Mark Joseph Stern

@mjsdc

Senior writer at Slate covering courts and the law. Co-host of the Amicus podcast. Dad.

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Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· 7d

Why did they make him look so cool though

A cool cat with sunglasses pointing a gun

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· 7d

At the park with my toddler and ATF is demonstrating its robot dog while Beyoncé plays as part of a violence intervention event

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· 14d

Agree with @jamellebouie.net that it's pretty clear Elon Musk wanted to eviscerate USAID *for the purpose of killing as many African people as possible.* Mass death wasn't an accidental byproduct of his "deep state" paranoia; it was a key mission of DOGE. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/o...

One might even see his destruction of the United States Agency for International Development — responsible, so far, for an estimated 700,000 deaths worldwide — as consistent with his concern with falling white birthrates relative to those in places such as sub-Saharan Africa, where U.S.A.I.D. was active. After all, one way to secure a future for Western children, in this zero-sum view of the world, would be to starve African ones.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· 17d

DoorDash, in damage control mode, now claims it supports D.C. home rule and denies lobbying against it. Here’s the letter their lobbyist wrote to Rep. Comer supporting his bill to ban D.C. from ever imposing or increasing a tax or fee without congressional approval. hillheat.com/files/492/DD...

Re: DoorDash Support for H.R. 9720, the "D.C. Taxing Authority Review Act"
Dear Chairman Comer and members of the committee:
On behalf of DoorDash, I write to express our support for H.R. 9720, the "D.C. Taxing Authority Review Act," which would require congressional approval before the District of Columbia can impose or increase a tax or fee. We believe this is a reasonable check against the hastily enacted local taxes and fees that fall hardest on small businesses and the residents who depend on them.
DoorDash's marketplace in the District is built overwhelmingly on small, independent merchants: Roughly 80% of DC merchants that were active on our platform as of December 2025 had 3 or fewer storefronts on the platform. These are the businesses least able to absorb new taxes and fees or the administrative burden of complying with them, from costly point-of-sale upgrades to added compliance overhead.
The District's recently passed delivery tax illustrates the risk: a tax on virtually every delivery, with proceeds designated for a myriad of projects and the District's general fund, passed without a single public hearing and, consequently, without input from the residents and small businesses it will most heavily impact. Based on our internal data, a tax like this would mean millions of dollars a year in added costs for D.C. residents and lost revenue for local merchants, and that burden grows quickly as the rate is increased, as authorized by the Budget Support Act. Research on comparable taxes bears this out: an economic analysis of Colorado's retail delivery fee found it raised takeout prices by nearly 1%; cut delivery orders by more than 400,000 a year; cost the restaurant sector over $12 million in revenue; and resulted in a loss of roughly 234 jobs across restaurant and delivery workers.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· 21d

Just canceled my DashPass and sent this email to DoorDash. I encourage you to do the same if you support D.C. home rule. press@doordash.com and ir@doordash.com

Hello,

I’m writing to let you know that I just canceled my DashPass because of DoorDash’s disgraceful campaign against D.C. home rule.

DoorDash is urging Congress to nullify a new D.C. law imposing a 20 percent tax on food-delivery services—not merely by overturning that law, but by prohibiting the District from enacting any new tax without prior congressional approval. That is an extraordinarily sweeping assault on D.C.’s right to govern itself and an odious insult to the District’s residents.

I am especially disgusted by DoorDash’s public claim that it is somehow defending D.C. residents while actively seeking to strip us of our right to govern ourselves through our own democratically elected lawmakers. Please do not pretend that disenfranchising District residents is an act undertaken on our behalf.

I intend to publicize DoorDash’s attack on home rule as widely as possible and urge everyone I know to boycott the company.

Shame on you.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· 23d

As Judge Higginson notes in dissent, this en banc rehearing takes up a recent call from Justice Clarence Thomas to dismantle federal gun laws and, with them, much of the U.S. Code by shrinking congressional power down to almost nothing. www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub...

