Did you know? About 4.5 million SNAP recipients are babies and toddlers under age 5. About 11.1 million SNAP recipients are kids aged 5 to 17 years, who need food for healthy growth, learning, & development. The federal government has the capacity to continue funding SNAP during a shutdown.

Pleasure talking with @cgrisales.bsky.social for this All Things Considered story: www.npr.org/2025/10/22/n...

I just finished reading this book. It is terrific.

A master class from MIT in responding to authoritarian overreach: Your “premise … is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone. … America’s leadership in science & innovation depends on independent thinking & open competition for excellence.

Trump's own DOJ website still has a press release up from January pointing out that violent crime in D.C. is at its lowest in more than 30 years.

I learned a ton about campaign finance from reading Robert Mutch’s painstaking research. It is sad that his passing went with seemingly little or no notice. Maybe some CF scholars could write something up about him for PS:Political Science

@adambonica.bsky.social and I are economists now (economist salary coming soon, I imagine) Ungated until the end of September: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Gettysburg College is hiring a VAP in judicial politics beginning August 2025! The successful candidate will teach an introductory course in American Politics and upper-level courses in judicial politics. Ad will be on APSA on Monday.

My New Draft: “Faux Campaign Finance Regulation and the Pathway to American Oligarchy” papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Just early published in ARPS (open access) @garlicksauce.bsky.social @wmjunk.bsky.social & I survey remarkable recent lobbying research that shows how lobbying matters & whats ahead for studies of influence www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Just a reminder how classic what we're seeing is: 1. redefine a group as a threat to civilization 2. reduce legal protections that they enjoy 3. abuse, threaten, harm, and/or relocate them 4. dismiss/ignore concerns about abuses and harms from the process 5. repeat steps 2-4, escalating each time

Where does the “Abolish ICE” movement go to get its apology? open.substack.com/pub/thebulwa...

RFK Jr. is seeking to destroy the consensus around vaccines, one of the greatest public health achievements in human history. People will die because of it.

Having been an expert witness in four documentary proof of citizen cases let me set the record straight: 1. Non-citizen voting is already illegal 2. It is exceedingly rare, when it happens it is almost always due to confusion 3. SAVE will burden millions of people who don't have the required id

Wesleyan's Michael Roth: "money doesn’t come with a loyalty oath. And that has served the country so well because Americans and various governments we’ve had recognized that it’s better for the country if people can practice freedom." www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

This excellent piece by @rickhasen.bsky.social does such a great job of explaining the current state of campaign finance in the U.S. and how we got here. I just assigned it to my money and politics class. slate.com/news-and-pol...

Today the biggest split among Democrats is between those who want to stand and fight and those who want to play dead. House Democrats united to stand and fight. Too many Senate Democrats played dead. We need more leaders from the stand and fight wing of the Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party’s problems are not about being moderate or left. That’s a consultant and pundit red herring The problems are in party organization, the culture of “it’s their turn” nominations, candidate recruitment, gerontocracy, inability to shape media topics, and coming off hella lame

If you are a political scientist and looking for ways to be helpful in this moment, a substantive, material thing you can do that will immediately impact on grad students is contributing to the APSA Grad Support Fund. 100% of this fund goes to students: connect.apsanet.org/graduate/gra...

You can donate here: members.apsanet.org/donate-now The demand we've had for this fund has been 4-5x what we have in the account for any cycle. This need is going to grow with project cancellations and schools withdrawing aid. Even a small donation of $5 or $20 goes a long way.

Wyden is a NO on cloture Dem YES Schumer Fetterman Cortez Masto Gillibrand Dem not sures Durbin King Klobuchar Schatz Hirono Shaheen* *added back after a quote saying she's still deciding Assuming Rand Paul stays NO, Schumer needs three of the remaining YES. All eyes to Hawaii...

🧵I think there are many members of Congress who either don't understand, or don't care to understand, how central it is to their job description to show representational leadership even if there's few to no good policy outcomes that can result.

Setting aside all of the political strategizing, this CR is so incredibly awful that letting it advance when you have the power to stop it seems unconscionable to me. Do the right thing and figure out the politics after.

the tesla protest might objectively be among the most successful in history already just in terms of immediate response, if you consider they forced the world’s most powerful person & its most wealthy to fully degrade themselves like used car salesmen on live TV while the whole world watched agog.

1/ This is wildly illegal. That is not a question on which reasonable legally informed folks can disagree. It doesn't fucking matter that he ran on doing illegal things. They are still illegal. And striking at Congress's power of the purse is worse than illegal. It's anti-constitutional.

60 years ago today. I am in never ending awe of John Lewis’s courage, conviction, and persistence.

60 years ago, civil rights advocates in Selma, Alabama, were violently attacked as they peacefully marched to demand voting rights for Black Americans — a day remembered as "Bloody Sunday." Their courageous advocacy prompted the passage of Voting Rights Act.

Some scattered thoughts after the most shocking and horrible moment of US diplomacy most of us have ever seen. Not even sure what the point of writing anything about this is, but here goes. 1/

🧵My statement in response to Trump illegally attempting to fire Federal Election Commission (FEC) Chair Ellen Weintraub: In claiming to fire a commissioner of the Federal Election Commission, the president violates the law, the separation of powers and generations of Supreme Court precedent. 1/

New and important: we built a federal expenditure tracker. All expenditure line items that are available on the Daily Treasury Statement. USAID was zeroed out on 1/28 and has been at zero ever since. www.hamiltonproject.org/data/trackin... #EconSky

Is there a list of resources somewhere to help federal workers feeling threatened by DOGE? I have had several former students who work in federal agencies email me about the legality of DOGE’s actions and if I knew of any publicly-available legal resources.

Is anyone tracking lawsuits over the federal spending freezes, the USAID shutdown, etc.? Who is suing? Where are those lawsuits being tracked or aggregated?

(re)reading @joshchafetz.bsky.social’s important 2017 book, Congress’s Constitution. This book changed the way I think about congressional power and separation of powers—and is uniquely suited for the present political moment.

This year, 10 U.S. billionaires gained $787B in wealth. That's nearly 4X more than the $214B earned annually by all 3.2M U.S. public school teachers combined. In fact, more wealth went to a *single person* than to all teachers combined. Is that fair? This is what extreme wealth costs society.

Wow. This is a fantastic collection of essays across all of the key areas of election law. There is nothing else out there like it.

This LSE blog post by my awesome colleague Alauna Safarpour provides a nice summary of her research on CRT recently published in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/20...

Interested in learning about trends in campaign finance from 2020--and where things might be going in 2024? Join us virtually on Monday! www.brookings.edu/events/finan...