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

Speaking at the University of Kansas earlier this month, Justice Sonia Sotomayor detailed some of the real-world implications that Kavanaugh, a well-to-do federal judge, appears not to have considered during the drafting process. “This is from a man whose parents were professionals, and probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour,” Sotomayor said. “Those hours that they took you away—nobody’s paying that person, and that makes a difference between a meal for him and his kids that night, and maybe just cold supper.”

As far as public responses to bad Supreme Court decisions go, this qualifies as pretty tame: a substantive, factually grounded criticism of a particular aspect of a particular opinion. Yet on Wednesday, Sotomayor nevertheless apologized to Kavanaugh, releasing a brief statement in which she expressed “regret” for her “inappropriate” and “hurtful” comments.

Just a few hours later, at an appearance at the University of Texas, Justice Clarence Thomas took the stage in front of several hundred law students and delivered the functional equivalent of a CPAC keynote address. In it, he bemoaned the emergence of a national sense of “cynicism, rejection, hostility, and animus toward our country and its ideals,” and criticized political leaders for their insufficient “devotion” to “traditional morality,” “free enterprise,” and “religious piety.” He blasted progressivism as an effort to “undo” the Declaration of Independence’s “commitment to equality, natural law, and natural rights,” and to “replace…our form of government.”

To leave no doubt about how he really feels, Thomas also asserted that progressivism “requires of the people a subservience and weakness” that is “incompatible” with the Constitution, and linked it to the rises of Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong, and Adolf Hitler.

Parts of Thomas’s speech covered the history of the early 20th-century Progressive Era, but as he wrapped up, he also made clear that he views progressive ideals to be just as dangerous today: To repel progressivism’s evils, Thomas urged the assembled students to strive to emulate the “courage” of the Framers. His examples of the forms this courage might take in their lives—“standing up for your religion when it is mocked and disparaged by a professor,” or “running for your school board when you see that they are teaching your children to hate your values and our country”—are the exact sort of the martyrdom fantasies that today’s right-wing culture warriors dream of someday getting the chance to live out.

At one point, Thomas also excoriated people who “gain positions of authority,” and then become “enticed by access to things that were previously unavailable to them.” In a related story, I have been unable to confirm whether Thomas flew to Austin for Wednesday’s event, or traveled there in the quarter-million-dollar luxury RV that one of his billionaire benefactors purchased for him.

Purely as a practical matter, I can understand why Sotomayor might have concluded that apologizing to Kavanaugh was the prudent course of action. As Chris Geidner points out at Law Dork, a Supreme Court justice’s most important task is to win cases—or, when the Court is under the control of a six-justice conservative supermajority, to at least lose cases less badly. As it stands, Kavanaugh’s vote is one that Sotomayor might need if she is to have any hope of, say, protecting trans kids’ right to play high school sports, or keeping the Voting Rights Act alive a little longer. Perhaps, after seeing her remarks yield several days’ worth of strong headlines about the impact of Kavanaugh’s pro-racial profiling opinion on people of color with working-class jobs, Sotomayor decided that she’d made her point.

All that said, Thomas’s and Sotomayor’s remarks on Wednesday lay bare the maddening double standard to which liberal and conservative judges are held in this country—by the journalists who cover them, the politicians who govern alongside them, and the legal profession as a whole. I promise you that if Sotomayor had gone to the University of Kansas the other week and scorned originalism as, for example, “a bunch of pseudoacademic horseshit reverse-engineered to justify reactionary policy preferences,” every editorial board of note would be scolding her for her breach of decorum, and a half-dozen House Republicans would be racing to see who could introduce articles of impeachment against her first.

Instead, for the offense of stepping outside the pages of the United States Reports to offer a thoughtful, mild critique of a colleague’s argument, Sotomayor felt compelled to issue a public apology that conservative pundits thirstily accepted on Kavanaugh’s behalf. That same afternoon, Clarence Thomas had zero reservations about somberly declaring, as C-SPAN cameras rolled, that every American to the left of Mitt Romney is a godless, freedom-hating coward. Conservative judges are never accountable for the deranged things they say, or the devastating consequences of the decisions they make. It is only liberals who have to say they’re sorry for ever having the temerity to mention such things 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

Neomi Rao Understands What It Means to Be a Trump Judge, Madiba Dennie

For conservative judges with Supreme Court aspirations, nothing is more important than reminding the president what you are willing to do for him

Trump Is Making the Most of the Appeals Court Picks He Has Left, JP Collins

Trump continues to appoint hardline conservatives to life-tenured federal judgeships. But with a tight Senate calendar and the midterms looming, time is running out for him to fill many more vacancies.

When Trump Judges Complain About “Woke Ideology,” Everyone Knows What They Mean, Jay Willis

Eighth Circuit nominee Justin Smith says he will decide cases “fairly and impartially.” On his LinkedIn page, he still describes himself as “an attorney and strategist who fights for conservative values.”

