Bonus 243: A Vacation-Inspired "Top Ten" List
Have you ever wondered about which of this newsletter's posts have drawn the widest readership? Well, even if you haven't, here's a list of the top ten (and an honorable mention).
I am, at the moment, on vacation—which, for those keeping score at home, is the first time I’ve taken off a full work week since … December 2024. So if the Supreme Court did something important and newsworthy on Wednesday (like deciding the mail-in voting applications), I’m afraid I won’t be covering it here until next Monday (August 17).
Rather than skip a week, though, I thought I’d try something a little different and a lot lighter—a more meta, pre-written post about the history of the newsletter as we are (quickly!) approaching our 500th post (this is #471); and, slightly more slowly, our fourth anniversary. Taking a page from my Letterman-watching youth, I thought I’d do a top-ten countdown of the most widely read posts in this newsletter’s history, drawn from the readership numbers on my end of the Substack dashboard. Mostly, I was just curious to see what the actual answers were (I knew what was #1, but I just don’t check this data often enough to keep tabs on the rest).
Three brief caveats. First, the dashboard data counts cumulative view totals (as of Thursday, August 6)—so they’re not adjusted for how long a post has been up; something from 2023 has had a lot more time to find readers than something from this spring. Second, I’ve counted only written posts, which means the audio episodes and Substack Lives are out, including one that would otherwise have landed at number four. Third, although it should be obvious, views measure attention, not quality (or even whether folks read the whole thing). Some of the posts I’m proudest of are nowhere close to this list (especially some of the earliest posts of the newsletter—when the subscriber base was much … smaller), and at least one entry below is one that I banged out in about ninety minutes (no spoilers).
One more thing worth saying up front, because I suspect it’ll jump off the page: all of the top ten posts were published after January 20, 2025 (which is why I included, as an honorable mention, the pre-2025 post with the most total views). At the end, I reflect a bit upon why that’s happened—and why it’s meaningful.
For fun, I’ll put #s 10-6 above the fold, and #s 5-1 (and the honorable mention) below the fold. Away we go (links to the posts are embedded in the titles if you want to go back and read/re-read them):
#10: 151. The Supreme Court’s (Alien Enemies Act) Patience is Wearing Thin
127,090 views — May 16, 2025
This Friday afternoon post followed up on my earlier state-of-play post about the many cases challenging the effort to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to remove, on a mass and summary basis, individuals the government claimed were Venezuelan members of Tren de Aragua. This post focused on the “per curiam” ruling the Supreme court handed down in the A.A.R.P. case (after the initial order the justices had issued after midnight on Saturday, April 19), especially the majority’s pointed rejection of the dissent’s characterization of what happened in that earlier ruling—a pretty sharp elbow by the Court’s standards—and on the continuing erosion of the presumption of regularity in the Court’s Trump-related rulings.
#9: 145. Justice Alito’s Misbegotten Dissent in A.A.R.P.
127,561 views — April 21, 2025
Speaking of A.A.R.P., this post took a closer look at the dissent Justice Alito filed from the original, April 19 order (somewhat after the fact), joined by Justice Thomas. My view was that the tone was relatively mild for an Alito emergency-docket dissent, but that the substance bespoke a justice grasping for ways to justify not granting the relief the applicants sought rather than genuinely struggling with the relevant procedural questions—and that it portended nothing good for those justices’ votes in future emergency applications.
#8: 200. Five Questions About the Maduro Arrest Operation
134,803 views — January 3, 2026
This is one of the “five questions about” explainer posts I’ve written a bunch more of since last January. I wrote this one while there was still a great deal we didn’t know about the military operation in Venezuela that appeared designed to secure the arrest of Nicolás Maduro and his wife, both apparently under indictment along with four co-defendants. I worked through the administration’s apparent theory that the operation was in support of extraterritorial criminal arrests, and through the objections Maduro would likely raise—head-of-state immunity, foreign official immunity, and the act of state doctrine among them.
#7: 208. The Fifth Circuit Jumps the Immigration Detention Shark
142,356 views — February 7, 2026
Rather than rehash the background and legal arguments I had covered in my December 2025 overview of the broader debate over the Trump administration’s attempt to dramatically expand “mandatory” immigration detention, I used this post to explain two things I wasn’t sure would be well-covered elsewhere: how the administration got this nationwide issue in front of the Fifth Circuit specifically, and what would happen next. Both answers ran through the Supreme Court. Reno v. AADC and Trump v. J.G.G. together closed the door to classwide relief, which is why more than 15,000 individual cases (and counting) have had to be filed challenging the mandatory detention policy.
#6: 156. Federalizing the California National Guard
143,140 views — June 8, 2025
I put out an extra issue that evening in response to the presidential memorandum federalizing 2,000 members of the California National Guard to support DHS activities in and around Los Angeles. My central point was that, even if it was validly invoked (and the Supreme Court would suggest in December that it wasn’t), 10 U.S.C. § 12406 supplies no substantive authority the federal government didn’t already have, so nothing in the memorandum let those troops conduct their own immigration raids or make their own arrests—only to protect federal personnel and property.
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For those who aren’t paid subscribers, we’ll be back Monday with our continuing coverage of the Supreme Court. For those who are, please read on for the top five and the honorable mention:
