“When she was 23,” is not that big of a caveat when she’s barely 28 now and was 25 when she became famous.

1) The Senate has never confirmed a Justice contrary to the statutory limit before, so the issue has never come up. There is no relevant history on the point.

My taek is that the law setting it at 9 is either unconstitutional or legally irrelevant. The Constitution says a nominee confirmed by the Senate is a Justice.

It’s really hard to say it was a terrible idea when one read of history is that it caused the Court to start ruling differently and enabled most of America’s 20th century success.

I’m not sure DACA is really comparable. DACA is a kind of prosecutorial discretion, which is widely accepted not just as a practical matter but an ethical one; prosecutorial ethics call for not prosecuting people in certain situations even if a prosecution could otherwise rightly be brought. And when people vote for…

I don’t think Bernie’s answers have been great but it has been frustrating to see the people who generally don’t like him characterize his answers as worse than those of the other candidates. Harris and Booker have said yes, for instance, but in ways that made it sound like they were talking about policies that aren’t…

I think this piece really oversells how good McSorley was as a QB, but I do also fail to see any reason to think he would be a good DB, and even if he’s a pretty weak QB prospect, the position is so much more valuable that it makes no sense to see if he can succeed there.

The idea that Roma, the best-reviewed movie of all of 2018, directed by Alfonso Cuaron, one of the most acclaimed directors alive, and the winner of the Oscars for Best Foreign Film, Best Directing, and Best Cinematography, is somehow qualitatively not a film is facially absurd.

I’m not sure that’s a bandage. In the official artwork it has identical rectangles on the soles of its feet.

A big problem with the plan (not detailed in the linked piece outlining some other ways it could be improved) is that most rural and urban neighborhoods are “child care deserts.” Thus for this to be anywhere near universal it would need to massively increase the number of child care centers. The main mechanism for…

Does she explain why at any point in the video she believed the policy conflicted with federal law? Generally speaking, federal law can’t tell state law enforcement what to do, but there might have been conditioned funding or something similar in play.

A less important point about the filibuster objectively, but perhaps important rhetorically, is that the filibuster is literally just a made up rule that in effect directly contradicts the Constitution by creating a 60 vote threshold as opposed to a 50 vote threshold. 

My guess is she had a research assistant write significant portions of the book and that assistant either doesn’t understand plagiarism or was under the impression that Abramson herself would rewrite the sections the assistant was providing. I don’t think that makes it any better for Abramson (and certainly not for how…

I mean, I get that if you assume he’s guilty... if he’s not, it’s hard on both parties for no good reason.

It is “literally the law”, but that does not mean the text of the statute creates a mandatory duty. The language here largely reads as non-mandatory, which is not that uncommon.

It’s not obvious to me that language creates an obligation, but I genuinely appreciate the citation. I personally read the language to suggest that the AG can decline to represent agencies, which probably would count as implicit consent for them to use in-house or outside counsel in the odd event that the AG did not…

Can you point me to legal authority that says she had to? Generally speaking, defending or prosecuting certain actions is often part of the job for lots of government legal positions, but that doesn’t mean the relevant authority actually has to. For instance, there’s a strong norm of the DoJ defending federal law, but…

Roe does not prohibit anything; it does allow states to prohibit later abortions absent certain reasons, which even New York does under the RHA.

Not obvious to me that this should count as a House floor proceeding under the rules anyway (though admittedly I haven’t looked into their definitions or anything).

Two things: