Harvard has a serious law school, but they got some big names in private practice to rep on this litigation. That’s probably a good move for them.

It’s more like the Pope clung on to life just for the opportunity to insult JD Vance. Once that was accomplished, there was no additional reason to stick around.

As long as it’s a federal court holding them in contempt, Trump can just pardon them.

Criminal contempt has this problem, but civil contempt is not pardonable, because there is no crime to pardon.

Judge Boasberg is trying to proceed with criminal contempt on the “turn the planes around” order. Whatever happens there, it is unlikely to end in convictions that stick.

Judge Xinis is proceeding towards civil contempt. If she finds someone in willful contempt, she can imprison them until they choose to comply. And the evidence standard in civil contempt is “clear and convincing,” not “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The infamous immunity ruling gives the President a lot of immunity from criminal prosecution.

But besides that, there’s an older precedent in civil litigation that no judge can write an injunction directly against the President in the performance of his official duties. So all of these TROs and injunctions, including the Friday SC order, either do not apply to the President himself, or they are illegally broad*.

Under this theory of law, the President could theoretically arrest and deport all the people he wants with no judicial intervention – just as long he does all the arrests by himself, and flies the planes by himself, etc. In reality, the fat man is always going to have underlings doing the stuff for him, and they do not have this immunity from civil injunctions.

*This is one of the points raised in Alito’s dissent: the SC order applies to “the Government”, without saying whether the President is included or not.

Now the branches come too close to grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both. This is a losing proposition all around. The Judiciary will lose much from the constant intimations of its illegitimacy, to which by dent of custom and detachment we can only sparingly reply. The Executive will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness and all of its attendant contagions. The Executive may succeed for a time in weakening the courts, but over time history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been, and law in time will sign its epitaph.

• Judge Wilkinson. Circuit Judge. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. Appointed by Ronald Reagan.

The “margaritas” were staged props and also inexplicably garnished with cherries.

The thing where the judge orders summary jail time is reserved for contempt “a facie curiae”, meaning “in the face of the court”. That’s for blatant disrespect or disruption in the courtroom in front of the judge.

So far, Drew Ensign has managed to refrain from anything as directed as that. So he hasn’t been jailed.

Someday the concepts will come and fix all of this. It has been foretold.

It is my understanding based on official reporting from our Embassy in San Salvador that Abrego Garcia is currently being held in the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador. He is alive and secure in that facility. He is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador.

• Michael G. Kozak. US State Dept. April 12, 2025.

Edit: you can track the Maryland court docket here.

The government represented that he was alive in a court filing on Friday or Saturday (I forget which).

Which they failed to do yesterday.

The judge demanded daily status updates on 3 questions. The filing yesterday only responded to question #1*, and completely ignored #2 and 3.

*Additionally, the response to #1 only relayed publicly available information, when the judge specifically ordered an affidavit from someone with personal knowledge of the matter.

At the end of the day, they still want their shit to work. It does, however, make things very uncomfortable in the mean time.

In the 1830s they were doing that shit in the southeast: Georgia, Carolinas, Alabama, and so on. They didn’t really get going clearing the “west” until after the war and into the twentieth century. Geronimo surrendered for the last time in the 1880s, and he died in 1909 as a POW at Ft. Sill. Oklahoma had gained statehood only two years before, in 1907.

Yeah. All by himself too; did not refer to the rest of the court. And his order appeared after the plaintiff filed the response that was requested.

If they managed to get Bukele to make such a statement, and they got it into the district court record, I would guess that Xinis would back off and not press contempt.

If I had to predict the supreme court on this pending appeal, I’m going with 7-2 to deny the stay, with Thomas and Alito dissenting.

This case is moving so fast because the DOJ career lawyer basically conceded the government’s entire case at the hearing last week. The normal rule is that you can’t introduce evidence and arguments on appeal if you didn’t raise them at the district court. The government is now furiously trying to bypass that in these appeals.

So I think some of the conservative justices will be upset with that, and they will also not want to concede power from the courts to the executive branch. They want that power for themselves.

This shit is going down today. There are three possibilities:

1. Supreme Court grants a stay, ignoring the rule of law, and hastening the slide to authoritarianism.
2. No stay, and the government hustles to get this man back to the US by midnight tonight. I’d guess it’s like 6-8 hours of flying just to get to El Salvador and back, so the clock is really ticking on this option.
3. No stay, and the deadline expires. The government will clearly be in continuous and ongoing contempt of court.

If they don’t get a stay and they make some kind of half hearted “bad man Bukele won’t cooperate” argument, I don’t think Xinis will buy that, and they’ll be back to #3.

Unfortunately, it seems that way unless we can find another rock headed this way.

They downgraded it again after taking more observations.

Elohim derives from El, the chief god in the Canaanite pantheon, and the father of other gods (such as Baal and Yahweh). El also appeared in the religions of many neighboring societies in the near east.

In Canaanite societies and in Hebrew, the name El became genericised, so the name could be used as a title for any god or for god powers in general.

God is multitudinous and thus worthy of the title, but also one single god dont you dare worship any other

In terms of the Hebrew Bible, it’s more like different parts were written by different people at different times, with various views on polytheism, henotheism, and monotheism. Elohim is grammatically plural, and in some places it is used as a plural to refer to multiple deities. In other places it agrees with singular forms, similar to “royal we”, or it becomes an abstract term for divinity as a concept.

As far as I know, the MAX software fully complied with its software requirements. The problem was crappy system requirements, and Boeing actively lied to their pilots to conceal that they added a brand new automatic flight control system that can push the elevators down independent of the autopilot and stick pusher.

That last part is what sent people to jail.