Just a few weeks ago, Justice Thomas, writing alone, asked lower
courts to reexamine the constitutionality of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g) under the
Commerce Clause. See United States v. Hemani, 146 S. Ct. 1677, 1694 (2026)
(Thomas, J., concurring). Already, our court answers the call. Today, we
grant a petition for rehearing in what was a Second Amendment as-applied
challenge to § 922(g)(1), now reframed as a facial1 Commerce Clause
challenge. So, rather than clarifying our § 922(g)(1) as-applied precedent to
provide fair notice to people in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas about
whether they can lawfully own guns, see, e.g., United States v. Cockerham, 162
F.4th 500, 518 (5th Cir. 2025) (Higginson, J., dissenting), we imperil much
of the United States Code.
2

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· 29d

Got to do TV with my bestie @cristianfarias.com 😍

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· Jul 12

Shorter Lyman Stone

Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views
Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?
Con: LOL no...no not those views
Me: So...deregulation?
Con: Haha no not those views either
Me: Which views, exactly?
Con: Oh, you know the ones

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· Jul 12

I’ll put a finer point on it: The actual solution to our birth rate “problem” is substantially increasing immigration. Lyman Stone is a virulent racist and nativist bigot, so he rejects or ignores this solution in favor of pushing heterosexual Christian couples to reproduce more. That’s my response.

So far the Bluesky response to my NYT op Ed has been:
1) Lyman has bad tweets
2) cancel Lyman
3) it's good birth rates are falling
4) nobody should have kids
Notably missing as a response:
Any evidence my thesis is wrong.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· Jul 11

Again. This is the author. What are we doing here?

The Somali community is a scourge on the republic. I have been saying this for years. The rampant fraud is just icing on the cake. We should indeed be reviewing if Somalis e.g. lied on naturalization forms, and deport any with deportable offenses.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· Jul 11

Forgot this one. I’m curious why NYT thinks this kind of vile racism isn’t disqualifying for an op-ed writer. I imagine that if an author said something similarly vitriolic about, say, Lutherans, the NYT would face massive blowback for publishing them.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· Jul 11

Interesting choice by NYT to publish an op-ed bemoaning America’s projected population decline by a guy who’s massively racist against immigrants and compares IVF to “Nazi eugenics.” The “pronatalists” only want more of a very specific kind of person in this country. It gives the game away.

The Population Forecasts Are Grim. Theyre Still Too Optimistic.
By Lyman Stone

It's difficult to articulate the extent to which Somalian immigrants are a *unique* problem.
Other immigrant groups may not always have stellar outcomes, but there are almost none who as persistently have the absolute worst outcomes in every country they move to as Somalians.

FWIW I think attacking IVF really is a massively losing political position, and I say that as someone with serious moral concerns around
IVF.
I think if you must attack IVF, you would argue against discarding embryos as a form of Nazi eugenics, not on the basis of personhood.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· Jul 2

NEW: The Supreme Court won't block a civil contempt order against the journalist Catherine Herridge for refusing to identify the source of a leak. Only Kavanaugh notes his dissent. Herridge will be fined $800 a day until she complies.

ORDER IN PENDING CASE
25A1448 HERRIDGE, CATHERINE V. CHEN, YANPING, ET AL.

The application for stay presented to The Chief Justice and
by him referred to the Court is denied. The motions for leave to
file the application and reply under seal are granted. The order
heretofore entered by The Chief Justice is vacated.
Justice Kavanaugh would grant the application for stay.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· Jul 1

Will be chatting with @stephruhle.bsky.social about SCOTUS shortly on MSNOW

Photo of the U.S. Capitol from the MSNOW studio

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· Jul 1

I know there’s no point arguing with Thomas because he just makes stuff up. But his sole textual evidence that birthright citizenship requires parental “domicile”—the word “reside”—simply doesn’t work. It applies to the child, NOT their parents, and says nothing about parents’ residency whatsoever!

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· Jul 1

Iconic line from @stevevladeck.bsky.social here in response to Will Baude’s SCOTUS boosterism www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/o...

Baude: I agree that we are in unprecedented times, maybe even a constitutional crisis, but if we survive it, the court deserves no small share of the credit.
Vladeck: Exactly the same credit we might give to the arsonist who shows up with a fire extinguisher.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· Jun 30

For years, originalists have lectured us that they no longer look to "the Framers' intent," but to the "original public meaning" of the Constitution. Here, Kavanaugh throws all that out the window to lash the citizenship clause in his subjective guess as to what its Framers intended it to do.

First, significant illegal immigration into the United
States is a new circumstance that was largely unknown as
of 1868 and that the Framers of the Fourteenth
Amendment could not have fully anticipated. And the
Framers likely would not have anticipated (and presumably
would not have intended) the odd result of granting a
substantial birthright citizenship benefit to (i) those foreign
citizens who violate U. S. immigration law and illegally
enter or overstay and then have children in the United
States over (ii) those foreign citizens who follow U. S.
immigration law and have children in their home countries
while seeking to lawfully immigrate to the United States.
Nor presumably would they have wanted to grant
constitutional birthright citizenship to children of foreign
citizens unlawfully in the country while simultaneously
denying constitutional birthright citizenship to children of
tribal American Indians. So too, the issue of temporary
visitors who give birth in the United States presents a new
and different circumstance than in 1868 given the
significant changes in immigration laws and travel.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· Jun 30

NEW: The Supreme Court will decide next term whether the Second Amendment guarantees the right to own assault rifles.

Viramontes v. Cook County
Docket No.
25-238
Op. Below
7th Cir.
Term
October Term 2026
SCOTUS Page
Issue
Whether the Second and 14th Amendments guarantee the right to possess AR-15 platform and similar semiautomatic rifles.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· Jun 30

The vote on the constitutional question in the birthright citizenship case is an absolute scandal slate.com/news-and-pol...

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled that the first sentence of the 14th Amendment means exactly what it says: Birthright citizenship is the nation’s fundamental law, and Donald Trump cannot repeal it via executive order. The vote was 5–4. This outcome is, of course, a relief. But the margin is a scandal. It is nothing short of stunning that Trump came one vote away from convincing the Supreme Court to repeal the bedrock of the Reconstruction Amendments based on a brazenly partisan contortion of their text and history. A view held only by fringe, far-right nativists until very recently has secured support from four of the nine members of the court: Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh. This is a shocking development that should upend all expectations that this Supreme Court can be trusted to apply the most basic constitutional guarantees when a Republican president seeks to nullify them. If a theory flatly rejected by all serious legal scholars and historians can come one vote away from success, no rights are safe. Everything is on the table.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· Jun 30

As Kagan sharply points out, Kavanaugh's opinion simply transforms Thomas' dissent in that 2001 case into controlling law of the land. She highlights how radically the newer justices have changed campaign finance precedent. Whole thing feels like a farce. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

Almost to
flaunt the point, the analysis gives pride of place to JUSTICE
THOMAS’s dissent in that case; if only the rest of the majority had been there to join him! See ante, at 23. Today’s
decision thus can join the parade of those recently overruling established law because of a new majority’s new outlook
on a consequential matter.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· Jun 30

The language Kavanaugh uses to describe transgender students in this opinion is so relentlessly bad www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

Second, we do not accept the dissent’s assumed monopoly
on understanding the effects on individuals involved in
disputes over transgender athletes. We are acutely aware
of the difficulties sometimes faced by boys who identify as
girls (and by girls who identify as boys) in middle school,
high school, and beyond. And we greatly admire the desire
of all students, including transgender students such as
B. P. J., who want to participate in sports. But in
conducting the equal protection inquiry, we must also
account for the effects on girls who are forced to compete
against biological males in sports.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· Jun 30

Kavanaugh doesn't decide whether rational basis review or heightened scrutiny applies, because (he says) the state laws satisfy both. This gives him an opportunity to gut heightened scrutiny for anti-trans laws by applying it in a weirdly deferential way. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

In these cases, we need not definitively resolve whether
rational basis review or intermediate scrutiny applies to
transgender classifications. In either event, the
classification here readily satisfies rational basis review or
intermediate scrutiny for the reasons already explained at
some length above. The States’ interests in ensuring safety
and competitive fairness amply justify the States in
maintaining women’s and girls’ sports for biological
females. Under the Equal Protection Clause, therefore,
schools may determine eligibility for women’s and girls’
sports based on biological sex.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· Jun 30

In a concurrence, Gorsuch tries to distinguish Title IX from Title VII to explain why Bostock's reasoning doesn't control here. I am unconvinced for the reasons Sotomayor lays out in dissent. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

In Bostock,
again, no one doubted that firing someone because of his
biological sex qualified as “discrimination” under Title VII.
See 590 U. S., at 681. Here, though, we face the question
whether it qualifies as discrimination under Title IX for a
federal funding recipient to sponsor sports teams restricted
to biological women or girls alone. And for the reasons just
laid out above and explored in depth by the Court, it does
not.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· Jun 30

Co-sign @stevevladeck.bsky.social. It may feel good to purge Trump holdovers under the next Democratic president. But the deeper damage that Slaughter inflicts on the infrastructure of our democracy will ultimately cause way more pain. www.stevevladeck.com/p/236-three-...

