Thanks for publishing so much back and forth. Apparently we’re all elite lawyers who read TPM! I’m not sure where I fall in that – practiced at an “elite” DC firm in my younger years, then stopped practicing for a bit working in government, and then have been a GC or in-house at a handful of small-ish tech firms in the bay area.
Anyway – this stood out to me in one of the replies you posted: “A category difference in simply manufacturing new constitutional law in cases where the constitution is simply as clear as it can be.”
I’m not a legal academic, but I was a pretty fancy pants lawyer – Harvard Law magna cum laude, federal clerkship, DOJ Civil Rights Division, AUSA for a decade doing public corruption cases, litigation partner, university general counsel’s office, etc.
I’m not sure I can describe the level of despair among many of my contemporaries.
I was discussing this last night with a retired ACLU lawyer and a retired big firm litigation leader.
As someone who almost certainly falls into your “elite academic” category, I have some thoughts about the current discussion.
A while back, many people thought that the law was deterministic. Enter a set of facts, and the law will immediately spit out an answer, one that is replicable regardless of who the judge is. I think that most now understand that the judge’s identity matters. This does not mean that the process is necessarily corrupt. Rather people approach interpretive questions and understand facts differently, with those differences often being based on life experiences.
I’ve read with interest some of your posts about the legal academy, and wanted to weigh in briefly.
I have a somewhat unique perspective here, in that I’ve been adjacent to some of the more elite legal world, but I am not a part of it: I have an Ivy League law degree, and know plenty of people who got fancy clerkships, but I am a lowly practicing lawyer in Minneapolis.
It’s a question that’s lingered since January, when the FBI raided Fulton County’s election hub at conspiracy theorists’ request: where’s next? There are a handful of swing states where Trump and his election truthers pressed hardest in 2020: Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. The DOJ obtained Maricopa County, Arizona’s, 2020 records through a roundabout effort that involved sending a grand jury subpoena to the state Senate, and there are signs its also investigating Wisconsin. In Michigan, however, the DOJ’s Civil Division did something unexpected — demand Detroit-area voting records not for 2020 but for 2024. Is a politicized investigation of that state’s 2020 vote also coming?
There will be a lot of discussion today of a Trump-backed automaton’s victory last night over Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), the eccentric libertarian who was perhaps the last Republican in Congress to reliably choose his right-wing but distinct ideology over Trump’s demands whenever he felt the two diverged. But don’t overlook Tuesday’s primaries for offices that will run Georgia and oversee its elections. The state has, of course, been a hotbed for MAGA hijinks and efforts (still!) to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss. Last night, Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state who famously resisted Trump’s demand that he “find 11,780” votes, lost the GOP gubernatorial primary to two election deniers, one of whom served as a fake elector in Trump’s 2020 scheme. The deeply Trumpy Vernon Jones, meanwhile, is one of two Republican candidates to advance in the race for secretary of state.
Georgia’s runoff is June 16.
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Kate and Josh discuss the expulsion of anyone of character from the Republican Party, Trump’s new taxpayer-funded slush fund and Jared Polis’ baffling commutation of election denier Tina Peters’ sentence.