The Trump White House Is Very Upset About States That Won’t Do Its Dirty Work, Madiba Dennie

Citing a long line of Supreme Court precedent, federal judges have been reluctant to force state law enforcement officials to help enforce immigration law.

The Supreme Court Keeps Embracing Convenient Lies to Excuse Rank Bigotry, Ava Ayers

Trans kids are only the latest victims of the justices’ long history of buying dubious arguments offered in support of a reactionary policy agenda.

How Originalism Broke the First Amendment, Luke Smith Morgan

The Supreme Court’s myopic focus on history and tradition yields free speech jurisprudence that is both incoherent and dangerous.

Trump Judge Gives Qualified Immunity to Cops Who Brought Murder Charges Against a Woman Who Had an Abortion, Susan Rinkunas

“When you have basically admitted constitutional violations and unchecked power—flagrant abuse of that power—and a court or a doctrine that shields people from any accountability, that’s a real problem.”

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

Judges Overseeing Louisiana’s Landmark Oil Cases Have Financial Stakes In Defendants, Garrett Hazelwood, Floodlight

“Since 2013, nine of these judges have collected nearly one million dollars in income from their investments in the defendants, according to an analysis of their financial disclosures.

The Supreme Court Has a Chance to Revolutionize Its Approach to the Law, David H. Gans, Slate

“Shamefully, the court has never cited any Black figure from Reconstruction—not even Frederick Douglass—in a majority opinion.”

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

The case was a challenge to ICE’s practice of detaining people in the Los Angeles area based solely on their race, their location, their occupation, and the language officers hear them speaking. But Kavanaugh asserts that people subjected to such stops are not meaningfully harmed, since they can “promptly go free” after a “typically brief” period of questioning.

Set aside, for a moment, the fact that this is simply not how immigration enforcement works in the real world. It also suggests that when Brett Kavanaugh sees Nazi soldiers giving “show me your papers” orders in the movies, he does not necessarily understand that they are the bad guys.

In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the Trump administration, with a friendly assist from Kavanaugh, had effectively decreed “that all Latinos, U. S. citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.” In the months since Vasquez Perdomo, these detentions have become known as “Kavanaugh stops.” Generally speaking, if you are a Supreme Court justice whose name pops up in connection with viral videos of ICE thugs clotheslining anyone caught speaking Spanish in the immediate vicinity of a Home Depot, that is a very good sign you did a very bad job.

Sotomayor’s remarks at an event at the University of Kansas School of Law earlier this week suggest that she is not done being annoyed about any of this. “I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, ‘These are only temporary stops,’” Sotomayor told the students, per Bloomberg. “This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.” (She did not mention Kavanaugh by name, but given that Kavanaugh grew up as the son of two lawyers in a wealthy D.C. suburb, and that, again, no other justice joined the concurrence she was criticizing, it is not especially difficult to discern whom Sotomayor was talking about.)

Sotomayor went on to detail the real-world consequences of, in Kavanaugh’s words, even “brief” periods of having to sit, handcuffed, in the back of a rented SUV until cops decide to let you go: “Those hours that they took you away—nobody’s paying that person,” she said. “And that makes a difference between a meal for him and his kids that night, and maybe just cold supper.”

Within the decorum-obsessed legal profession, this qualifies as wild stuff. Typically, Supreme Court justices bend over backwards to keep their comments about one another as banal as possible, emphasizing their deep, abiding respect for one another, and the professional (never personal) nature of their occasional disagreements. In this context, singling out a colleague for having no idea what life is like for people who are not double Yalies is as close as a Supreme Court justice gets to publicly suggesting that another Supreme Court justice is full of shit.

In the years since Kavanaugh’s confirmation in 2018, it has become very apparent that the other justices, diplomatic though they may be in polite company, kind of hate his guts. He has had a hard time writing opinions that earn the five votes necessary for a majority, and when he does write majority opinions, they are often sloppy enough to generate annoyed critiques from justices to his right and to his left.

As a result, Kavanaugh’s calling card has become the weird, incoherent solo concurrence in which he supplies wrong answers to questions no one asked, all in the cadence of a college sophomore padding a final paper using ChatGPT. I honestly think none of the conservatives joined Kavanaugh’s opinion in Vasquez Perdomo because, even though they were fine with giving Trump the result he wanted, none of them wanted to attach their names to a piece of writing that failed so badly to justify that result.

Even at the time of his nomination, Kavanaugh was, on paper, one of the weaker Supreme Court nominees in recent memory—a replacement-level GOP political operative whose primary qualifications, in Trump’s eyes, were his Federalist Society bona fides, his flexible approach to precedent, and his expansive views of executive power whenever the president is a Republican. If anything, his tenure as a justice has shown that critics who argued that Kavanaugh was unfit for the job actually overestimated his ability to do it. Sotomayor’s willingness to set aside the rules for a minute to air out her irritation in public—in front of a bunch of law students, no less—suggests that Kavanaugh’s colleagues are as tired of him as 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 Supreme Court Sounds Pretty Skeptical of States That Want Protect Your Right to Vote, Madiba Dennie

By signaling their willingness to intervene in state court decisions that protect voting rights, the conservative justices are building a one-way anti-democratic ratchet.

