"The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country. "

pic.twitter.com/sYG2neeuoc

— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) January 3, 2026

Just got off the phone with @SecRubio

He informed me that Nicolás Maduro has been arrested by U.S. personnel to stand trial on criminal charges in the United States, and that the kinetic action we saw tonight was deployed to protect and defend those executing the arrest warrant… https://t.co/lXCxhPoKSZ

— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) January 3, 2026

AND: From the live updates at the NYT:

Mike Lee — lawyer, former federal prosecutor, and current member of the Senate Judiciary Committee — has a lot of questions about the Mar-a-Lago raid...

... so many that he lost count. I'll copy them all, and don't think I skipped one (he jumped from "Third" to "Fifth" [ADDED: and from "Tenth" to "Twelfth"]):

As a lawyer, former federal prosecutor, and current member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I have a few questions about the FBI’s raid of Mar a Lago. First, did Attorney General Garland personally sign off on this action?

Second, why break into the safe rather than seize it, take it into custody, and then seek a warrant to open it?

Third, why obtain and execute a search warrant rather than first seeking the items in question either through an informal process or with a subpoena? 

Why is the Third Amendment trending on Twitter?

The typical experience on Twitter is that you see that the Third Amendment is trending on Twitter and you click and you just get lots of tweets asking Why is the Third Amendment trending on Twitter?

But I got to the answer quickly enough. Senator Mike Lee tweeted this:

Just heard that Mayor Bowser is kicking the Utah National Guard out of all DC hotels tomorrow. More than 1200 troops from 10 states are being evicted. This is unacceptable. 1/2

— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) June 5, 2020

These brave men and women have risked their lives protecting DC for three days. Rioting, looting, arson, and vandalism have all disappeared bc these soldiers served. And now they are being kicked to the curb by an ungrateful mayor. This must be stopped. 2/2 pic.twitter.com/YYyctKvUqN

— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) June 5, 2020

Twitter users piled on. I'm reading things like:

1. "You Republican Senators should really try reading the Constitution once, instead of just using it for toilet paper. The Third Amendment prohibits the government from quartering troops over objections, you fascist cheese biscuit."

2. "It’s called the Third Amendment, and as a lifetime member of the National Anti Quartering Association they can sleep in my house when they take it from my cold, dead hands."

3. "All my old law professors who have been waiting forever to talk about the Third Amendment: your moment has finally arrived. Enjoy yourselves."

And this is a comic meme I'm seeing in a lot of versions — I'm just picking one:

The Third Amendment of the Constitution rolling into 2020 like pic.twitter.com/i821kuPolk

— Markus T. (@mjtarjamo) June 5, 2020

Observations from the Kavanaugh hearings.

1. I'm watching the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination today, now that they've moved beyond the introductory orations, and I'll make some notes here, using a numbered list, updated throughout the day. I'm using a DVR, so I'm behind real time, and the updates will come as I get to things in my recording, but just as the people in the gallery are — under Senator Grassley's rule — free to shout out whatever they want at any time, you can talk about what you like in the comments. I mean, you can talk about anything in the hearings. The people in Grassley's domain might be yelling about anything. I can't make out the words. I've tried. Was someone shouting "Death is death"? I don't know!

2. Grassley, the Committee chair, seems to have made a decision — in consultation with whom, I don't know — to allow the protests to interrupt the Senators and the nominee willy nilly. Grassley is  not terribly articulate, but he mumbled something about "free speech" and the ability of 300 million Americans to make our own judgment. I interpreted this to mean that he (presumably in consultation with others) has decided that the disruption hurts the anti-Kavanaugh side. Kavanaugh either actively agrees or understands the game, and he's showing patience and fortitude and an ability to maintain focus as he gets right back, in the same calm voice, to whatever point he was in the middle of making. The protesters probably think they represent society's victims, but they sound like nothing but noise, and they're making the serene and diligent Kavanaugh seem like the victim of crude disrespect.

3. Kavanaugh has a little booklet-sized copy of the Constitution, and he's got the effective stage business of holding it up when he says "Constitution." We can see how small it is. It does not partake of the prolixity of a legal code, we constitutional scholars know very well. So he demonstrates his dedication to the document, but also — for those who can see it — demonstrates that everything he contends is in there can't possibly be there except as a high level abstraction, leaving the specific details for most things to be discovered elsewhere. Attesting to his dedication to precedent, Kavanaugh held up the Constitution and said it's rooted in Article III, where the words are "judicial power." The judge still must figure out what the judicial power is, and Kavanaugh was soon enough off onto what's in Federalist 78, but why Federal 78 and not something else? He has his favorite sources, and those sources require interpretation too. Once you find the judges are required to follow precedent, you still have to figure out how far. Kavanaugh keeps bringing up Brown v. Board of Education, but not in the context of precedent, and Brown v. Board of Education went against precedent. This is all first-week-of-Conlaw1 stuff, and of course, Kavanaugh knows it. He's got to simplify to talk to the Senators and to the American people, and it's sophisticated not to get too sophisticated.

4. Kavanaugh says that in all of the roles he undertakes, he looks at how the people who have gone before him have done their work. As a judge he is following the case law, and now, as he sits before this committee, he's following what he calls the "nominee precedent." He's read the old transcripts of hearings, and he's using the precedent, notably the precedent of the very influential Ruth Bader Ginsburg performance of the nominee role. What does it mean to "follow" those who have gone before? Obviously, he follows them in the literal sense of chronology. But he's not bound to do the same. Presumably, he'll use what works well and avoid what he can see with hindsight does not. Maybe someone will ask him if his adherence to judicial precedent is analogous. In "nominee precedent," you're following Ginsburg and not Bork. Aren't you picking and choosing, based on what's pragmatic? There's no authority that binds. Bork's Senate performance is like Plessy v. Ferguson. It's bad. You're using your human judgment and power to see that it's bad, and that's how you follow it.

5. One reason Kavanaugh, like Ginsburg, won't talk about how he will decide cases is that he puts great value on judicial independence. He wants litigants coming before him to feel that he has an open mind, and that the one with the better legal argument wins. If he'd talked about the subject to the Judiciary Committee, he'd feel morally bound to the Senators, and then he wouldn't be a proper judge, but a "delegate of the Judiciary Committee." Saying that, he was implicitly telling the Senators that they are violating the Constitution if they try to nail him down about anything.

6. This only gets me to the end of Grassley's questioning (and he reserved some of his time). You see why I can't really live-blog this thing or even delay-blog it completely. There's too much. Not sure how much of this I can do. Feel free to encourage me.

7. Dianne Feinstein endeavored to be gracious, but her patience wore thin as K consumed her time with his spelled-out explanations of specific cases and the rigors of judicial methodology. I was about to compliment her on refraining from interrupting when she interrupted him. She'd say, "Sorry to interrupt, but..." Once he kept speaking a little and then said, "Sorry to interrupt" — that is, apologizing for interrupting her interruption. K expressed empathy with DF's concerns. He was super-nice to her, and as things progressed, what I read in her face was pain — pain over wanting him to feel pain. But he's so heavily swaddled in judicial values that he's safe from everything. As a judge, he does what he must do as a judge, even when it pains him. He's pre-pained, inoculated to pain, and there's no way to further pain him. The children who die in school shootings... the women who would die from illegal abortions... these causes for empathy receive his empathy, but they do not change what he must do. His cold, dry judicial virtue is supreme and sublime, and he must, as ever, humbly submit. Feinstein was reduced to scoffing that K had learned (from Senators?) to "filibuster."

8. Orrin Hatch. Maybe I should skip the Republicans. It's not as though they're giving me a breather.

9. Patrick Leahy. The gravelly-voiced Senator — who I'm surprised to see is only 78 — laid an elaborate trap that hyper-focused on some typo-ridden email that a fellow named Miranda had stolen from him. The idea seemed to be that Kavanaugh knew about this terrible theft (which I think may have upset Leahy not so much because it was "stolen" as because it was so embarrassingly badly written). It was was only a draft as anyone could see, so anyone would know it was stolen, stolen... Or something like that. Miranda was a mole, a mole, I tell you!! I think this is video of Leahy...



Kavanaugh kept his cool, but he needed to see the email under discussion, so we had a minute of watching Kavanaugh read. Then Kavanaugh asked Leahy to tell him where to look to see what he was talking about, and Leahy, facing the requirement that he too read on camera, and quite apparently not up to the task, said he'd move on to some other question. So much for the trap. Leahy proceeded to some other document-heavy trap that didn't work, and he tried to blame Grassley for keeping something confidential and — with the 85-year-old Feinstein sitting between them — the 84-year-old Grassley went ballistic on Leahy. Zero progress was made against Kavanaugh, and I think Kavanaugh had to suppress laughter. Here at Meadhouse, we frequently paused and laughed and were all Ahh, but the strawberries that's... that's where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt and with... geometric logic...

