"I do love revenge, I will say that,' adds Meeropol, 57, taking a sip from an iced Americano... 'I’d always loved revenge movies."

That's from "The woman behind E Jean Carroll: I do love revenge, I will say that/Ivy Meeropol has made a film starring one of Trump’s biggest foes. And she has her own beef with the president — dating back to her grandparents’ execution" (London Times).

Meeropol = Ivy Meeropol, the documentarian who made a movie about the man, Roy Cohn, who "helped to send her grandparents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, to the electric chair, leaving her father orphaned at the age of ten." Now, Meeropol has a movie about E. Jean Carroll.

A few days ago, Carroll finally received the $5.6 million she won in her lawsuit against Trump, and Meeropol said: "This historic moment shows that our legal system — established almost 250 years ago to serve as a check against absolute power — still works. E Jean used to sign off from her television show in the mid-Nineties saying, 'Fate loves the fearless,' and it couldn’t be more appropriate today...."

Much has been made of the fact that Carroll is not a perfect MeToo victim.

NPR got something very right and wrong or just very very wrong.

But if you go to the link now, you get this:

Is this what Justice Thomas was so jovial about yesterday?

"Applicants are not entitled to a stay of an adverse court order based on lost profits from their criminal enterprise."

"They cannot, in any legally relevant sense, be irreparably harmed by a court order that makes it more difficult for them to commit crimes."

Writes Justice Thomas, dissenting from the Supreme Court's grant of a stay in Danco Laboratories v. Louisiana, pending its disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari. The stay permits Danco to continue to ship its abortion drug mifepristone, undercutting Louisiana's law criminalizing abortion.

There's also an Alito dissent. Excerpt: "What is at stake is the perpetration of a scheme to undermine our decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U. S. 215 (2022), which restored the right of each State to decide how to regulate abortions within its borders. Some States responded to Dobbs by making it even easier to obtain an abortion than it was before, and that is their prerogative.... [M]ifepristone shipped to Louisiana... causes nearly 1,000 abortions per month...."

"But to me, a question lingers: Why?"

Writes Justice Gorsuch, concurring, alone, in William Trevor Case v. Montana, issued this morning, which held that "police officers generally do not violate a person’s Fourth Amendment rights when they enter his house without a warrant, but with an 'objectively reasonable basis' for believing someone inside is in physical danger and in need of immediate aid."

Does the Fourth Amendment tolerate this limited emergency aid exception to the warrant requirement just because five or more Justices of this Court happen to believe that such entries are “reasonable”? Or is this exception more directly “tied to the law”? Carpenter v. United States, 585 U. S. 296, 397 (2018) (GORSUCH, J., dissenting). The answer, I believe, is the latter. 

"Of all the genres of unsatisfying nonfiction, books by Supreme Court Justices may be at the top of the heap."

"One subset is the memoir that focusses on the Justice’s early life, ending before confirmation. Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s 'My Beloved World,' Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s 'Lovely One,' and Justice Clarence Thomas’s 'My Grandfather’s Son' are examples. These can be gripping narratives and helpful to understanding a Justice’s formative years, but by definition they omit what readers most want to know: what the Justice did on the Court and why she did it. Another category is the learned disquisition on the law, as in Justice Neil Gorsuch’s 'A Republic, If You Can Keep It' and Justice Stephen Breyer’s 'Reading the Constitution.' These, too, fall short of readers’ hopes, for the simple reason that the authors resist any temptation to rule and tell. They write about their understanding of the law and the judicial process, but when it comes to their dealings with colleagues they remain resolutely circumspect. Barrett’s book is a mashup of the two forms: memoir and personal reflection are interlaced with explanations of legal doctrine. (Her grandmother’s unwritten recipe for shrimp remoulade provides a jumping-off point for discussing the benefits of a written constitution: 'Unwritten constitutions, like unwritten recipes, can be hard to pin down.')"

Writes Ruth Marcus, in "How the Supreme Court Defines Liberty/Recent memoirs by the Justices reveal how a new vision of restraint has led to radical outcomes" (The New Yorker).

This definitely gets my "unread books" tag (though I did read, a blog about, "My Grandfather's Son"). 

Marcus gives the Justices credit for writing "about their understanding of the law," but do they? How could they really?

