HeyJaredBalls & Strikes
The official newsletter of Balls & Strikes, each week from Jay Willis
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 11
- Latest publication
- Sep 25, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 10, 2026
Latest issues
Trump Nominee: For Ethical Reasons, I Cannot Discuss the Time I Called Biden a “Great National Nightmare” (opens the original)
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There is no topic that federal judicial nominees love more than proclaiming their commitment to upholding the rule of law in a nonpartisan, even-handed manner. The website you are reading right now takes its name from perhaps the most infamous attempt to make this point: Chief Justice John Roberts’s assertion during his confirmation hearings that judges are “umpires” who just call “balls and strikes.” In my view, before trotting out this metaphor on national television, he really should have con
John Roberts Is Not an “Institutionalist” (opens the original)
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Earlier this week, the first-ever Black head of the Smithsonian Institution, Lonnie Bunch, announced that he will step down from his position by the end of the year. His departure comes on the heels of months of withering attacks from the Trump White House, which has accused the Smithsonian under Bunch’s leadership of perpetrating a “divisive, race-centered ideology&
Democrats Who Are Still Afraid of Supreme Court Expansion Need to Grow Up (opens the original)
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On Wednesday, the House of Representatives voted on a version of the “Keep Nine” amendment, which, as the name suggests, would amend the Constitution to cap the Supreme Court at its current size of nine justices. Given that the Court’s six-justice conservative supermajority has spent the last six years happily implementing the Republican Party policy agenda by judicial fiat, it is not really a surprise that GOP lawmakers approve of the status quo and would prefer to maintain it indefinitely.</sp
The Trump DOJ Is Running Out of Ways to Humiliate Itself In Public (opens the original)
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For some time now, I have been tracking the Justice Department’s alarmingly rapid transformation from one of the legal profession’s most prestigious employers into a cl
Career DOJ Lawyers Cannot Believe How Unserious Their Bosses Are (opens the original)
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The second Trump administration has put Justice Department lawyers who care about civil rights in—and here I have to apologize for the legal jargon—a real pickle. On the one hand, there are of course real violations of civil rights laws happening on an ongoing basis, and a basic responsibility of a functioning government is to investigate these violations and punish those responsible. On the other hand, the powers that be in the second Trump administration do not give a shit about civil rights,
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