Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 6d

“the constitution forbids race conscious remedies” would be news to the people who wrote the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments

Michael Li (李之樸) @mcpli.bsky.social · 6d

Griem goes there, arguing in response to Justice Jackson that there can be no race-conscious remedy absent a finding of intentional discrimination.

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Ben D’Avanzo @bendavanzo.bsky.social · 8d

The film "NO" about the plebiscite that took down Pinochet has definitely influenced my advocacy. The lesson was, if you seem fun and upbeat, even in very serious times, the public is much more likely to stand with you.

These folks are doing it right!

The Tennessee Holler @thetnholler.bsky.social · 9d

Chicago not letting Portland have all the fun 🐧

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Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 19d

“.. no modern American president has positioned his family to make so much money while in the White House. Already, since the early days of his reelection campaign, he’s more than doubled his net worth to about $5.4 billion.”

@bloomberg.com
www.bloomberg.com/features/202...

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Clara Jeffery @clarajeffery.bsky.social · Aug 18

The reason they don’t want to show their faces is that they are engaged in illegal and amoral acts

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Sherrilyn Ifill @sifill.bsky.social · Aug 17

STOP conceding that Trump can legitimately expand grab by deploying baseless claims of “emergency.”

There was NO EMERGENCY to justify tariffs.
There was NO “INVASION” to justify this migrant crackdown.
And there is NO “EMERGENCY” that justifies military takeover of local law enforcement in D.C.

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emptywheel @emptywheel.bsky.social · Jul 17

One thing that will become increasingly clear as DHS starts spending the billions they got in the Big Ugly is that a lot of this will go to pay off favored contracts.

@hunterw.bsky.social lays out how Florida did that here.

talkingpointsmemo.com/news/contrac...

Contracts Show Millions of Dollars and Diverted Disaster Resources Were Used to Build DeSantis’ ‘Alligator Alcatraz’

TPM has obtained and analyzed over a dozen contracts and invoices related...

talkingpointsmemo.com

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Sherrilyn Ifill @sifill.bsky.social · Jul 14

I have no words. Everyone prepared for the constitutional crisis of the President defying the SCOTUS. The crisis is the SCOTUS being fully aligned with Trump’s vision of presidential power. So here we are.

Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social · Jul 14

BREAKING: The Supreme Court allows the Trump administration to move forward with the abolition of the Department of Education. It gives no explanation for its order. All three liberals dissent. www.documentcloud.org/documents/25...

From Sotomayor's dissent:

Lifting the District Court’s injunction will unleash
untold harm, delaying or denying educational opportunities
and leaving students to suffer from discrimination, sexual
assault, and other civil rights violations without the federal
resources Congress intended. The majority apparently
deems it more important to free the Government from paying employees it had no right to fire than to avert these very
real harms while the litigation continues. Equity does not
support such an inequitable result.
* * *
The President must take care that the laws are faithfully
executed, not set out to dismantle them. That basic rule
undergirds our Constitution’s separation of powers. Yet today, the majority rewards clear defiance of that core principle with emergency relief. Because I cannot condone such
abuse of our equitable authority, I respectfully dissent.

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Sherrilyn Ifill @sifill.bsky.social · Jul 6

This.

Joanna Schwartz @jcschwartzprof.bsky.social · Jul 3

There will now be 10,000 new ICE agents & 100,000 new detention beds--and few safeguards protecting people from constitutional violations by the feds.

Time for states to pass laws allowing people to sue fed agents. Read about it these "converse-1983" statutes here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · Jun 24

Remember, this new normal -- in which gangs of masked armed gunmen are causing chaos in the streets, pulling weapons and assaulting innocent people, and no one can say if they're crooks or cops -- was all sold to Americans as a way to make us feel safer.

Omar Wasow @owasow.bsky.social · Jun 24

“In Pasadena last week, a man stepped out of his unmarked vehicle at an intersection, unholstered his pistol and aimed it at a group of pedestrians before returning to his car… That incident left the police chief of Pasadena resigned to figure out whether it was a crime or part of a federal raid.”

'Who are these people?' Masked immigration agents challenge local police, sow fear in L.A.

Local police have little or no insight into where the federal enforcement actions are taking place. In some cases, local cops have been mistaken for federal agents, eroding years of work to have immig...

www.latimes.com

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Sherrilyn Ifill @sifill.bsky.social · Jun 24

I didn’t have the Supreme Court destroying the authority of federal district courts on my bingo card. But in retrospect that’s perhaps where all this shadow docket decision-making was going all along.

Really scary stuff.

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Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social · Jun 20

The Supreme Court's bias toward corporate interests is persistent, pervasive, and exhaustively documented.

But it is still extraordinary to hear a sitting justice bluntly call it out and castigate her colleagues for consistently twisting the rules in favor of big business. slate.com/news-and-pol...

