Here's the deal. There are in fact cases - cases where the Supreme Court law is against you - where your only job is to lose in the lower courts as fast as possible. That's because you can only win on the facts if you get *new law* made. And only SCOTUS can reverse itself. But! https://twitter.com/JanNWolfe/status/1336136383031873539

Powell's various cases and Trump's cases are not like that. Their problem is not really some SCOTUS law they're trying to change. Their problem is that their claims fail in every way: the facts are made up, the law is against them on every ground, they're litigated badly /2

There's no "circuit split" in these cases, for example - that is, Trump isn't challenging some law where the lower courts have disagreed, or where people have been agitating to reverse SCOTUS precedent for years. There's literally not a single indicator of a SCOTUS case. /3

What these cases have is a fast track to getting the cert petition denied (that is, the Supreme Court won't take the cases). They have a fast track to the great garbage can in the sky. They are completely void of merit. If they were a sack of merit, the sack would have a hole.

The fact that there are indeed cases in the world - think something like the challenges to segregation - where losing really is the path to the Supreme Court does not mean *these* cases are anything like them. They are not. Not even close. Not in the mind of any lawyer who knows.

For my fellow lawyers, yes I'm papering over a few details here in the interests of clarity - maybe inside the cases there are splits of some interest, etc. But nothing that would cause SCOTUS to take them and not in these vehicles and not in this context.

Finally, this is not really me opining on this. I don't know of a single lawyer who litigates in this world at all (and I'm not really in that world, one accidental case notwithstanding) who thinks this is going up.