Through its newly-radicalized Supreme Court, the hard right hopes to use the “Independent State Legislature” (ISL) doctrine to give sole control over federal elections to state legislatures (and the Republican Party) — unconstrained by provisions in states’ constitutions, and beyond review by the other branches of state government, i.e., …

SCOTUS Reform: Democrats’ new TERM Limits Bill House Democrats have introduced legislation which would establish 18-year term limits on Supreme Court justices’ active tenure. It’s called the TERM Act (Supreme Court “Tenure Establishment and Retirement Modernization.”) It would: Establish terms of 18 years in regular active service for Supreme Court justices, after which justices who retain the…

How the Supreme Court Can Have its Jurisdiction “Stripped” When I was still practicing law, there was a pretty smart lawyer in my firm who knew the ins and outs of tax law. The collective wisdom was that if you ever needed to ask Louie a question, you better make sure you had a place to sit. …

Steve Bannon, Trump’s Joseph Goebbels, has made clear that one of his key propaganda objectives is to “flood the zone with shit.” And at this point, with inflation piled on COVID; with a radicalized, activist Supreme Court rewriting decades of jurisprudence in the space of a couple of weeks; with…

THE DEATH OF ROE AND THE FRUIT OF THE POISONOUS TREE — In criminal cases, there is a doctrine called the “fruit of the poisonous tree” under which the government is prevented from offering evidence of a crime if the path to obtaining that evidence began with illegal conduct by the government. The rule applies even where subsequently obtained evidence unquestionably proves…

During the Watergate hearings, Senator Howard Baker, famously defined the scope of committee’s job. It was just after John Dean had testified for two days, implicating Richard Nixon in the cover-up of the burglary of Democratic Headquarters, including Nixon’s knowledge and orchestration of the payment of illegal “hush money” intended…

Republicans are mid-cycle through their trademarked Do-Nothing Response to the latest episode of American gun carnage, this time in Uvalde, Texas. First, Abbott, without irony, pronounced the murder of 19 kids “unacceptable in Texas.” Given Texas’ record in mass civilian gun murders over the past few decades, he might want…

The core argument in Alito’s profoundly disingenuous opinion is that courts have no business deciding matters which are best left to the will of “the people.” That will, he says, is best expressed in the election of state legislatures. In other words, it’s the old states’ rights pitch. The “oppression”…