Strict Scrutiny

Make America Grift Again

• ✓**Citizens United's measurable legacy:** Billionaire political spending shifted from roughly 0.3% of all federal election contributions in 2008 to 19% in 2024, with 300 billionaire families averaging $10 million each. Five dollars went to Republicans for every one dollar to Democrats. This asymmetry is historically new — wealthy donors previously hedged bets across both parties. Tracking this escalation provides a concrete framework for understanding how Supreme Court decisions translate into structural political power over time.
• ✓**Regulatory capture pattern:** Live Nation donated $500,000 to Trump's transition fund, hired lobbyist Kellyanne Conway, named Rick Grenell to its board, and retained MAGA-aligned lobbyist Mike Davis. The DOJ then settled an antitrust case mid-trial, capping state damages at under 1% of Live Nation's 2025 revenue. The antitrust chief departed just before the settlement. This sequence — donations, board appointments, lobbyist hires, favorable settlement — provides a replicable template for identifying regulatory capture in real time.

A Court of Drugs and Guns

• ✓**Bruen Test Instability:** The Supreme Court's originalist framework for Second Amendment cases operates on two incompatible standards — the Bruen "historical twin" requirement and the looser Rahimi "vibe check" approach. Advocates cannot predict which standard applies in any given case, making constitutional gun regulation effectively unpredictable. Hamani exposed this contradiction directly, with justices unable to agree on which version of their own test governed the challenge to the drug-user firearm prohibition.
• ✓**Hamani Outcome Prediction:** The court appears likely to invalidate the federal statute prohibiting unlawful drug users from possessing firearms, but potentially on due process vagueness grounds rather than Second Amendment grounds. The statute fails to provide clear notice of who qualifies as an "unlawful user." This procedural off-ramp would let the court avoid a broad Second Amendment ruling while still striking the law, leaving a narrower addict-possession statute intact as a fallback.

S7 Ep21: The Conservative Push to Weaken Our Democracy

• ✓**UN Charter War Powers:** The UN Charter permits military force under only two conditions: a UN Security Council resolution authorizing it, or acting in self-defense against an actual armed attack. The Iran strikes satisfy neither. The administration offered no legal justification referencing the Charter, and the "imminence" argument fails because imminence still requires an identifiable armed attack being repelled — not preemptive regime change operations launched from a private club.
• ✓**Constitutional War Powers Escalation:** Executive branch lawyers have historically justified presidential force by weighing factors including operation scope, likelihood of casualties, and whether regime change is the goal. All three factors here point toward requiring congressional authorization. The administration's own Venezuela OLC memo, published publicly, reveals a legal theory that combines every prior permissive precedent simultaneously — a strategy law professor Rebecca Beck Inger identifies as unprecedented in its aggregation of previously separate justifications.

S7 Ep20: SCOTUS Again Takes on the 2nd Amendment—What Could Go Wrong?

• ✓**Tariff ruling coalition shift:** Track Kavanaugh, not Gorsuch, as the swing vote most likely to support Trump. In the tariffs case, Kavanaugh joined Thomas and Alito in dissent while Gorsuch joined the majority. Every publicly visible Trump-era vote shows Roberts, Barrett, and Gorsuch voting against Trump more frequently than Kavanaugh, reframing this as the Roberts-Barrett court in consequential cases.
• ✓**Major Questions Doctrine asymmetry:** Barrett's concurrence signals she sees minimal daylight between the major questions doctrine and existing statutory interpretation canons. This matters for future Democratic administrations — the doctrine can veto ambitious executive action when Congress is gridlocked. Getting to five votes against the doctrine requires Barrett plus four others, making her position a critical variable to monitor in future regulatory cases.