Ruth Marcus
Verified
Contributing writer, New Yorker. Ex Washington Post. Author Supreme Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover.
Articles by Ruth Marcus
Kimberly Who?
Guilfoyle, a lawyer and former prosecutor—she overlapped with Kamala Harris in the San Francisco district attorney’s office—understood the risk posed by Deters’s digital trail. “Stop papering all these things,” she warned, advising Deters to call her on Signal instead. “It’s really dangerous.” Deters ultimately balked at the AmEx payment. “I can’t do this without getting a divorce,” he told Guilfoyle.
Mail-In Voting Survives
Imminent chaos aside, the Administration’s claim that the Postal Service has authority to regulate mail-in ballots is questionable at best. The Constitution entrusts the conduct of elections to the states and Congress, if it wishes; the executive branch has no assigned role. The Administration attempted to discern authority over mail-in ballots in 1970 legislation authorizing the modern Postal Service, a stretch worthy of Spider-Man.
Mail-In Voting Survives
1:58 4 hours ago Maryland woman nearly fooled in Wells Fargo scam WBAL • 4h Lauren Star said it began with three consecutive calls from the same unknown number. Initially, she worried it might be an emergency involving her family. Instead, Star said the caller claimed to be from Wells Fargo's fraud department and told her someone had opened a credit card in her name. According to the caller, the card had been used to purchase thousands of dollars in guns and ammunition.
How Donald Trump Outmaneuvers the Supreme Court
Perhaps the most unexpected aspect of Monday’s ruling was that Chief Justice John Roberts dissented. Roberts has typically been supportive of Presidential authority, and reluctant to use the Court’s emergency docket to block the Trump Administration from implementing its initiatives. In the ballroom case, Roberts broke with that stance, not only joining the three liberal Justices but reserving his authority to write the dissent himself.
How Trump Is Trying to Weaken Migrant Children’s Legal Defense
The announcement of the no-bid award to Our Rescue cited the need to “ensure continuity of legal services for unaccompanied alien children.” Immigration advocates’ concerns about this second contract announcement focussed on whether the organization was capable of filling that gap. I spoke with Stephanie Richard, who directs an anti-trafficking program at Loyola Law School.
How Trump Is Trying to Weaken Migrant Children’s Legal Defense
4 hours ago Hundreds of Afghans who fought alongside U.S. troops and supported the U.S. government in Afghanistan are now worried their green cards could be revoked. In Afghanistan, their efforts ranged from custodial jobs at the U.S. embassy, to technology and engineering roles with U.S. contractors and …
The Senate’s Shameful Acquiescence to Todd Blanche as Attorney General
The biggest sticking point for Blanche’s confirmation has been his efforts to settle a lawsuit that Trump filed against the I.R.S. over the release of his tax returns. Blanche, who had been Trump’s criminal-defense lawyer before joining the Justice Department, helped create a $1.776-billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund that would have opened the door to reparations for January 6th defendants.
The Outlandish Case Against James Comey
Of all the prosecutions of Donald Trump’s enemies, the case against James Comey has always stood out for its tragicomic excess.
Trump’s War on Journalists
For years now, in office and out, Donald Trump has been unabashed about his desire to see reporters behind bars. The President’s fantasies can, at times, take on a lurid tone. Campaigning for Republican candidates during the 2022 midterms, Trump assailed the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion in Dobbs, the landmark abortion case, and outlined his preferred approach to identifying the source: “The reporter goes to jail.
Trump’s Election-Fraud Bait and Switch
Voters, it appears, have a more dyspeptic view; a Washington Post-Ipsos poll published earlier in the day found the President’s approval rating to be floundering at thirty-seven per cent, where it was in April. More alarming for Trump, the poll suggested a weakening of his base; just fifteen per cent, a new low, said they “approve strongly” of his performance.
Donald Trump’s Election-Fraud Bait and Switch
The President promised “really, really big news” before his prime-time speech. But the declassified, heavily redacted documents he delivered felt more like Pam Bondi’s bogus Epstein binders than any true revelation. President Donald Trump wants Americans to be very afraid about the midterm …
The Remaking of Lindsey Graham
On July 13, 2015, my Washington Post colleague Michael Gerson and I interviewed Senator Lindsey Graham about his long-shot and, as it turned out, not terribly long-lasting Presidential campaign. The day before, on CNN, the South Carolina Republican had unloaded on Donald Trump, who had glided down the golden escalator at Trump Tower the previous month to launch his own, seemingly improbable, Presidential bid.
