What annoys me about the whole situation with most favored nation status for China is that it was perfectly clear they were Communist authoritarians and were going to be menace to the world and yet everyone pretended they wouldn't be so they could make money.
People act as if we didn't know. We knew! They had just done Tinanamen Square. If their plan was to allow freedom of speech they would have... not massacred people on worldwide television in their Capitol! How could we possibly not know?
Nov 15 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
I dump on the Ivy League a lot, and I see David Brooks is now joining in, and it might be good to be constructive about solutions to the problem (and it is a problem) that Ivy League sensibilities have too much of a hold on the Democratic Party. I have 2.
theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
First, just as liberals would be aghast in 2024 to cast a net that didn't include women or people of color or LGBT people when hiring for important positions, you should be aghast to cast a net that only includes super-elite colleges.
Nov 4 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
This story has been haunting me a few days. And I think there's something here about our own discourse that is worth talking about.
It has to do with how people say very dumb things about levels of freedom in countries. 1/
There are only a few countries on earth where a woman walking down the street in underwear that covers her breasts and private parts will be arrested, disappeared, and possibly killed. Iran is one of them. There are a handful of others. 2/
Oct 27 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
I think one of the biggest reasons to prefer Harris over Trump is the issue of normality.
Remember how in 2017-21, you lived in fear of what President Trump was going to tweet next? What he was going to do next?
He was completely unpredictable. Take North Korea. I happen to agree with his decision to talk to Kim Jong Un (I think "refusing to talk" is one of the most overrated things in all of foreign policy). But maybe you did, maybe you didn't. The point is Trump was INCONSISTENT.
Oct 23 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
The entire premise of the pro-life movement-- that banning abortion would deter women from getting them-- was wrong.
Obviously, this is an application of what we learned in Prohibition (you can't ban things people want to do). 1/
jabberwocking.com/abortion-bans-…
But I think there's something more to it than that. I think pro-lifers, as a group, don't understand women.
I can see the objection immediately-- how can it be? Pro-lifers include many women.
And, sure, they do. But those women are women who don't understand other women. 2/
Sep 19 • 24 tweets • 5 min read
Since I always get a lot of pushback from high speed rail advocates whenever I discuss the failure of their pet project, LA-San Francisco high speed rail, a thread on my position on this. Basically, high speed rail is good but magical thinking about it isn't. 1/
Let's understand something up front. High Speed Rail is NEVER going to be the primary way of moving people between cities in the United States. There are several reasons for this.
First, we are extremely spread out, especially out west. 2/
Jul 27 • 29 tweets • 5 min read
A quick thread on an issue that blew up a bit last night. I think a lot of religious conservatives (and some liberals) with broad sympathies for Catholicism, in a strange way, don't understand exactly why the sex abuse scandal was so bad. They want to minimize it. 1/
Now, to be clear, I am not saying they don't understand lots of children were raped. I think nobody denies that. But a bunch of people replied to me with some version of the following: lots of organizations, like the Boy Scouts and various schools, had similar scandals. 2/
Jul 19 • 38 tweets • 7 min read
Since "the Supreme Court will interpret the 14th Amendment to ban abortion" is the talking point that will never die, on both the Left and the Far Right, I want to synthesize in one thread all the reasons this will never, ever happen. 1/
First, of all, this is just impossible to do. Literally impossible. What do I mean by this? I mean, the decision as to whether to prosecute people for committing or abetting homicide is in the control of prosecutors, at the state level. 2/
Jul 5 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
So I read SEC v. Jarkesy this morning. This is the case about the 7th Amendment and jury trials and administrative agencies. And-- I gotta say-- I think the conservatives are right on this one. #appellatetwitter 1/
So the issue is this: the SEC has the power to fine people for securities fraud. Going in to this case they could do it by bringing an administrative action, heard by an executive branch official, whose ruling would be deferred to in any court action. 2/
May 22 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
Unappreciated point: the Democratic Party's commitment to identity politics forces it into bad political strategies and prevents it from implementing effective ones.
I was thinking about this listening to @mattyglesias and @brianbeutler this morning.
politix.fm/p/big-alito-li…
Matt points out that one of the reasons the Democratic Party cannot get a campaign to get Sotomayor started is because every time someone steps out and calls for her to retire they get called a racist and a sexist by The Groups. Richard Blumenthal, for instance, faced this.
Apr 13 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
this is why gag orders on criminal defendants implicate the 1st Amendment.
I realize folks feel Trump is sui generis, but imagine if a prosecutor falsely accuses you of a crime (which happens ALL THE TIME) and you having no right to tell the public the witnesses aren't credible.
I GET why people don't want to extend that right to Trump when he has all these supporters who could be riled up to intimidate a potential witness.
