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Say it ain't so, Chauncey

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The news that NBA Hall-of-Famer and current Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, former NBA player Damon Jones, and possibly other NBA players, coaches, assistant coaches, and hangers-on have been indicted for various gambling-related offenses is shocking, but only in the classic Casablanca sense . As professional sports leagues have increasingly formed lucrative partnerships with sports gambling platforms, they have fueled the growth of a national addiction. The only thing that's shocking about the allegations in the indictments is that it took so long for these sorts of charges to surface. That said, I confess that I was initially puzzled about the involvement of Rozier--who made $25 million in basketball salary last year--and Billups--who made nearly $5 million in coaching salary last year and way more than that during his playing days. Jones, I learned, earned nearly $22 million during his playing career , but he retired in 2012, and man...
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Conservatives' Lies About the National Debt -- and They Are Indeed Lies -- Have Tragic Consequences

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There is a truly bipartisan consensus in the US on one issue, a consensus that is demonstrably -- even trivially -- wrong but that harms millions of people.  All Republicans and far too many Democrats performatively rail against the supposed evils of government borrowing, their piety exceeded only by their irrationality.  This consensus is a tragedy, and it is why I have taken to echoing Paul Krugman's use of the term Very Serious People (VSP's) to describe the DC insiders and wannabes who know exactly nothing about public economics but who are proudly unwavering in their certitude that the federal government is sending us all to hell by taking on excessive debt. Yes, there are other policy areas in which we see similarly unfortunate American bipartisanship, notably in foreign policy (particularly regarding the Middle East), and a predictably ugly groupthink forms whenever it comes to military invasions.  A barely known Barack Obama was able to take down Hi...
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Trump's Not-So-Cute Means of Becoming President-for-Life

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As if we don't have more immediate problems, on Monday a reporter asked President Trump whether he was considering running for Vice President in 2028 so as to assume the presidency upon the immediate resignation of the nominal head of the ticket and thus circumvent the 22nd Amendment. Trump, displaying greater understanding of the scenario than I would have expected, said that he'd be "allowed to do that" but added: "I wouldn't do that. I think it's too cute. Yeah, I would rule that out because it's too cute. I think the people wouldn't like that. It's too cute. It's not - it wouldn't be right." At the same time, however, Trump didn't rule out unspecified other means by which he might serve a third term. But then yesterday, both House Speaker Mike Johnson and Trump himself conceded that the 22nd Amendment precludes a third term. Or did they? Trump said "based on what I read, I guess I’m not allowed to run. So we’ll see ...
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Why Hasn't Even More Wealth Been Destroyed? (Who Knew That Trump's Superpower Would Be Destroying Wealth? Part 4)

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I ate a low-fat cookie for dessert, but I didn't lose weight. It rained, but I didn't get soaked to the skin. Tariffs went up, but the economy wasn't immediately destroyed. Early last month, I inaugurated this occasional series of columns under the title: "Who Knew That Trump's Superpower Would Be Destroying Wealth?"  I have listed the three previous series entries (with links) at the end of this column. The penultimate sentence in Part 2 ("I will return to the question of tariffs specifically in my next column in this series, but the lesson for today is that chaos is bad for business.") turned out to be a bad prediction, because Part 3 was in fact not about tariffs or foreign trade at all.  That the tease in Part 2 turned out to be misleading should not be especially surprising, however, because the chaos of 2025 politics all but guarantees that events will overtake even the most earnest planning.  Indeed, long before Donald Trump's return to ...
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Judicial Transparency and the Tenth Anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges

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I was pleased and honored last week to be part of a symposium at Mercer University School of Law celebrating the tenth anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges , the case that required states to recognize same-sex marriages. My panel included attorney Jon Davidson, who was part of the litigation team behind Obergfell,  as well as Suzanne Goldberg, a clinical law professor at Columbia Law School who has been a major advocate in the movement to gain equality for the LGBTQ community. I began my remarks by mentioning that over the last ten months when speaking at conferences or to the media, I have been unable to express any optimism about the future of our country, the Supreme Court, or the rule of law. My social media nickname, “Professor Doom and “Gloom,” has been quite fitting over this time.  But on this day, I was able to stand up and say, for the first time in a long time, that I had something semi-optimistic to report. I predicted that the Supreme Court would not overturn the h...
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Two Questions About Political Questions

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In my essay on this blog on Monday , I criticized Justice Alito's statement during the oral argument in Louisiana v. Callais  characterizing  Rucho v. Common Cause   as holding that political gerrymandering is constitutionally permissible. Rucho , I noted, held that constitutional challenges to political gerrymandering present nonjusticiable political questions, but this does not mean that there are no constitutional constraints on political gerrymandering. It means only that legislators--either state legislators or members of Congress if it chooses to exercise its power under Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution to modify the manner of conducting congressional elections--are the actors who have the responsibility to determine when political gerrymandering goes too far and is thus unconstitutional. I begin each class in my constitutional law course with a 5-to-10-minute segment I call "Con law in the news." On Monday during Con law in the news, we discussed the Callai...
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More of What’s in Store for Mamdani That Won’t Be Pretty

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In my two most recent Dorf on Law  columns ( here and here ), I discussed the frantic efforts by the Democratic Party's establishment -- together with the likes of  The New York Times , both on its editorial and news sides -- to kneecap Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani in the upcoming New York mayoral election.  The party's leaders could not be bothered to find an alternative to Mamdani who is even a little bit palatable, instead falling in line behind the disgraced Andrew Cuomo, who was forced to resign as governor in 2021 when his lifelong habits of bullying, dishonesty, and misogyny at long last became impossible to ignore.  Are there truly no non-Mamdani politicians in New York who are decent human beings, bigwig Democrats? Apparently not, or at least the party's leaders seem not to think so.  In any event, my ire in those two recently columns has been focused on the fact that the party's power brokers have obviously been icing out Mamdani because he proud...
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Don't Worry. Trump will take the $230 million in taxpayer money that his hand-picked lawyers will award him and "give it to charity or something."

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As reported yesterday by The New York Times , President Donald J. Trump has demanded that the federal government pay him $230 million to settle two administrative complaints in which he alleges that various legal actions against him by the Justice Department--including the Russia investigation during his first term, the search of his Mar-a-Lago home for the documents he unlawfully retained during the interregnum, and the January 6 investigation and indictment during that same period--were malicious and otherwise damaging. Neither the NY Times story linked above nor any other source I was able to locate explains how Trump arrived at the $230 million figure. That seems like too much to be legal fees, even if Trump had very expensive representation. By way of comparison, before his disbarment in both New York and DC , Rudy Giuliani reportedly demanded $20,000 per day for himself and his staff to represent Trump during the 2020 post-election whirlwind of litigation. Trump didn't pay t...
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What’s in Store for Mamdani Isn’t Pretty, But the Alternative is Worse

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In my column this past Friday, " Democratic Bigwigs versus Their Own Voters, Mamdani, and the Future ," I expanded on a couple of side comments that I have recently made here on  Dorf on Law  regarding the Democratic Party establishment's latest failures.  Although there are many such unforced errors to discuss, I was referring specifically to their failure to capitalize on the enthusiasm that the prohibitive frontrunner in the New York mayoral race, Zohran Mamdani, has generated with voters there. Most tellingly, the bigwigs are frantically distancing themselves from their own party's nominee even though Mamdani-supporting New Yorkers are the most important groups of voters in the party's base -- young people, progressives, and everyone else who falls into what Howard Dean once famously called "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." Indeed, the people who will turn out to elect Mamdani are not just "important groups of voters in the party...
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