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Over the last decade, Democrats have criticized McConnell’s approach to shoring up conservative judicial nominees. But Durbin, who is retiring at the end of the year, said that his party shouldn’t engage in retaliation if Democrats win the majority in the midterm election.

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"Somebody yelled down the hall, ‘Brett Kavanaugh just put his penis in Debbie’s face,’ ” she said. “It was his full name. I don’t think it was just ‘Brett.’ And I remember hearing and being mortified that this was out there." www.newyorker.com/news/news-de...

Ramirez said that, when both she and Kavanaugh were freshmen at Yale, she was invited by a friend on the women’s soccer team to a dorm-room party. She recalled that the party took place in a suite at Lawrance Hall, in the part of Yale known as Old Campus, and that a small group of students decided to play a drinking game together. “We were sitting in a circle,” she said. “People would pick who drank.” Ramirez was chosen repeatedly, she said, and quickly became inebriated. At one point, she said, a male student pointed a gag plastic penis in her direction. Later, she said, she was on the floor, foggy and slurring her words, as that male student and another stood nearby. (Ramirez identified the two male onlookers, but, at her request, The New Yorker is not naming them.)

A third male student then exposed himself to her. “I remember a penis being in front of my face,” she said. “I knew that’s not what I wanted, even in that state of mind.” She recalled remarking, “That’s not a real penis,” and the other students laughing at her confusion and taunting her, one encouraging her to “kiss it.” She said that she pushed the person away, touching it in the process. Ramirez, who was raised a devout Catholic, in Connecticut, said that she was shaken. “I wasn’t going to touch a penis until I was married,” she said. “I was embarrassed and ashamed and humiliated.” She remembers Kavanaugh standing to her right and laughing, pulling up his pants. “Brett was laughing,” she said. “I can still see his face, and his hips coming forward, like when you pull up your pants.” She recalled another male student shouting about the incident. “Somebody yelled down the hall, ‘Brett Kavanaugh just put his penis in Debbie’s face,’ ” she said. “It was his full name. I don’t think it was just ‘Brett.’ And I remember hearing and being mortified that this was out there.”

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It takes a special kind of Guy to look at all the circumstances of Brett Kavanaugh's career arc and reach the passive-voice conclusion that Kavanaugh "was forced" to join the Supreme Court's conservative wing. But Noah Feldman? He is that special kind of Guy. noahfeldman.substack.com/p/brett-kava...

On top of that, for years, Kavanaugh taught a popular course at Harvard Law School where he was straight down the middle, and conservative and liberal students both liked him. In fact, that’s how I met him.

Kavanaugh is personally engaging, and he enjoyed conversations with people across the whole ideological spectrum, and I think people mostly really ended up respecting him.

Then came Kavanaugh’s disastrous confirmation hearings, with the accusations by Christine Blassi Ford against him.

After Kavanaugh’s heated defense of himself and of his record, liberals pretty much turned against him. He stopped teaching the class at Harvard, he stopped teaching a class that he taught at Yale, and he began teaching only at more conservative schools.

I believe Kavanaugh really valued his ties across the ideological spectrum. The problem was that after the confirmation hearings, those connections across the spectrum were not really available to him anymore.

Justice Kavanaugh is a social person, he needs friends. But once liberals had turned against him, he really couldn’t afford to lose conservatives, because then he would have been entirely friendless — a situation not dissimilar to that experienced by Chief Justice John Roberts.

And so, as a result of the confirmation hearings, I think Kavanaugh ended up in a position where he was just forced into the conservative wing of the Court.

The result is that Kavanaugh has joined the hard right on a series of very conservative judgments, including cases like the birthright citizenship case, where his vote wasn’t even necessary for the conservative side. He cou

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Bob on Bob-on-Bob violence

ANTITRUST
Robert Reich Still Can’t Answer Robert Bork
ROBERT BORK JR.
JUL 22, 2026

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Jay Willis @jaywillis.net · 15/09/2026

Today I learned that Robert Bork Jr. writes a Substack where one of his primary beats is zealously defending Robert Bork

The Robert Bork The Atlantic Invented
ROBERT BORK JR.
SEP 15, 2026
My father has been dead for nearly fourteen years, but his critics are still fighting the Robert Bork they invented.

