walterolson.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Trump just announced new 50% tariffs on household appliances like dishwashers, washing machines, refrigerators. Hope no one out there was in the middle of a remodel, or had a stove recently conk out www.reuters.com/world/us/hom...

submitted 7 hours ago • 69 comments

The Illinois secretary of state on Thursday asked for an investigation into a suburban Chicago police department after learning that it violated state law by sharing data from automatic license-plate readers with a Texas sheriff seeking a woman who had an abortion.

submitted 6 hours ago • 1 comment

“.. as his second-term immigration crackdown—including stepped-up deportation flights and workplace raids—has drawn protests in several cities ..” @forbes.com @zacheverson.com www.forbes.com/sites/zachev...

submitted 6 hours ago • 37 comments

This is insane, but also, what does it even mean to have "costs and damages" for the government being ordered not to do something? In some cases they're being ordered to affirmatively do something, or maybe not do something that would raise revenue I guess. But more often it's simply "stop that."

submitted 7 hours ago • 9 comments

New from me at Cato: Senate Judiciary has responded with its own version to the House’s provision meant to gut enforceability of court orders. The aim is still to shield the Trump administration from accountability, but instead of monkeys with sledgehammers we now get a skillfully wielded dagger.

submitted 6 hours ago • 0 comments

Big news on the House budget bill provision proposing to kneecap courts' power to enforce their orders through contempt: Senate Judiciary has now countered with a version that drops the unconstitutional craziness while still advancing goal of discouraging TROs against Trump. From Sam Bray. /1

submitted 9 hours ago • 4 comments

Every elected Republican should be asked if they think the president has the power to send in military in to “liberate” a state or city from its elected government.

submitted 1 day ago • 113 comments

submitted 20 hours ago • 116 comments

BREAKING: Judge Breyer orders Trump to "return control of the California National Guard" to CA Gov. Newsom, finding that Trump's order taking control was illegal because it did not follow the required procedure. The order is stayed until noon Friday. More to come at Law Dork: www.lawdork.com

submitted 20 hours ago • 22 comments

If all a masked, badgeless, ICE agent needs to do to be untouchable is say the word "ICE", then all a Senator should need to do is say the word "Senator", right? They could be in full head to toe combat gear with an obscured face, right?

submitted 21 hours ago • 4 comments

We don't need answers, Senator Schumer, we already know what happened: forceful abuse of power violating rights by an anti-Constitutional regime, in defense of other abuses. Maybe working with and appeasing them, or doing nothing and hoping they'll go away on their own, isn't the best strategy.

submitted 1 day ago • 14 comments

Senator Padilla’s office sends me this video of his take-down and detention at Sec. Noem’s press conference in L.A.

submitted 1 day ago • 291 comments

Anyone in replies who asks a question is getting arrested immediately

submitted 1 day ago • 20 comments

Two days ago, I joined my former Cato colleague & dear friend @aaronrosspowell.com for a discussion about my new book, events in LA, how we got to this point, and what post-Trump era constitutional/legal reforms must be on the national agenda. Listen here: www.aaronrosspowell.com/p/fear-and-c...

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

"In an essay published on the website of @cato.org , Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the institute, wrote, 'For the Trump admin, turning masked raids into standard practice fits into a wider effort to dodge accountability for potentially illegal and unconstitutional actions.'” [E.J. Montini]

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

"Trump is using the Guard and the military to enforce his will, not the law....When rioters were on his side, he didn’t call in the Guard. He embraced the criminals, pardoned them, and purged the law enforcement officials who prosecuted them. He’s a despot and a scofflaw." -- @saletan.bsky.social

submitted 1 day ago • 3 comments

Today's bonus "One First" looks at how well the Trump administration has fared with respect to the unprecedented number of emergency applications it has filed at #SCOTUS — including why the Court has (likely) granted so many of them, and what it means for litigants and lower courts going forward:

submitted 1 day ago • 10 comments

FactCheck takes apart a piece of viral sludge that makes various false / exaggerated claims about the House budget bill, as if there weren't enough accurate arguments one could make against this awful bill. I get quoted analyzing one of the more defensible bits, about court contempt powers.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

"The conservative legal movement’s fixation on the judiciary led many of its members to ignore (or worse, excuse) the degradation of the other two branches of government and damage to constitutional norms and values." -- @greggnunziata.bsky.social

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

ICE wanted the San Francisco Standard to blur the faces of agents who were taking immigrants into custody. The Standard told them "no." "...we believe that censoring images from this news event would set a harmful precedent for the media’s right to report and the public’s right to know."

submitted 12 days ago • 42 comments

Good article on masking and identity concealment by agents on ICE raids (also quotes me, for which thanks). A few bits: /1

submitted 1 day ago • 15 comments

WSJ: “.. an extraordinary pressure campaign that Musk and X CEO Linda Yaccarino launched to boost revenue by cajoling advertisers—including Amazon, Unilever, Pinterest and Lego—to spend money on their platform.” @wsj.com www.wsj.com/business/med...

submitted 2 days ago • 65 comments

The “free speech absolutist” demands you run paid ads next to Catturd’s rants or he and Linda will sue and he’ll have his govt friends investigate you. Some of the companies that have chosen to comply rather than say fk off are Verizon, LEGO, Amzn, RL, & Pinterest. www.wsj.com/business/med...

submitted 2 days ago • 11 comments

Kennedy appointed Robert Malone to the top vaccine advisory committee ACIP. Malone is one click off Andrew Wakefield. He thinks the covid shots killed 17 million and that bird flu vaccines are a deep state psyop.

submitted 1 day ago • 28 comments

The entire board of the Fulbright program reportedly resigned today after accusing the Trump administration of illegal interference www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-...

submitted 2 days ago • 10 comments

RIP Brian. Thank you for all the gifts. Especially THIS gift.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

““At what point will we as a nation find ourselves with a secret police?” wrote Walter Olson, a fellow at the right-leaning libertarian Cato Institute.” www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

submitted 1 day ago • 7 comments

Chair of history department at U.S. Naval Academy resigns after order to remove paper from symposium “for reasons having nothing to do with scholarship.” [James Matheson, Baltimore Sun]

submitted 1 day ago • 31 comments

🧵 My small country, Estonia, population 1.3 million sent 2003-2014 over 2500 soldiers. 9 were killed in the line of duty. 109 wounded, half of them so seriously they could no longer lead a normal life. In Iraq 2003-2009 we had more than 440 soldiers. 2 were killed. 18 seriously wounded. 1/n

submitted 2 days ago • 135 comments

"The treatment Harvard is receiving from the Trump admin is neither measured nor reasonable nor, according to many legal scholars across the ideological spectrum, within statutory authority. Yet worse is the federal gov't’s apparent willingness to accept the damage being done to [science]." /1

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

“I don’t think there’s any way to put this, other than saying that this is an unmitigated public health disaster" www.nytimes.com/2025/06/09/h...

submitted 3 days ago • 4 comments

Thanks for these kind words. (And as you point out, I was never a Trump voter.)

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment