‘The Most Entertaining Dead-Cat Bounce in History’

Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage. Not very long ago, the harshest thing Nikki Haley would say about Donald Trump was that “chaos follows him”—a sort of benign jab that creatively avoids causation and suggests mere correlation, like noting that scorched trees tend to appear after a forest fire. For most of the Republican-primary campaign to date, Haley adopted a carefully modulated approach toward the former president, and reserved most of her barbs for her other primary rivals. Her motto seemed to be “Speak…

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Supreme Court’s Affirmative Action Ruling May Be Bigger Than You Think

One of the more interesting, but less reported, aspects of the Supreme Court’s decision in the landmark affirmative action case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard was its criticism of universities’ racial categories in admissions policies. That critique opens a new way to challenge racial discrimination in court. Lawyers and litigants who care about racial equality should take full advantage of it. The high court’s perspective on racial categories arose out of what is known among lawyers as “the diversity rationale,” which comes from a 1978 opinion by Justice Lewis…

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MoveOn’s “Recuse Clarence” Billboard Truck Circles DC

PHOTOS: “Disqualify Trump” Demand Projected On SCOTUS Steps Washington, D.C. – Today, Friday, February 2, MoveOn Political Action commissioned a mobile billboard circulating throughout the District as part of a grassroots push to pressure Justice Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from ruling on the Trump v. Anderson case. The nation’s highest court will begin oral arguments next week on an appeal to a landmark ruling in Colorado blocking former President Donald Trump from voter ballots in accordance with the Constitution’s 14.3 clause. Justice Thomas has a clear conflict of interest…

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New cloud category sinks FITARA scores, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing

Federal agency scores plummeted on the 17th Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) scorecard. The reason for the drop in grades: Continued struggles to implement best practices for moving workloads and services to the cloud. But oversight leaders say the decrease in grades is not only expected, but not indicative of the progress agencies have made over the last decade. The scorecard, released today by Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), co-author of FITARA, showed double the amount of “C” grades with 10 “Cs” and three “Ds” for the first time since…

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Can Biden Win a Primary He Ignored?

As he stood on a frigid New Hampshire street corner on Saturday morning, Jim Demers was trying to persuade me that the fate of the republic hinges on today’s presidential primary—specifically, whether more people write “Joe Biden” on their ballot than fill in the bubble next to the names of his Democratic challengers. “This is an election like we’ve never seen before. This is one where democracy is on the ballot,” Demers, a lobbyist and former state representative, told me. “This is bigger than New Hampshire. This is about the…

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