Opening Arguments

Hey folks, no VR this week because Lydia and I are traveling. (We're in Boston, going to record RRF live together with Matt!) But folks NEED to hear this episode of Gavel Gavel we did. It's so absurd. Gavel Gavel Episode 83: Thomas, Lydia, and Matt dig into a newly released federal indictment out of Minneapolis, where ICE's undercover operation, officially named Operation Puppet Master, has charge...

OA1292 - Jenessa takes us through the Supreme Court's 6-3 shadow docket ruling in Trump v. California , which lifted a preliminary injunction blocking Trump's executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service to gatekeep mail-in ballot delivery before the midterms. Is this a procedural technicality or a five-alarm fire for November? And what does it mean that the Postal Service published its final...

OA1291 - This week on Rapid Response Friday: the single biggest consumer protection settlement ever reached with any U.S. company puts new guardrails on younger social media users, a federal judge refuses to let Steve Bannon off the hook just because DOJ asked him to, an under-the-radar example of ICE’s determination to get around federal court orders, and Trump’s new war on how law schools are ac...

VR42 - Today on Vapid Response Wednesday: Lydia, Thomas, and Matt check in on the official podcast of Stephen Miller's America First Legal, and Matt brings the receipts to show just how bad its recurring "Bad Legal Takes" feature truly is. How is an organization with this much dark money behind it so consistently terrible at producing the MAGA version of our very own Vapid Response? Plus in today'...

OA1290 - Jenessa returns with a surveillance grab bag: a New York mayor declares a bizarre "emergency" to keep her city's Flock cameras running after the city council said no, and a state lawsuit arguing license plate readers are flatly unconstitutional, no federal court needed. Plus a federal bill that could make biased AI hiring and healthcare tools very expensive, and the surprisingly deadly re...

OA1289 - Is Disney/ABC’s bold new legal action against the Trump administration one of the most important First Amendment challenges  of our lifetimes, or just another Mickey Mouse operation? Matt explains. Also an explainer on the legally questionable end of Temporary Protected Status for El Salvador, a new ICE purchase that will truly shock you, and a footnote on how the lawyer who put himself i...

VR41 - What does a “moderate conservative” sound like in August 2026? Thomas and Matt take a closer look at two very different self-proclaimed “moderates” representing the best and brightest in MAGA apologism. We begin with some low points from Tim Pool’s recent appearance on the gimmicky “Surrounded” debate series before taking on our main story:  a National Review cover piece by Dan McLaughlin o...

OA1288 - What happens when a hotheaded cop who isn’t interested in putting in much effort to solve a crime meets up with another cop who thinks computers are infallible? A man with no criminal record who lives 300 miles from the crime scene and has no conceivable connection to the crime gets arrested. Hear the ACLU lay out the case for strict guardrails on the use of facial identification software...

OA1287 - Today on Rapid Response Friday:  Todd “Two Taints” Blanche flexes his new freedom as two Tates blanch at the loss of theirs, and a lawsuit over a cinematic heist starring Nicolas Cage. Applicability of Executive Privilege to Presidential Communications with Private Advisers , Office of Legal Counsel (8/10/2026) Second Superseding Indictment in United States of America v. Southern Poverty...

VR40 - This Vapid Response Wednesday, we note the end of Ross Douthat’s 17-year run as the resident New York Times conservative columnist with a drive-by review of some of his most willfully clueless work--and a closer look at his recent farewell message in which he provides a fitting capstone to a long career of willfully ignoring everything about how and why the American right went full MAGA. Yo...

OA1286 - NYU Law professor and Strict Scrutiny co-host Melissa Murray joins to discuss (among many other things) her new book, Sonia Sotomayor’s dance moves, and why actually reading the Constitution matters now more than ever.  Professor Murray’s book The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader is this month’s OA Book Club selection, and we’ll be meeting to di...

OA1285 - This week on Rapid Response Friday: regulators, mount up! We take a closer look at the actual documents provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee by Attorney General nominee Todd Blanche which convinced John Cornyn and Thom Tillis to change their votes, how deregulation caused a national cyclospora outbreak (and the legal response to it), and state efforts to stop the “prediction market”...

