Of all the awful things that Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins did as senators, their joint creation of DHS, in the post-9/11-Iraq frenzy, may be the awful thing with the most lasting bad consequences. A full reorg should be a priority for a future Dem president, but will take time.

I wouldn't write off Dem senate candidates in OH, IA, NE. All long shots but worth trying. But try a thought experiment: Is Sherrod Brown the strongest D candidate in OH? Of course. He ran 3 pts ahead of Harris and won 3 times. Would he be a stronger candidate if he declared himself pro-life? No! 1/

There is no world in which it is normal for the president to publicly call upon his attorney general to hurry up and prosecute his political foes. It’s like the Watergate tapes but posted on social media. Let’s get a grip on what’s happening here.

This also goes to a point @donmoyn.bsky.social made last week: College campuses are *uniquely* open, among all American institutions, to debate and disagreement. You can't go to an evangelical church (or any church) or corporation and expect them to give a hearing to an alternative viewpoint.

I've been involved w/ a number of think tank startups, but this is the first I've seen started with the mission of *not* doing things. There are no ideas here My only other thoughts were in response to Jentleson's 9/16 op-ed markschmitt.substack.com/p/the-groups... www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/u...

Please join New America's Political Reform Program, Columbia World Projects, and @north.america.fidemocracy.org tomorrow from 11am to 12pm ET for an exciting panel that will explore the past, present, and future of assemblies in America, and their role in broader institutional reform movements.

One of the privileges of my life was to work w/ both @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social and @jamellebouie.net at @prospect.org in 2008-2011, though they didn't quite overlap. They are not "opposing viewpoints," but are both motivated by curiosity, not just glib "takes," and a commitment to human dignity. 1/2

I offer up “Borgen” as a tv series that political scientists appreciate for getting politics right.

My office for 10 years has been at 15th and H in DC, above Joe's Stone Crab. The President of the United States, describes our block: “Here I am standing out in the middle of the street. I wouldn’t have done this three months ago, four months ago. I certainly wouldn’t have done it a year ago."

I guess on this point I am on team abundance! The climate crisis is very real, and very serious. But I don't think scarcity in an economic sense is the right way to think about it. Seriously addressing climate should raise material living standards - there's no tradeoff.

If we're going to have a Department of War, maybe it's time to revive the idea of a Department of Peace, which has a long (Benjamin Rush, 1893) and bipartisan history. (I associate it w/ Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-OR, but there were many other R supporters.) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Departm...

I served on a DC jury last week. For @newamerica.org , I wrote about the weird experience of civic responsibility in an occupied city where Jeanine Pirro is the US Attorney: www.newamerica.org/the-thread/d...

It’s not just that the President of the United States posted a video of eleven people being murdered in international waters it’s that the President of the United States ordered the murder of eleven people in international waters so he could post a video of it.

I have found a lot of use for Melinda Cooper’s concept of the anti-social state: a government that exists only to extract wealth and inflict violence, and dismantles all its pro-social and life-enabling functions. www.dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

I might quibble with some of the details, but this taxonomy of different abundance tendencies is really useful. A lot of discourse on this website is driven by the mistaken belief that Moderate-Abundance Synthesis is the only tendency out there. www.niskanencenter.org/abundance-va...

The "messages" Shor tested, the ones that tested well as well as some of the real ones from electeds, are all just terrible messages. They jam so many concepts-Trump takeover, distract, stunt, tariffs, price of groceries, hitting working people, "picking political fights to change the subject,"

the actual communication problem democrats have is this: their most prominent national figures filter everything through focus grouped lines and are incapable of plain speech

It's not just that no Dem politicians use the words on 3d Way's silly banned-words list. There are real problems w/ the way Dems talk, but they aren't about individual words. They involve insincerely mouthing talking points from groups like 3d Way, or talking programs rather than human goals 1/

On the Biden presidency scorecard, it needs to be noted that he appointed at least the second best justice of any Dem president since LBJ, w/ Ginsburg 1st and Sotomayor close. And by far the best writer since the previous Justice Jackson.

Arrested for "carrying a pistol without a license" is only possible in DC and the 21 states that require licenses. In almost all the red and very purple states (+northern New England), this would not be a crime. Which is why most of them have higher rates of gun violence and murder than my city.

13% of Republican senators voted against Bork's confirmation. So did the very conservative Democrats Howell Heflin & Richard Shelby of Alabama (Shelby would soon switch parties). Even 86-yr-old racist Sen. John Stennis of Mississippi voted against Bork. This wasn't even a close call.

NEW in Bolts: Seattle's democracy vouchers program hands residents $100 to donate to local candidates and it’s credited with broadening civic involvement. Voters appear to have extended it by 10 years. boltsmag.org/seattle...

There have been so many rounds of, "We need a ___ for the left": We've needed a Grover Norquist, a Powell Memo, a Limbaugh, a Heritage Fdn, a Weekly Standard, a Fox News, a Joe Rogan, etc. Maybe a pluralistic, democratic alternative needs different kinds of people and orgs than an authoritarian one.

Think tanks are a bit tangential to a lot of what Trump 2.0 is doing, but the overall war on expertise and high quality information gathering presents hard questions for how Washington has been wired since roughly the Cold War.

A great piece, but leaves out the crucial role for organizations in this benighted moment to recruit and nurture the experts that can help inform policy when facts and expertise matter again. Even if we make no headway in the short-term, we need infrastructure in place for when new space emerges.

