Mike Sacks
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mikesacks.bsky.social
Mike Sacks
@mikesacks.bsky.social
24K followers 880 following 2.4K posts
NY-17 Congressional Candidate. Democracy advocate. Former political-legal journalist. Retired competitive air guitarist. Second-Best dad ever.

mikesacksforcongress.com
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mikesacks.bsky.social
Mike Sacks @mikesacks.bsky.social · Apr 9
I’m running for Congress.

I’ve spent my career holding the powerful accountable as a political & legal journalist. I’m running for Congress to tell you the truth, fight for New York, and Unf*ck Our Country.

Join us: secure.actblue.com/donate/mbs-e...

Learn more: www.youtube.com/watch?v=20U5...
Unf*ck Our Country
YouTube video by Mike Sacks for Congress
www.youtube.com
Reposted by Mike Sacks
dhnexon.bsky.social
These fascist thugs should just say “white people” and stop pretending that classical thought, golden-age Islamic philosophy, renaissance authors, enlightenment thinker, American pragmatists, English liberals, &c has shit to do with their know-nothing race war.
atrupar.com Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 3h
Trump: “I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries … denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.“
November 28, 2025 at 5:39 AM
mikesacks.bsky.social
This album rules so hard
punkrockhistory.bsky.social Punk Rock History @punkrockhistory.bsky.social · 4h
54 years ago
A band called 'Death' was punk before punk was punk

Formed in November 1971 by the 3 Hackney brothers, they were influential pioneers of the genre and, along with Pure Hell, the first all-black proto-punk/punk band.

#punkrock #death #protopunk #history #punkrockhistory #knowyourroots
November 28, 2025 at 4:13 AM
mikesacks.bsky.social
Sorry this is impossible
chuckwendig.bsky.social Chuck Wendig @chuckwendig.bsky.social · 8h
Introduce yourself with five concerts you've seen —

NIN
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Soul Coughing
Poe
Tom Morello
stephensmith.bsky.social Stephen R. Smith @stephensmith.bsky.social · 12h
Introduce yourself with five concerts you've seen:

Bowie *
Roger Waters
July Talk *
Metric *
Alice Phoebe Lou *

* multiple times
November 28, 2025 at 4:04 AM
mikesacks.bsky.social
Now more than ever now that one Guardwoman will never go home
mikesacks.bsky.social Mike Sacks @mikesacks.bsky.social · Aug 18
Shame on the governors who sent their National Guardsmen away from their families to be bored extras in Trump’s fascist theater of the absurd.
November 28, 2025 at 3:01 AM
mikesacks.bsky.social
Now more than ever now that one will never return home
mikesacks.bsky.social Mike Sacks @mikesacks.bsky.social · Aug 18
I hope the National Guardsmen get some time to check out the Memorial, find inspiration from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address inscribed on the South Wall, and return home dedicated to ensuring “that government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
November 28, 2025 at 2:59 AM
Reposted by Mike Sacks
beijingpalmer.bsky.social
I found this terribly sad. A young woman with her life ahead of her, and she becomes one of the last American victims of the Long War.
November 28, 2025 at 2:07 AM
Reposted by Mike Sacks
jamellebouie.net
a young woman who signed up to serve her community and our narcissistic, despotic president decided to use her as a prop for his ego
November 28, 2025 at 2:11 AM
Reposted by Mike Sacks
tapirtrouble.bsky.social
Apparently she offered to cover other people's shifts so they could go home to their families for the holiday.
www.cnn.com/2025/11/27/u...
Two National Guard members were tasked with serving the nation. One is dead as the other fights for his life after shooting | CNN
On a day when many families gather across the country to give thanks, a National Guard member’s family is mourning her death after an ambush-style shooting in Washington, DC, as her colleague fights f...
www.cnn.com
November 28, 2025 at 2:09 AM
mikesacks.bsky.social
OFUUPOS
atrupar.com Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 6h
TRUMP: If you look at Somalia, they are taking over Minnesota.

REPORTER: What do the Somalians have to do with this Afghan guy who shot the National Guard members?

