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1 month ago | 
thedispatch.com | Alison Somin |Adam White |Kevin Williamson |Jonah Goldberg
“She’s a big problem” blared a tweet featuring a photograph of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Given the opposition she faced from Democratic senators and the broader left during her confirmation hearings in 2020, one might suspect that the post came from a progressive critic.
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Dec 6, 2024 | 
wsj.com | Adam White
When Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. died in 1935, he left a large bequest to the U.S. government. Eventually Congress resolved to use his gift to fund “a history of the Supreme Court of the United States.” Nearly a century later, that official history—the “Holmes Devise”—runs to 12 volumes and several thousand pages. And it has gotten only as far as 1953.
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Aug 2, 2024 | 
thedispatch.com | Jonah Goldberg |Adam White |Kevin Williamson |Grayson Logue
Politicians lure voters with solutions touted as cost-free that are anything but. Published August 2, 2024 Dear Reader (except those of you letting your snakes roam),H.L. Mencken once said of Harry Truman, “If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country he would have promised to provide them with free missionaries, fattened at the taxpayer’s expense.”It was a joke, but let’s take it seriously for a moment. What would that look like?
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Aug 1, 2024 | 
thedispatch.com | John Mccormack |Keith E. Whittington |Adam White |Ben Rolsma
The White House and Kamala Harris want Supreme Court term limits but won’t answer key questions about their proposal. Published August 1, 2024 On Monday, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris called for dramatically restructuring the U.S. Supreme Court but provided almost no details about how they would implement the proposal. Several senators told The Dispatch this week that they were not sure exactly what the president and vice president had in mind.
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Jul 31, 2024 | 
thedispatch.com | Keith E. Whittington |Adam White |Michael Warren |Sarah Isgur
On February 5, 1937, not long after his second inauguration, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent Congress a special message outlining a plan to reform the judicial branch. He claimed to merely be trying to “reorganize” the modern judiciary, to help elderly justices manage their workload and “maintain the effective functioning of the Federal judiciary.” But FDR’s court reforms were not really about administrative efficiency—and the veil was soon ripped away.
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Jul 30, 2024 | 
thedispatch.com | Adam White |Mary Trimble |Grayson Logue |Peter Gattuso
In 2020, just days before his election, President Joe Biden rebuffed calls to radically change the Supreme Court by packing it with additional justices. But four years later, Biden is calling for legislation to strip current justices of their duties and appoint new justices. After rightly criticizing court-packing throughout his career, pursuing it now would be a terrible mistake.
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Jul 11, 2024 | 
thedispatch.com | Will Rinehart |Adam White |Timothy Sandefur |Chris Stirewalt
Welcome back to Techne! Last week, this newsletter was off for July Fourth. So, for your moment of zen this week, here is a video from Glacier View, Alaska, of an Independence Day celebration launching cars off a cliff while blasting patriotic music. Occupy Mars: A recent study by Chinese scientists suggests that Syntrichia caninervis, a resilient desert moss, could play a crucial role in terraforming Mars by enriching the planet’s rocky surface to support other plant life.
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Dec 5, 2023 | 
thedispatch.com | Adam White
Today’s administrative state would be unrecognizable to the Constitution’s founding generation, but today’s agencies also bear an ever-decreasing resemblance to their mid-20th century selves. How should the Supreme Court grapple with precedents and theories built around the smaller and simpler agencies of the 1940s or 1970s?
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Jul 18, 2023 | 
aei.org | Adam White
Amid all the debates over the Supreme Court’s year-end decisions, we should take a step back to recognize that the court’s term was a turning point—the end of one era and the still-early moments of another. The affirmative action cases reflect the end of one era. Applying constitutional textualism, the court resolved one of the central constitutional debates of the last 40 years: the use of race in university admissions. Like last year’s Dobbs decision renouncing the Roe v.
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Jul 18, 2023 | 
thedispatch.com | Adam White
Amid all the debates over the Supreme Court’s year-end decisions, we should take a step back to recognize that the court’s term was a turning point—the end of one era and the still-early moments of another. The affirmative action cases reflect the end of one era. Applying constitutional textualism, the court resolved one of the central constitutional debates of the last 40 years: the use of race in university admissions. Like last year’s Dobbs decision renouncing the Roe v.
