Category Archives: Law

Mayor Mamdani of Hamas

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There he is, Zohran Mamdani, Mayor of New York City, appearing in a video produced with all the trappings of a State of the City address or another important civic event and at taxpayer expense.

If Mamdani looks annoyed, it is probably because he is. He found himself forced to admit one of his major campaign issues was a promise that he could never deliver. In other words, he had to admit he lied. Throughout his campaign Mamdani promised voters he would arrest Benjamin Netenyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, should he ever have the temerity to show up in New York City. Netenyahu is expected to do just that to make his annual speech to the United Nations General Assembly in September.

In his high-profile video address, Mamdani admitted that New York City lacks the legal authority to arrest Netanyahu. That is true and was well known even while Mamdani was scoring political points with his pledge. When he threatens the Israeli prime minister, Mamdani references an arrest warrant issued for Netanyahu by the International Criminal Court. But the United States is not a party to the ICC and does not recognize its jurisdiction, a fact which makes the warrant worthless in the U.S. The ICC’s selection of targets to investigate is demonstrably political and biased. And its leadership faces severe allegations of sexual assault and misconduct. A 2002 law broadly prohibits US cooperation with the ICC.

In addition, the United States is a signatory of the United Nations Charter, and to the “host country agreement,” No. 147 in the United Nations Treaty Series. The charter and the agreement guarantee access by diplomats to the UN Headquarters in New York City. Delegates to the UN also enjoy diplomatic status and diplomatic immunity. This is binding under federal law. Heads of state visiting the US are under protection of the Secret Service. Did Mayor Mamdani imagine that when Mr. Netanyahu’s motorcade leaves the UN, the NYPD can pull it over and kidnap a head of state? The idea is preposterous.

So why did Mamdani make his promise?

It might be that the new mayor of the nation’s most populous city is just ignorant of these details. A New York City mayor need not be schooled in the art of foreign policy. But Mamdani is an intelligent man. He is well-schooled. He is a charismatic speaker. His words are well chosen.

No, ignorance does not explain this. The explanation is much simpler. Mamdani is obsessed with Jews. His head is filled with Jews. Mamdani hates Jews. He has, in fact, made a career out of exploiting his hatred of Jews before, during, and after his election. And he channeled his hostility toward Israel and its people by attacking Netanyahu in front of the world.

His video statement makes his position clear. Mamdani called the Israeli Prime Minister a “war criminal” and “the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people”. He accused Netanyahu of the deaths of over 73,000 people, targeting hospitals, blocking humanitarian aid, and starving civilians. He demanded that the United States federal government step in, join the ICC, and execute the arrest warrant itself.

“Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large,” Mamdani said. “While we cannot end the genocide on our own, we can decide whether our silence will become another weapon, and we can examine every tool we have to defend the humanity and dignity of all people.”

Each claim is simply the reiteration of the antisemitic tropes Jews have been subjected to for millenniums. And by far better men than Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani tries to make a distinction between Jew, Israeli, Zionism, and antisemitism. Those who believe that is possible have a fundamental misunderstanding of what each term means.

I have generally avoided getting into the discussion of those tropes mainly because I have found that people who repeat them are not willing to discuss history, facts, or even grammar. They have a view that rejects civilized debate. I should probably knock them down in future posts. For this post I’m going to stick with what Mamdani says and does. His words and actions show what he is and has always been.

Mamdani took office on January 1, 2026. You might think he would address New York City’s challenges. Housing affordability is a real issue with market-rate rents near historic highs. The rising cost of living is squeezing families, small businesses continue to struggle, and public safety concerns are on the rise, including an increase in reported sexual assaults. These are the things a mayor should focus on.

Instead, on that first day, he found it necessary to officially revoke Executive Order 52, which had formally adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. That stripped away key protections for Jewish New Yorkers amidst rising hate crimes. He has since boycotted cultural events involving his Jewish constituents like the city’s Israel Day Parade.

In July Mamdani announced appointments to an 18-member Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, which screens and recommends judicial candidates for local courts. Mamdani did not appoint a single Jewish lawyer to the committee. He apparently could not a Jewish lawyer he felt was qualified. He did find Muslims to appoint.

Hate crimes against Jews have risen on Mamdani’s watch. NYPD officials reported 205 confirmed hate crimes against Jews between January and July 2026, up from 189 during the same period last year. Jews were targeted in more than half of all hate crimes, or 57%.

On August 14, 2026, a 46-year-old man named Larry Montes violently disrupted a Friday night Shabbat service at Central Synagogue in Manhattan. He shouted antisemitic slurs, struck a 63-year-old female congregant in the face, and assaulted a security guard. On July 23, 2026, a 51-year-old man named Raul Morales targeted and stabbed a Jewish man wearing a yarmulke near a synagogue on the Upper West Side. The attacker shouted “Allahu Akbar” during the violent episode.