How the Supreme Court Made the First Amendment a Tool For Getting the Results the Justices Want, G.S. Hans

The right to free speech is sacred in this country—especially if your speech is speech that Neil Gorsuch likes.

Kentucky Republicans Are Trying to Impeach a Judge For Acknowledging That Racism Exists, Steve Kennedy

Lawmakers are no longer even trying to pretend that their impeachment efforts are serious.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

How an Alito Retirement Could Allow Trump to Reshape the Supreme Court, Matt Ford, The New Republic

“Trump’s first three choices were in their late forties or early fifties when nominated, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh marking the upper bound at 53 years old. A child born today can expect them to still be handing down rulings when he or she starts college.”

DOJ Says Laws Congress Passed to Prevent Another Nixon Don’t Apply to Trump, Shirin Ali, Slate

“In practice, it means a man who once claimed he was ‘the most transparent president in history,’ but was also indicted for mishandling classified documents, can legally walk away from the White House with any document he so pleases and never have to publicly report a single one.”

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

On Truth Social, Trump praised Bondi as a “loyal friend” who had “faithfully” served him as attorney general. He is right about the faithful part, at least: In the years leading up to her appointment and throughout the 14 months she held the job, every decision Bondi made was driven by her professional need to remain in Trump’s good graces. She served on Trump’s first impeachment defense team, and after the 2020 election, she frequently appeared on cable news to support his efforts to overturn the results—sometimes with so much unbridled enthusiasm that even Fox News talking heads thought she was laying it on a little thick.

Four years later, the newly elected Trump made clear that he’d seen her audition tapes and was pleased with her performance. “For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans,” Trump said when he nominated Bondi in February 2025. “Not anymore.”

Under Bondi’s leadership, the Justice Department’s primary targets can be fairly summarized as “whomever Trump was most upset with at that particular moment.” She lashed out at federal judges, asserting that they had “no power” to block Trump’s orders and accusing them of “meddling” in “our government.” She attempted to extort Democratic-controlled states for access to their voter rolls, and continued to push Trump’s stolen-election lies, forever in search of smoking-gun evidence of massive voter fraud that does not exist.

Whatever the issue, Bondi always understood that the most important aspect of her job was playing the part in public, no matter how stupid or ridiculous she looked. During a televised Cabinet meeting in 2025, for example, Bondi asserted that fentanyl seizures during Trump’s first 100 days in office had saved 258 million lives. The math here suggests that she believes that if not for Trump, fentanyl would have wiped out three-quarters of the U.S. population in three months. At a congressional hearing in February, when pressed about her refusal to comply with a federal law requiring her to release the Epstein files, Bondi responded by alternating between insulting Democratic lawmakers and praising Trump for the stock market’s performance.

Bondi’s job was always going to be a tightrope act: Career government lawyers were leaving in droves even as Justice Department caseloads skyrocketed. And as her “THE DOW IS AT 50,000!” moment demonstrated, there is not really a good way of reconciling her earlier vows to release the Epstein files with her sudden reluctance to do so as more connections between her boss and Epstein came to light.

Even so, as hard as Bondi tried, Trump made no secret of the fact that he thought she should be punishing his enemies even more aggressively. This means that as bad as Bondi was, Trump’s next attorney general will almost certainly be worse. Over the course of both of his presidencies, his motivation for firing members of his Cabinet has always been his desire to replace them with even more pliant supplicants. In 2018, for example, he fired Jeff Sessions, who’d angered Trump by recusing himself from the investigation into Russian election interference. Sessions’s replacement, Bill Barr, had garnered Trump’s attention for his expansive views of executive power, and for publicly praising Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director Jim Comey as “the right call.”

Where Sessions came up short, Barr delivered: Today, Barr is best known as the author of a four-page letter, published in March 2019, that downplayed the then-forthcoming Mueller report’s conclusions about Trump’s alleged criminality. By the time Mueller’s actual report became public, and showed that the summary in Barr’s letter was a mendacious collection of selective quotes and clumsy half-truths, Trump had spent weeks publicly celebrating the report as a “complete and total exoneration.” What Barr showed is that he did not care about enforcing the law, in any meaningful sense of the phrase; he cared about doing whatever was necessary to defend Trump from its consequences.

On Thursday, Trump announced that he would replace Bondi on an interim basis with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer. The New York Times says he is considering Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin as Bondi’s full-time replacement. Zeldin, a former Republican congressman and longtime Trump ally who voted against certifying the 2020 election results, appears to have practiced law for two or three years before entering politics. His confirmation as attorney general, as far as I can tell, would make him the first attorney general in U.S. history who has roughly as much legal experience as I do.

