Vox Sentences: Supreme Court Kremlinology, immigration edition

SCOTUS hears oral arguments in United States v. Texas; what's up with the Yahoo sale; a disturbingly familiar terrorist attack.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

In which the Supreme Court tries to make sense of immigration law without going utterly mad

Alex Wong/Getty Images

• On Monday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the lawsuit filed by 26 states over President Obama's 2014 executive actions on immigration — which would have protected up to 4.5 million unauthorized immigrants from deportation if they'd ever been implemented. (They were put on hold by the injunction the Supreme Court is currently evaluating.)

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• SCOTUS Kremlinology is always tricky. But it sure looked like the Court was split 4-4 on the case.

  [LA Times / David G. Savage]

• That could create a judicial mess, with the lawsuit continuing to plod through the lower courts in search of a final ruling while activists try to force a circuit split by filing a lawsuit to start implementing the executive actions.

  [USA Today / Richard Wolf]

• This isn't inevitable. The court just has two months, or a little less, to figure out whether it can get to a five-vote majority — most likely by Chief Justice Roberts or Justice Kennedy joining the liberals to kick the case out entirely, by denying that the states had legal grounds to bring it, without ruling on the merits of Obama's actions.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• One thing was certainly clear from the oral arguments: Immigration law is a series of compounding kludges. That makes it hard for the states to argue that Obama's 2014 executive actions crossed a bright line. It also makes it hard for the feds to argue that there is any limit to what the president can do.

  [Wall Street Journal / Jess Bravin]

• Outside the Court, immigrant activists held the biggest demonstration that many court watchers had ever seen; they were met with a few dozen counterprotesters, one of whom attempted to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at them through a megaphone but forgot the words.

  [Politico / Sarah Wheaton]

• (If you're interested in Supreme Court stuff that isn't just tea-leaf reading, check out Vox's Libby Nelson's write-up of an opinion the Court released today that could affect the sentences of a few thousand federal prisoners.)

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

Yahoo tries to sell Yahoo and keep the rest

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

• Yahoo is trying to pull off a tricky corporate manuever: selling off its unprofitable core business (the things you think of as Yahoo) while holding on to its stakes in other, profitable companies like Alibaba.

  [Vox / Timothy Lee]

• Bids for the company are expected to come in before tomorrow's earnings call — which will then be closely scrutinized for any evidence that the company has already found a buyer.

  [Quartz / Alice Truong]

• Of course, the fact that bids are supposed to come in before earnings are announced, and the fact that the company has been pretty reticent to provide other details about its finances, has made the bidding process a little hard.

  [NYT / Vindu Goel and Michael J. de la Merced]

• We don't yet know exactly who's made bids. Likely suitors include Verizon and the owner of the Daily Mail. (Google and Time Inc. have reportedly decided not to file bids.)

  [USA Today / Mike Snyder]

• As Vox's Timothy Lee writes, it might actually make sense for Verizon to buy Yahoo — it would expand its ownership of ad networks, and ads are easier to sell in bulk.

  [Vox / Timothy Lee]

• The same logic holds for a late dark-horse, cosmically ironic buyer: the Yellow Pages.

  [Bloomberg / Alex Sherman]

A bus bomb in Jerusalem

Ilia Yefimovich/Getty Images

• 21 people were injured when a bomb exploded on a bus in Jerusalem, in what the mayor has described as a terrorist attack.

  [The Guardian / Peter Beaumont and Harriet Sherwood]

• The bombing comes after several relatively quiet weeks in Israel, which had some in the country wondering if the relatively frequent attacks of recent months were settling down.

  [Jewish News (Australia) / Nathan Jeffay]

• More importantly, though, the attack is a disquieting reminder of the extremely deadly second intifada of the early 2000s, when bus bombs were a frequent tactic of Palestinian terrorists.

  [Haaretz / Nir Hasson]

• The intifadas play a tremendous role in the collective memory of both Israelis and Palestinians, something this 2013 feature from the New York Times illustrates better than anything else I (Dara) have seen.

  [NYT / Ben Ehrenreich]

• This 10-minute history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, meanwhile, places the intifadas themselves in context.

  [Vox / Max Fisher and Johnny Harris]

• One big difference between the current wave of violence and the intifadas: The current attackers aren't affiliated with established terrorist networks. That makes them harder for Israeli law enforcement officers to track down.

  [The Economist]

MISCELLANEOUS

Andrew Jackson is leaving the $20 bill. Good riddance. [Slate / Jillian Keenan]

• Fight for $15 and SEIU are gaining a new, unlikely ally: Airbnb.

  [Washington Post / Elizabeth Dwoskin]

• Helena is "an organization of 30 global influencers who work together to achieve positive global impact." Good luck figuring out what the hell that's supposed to mean.

  [Gawker / Sam Biddle]

• NPR has put together an incredible interactive showing how much school districts nationwide spend per student.

  [NPR / Katie Park, Alyson Hurt, Tyler Fisher, and Lisa Charlotte Rost]

• How English alt-rock legend PJ Harvey wound up totally alienating Ward 7 of Washington, DC.

  [DCist / Rachel Kurzius]

VERBATIM

"The rich didn’t earn their wealth — they’re just holding on to it for us." [Jacobin / Michael McCarthy]

• "We all have to decide what to think about these questions. We all already interact with arguably conscious non-human animals of various levels of intelligence, and many of us will at some future point interact with arguably conscious machines of various levels of intelligence."

  [The Conversation / Joshua Shepherd]

• "A natural hierarchy arose in the hospital. … The ones with schizophrenia, on the other hand, landed at the rock bottom — excluded from group therapy, seen as lunatic and raving, and incapable of fitting into the requirements of normalcy."

  [BuzzFeed / Esmé Weijun Wang]

• "Those who banked on the plausible in Weimar Germany were proven naïve, even if they constantly adjusted their definition of plausibility to accommodate the latest bizarre occurrence."

  [LA Review of Books / Elizabeth Schambelan]

• "If we all can agree that representation matters, then white people are impossibly well represented — while seeing an Asian face in the movies is bordering on the impossible. And apparently it's getting more impossible every day."

  [LA Times / Marc Bernardin]

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Vox / Liz Plank, Carlos Waters