Yet Mamdani issued his first mayoral veto against a bipartisan City Council bill intended to combat antisemitism by expanding protest security around schools. He argued the bill would suppress free speech and harm labor, reproductive rights, and pro-Palestinian student demonstrations. He lifted the restriction on boycotting Israel. Nothing had happened yet. No crisis had landed on his desk. He walked in, and this is what he reached for first.

Manmdani has always had a perverse definition of “genocide.” While quick to apply the term to Israel, during a July 2026 press conference, he explicitly declined to label the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, as a genocide. As a New York State legislator, he formalized his alignment with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and openly accused Israel of genocide in Gaza. He has denied Israel’s right to exist as a specifically Jewish state.

Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, has been active on social media since she was a teenager posting in 2015, “Tel Aviv shouldn’t exist in the first place.” She apologized when those posts resurfaced. Watchdog groups and publications like Jewish Insider reported that Duwaji’s personal account had “liked” multiple Instagram posts that appeared to cheer on or celebrate the Hamas attacks on Israel in which 1,200 Israeli civilians were slaughtered, and 251 hostages were abducted and taken into the Gaza Strip.

Mamdani’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a academic whose work on colonialism and Israel has faced severe allegations of antisemitism. A Columbia University professor, Mahmood Mamdani’s academic writings, which his son Zohran has credited as a major influence on his own political worldview, frequently center on the Israeli Palestinian conflict.

We are not asked our ethnicity or religion when we vote in the United States. But exit polls consistently showed roughly 33% of Jewish voters supported Mamdani in the November 2025 election, with 63% supporting independent Andrew Cuomo, and about 3% for Republican Curtis Sliwa.

Go figure.

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The Trump Court’s Summer

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The Supreme Court is only two thirds of the way through its three-month summer vacation. But the conservative majority has kept busy facilitating Donald Trump‘s marauding destruction of the institutions of the government, both physical and abstract. In so doing they have supported his strategy to wreak havoc on the nation, sowing a path of destruction so quickly his opponents can’t mount a defense quickly enough to stop him from achieving his goals. Their embarrassingly rash decisions make a mockery of the judicial process and the rule of law.

Mail-In Ballots

Using the tool of the Executive Order Trump has directed the United States Postal Service to deliver mail-in ballots only to people on a federal list of voters. Never mind the fact that the Constitution assigns to the states control over the election process absent specific legislation passed by Congress. Never mind the fact that the law establishing the USPS charges it with delivering the mail and little more, making any attempt by that organization to restrict the mailing of ballots by the states and their return by the voters illegal. Never mind the fact that in spite of  Trump’s whining that mail-in ballots lead to election fraud not a single court has ever found such fraud affecting the outcome of an election. The Supreme Court members who Trump refers to as “my judges” interrupted their summer vacation to do his bidding.

The Executive Order has been challenged in multiple courts. Several issued injunctions, stopping the order from being implemented pending a full court review. This is known as preserving the status quo and with less than 60 days until the election, agrees with past challenges to election law and procedure.

Which sent Trump running, as he has done so many times before, to “his” judges. They found, on their emergency docket and without any formal brief or public arguments, that the status quo meant don’t interfere with Trump while the case is pending. This stands the entire concept on temporary injunctions on its ear. Trump v. California was decided on a strictly partisan vote, 6-3.

A whistleblower report to Congress from inside the USPS says the service is rushing out “untested” technology that could “derail” the upcoming election. State officials, in many cases about to send out their mail ballots, have no idea how they should respond to the order’s requirements. They only know they face criminal charges for failure to comply.

That is clearly what the conservative majority wants. They did caution that their order was preliminary and not a final decision on whether the administration’s order “will necessarily be lawful” once the plans are complete. “On that score, time will tell,” the majority said in the 10-page, unsigned order. But of course, the election will have come and gone and who knows how many voters will have been kept from casting their ballots by Trump’s action. Which is what he wants. The Court could have dealt with the substantive issues right then and there and eliminated the uncertainly. But that is not their plan.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, with a separate 23-page dissent, considered the merits. “The President does not have any legal authority to require that elections be conducted in accordance with his preferences,” she says, “or to withhold delivery of mail-in ballots that are not formatted consistent with the President’s wishes.”

The Ballroom

And then comes the matter of the ballroom. Everyone who has ever rented a place to live knows full well the lease does not give you the right to damage the place, least you sacrifice your security deposit and be subject to a lawsuit for additional damages. So, what do you think “We the People,” landlords of The White House, should charge Donald Trump? He has trashed the joint from end to end.

The West Wing offices have been gilded to look like the French Palace of Versailles. The lawns and gardens have been paved over like a roadside motel. And the East Wing has been totally destroyed and rising in its place is some sort of monstrosity which will dwarf the historic residence the people loan every four years to their president.

The conservative majority which dominates the Court won’t stop it.

Again, a district court granted an injunction to stop the building pending a full hearing on the key question, “Can a president do what he wants with the White House?” Again, the conservatives on the Supreme Court stayed the injunction, finding that preserving the status quo meant letting Trump continue pending the court hearings. Trump has the workers on the job 20 hours day with the clear expectation that he will have his giant ballroom finished before the court issues a final ruling. That is characterized by another French term, a fait accompli.

In July 2025, the White House said the ballroom would be funded by private donations and cost about $200 million. Later, the cost was adjusted to $400 million. Now, the price tag is closer to $600 million, according to contractor invoices, and about half will be paid by taxpayers. No surprise. The ballroom will be built with missile-resistant columns and a drone-proof roof. What will it cost if the next president decides to pull it down?

The Supreme Court’s shadow docket ruling, National Park Service v National Trust for Historic Preservation, didn’t address the legality of the project. Lower courts said the construction required congressional approval. The decision focused on whether the plaintiff, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, had the standing to bring a lawsuit. The trust had to show that the ballroom’s planned construction would, among other things, cause board member Alison Hoagland “harm.” How can a building inflict pain, and how could such suffering be quantified?

In a declaration, Hoagland wrote: “I would suffer both professional and personal injuries, including to my aesthetic, cultural, and historical interests.” Hoagland, a historian, said she enjoyed walking past the White House and feared that Trump’s addition would distort the building’s character.

This shadow docket ruling was so disgusting even Chief Justice John Roberts couldn’t stomach it, breaking with his five conservative collogues to join the liberals 5-4 and writing the dissent.

Wrote Roberts, “The White House is not just any building, and — when it comes to historic preservation — Hoagland is not just any person. In failing to appreciate as much, the Court misconceives the plaintiff’s injury, allowing the Executive’s likely infringement of the Legislature’s power of the purse and authority to regulate federal property in the District of Columbia to continue.”

The Trump administration didn’t go through the usual review process. But the Republican-controlled Congress, as usual, is not willing to do anything about it. Trump’s desire seems to be to remake Washington in his image. And to leave his name and likeness on as many parts of the government as possible.

An overhaul of the East Potomac Golf Links is about to begin. Trees are already facing the axe. A 250-foot triumphal arch will, according to the White House, start construction within weeks. Trump threatens to tear down the Kennedy Center unless he can put his name back up under the name of the fallen president.

Designed by Trump. Approved by nobody.

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The Pirro Pivot

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In one area the Trump administration is remarkably successful. It is hard to imagine another national government where more unqualified, incompetent, and corrupt people have been assembled in one place. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Pete Hegseth take note.

Pictured above is Jeanine Pirro, the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, one of the most important federal prosecutors in the Department of Justice. Pirro auditioned for her post in the usual Trump way. It is true that Pirro was Westchester County’s first female judge and district attorney. But that was two decades ago. Her key qualification for a post in the Trump administration was her longtime service as a Fox Channel personality hosting Justice with Judge Jeanine and co-hosting The Five. Pirro is also a best-selling author. One of her titles, “Liars, Leakers, and Liberals: The Case Against the Trump Conspiracy,” surely caught Trump’s eye.

Since her appointment Pirro has consistently aligned her office with Trump’s aggressive law-and-order directives, specifically implementing the federal crime crackdown in D.C. Pirro publicly defended and credited Trump’s federal law enforcement enhancements for lowering crime statistics in the nation’s capital, stating that the administration brought much-needed safety after previous high homicide rates.

In this video from July 2, 2026, Pirro is holding a news conference to announce the indictment of David Hearn, a Maryland resident, charging he vandalized the famous Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the object of a high-priority renovation directed by Trump himself. Pirro told reporters that Hearn was seen by National Park Service employees making a “forcefully and violently” effort to rip up the pool liner with his bare hands. When reporters pressed her for details and asked how she would prove the damage exceeded the $1,000 felony threshold, Pirro snapped at the press and repeatedly clashed with reporters questioning the validity of the case.

Pirro had presented her case to a D.C. grand jury and personally signed the indictment. The charge carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison upon conviction. Hearn, 67, competed for the United States as a canoeist in 1992, 1996 and 2000 Summer Olympics.