In the end, what doomed Bondi is the basic reality that for Trump, the law is nothing more than a tool for destroying his rivals, protecting his wealth, and keeping him out of prison. People who use the law to do those things are useful to him; people who do not do so to his satisfaction are not. All of Bondi’s stunts were attempts to please an audience of one, and it worked until the moment he decided that he’d seen enough, and that his interests would be better served by someone who is even louder, more shameless, and more obedient.

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

For Once, the Supreme Court Seems to Think the Fourteenth Amendment Means What It Says, Madiba Dennie

Several members of the Court’s six-justice conservative supermajority sounded skeptical of Trump’s attempt to unilaterally end birthright citizenship.

The Right’s Crusade Against Birthright Citizenship Is Just Getting Started, Jay Willis

The Supreme Court appears poised to rule against Trump this time. But any votes in his favor will help lay the groundwork for the conservative movement’s next attack on the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Supreme Court Has Never Heard a Case As Easy As This One, Madiba Dennie

Oral argument in Trump v. Barbara will reveal nothing new about the Fourteenth Amendment. It will reveal how gone this Court really is.

The Supreme Court Didn’t End Abortion. It Just Made Pregnancy More Dangerous, Madiba Dennie

Anti-choice activists argued that the end of Roe v. Wade would make women safer. The data shows that it did not.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

The Birthright Con, Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times

“The evidence in favor of the traditional view of the citizenship clause is overwhelming. To rule otherwise is to say, in essence, that two plus two equals five.”

What the Birthright Case Is Really About, Adam Serwer, The Atlantic

“The legal question before the Supreme Court is jarringly easy to answer. The more difficult question is what kind of country Americans want.”

How in the World Was the Supreme Court’s Awful Conversion Therapy Ruling 8–1?, Mark Joseph Stern, Slate

“‘Because the majority plays with fire in this case,’ Jackson warned, ‘I fear that the people of this country will get burned.’”

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

Democratic senators of course had some follow-up questions about her posting habits, but as you can see, some of Westercamp’s more alarming flirtations with right-wing conspiracy theories are Kara Westercamp originals, and some are retweets of James Woods, Ian Miles Cheong, Diamond and Silk, and other denizens of the conservative media ecosystem. Her confirmation hearing thus gave both Westercamp and her Democratic cross-examiners the opportunity to explore the outer limits of that time-honored boilerplate social media bio disclaimer: When, exactly, are retweets endorsements?

Ranking Member Dick Durbin kicked off the proceedings by reciting some of Westercamp’s greatest hits, which included referring to Kentucky Republican Senator Mitch McConnell as “Cocaine Mitch,” scolding Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins for being insufficiently deferential to Trump, and accusing South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of caring about nothing but his “own self-preservation.” (Broken clocks, et cetera.)

In response, Westercamp stated that she was posting only in her “personal capacity as a private citizen,” but allowed that “in hindsight,” she might do some things differently. “I think that using Twitter is not the right platform—especially retweets from someone I don’t know regarding political opinions, controversial topics, or even characterizations of people.” Westercamp accepted Durbin’s suggestion that she apologize for those posts, and she added that she has “seriously considered” the prospect of “completely deactivating” her account.

Set aside, for a moment, the revelation that Westercamp’s passion for the Elon Musk radicalization algorithm still runs so deep that, even if confirmed as a judge, she might not log all the way off. Westercamp’s description of Twitter as “not the right platform” for sharing certain “opinions” elides the basic question of which of those “opinions” Westercamp holds.

To take an example from her timeline, I do not especially care whether Westercamp personally asserts that “keeping hundreds of people who showed up at the Capitol in solitary confinement is a perfect example of the two-tiered justice system in America,” or merely boosts someone else who says it. I care about whether, in her view, “keeping hundreds of people who showed up at the Capitol in solitary confinement is a perfect example of the two-tiered justice system in America.”

The task of drilling down a little further fell to Vermont Senator Peter Welch, who began with ten words you never, ever want to hear during a job interview: “I want to ask you about a couple of tweets.” He went on to read two more of Westercamp’s retweets: one from former Trump advisor George Papadopoulos, who is fond of describing America’s two political parties as “traitors” and “patriots,” and another from a conservative account that referenced a “big difference between us and the party of hate.” Welch then asked Westercamp to clarify: Who are the “traitors,” who are the “patriots,” and which party is the “party of hate”?

Perhaps aware that candidly answering “Democrats, Republicans, and Democrats, respectively” would have been an unwise choice under the circumstances, Westercamp demurred, which Welch found deeply annoying. “Retweeting is an indication that you want to amplify what you read in the tweet, right? That’s why people retweet,” he said. “You made an active decision to amplify a tweet. You thought other people should see it.”

