Interesting speculation about that in this Axios story:

What they’re saying: J. Michael Luttig, a former U.S. Court of Appeals judge appointed by the late President George H.W. Bush, told Axios: “Ideally, federal judges would make few, if any, extrajudicial comments in their opinions — and none in their public speeches and remarks.”

• “The former is exceedingly difficult to honor in practice over a long period of service on the bench, but every attempt should be made,” he said.

Sarah Isgur, a former Trump administration Justice Department senior official and, now, co-host of the legal podcast Advisory Opinions, said the partisan split in the Senate is propelling the change in judicial temperament.

• “Once the filibuster was gone for the lower-court judges, what you see is that people no longer need to get votes from the opposing party, but they need to be the most extreme version of their own party,” she told Axios.
• “And, so, with some of the Trump appointed judges, there is a lot more willingness to signal to the right-flank of the party. For those who want to be Supreme Court justices, or want to be in the running for that sort of influence, they don’t need to signal to the left.”

One of the most consequential, yet not fully appreciated, decisions when the Constitution was formed was the choice of a single-headed rather than plural executive branch. This was an issue much discussed at the time. Putting the power in one person’s hands raised risks, but creating a multi-headed executive branch was thought riskier, because it was too likely to lead to a diffusion of responsibility and indecisive leadership.

Perhaps this new study from the business world is an amusing source of confirmation of the decision to have a single-headed executive branch. From the WSJ:

Company co-founders often split ownership of their startup evenly. It seems fair and simple.

But starting off equal may hurt the company’s chances of getting off the ground.

New research finds that early-stage companies formed with an equal ownership split—such as 50% each for two partners or 25% each for four—were less likely to have measurable revenue or employees one year later, says Dave Noack, an assistant professor of entrepreneurship in the Goddard School of Business and Economics at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah….

Today, roughly three out of four startups decide to divide the business equally when getting started, he says. The problem, though, is that when shares are split evenly, no one founder feels they have ownership of the company and the responsibility for running it. And that often means that nobody takes charge, and the startup stalls. So, an uneven split—even if it is 51% ownership for one of two partners—offers one founder a feeling of individual ownership, and that helps them to push ahead.

“The key takeaway is that there needs to be someone on the team who ultimately takes charge,” says Dr. Noack, whose research was published in the Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development last year….

Dr. Noack hopes the research will result in more purposeful thinking around the ownership split. Companies often want equal ownership to increase harmony and cohesion within an emerging venture but don’t account for the drawbacks, he says. “It comes down to decision making and who is ultimately going to feel the pressure on their backs to persevere,” he says.

One might be tempted to say this shows the insights that looking at “politics as markets” can sometimes provide.

I’m very proud of the programs David Kaye and I put together over the last year for UCI Law’s Fair Elections and Free Speech Center. Here are links to the videos of the events:

1. Is the US. Constitution Up to the Task of Preserving American Democracy? (Jack Balkin, Michele Goodwin, Michael Klarman (Rick Hasen moderator))
2. Symposium: Election Subversion: Is U.S. Democracy in Danger? (Julia Azari, Edward Foley, Mara Liasson, Bob Bauer, Guy-Uriel Charles,  Larry Diamond, Ben Ginsberg, Rick Hasen, Gretchen Helmke, Steve Levisky, Isabel Longoria, Sarah Longwell, Michael Morley, Janai Nelson, Rick Pildes, Brad Raffensperger)
3. Disinformation in American Elections, Part I: Election Officials (Jocelyn Benson, Neal Kelley (Tammy Patrick moderator))
4. Disinformation in American Elections, Part II: Legal Scholars (Danielle Citron, Spencer Overton, Nate Persily (Rick Hasen moderator))
5. Disinformation in American Elections, Part III: Social Scientists (Joan Donovan, Renee DiResta, Brendan Nyhan (Pam Fessler moderator))
6. Global Elections 1: Israel, the Netherlands and Uganda ( Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, Lillian Nalwoga, Alice Stollmeyer, (David Kaye moderator))
7. Global Elections 2: Germany (Sabine Frank, Falk Steiner, Natascha Strobl (Christian Mihr moderator))
8. Global Elections 3: Hong Kong (Glacier Kwong, Jeffrey Wasserstrom (Melissa Chan moderator))
9. What Can and Should Journalists Do to Prevent Election Subversion and Another January 6? (Bart Gellman, Jessica Huseman, Margaret Sullivan (Rick Hasen moderator))
10. A Conversation with 2021 Nobel Prize Laureate Maria Ressa (Maria Ressa and David Kaye)
11. UCI Law Distinguished Lecture: “Constitutional Patriotism, the Failures of Partisanship, and the Future of American Democracy” by Rep. Jamie Raskin
12. Cheap Speech book talk (Rick Hasen and Henry Weinstein)
13. 100% Democracy book talk (E.J. Dionne & Miles Rapoport (Sara Goodman moderator))

Thanks to all the speakers who participated in this events, the UCI Law staff that made them possible, and all who tuned in and asked questions!

Bloomberg Law:

A case about birthright citizenship for residents of American Samoa could prompt the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider longstanding rulings Justice Neil Gorsuch blasted as resting “on a rotten foundation.”

At issue are decisions known as the Insular Cases from the early 1900s that deprive Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories of full constitutional protections. Although the justices appear to no longer consider the decisions, which Gorsuch has previously said are based on “ugly racist stereotypes,” good law, lower federal courts continue to rely on them when dealing with U.S. territories.

The justices ruled 8-1 on April 21 in United States v. Vaello Madero that the federal government could continue to exclude Puerto Rico from a Social Security benefit program. Gorsuch joined the opinion after noting no party asked the justices to overrule the Insular Cases. Now, in a petition filed Wednesday, individuals seeking citizenship in the American Samoa case explicitly ask the court to do just that.

The American Samoa case, Fitisemanu v. United States, “is exactly the opportunity the court needs to reconsider the doctrine and overrule it,” said Columbia Law professor Christina Ponsa-Kraus.

You can find the petition at this link.

Politico:

What’s happening: The Democratic National Committee and the Arizona Democratic Party are planning a lawsuit over a law in Arizona that demands further proof of citizenship to register to vote, creating a bifurcated system in the state for voters casting a ballot in federal elections.

NYT:

For Republican supporters of Donald J. Trump in Michigan, it seemed like a crowning moment: The state party chose two candidates endorsed by the former president, both outspoken preachers of 2020 election falsehoods, as its contenders for the state’s top law enforcement officer and its chief of election administration.

But instead, that move at a convention last weekend — where Republicans officially endorsed Matthew DePerno for attorney general and Kristina Karamo for secretary of state — has ruptured the Michigan Republican Party. After months of strain, it appears to finally be snapping as what remains of the old guard protests the party’s direction.

This week, Tony Daunt, a powerful figure in Michigan politics with close ties to the influential donor network of the DeVos family, resigned from the G.O.P.’s state committee in a blistering letter, calling Mr. Trump “a deranged narcissist.” Major donors to the state party indicated that they would direct their money elsewhere. And one of Mr. Trump’s most loyal defenders in the State Legislature was kicked out of the House Republican caucus.

The repudiation of the election-denying wing of the party by other Republicans in Michigan represents rare public pushback from conservatives against Mr. Trump’s attempts to force candidates across the country to support his claims of a rigged 2020 vote. That stance has become a litmus test for G.O.P. politicians up and down the ballot as Mr. Trump adds to his slate of more than 150 endorsements this election cycle.

We use party primaries, followed by a single-round general election. Matt Yglesias speculates that, in our system, Le Pen would have won the primary among the party on the right, while Mélenchon would have won the primary among the party on the left — with Macron voters split between those two parties, given the various policy positions of these candidates. In a general election between Le Pen and Mélenchon, Le Pen would have been likely to prevail, given the distribution of votes among various parties of the left and right in the first round of the French election.

Of course, these counterfactuals are always uncertain, given that candidates, parties, and voters would alter their behavior under a different set of electoral structures. Still, it’s interesting to speculate how much these different institutional-design structures for elections influences the types of candidates who are likely to prevail.

The U.S. election structure most closely analogous to the French system is probably the Top-Two primary structure used in CA and WA.