From TPM Reader JH …

Thanks for publishing so much back and forth.  Apparently we’re all elite lawyers who read TPM!  I’m not sure where I fall in that – practiced at an “elite” DC firm in my younger years, then stopped practicing for a bit working in government, and then have been a GC or in-house at a handful of small-ish tech firms in the bay area.

Anyway – this stood out to me in one of the replies you posted: “A category difference in simply manufacturing new constitutional law in cases where the constitution is simply as clear as it can be.”

From TPM Reader BM …

I’m not a legal academic, but I was a pretty fancy pants lawyer – Harvard Law magna cum laude, federal clerkship, DOJ Civil Rights Division, AUSA for a decade doing public corruption cases, litigation partner, university general counsel’s office, etc.

I’m not sure I can describe the level of despair among many of my contemporaries.

I was discussing this last night with a retired ACLU lawyer and a retired big firm litigation leader.

From TPM Reader AC …

As someone who almost certainly falls into your “elite academic” category, I have some thoughts about the current discussion.

A while back, many people thought that the law was deterministic.  Enter a set of facts, and the law will immediately spit out an answer, one that is replicable regardless of who the judge is.  I think that most now understand that the judge’s identity matters.  This does not mean that the process is necessarily corrupt.  Rather people approach interpretive questions and understand facts differently, with those differences often being based on life experiences.

From TPM Reader JH …

I’ve read with interest some of your posts about the legal academy, and wanted to weigh in briefly. 

I have a somewhat unique perspective here, in that I’ve been adjacent to some of the more elite legal world, but I am not a part of it: I have an Ivy League law degree, and know plenty of people who got fancy clerkships, but I am a lowly practicing lawyer in Minneapolis.   

It’s a question that’s lingered since January, when the FBI raided Fulton County’s election hub at conspiracy theorists’ request: where’s next? There are a handful of swing states where Trump and his election truthers pressed hardest in 2020: Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. The DOJ obtained Maricopa County, Arizona’s, 2020 records through a roundabout effort that involved sending a grand jury subpoena to the state Senate, and there are signs its also investigating Wisconsin. In Michigan, however, the DOJ’s Civil Division did something unexpected — demand Detroit-area voting records not for 2020 but for 2024. Is a politicized investigation of that state’s 2020 vote also coming?

Josh Kovensky and Khaya Himmelman have what might be at least a partial answer to the question: conspiracy theorists have obtained, through a public records lawsuit, copies of ballots and records from Wayne County, and are running their own supposed “audit.” Whether or not they have already given those records to DOJ is unclear, but they’ve made clear that they intend to.

There will be a lot of discussion today of a Trump-backed automaton’s victory last night over Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), the eccentric libertarian who was perhaps the last Republican in Congress to reliably choose his right-wing but distinct ideology over Trump’s demands whenever he felt the two diverged. But don’t overlook Tuesday’s primaries for offices that will run Georgia and oversee its elections. The state has, of course, been a hotbed for MAGA hijinks and efforts (still!) to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss. Last night, Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state who famously resisted Trump’s demand that he “find 11,780” votes, lost the GOP gubernatorial primary to two election deniers, one of whom served as a fake elector in Trump’s 2020 scheme. The deeply Trumpy Vernon Jones, meanwhile, is one of two Republican candidates to advance in the race for secretary of state.

Georgia’s runoff is June 16.

You’ve seen the kind of stunning, kind of not stunning news that President Donald Trump has endorsed Ken Paxton for the GOP Senate primary runoff in Texas. Two months ago, Trump was on the cusp of endorsing Sen. John Cornyn, apparently already had the statement written out. Paxton rolled Trump and rolled him hard. The most obvious explanation for this is that the polling is showing that Cornyn is going to lose and Trump absolutely never wants to back a loser. It may be that. But I see something a little different. Trump has been taking out a lot of not-100% MAGA members of Congress. Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy is the latest example of that. There were those state senate holdouts in Indiana. It’s happened again and again. On that front, he feels like he’s on a roll. But it’s not just that either.

As some of you may have seen on Saturday, we’ve made some changes to our Weekender newsletter. We want to use it as a space to step back from the 24-7 news cycle to reflect on What It All Means and write about some of the entertaining, strange, surreal elements of our politics and political culture that we don’t always get to cover on-site. (It’s the weekend, after all!) We’ve also introduced some recurring segments, including No Words (an image that captures the spirit of the week), From TPM’s Group Chat (social media posts that made the staff chuckle or raise an eyebrow), Trivia Time (a little mini news quiz) and more.

I’ll be leading up the new Weekender alongside our Head of Product Derick Dermaier, and you’ll also still regularly hear from our other editors and reporters, including the indefatigable Nicole LaFond, who often anchored the Weekender in the past. She’ll also be helming Where Things Stand for you Monday through Thursdays.

Please give me a shout at allegra@talkingpointsmemo.com if there are things you love/hate about the look or content of the new Weekender. 

And subscribe here to get it in your inbox on Saturday mornings!

The more I speak with people both in the political world and in what I’ve called the legal academic-judicial nexus, the more I see just what a sea change is underway about Court reform. It’s come in successive waves: Dobbs, the immunity decision, Callais. There are various models of reform. But I don’t know anyone who has seriously considered the matter who thinks that you can have serious reform without expanding the Court. In these conversations, a few people have raised the question: what if the Court rules that a Court expansion law is itself unconstitutional? To put it slightly differently, what if the Court decides that the limits on its authority the Constitution creates, the paths for accountability it creates, are themselves unconstitutional.

This is question that is once absurd but also in a certain specific way important to prepare for.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) was defeated in a three-way primary against two Trump-aligned challengers tonight. Emine Yücel has our story.

Rep. Julie Letlow (R-LA), endorsed by Trump, and Louisiana’s state treasurer, former congressman John Fleming, will proceed to a runoff next month. Cassidy, with about 25 percent of the vote, will not.