The Supreme Court’s Check on Trump’s Power Was Too Close for Comfort
If anything, this term served to reinforce the dominance of the conservative majority, its willingness to overturn precedents, and the ideological chasm between the Court’s liberal and conservative wings. It saw a doubling, compared with the previous term, of the share of cases in which the Justices split 6–3 along ideological lines.
The Supreme Court Enables Trump’s Cruel Immigration Agenda
“This case presents a straightforward question: whether an alien who seeks to enter the United States from Mexico ‘arrives in the United States when he or she is still in Mexico,’ ” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. “In ordinary speech, no one would say that a person ‘arrives in’ a place—for example, a house, a city, or a country—before the person enters that place.” For Alito, that sufficed, and he kept the analogies flowing.
Why Todd Blanche Should Not Be Attorney General
Shortly before midnight on April 27th, two days after a gunman disrupted the White House Correspondents’ dinner, the acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche, submitted an extraordinary petition to a federal court that had blocked the construction of the White House ballroom.
Why Todd Blanche Should Not Be Attorney General
Catholic University of America Now The New Right Has a Blueprint for Building a Christian America POLITICO - By Ian Ward • 5m WHITLEYVILLE, Tennessee — On a Tuesday morning earlier this spring, Josh Abbotoy steered his pickup truck through a grassy meadow in central Tennessee. The field was empty, save for a few patches of yellow wildflowers.
The Supreme Court’s Latest Blow to Black Voters’ Rights
When the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, in late April, gutting what remained of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it insisted, unconvincingly, that it was merely offering an “update,” clarifying the precise standards for determining violations of the law. Last week, the Court issued an unsigned order in a long-running case involving congressional redistricting in Alabama that exposed that obvious fiction.
How Trump Created a Slush Fund for His Allies
The day after the Justice Department announced the creation of an enormous “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to recompense self-proclaimed victims of government overreach, a Florida-based Republican operative named Michael Caputo filed what is believed to be the very first claim, for $2.7 million in damages, that Caputo says he and his family suffered at the hands of the Biden Administration.
How Trump Created a Slush Fund for His Allies
World News 6 hours ago Silicon Valley takes its AI pitch to the pope politico.eu - Océane Herrero • 6h As Leo XIV prepares his first encyclical, technology firms and Western diplomats have worked to make their case inside the Vatican.
Clarence Thomas Against Progressivism—and Progressives
In a recent speech, the Justice made clear that he views the movement, past and present, as anti-American. During his confirmation hearings, in 1991, Justice Clarence Thomas employed an arresting image to assure senators that he would be an impartial jurist. Taking the bench means “having to strip down, like a runner, to eliminate agendas, to eliminate ideologies,” Thomas said. “It is an amazing process, because that is precisely what you start doing.
Clarence Thomas Against Progressivism—and Progressives
Thomas singled out Woodrow Wilson—a political scientist, a Progressive, and a Southern Democrat, who, as President, from 1913 to 1921, segregated the civil service and helped create the modern bureaucratic state, including the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission. “To Wilson, the unalienable rights of the individual were, quote, a lot of nonsense,” Thomas said.
Will Donald Trump Be Allowed to Destroy His Records?
Enacted in the wake of Watergate and the struggle for control of Richard Nixon’s White House tapes, the Presidential Records Act provides that a President’s official records are government property.
Will Donald Trump Be Allowed to Destroy His Records?
A law passed after Watergate makes Presidential records government property. The Trump Administration has declared it unconstitutional. Donald Trump has long chafed at demands that he preserve Presidential records. During his first term, he had a habit of tearing documents into tiny pieces after he was finished with them; he persisted despite two chiefs of staff and the White House counsel urging him to stop, leaving White House employees with the task of taping them back together for archiving.
Donald Trump’s Pardon Economy
“I have great respect for you,” Donald Trump told Rod Blagojevich. “I have great respect for your tenacity, for the fact that you just don’t give up. But, Rod, you’re fired.” It was April, 2010, week four of the third season of “The Celebrity Apprentice,” and Blagojevich, the pugnacious former governor of Illinois, had bungled the assignment: to design a promotional campaign for a new Harry Potter exhibit at Universal Studios. In truth, Blagojevich had bigger things to worry about.