In the month that followed Donald Trump and the Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, who supervises the National Park Service and is responsible for the pool, insisted that the damage involved “multiple gashes” by vandals, first and foremost Hearn. Hearn insisted that all he did was pick up a piece of material floating in the water, which had peeled off from the bottom of the pool. Burgum said the pool suffered “multiple gashes” to the industrial liner that add up to 350 feet of damage. He said Interior Department employees had witnessed Hearn’s actions. In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Burgum said that the same contractor who installed the lining will repair it and that the peeling liner had nothing to do with faulty workmanship.

Fast forward to Friday, July 31. Jeanine Pirro was nowhere to be seen late in the afternoon, when the United States Department of Justice dropped off a 20-page document at the D.C. Superior Court. No news conference, no press release. This is known as “taking out the garbage.” You dump into public view something you hope will draw little or no notice, figuring late on a Friday reporters and the general public will be focused on the upcoming weekend and not paying too much attention. “Government’s Motion to Dismiss the Indictment” is the title. One of Pirro’s assistants prepared the dismissal motion, although the motion was submitted on her behalf.

The motion says that after the indictment came down the Interior Department (DOI) provided additional documents to the U.S. attorney’s office “indicating that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings.” The DOJ said it “first became aware of information showing that the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism” after reviewing more documents. “Had DOI been forthcoming with the information clearly in its possession, the government would not have sought a grand jury indictment.”

In other words, never mind.

The DOJ said when it presented the case to the grand jury, it was “not in possession of any information from DOI indicating that any damage to the Reflecting Pool was caused by anything other than the actions of the defendant and other vandals who damaged the pool’s lining.” The filing continues, “it is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool to vandalism, let alone to establish that fact beyond a reasonable doubt.”

So why did Pirro pivot? Why not just continue the case and hope it will fade away in the year or two it would take to get before a jury? After all, that is what the boss in the Oval Office clearly wanted. I can only speculate that Pirro is thinking about her future.

Presenting a case to a grand jury built on incomplete or misleading information, without a proper investigation, could invite sanctions for filing a frivolous proceeding. Pirro may be planning on returning to her Fox platform at the end of the Trump administration. But even Fox might look askance at hiring a commentator who had been disciplined or even disbarred for unethical behavior.

Pirro might be looking for a new job sooner than she planned. The boss is not happy. In a social media post, Trump writes, “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro… it was a pure case of VANDALISM.”

One would think Hearn would have some recourse here for what was done to his reputation and for what his defense may have cost. Think again. Statute and case law make it virtually impossible to recover against government officials no matter how outrageous their actions. He might be able to make a claim to recover his legal fees. But that is still an uphill battle.

Maybe he should sell the film rights. Or write a book. Maybe Pirro can give him some advice along those lines.

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The Supremes 2026

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The Supreme Court wrapped up its 2025-2026 term with a flood of high-profile decisions announced on June 26, 29, and 30th. The usual end of the session reviews quickly flooded the media. Most watchers of the Supremes tried to frame the session as a win or loss for Donald Trump. Or at least a win or loss for the conservation majority which has dominated the Court in recent years.

I see the term as a continuation of the conservative drive to remake, or at least change the direction, of constitutional interpretation in the United States. It featured major rulings on birthright citizenship, tariffs, transgender school sports, independent agencies, and election rules, while also producing some surprising coalitions in the final week of the term. The great online court watching service, scotusblog, has the numbers.

The term was more polarized than the one before it. The share of decisions that were 6-3 rose from 15.2% last term to 28.8% this term and ideologically split 6-3 decisions rose from 9% to 22.7%. Liberal justices also dissented together more often than before. The Court still had a conservative center, with Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett frequently in the majority. Yet some headline cases ended with the liberal justices in the majority. Although I would not make as much of that as some other commentators have done. I think their wishful thinking is not justified.

Major rulings

One of the term’s defining cases was the birthright-citizenship dispute, Trump v. Barbara. The outcome was expected, but the voting alignment was not. Roberts wrote the opinion, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, while Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented. That made it a major case in which the liberal justices were part of the prevailing coalition rather than the dissent.

The New York Times wrote the decision “capped a more than decade-long effort by Mr. Trump to use the issue as a political tool.” A relief, to be sure, but no cause for celebration. A plain reading of the 14th Amendment would bring anyone to the same decision. The court was split, however, with some justices unable to resist the temptation to dehumanize immigrants by calling them “foreign birth tourists.”

