But since I've the author relationship with it appended, I get the author as null (due to the global scope if the user is blocked).
How can I remove the global scope of the author in the above query and get all posts (published/unpublished) along with the author (blocked/unblocked).
I just came across this looking for a solution. You can actually remove global scopes from relations using closures (also from relationship existence queries):
To remove global scopes from a models relation, you need to eager load the relation and modify the query of the eager load.