I saw lots of folks claim online yesterday that Slaughter is a good thing (or, at least, that it has a silver lining) because it will make it easier for the next Democratic president to simply clean house-and fire many, if not most, individuals who were appointed/hired/installed by President Trump. That may be true in the short term, but that comes at the enormous expense of (1) Congress, which will find itself increasingly hamstrung in trying to exert any control over how the executive branch exercises the powers Congress authorizes and delegates; and (2) the American people, who will find themselves subject to executive branch agencies doing the bidding of the incumbent administration rather than the goals Congress set for them by statute.
That may feel good when we like the current administration, but it's a recipe for instability and for the elimination of expertise in almost every
facet of governmental regulation. And in the interim, it also gives even more power to the courts (the Supreme Court, in particular), to sort out all of the subsidiary questions that Slaughter has already raised.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· Jun 30

A lie. Slaughter allows Trump to purge the heads of the MSPB and Office of Special Counsel, which protect civil servants from unlawful firings. When those agencies are paralyzed or corrupted, civil servants’ job protections become worthless. Thomas and Barrett endorsed this outcome just last month.

This is sloppy and highly misleading. It addresses only principal officers. Even Chief Justice Taft, in Myers, accepted that the appointment of inferior officers can be vested in the department heads and they can be granted removal protections, creating the civil service.
This decision doesn't even come close to touching that issue.
Barb McQuade &
@BarbMcQua...•20h
The Slaughter case, overturning precedent, returns us to a spoils system where a president can "clean house" every four years, destroying our professional, independent civil service.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· Jun 29

In the same vein: It is extraordinary just how little effort Roberts (and Kavanaugh) put into distinguishing the Federal Reserve from every other independent agency. They can just speak it into existence. There's basically no law here, and barely any pretense of it. slate.com/news-and-pol...

On what basis could Roberts and Kavanaugh possibly allow Trump to purge Democratic appointees from the rest of the administrative state while zealously protecting members of the Fed? Roberts barely bothered to explain. After recounting the various permutations of a central bank throughout American history, he concluded that the Fed’s independence constitutes a “special arrangement sanctioned by history.” What does that mean? Kavanaugh, in a concurrence, added his own gloss, reiterating the court’s previous declaration that the Fed is a “quasi-private, uniquely structured entity” with a “distinct historical tradition.” But its board of governors is not actually quasi-private or unique, except in the sense that all federal agencies have some unique origin story. So, again: What is the constitutional distinction that allowed the court to spare the Fed from its otherwise categorical execution of agency independence?

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· Jun 29

John Roberts handing down Slaughter and Cook together felt like a weird domination ritual in which he gets to flaunt his power to issue irreconcilable rulings that perfectly track his partisan preferences and we all just to take it because, really, who's gonna stop him? slate.com/news-and-pol...

On Monday, the Supreme Court banished any doubt that it has claimed absolute authority to reshape the federal government as it sees fit. Its decisions in Trump v. Slaughter and Trump v. Cook are almost comically irreconcilable as a matter of logic: The court at once allowed the president to fire the heads of almost every independent agency while preventing him from removing a leader of the one agency it really values, the Federal Reserve. These rulings make sense only as one step in the court’s broader campaign of empowering the president—specifically this president, Donald J. Trump—to enact most of his agenda through executive action without becoming complicit in a catastrophic recession. But the biggest winner here isn’t even Trump; it’s SCOTUS itself. The court not only gets to establish sweeping new rules of American governance, but also to tweak those rules as necessary to favor presidential policies it prefers while quashing those it dislikes. Who could possibly call this a democracy?

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· Jun 29

Roberts' core holding is that (a) the Federal Reserve is special because of history, and (b) Trump did not allow Lisa Cook to exercise her statutory right to dispute the charges against her. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

Having rejected the Government’s view that the courts
are to play no role in assessing the validity of a Governor’s
removal, we may decide this application on narrow
grounds. No matter the precise definition of cause, or the
scope of our review of any such determination, the President failed to afford Cook the procedural protections to
which she was entitled by statute. Without such protections, she could not properly dispute the charges the President laid against her. We thus need not address Cook’s constitutional due process argument, for the statute alone
makes it unlikely that the Government will prevail on appeal as to the validity of the procedures used to fire Cook.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· Jun 29

Applying the Katz test, the majority holds that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in our cell phone location information, so the government conducts a 4th Amendment "search" when it invades that privacy. I think that's pretty clearly correct. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

For all those reasons, we hold that police officers invade
a cell-phone user’s reasonable expectation of privacy when
they access his Location History. It does not matter if the
time period scrutinized was only two hours. Nor does it
matter that the materials obtained were handed over by a
third-party tech company. When the government “accesses
historical cell phone” location information—Location History as much as CSLI—it “conducts a search under the
Fourth Amendment.” Carpenter, 585 U. S., at 300.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc· Jun 29

The Supreme Court's second opinion is Chatrie v. U.S. By a 6–3 vote, the court holds that a geofence warrant (described below) IS a "search" under the 4th Amendment. But it declines to say whether THIS search was "reasonable." Kagan writes. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...