In practically every case, the court aligned not just with a majority but a supermajority...

This seems trivial as you can often word a policy question to get the answer you want, especially for low-salience, first-time-they-thought-about-it questions like "should gunmakers be financially responsible for crimes committed by Mexican cartels." And these researchers did run the polls they're citing.

And then the essay no-true-Scotsmans it by saying, well, they didn't align with public opinion in Dobbs, but then they moderated after. What good is a theory if it doesn't predict the most important cases?

And it doesn't mention the grant of presidential immunity at all.

I also notice it doesn't mention student loan forgiveness or the environmental "Major Questions Doctrine" case.

There's a great Uncommon Law case (Dahlia Ltd v Yvonne, "An Act of God") in which a very junior barrister argues in front of the Lords that his client, though they have lost their case, should not be held liable for costs, because it's settled law that you can't be held liable for an Act of God, and a judgement of the House of Lords is effectively an Act of God, ie something "that no reasonable man could be expected to anticipate".

"Milord, it must be evident a priori that no reasonable man can foresee a decision of the House of Lords, for otherwise no reasonable man would appeal to the House of Lords, only to lose his case... No man can foresee an Act of God and therefore no man is mulcted in money by the Courts for anything that follows from these proceedings, since it would be inequitable to hold a man responsible in law for that for which he cannot ex hypothesi be responsible in fact. A decision of your Lordships on a difficult point of law, with great respect, is as incalculable as the onset of a flood, and by the same reasoning it would be inequitable for either side to be compelled to pay for it."
"But would not your reasoning apply with equal force to the costs of the hearing in the High Court or the Court of Appeal?"
"In the Court of Appeal, perhaps, milord, but not in the High Court, for there the proceedings consist mainly in a finding of fact by the jury, and a reasonable man can be expected to foresee that a British jury will discover the true facts..."

More seriously, most of the cases the Supremes look at are fairly low-salience issues, and, if we assume for a moment that the US is a functioning democracy, the state of the law actually should represent what a supermajority of people think is right, and a functioning and non-corrupt court should interpret the law honestly - so you'd see the same results even without any attention to public opinion.

Malhotra's hypothesis is that the Court may be picking cases where it knows it will rule in line with public opinion, but that begs a very important question:

How are the Supremes supposed to know what public opinion is in the first place? Was there really readily available public polling on all these issues in advance?

Those are great points about which decisions were excluded.

I suspect the "median voter" concept no longer works well in this era, because elections just don't turn on policies that much any longer. 90% of the country votes for the same party every time out and their policy preferences mostly change in tandem with party leadership's preferences. The remainder is primarily a hodgepodge of people who just dislike whoever is in power and "vibes" voters that may as well be choosing radio stations in the car. The median American voter in 2024 is an ideologically incoherent mess.

I can't find the 2025 questions. The OP item seems to frame the issues in terms of the results as reported by SCOTUSblog, and not by the questions asked in the survey.

Here is the 2024 data. I don't think this method can get at real public opinion about real court decisions.

So for instance, presidential immunity was taken up in the 2024 survey and, yeah, 73.6 percent disagreed with SCOTUS on that one. Here's how that looks in the survey:

Some people think that former presidents are not immune from criminal prosecution for actions they took while president and so can be criminally prosecuted for such actions. Other people think that former presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for actions they took while president. What do you think?

Former presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for actions they took while president

Former presidents are NOT immune from criminal prosecution for actions they took while president

But this leaves out the fact that this immunity only applies to "official acts." Personally, I believe that omission is legit and gets to the core issue, but it fails to reckon with the court's actual argument.

On the other hand, it also doesn't touch on the inadmissability of evidence about unofficial acts if the evidence is related to the performance of an official act. What would the public think of that important aspect of the decision?

It all reminds me of Jonathan Haidt. You can prove whatever you want to prove using surveys like this.

That's also very true. The way it was phrased in the interview was "if you were building a new party, what positions would maximize the portion of voters you align with?" The answer ...

OMFG MY PHONE IS FORCING VOICE TRANSCRIBE ON ME AND IT KEEPS WRITING DOWN WHAT MY KIDS ARE SAYING AND ITS TAKING ME TEN MINUTES TO WRITE THIS DOWN, what fresh hell is this!???

I think I turned it off.

Anyway 9 was responding to 7 and I don't even remember my point, probably something brilliant.

I mean 8 was responding to 6. Sorry pf.

I've only skimmed the Trump rape allegation, but it's hard for me to conceive of an allegation of nonconsensual sexual behavior by Trump that I would find implausible.

12: I don't think he likes guys at all. But involving a woman or a girl who looks at least on the cusp of womanhood, I don't think there's anything I would find implausible there. What a gross fuck. I hate that I have to think about him at all, ever, in any way.

Two instances of him forcibly raping adult women are on public record, so yeah, hard to put any of it past him.

The aspect I think about is that we know well that he sees anyone who walks away from cheating/scamming/taking advantage is a sucker. It never crosses his mind to walk away from something he desires. So I don't have an opinion on whether he'd seek out young girls on his own volition. But this is not that. If his buddy orchestrates young girls for everyone, I 1000% cannot imagine him demurring and not joining in.

I guess the article had to mention Dobbs. But not to mention Trump v. US ? Or Shelby County? Or overturning Chevron ? Maybe the median voter wants a king, wants voter suppression, wants no regulations. I guess. But it's suspicious that these -momentous- decisions (I'm surely leaving out other equally important ones[*]) are left out.

[*] and allowing Trump to impound any monies he wants? firing anybody he wants?

If the median voter thinks all this is good-to-go ..... really, stick a fork in America.

America lacks a pop-up thermometer like the turkeys from Butterball.

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Seed of the Sacred Fig? I don't want a downer.
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18 I haven't seen it yet but it looks excellent, though unfortunately a downer.

I hope we live to see the day a buzzy Iranian film can reasonably be expected not to be a downer.

Ha! But they are so very good. Have you seen Kiarostami's Where is the Friend's House? A masterpiece and one of the most uplifting films I've ever seen.

28 it's definitely time for my knockabout comedy set in tenth-century Syria, "Omar The Assassin" about a harmless Iranian stoner who is known to everyone in his village as Omar the Weed Dude, "Omar al-hashishin", and then travels to Alawite Syria and gets involved in HILARIOUS MISUNDERSTANDINGS.

Think "Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle" except it's two Iranian dudes, it's Alamut, and the Neil Patrick Harris character is Hassan al Sabbah.

The other Iranian dude is of course perpetually wasted college dropout and tent entrepreneur Omar Khayyam.

6: I'm closer to the median voter on drug policy than I am when I was 20, but my views on drug war etc. haven't budged much since there of 18.

I forgot about Harold and Kumar! I wonder if that would be fun to watch with kids.

I mean, probably? There's some naughty words used but not much else - the worst bit a euphemised suggestion at the end that NPH has had what the tabloids would call a "tryst" in the front seat of Kumar's car and left stains.

The Washington Post is surveying former subscribers and I really appreciated the opportunity to tell them exactly why I dropped.

They were deeply committed to the idea that I dropped because $120 was too much money in tightening economic times.

If the kids have already seen the Lemony Snicket show on Netflix, then they probably won't get the humor value of Harold & Kumar's Dirtbag Doogie Howser.

Fortunately, WaPo has now laid off most of the people whose work occasionally made me wish I was still subscribed.

Yeah, I mentioned that to them.

I'm not one of you modern parents with the permissive attitudes about movie sex, drugs and violence, but I think even you liberal elites might find the two Harold and Kumar sequels a bit much for the kids.

So for instance, in Escape from Guantanamo our heroes go to the house of a friend who, bored with the idea of a topless party, instead hosts a bottomless party. And A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas includes a scene with penis frozen to a pole in a manner reminiscent of A Christmas Story.

It turns out that imdb has parental guides for all three movies. Christmas here, Guantanamo here and the original here.

"Sex and nudity" for the sequels is rated "Severe."

All three are rated ungenerously by Rotten Tomatoes at 74, 53 and 69. Movie critics have little patience for frat-boy stoner humor.

Guantanamo (the 53) included a sympathetic portrayal of GW Bush that was somehow weirdly plausible. Christmas had an over-the-top claymation sequence and a violent episode involving Santa. I find myself wanting to watch them all again, but I don't think I can do the latter two with my quasi-adult kids.

Severe nudity?

On the temperature scale.

I've never seen the movie though.

And I probably never will. Dude, Where's My Car perfected the stoner comedy. There's no need to see another.

37: Not even for the severe nudity?

Dude. Sweet.

Maybe.

38: It's available for free at any bus stop

If you've lost your car, that is indeed where you will be.

I remember the original Harold and Kumar being more for college-age and older. It's weird scrolling through movie listings on Fandango* and seeing "unrated" versions of all three movies as possible choices. I didn't see the sequels, but the first movie wasn't something I'd have expected to include an unrated version.

*More of a rental/"ownership"** service, not a subscription service. Maybe everyone knows it, but I don't think it's as widely used as the big subscription streamers. I'm only an occasional subscriber to things like Netflix/Hulu/etc. and will buy [licenses] to stuff if I don't want to depend on a subscription to have it. In addition to still buying discs.

**Actually, just a long-term license to stream.

Has anyone else here seen "The Lizard" (Kamal Tabrizi, 2004)? Fairly kid appropriate Iranian movie. I thought it was very enjoyable as a non-traditional college student when it came out.

I'm currently recovering from severe oral nudity surgery, flying high on 5mg oxycodones. When I was in hospital recently, I was able to convince them to give me iV Dilaudid a couple of times, but it's not as fun when you're in extreme pain and rockin' the naso-gastric tube like some kind of horrible elephant costume.

Oxycodone is the best. I don't know why people were so mean to those nice Sacklers.

I've never had any. My sister made me throw away perfectly good morphine once.

And that wasn't my really responsible sister.

The spine doctor said that my tingly fingers and my neck pain are two separate things, and the neck pain just needs good old fashioned PT. For the tingly fingers, she wants to rule out MS, which has me a little bit spooked. I get to get a brain MRI next.

I just learned that I have been conflating Marc Marron and Marc Summers.

I thought he got older and became a comedian.

Omg, that's such a great conflation.

I was just listening to Ezra Klein interview Barbara Kingsolver. I liked her so much at the beginning of the interview, but as it wore on I started to really dislike her.

Granted it was recorded in 2023, when I had much less anger at rural red voters.

I was listening to Marc Marron, who is pretty funny.

52: I didn't make it through the interview; I hadn't figured out what annoyed me but 53 is a reasonable explanation.

I'm not sure I would have tolerated it in 2023 either, but solidarity on the irksomeness in 2025.

I have no idea how people find out what Ezra Klein thinks or says and I do not want to know.

48: Another triumph for Hickum's dictum.

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Remembering the diplomatic maxim that "countries have no friends, only interests", Amorim said Trump was an unusual case because he had "neither friends nor interests, just wishes". The US president's approach is "an illustration of absolute power", he said.

52: I had liked lots of Kingsolver's books and essays, but was extraordinarily annoyed by hearing her interviewed about her book that's an Appalachian rewrite of David Copperfield a couple of years back. Poverty is bad wherever it is, and needs more attention, but cultural disdain for rural Appalachian poverty is just not an important root of America's problems, and the way she was talking about it made her sound like an extremely silly person.

That's definitely the same interview tour as the one I heard.

She was simultaneously saying:
1. City/capitalism America has forgotten Appalachia and caused all its problems
2. Those problems that are uniquely Appalachian are extreme poverty
3. Appalachia has unique wonderful things like humanity and community

I granted her #1, but 2 and 3 were so insufferable, under the guise of "no one realizes these things about America and until you city liberals do, you can't understand why they might fall for a demagogue."

I'm buying Irish butter to fuck over central Pennsylvania. Which is not technically Appalachia.

Kingsolver lived in Tucson when I was growing up, so every time you went over to someone's house there'd be a copy of The Bean Trees or Animal Dreams lying around, either because their parents were reading it or because it had been assigned in school. I was always sympathetic to where she was coming from and had the sense that her fiction was not, as fiction, the greatest fiction. I didn't know she had abandoned the borderlands for Appalachia.

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Am I missing it, or does the US not have a federal river police service?
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Also, how the fuck does it take two years for an Atom Egoyan film to find a distributor?

I think the Coast Guard has police power on some of the bigger rivers.

The best way to understand river police in the United States is to watch Striking Distance.

I think the Coast Guard has police power on some of the bigger rivers.

Probably the result of someone asking Who will police the river police?

The rivers are policed by former homicide cops who accused their colleagues of crimes, per 67.

44: OMG, dilaudid. A couple decades ago when, I took a leisurely barefoot stroll across the family room, unaware that sweet Rory had planted a toothpick garden... The nurse in the ER was waaayyyy too enthusiastic about administering the IV dilaudid--like, there was even some weird reference to its street value. They had only pushed about half of what the doc had ordered when I learned that opiates make me violently nauseated and vehemently refused any more. I mean, I suppose it worked in that the overwhelming urge to vomit made me briefly forget about my toe kebab. Whatever it is other people find enjoyable about these drugs is just totally inaccessible to me.

my toe kebab

Maybe the lamb ones are easier to digest.

61: Even 1 is bullshit. I will accept that America is not actually doing enough about problems in Appalachia (as with problems everyplace else in the country), but Forgotten Appalachia has been trendy for ages. JD Vance rode it to national office. It simply is not disproportionately neglected.

We don't have a federal river police service. Crimes committed on rivers are prosecuted by city/county authorities.

The Bitterroot River near me has a commissioner -- he's not prosecuting crimes, but making sure allocations of river water are appropriate under the law.

Fish Wildlife Parks 'polices' fishing -- I'm sure we're in hoot owl restrictions now, because of the drought.

To float the lower Flathead River, you have to have a CSKT pass -- and if you don't, tribal police can write you a citation.

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We went to a poetry reading thing last night. Joy Harjo is a gem. Sasha Lapointe is amazing. Seek them out!

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But what about the major barge-related rivers? I'm pretty sure Dakota County, Nebraska isn't who gets called if someone runs a bunch of barges down the river when the Corps of Engineers says not to.

70 is also my reaction. I took Oxy once and felt like shit. I had IV dilaudid after face surgery (and fentanyl during it) and puked on the nice people trying to put me in the CT machine afterwards and ended up having to stay overnight because I couldn't move, which meant I had to have a catheter, which meant I got to experience what it feels like to be pulled inside out when they removed it... where was I? That was also the "Do I really need to breathe? It's easier not to..." episode.
For the follow-up surgery I found my own anesthesiologist via a friend of a friend who is skilled at minimizing opiate usage and it went much better.

Apparently, New York just had a small earthquake, but it was New Jersey's fault.

OMG, I did sooooo much puking at the hospital this last time. Once when they were putting in the NG tube for the first time and then again for no obvious reason. Super not fun. Today I had to drag the periodontist in to the office to deal with the dressing on my teeth which has come loose. Apparently it's not a critical part of the healing, but it works to prevent the gums from springing back up. Nasty thing though. Probably going to be relying on yogurt for much of my diet for the next two weeks, so in a fortnight I'll probably be a yogi. The fancy little grocery store a mile from me has bottles of mango lassi for $11, so I am hoping to avail myself of some of that.

Now if they would just legalize opium, we could get some of the really good bhang lassi going. Mango, yogurt, ganja, nutmeg and opium -- if Shiva made anything better he kept it for hisself!

Unpleasant opiate reactions sound very unpleasant. Not my particular (recreational) poison, but have always found them lovely and floaty any time I've been given them.

75: Not sure about US but in Canada, DFO has jurisdiction up some amount from the estuary, then the province (or national park in my case). But DFO always has jurisdiction for fishing or damaging habitat bits, even in the park which otherwise is a bit like its own kingdom. But boats? I don't think boats are banned from rivers. But actually, now that I think about it, I bet at a certain point it switches to DOT for the province/state.

Water stuff is a pain. In another park, it turned out the strip between the mean high and low tides was owned by the province so the park couldn't ban people from walking along it. But unfortunately that was the exact bit the endangered bird needed to feed in. And people were such jerks about it. I think they ended up renting it from the province for like $1.

No experience with anything stronger than a NSAID.

"Now if they would just legalize opium, we could get some of the really good bhang lassi going."

SEE THATS JUST WHAT I BEEN SAYIN ALL THIS TIME

Now wondering if I have the energy to argue that the only redeeming feature of the otherwise appalling and worthless British Empire was its willingness to fight for the right of the Chinese working man to get high if he damn well wanted.

Trump is going to replace the U.S. military with Proud Boys and assorted racists, then declare war on Canada. Canada will win this war as 75% of the American military will have shot themselves in the dick by the end of the first day, the other 25% having been shot in the dick by another American soldier. Under the terms of the surrender, Canada can import unlimited fentanyl into the United States and it is for sale at every Cracker Barrel (now a subsidiary of Canadian Tire).

81, 64: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuGGNsE3_8Y

75 Violating a Corps permit is going to result in action from the district engineer. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-33/chapter-II/part-326

The Coast Guard does some law enforcement.

I'm sure Trump's expanded ICE will start kidnapping and deporting people working on barges on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. If they aren't already.

I don't know who works on the barges. Locally, the worst ICE action is said to be in Ambridge, right on the Ohio.

Locally, the worst ICE action is said to be in Ambridge

Trouble at Home Farm, I hear, Shula?