Posts

The Vaporware Presidency

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In the tech world, the term vaporware is used to describe a product that does not yet and may never exist but that a company hypes for any number of reasons. For example, eventually, we will probably have a fully functional fleet of driverless cars, but Elon Musk has been promising that his Teslas will be fully self-driving in just another few years for a decade . Unless and until Tesla produces and sells such vehicles, its self-driving cars are vaporware. Meanwhile, three events in last week's news highlight how much of what Donald Trump does as president is the equivalent of vaporware. 1) Pardon? The most amusing incident was Trump's announcement that he was pardoning Tina Peters, a Colorado county clerk who was convicted and sentenced to nine years in prison for tampering with election machines in service of Trump's Big Lie during the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. It is not clear whether Trump merely announced an intention to pardon Peters or has actually...
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A Very Public Tantrum Points to a Very Different Future for College Football

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For fans of American college football, this is the almost -empty weekend that sits between the end of the conference championship games and the beginning of the expanded playoff tournament.  As I put it in my most recent column on this topic (ten months ago), "I write one or two columns every year at the end of the season, usually offering a guilt-ridden confession that I continue to be fascinated by that brutal and corrupt sport, followed by some observations about the new ways in which the brutality and corruption are playing out." Although I prefer to wait until the end of the season to go through this ritual, the temptation to write such a column arrived early this year, for reasons that will become clear soon enough. [Before getting there, however, I should state up front that a major news story  emerged from the college football world this week, but that story is in an entirely separate category.  The now-former head coach of the University of Michigan's footb...
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Teaser for New Content (Early Tomorrow)

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Note to Readers: This has been "a day," as the kids no longer say.  My usual response to unexpected chaos on a day when I am scheduled to write for  Dorf on Law is to (very reluctantly) run a Classic.  Today, however, I have an idea for a new column that I am particularly excited to share, which means that I am not going to be satisfied by simply posting a Classic and calling it a week. Therefore, I have copied below a Classic-ish column from earlier this year that is relevant to a new column that I am going to post tomorrow morning.  Please check back to find something to read over your Saturday morning coffee. -- Neil H. Buchanan     When the World Turns Upside Down, We Need to Be Willing to Change Our Minds (warning: misleading teaser) By Neil H. Buchanan - February 03, 2025 While not exactly click-bait, this column's headline is deliberately somewhat deceptive.  (Hence, the parenthetical disclaimer.)  After all...
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A Sans-Serif Font and a Sans-Serious Secretary of State

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Even the straight news reporters who wrote articles in  The Guardian  and  The New York Times  failed to conceal their bemused confusion when reporting on US Secretary of State Marco Rubio's announcement early this week that his department will henceforth return to using Times New Roman rather than the Calibri font.  Yes, the story truly is that stupid, but that is Rubio's world in late 2025. Not that the font change itself deserves much discussion, given Rubio's claim that the now-returned-to-its-rightful-place-of-greatness font "restore[s] decorum and professionalism to" State's printed communication.  Sure.  Also, he claimed that it was "wasteful" to have changed to Calibri in the first place, which evidently means that it costs money -- or at least Rubio is willing to stand publicly beyond the claim that it costs money -- to have changed the font, which means that it will cost money to switch it back.  I guess two wastes make an efficient, or ...
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Why Did SCOTUS Grant Cert in the Birthright Citizenship Case?

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Last week, the Supreme Court granted   certiorari  in   Trump v. Barbara . A federal district judge in New Hampshire preliminarily enjoined  President Trump's Executive Order  (EO) purporting to deny citizenship to children born in the United States to non-citizen parents unless at least one of those parents is a permanent resident. In accord with every other ruling by lower court judges who have addressed the merits of such claims, the judge concluded that the plaintiffs (as representatives in a provisionally certified nationwide class action on behalf of all children who would be affected by the EO) had established a likelihood of success on the merits of their claim that the EO violates both the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause and   8 U.S.C. § 1401 (a), which, in language that mirrors the Fourteenth Amendment, makes "a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" a "citizen[] of the United States." The governm...
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What We Learned From the Trump v. Slaughter Oral Argument

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Having wasted  spent two and a half hours of my day listening to yesterday's oral argument in Trump v. Slaughter , I have less time than I typically spend writing up my musings for this blog, so I'll confine my commentary to four bullet points: •    Bottom Line : As I explained yesterday , given the Court's recent actions on the emergency docket, I went into the oral argument expecting that at least five and very likely six Justices intend to overrule Humphrey's Executor and thus invalidate good cause removal protection for Federal Trade Commissioners, with implications for most if not all independent agencies, subject to an ad hoc exception for the Federal Reserve. Nothing that happened during yesterday's oral argument changed that expectation. •     Respondent's Counsel Boxed Himself In : A key piece of the respondent's argument is that Humphrey's Executor is a 90-year-old precedent that should be preserved absent the sorts of considerations that just...
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SCOTUS Oral Argument Preview: Do We Really Want More Vindictive And Incompetent Federal Agencies?

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Today the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Trump v. Slaughter , which presents the question whether the statutory prohibition on presidential removal of a Federal Trade Commissioner except for good cause is constitutional. The federal district court said it is and thus enjoined the defendants from giving effect to President Trump's purported firing of FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter without cause. The D.C. Circuit then declined to stay the injunction, because, as that court explained, "ninety years ago, a unanimous Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Federal Trade Commission Act’s for-cause removal protection for Federal Trade Commissioners. See  Humphrey’s Executor v. United States . " The outcome of the case is thus essentially a foregone conclusion, right? Yes, but in the wrong direction. The Supreme Court has twice signaled that it intends to use the Slaughter case to overrule Humphrey's . In its per curiam opinion in May, in Trump v. Wilc...
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Racial Redistricting, the GOP Court, and History for Me but not for Thee

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The Republicans on the Roberts Court love to lecture us on the importance of history to constitutional interpretation. But as almost everyone knows, the conservative justices use history only when it suits their purposes and ignores it or distorts it when history cuts against GOP goals and priorities. When it comes to voting rights and redistricting to ensure partisan advantage, the Court acts like our blatantly racist past that prevented racial minorities from being elected to state and federal legislatures never happened. History for me but not for thee. All of which brings us to Thursday's two-page "opinion" in Abbott v. League of  United Latin American Citizens.  overruling a 160-page lower court decision written by a Trump nominated judge after a nine-day evidentiary hearing finding that Texas illegally used race to give the GOP maximum partisan advantage in the state. Texas decided to redistrict in advance of the important 2026 mid-terms only after President Trump ...
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