Rick Hasen

@rickhasen.bsky.social

67292 Followers 624 Following

Professor, UCLA Law; Director, http://SafeguardingDemocracyProject.org; 2020 CNN, 2024 NBC/MSNBC Election Law Analyst; electionlawblog.org

But today, Prelogar is just one of several former Biden officials arguing on behalf of crypto and its younger brother, the prediction market industry. Sean Patrick Maloney, Biden’s representative to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), is the head of the Coalition for Prediction Markets, violating a pledge he made to get confirmed to not take compensation from any crypto company or organization for four years after his tenure. Former Biden deputy chief of staff Curtis Doster is a Kalshi lobbyist. Former Biden White House liaison John Bivona became Kalshi’s first-ever head of government relations this year, and Stephanie Cutter joined Kalshi as a “strategic partner,” the same position Donald Trump Jr. holds with the company. Prelogar isn’t even the only former Democratic solicitor general representing Kalshi in court. Neal Katyal, Barack Obama’s acting solicitor general who infamously defended Nestlé from liability for child slavery profiteering, represents Kalshi directly in the litigation. He previously represented Kalshi against the Utah, Nevada, Ohio, Maryland, and Connecticut gaming commissions, and is representing them in a concurrent Tennessee case on similar issues. For political purposes, the mere presence of a former Biden official’s name matters far more than anything else. The Prelogar brief allowed Kalshi’s head of legal counsel Robert DeNault to tweet that gambling law immunity “is not a D versus R issue.” Plausible claims to bipartisanship are the oil that D.C. runs on. Hiring out of the revolving door is a key way to supply it. Yet all of these hires come out of minor diplomatic posts, the White House’s political office, or the Department of Justice’s litigation desks. In the Tennessee case, Gary Gensler, Biden’s chair of the SEC, wrote an amicus brief coming to the exact opposite conclusion as Prelogar, arguing strenuously that sports gambling is not a commodity swap, and that the Dodd-Frank Act surely did not intend …
BREAKING via @CBSNews: Part of Trump's speech Thursday night will touch on previously unreported Chinese meddling in U.S. elections, sources told me. Some evidence shows Beijing compromised U.S. voter data -- and evidence the CIA knew about the action and didn't share that information with Trump during his first term, per sources. Cabinet officials are expected to be in the audience during his remarks. Among those invited are the heads of CIA, FBI, ODNI and DHS, as well as other agencies and staff. Some cabinet members will not be there due to scheduling conflicts, I'm told.
Age verification panel
At least 13 other states, including Arizona, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, received letters containing identical language. More states likely received the letter as well but may not have immediately realized it; in several states, the Justice Department sent the letter to the generic email addresses listed on agency websites for use by the public. “I had to go look for it,” said one state election official, who asked not to be named.
Slate
picture of a young jake tapper
The discussion came to a head in late January. Federal agents had shot and killed two U.S. citizens who had been voicing their opposition to the administration’s deportation policies in Minnesota — Renee Good, a poet and mother of three, on Jan. 7, and Mr. Pretti, an intensive care nurse, on Jan. 24. The ensuing protests had grown into the most intense unrest of Mr. Trump’s second term. Mr. Miller and other senior officials accused Ms. Good of “domestic terrorism,” and Mr. Miller called Mr. Pretti an “assassin.” Yet a few days after the Pretti killing, and even as the administration was moving to de-escalate the situation, Mr. Vance walked into Ms. Wiles’s West Wing office shortly after 9 a.m. for the regular senior staff meeting, and took a seat at the end of her long conference table. Attendance was lighter than usual. Mr. Miller sat to his right, his back to the windows overlooking West Executive Avenue. Mr. Scharf sat at the opposite end of the table. Mr. Warrington, the White House counsel, was beside the vice president. Ms. Wiles took her customary wingback chair near the fireplace. Her deputy, James Blair, took the other. Mr. Vance got to the point. They needed to invoke the Insurrection Act, swiftly, to crush the unrest in Minnesota. It would be painful in the short term, he said, but the message it would send — that paid agitators could not get away with disrupting ICE operations — would make sure no one tried it again. (There was no evidence that either Mr. Pretti or Ms. Good had been paid activists.)
“I started talking about Steve Hilton who’s a fantastic guy and I saw them say it was going to be two weeks before they knew, and I started hitting them,” he continued, recounting that he said “it’s going to happen to Steve Hilton.” “And they approved Steve Hilton very quickly,” he said. “There was too much heat on them.”
Think about election tallying this way. You have to be away from your television during the Super Bowl and so you record the game. When you watch it the next day — having avoided hearing the result in between — the game is already over. The winner was the same before you watched and after. It is the same with California’s election ballots: All the ballots were cast by Election Day, the election is over, and we just must wait to learn the final results.
n the long term, California should still do what it can to speed up the vote count; that would help maintain confidence in elections. With enough resources thrown at the problem and commands from the Legislature, election officials can improve their ballot processing time. But serious progress is unlikely before November. For this year, election officials, the media and even the public all play roles in assuring voters about the fairness and integrity of the process. California election officials have been quite transparent about their processes all along the way, and that should continue. Media outlets should stop reporting which candidate is “in the lead.” This is not an ongoing election; the election is over, and the results are simply “too early to call.” In response to charges of “voter fraud,” ordinary people can share media, such as the two-minute exchange between Trump and Welker, which show the emptiness of the president’s claims.
But Trump has shown his hand and he’s come up short. It is hard to overstate the importance of the exchange on Sunday between Trump and NBC News’ “Meet the Press” anchor Kristen Welker. Speaking about California’s elections, Trump said, “They’re crooked just like you’re crooked, your press is crooked. And ‘Meet the Press’ is crooked.” As Welker pushed him repeatedly for evidence, Trump could only repeat his entirely unsupported charges: “There’s tremendous evidence. There’s nothing but evidence.” In the end, he stormed out.
And he’s not alone. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson told reporters the “efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it’s impossible to prove. But I think everybody knows instinctively that something is wrong here.” Yes, the alleged voter fraud claimed by Trump and his allies is always the perfect crime: happening on a massive scale yet impossible to detect. It’s quite convenient to have a theory that is completely unfalsifiable.
Professor Hasen also called the state’s position self-defeating. “If the argument won,” he said, “it would signal that the very conservative Supreme Court would be extremely willing to second guess state court interpretations of their election laws as applied to federal elections — a trend that would no doubt hurt Democrats before the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority.”
poster for yes virginia there is a santa clause
Library instruction
The application to vacate stay of execution of sentence of death presented to JUSTICE ALITO and by him referred to the Court is granted. The May 8, 2026 order of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, case Nos. 26– 70004 and 26–10354, granting a stay of execution is vacated.
J USTICE ALITO , dissenting.The Court’s unreasoned order granting stays in this caseis remarkable.
First, and most crassly, these decisions could have been motivated by partisanship. They almost certainly advantage Republicans in the race for control of Congress, because Republicans can do more gerrymandering than Democrats at this stage of the election season—and it’s easier for them to do the sort of gerrymandering the court blessed in Callais. Second, even if not consciously biased in favor of Republicans, the conservative justices could be the victims of motivated reasoning: They see the risks of changing election rules at the last minute much more clearly when Republicans are hurt than when they are helped. Witness Alito, concurring in the shadow docket order to immediately issue its final judgment in Callais, noting that any delay would allow an unconstitutional map to be used in an upcoming election. Third, perhaps John Roberts sees the court as running out of time, and he wants to get many rulings in the books that change American politics in his preferred direction and forestall the move toward a multiracial democracy. He’s a 71-year-old chief justice now, not a 26-year-old staffer. The Supreme Court’s rulings in cases ranging from abortion to presidential immunity to the power of the government to fight climate change are growing increasingly unpopular. In the most important cases, the court is now splitting along not just ideological lines but party lines: All the conservative justices on the court have been appointed by Republican presidents, and all the liberals by Democrats. Roberts well knows that Democrats and progressives are mobilizing against the court. The chief justice has complained about the public viewing the justices as political actors, but that is exactly what they are. People, including me, who had resisted Supreme Court reform, increasingly see it as the only way to save American democracy….
The standard that Fulton County had to meet was a demanding one under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41(g): it had to show, among other things, that the federal government displayed a “callous disregard” for the county’s constitutional rights in seizing the ballots and related materials from the 2020 election. The district court applied case law from the 11th Circuit which appears to make it very difficult for a person whose property was seized by the federal government to get its return under 41(g). Although this ruling is a disappointment in that it allows the federal government to continue to hold on the ballots when the allegations in the search warrant were based on discredited conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, I do want to point to a part of footnote 26 that I consider very important in the event that the federal government tries to seize ballots in an election that is not already final and beyond a contestation period: Importantly, the seizure at issue in this case did not interfere with the State’s ability to conduct the 2020 election or certify election results, nor have Petitioners shown that it will hinder the State’s ability to conduct future elections. These issues are key: it’s a much more serious matter if a federal seizure of materials would interfere with the state’s ability to conduct elections or certify election results. Keep your eye on this standard.
Now, in Callais, Roberts has engineered the chance to take down Section 2. In its extreme amicus brief, the Trump administration offers a number of ways for the court to deprive Section 2 of its power while potentially avoiding headlines saying that the court struck down another part of the VRA. The brief suggests that the court reject Gingles and reinterpret Section 2 so that it only applies to cases involving discriminatory intent, not effects. This would mangle Section 2’s text and ignore congressional intent, while giving Roberts and Reagan a much-belated victory. The risks in the Callais case for minority voters are dire, with the case potentially leading to the bleaching of legislative bodies throughout the United States. But the risks are raised even higher by the timing. The court quickly reset the case for oral argument in October, potentially leading to a decision in time for states like Louisiana to re-redistrict and eliminate black, Latino, Asian and Native American opportunity congressional districts before voting in the 2026 midterm elections and thereby affect control of Congress. Trump’s Justice Department was granted permission from the Supreme Court to weigh in against the Voting Rights Act at oral argument, probably the first time that the United States has taken a position against the Act. When Mr. Trump attacks democratic institutions, he does so in the manner of a car wreck — so flagrantly destructive as to command public attention. When the Supreme Court undermines our democracy, as it seems poised to do in Callais, it feels more like a slow poisoning: the attacks may be harder to notice, but they are just as deadly.
To bad Dick- the Supreme Court just gave King 👑 Trump a good reason to look forward to this Fall’s Midterm elections you liberal fucknut!!! I must say this win in again for the ages for Conservatives and the death knell for disgraceful Democrats trying to steal more elections in the future!! So keep pouting you jackass- you and your liberal scum in Academia finally have something to cry about…..get some tissues at Costco!!!
Image of the cowardly lion from the wizard of oz
In the end, Justice Alito is afraid to stand up and say what his opinions necessarily imply: that Congress cannot do anything to protect minority voting rights short of banning intentional discrimination despite the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee, despite the Fifteenth Amendment’s ban on race discrimination in voting, and despite the fact that both amendments explicitly give Congress the power to enforce the measures by “appropriate legislation.” Maybe Alito is worried that a ruling forthrightly saying what he is doing would sully the reputation of the court, which has already faced public criticism for killing off another key part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013’s Shelby County decision. Perhaps he is worried that a frontal kill of Section 2 would energize Democrats, leading to greater losses for Republicans in the midterm elections and in future elections. Whatever the reason, Justice Alito lacks courage, a word which ironically has been embraced by the Trumpiest of judges and legal commentators to describe taking positions that are extreme, unpopular, and I would argue, in conflict with the rule of law. No one is fooled by Justice Alito’s act of cowardice, unless it is Justice Alito himself. If that’s the case, he is more deluded than he seems to think the rest of us are.
Some Democrats may say this “cracking” of minority districts benefits all Democrats, including minority voters, because electing more Democrats gives Democrats more power to help minority voters and others. But Democrats who represent fewer minorities are less likely to champion the interests of minority communities than minority-preferred candidates. And the pressure that these minority-preferred candidates can bring to bear in Congress (such as through the Congressional Black Caucus) is crucial to encouraging the Democratic Party to be responsive to the needs of minority voters. If appeal to higher values of fair representation does not move Democrats, self-interest might. A strategy of cracking could be self-defeating for Democrats. With diluted representation in Congress and other legislative bodies, Black voters will have less incentive to turn out to vote. That would decrease Democrats’ chances of winning election not just for these districts, but for statewide and federal races as well. Democrats should never take for granted the continued support of large majorities of minority voters. If maximum warfare means dismantling minority opportunity districts, Democrats act at their own peril
So what’s to be done? The Supreme Court itself has shown itself to be the enemy of democracy. If and when Democrats retake control of the political branches, it will be incumbent on them not only to write new voting legislation protecting minority voters and all voters in the ability to participate fairly in elections that reflect the will of all the people. They will also have to consider reform of the Supreme Court itself, a conclusion I had been resisting until the Court made this unavoidable. As I wrote in Slate last summer, when the Court rejiggered the question in Callais late on a Friday afternoon in August, “Court conservatives likely thought teeing up the issue of overruling Section 2 on a hot summer weekend would avoid public notice. But that’s a short-term strategy. … Any decision to strike down what’s left of the Voting Rights Act could kick off the start of a new civil rights movement and more serious talk of Supreme Court reform in the midst of crucially important midterm elections. Justices fundamentally hostile to the rights of voters place the court increasingly at odds with democracy itself.”
Wednesday’s 6-3 party line decision in Louisiana v. Callais will go down in history as one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the last century. All six Republican-appointed justices on the court signed onto Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion gutting what remained of the Voting Rights Act protections for minority voters, while pretending they were merely making technical tweaks to the Act. This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils, by ending the protections of Section 2 of the Act, which had provided a pathway to assure that voters of color would have some rudimentary fair representation. It’s the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy, and a brazen willingness to reject Congress’s judgment that fair representation for minority voters sometimes requires race-conscious legislation. It gives the green light to further partisan gerrymandering. It protects Alito’s core constituency: aggrieved white Republican voters. It’s a disaster for American democracy.
Justice Kagan’s strenuous dissent is exactly right. She notes the history of the Reconstruction Amendments, the subsequent failure to protect minority voting rights, the strong bipartisan nature of various amendments to the Voting Rights Act beginning in 1965, including the response to City of Mobile, to the 1982 Congress that broadly embraced a stronger vote dilution standard, the Supreme Court’s repeated acceptance of the VRA’s provisions as constitutional, to the retrograde turn of the Supreme Court in Shelby County and elsewhere, making the current Supreme Court the most hostile to voting rights in at least a century. And it is all done by Alito with subterfuge. The opinion adopts Justice Alito’s dissent in Allen v. Milligan while denying it is doing so. It brings back the requirement that minority voters prove discriminatory intent while denying it is doing so—in contravention to text, congressional intent, and common sense. Justice Kagan noted, citing my recent Yale Law Journal article, the effects of the Alito treatment in Brnovich: “Since the Court ruled, not a single Section 2 suit has successfully challenged such a restriction on voting, however discriminatory in operation. See R. Hasen, The Stagnation, Retrogression, and Potential Pro-Voter Transformation of U. S. Election Law, 134 Yale L. J. 1673, 1686 (2025).” It is not hyperbole when Kagan writes: “Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.” In other words, Justice Alito knows exactly what he’s doing: make it seem like he’s not gutting the Voting Rights Act through technical language, turning both the statute and the Constitution on its head. It’s the product of his long mission: to favor the white Republicans he seems to think he represents on the Supreme Court, rather than all Americans.
The charge stems from an incident nearly a year ago, when Mr. Comey, vacationing on the North Carolina coast, posted a photograph on social media showing seashells arranged to say “86 47,” combining the slang term “86” often used to mean dismiss or remove in reference to Mr. Trump, the country’s 47th president. Members of the administration, as well as Mr. Trump’s family, declared that the meaning of “86” was to kill, and that the seashell message amounted to a threat to assassinate the president.
I think the Court should interpret the “relating to” addition primarily by determining what Congress intended to accomplish with this amendment. Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, 607 U. S. ___, ___–___ (2026) (JACKSON, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment) (slip op., at 1– 2). Indeed, the Court’s “fundamental task” in interpreting federal statutes is to give effect to Congress’s intent. R. Katzmann, Judging Statutes 31 (2014) (Katzmann); see Pennington v. Coxe, 2 Cranch 33, 59 (1804) (opinion for the Court by Marshall, C. J.) (“It is the duty of the court to discover the intention of the legislature, and to respect that intention”). And the Court faithfully discharges this duty when it considers all reliable evidence of Congress’s intent—including statutory and legislative history. See United States v. Hansen, 599 U. S. 762, 775 (2023) (“Statutory history is an important part of [the] context” in which we interpret text); Katzmann 38 (“Legislative history . . . can help [judges] understand what the law means”). Here, the statutory and legislative history is clear:
Hungary’s Orban, Beacon to the Right, Concedes Election Defeat
Pending before the Supreme Court are three disparate cases, each with the potential to remake rules on district boundaries, campaign finance and the eligibility of certain mail-in ballots. These rulings, issued in the middle of the election season, could potentially confound voters, scramble overworked and threatened election administrators, and alter campaign strategies in the middle of heated election contests. And depending on how the justices rule, these decisions may have cascading effects including new court challenges, legislative changes and even more uncertainty in the months before the midterms. The justices can avoid this confusion entirely. In June 1964 the court issued a landmark decision in Reynolds v. Sims that helped cement the principle of “one person, one vote.” Yet the ruling made clear that it need not be applied to that fall’s fast-approaching elections. Whatever this court ultimately decides on the merits in these cases, it should apply the same principle.
Bruce Springsteen performs the Clampdown
The point, though, isn’t to win in court. Trump is engaging in election denialism theater. It makes voters of all sides mistrust the election process and the virtues of democracy. It convinces his supporters that Democrats have to cheat to win, something that will come in handy should Democrats take back control of the House in November with the intent of beginning investigations and potentially impeachment. It lets Trump, the most powerful person on earth, paint himself as a victim of fraud and of “bad, bad” judges. It also puts into question the rules of an election that is just months away, giving voters reason to fear that the postal service could sabotage their ballots. (The recent Supreme Court ruling saying that postal service employees cannot be held liable for intentionally failing to deliver mail surely doesn’t help that perception.) Trump’s executive order, seems aimed to sow chaos in elections and depress turnout. We will look back at Donald Trump’s presidency as years where the concept of election integrity got turned on its head. In the name of protecting democracy, Trump is breaking democracy. The damage could last a generation, even if the shelf life of his new executive order might be measured in days.
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Sunrise, Studio City, Ca
Crowd at jfk
No Faux King Way!
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page 35 of carter-baker report
What do we know about the judge who approved the warrant? The warrant was approved by Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas. Magistrate judges are not appointed by the president, but rather by the bench of the district in which they serve. Salinas has been serving in her position since 2015. Her credentials appear to be impressive and, if anything, somewhat liberal from a political standpoint. According to the State Bar of Georgia, she received her undergraduate degree from Emory and her law degree from the University of Texas. Early in her career, she worked as an attorney with Texas Rural Legal Aid along the Mexican border and later, upon returning to Georgia, with the Fulton County Public Defender. She clerked for U.S. District Judge Willis B. Hunt, Jr., who was appointed by President Clinton. Prior to her judicial appointment, she spent ten years as a commercial litigator. She’s a past president of the Atlanta Legal Aid Society and currently chairs the state bar’s Access to Justice Committee.