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Nicholas Handler

@nicholashandler.bsky.social
3.6K followers 446 following 2.5K posts

Assistant Professor, TAMU School of Law. Interested in administrative law, bureaucracy, civil procedure. Fairweather Jets fan. Opinions my own. SSRN: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAu…

PostsRepliesMedia
Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Yell at me if you want, but auto-enrolling people in government programs is good. Democrats now have permission to do this, too.
nytimes.com
What to Know About Trump Accounts as More Than 60 Million Children Are Auto-Enrolled
The Trump administration may have just signed up your child — and more than 60 million others — for a 530A savings account (if you haven’t already done so).
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Anecdotal but when I moved to my neighborhood in Fort Worth in 2024 I’d say yard signs were 60-40 Harris-Trump. Same neighborhood 2 years later is wall-to-wall Talarico with not a single Paxton sign in sight. I don’t think everyone has turned D but the enthusiasm gap is massive.
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Reposted by Nicholas Handler
Steve Vladeck @stevevladeck.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
By my math, the order was filed 11 minutes after the Trump administration's reply brief came in.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
You have staffers to know about sports and stuff so you don’t get embarrassed like this. The problem with hiring groypers is that all of their normal guy knowledge has been removed and replaced with theories about skull shapes.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
The biggest problem with Democrats' major policy proposal is that it isn't a Republican policy proposal instead
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
In honor of this professor and his ideals, I will not be reading this.
nytimes.com
Opinion | I’m a College Professor. Writing Isn’t as Important as We Think.
If I do not treat writing as essential for achieving thought, it is not clear why I should force my students to.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
This is what professional pollsters refer to as the “bribery bump”
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Gonna be incredibly hard and expensive to convince people to work for these agencies again.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I'm not that worried. AI regulation is just a collective action problem. I haven't been paying much attention to the news for the past few years, but my understanding is that we're pretty good at solving those.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
The Supreme Court in its modern form (discretionary docket, etc.) and the Federal Reserve are two examples of institutions that were basically invented in the 20th century, but also somehow date back to the founding because we like them.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Cool!
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
As a court, we’ve done a great job not constraining the president. If only we had some big, ugly, hugely unpopular monument to commemorate it with.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Tfw you’re counter-cyclical.
reuters.com
US law school applicant pool is largest since Great Recession
Law school was a hot ticket in 2026, with an 8% increase in applicants hoping to spend the next three years getting a J.D. rather than enter a lackluster post-college job market.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
I got one of these calls. I realized it was a scam after a few minutes, but these guys are very convincing and aggressive and have a surprising amount of sensitive information about their targets. Brave new world of scams out there.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
Uh I think a central feature of a post-American world order is that Americans don’t really get a say on what replaces it.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
Next Dem president should go full Brooklyn MCM on the White House. Pewter grey paint job, fill it up with Eames chairs and Rothko prints. The culture war is on.
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Reposted by Nicholas Handler
jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 10/07/2026
really think that if democrats hold any chamber of congress next year that a condition of passing a budget is the removal of russ vought, who has a genuinely tyrannical vision of presidential power and is a focal point of the lawlessness of the trump administration
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
I think this perpetuates a lot of ugly stereotypes about how people from Appalachia only eat beef tartare tostada with pickled cucumber and lime.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Bluesky is more posted about than posted on, in part because you can just say stuff like “my terrible politics are good because I’m not an annoying lib like they have on Bluesky.”
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Everything else aside, Platner doesn’t seem to understand that you don’t get “due process” in an election. Your public image is everything, which is why it’s important not to have an extremely terrible one.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Graham Platner, transparency fan.
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Reposted by Nicholas Handler
Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
DOGE wielded extraordinary power during the first months of the Trump administration. It was more important than any Cabinet official. The fact it has been completely memory-holed by this administration says much about its purpose and impact. federalnewsnetwork.com/agency-overs...
federalnewsnetwork.com
Vought: Trump admin won’t do DOGE after-action report | Federal News Network
OMB Director Russell Vought says there are no plans to do a closing report on DOGE's controversial, cost-cutting blitz across government.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
At the end of the day, the Intercept saga is a pretty uninteresting story about audience capture where a bunch of guys decided to pander to angry, conspiracy-brained freaks and eventually they just turned into this.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
The majesty of our constitution is that it allows our Supreme Court to rewrite legislation and it allows our legislators to be dead.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
A date that will live in infamy
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Unironically, big props to student 22 on the honest D. 👑
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
The reason you should relentlessly attack and ostracize Platner defenders is because they will do this exact same thing again the millisecond they get the chance.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
My hot take on VAR is that at some point technology becomes so minutely accurate that it stops resembling human perception. At that point it stops being useful for games played and watched by humans.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
“He went down countless online rabbit holes, becoming so consumed by the videos and the theories that his wife, Usha, told him she was worried about him.” 👍
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Ditto to this. The idea that the President is an agent of Congress has been utterly ignored by this court, despite being what the framers clearly intended.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Now I’m having vivid fantasies of the Cowboys getting relegated to the UFL and replaced by the Columbus Aviators.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
One soccer take I don’t buy is the idea that the US doesn’t send its best athletes to play soccer. I’m not sure that LeBron or Tom Brady or whoever would actually be as good at soccer as they are at their actual sports? I just think we don’t develop the talent we have.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
This stuff is just going to become a running joke with students, like DARE or whatever. They’ll probably quietly discontinue it in a few years.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
US front three for 2030: Jalen Brunson, Aaron Judge, Josh Allen. Let’s go.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Might need another call from Trump to sort this out
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
A core feature of the Platner campaign was the rejection of any personal or professional standards for D party leaders. And his biggest cheerleaders were all people who could never meet those standards themselves and were filled with resentment over it.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
MTG is just like Trump in that her whole mission is to relentlessly pander to conspiracy-brained rubes in hopes of making money off them.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
Idea for a horror story where the guy you voted for turns out to be a Nazi sex predator.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
I don’t have a position on the red card thing, but it’s a little surprising that a self-respecting European team would be this publicly upset about having to face the US’s full starting 11.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
Get in, loser, we’re doing normal politics with extensive vetting and candidates who only post to socials through their communications staff.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
Cristiano Ronaldo and Graham Platner out in one day. Vibe shift.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
Checked the other site briefly, and in their (sort of) defense no one is really defending Platner. We’ve just decided to skip straight to the “no one ever really supported him anyway” phase of the disaster.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
While we’re at it can we also be done with the entire left-chud blogger complex that insisted on backing this walking red flag of a human?
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
He should petition to have future damaging stories suspended until December.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
“Salute to America Immediate Evacuation” is an instant classic.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
Kamp Krusty but it’s run by the president.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
So like what’s going on here?
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
I think the hard right attitude in these cases is “we’ll pay what it costs to fire this professor and replace them with an ally.” But I don’t think paying millions of taxpayer dollars to fire a perfectly good professor and replace them with a patronage hire is actually possible at scale.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Well, for this Supreme Court executive power mostly is just for Republican presidents. Without major reform, the next Democratic president will find themselves unable to do anything because of hitherto undiscovered constitutional doctrines that specifically prohibit most progressive policies.
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Nicholas Handler @nicholashandler.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
One big lesson from the conservative legal movement is that you can just kind of assert that the Constitution says whatever you want and ignore people who disagree with you. Progressives should do way more of this going forward.
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