10. From my handwritten notes, quoting Dick Durbin: "The things I did were unimaginable." He was referring to his work in a slaughterhouse, after getting Kavanaugh to say that the "dirtiest job" Kavanaugh ever had was construction work (or maybe mowing lawns). I wonder what exactly Dick Durbin did in the slaughterhouse, but it was a set-up to excoriate Kavanaugh for going out of his way to decide a case against some workers in a slaughterhouse. It reminded me of the Gorsuch hearings, the way the Democratic Senators got pretty far along toward proving Gorsuch didn't care if a man froze to death. GOP nominees lack empathy. They don't know the suffering in the real world. That's the theme.

11. Senator Whitehouse had some good material, but he was too disorganized and self-indulgent to make it work. A hardworking, on-task, on-the-ball Senator might have built the argument deftly, but Whitehouse was not the man for the job. The idea was something about the role of the Federalist Society in getting judges (including Kavanaugh) nominated, the participation of right-wing groups in bringing cases and filing amicus briefs, and the success of corporations in winning 5-4 Supreme Court cases (where the 5 Justices in the majority were appointed by Republican Presidents). Whitehouse kept reminiscing about his own cases — back in the day when he was a lawyer — and musing generally about various suspicions that have crossed his mind and it's just not good if people think the Court is political. Of course, Kavanaugh coasted through all of this, repeating the standard message that he's dedicated to judicial independence and deciding cases according to the law.

12. Not long after that I got tired. The channel I was watching (Fox News) turned away to cover President Trump and someone from Kuwait — a great country with a lot of great people many of whom Trump has known for a long time. It was refreshing to hear Trump talk after all that Senatorial smeech. The reporters were yelling questions at Trump, and Trump was rattling out answers. Woodward's book is "fiction." Canada will come to a trade agreement. Three million innocent people are surrounded in Syria and Trump is watching, so the Syrian military had better be careful. After that it was hard to settle in to Mike Lee walking Kavanaugh through the Quirin case. It has rained all day, and it was getting dark. What a crazy slog! It's absurd to expect the nominee to be up for this grilling for 8 hours with scarcely a rest. But it was kind of hard on me too. And it's almost 7 o'clock. The "Team of 9" we're thinking of here is not the Supreme Court, but the Milwaukee Brewers. It's the 3rd game of the series with the Chicago Cubs, and we've won the first 2. What an amusing game last night, no? I love when runs are scored in all sorts of weird ways. What was it — 8 runs in a row scored on plays that were not hits?

13. So that's it for me on the Kavanaugh hearings today.

14. It was the emir of Kuwait. Here's video:



15. Here's the video of the Kavanaugh hearing today, including the part that is still happening as I write this (at 7:17 PM Central Time). How brutal! I do wish I'd jumped ahead to see the more junior Senators. I'm especially interested in the 3 who might be running for President (Klobuchar, Booker, and Harris). I'll probably get to these tomorrow.

"An almond doesn’t lactate, I will confess."

Said FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, quoted in "Senators Ask ‘What Is Milk?’/Dairy industry wants to limit the word to what comes out of cows" (Business Insider).

The Senate voted, 14-84, to defeat an amendment, offered by Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, that would kill spending on a Food and Drug Administration study on what can be marketed as milk.

“Consumers are not deceived by these labels,” said Lee. “No one buys almond milk under the false illusion that it came from a cow. They buy it because it didn’t come from a cow.”...

Wisconsin Democrat Tammy Baldwin called the amendment “an attack on dairy farmers”...

“These labeling requirements play right into the hands of the large, cronyist food industries that want to place new, innovative products at a disadvantage,” said Lee in a statement last week.

That actually is an attack on dairy farmers — cronyist.

I wrote about the what-is-milk issue long ago. In 2005, in a post called "Sitting in a café":

Extremely mild irritation of the morning (heightened by my caffeination): a man orders a coffee drink made with soy milk. Unless you're allergic to milk or moralistically vegan, don't order soy milk! What are you doing? Soy is a bean -- or, really, a legume. Do you drink peanut milk? Lentil milk? There is no milk, not even juice in a soy bean. So what is this soy "milk"? It's some kind of water containing tiny bean particles. That's not aesthetically correct.

I had to update to say:

An emailer writes: "Hel-lo! Coffee! Cocoa! ... Water with bean particles makes my whole life better, dammit." Wait! Cocoa goes in milk. But still, I get the point. And what is milk anyway? Water with -- what? Why do I favor it solely because the water has been transformed inside an animal rather than suitably boiled and then mixed with a pure powder of human manufacture? Why do I want my liquids to be something that appear in their final form in the natural state? Every other liquid that emerges from the body of an animal is something we -- most of us -- hate to drink a glassful of. The wonder, then, is that we find cow's milk aesthetically pleasing.

"Over the past five decades, the Out Party has tried solos, duos, men, women, men and women, press conferences, films and telethons..."

"... in generally unsuccessful attempts to match the presidential pageantry. The Republicans had 17 responders in 1968; the Democrats used to trot out 10 or 12 at a time in an attempt to match Reagan’s star power during the early 1980s."

Writes political biographer John Aloysius Farrell in a piece titled "The State of the Union Curse/Why responding to the president can be hazardous to your political career."

Do you even know who's doing the SOTU response this year?

It's Cathy McMorris Rodgers. Do you even know who she is? Do you think her diminuitiveness is appropriately augmented by having a second responder? That's what they're doing, those brilliant Republicans, who no, no, no are not having a war on women. There's a second SOTU response, from Senator Mike Lee — ostensibly on the theory that the Tea Party should have its own voice.

I sure hope America gets that, as opposed to thinking: Oh, there are the Republicans for you. They show you they actually have a woman, but then they bring out their real person, the pasty old white guy.

Don't tell me it would be wrong for people to take that message. The whole point of the SOTU response is messaging. Whatever message is received is the message. I'm tired of the explanations for all the poorly delivered messages from Republicans. They've got to improve their messaging.

Here's a big clue for you all: Don't Disrespect The Woman.

"The National Security Agency’s seizure and surveillance of virtually all of Verizon’s phone customers is an astounding assault on the Constitution."

Says Senator Rand Paul in a press release, received just now in the email:

After revelations that the Internal Revenue Service targeted political dissidents and the Department of Justice seized reporters’ phone records, it would appear that this Administration has now sunk to a new low.

When Sen. Mike Lee and I offered an amendment that would attach Fourth Amendment protections to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act last year, it was defeated, and FISA was passed by an overwhelming majority of the Senate. At the time, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid remarked that FISA was “necessary to protect us from the evil in this world.”

The Bill of Rights was designed to protect us from evil, too, particularly that which always correlates with concentrated government power, and particularly Executive power. If the President and Congress would obey the Fourth Amendment we all swore to uphold, this new shocking revelation that the government is now spying on citizens’ phone data en masse would never have happened.

I don't know why you'd need to "attach Fourth Amendment protections" to a statute. I'll just observe that Senator Paul is a very active participant in the debate about what rights are. So is President Obama (and so was President Bush in his time). I think the legal questions are complicated, but if people do not find these things "astounding" and "shocking," the President is likely to win.

UPDATE: Another press release from Paul: "Sen. Rand Paul today announced he will introduce the Fourth Amendment Restoration Act of 2013, which ensures the Constitutional protections of the Fourth Amendment are not violated by any government entity."

“The revelation that the NSA has secretly seized the call records of millions of Americans, without probable cause, represents an outrageous abuse of power and a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. I have long argued that Congress must do more to restrict the Executive’s expansive law enforcement powers to seize private records of law-abiding Americans that are held by a third-party,” Sen. Paul said. “When the Senate rushed through a last-minute extension of the FISA Amendments Act late last year, I insisted on a vote on my amendment (SA 3436) to require stronger protections on business records and prohibiting the kind of data-mining this case has revealed. Just last month, I introduced S.1037, the Fourth Amendment Preservation and Protection Act, which would provide exactly the kind of protections that, if enacted, could have prevented these abuses and stopped these increasingly frequent violations of every American’s constitutional rights.

“The bill restores our Constitutional rights and declares that the Fourth Amendment shall not be construed to allow any agency of the United States government to search the phone records of Americans without a warrant based on probable cause.” 

"In this anti-establishment year, Ron Johnson is perhaps the only member of his freshman Republican Senate class who can truly lay claim to the Washington outsider label."

"Wisconsin’s newly elected senator has never served in public office. He didn’t benefit from family political connections, as did Rand Paul of Kentucky or Mike Lee of Utah. He funded most of his campaign with his personal fortune, keeping special interests at bay."

A worthy successor to our much-loved Senator Feingold.