s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24...