Westercamp, who appeared genuinely nervous throughout most of the hearing and more than once appealed to Chairman Chuck Grassley to cut off Democrats who were asking her uncomfortable questions, told Welch that in both cases, she did not “have an answer.” She did reiterate that she doesn’t “agree with everything that has been retweeted in the past,” which is a very funny use of the passive voice to obfuscate the fact that the retweet decisions with which Kara Westercamp ostensibly disagrees are the retweet decisions of, well, Kara Westercamp.

Regrettably, I didn’t hear anything on Wednesday to suggest that GOP senators won’t obediently close ranks when it is time to vote on Westercamp’s confirmation. The lesson here is that if you are a Republican lawyer who aspires to sit on the bench, the smartest thing you can do for yourself is to never tweet. And if you really cannot bring yourself to stop posting, at least make sure the obligatory “RTs ≠ endorsements” disclaimer is in your bio first.

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 Is Making the Constitution Optional For Cops, Madiba Dennie

The conservative justices keep expanding qualified immunity in order to erode your right to be free from police abuse.

Texas Police Arrested This Journalist For Asking Questions. No Problem, Says the Supreme Court, Jay Willis

The justices’ decision to turn away Priscilla Villarreal’s case sends a chilling message to journalists who report stories that powerful people do not like.

The Supreme Court Is Scaring Off State Criminal Charges Against Federal Agents, Steve Kennedy

Officials in Oregon have dropped a negligent homicide case against a DEA agent, worried that appealing it to the Supreme Court will do more harm than good.

The Supreme Court’s Conspiracy-Brained Justices Are Ready to Limit Mail-In Voting, Madiba Dennie

Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election is getting the six-justice conservative supermajority treatment.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

The Alito Wing of the Supreme Court Sure Sounds Sold On Trump’s Voter Fraud Lies, Mark Joseph Stern, Slate

“ A democracy that rests on the knife’s edge of a single Supreme Court vote is living on borrowed time.”

Sonia Sotomayor Just Issued a Stirring Defense of One of Trump’s Biggest Targets, Shirin Ali, Slate

“Criminalizing this work without consequence doesn’t just endanger those journalists; it threatens everyday Americans who rely on local and national reporting in nearly all aspects of their lives.”

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

Here, for example, is “Lemon Poundcake,” set to the tune of The Drifters’ 1964 classic “Under the Boardwalk,” which skewers a deputy whom Afroman’s security cameras recorded as he stared down a sweet treat on the kitchen counter like he’d forgotten to eat breakfast.

The following year, the cops decided to sue Afroman, whose government name is Joseph Foreman, for defamation, arguing that his dissemination of hilarious YouTube videos caused them to suffer “embarrassment, ridicule, emotional distress, humiliation, and loss of reputation.” They sought a combined $4 million in damages, but yesterday, after a delightfully surreal three-day trial, the jury sided with Afroman, who promptly walked outside and celebrated his victory with supporters on the courthouse steps. “When life gives you lemons, you make lemon poundcake,” he told a local TV station.

The saga started back in 2022, when the Adams County sheriff’s office got a warrant to search Afroman’s property for evidence of drug trafficking and kidnapping. Other than a few thousand dollars in cash that they eventually returned, they found nothing of note and made no arrests, and prosecutors never filed any charges.

But the cops did leave behind a broken gate, a broken door, and a very annoyed professional entertainer with (1) a talent for cranking out earworms and (2) a home security system that captured everything on video. The amount of cash returned to Afroman was also $400 less than the amount the deputies counted during the raid. The result? “Will You Help Me Repair My Door,” Afroman’s soulful plea to the cops to go to Home Depot, pick up a framing kit, and come back to clean up their mess.

At his trial, Afroman’s principal legal argument was of course that his speech is protected under the First Amendment. He also pointed out that he never would have made these deputies go moderately viral if they’d simply done their jobs better, and that under the circumstances, his decision to limit his response to cops breaking down his door with long guns to making novelty songs about the incident demonstrates pretty remarkable restraint.

I am not going to spend too much time on the law here, because I would rather you enjoy this video of Afroman strutting around the countryside, wearing a novelty American flag suit, belting out an ACAB-ified version of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” But at a very high level, the problem with the cops’ case is that insults and hyperbolic jokes are usually not defamatory, since reasonable people would not interpret them as statements of fact.

This concept was illustrated most clearly at trial by the testimony of Randy Walters, a deputy who admitted that Afroman’s vocoder-assisted characterization of Walters as a “son of a bitch”—in a song titled, naturally, “RANDY WALTERS IS A SON OF A BITCH”— is a statement of opinion, because it is impossible to prove or disprove whether Walters is, in fact, a son of a bitch.

In the music video for “RANDY WALTERS IS A SON OF A BITCH,” which Afroman released on the first day of the trial, he dances around in triplicate, still wearing the suit, crooning about having “fucked” Walters’ spouse and then gotten “filthy rich.” This is both rude and crude, but again, a reasonable person who views it would understand it to mean that Afroman really, really dislikes Randy Walters. They would not understand it as an assertion that Mrs. Walters is literally having an extramarital affair with Joseph Foreman.