Pardon Me
For some wealthy offenders, clemency is just a golf game—or a million-dollar plate at Mar-a-Lago—away. "I have great respect for you,” Donald Trump told Rod Blagojevich. “I have great respect for your tenacity, for the fact that you just don’t give up.
Pam Bondi’s Legacy of Flattery and Destruction
But Bondi’s departure does not augur a better world to come. Like the former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whom Trump fired in March, Bondi had become a political liability. She had, in the words of the White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, “completely whiffed” on dealing with conservative clamor for the Epstein files. As Wiles told Vanity Fair, “First she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk.
The Long Odds of Undoing Birthright Citizenship
The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment of that Constitution adopted following the Civil War, in 1868, forms the centerpiece of the case: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” The Amendment was designed to write the concept of birthright citizenship into law, and to undo the damage inflicted by the Supreme Court’s ruling eleven years earlier in Dred Scott v.
The End of Limits on a President’s Wars
But here we are, in a world of congressional atrophy and seemingly unlimited Presidential war-making power. This lopsided situation is not solely of Trump’s making. Congress has not formally declared war since the Second World War, as the executive branch, under Presidents of both parties, has asserted ever-increasing authority to engage in the unilateral use of military force.
The Supreme Court Refuses Trump's Tariffs
The Supreme Court's 6-3 decision today striking down President Trump's tariffs isn't just significant because it constrains him from imposing his transformative economic policy under the guise of a national emergency. The ruling in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump is more important as a welcome signal that even this Court is willing, at times, to stand up against an overreaching President. Warning: Don't go overboard with the champagne.
Pam Bondi's Contempt for Congress
"You don't tell me anything, you washed-up loser lawyer. Not even a lawyer." The Attorney General of the United States was yelling. The target of her fury, who shouted right back, was Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, and, as it happens, a graduate of Harvard Law School and former professor of constitutional law.
How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post
Each week, our editors select aNew Yorker story for you to read: something timely, something important, or something unexpected—or even, perhaps, all three. To support journalism like this, consider subscribing. Photograph by Kent Nishimura / Bloomberg / Getty The Amazon founder bought the paper to save it. Instead, with a mass layoff, he’s forced it into severe decline.
How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post
On September 4, 2013, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos held his first meeting with the staff of the Washington Post, the newspaper he had agreed to purchase a month earlier from the Graham family, for two hundred and fifty million dollars. It had been a long and unsettling stretch for the paper's staff. We-I was a deputy editor of the editorial page at the time-had suffered through years of retrenchment.
How an Attack on Obamacare Saved Abortion in Wyoming
In 2012, voters in Wyoming were asked to approve on three changes to the state constitution: to preserve the right to hunt, fish, and trap; to expand the power of certain judicial employees; and to establish citizens’ authority to determine their own health-care choices.
Jack Smith’s Closing Argument Original
Republicans’ takeaways from Smith’s testimony were, at best, tangential to furthering their claims of weaponization. The main one concerned the House select committee on January 6th, which conducted a separate, public investigation. Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to the White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, was the star witness, testifying in the summer of 2022 that Trump had lunged for the wheel of the Presidential limousine and demanded to be taken to the Capitol.
The Federal Judge at the Trump Rally
The MS NOW reporter Vaughn Hillyard observed that Bove’s appearance at the resort was “an unusual move.” That’s a dramatic understatement. It is normal and appropriate for a President to nominate a political ally or an administration official to a judgeship. It is neither normal nor appropriate for that individual—or any federal judge, for that matter—to attend an unambiguously political event.
The Federal Judge at the Trump Rally
Emil Bove violated a basic tenet of judicial ethics, presumably on purpose. President Trump kicked off his campaigning for the midterm elections on Tuesday night, in a ballroom at the Mt. Airy Casino Resort, in the Poconos. He introduced the Pennsylvania senator David McCormick. (“He’s here again, as usual.
The Dishonorable Strikes on Venezuelan Boats
The Post’s account of a deliberate attack on the survivors takes the situation to a new level of moral depravity and legal recklessness. On Friday, Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who served as the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush, wrote that the Administration could make a “conceivable” argument in defense of the boat strikes.
The Justice Department Hits a New Low with the Epstein Files
On a Friday evening in October, 2021, the Justice Department launched into damage-control mode. The Attorney General, Merrick Garland, the Deputy Attorney General, Lisa Monaco, and other senior officials gathered on an emergency conference call to decide how to deal with what they considered out-of-line remarks from President Joe Biden. Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald Trump, had defied a subpoena from the House select committee investigating January 6th.
