"Free people do not sit still as rights are stripped away, as laws are broken by those trusted to keep them, and as diktat replaces democratic deliberation." — @tomgpalmer.bsky.social

4 in 5 Americans agree there should be upper age limits for Congress. A constitutional amendment to that effect would sail through ratification (even on their own self-interest, state legislators would like the idea of more frequent open seats). But nobody in Congress is willing to even file it.

You know they don't actually care about the supposed virtues attributed to Lee by the Lost Cause myth because they demonstrate none of them and don't support anybody who does. Not that Lee did either, of course. But they don't really value such things anyway.

Which of you shall we say doth love us most, That we our largest bounty may extend Where nature doth with merit challenge?

Correct. At which time Congress was fully aware that a ton of states had this policy, which they did nothing to touch.

NEW: For the first time, ProPublica has been able to quantify how many U.S. citizen children have been directly affected by Trump’s immigration crackdown: more than 11,000 kids had a parent detained — and that’s an undercount. 1/ 🧵 www.propublica.org/article/trum...

My read of the first part of this Watson argument is that Alito and Gorsuch will vote to hold that states cannot accept ballots arriving after election day for congressional elections. Despite what I view as very clear text and history back to the Civil war to the contrary. Rest is hard to know yet

This is a chronic problem in election administration cases. None of the justices are familiar with the nuts and bolts. Some are worse about making up their own ill-informed policy preferences, to be sure. But they all make pretty elementary factual mistakes when this stuff reaches them.

What the law actually means when it sets "election day" as the first Tues after the first Mon in Nov is that's the latest people can vote. Which a voter who puts their ballot in the mail has done. Nobody's voting after election day, you can't can mark and successfully cast a ballot the day after.

Fact check: the paperclip was invented in the 1890s, not in 1844.

oh my God literally over coffee on Friday I told @queenmab.bsky.social "it just hit me that on Monday ima have to hear Alito banging the table while saying some shit like 'it's called Election DAY, not Election MONTH' in that whiny voice" and my friends would you like to know what just happened

I know they'll probably get up to worse, but part of me kind of likes the idea of making ICE agents spend all day restacking those plastic trays because it's the only thing they can do with zero training on all the other stuff that goes into running a TSA checkpoint.

I'll give Schumer this one: this is a good and factually correct explainer of what the bill would actually do, why it's insane, and how Republicans are lying about it. The only thing I'd add that he doesn't mention is it's not even possible, logistically, to implement this year in time for November.

It wasn't that long ago this kind of overt endorsement in another country's elections, even if favoring the incumbents, would have been a major diplomatic incident and political scandal. A norm now demolished by the supposed defenders of national sovereignty.

This, and also federalism more broadly. The failure to consolidate an authoritarian regime owes a decent amount to how ~90% of law enforcement (for all their ills) and the vast majority of people's day-to-day interactions with government are state and local, and the president's not their boss.

lmao

It's a testament to his personal clout with his colleagues that Rand Paul, *as the Homeland Security chair*, flipped against a DHS Sec. nominee and brought along zero Republicans and negative two Democrats.

This is excellent. open.substack.com/pub/no01/p/m...

"Withhold congressional pay during a shutdown" is a perennial bit of slopulism, but at least Kennedy gets credit for drafting his in compliance with the 27th Amendment, which they sometimes forget about.

Trump: I’m going to put ICE in the airports, where they will target and arrest all the illegals, especially Somalis, because I hate the Democrats Headlines: Trump puts ICE officers in airports to ease long lines, provide relief for weary travelers

There are of course unique natural wonders elsewhere, but one of the fun things about the US is that it's as close as you can get to the world in miniature within a single country. True of the people but also geographically. Like, you can find a slice of almost any biome / scenery you want.

Sometimes you get flashes of how his prejudices and ethnic/racial ideas are specifically mid-century NYC. His particular hatred of Puerto Ricans is one. That he's even aware of the Sopranos-parodied link between Columbus and Italians is another. Neither of those are things you get in, like, Alabama.

I like how he notes this is "the nation's first," implicitly not its last.

The fact Mueller was a veteran, or if you have a favorable opinion of his long public career, is rather immaterial to why it's sociopathic degeneracy for the ostensible president of the United States to say such a thing. It's not wrong because Mueller was a good guy. It's wrong regardless.

Yep, just an objectively terrible human being

I'm seeing a lot of these fake Donald Trump truths being posted on BlueSky (and lesser sites) at the moment. Its pretty easy to check, and you owe it to yourself and other people before sharing it.

And if you want even more on executive branch contempt of Congress, there's a whole chapter on it in here ... www.amazon.com/dp/0300248334/

I've written about why the most promising way to avoid these problems while capturing the benefits of a nonpartisan primary is the Alaska model, under which four or five finalists advance from a preliminary winnowing round and then ranked choice voting #RCV is used to decide the final. /3, end

On this note, they need to heed @joshchafetz.bsky.social on how they can do subpoenas in a way that has real teeth and doesn't depend on the courts or DOJ. No more futzing about with futile civil litigation or pointless criminal referrals as they have for too long. Use your own power as the House.

If we're running out of essential ammo in less than a month of a war against a regional middle power with a GDP smaller than Vermont, it does make you wonder what would happen in a near-peer conflict that somehow lasted longer than March Madness.

Attempts to insist on a good kind of populism are either really just plain old left-liberalism (progressivism if you prefer), which doesn't need to be mislabeled, or else actually are zero sum, us vs. them, the real people vs. illegitimate enemies, which is simply bad and a path to authoritarianism.

a fuller explanation of why populism is bad, full stop.

This isn't a stretch based on assumptions or interpretations, or just some unpublished notes and letters. He very plainly said she was the co-author at the time. This dedication is in the first edition, published a year after she had died.

Last month, the pro-Trump cable network OANN asked a court in San Diego to restrain our client, Chelsea Goss, from speaking on social media about Matt Gaetz's statutory rape of a 17-year-old girl—or at all about OANN, Matt Gaetz, or Charles Herring. Today, we filed the anti-SLAPP.

Utterly loathsome and morally bankrupt.

In 1973, Congress almost forced a government shutdown in the fight to cutoff funding for Nixon’s unauthorized war in Cambodia—Operation Freedom Deal. The power of the purse is the ultimate war power.

I would like to personally award Afroman the Bluesky Medal of Valor for Exemplary Service in Bringing Back Shame

I feel it's important to keep pointing out that these "doomed to fail" votes are important in themselves as a political tool and could have been wielded far more often over the last year, including impeachment.

I think my favorite part of this suit is where the guy who was suing because Afroman said he fucked his wife said on the witness stand that he did not know for sure that Afroman did not fuck his wife.

The best part of the Afroman case isn't just the original couple of videos about the bogus raid on his house. He then proceeded to make a bunch of others calling them out by name with all the highly damning dirt he found about all their numerous other crimes and history of extreme misconduct.

multiple afroman videos were entered into court record. just played in full as the subject of them sat on the witness stand and afroman sat at the defense table in an american flag suit smiling. these are like 10-15 minute music videos. folks were calling it an album release party

for those not caught up on the trial the officer mentioned here was asked if he was called a “son of a bitch” by afroman yesterday and said yes but not publicly. so aftoman went home and posted this clip, which he released two days ago

Update:

Top Two is a terrible, no good, awful system. But CA Dems could—as in right now hurry up what are you waiting for—prevent the worst case scenario just by putting a write-in space back on the general election ballot. That's not in the constitutional amendment, they did it by statute and can undo it.

Attorney for the plaintiff cops: You are making outrageous lies about the police Afroman: They stole my mother's lemon pound cake Cop: *flees courtroom in tears*

Some politicians had cultish fan bases before of course, but it was mostly limited to major presidential candidates. With rare exceptions you had to genuinely be in, like, the top four or five people who might plausibly be the next president before you could get that much attention. Now you don't.

The problem with banking on senatorial courtesy for an easy confirmation is sometimes senators really hate each other.