Amy Sorkin

His campaign is careening, his poll numbers are slipping, and, after something of a summer lull, he is due for several confrontations in court.

President Biden has proposed radical changes to the Court. Reviewing them is a reminder of why reform is so hard, despite dissatisfaction and a wealth of ideas.

Any V.P. choice involves weighing factors such as readiness, regional balance, and demographics. Harris is a fifty-nine-year-old woman from California; she is Black and South Asian (and is married to a Jewish man). The person she chooses will be squaring up directly against Trump’s running mate, Senator J. D. Vance, of Ohio. And, thanks to the Twelfth Amendment, it can’t be someone who, like Harris, is a Californian, unless the Democrats want to give up that state’s electoral votes—so Governor G…

Judge Cannon treated the charges brought by the special counsel and his team as if they were the work of a vigilante.

Trump didn’t get everything he asked for from the Supreme Court—but only because he asked for so, so much, including that a criminal trial might not be possible absent an impeachment conviction. Trump got more than enough to turn the January 6th indictment brought against him by Jack Smith in Washington, D.C., into, at best, a shard of its former self. The same can likely be said for the indictment against him in Fulton County, Georgia, for some of the same acts; Trump has already tried to get t…

Afterward, C.M. got a call from Rahimi, who threatened to shoot her if she reported him. She sought a temporary protective order against him anyway. Rahimi, who was then twenty years old, appeared in court, and a judge mandated that he stay away from C.M. and suspended his gun license for two years. She should have had reason to hope that such orders are worth more than the paper they’re written on. And, on Friday, in the case of United States v. Rahimi, the Supreme Court at least partly affirme…

There were, Cannon said, “myriad and interconnected” unresolved issues and “novel and difficult questions,” which made it “imprudent” to proceed sooner. For Smith’s team, these supposed mysteries might be boiled down to a couple of simple questions: Why can’t Cannon just move faster? Why won’t she shut Trump down, when he clearly wants delay for delay’s sake? (If Trump wins the election, he might kill the case.) “Each time the Court sets a new deadline in this case and attempts to keep it moving…

That sorry episode was revisited, repeatedly and somewhat incongruously, before the Supreme Court on Tuesday, in oral arguments for Joseph W. Fischer v. United States. Fischer was part of the mob that assaulted the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He, like hundreds of other January 6th defendants, has been charged with, among other things, violating the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a law that Congress passed, as Justice Elena Kagan put it on Tuesday, when “it had just gone through Enron” and had wanted to be…

That’s the theory, anyway. But the focus will not only be on New York. In a ten-day period beginning on Tuesday, the second day of jury selection, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in two cases—Fischer v. United States and Trump v. United States—that could each undermine another indictment that Smith brought in Washington, D.C., involving Trump’s actions in the lead-up to the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The Fischer case will be heard first, on April 16th. It is a challeng…

As Jackson pointed out, “the obvious common-sense remedy” would be to provide any such doctors with an exemption—which, as it happens, they already have. Federal law allows doctors to decline to take part in an abortion at any stage. The A.H.M. wants “more than that,” Jackson said. “And I guess I’m just trying to understand how they could possibly be entitled to that.” She wasn’t the only Justice to wonder. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was part of the conservative majority that overturned Roe v.…