Here's my old post "What I really think about the Clarence Thomas book" (from October 2007). I sort of "live-blogged" my reading of that book, and along the way, I was "accused both of fawning over him and of obsessively hating him," but, I said:

"Still, the justices’ consideration of Ms. Davis’s petition had set off alarms among gay Americans, who were already reeling from the Trump administration’s targeting of programs and funding that benefit L.G.B.T.Q. individuals."

"Gay Americans and their allies had been on alert since the Supreme Court’s conservative majority eliminated the nationwide right to abortion after 50 years, showing a willingness to undo longstanding legal precedent. In that decision, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote separately to urge reconsideration of the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, which recognized gay marriage nationwide."

From "Supreme Court Denies Request to Revisit Same-Sex Marriage Decision/Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses, had asked the court to reconsider its landmark 2015 opinion" (NYT).

I'm glad to see this precedent left alone. There's so much reliance on it.

"You rely heavily on the history of regulating the medical profession. What's the history of regulating therapists? When did that begin?"

Asked Justice Thomas in yesterday's oral argument in Chiles v. Salazar. 

He was speaking to the lawyer defending a Colorado law that prohibited licensed therapists from delivering treatments aimed at changing a minor's sexual orientation or gender identity. 

The lawyer, Shannon W. Stevenson, responded with a surprisingly early date:

Mental health care and healthcare delivered through words were both well-established at the founding of this country. At that time, such practices were primarily carried out by physicians, whose work largely involved giving advice through words.

That's a far cry from the history of regulating therapists, but I'm intrigued by the idea of people in the late 18th century talking to their doctors about their mental difficulties. And when did the licensing of doctors begin? That is a much older idea, going back the middle ages. But I think licensing therapists is much more recent, and Stevenson quickly pivots to that:

"I don’t think that … any of these cases that have been decided are the gospel.... And I do give perspective to the precedent. But… the precedent should be respectful of our legal tradition..."

"... and our country and our laws, and be based on something – not just something somebody dreamt up and others went along with.... I think we should demand that, no matter what the case is, that it has more than just a simple theoretical basis.... [If it’s] totally stupid, and that’s what they’ve decided, you don’t go along with it just because it’s decided."

Said Clarence Thomas, quoted in "Clarence Thomas says precedent might not determine cases on upcoming supreme court docket/The court is expected to weigh in next session on same-sex marriage, which it legalized in 2015" (The Guardian).

I picture him gesturing at the shelves of case reports and scoffing These are full of things somebody dreamt up and others just went along with.

That calls an old anecdote up in my mind — a distant memory. What was it? Who was the judge? I'm seeing that it was Learned Hand, the famous 2d Circuit judge. He supposedly said: "The reports are full of cases that were wrongly decided, and the only way to avoid making a fool of yourself is to be humble about it."

JD Vance — signing onto Bluesky — starts a conversation about the Supreme Court's upholding of a state law banning transgender drugs and surgery for minors.

First, the site takes him down, but he's back up, and they're saying that happened because the account was flagged as a possible impersonation. I don't know what Bluesky's rules are about that, because when I searched for "JD Vance," I got various un-cancelled accounts that look like impersonations:

The one with the blue check is the real one, and maybe those others are marked clearly enough. The third account on that list, if you click through, says, in small print "(parody account lol)."

Anyway, what I'm more concerned about is whether JD Vance was able to make himself available for respectful conversation on Bluesky. Here's his set of 3 posts, which highlight Justice Thomas's expression of skepticism about "experts."

Vance says hi like this: "Hello Bluesky, I've been told this app has become the place to go for common sense political discussion and analysis. So I'm thrilled to be here to engage with all of you." I can see that some people are reading that as trolling. It's easy to hear sarcasm. 

Vance continues with a block of text from Thomas and the statement "I found Justice Thomas's concurrence on medical care for transgender youth quite illuminating. He argues that many of our so-called 'experts' have used bad arguments and substandard science to push experimental therapies on our youth." And he adds: "I might add that many of those scientists are receiving substantial resources from big pharma to push these medicines on kids. What do you think?"

Does Vance get the "common sense political discussion and analysis" he says, perhaps sarcastically, that he wants?