TRUMP: Ah, nothing. But Somalians have caused a lot of trouble. They're ripping us off.
November 28, 2025 at 1:11 AM
Reposted by Mike Sacks
mikesacks.bsky.social
OFUUPOS
atrupar.com Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 1d
Trump's speech about the shooting in DC veered into him attacking the Somali community in Minnesota, which of course had nothing to do with the shooting. Gives away his bigoted game.
November 27, 2025 at 4:22 AM
mikesacks.bsky.social
Fuck these fascists
reichlinmelnick.bsky.social Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 1d
It didn’t even take 6 hours.
USCIS @USCIS X.com Effective immediately, processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals is stopped indefinitely pending further review of security and vetting protocols. The protections and safety of our homeland and of the American people remains our singular focus and mission. 10:04 PM • 11/26/25 • 2.1K Views
November 27, 2025 at 4:18 AM
Reposted by Mike Sacks
mbkplus.bsky.social
This proposal of Musk’s sounds pretty fascist
paleofuture.bsky.social Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social · 1d
Elon Musk, the guy who did two Nazi salutes in public and has previously described himself as a “free speech absolutist,” thinks it should be a crime to “falsely” call someone a Nazi or a fascist.
Elon Musk * x @elonmusk x.com Falsely labeling non-violent people as "fascist" or "Nazi" should be treated as incitement to murder * Not the Bee $@Not the_Bee • 2h The left labeled Charlie Kirk fascist, and he got shot. The left labeled the National Guard deployments fascist.... 3:46 PM • 11/26/25 • 1M Views
November 27, 2025 at 12:33 AM
Reposted by Mike Sacks
jenrice.bsky.social
NEW: A panel of three federal judges (two appointed by Trump) says North Carolina can use its new Trump gerrymandered map in 2026 - possibly handing the GOP one more seat in Congress, at the expense of Black voters

www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...
Federal Court Greenlights North Carolina’s Trump-Ordered Gerrymander
Read more here.
www.democracydocket.com
November 26, 2025 at 10:59 PM
mikesacks.bsky.social
I hear the other side’s in Yiddish, too.
bjkeefe.bsky.social bjkeefe @bjkeefe.bsky.social · 1d
Opposition Flyer of the Day
A flyer about Mike Lawler (R-NY) that is cleverly against him. Begins "Congressman Lawler does not 'Love Hitler' or joke about gas chambers." Goes on to assert that he does not say or endorse many other horrible things that were said by NY's Young Republicans in their group chat from a short while ago.
November 26, 2025 at 7:30 PM
mikesacks.bsky.social
CA11 affirms lower court order tossing of Trump’s cases against Hillary Clinton and sanctioning his lawyers for bringing bad faith and frivolous claims.

Unanimous, bipartisan panel (GWB/Trump/Biden)