The case is a very funny illustration of what can happen when cops, who as a general rule rarely face consequences for their actions, manage to cross a person with plenty of time, a sizable social media following, and a smooth baritone. If the sheriff’s office had apologized and offered to pay for the damage they caused, perhaps Afroman would have never recorded these songs. Or if he had, the songs probably would not have become national news, and the jurors would not have a hell of a story to tell at their next high school reunion.

But the cops who sued could not bear the idea of allowing a famous Black man whose home they raided to make them look foolish on the internet. As a result, they had to spend three days getting stuffed into lockers by Afroman and his lawyers, all while thinking about how much less famous they would be right now if, on the day of the raid, they had simply decided to call in sick.

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

Trump Expects His Judges to Do Whatever He Wants, Jay Willis

The president has made clear that he cares about loyalty above all else. Ambitious conservative lawyers are taking notes.

Federal Judges Are Begging Lawrence VanDyke to Stop Being Thirsty and Gross, Madiba Dennie

The Ninth Circuit’s resident try-hard wrote an opinion about “swinging dicks.” His colleagues are appropriately horrified.

Federal Courts Are Putting Trans People In Danger, Madiba Dennie

The Supreme Court’s decision in Skrmetti is already leading to devastating consequences in the lower courts.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

How Congress Can—and Must—Fix the Supreme Court, Sean Casten, The Hill

When normie Democratic lawmakers are talking Supreme Court expansion, something in The Discourse has absolutely changed.

Sam Alito’s Latest Reversal at the Supreme Court Is an Absolute Embarrassment, Hannah Story Brown, Slate

Not doing a ton for those abysmal “trust in the Supreme Court” polling numbers!

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

To put this in perspective, after the Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, that overall confidence figure sank to a then-all-time low of 27 percent. What this means is that in the four years since it issued a wildly unpopular decision that deprived hundreds of millions of people of their legal right to bodily autonomy, the Court has since managed to make itself even more loathsome.

NBC News’s story about the results includes a helpful line graph tracking confidence in the Court since the justices decided Bush v. Gore in 2000. Just eyeballing it, the blue “great deal/quite a bit of confidence” looks a lot like Trump’s approval rating; the green “very little/no confidence” line, by contrast, looks a lot like the price of a barrel of crude these days.

More intriguing, I think, are the trends peeking through in the cross-tabs. For several years, the Court’s overall approval rating has been propped up by Republicans who fervently supported the six-justice conservative supermajority’s policy agenda. The Court’s approval rating among Democrats, meanwhile, has either been in single digits or close to it. For example, NBC News last polled this question shortly after the justices created a bespoke doctrine of presidential immunity in Trump v. United States. As you might guess, at the time, 53 percent of Republicans expressed their confidence in the Court, compared to 4 percent of Democrats.

The latest results are a little different. Democrats are as skeptical as ever, but Republicans, too, have their doubts: Just 35 percent now say they are confident in the Court—the lowest figure since 2015, when the justices infuriated Republicans everywhere by extending constitutional protections to same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges. Recent headlines probably play a role here, too: The 2026 poll took place a week after the Court struck down Trump’s tariffs regime in Learning Resources v. Trump, which prompted the president to lash out at the conservatives who joined the majority for “not having the courage to do what’s right.” It appears that at least some of his supporters were listening, and adjusted their views accordingly.

For Democratic politicians and candidates, the bottom-line takeaway is the same as the bottom-line takeaway from polls that show growing support for meaningful Supreme Court reform, which I covered last month: People do not like the Supreme Court, and running against it is basically a free square on the campaign trail bingo card. But these poll results introduce a fun new wrinkle: Among Republican voters, support for the Court—even the most conservative Court in a century—is softer than recent history and conventional wisdom might suggest.

I am not saying that Democratic candidates will be able to effortlessly persuade broad swaths of the Republican electorate to vote for Democrats, since disapproval of the Court for empowering Trump’s lawlessness is notably different from disapproval of the Court for not empowering Trump’s lawlessness enough. But at the very least, these numbers indicate that Democrats who have remained wary of “politicizing” the Court do not need to be skittish anymore. Everyone from the President of the United States on down understands the reality that the Supreme Court is “political.” Democrats have the most to gain by acknowledging 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 Alarming Twitter Timeline of Trump Nominee Kara Westercamp, Jay Willis

Personal loyalty to Trump is the most important qualification for aspiring Trump judges. But rarely has a nominee auditioned this publicly, or with this many hashtags.

Americans Are Ready to Stop Executing People for Murders They Didn’t Commit, Madiba Dennie

The Supreme Court allows criminal defendants who did not kill to be put to death under the “felony murder” rule. It shouldn’t.