"In our constitutional system, the executive power belongs to the president, and that power generally includes the ability to supervise and remove the agents who wield executive power in his stead."

"While we have previously upheld limits on the president's removal authority in certain contexts, we decline to do so when it comes to principal officers who, acting alone, wield significant executive power."

Wrote Chief Justice John Roberts, 5 years ago, quoted in "Trump's firings of independent agency heads put 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent in crosshairs" (CBS News).

In what is likely to be the Trump administration's first Supreme Court emergency appeal of his second term, the solicitor general is expected to ask the high court to permit Dellinger's firing, according to documents obtained Sunday.

Dellinger = Hampton Dellinger, "who oversees the office that investigates whistleblower complaints"

The 90-year-old case =  Humphrey's Executor. Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Neil Gorsuch, called Humphrey's Executor "a direct threat to our constitutional structure and, as a result, the liberty of the American people," and said he "would repudiate what is left of this erroneous precedent."

(It's Humphrey's Executor because the man, who was fired by FDR, had died, and the family was suing for back pay.)

Donging echoically.

You could go your whole life without using a word, then one day, it seems like the perfect word, and you use it for the first time. That happened to me yesterday, with "echoically": "Trump responds echoically, then darkly...."

Trump dealt with something Musk had said by echoing it, then quickly inserted what he wanted to say, which was quite different. The segue was easily accomplished. Listening to the audio, you might not notice how little he gave back to Musk and how abruptly he changed the subject, but it jumped out at me, reading the transcript.

The first commenter, Mike (MJB Wolf) said, "Dig that word 'echoically' and don't recall ever encountering it before." 

Yeah, I don't recall ever encountering it before either, so why did it strike me as the perfect word? That's odd, no? How often do you use a word and know you're using it for the first time and have no memory of anyone else using it either? 

"Could students take their college professor out to Chipotle for an end-of-term celebration? And if so..."

"... would it somehow become criminal to take the professor for a steak dinner? Or to treat her to a Hoosiers game?"

Wrote Justice Kavanaugh, quoted in "Corruption Law Allows Gifts to State and Local Officials, Supreme Court Rules/The court, which has limited the sweep of several anti-corruption laws, distinguished after-the-fact rewards from before-the-fact bribes" (NYT).

The alleged gratuity in the actual case was money — $13,000. The federal statute, §666 — to quote the opinion — "makes it a crime for state or  to 'corruptly' solicit, accept, accept, or agree to accept 'anything of value from any person, intending to be influenced or rewarded' for an official act." Importantly, federal law subjects federal officials to 2 different provisions, one for bribes and the other for gratuities, with a much lower sentence for corrupt gratuities. As for the non-corrupt gratuities, where is the line drawn?

The NYT reminds us that Clarence Thomas has received "luxury travel and gifts from the Texas billionaire and conservative donor Harlan Crow."

"The Supreme Court seemed wary... of letting prosecutors use a federal obstruction law to charge hundreds of rioters involved in the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021...."

"Mr. Trump’s case did not come up at the argument, which was largely focused on trying to make sense of a statute that all concerned agreed was not a model of clarity. But the justices’ questions also considered the gravity of the assault and whether prosecutors have been stretching the law to reach members of the mob responsible for the attack. Justice Clarence Thomas, who returned to the bench after an unexplained absence on Monday, asked whether the government was engaging in a kind of selective prosecution. 'There have been many violent protests that have interfered with proceedings,' he said. 'Has the government applied this provision to other protests?'..."

Adam Liptak reports in the NYT.

"I can attest that to speak as a black man often at odds with the stated consensus of his fellow blacks can be liberating."

"Just as often, however, race becomes a burdensome constraint on how one’s statements are received. For some, I will always be speaking, thinking, and acting 'as a black man.' The specter of race always threatens to impart an undue exemplarity to whatever I—or whatever any black people—say or do, as though the firing of every synapse in our brains could be traced back to a racial origin. In that sense, race is both qualifying and disqualifying—a reason to believe a speaker’s account of himself (for, of course, blacks are always 'authentic') and, at the same time, a reason to disbelieve it (for, of course, a black person would say that)...."

