The essential premise of fascism is that the individual has no existence save as part of the collective. I've been wrestling with this ever since it became clear that Trump is going to get back into power last night. So much of my identity is wrapped up in
After a hiatus of slightly more than two months, here, finally, is the second part of my series on How (Not) to Reform the Supreme Court! This time, I'm covering what I consider to be the single most important piece of any court reform effort: court-packing, these days
My How (Not) To Reform the Supreme Court series got slightly interrupted by my month off from writing here. But yesterday Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), one of the good ones, introduced a court reform proposal, and there's one particular feature of it that I wanted to comment on:
As I mentioned in my introductory post, one of my ambitions for this site is to create a resource library for those interested in learning about constitutional theory. This post is the first of what I hope will be many in that vein: a basic primer on the six so-called
Today the Senate Democrats introduced what they style the "No Kings Act," which purports to overrule Trump v. United States. Now, you may be saying, wait a minute, Trump v. U.S. was a constitutional case, how can Congress overrule it by ordinary legislation? The answer is that
President Joe Biden has just this morning published an op-ed in the Washington Post sketching out his plan for Supreme Court reform. I want to say right off the bat that, completely aside from the details of his plan, this is great to see. We absolutely need court reform, and
This site is basically not for doing political commentary. But I think there's an interesting political-philosophy wrinkle to this week's rather momentous political developments. One theme of the first few hours after Joe Biden withdrew from the race for president and Vice President Kamala Harris became
The other day, while discussing court reform on Bluesky, I described the arguments against construing the phrase "good behavior" in Article III as meaning life tenure as "sophomoric textualism." What did I mean by that? The idea here is that there's a phase everyone
There were reports yesterday that Joe Biden is preparing to endorse a significant package of Supreme Court reforms. As a result, I spent basically the whole day having discussions online (mostly on Bluesky) about those rumored reforms, and specifically whether or not they're constitutional. I will have more
Eminent historian and public intellectual Kevin Kruse has a piece out today arguing, in essence, that we shouldn't view the failure of Franklin Roosevelt's 1937 "court-packing" plan as a cautionary tale for court reform today. I agree with that as stated! And the way
Most case captions are pretty random. Baker v. Carr? What's that about? The name doesn't really tell you anything. It's just two random names: who knows what Mr. Baker and Mr. Carr were fighting about? Some captions, though, feel absolutely perfect, an exact distillation
Cross-posting here: I have a piece today in Liberal Currents about why judicial review is essential for our democracy and that means we have to attack and dethrone (and then rebuild) the Supreme Court!