The outlier was conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who concurred in the outcome but dissented as to the reason. The five justices in the majority cited the amendment. Justice Kavanaugh said current immigration law grants citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil, implying that Trump can have his way if he can get Congress to change the law. As for Alito and Thomas, they dissented with their usual outrage at any decision which upholds the rights and dignity of groups that they see as fundamentally less deserving of rights and dignity than themselves.

Another major case was Learning Resources v. Trump, the tariffs case. The Court rejected the administration’s tariff position, and the decision reflected the Court’s willingness to police the limits of presidential power where statutory authority is unclear.

Executive Power

The term also produced an important executive power ruling in Trump v. Slaughter, involving the president’s power to remove the head of the Federal Trade Commission. The Court overturned, in the majority’s words, whatever is left of Humphrey’s Executor, the 1935 precedent protecting some independent agencies from at-will presidential removal. SCOTUSblog described it as the term’s major overruling, because the Court made explicit a direction it had been moving toward in earlier removal-power cases.

While Slaughter seems to imply Congress cannot put any restraints on the president when it comes to firing officers of the executive branch, a majority did make an exception, for now, in the case of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. In Trump v. Cook, Trump had fired Cook, citing accusations regarding a home mortgage. The Court rejected that effort by a 5-4 vote, with Roberts joined by Sotomayor, Kagan, Kavanaugh, and Jackson.

The case was sent back to the district court, where Cook will be given an opportunity to contest the allegations. I see this as only a temporary victory, because the president can fire Cook again without cause, as he did in the case of Slaughter.

In Slaughter, Chief Justice Roberts ruled that because the FTC exercises executive power, its commissioners must be removable at will. The statute governing the FTC allowed removal only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance”. The Federal Reserve Act (12 U.S.C. § 242) uses the exact same core standard, stating that governors may be removed “for cause by the President”. I don’t see how the Court can differentiate the two cases, should Cook come back before it.

Voting and social issues

In Louisiana v. Callais, Louisiana urged the Court to rethink Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and the case raised the possibility of further narrowing race-conscious redistricting rules. The Court continued its campaign to neuter the VRA, a lifelong goal of Chief Roberts, allowing Louisiana to redraw its Congressional districts to eliminate a Democratic seat, not caring that it also cut down minority representation from the state.

In Watson v. Republican National Committee, a 5-4 decision in which Barrett and Roberts joined the liberal wing, the Court rejected a position on late-arriving ballots that had been strongly supported by the Trump administration. The ruling allows Mississippi to continuing counting ballots which arrive by mail for five days after the date of an election, as long as the ballots are postmarked on or before election day.

The Court also dealt with transgender school sports litigation, including West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, decided together, the Court held that schools can separate women’s and men’s sports teams defined by biological sex. Those cases fit the Court’s broader recent pattern of closely watched disputes over gender identity, education, and equal-protection claims. Taken together with prior terms, they showed that the Court continues to use these cases to define the legal boundaries of state regulation in culture-war conflicts.

While progressives are beginning to believe there is a future down the road with a Democratic president arriving in two years, it will not be sufficient to change the direction of law in the nation. He, or she, will be up against a Supreme Court which continues to reenforce a conservative rule of law, empowering a president now with no promise it will continue to do so if a progressive occupies the Oval.

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Poof! It’s Gone. Maybe.

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We think Donald Trump‘s name has been removed from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. At least, that what Trump’s handpicked board of directors told the District Court for the District of Columbia in a filing on Saturday. The removal had been ordered by the court two weeks earlier in a decision enforcing the Center’s original statutory name.

Trump’s name was added in December 2025 after he replaced the Kennedy Center’s leadership and the new board voted to rename the institution. The court found this action illegal, ruling that the board cannot unilaterally change the name of a national memorial.

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It’s Still the Kennedy Center

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A federal judge ruled today that Donald Trump’s name must be removed from the Kennedy Center. The decision says the Trump appointed Kennedy Center Board acted illegally when it voted to add Trump’s name to the Center. The court also ordered a halt to a plan to temporarily close the center for renovations.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper sided with Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), a member of the Kennedy Center’s Board of Trustees, who challenged both the name change and the proposed two-year closure. Her lawsuit, filed last December, argued that “[b]ecause Congress named the center by statute, changing the Kennedy Center’s name requires an act of Congress.”

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John Roberts is …

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John Roberts is displeased. John Roberts is exasperated. John Roberts is frustrated. John Roberts is annoyed. John Roberts is irked. John Roberts is any other of the many synonyms my thesaurus suggested instead of the word I originally used, which it found to be “vulgar.”

What has the Chief Justice of the United States in high dudgeon (I thought of that one myself) is the reaction to the Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which drove a stake through the heart of the only section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 the Court had not previously decimated. With the vote falling along party lines, many critics condemned the decision as racist and political.

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