Republican Lawmakers Are No Longer Even Pretending to Care About Judicial Independence, Steve Kennedy

GOP lawmakers used to at least pay lip service to the importance of an independent judiciary. Then state courts started issuing rulings that GOP lawmakers do not like.

Federal Judges Are Slowly Realizing They Can Treat Trump Like Anyone Else, Madiba Dennie

Federal judges have been reluctant to hold the Trump administration in contempt for violating court orders. Now, they are getting impatient.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

The Trump Administration Floats a New Way to Humiliate the Legal Profession, Deborah Perlstein, The New York Times

“Briefs are riddled with errors. Lawyers come to court grossly unprepared. Worst, court orders stand violated—in some cases, it seems, because there weren’t enough lawyers available to ensure they were carried out.”

A Sharp Warning In an Ordinary News Release: “President Trump’s Justice Department”, Chris Geidner, Law Dork

“In a normal administration, either the president would have been consulted—or the president would have trusted that DOJ, in consultation with counsel’s office, made the right decision. We are not, however, in a normal administration.”

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

Four firms—Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, Jenner & Block, and Susman Godfrey—elected to challenge the orders in federal court. All four quickly won decisions in their favor, and on Monday, the Justice Department waved the white flag, informing the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that it would not defend the orders any further. This was pretty clearly what pickup basketball enthusiasts everywhere call a Business Decision: At a time when Justice Department lawyers are making headlines for resigning in disgust, failing to fulfill their basic job responsibilities, and occasionally breaking down in open court, there is no reason to dedicate dwindling government resources to cases that are obvious losers.

The firms promptly issued statements that are as close as your average BigLaw partner will ever get to unleashing a hellacious windmill dunk. Susman Godfrey described the government’s “capitulation” as a “fitting end to its plainly unconstitutional attack,” and placed its lawsuit in the context of a broader fight “for the people across this country who refuse to back down in the face of an administration that seeks to silence and intimidate them.”

Jenner & Block pointed one more time to the scoreboard, noting that the White House had gone 0-for-4 defending its orders at the district court level. It also touted the firm’s demonstrated commitment to advocating for its clients “without compromise”—an unsubtle dig at the firms that preemptively surrendered to Trump rather than risk getting hit with similar orders.

On Tuesday, however, the Justice Department abruptly reversed course, asking the D.C. Circuit for permission to, in effect, withdraw its own voluntary withdrawal request from just 24 hours earlier. Shortly thereafter, CNN reported what anyone with a passing familiarity with Trump’s political career immediately guessed: that the splashy headlines announcing the firms’ victory and the administration’s defeat had so incensed Trump that he made some calls, demanding that the Justice Department resume its efforts to punish his enemies at taxpayer expense.

Over the past year and change, much has been made of the politicization of the Justice Department, which now more or less operates as Donald Trump’s personal grievance-settling machine. I am not sure there is a better encapsulation of this trend than leadership immediately flip-flopping on an eminently reasonable decision because their audience of one got so embarrassed by unflattering cable news segments that he forced an underling to track down their cell numbers and then honked in their ears for 45 minutes. I am reminded of what Josh Michtom wrote for Balls & Strikes in February: The serious people at the Justice Department quit their jobs months ago. The lackeys, cowards, and stooges are all that are left.

Correction: An earlier version of this post stated that Trump issued the law firm executive orders in 2026. He did so in 2025. You knew what I meant.

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 Tariffs Case Had an Easy Answer. Only One Justice Knew Where to Look For It, Jamaal Lockings

The justices spent dozens of pages arguing about the meaning of a federal law. Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson focused on what the enacting Congress actually said.

Supreme Court Continues to Shoot Self In Foot In Second Amendment Cases, Madiba Dennie

The Bruen decision is somehow getting even more embarrassing with time.

How the Supreme Court’s Conservatives Created the Tariff Refunds “Mess”, Steve Kennedy

In dissent, Kavanaugh called the prospect of refunding Trump’s tariffs a “mess.” He does not grapple with the fact that the conservative justices created it.

Trans Kansans Are Right to Distrust Federal Courts, Madiba Dennie

Transgender Kansans are challenging a new discriminatory law in state court, refusing to leave their freedom up to an untrustworthy federal judiciary.

Barrett and Gorsuch Try, Fail to Offer Coherent Defenses of the Major Questions Doctrine, Madiba Dennie

The conservative justices are looking for any theory of the major questions doctrine other than the very obvious one.

Prosecutors Keep Charging Women Who Have Abortions For Crimes They Did Not Commit, Susan Rinkunas

Kentucky’s fetal homicide law does not apply to people who end their own pregnancies. This woman got charged anyway.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

How SCOTUS Manipulated Its Docket to Hide an Anti-LGBTQ+ Ruling From the Spotlight, Hila Keren, Slate

“The Republican appointees on the court actively support and advance the concerted efforts outside of the court, by the conservative movement and the executive branch, to eradicate LGBTQ+ equality in general and particularly the existence of gender identity.”

