Dorf on Law

The most famous classic blunder is getting involved in a land war in Asia, but there are other classic blunders, including the only slightly less well known classic blunder of wagering against a Sicilian when death is on the line. In The Princess Bride , Wallace Shawn as Vizzini recounts these blunders as admonitions : "Never get involved in a land war in Asia." "Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line." I would add another classic blunder to Vizzini's list: "Never agree to be interviewed by  New Yorker  reporter Isaac Chotiner." Has anybody ever emerged unscathed from an interview with Chotiner? Not to my knowledge, although some interviewees come off worse than others. Cass Sunstein is Chotiner's latest interviewee/victim. Chotiner interviews Sunstein about the topic of his new book defending liberalism, very broadly defined. Per his usual approach, Chotiner mostly confronts Sunstein with his own words and then asks the equivale...

It has been over a month since my last entry in this series , but that is hardly because there has been any shortage of legally dubious actions by the Trump administration. On the contrary, the sheer volume of law breaking and law bending has frequently led me to skip the "Wait, Can He?" prefix and proceed from one to another presidentially generated crisis. I return to the series today because my analysis of the politically motivated indictment of James Comey underscores a point that has usually been the conclusion of my entries in the series: To answer the question whether Donald Trump and/or his agents can actually do many of the dangerous things they do, it is not sufficient to know whether the actions in question are lawful; even if they are unlawful, Trump can often get away with those actions because of the inability or unwillingness of other actors to stop him. Seeing Comey’s case from that perspective, let’s identify the various actors who might have prevented (but ...

One of my pet peeves is the reflexive self-flagellation that we see so often among US liberals, with all of their "to be fair" overcompensation for daring to be not-conservative.  Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is one of the poster boys for this, which makes sense given his vintage.  Schumer, after all, came up through the ranks of Democratic Party politics in the 1980's and especially the 1990's, when Bill Clinton's despicable "triangulation"  strategy was all the rage for people who were deathly afraid of what George H.W. Bush irritatingly labeled "the L word" (long before the Showtime TV series used that letter for a quite different meaning).  Negative shout-out to 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, who ran away from the liberal label when the elder Bush started to treat it like a slur.  But in any event, Democrats of Schumer's cohort were all convinced that "this is a conservative country," even thoug...

The rhetorical battle over political violence in the United States shows no signs of abating, or even leveling off.  The latest high-profile shooting (at an ICE facility in Dallas) saw the Vice President -- of course it had to be him! -- immediately labeling the shooter a "violent left-wing extremist" and claiming to have non-public information showing that "this person was politically motivated."  It is important to remember, however, the the now-VP admitted (bragged, actually) to an interviewer a year ago that he will make things up to support his political aims: "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do." And create stories he does.  I will get back to Vance in due course, but my purpose here is to talk not about this latest tragedy but to revisit the one that dominated the news for the last two weeks, that is, the murder of Charlie Kirk. ...

Workplace raids have become an important part of the Trump administration's mass deportations agenda. The recent ICE raid  at a Hyundai facility in Georgia made headlines not only because of its near-unprecedented scale—nearly 500 Korean workers were arrested—but also because of its unusual targeting of visa holders hailing from a key U.S. ally. But ICE enforcement at the places where immigrants work has been routine  over the past year, since the government stopped following a Biden-era policy against the practice. Federal agents have in some instances opted for indiscriminate arrests in places where they think undocumented immigrants tend to gather, such as Home Depot parking lots and other meeting places for day laborers. Workplace raids offer a potentially more targeted tool to identify immigrants without legal status, since ICE can seek to verify work authorization information collected by employers. In this enforcement context, some immigrant workers have been taking a...

Perhaps one of the most disorienting aspects of living through our current times is the mix of menace and buffoonery that emanates from President Trump and his agents. Even as Trump and his allies inspire fear by silencing  academics for wrongthink and comedians who criticize him, he invites ridicule as a buffoon by nearly everything he says, such as  repeatedly mispronouncing  Azerbaijan and confusing Armenia with Albania . Or, just yesterday, struggling to sound out "acetaminophen" and then saying this actual thing while dispensing dubious medical advice about childhood immunizations: "It’s too much liquid, too many different things are going into that baby at too big a number." Meanwhile, we have every reason to be made anxious by t he conspiracy theorist who was standing beside Trump when he made that eloquent statement. The man whom Trump made Secretary of Health & Human Services to "go crazy on health" is doing exactly that by canceling vital r...

The air has turned chilly for university academics and administrators. Just a few blocks from my house, an Emory University professor was "terminated" for an apparently insensitive social media post about current events. Half a country away, the President of Texas A & M was forced to resign over what looks like a disagreement between a religious student and a professor about the proper content of the professor's course and a skirmish over "gender ideology." Oh, the professor was fired too. It feels like every day someone is being fired for saying something that until recently wouldn’t and often couldn’t get anyone fired. So, I have been reflecting on what I am allowed to say and not allowed to say given the current environment. I live in a Blue City, in a State that nationally votes Purple, but is very much run by Red, meaning GOP, politicians (both houses of the legislature and the governor). Given the current realities, I want to be clear that I am just ...

ABC has "pre-empted indefinitely" late-night show Jimmy Kimmel Live! in response to network affiliate and official backlash against host Jimmy Kimmel's statements about the murder of Charlie Kirk. Because I do not regularly watch the show, when I first learned this news yesterday, I assumed that Kimmel must have said something that could be misconstrued as celebrating or approving the murder--something similar to what some random people on social media have posted, something at best insensitive and at worst offensive. I did not imagine that Kimmel had actually  celebrated or approved the murder because Kimmel is not, to my knowledge, a psychopath or a revolutionary. I then watched the offending clip from Monday night's show and was astonished to learn that Kimmel's sin appears to have been that he made one statement that was based on a factually erroneous assumption. Here's the relevant statement: "We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang ...

After a party loses an election, it is both necessary and healthy for everyone involved to ask what happened.  After the 2024 election, however, Democrats' combination of internal rifts and chronic self-doubt was guaranteed to lead to misreadings -- some honestly mistaken, many cynically deliberate -- that would cause them to misconstrue nearly everything.  And misconstrue they did. Given who holds the real power in that party, it was grimly predictable that people like Thomas Edsall of The New York Times would soon be pushing nonsense like this in March of this year: "Can the Democratic Party as currently constituted move to the center? After the 2024 elections, many sympathetic politicians and commentators made it quite clear that they would like the party to do so.  It will be an uphill struggle."  And just yesterday, it should have surprised no one that another group of right-wing Democrats falsely grabbed the centrist label and met this moment of emerg...