media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub...
Opinion of the Court 22-13410 No. 22-14099 DONALD J. TRUMP, ALINA HABBA, MICHAEL T. MADAIO, HABBA MADAIO & ASSOCIATES, PETER TICKTIN, JAMIE A. SASSON, THE TICKTIN LAW GROUP, et al., versus HILLARY R. CLINTON, et al., CHARLES HALLIDAY DOLAN JR., Plaintiff, Plaintiffs-Appellants Defendants, Defendant-Appellee. Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida D.C. Docket No. 2:22-CV-14102-DMM Before WILLIAM PrYoR, Chief Judge, and BRASHER and KIDD, Circuit Judges. WILLIAM PRYOR, Chief Judge: These four consolidated appeals concern five separate or-ders. In 2022, between his terms of office, President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against dozens of defendants, alleging several claims, including two under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and three under Florida law. The district court dismissed the amended complaint with prejudice for failure to state a claim. On the defendants' motions, the district court also entered sanctions against Trump and his attorneys, under Rule 11 and under its inherent authority. While those orders were on appeal, Trump and his attorneys moved the district court to reconsider each order in the light of a report by Special Counsel John Durham. They also moved to disquality the district judge. The district court denied both motions. Two defendants ask us to sanction Trump for bringing a frivolous appeal. We affirm the orders with a caveat. Because the district court lacked jurisdiction over one defendant, it erred in dismissing the claims against that defendant with prejudice. So we vacate the dismissal of those claims and remand with instructions to dismiss them without prejudice. Because Trump's remaining claims are untimely and otherwise meritless, we affirm the dismissal of the amended complaint with prejudice for the other defendants. And because Trump and his attorneys committed sanctionable conduct and forfeited their procedural objections, we affirm both sanctions orders. The Durham Report does not change our conclusions, and the district court lacked jurisdiction to consider the disqualification motion. Yet, because the appeal of the dismissal order is not frivo-lous, we deny both motions for appellate sanctions. The District Court Correctly Dismissed the Amended Complaint for Failure to State a Claim. We do not doubt that, in the light of the Durham Report, President Trump has concerns about some defendants' conduct during the 2016 election. The investigation by Special Counsel Durham found that some defendants played a role in orchestrating unverified allegations of him colluding with Russia. Durham Report 11-12, 16-17. And it found that key allegations in the Steele Dossier, relied on by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the press, were never corroborated. Id. at 13. Some appeared to be fab-ricated. Id. at 16. The Special Counsel's investigation found that Bureau officials appeared to favor Clinton and that their investigation decisions reflected that preference. Id. at 9-10. And it found that the Crossfire Hurricane investigation began without "any actual evidence of collusion." Id. at 8. Yet, those findings do not cure the deficiencies in Trump's racketeering claims. The district court committed no error in ruling that Trump's federal claims of racketeering and state tort claims failed as a matter of law. We reject the argument that the district court based its dismissal on the shotgun nature of the pleading. We address below why the dismissals were sound. C. The District Court Did Not Abuse Its Discretion in Issuing Sanctions Based on Its Inherent Authority. Federal courts have the inherent authority to "fashion an appropriate sanction for conduct which abuses the judicial process." Chambers v. NASCO, Inc., 501 U.S. 32, 44-45 (1991). This authority arises from the "control necessarily vested in courts to manage their own affairs so as to achieve the orderly and expeditious disposition of cases." Link v. Wabash R.R. Co., 370 U.S. 626, 630-31 (1962). To "unlock[] that inherent power," a court must find that a party or his attorney acted in "bad faith." Sciaretta v. Lincoln Nat'l Life Ins. Co., 778 F.3d 1205, 1212 (11th Cir. 2015). On a finding of bad faith, the district court may "assess attorney's fees." Id. The district court ordered Trump and Habba (along with her law firm) to pay nearly $1 million in attorney's fees under its inherent authority. On appeal, Trump and Habba present several arguments against the sanctions. We discuss and reject each in turn.
November 26, 2025 at 2:59 PM
mikesacks.bsky.social
Amazing show! And thanks as ever to @alexwinter.com for being an amazing human
November 26, 2025 at 3:24 AM
mikesacks.bsky.social
Paramount, which was recently acquired by Skydance, needs new films to populate its slate — the company has a goal of moving from its current eight annual releases to 15 by 2026, 17 by 2027 and 18 by 2028. Paramount’s new chairman and CEO David Ellison is the son of Larry Ellison, one of Trump’s most prominent financial supporters. Trump has publicly praised the Ellison’s leadership of the media company.
November 25, 2025 at 6:57 PM
mikesacks.bsky.social
I was Scripps’s National Political Correspondent from 2016-18. The company’s news operation in the stations it owns across the country is honest and fair. Sinclair will make them right-wing propaganda outlets for an all-out push to prop Republicans up for the remainder of Trump’s term and beyond.
November 25, 2025 at 4:05 PM
mikesacks.bsky.social
I gave and so should you
adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com Adam Gurri @adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com · 2d
I want to talk a bit about one specific project we will get off the ground if we're able to meet our goal and hire full time staff. We have been calling it The Reconstruction Papers. It will be a collection of essays focused on a positive, practical vision for the country gofund.me/29ce4ead3
November 25, 2025 at 3:49 PM
Reposted by Mike Sacks
heidikitrosser.bsky.social
Trump and the Defense Department (sorry, “War Dept.”) are attacking a moderate astronaut Senator for advising troops to honor the rule of law.