But there's a principle here whatever you want to say about former President Trump.
Mar 1 • 22 tweets • 4 min read
Let's talk about the last time a President brought a questionable immunity claim up through the courts, Clinton v. Jones. It makes an interesting contrast to the Trump case. 1/
So some background. Bill Clinton was a brilliant politician. He also had what one of his aides called a "zipper problem" and what another one (a female aide, to be clear) called "bimbo eruptions". He wasn't faithful to Hillary in Arkansas and had a number of girlfriends. 2/
Feb 29 • 30 tweets • 5 min read
This "the courts are slow-walking Trump's immunity claim" narrative (for the most part coming from non-lawyers who don't understand anything about the system) is truly pissing me off. So here's the real story. 1/
President Trump was indicted last August. Notably that's the biggest slow walk of all- an August 2023 indictment for a January 2021 alleged crime, and 10 months after Jack Smith was appointed. But Smith is a saint among men and "on our team", so he cannot be criticized. 2/
Feb 24 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
I've been thinking a lot about how quickly at least the official Republican Party flip-flopped on IVF. I think it tells you something about a certain kind of political issue. I am going to call these Vampire Issues because they can't be exposed to sunlight. 1/
A Vampire Issue is an extremist position that a political party takes to please some very small set of people in its coalition, because the country is not paying attention and it will shut the group up/cement their support. 2/
Feb 21 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Maybe I will write about this in detail (could even be a law review article, although IDK if I have the bandwidth), but the District Court which thought it was helping Harvard with its finding of no anti-Asian discrimination took the SFFA case in a much worse direction as Con Law
The elements of the argument:
1. The District Court and Court of Appeals were REALLY biased towards Harvard, and the finding of no anti-Asian discrimination was, given the "personal score" stuff (which was CLEARLY discriminatory), obviously an attempt to help Harvard on appeal.
Feb 6 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
You are going to hear a bunch of takes this week about how the Supreme Court is "required" to take Trump off the ballot.
Whether or not you buy the argument that he's disqualified, remember this-- nothing is "required".
SCOTUS can do whatever it wants. 1/
Moreover, even if there's some notion that plain text should constrain SCOTUS from considering pragmatic issues (such as how half the country would react to disenfranchisement), this case is NOT about plain text. Section 3 is an old, very ambiguous, seldom invoked provision. 2/
Jan 8 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
having listened, on @ProfDBernstein 's recommendation, to the Federalist Society's excellent, diverse (no pun intended) panel on affirmative action, one thing I think a lot of people don't get is there really is a lot of anti-Asian animus in college admissions. I think it evolved
in other words, i don't think it started out "there's too many Asians, let's screw them over". Rather, I think that people who started out open minded and tolerant ran into a situation where they couldn't reach their other goals without discriminating against Asians.
Dec 19, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
So after the latest Clarence Thomas revelations, I have a modest proposal which John Roberts et al. won't like. But I'm convinced it is fully constitutional.
We should make serious Supreme Court ethical violations criminal offenses. 1/
So here's the basic problem. The Constitution grants life tenure to justices subject only to impeachment. And further, partisan political polarization means NOBODY will ever impeach the other party's justices.
And that leads to the Court having complete impunity. 2/
Dec 9, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
just once i'd like to see the NGO sector pressure Hamas to offer concessions that would be attractive to Israel to induce ceasefire.
E.g., if Hamas said "we will release the hostages, fill the tunnels, locate in the open, and offer up the planners of 10/7 for a war crimes trial"
obviously NGO's won't say "we support Hamas", but they definitely and conspicuously don't want to push Hamas to give up any capability to launch future terrorist attacks, because a lot of folks in that sector hate Israel and think Hamas is engaging in justified resistance.
Dec 7, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
i think it rather obvious that a lot of academia got caught with its pants down when its very under-reasoned "words are violence" theories started to be used against Lefty pro-Palestinian revolutionary-type students, and there's a lesson here about insisting on scholarly rigor.
because a lot of this was just academics saying a bunch of stuff in echo chambers and never subjecting it to real challenge.
When i was at the ACLU the law student interns had better debates about the protection of hate speech than many scholars faced.
Nov 21, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
So I know I am supposed to hate the new Twitter suit against Media Matters, but having read it-- it looks to me like it states a cause of action for disparagement and maybe for interference of contract as well.
To understand it, read this case:
1/casetext.com/case/suzuki-mo…
The Suzuki case arose out of a sensationalized report in Consumer Reports about the Suzuki Samurai, a small Jeep Wrangler-style SUV, which Consumer Reports claimed had the tendency to roll over. The thing is, CR rigged the tests to make the rollovers more likely. 2/