In a Stunning Critique, Ketanji Brown Jackson Nails One of This Court’s Worst Traits

The court is contorting the law to favor big business while locking out the most vulnerable, the newest justice wrote.

slate.com

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Chris Hayes @chrislhayes.bsky.social · Jun 18

Twenty years ago the Republican party stood for huge tax cuts for the rich and wars of choice in the middle east, but then Donald Trump totally remade the party and realigned American poltiics, and now the Republica party stands for...huge tax cuts for the rich and wars of choice in the middle east.

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kragtbakker.bsky.social @kragtbakker.bsky.social · Jun 16

I dug this one out for #NoKings Memphis yesterday:

Smokey the Bear: Remember, only YOU can prevent this dumpster fire of an administration from burning everything we hold dear to the ground

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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · Jun 15

The Tea Party protests in April 2009 had about a third of a million people involved, and the political media treated it like a game changer for the Obama presidency.

The No Kings rallies were AT LEAST ten times bigger than the Tea Party protests. Will the press keep pretending Trump is popular?

G Elliott Morris @gelliottmorris.com · Jun 15

Based on crowd-sourced records of No Kings Day event turnout, and extrapolating for the cities where we don't have data yet, it looks like roughly 4-6 million people protested Trump across the U.S. yesterday. That's nearly 2% of the U.S. pop!

Mobilized anti-Trump resistance is exceeding 2017 levels

"No Kings Day" protests turn out millions

Our unofficial estimate is that around 4 million people attended a protest event yesterday. Anti-Trump resistance is outpacing 2017.

www.gelliottmorris.com

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kragtbakker.bsky.social @kragtbakker.bsky.social · Jun 15

“…in order to tell them that violence wasn’t the answer.”

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Liza Goitein @lizagoitein.bsky.social · Jun 8

No president has ever federalized the National Guard for purposes of responding to potential future civil unrest anywhere in the country. Preemptive deployment is literally the opposite of deployment as a last resort. It would be a shocking abuse of power and the law. 15/19

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Timothy Snyder @timothysnyder.bsky.social · May 25

Best read as a reasoned call to action, not a question. And we will need vivid terms for where we are going — oligarchy and fascism — as well as what we are seeking — freedom and equality.
www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/o...

Opinion | How Will We Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy?

www.nytimes.com

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kragtbakker.bsky.social @kragtbakker.bsky.social · May 24

My dad says (maybe) a Sphinx moth of some kind.

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kragtbakker.bsky.social @kragtbakker.bsky.social · May 21

Consider adding a poopmark if you screenshot him in the future: loveandresistance.org/poopmark

Poopmark

loveandresistance.org

kragtbakker.bsky.social @kragtbakker.bsky.social · May 8

Chronicling America could be a goldmine:
chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/newspapers/?...

Results: Digitized Newspapers « Chronicling America « Library of Congress

Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1756-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.

chroniclingamerica.loc.gov

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Timothy Snyder @timothysnyder.bsky.social · Apr 15

"the president defied a Supreme Court ruling to return a man mistakenly sent to a gulag... and spoke of sending Americans to foreign concentration camps.
This is the beginning of an American policy of state terror, and it has to be identified as such to be stopped"
snyder.substack.com/p/state-terror

State Terror

A brief guide for Americans

snyder.substack.com

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Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · Apr 15

Oh dear you’re going to want to read this. Looks like DOGErs were caught exfiltrating NLRB data, likely on unions, for private (seemingly Elony) use. This is must read. What we’ve all suspected. But now details. www.npr.org/2025/04/15/n...

A whistleblower's disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data

A whistleblower tells Congress and NPR that DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data and hid its tracks. "None of that ... information should ever leave the agency," said a former NLRB official.

www.npr.org

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Jeff Sharlet @jeffsharlet.bsky.social · Apr 14

Harvard stepping up for the fight with fascism is big news. Even bigger news is Trump's declaration that he won't comply with court orders and that he plans to start imprisoning U.S. citizens abroad based on "evidence" his DOJ says it doesn't have to and won't reveal.

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Jacob Rosenberg @jacobrosenberg.bsky.social · Apr 8

When the guy who represented Bush in 2000 says you're going to bizarre places in challenging votes...

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Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · Apr 9

The only way forward, that I can see, requires both courage and collective action. If we’re not going to fight for our students and our scholarship, then what the hell are we doing anyway?

Aaron Shaw @aaronshaw.bsky.social · Apr 9

University presidents, the time is now! Unshackle the general counsel's office! File all the lawsuits! Release the faculty upon the op-ed sections! Write to your alumni, parents, and donors! You have nothing to lose but a tiny percentage of your enormous endowments... www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/u...

Trump Officials Freeze $1 Billion for Cornell and $790 Million for Northwestern

The funding pause amid civil rights investigations into both universities sharply escalates the Trump administration’s campaign against elite colleges.

www.nytimes.com

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