Writes Glenn Loury in "Clarence Thomas and Me/To speak as a black man at odds with the consensus of other blacks can be burdensome—and liberating." (City Journal)

The loyalty trap does not spring unexpectedly and maim you; it welcomes you in and fills you with the warmth of comradeship. That is what makes it so deadly: it feels good to be trapped....

Dianne Feinstein has died.

"Senator Dianne Feinstein Dies at 90/The California Democrat, the oldest member of the Senate, had been declining in health for months" (NYT).

ADDED: The NYT story is just a squib with the notation "This is a developing story. Please check back for updates." I can't understand why they wouldn't have a long and complete obituary ready to publish at the push of a button.

AND: From the WaPo obituary:

Mrs. Feinstein won her Senate seat in what became known as the Year of the Woman, an election that sent 24 new women to the House of Representatives and brought the total number of female senators to six.

"They reject any question of his ethics! And they somehow believe that their position as clerks, whose careers benefit from Thomas’s prestige and influence..."

"... somehow makes them more rather than less suited to make this judgment. Taken at their word, they believe a factual allegation of ethical misconduct can be adjudicated entirely on a combination of Thomas’s identity as a once-poor Black man and their say-so as judges of character. This doesn’t tell us anything about Thomas’s compliance with ethics rules."

Writes Jonathan Chait in "Even Clarence Thomas’s Law Clerks Can’t Defend His Misconduct/A truly pathetic letter vouches for the disgraced Justice’s character" (NY Magazine).

Chait is reacting to an open letter in which 112 ex-clerks of Justice Thomas assert that "His integrity is unimpeachable" and "unequivocally reject attacks on his integrity, his character, or his ethics."

Pay attention to what Joy Reid actually says here: It's not that she got into Harvard on lesser credentials!

I think Ramaswamy is distorting (or, less likely, not hearing and understanding):

Like me, @JoyAnnReid is a kid of immigrants from a former European colony who went to Harvard. Unlike me, she benefited from affirmative action because she counts as “black” & in her own words wouldn’t have gotten in without it. She complains that her peers looked at her… pic.twitter.com/zCMbXNHwEZ

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) July 2, 2023

She says she got high grades and test scores in high school, but she wouldn't have thought to try for Harvard if Harvard hadn't come out to her small, majority-black town and recruited. She was strongly encouraged to apply. The Supreme Court hasn't changed the power of schools to recruit in places like hers. Reid never says her scores and grades wouldn't have been enough if she were not black.

Watching the Supreme Court. [ADDED: Supreme Court makes a moderate, minimalist change to affirmative action doctrine.]

 At SCOTUSblog.

"We have the university cases."

"The court holds that Harvard and UNC's admissions programs violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment."

The Chief Justice wrote the opinion. The question is how moderate/extreme is it. 

I'm just hanging on the SCOTUSblog feed.

Ah.. no... wait: Here's the opinion.

Excerpt from syllabus:

Because Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points, those admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. At the same time, nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university. Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice. Pp. 39–40.

The decision must be somewhat moderate, I'm inferring, because there are concurring opinions from Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh. 

The Chief quotes Grutter — "We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today" — and adds:

The Supreme Court issues its "true threats" case.

"The state must show, Kagan writes, that the defendant consciously disregarded a substantial risk that his communications would be viewed as threatening violence. The state need not prove any more demanding subjective intent to threaten another."

Summarizes SCOTUSblog.

Opinion here: Counterman v. Colorado.

ADDED: From the majority opinion by Justice Kagan:

A strange but intriguing grammatical error in a Supreme Court opinion.

From yesterday's unanimous opinion, Twitter v. Taamneh, written by Justice Thomas:

The plaintiffs (who are respondents) contend that they have stated a claim for relief under §2333(d)(2). They were allegedly injured by a terrorist attack carried out by ISIS. But plaintiffs are not suing ISIS. Instead, they have brought suit against three of the largest social-media companies in the world—Facebook, Twitter (who is petitioner), and Google (which owns YouTube)—for allegedly aiding and abetting ISIS.

You'd think the proximity of "Twitter (who...)" to "Google (which...)" would set off somebody's grammar alarm. They're both corporations and — though it's sometimes said jocosely or not that "corporations are people" — they're not human beings and they don't get "who."

It's an outright error, but I'm interested in why something worked on by so many industrious writers and editors would fail to catch it. I came up with 2 ideas: