In things I write here in the Editors’ Blog, I am both critical of mainstream news conventional wisdom and also interested in it as a political artifact in itself. Whether it is accurate, fair, quality journalism, it is a fact of the political geography on its own. So it’s important to understand, and I spend a lot of time trying to analyze and place it on that basis.

On that front I wanted to return to a point I’ve alluded to a few times recently, which is that just in the last week or so there’s been a shift in that elite news conventional wisdom toward what we and others have been saying for a couple months. And that is a new focus on the disconnect, really the chasm opening up between Donald Trump’s political fortunes and his political actions. It’s not simply that Trump isn’t adjusting or repositioning as a more conventional politician might. Trump’s never been that way. It’s out of character. But he’s accelerating into the most toxic parts of his presidency. In addition to general discontent about the economy and the very unpopular Iran War, he’s pushed things like his ballroom and his slush fund to the very top of the political agenda, even short-circuiting or delaying other parts of his agenda to further them.

I went to my college reunion this weekend. It was cold and rainy at a time of the year when it’s supposed to be warm and sunny or at least warm and rainy. So I didn’t stay as long as I’d planned. But in the short time I was there, I had a number of people come up to me and say that I’d brought them around on the idea of Court reform. This was about things I’ve written here in the Editors’ Blog but, interestingly and somewhat surprisingly to me, far more of the comments were about things I’ve said on the podcast. This was of course gratifying to hear personally. But I note it here because it was an example, out in the wild if you will, of the broader pattern: a sea change in ideas, goals and judgments of the Supreme Court and the necessity of reform. I saw it at this elite university reunion. I’m seeing more and more examples of it within the legal academy – at least the beginnings of it. And perhaps most importantly we’re seeing discussion about it from elected members of Congress.

With the latest “peace deal” now perhaps receding into what we might call the eternal “two weeks,” I wanted to provide some mix of guidance or thoughts on what is going on. How do we go from a peace deal that is all but inked (despite only being a ceasefire and agreement to negotiate) to now where the deal is drifting off into the distance and Trump is adding new demands on Truth Social?

Let’s go back to the fundamentals.

I was thinking last night about the denouement of the Broadview Six case, a collapse which I’m told by some legal observers stands a non-trivial chance of seeing some of the prosecutors disbarred. And I contrasted it with the series of TPM Reader emails about the “fancy lawyers.” A number of these emails start out with some version of, I’m not part of the legal elite, I’m just working here in the trenches as a lawyer in [this or that mid-sized city in the United States]. Or maybe, my background is in elite law but I’m down here in the trenches, etc.

Here’s a story you should pay close attention to. You may have heard of the “Broadview Six” (later reduced to “Four”). It was a case focused on prominent local Democrats protesting at a Chicago-area ICE facility. (One was congressional candidate and influencer Kat Abughazaleh, who lost her primary this spring.) It was a classic over-charging case: A brief chaotic moment around the vehicle of an ICE employee ratcheted up to be a federal felony conspiracy charge. The case has been moving toward trial for like eight months and it was scheduled to go to trial next week.

For the last month, however, questions about the underlying grand jury proceeding have been roiling the case. First that prompted the government to drop the felony conspiracy charge rather than show the judge the grand jury testimony. (It thus went from a felony trial to a federal trial on one misdemeanor charge.) The judge finally saw those transcripts Tuesday night. That led to a closed-door emergency hearing this morning. In rapid succession today, the remaining charges were dropped and Chicago U.S. Attorney Andrew S. Boutros appeared in court personally to apologize to the judge and deny all knowledge of what had happened.

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.

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.

I want to share with you a letter from fellow TPM Reader DA. He makes a point I fully agree with but didn’t make clear enough in yesterday’s post. I fully agree there is such a thing as legal expertise. I’ve made that clear in my actions over a couple decades by paying for some of the very best (and priciest) legal counsel — mostly though not exclusively on 1st Amendment and libel law. It of course goes beyond this. Law, in its largest scope, is a complex set of rules and practices that we as a society have agreed on — sometimes explicitly, usually implicitly — to govern ourselves by and through which we resolve the countless range of disputes — civil and criminal — that arise among us. But it is in the nature of any specialized and professionalized craft to cast a penumbra of authority beyond its actual area of expertise.

If you’re not a regular listener to our podcast, I hope you’ll listen to the episode that will come out later this afternoon. It was, I think, a particularly good episode, in large part because we had such critical issues to discuss: Callais, the wave of emergency redistrictings across the southern tier of the old Confederacy and what seems to be a sea-change moment on Supreme Court reform among establishment Democrats. I want to expand today on some points about Supreme Court reform, offering some of the historical background for this present moment.

Every current member of the Supreme Court comes out of what we might call the elite academic-judicial nexus, which is to say they’ve been law professors at elite universities and judges in the federal judiciary. I believe this applies to all the current justices. It didn’t used to be this way. It used to be relatively common to have justices who had never served as judges before and had never been law professors. Frequently they were ex-politicians. Famously, William Howard Taft was an ex-president when he became chief justice. Earl Warren was a popular Republican governor of California who had never served as a judge until president Eisenhower nominated him as chief justice. If you go further back, many justices never even went to law school, though this was more a matter of the evolution of legal education. The last non-law school justice was James F. Byrnes. (In earlier history, you generally learned the law as a kind of apprentice and then passed the bar to practice.) There was a brief boomlet of chatter when Bill Clinton was elected that he should or would try to re-inject this “politician on the Court” tradition back into the system. Of course that didn’t happen. The idea has scarcely been entertained since.

Some of the most consequential and trust-shattering Supreme Court decisions of late have been ones that could have been predicted decades ago. Certainly that’s the case with the Dobbs decision. Callais doesn’t have quite as long a history, in terms of attempts to overturn the precedent. But certainly it’s been in the cards for at least a decade. Still, it’s some of the smaller decisions that tell us just who and what this corrupt court is. Kate Riga notes one of them here: Conservatives on the Supreme Court have previously invoked the “Purcell principle” to rule that a change couldn’t be made to districts on the “eve” of an election. Now it’s fine to do so in states like Louisiana and Alabama where primary elections are actually already underway and tens of thousands of cast ballots must be invalidated.

The message is simple: there are no rules. Only power. It reminds me of my hand tool woodworking shop. There are a big selection of tools. And it’s just a matter of what helps the GOP and the Court in that particular moment. In a way it’s clarifying. Even helpful.