The Justice Department Hits a New Low with the Epstein Files
21 hours ago When I was a MAGA believer, I told myself I was fighting for freedom. I was certain we needed a revolution to tear down our established political order. It took me years to realize what I was really after: a sense of belonging. Just like their liberal and moderate compatriots, most people inside the …
How the Supreme Court Defines Liberty
To understand how grudging Amy Coney Barrett’s new book is when it comes to revealing personal details, consider that one of the family members the Supreme Court Justice most often refers to is a great-grandmother who died five years before she was born.
How the Supreme Court Defines Liberty
Louisiana prison guards cut a Rastafari inmate's dreadlocks. Supreme Court will decide if he can sue WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday wrestled with whether a former Louisiana inmate can sue prison officials who cut off his dreadlocks in violation of his Rastafari religious beliefs. The justices heard arguments in the case of Damon Landor, who wants to sue for money damages under a …
Tom Homan and the Case of the Missing Fifty Thousand
Lawmakers and ordinary citizens have to keep asking about the bag of cash, or accept an executive branch without any accountability. Donald Trump’s second term is straining the national capacity for outrage. There is only so much bandwidth to process the scandal—or scandals—of the day. Worry over using the military to kill alleged drug traffickers without legal authority gives way to worry over using the military to quell domestic protests.
Tom Homan and the Case of the Missing Fifty Thousand
Donald Trump’s second term is straining the national capacity for outrage. There is only so much bandwidth to process the scandal—or scandals—of the day. Worry over using the military to kill alleged drug traffickers without legal authority gives way to worry over using the military to quell domestic protests. The vindictive indictment of the former F.B.I. director James Comey is followed by the vindictive indictment of New York’s attorney general, Letitia James.
Nixon Now Looks Restrained
The former President once made an offhand remark about Charles Manson’s guilt. The reaction shows how aberrant Donald Trump’s rhetoric is. On August 3, 1970, prosecutors in Los Angeles were in the second week of presenting their murder case against Charles Manson and three young women accused of killing the actress Sharon Tate and six others. A thousand miles away, at the Federal Building in Denver, President Richard Nixon was attending a conference on crime control for federal and state officials.
The Indictment of Letitia James and the Collapse of Impartial Justice
“One tier of justice for all Americans,” the U.S. Attorney General, Pam Bondi, wrote Thursday on X, shortly after a federal grand jury in Virginia indicted the New York attorney general, Letitia James, on charges of bank fraud and making false statements. Bondi had made a similar point, two weeks before, after the indictment of the former F.B.I. director James Comey. “No one is above the law,” she proclaimed.
Nixon Now Looks Restrained
On August 3, 1970, prosecutors in Los Angeles were in the second week of presenting their murder case against Charles Manson and three young women accused of killing the actress Sharon Tate and six others. A thousand miles away, at the Federal Building in Denver, President Richard Nixon was attending a conference on crime control for federal and state officials.
The Flimsy, Dangerous Indictment of James Comey
Thursday’s indictment of the former F.B.I. director James Comey bore a single, telling signature: that of Lindsey Halligan, installed by President Donald Trump just three days earlier to serve as the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Halligan is an insurance lawyer turned Trump attorney and White House aide; in March, Trump appointed her to remove “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian. She has scant experience in federal courts and none as a prosecutor.
The New Yorker Daily Newsletter
Back in January, during his Inaugural Address, Donald Trump declared that “after years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression,” he would issue an executive order “to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.” There was, as always, reason to be skeptical.
Donald Trump’s Firing of a Federal Prosecutor Crosses the Reddest of Lines
“I want him out,” President Donald Trump declared on Friday, referring to Erik Siebert, the career prosecutor he had tapped less than five months earlier to serve as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Siebert, who had been in the role in an acting capacity since January and whose nomination was pending on the Senate floor, complied in short order.
What Ghislaine Maxwell Told the Justice Department
Listening to the convicted sex offender’s lengthy interview reveals that she and her interviewer had one goal—to satisfy Donald Trump. Ghislaine Maxwell first met Jeffrey Epstein for tea in his Madison Avenue office. What she remembers most vividly about the encounter, Maxwell told the Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche, in an interview in late July, which was released last week, is Epstein’s tie. “It had a giant, seemed like a ketchup stain on it,” she said.
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