There is no placating this regime through compromise or reason.
November 25, 2025 at 3:30 PM
mikesacks.bsky.social
Invert the judicial pyramid.

courtaccountability.substack.com/p/where-law-...

www.huffpost.com/entry/a-defy...
• District Courts: Trump's challengers have a 60% win rate in the nearly 240 orders issued by federal district courts. Republican-appointed district judges have ruled against him in 55% of the cases before them. Democratic-appointed judges have ruled against him in 63% of the cases before them. • Circuit Courts: Trump's challengers have a 59% win rate across just over 90 orders issued by federal circuit courts. Republican-appointed circuit judges, however, have given 84% of their votes to Trump, while Democratic-appointed circuit judges have given 85% of their votes against Trump. • Supreme Court: Trump has a 90% win rate in the 23 Supreme Court orders included in our analysis. Virtually every case was decided on the Court's so-called shadow docket, with the right-wing majority often refusing to provide much, if any, reasoning for its result. What this data tells America, according to Court Accountability's senior adviser Mike Sacks, is that the lower courts are hewing closer to the rule of law than the highest court in the land, which, for years, has drawn the public's attention over its high-profile issues. But as the Roberts Supreme Court continues to "regularly delegitimize itself with unreasonable orders and its overwhelming greenlights for this Trump administration,' " Sacks said something unique and potentially revolutionary is happening in real time. "Right now, we have more important work for posterity being done in the lower two levels of the judicial pyramid," he noted. "They are memorializing a vision of this country that if we the people stand up for and follow what they're saying, that will be what guides us in the future.
November 25, 2025 at 12:39 PM
Reposted by Mike Sacks
davidnir.com
We really do have two different kinds of law now: District Court law (aka the law), and Supreme Court "law" (aka the U.S. House of Lords upholding Trump's personalist regime)
nycsouthpaw.bsky.social southpaw @nycsouthpaw.bsky.social · 3d
I don’t know what the Supreme Court will do, but I am confident that at the District Court level it is still the case that the Pentagon cannot recall a sitting US Senator to active duty in order to court martial him for something he said. Article 1, Section 6, among other constitutional provisions.
November 24, 2025 at 6:04 PM
Reposted by Mike Sacks
zachsdorfman.bsky.social
Cannot overstate how, from my perch as a national-security reporter, this would have been an earth-shattering scandal in a prior era.
robertscotthorton.bsky.social Scott Horton @robertscotthorton.bsky.social · 3d
Billionaire Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, pardoned by Donald Trump, has been accused of facilitating millions of dollars’ worth of payments to Hamas in the wake of its attack on Israel on October 7 2023. Zhao also financed the Trump family's entrance into the cryptocurrency market.
Binance founder Changpeng Zhao accused of facilitating payments to Hamas
Crypto tycoon pardoned by Donald Trump faces US court complaint from families of victims of October 7 attack
www.ft.com
November 25, 2025 at 4:33 AM
Reposted by Mike Sacks
bachynski.bsky.social
“From the night of the massacre onward, Ms. Fletcher was never again able to sleep comfortably in a bed, she wrote…
“When I sleep, it is never very deep or for very long because of the anxiety and the things I see,” she wrote. “Imagine having the same horrible nightmare every night for 100 years.”
Viola Fletcher, Oldest Survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, Dies at 111
www.nytimes.com
November 24, 2025 at 10:39 PM
mikesacks.bsky.social
The lawyer who wrote this brief was a favorite clerk of Chief Justice Roberts and then-Judge Kavanaugh, who are both typically very hostile to campaign finance regulations.
www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24...
Petitioners and the FEC want this Court to stretch—along every possible dimension—to advance their project of derailing decades of campaign-finance law enacted by Congress and upheld by the Judiciary. Their reply briefs underscore just how badly they want the Court to abandon traditional principles of justiciability and restraint. But there is no real-world Article III controversy here, and petitioners are not proper parties in any event. The Court should reject jurisdiction or dismiss the petition as improvidently granted.
November 24, 2025 at 10:40 PM