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Opened WhatsApp this morning and look who’s at the tippy-top of my “start chatting” contacts suggestions

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Jay Willis @jaywillis.net · 15/09/2026

Alito and Thomas got the only reward they care about: a Trump Truth Social post calling them “legends.” Job well done boys. Now it’s time to go looking for a new reason to lick his boots.

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Republicans just got another bad decision from the United States Supreme Court, one that the Court System took forever to give, and then blamed it, in part, on no time left to implement a solution to our totally CORRUPT and out of control Mail-In voting "disaster," which is a laughing stock all over the World, and where we are the only country that has to andure
such a Nation Destroying SCAM. Justices Alito and Thomas, legends both, strongly disagreed with this horrible, hignly political, ruling. It is a big loss for Republicans, and America itself, and makes cheating by the Radical Left
"Dumocrats," on Mail-In Ballots, a much easier thing to do - And now they have an

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Jay Willis @jaywillis.net · 15/09/2026

Genuinely an insane paragraph from Sam Alito. “Voter fraud is real and scary and we have to stop it, so the fact that implementing Trump’s mail ballot rule will disenfranchise millions is legally irrelevant.” Brain melted. A right-wing podcaster in a robe. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

___, (slip op., at 9) (internal quotation marks omitted).
As for the equities, the Government has a strong interest
in enforcing the rule, and implementing it will also “en-
hance the visibility of Federal Ballot Mail” in order to better
detect election fraud. 91 Fed. Reg. 54972. On the other side
of the balance, the plaintiff States invoke the practical ef-
fects of implementing the rule close to the midterm elec-
tions. I take that problem very seriously, but it is not
enough to convince me to deny the application.
First, as the District Court acknowledged, the States dis-

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Jay Willis @jaywillis.net · 14/09/2026

I'm struck sometimes by how comfortable Republican politicians feel casually taking the position that brown people *can't* be Americans www.dallasnews.com/news/politic...

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Bo French
@bofrench
I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.

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Jay Willis @jaywillis.net · 14/09/2026

Finding out that SCOTUSblog is hosting Elizabeth Prelogar for a "fireside chat" at the annual SCOTUSblog summit while she is *representing Tom Goldstein in his criminal appeal* has my jaw hanging open like a cartoon character www.scotusblog.com/2026/08/scot...

Registration is now open for The SCOTUSblog Summit: 2026 Term Preview, which will take place on Wednesday, Sept. 16, in Washington, D.C. Programming will include a keynote address featuring Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA); a live taping of the Advisory Opinions podcast; a fireside chat with Cooley partner Elizabeth Prelogar; and a panel featuring Brett Gerry (Boeing’s chief legal officer), Brian Callanan (TD Bank’s general counsel), and Jeff Taylor (ExxonMobil’s general counsel). Use this registration link to request a spot at this exciting event.

Goldstein’s attorneys on Thursday filed their opening brief in the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The brief presented their main arguments challenging the prominent U.S. Supreme Court lawyer's conviction for tax crimes and mortgage fraud stemming from his side career as a ⁠high-stakes poker player.

Goldstein was sentenced in July to six years in prison following his conviction at trial on allegations that he failed to report millions of dollars in poker winnings, lied on home mortgage loan documents and made improper payments through his former law firm Goldstein & Russell.
His lawyers told the appeals court that "in this case, the government decided to secure a conviction no matter the facts or law."

The lawyers contend that prosecutors did not disclose some evidence from meetings with a key ‌witness, ⁠and excluded some text messages involving Goldstein that he said benefited his defense. They also argue the trial judge’s instructions to the jury before their deliberations did not fully specify required elements of the charges.

Goldstein at trial admitted he should have paid more attention to his ⁠tax returns but denied intentionally violating any laws. He remains jailed but has asked to be released pending his appeal.
Two lawyers for Goldstein, Elizabeth Prelogar of law firm Cooley and trial ⁠attorney Jonathan Kravis of Liu Shur Kravis, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The prosecutor’s office declined to comment.

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No offense but I don’t believe 28-year-olds should be allowed to have opinions, much less publish them

Education
George Mason University
Master of Arts - MA • Economics
Aug 2020 - Dec 2021
George Mason University
Bachelor of Science - BS • Economics
Aug 2017 - May 2020
Grade: Summa Cum Laude
Activities and societies: Mason
Ambassadors, Econ Society
-Part of University Scholars program (full-tuition academic scholarship for higher end of Honors College)
-Minor in Data Analysis

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What kind of experience would a baby-brained doofus like this possibly hav—ah, yes, got it

Dominic Pino • 3rd
Thomas L. Rhodes Journalism Fellow at National
Review Institute
George Mason University • National Review Institute Fairfax, Virginia, United States • 500+ connections

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The Washington Post opinion section is an elaborate experiment to find the least compelling angle on everything

As the weather cools and the leaves change color, take in the beauty of Earth while getting some exercise if you're able. Just don't be under the illusion that you're rebelling against modernity. Hiking is fun only because of the industrial revolution.
View comments
Dominic Pino is an editorial writer for The
Washington Post Opinion section.

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Jay Willis @jaywillis.net · 11/09/2026

One thing to know about me is that if I see something in a grocery store and part of my brain thinks “wow that looks disgusting,” another, louder part of my brain is going to decide “and therefore I must try it”

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Not how this works, ma’am! No one made you say all that. You decided to be an anti-trans celebrity. If you don’t like the “distractions” of a bunch of thirsty bigots showing up at your games, then you should have kept that shit to yourself. www.espn.com/wnba/story/_...

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Jay Willis @jaywillis.net · 11/09/2026

The biggest flex in an email auto-reply I've ever seen. It must have felt INCREDIBLE to write that.

Thank you for your email. I retired on August 31, 2026, so please reach out to

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Well, I guess the Smithsonian's independence is doomed then, that settles that

Democracy Dies in Darkness
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It’s up to Chief Justice Roberts to preserve the Smithsonian’s independence
The chief justice heads the institution’s Board of Regents, which will choose retiring secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III’s successor.
Yesterday at 3:13 p.m. EDT

7 min

Summary

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I read this sentence and immediately felt an overpowering urge to go lie down www.washingtonpost.com/style/2026/0...

The actual or implicit prerogatives of the chancellor may be the only power that can keep the Smithsonian from the path of ruin. Roberts has a reputation as an institutionalist, even as he presided over and sometimes abetted the Supreme Court’s radical consolidation of executive power and its enthusiastic contempt for established precedent. Now comes one of the most consequential tests of that reputation. Will he use his power, even if it is only the power of speaking publicly in defense of the institution, to assure its independence?

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There's simply no way I can adequately prepare you for how much The Dispatch is charging for lifetime "SCOTUSblog Plus" memberships

the splash page on this website, scotusblog wants SO much of yoru money lmao
https://www.scotusblog.com/join/#offer

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Really rare to spot something like this in the wild, but The Wall Street Journal ran a "Supreme Court Expansion Is Secretly Unconstitutional Actually" column that directly refutes its thesis in the paragraph that immediately follows. Beautiful stuff. www.wsj.com/opinion/is-c...

Last week only one House Democrat, North Carolina’s Don Davis, voted for a measure to propose a constitutional amendment fixing the court’s size at nine. But it’s unclear that such an amendment is necessary. Democrats cite several precedents from the 19th century in which Congress voted to increase the number of justices. But there are no clear precedents that support a partisan court-packing plan and a strong argument that it would be an unconstitutional assault on judicial independence and the separation of powers.

Article III establishes “one Supreme Court,” and Article I mentions “the Chief Justice,” but otherwise the Constitution leaves to Congress the authority to establish the structure of the federal judiciary, including the number of justices. In the Judiciary Act of 1789, Congress created the Supreme Court with six justices.

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He'll never recover from this

OPINION
MAUREEN DOWD
Not So Supreme, Mr. Roberts

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Wife took this, sunglasses back on

Me and my kid holding hands walking to school

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Calkins refers to it as “Reese’s claim” but the WNBA did not identify who filed the complaint. You wonder if it’s the sort of thing a newsroom fact-checker might be good for.

NEW YORK (AP) - The WNBA is investigating racial comments directed toward Angel Reese by fans during the Chicago Sky's loss to Caitlin Clark and the Fever at Indiana on Saturday, according to a person familiar with the situation.
The person spoke to The Associated Press on Sunday on condition of anonymity because the league had not publicly identified who the taunts were directed toward or who made the allegations.

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