United Kansas’ lawsuit against the 1901 anti-fusion law is a reminder that we can learn a lot from our history. There was a time in Kansas when voters had more choices. Read more at: www.kansascity.com/opinion/read...

I wrote about the role of think tanks in a moment when knowledge and ideas are under attack. Many thanks to colleagues at @newamerica.org and other organizations for sharing thoughts on this challenge. democracyjournal.org/arguments/th...

New report from @maresastrano.bsky.social @mschmitt9.bsky.social and @oscarp.bsky.social rp.bsky.social‬ lays out the why, how, and where of expanding access to statewide ballot initiatives to more states: https://www.newamerica.org/political-reform/reports/expanding-citizen-led-policymaking/

It's not just the ACA expansion of Medicaid. It was the incremental work of *decades* to expand Medicaid beyond the small group also eligible for AFDC. It ended the trap where ppl lost health coverage if they earned a little more money. One of the great generational policy achievements, tossed away.

Great to hear this, but I worry that 49+ of his colleagues barely know what Tillis is talking about. They've shut out info about the interaction btw Medicaid and their rural hospitals; they assume ppl who raise their hands at town halls are paid agitators. They've cut off any normal feedback loop.

This illustrates the big change in political $$ that I wrote about in @bostonreview.bsky.social: It's no longer raised by candidates, but billionaires move their own pots of money, attaching themselves to various pols, like mercenary armies in the Middle Ages, allied to one prince or another.

Sincere question. Democrats have been lighting up Trump officials in hearings, many of which, not all, are yearly appropriations hearings. it's really fun to watch, mostly. Why aren't you seeing that? What would it take you to do so? To make it go viral?

Taking this more seriously than it merits, I'm always curious how people who think 4 of the last 5 presidents were "dumb" reconcile their support for absolute presidential power and immunity. If the US is so likely to elect "dumb" presidents, isn't that a good case for robust checks and balances?

Don't know if she mentioned this in the interview, but there's a very personal context here I had forgotten: Smith managed the brief Mondale campaign after Wellstone's death. (From a plane crash, but oldsters will remember how Wellstone's *funeral* was aggressively spun by the GOP).

Before calling NYC's ranked-choice system undemocratic, should compare it to NYC's previous system, in which if no candidate reached 40%, there'd be a 2-person runoff, later, low turnout. Same possibility that plurality winner in first round wouldn't win, but a more cumbersome, limited process. 1/2

I am as big a sucker as anyone for the fine-grained legal analysis, but I do sometimes worry it distracts us a little from the big, dumb, obvious points. This is appalling & precisely what the Framers were terrified of. Whether it’s technically legal if you squint right doesn’t change that.

Here's the thing: While some of the administration absolutely intend an autocracy and I suppose some may not, almost everyone in the administration was chosen for winning the contest of Who Can Say the Most Outrageous Things. *That's their skill set.*

My advice to Democratic politicians in this moment: Speak in your own voice, say what you believe, listen to your own constituents, and try to convey the story of the authoritarian moment as best you can. Others will speak in their own voices. A majoritarian political party is a broad coalition.

Try telling younger people (and not very young) about the 1992 House bank scandal. 20-30 House members lost their seats or retired early because they took advantage of what was basically overdraft protection at their payroll office. Sloppy, but no public $ was lost, no bribes or corruption.

Partial context for Ernst here is that like many Republicans, she's convinced herself that people who show up for town halls don't represent real concerns among constituents. Recall Musk's "the left is mostly fake," and resistance is "paid protesters." What an ugly view of the people they represent!

I worry that the "don't rank Cuomo" campaign makes people think there's some secret strategy to ranked-choice voting. There's not. The goal and value of RCV is that the winning candidate should be broadly acceptable to a majority. So if a candidate's not acceptable to you, don't rank them. Simple.

I'm just "somebody sitting at a think tank," and not aligned with Loury, but I nonetheless agree with this paragraph and @joshchafetz.bsky.social's endorsement of it. Academia has its b.s., but the whole sphere, from community colleges up to the elite institutions is an amazing human achievement.

DOGE should update everybody’s beliefs downward about the extent of redundancy and bloat in the federal government

If Schumer could force a vote on the bill, it might be worth it, just to put some R's in a tough spot and elevate the issue of the bribe. But he can't get a vote. At best he'll get a late-night vote on a "sense of the Senate" on the budget bill. That's useless. Need really creative oversight instead

This Democracy Docket post expands on the point I made yesterday that attempt to take over LOC previewed Trump attack on GAO: bsky.app/profile/msch...

Good piece, but I disagree w/ @mjsdc.bsky.social's framing it as a "blow to the filibuster." Extending Congressional Review Act to administrative waivers is another exception to the filibuster, one that advantages deregulation and reaction. Exceptions to filibuster are best reason to get rid of it.

Pure speculation, but possible that the admin's attack on the Library of Congress previews similar move against the Government Accountability Office (GAO)--also a leg branch agency w/ head (Comptroller General) appointed by WH. GAO has been more of a thorn in Trump's side, and a likely DOGE target.

It shouldn't get lost in the day's other news that two agency heads--Noem and Patel--seem to have shown up for congressional Appropriations Committee hearings completely unprepared to explain or defend their administration's budget requests. I would be surprised if that's happened even once before.

A useful thread.

My @newamerica.org colleagues and I are hosting a great event on Tuesday, 4/29, on whether civil society institutions can save US democracy, w/ @crow.house.gov, Wesleyan president Michael Roth, @karenattiah.bsky.social and others. In-person and live-streamed. www.newamerica.org/education-po...