"Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year. Pam did a tremendous job..."

"... overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900. We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future, and our Deputy Attorney General, and a very talented and respected Legal Mind, Todd Blanche, will step in to serve as Acting Attorney General. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP"

Trump, at Truth Social.

The spin at the NYT: "The firing of Ms. Bondi, 60, ends a turbulent 14-month tenure as attorney general in which she tried desperately to appease a boss who demanded unimpeded control of the Justice Department to pursue politically motivated investigations against targets of his choosing, even when prosecutors warned that there was no evidence to do so.... Yet Mr. Trump remained annoyed by Ms. Bondi’s inability to secure indictments of people he referred to as 'scum' during a speech in the department’s Great Hall about a year ago.... He has also complained about her shortcomings as a communicator and TV surrogate — a role he thought would suit her talents.... In mid-March, five Republicans on the House Oversight Committee blindsided their own leadership — and Ms. Bondi — by joining Democrats to vote to subpoena her to testify under oath behind closed doors about the Epstein case...."

The spin at The Daily Mail: "Trump's reasoning for the sudden dismissal comes in part because the President believes Bondi tipped off Eric Swalwell about the FBI's efforts to release investigative documents related to his relationship with an alleged Chinese spy."

Will the Supreme Court be nakedly political without the skimpy string bikini that was Anthony Kennedy?

Lawprofs Lee Epstein and Eric Posner have a NYT column with the titillating title "If the Supreme Court Is Nakedly Political, Can It Be Just?" .

In the past 10 years, however, justices have hardly ever voted against the ideology of the president who appointed them. Only Justice Kennedy, named to the court by Ronald Reagan, did so with any regularity. That is why with his replacement on the court an ideologically committed Republican justice, it will become impossible to regard the court as anything but a partisan institution....

Republicans still can’t forgive President Reagan for appointing two moderates, Justices O’Connor and Kennedy, and President George H. W. Bush for appointing Justice Souter, who veered left.... Assaults on judicial independence are made easier when the public comes to view the judiciary as a political body. This risk, and not just the identity of the next justice, should be at the center of public attention.

The headline is cagey, with the use of the adjective "nakedly" and the verb "is." Consider the alternative "If the Supreme Court Is Completely Political and Looks Exactly Like What It Is, Can It Be Just?"?

With that change, which I've done to separate out independent propositions, the final clause doesn't work anymore. There's no musing over the meaning of justice worth doing. I'd want to change it to "If the Supreme Court Is Completely Political and Looks Exactly Like What It Is, Will the People Accept Its Exercise of Power?"

Epstein and Posner are concerned that when the Supreme Court splits 5-4, we will now, without Kennedy, always know who the 5 and the 4 are. Kennedy preserved a little mystery. He was the skimpy string bikini on the otherwise naked Supreme Court. But if this nudism analogy is any good, the Court will be less sexy when completely naked. That's what I've heard about nudist colonies. The skimpy bikini gets the mind churning away about the last little bits of unrevealed skin.

Without Kennedy, the political grouping of the Justices — appointed by a Democrat and appointed by a Republican — may feel quite dull and predictable. It won't be that these judges are just reaching policy outcomes and lying to us about law. Not all opinions will be 5-4, but when they are, it's because they're complicated enough to go either way, and intuitions about where the right answers are affect reasoning that is still creditably legal, especially to observers who want and need the Court to be a functioning part of our system of separated powers.

The naked Court will be political in a way that's as unremarkable as 9 middle-aged nudists sunning on lounge chairs by the pool.