VR39 - Vapid Response Wednesday returns with a tasteful pairing of stories about alleged anti-Italian discrimination that go together like chianti and red sauce. Today's specials include: Aperitivo : a tasteless morsel from the least deserving recipient in the history of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor Primo: a chef’s kiss Washington Examiner oped on how NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani “erased” L...

OA1284 - Can a modern court implement modern solutions? It really depends on your perspective. Despite some baffling misconceptions about how… anything works, the Justices seem to be doing a pretty good job of ultimately deciding that yes, police do in fact need a warrant to deeply invade your digital privacy. While Kavanaugh appears to have the entire concept of data storage and search queries up...

Apologies for being a little late on this one! Donald Trump sued the IRS, an agency he currently runs, for leaking his own tax returns, and asked for a cool $10 billion. Thomas, Lydia, and Matt dig through the actual complaint and a judge's increasingly suspicious rulings, all timed suspiciously close to Todd Blanche's confirmation hearing. It is dumber, and more corrupt, than it sounds. Cases dis...

LAM1015 - Jimmy Smits stars as a gambling, sports-shooting Supreme Court Justice with a law clerk paid to fend off his advances, in NBC's forgotten 2010 flop Outlaw . Thomas, Matt, and Lydia can barely get through a single scene without stopping to ask what this show thinks a Justice actually does. This free 45-minute preview only scratches the surface of how bad it gets. $2+ Patrons already have...

OA1282 - Is anything private any more? Depends which Supreme Court Justice you ask. To kick off a series of episodes around data privacy and the law, first Jenessa walks us through a string of Supreme Court cases addressing 4th Amendment rights and technology. In part 1, we cover landmark cases with wiretapping, beepers, GPS trackers, thermal imaging, and more. Stick around for part 2 to hear how...

OA1281 - As we wait on the final vote tally for Attorney General nominee Todd Blanche, we take a look at written responses which he recently provided into the record to answer a wide range of Senate questions the day after his hearing concluded. We also take a closer look at how the 5th Circuit is trying to make a recent Clarence Thomas concurrence into law, and how Thomas’s retrograde reading of...

OA1280 - Peter O’Neil was preparing for retirement after decades of practicing law when he learned that he was autistic at the age of 65. This realization inspired his memoir  My So-Called Disorder: Autism, Exploding Trucks, and the Big Daddy of Rock and Roll , in which he looks back at his life and legal career to better understand how his neurodiversity played a role in both his most significant...

OA1279 - This week on Rapid Response Friday: A federal judge rips up the corrupt “settlement” Trump reached with his own IRS at the unprecedented request of a group of 35 former federal judges just in time time for aspiring Attorney General Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing, humanizing the latest victims of ICE, and a metafootnote about a DC judge who hates footnotes nearly as much as Matt loves...

VR38 - This week in Vapid Response Thomas, Lydia, and Matt review some truly awful takes from a MAGA economist on the true cause of low crime rates, Rep. Nancy Mace on her extremely real and not-at-all-racist concerns about the dangers of judges with dual citizenship, and a then-20-year-old Rolling Stone columnist in 1969 on his immediate disdain for what would become one of the greatest rock albu...

OA1278 - On its face, the decision in Watson is a pretty narrow ruling. Some states allow ballots postmarked on or before election day, but arriving after election day, to be counted. The court decided they can continue to do so. But at stake was so much more. Bubbling under the surface, election deniers were trying to open a door to far more aggressive limitations on voting rights. With this deci...

OA1277 - We continue our coverage of the Trump administration’s criminalization of dissent with a brief update on the sentencing of the last remaining Prairieland defendant and a closer look at similar federal prosecutions of ICE protesters in Minneapolis, Spokane, and a number of other jurisdictions. Matt then explains how the DOJ just complicated a case against someone alleged to have leaked the...

VR37 - Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh both wrote furious, error-riddled columns attacking the Supreme Court's birthright citizenship ruling in Trump v. Barbara. And so Thomas, attorney Matt Cameron, and producer Lydia ran the columns through an AI detector and their BS detectors to see just how fake and how BS they were. Spoiler: it's a lot.

OA1276 - Who could have predicted this? Us! The Trump administration has made their complete disdain for people with disabilities clear since day one. We’ve called it out before, and the natural progression of those efforts came to a head mid-June when they announced their intention to turn over governance of special education to RFK Jr in HHS (least trusted man in America when it comes to the nee...