The Court’s (Selective) Impatience Is a Vice, Steve Vladeck, One First

“We’re long past the point at which there are neutral legal principles that can be deployed to persuasively reconcile all of the Court’s behavior on emergency applications. The Court is intervening because it (thinks it) can, and because, for whatever reason, it doesn’t want to wait.”

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

On that third point, I am pleading with Democratic politicians to take a peek at new data from Strength In Numbers and Verasight, which earlier this month polled support for (among other things) Supreme Court reform proposals. The findings: 65 percent of respondents support imposing 18-year term limits for the justices, with 15 percent opposed and 20 percent “not sure.” That 65 percent support figure includes 61 percent of independents and 56 percent of Republicans. This means that even within the party whose appointees have controlled the Court since the Nixon administration, a solid majority of voters still look at the status quo and think, “Yeah, We As A Society really ought to make some changes here.”

Support for expanding the Court from nine to 13 justices is less strong: 39 percent support, 32 percent oppose, and 29 percent not sure, for a net support number of 7 percent. But as G. Elliott Morris of Strength In Numbers explains, a large “don’t know” figure can indicate soft support, and among independent voters, net support for Court expansion is at plus-three. Together, these data points suggest to me that, at the very least, a good chunk of the electorate is expansion-curious, and could perhaps be persuaded to move into that first column.

I am bringing all this up because, for most of the five years and change since Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation in 2020, meaningful Supreme Court reform has been a third rail among Democratic candidates for office. During the Biden administration, as the Court’s approval numbers cratered and support for expansion (among Democratic voters and in general) ticked up, President Joe Biden maintained his longtime opposition to the idea. The blue-ribbon commission he convened to study Court reform eventually produced a final report that expressed cautious support for term limits and recommended against expansion, which, the commission said, entailed an intolerably “considerable” level of risk.

Over on Capitol Hill, a 2021 bill to add four justices to the Court picked up 60 Democratic backers in the House and three in the Senate. In 2023, a year after the Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the same proposal made it to 66 lawmakers in the House but drew no additional supporters in the Senate. In July 2024, as Trump widened his lead in general election polling, Biden at last announced his support for “major” reforms, which turned out to be term limits and an “enforceable ethics code” for the justices. He dropped out of the race five days later.

To the extent that Biden-era conventional wisdom about the politics of Court reform was ever wise, it is not anymore. Trump is a wildly unpopular president, and as it turns out, a half-decade of reactionary jurisprudence has not endeared the Supreme Court he built to the people whose fundamental rights it has been taking away. Among voters, there is real interest in politicians whose plan to change the status quo is something other than “hoping a Democrat is in the White House next time a justice dies.” For Democratic candidates, running against the Court is basically a free space on the campaign trail bingo card. They should not hesitate to take 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

You Guys Look Miserable, Jay Willis

The Supreme Court’s silliest tradition is sending a handful of justices to sit through a two-hour State of the Union without changing their facial expressions.

The Surest Path to a Federal Judgeship Is Being One of Trump’s Lawyers, JP Collins

President Donald Trump’s latest slate of judicial nominees includes another member of his personal legal team—proof that loyalty remains the surest path to lifetime tenure.

Supreme Court Says You Can’t File Tort Suits Against Postal Carriers Who Won’t Deliver Mail to Black People, Madiba Dennie

According to Clarence Thomas, mail that your mail carrier steals from you is really just “lost,” if you think about it.

We’re About To Find Out Whether Trump’s Judicial Confirmation Machine Is Going Boom or Bust, JP Collins

As the 2026 midterms approach, three conservative appeals court judges just decided to give Trump and this GOP-controlled Senate the chance to confirm their successors.

Justice Department Lawyers Who Cared Would Quit, Josh Michtom

Ethical rules in the legal profession prescribe a clear path forward for the government attorneys being asked to violate the Constitution on a daily basis.

Republican Judges Are Using Imaginary Voter Fraud to Empower Real Voter Suppression, Madiba Dennie

Fifth Circuit Judge Edith Jones says that mail-in balloting is a “rich field for fraud” in Texas. The numbers tell a different story.

This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated

Aileen Cannon’s Campaign for a Supreme Court Seat Just Reached a New Low, Shirin Ali, Slate

“​​Who better to replace [Alito] than a young, fortysomething judge who has spent the past four years proving her fealty to the president in a case that dogged his presidential campaign, threatened him with prison, and which she just sought to bury once and for all?”

The Supreme Court Is Not “Reining In” Executive Power, Steve Vladeck, One First

“It is just not possible to look at the Court’s behavior across this entire field—versus a cherry-picked, non-random sample—and come away with the conclusion that this is a Court trying to re-empower the legislature and weaken the executive.”

Mississippi’s Black Voters Brace For SCOTUS to Gut Their Political Clout, Caleb Bedillion, Bolts

How the Supreme Court’s Callais decision could upend politics in the South.

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