Among (lots of) other things, this is going to flood the federal courts of appeals with cases in which the BIA might previously have cleaned up the IJ's messes. When something like this happened in 2004, the circuit courts ... did not respond favorably to the government's positions in those cases.

It's not a moral panic. Delusions about satanic sex abuse rings in daycares, that was a moral panic. Salem witch trials also fit the bill. Epstein is about specific known people who are either directly implicated or at least suspiciously in his orbit for one guy who really was raping kids en masse.

It's genuinely just this.

This morning at the Minnesota State Capitol. An ice sculpture that reads "PROSECUTE ICE". I'm told the organization behind the sculpture is Common Defense.

SAVE Act has nothing to do with voter ID, that's not in there. It creates deliberately difficult hurdles for registration to vote, where a DL-type ID isn't sufficient. But states that don't check ID at the polls would not be required to start. Every time they claim it's a "voter ID" bill is a lie.

NPB, aside from its other issues, is the kind of traditional bipartisan event nobody should attend if he's going to be there. Don't show up and observe the norms as if he's a normal president. Symbolism matters, don't give it to him. Let him speak to a room full of only his own braying jackasses.

I also tend toward this view based on past experience and the feds’ lack of manpower. A lot of voter suppression tactics are met with counter-mobilization and also suppress some R-leaning groups, reducing their impact. They remain illegal and immoral but thankfully they are also often ineffective.

The thing to do, though, is fix laws that have made us more vulnerable to this nonsense, esp. like in AZ, where there probably are the votes for it: - Ensure early voting - Allow drop boxes and help voting - Allow poll monitors (including by out-of-state observers, even if just lawyers, etc.)

Killing the CIA World Factbook might seem like small potatoes, but it was a touchstone of curated facts in a sea of disinformation.

My new one @slate.com : I Wrote a Book in Support of Nationalizing Elections. Trump Changed My Mind. slate.com/news-and-pol...

My expectation for this is they'll make a big show of rolling out the goon squad outside a handful of locations, the states will seek and likely get emergency injunctions, and meanwhile the whole spectacle will only motivate way more people to show up and vote in defiance than are scared away.

If every single ICE + Border Patrol agent was assigned to go be menacing outside a polling place, with only one agent at each location, that still wouldn't cover even half of all in-person voting sites in the United States.

Somehow we wound up getting professional wrestling, the clergy, and concealed carry bros.

Read this whole astonishing document. it should be taught as an object lesson in what volunteering to assist a fascist government does to your mind, body, and soul.

no comment could possibly be adequate

The thing about this that's so backwards is renaming / rebranding / combining / splitting government agencies is something politicians do all the time. It's not the farther out there radical idea, it's the easy perception win even if the actual substantive changes aren't so impressive.

Really nuts how many men were like "Me Too went too far, and I need to email Jeffrey Epstein about it."

If she's going to run (def not my top pick), I both kind of hate but also can kind of see the strategy for unexpectedly announcing super early this year.

Trump has weaponized every other part of the federal government, but we’ve heard surprisingly little about the Intelligence Community proper. It’s a shoe I’ve been anxiously waiting to drop for the past year.

NEWS Elon Musk and others LOSE their bid to duck depositions in DOGE litigation. Judge doubts protections for "high-ranking government officials" for multiple reasons. It's unclear they ever had that status, and Musk "left government service." Doc buff.ly/uhpSOTz

He's 100% right, and I'm not going to caveat every 300 character post about what the law is or why something's wrong with repetitive "but of course they try anyway and might succeed." Which people inevitably chime in with to repeat ad nauseum, often in a stupidly hostile way that merits insta-block.

A statement against doomerism as some kind of intellectually elevated, clued-in reaction to the horrors of our political moment.

Denaturalization as criminal punishment is not a thing in American law, it's unconstitutional under any circumstances. It can only be done in the narrow case of somebody who fraudulently obtained the naturalization itself. Otherwise they are no different from natural-born citizens who commit crimes.

There’s still some difference between a bad faith unserious fig leaf of an argument and one scrawled in crayon without even the pretense of being serious.

I know it's not easy and wouldn't be on the same scale, but I would think there's at least some demand sufficient to support a newspaper in the nation's capital that has actual reporters.

Nobody who's been incidentally mentioned or revealed to have had only trivial interactions with Epstein has suffered any consequence worse than being mildly embarrassed, at most, and they have been the focus of little if any media coverage.

It's kind of wild that the French foreign ministry has an official shitposting account.

This is true and the extreme nature of how bad US elite impunity has gotten. But it's also because it's such a US-centered scandal. It implicates such a concentration of the most mega-powerful political and economic elites, their combined pull far exceeds Andrew plus a few specific politicians/CEOs.

"whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise"

There's both the dumb Trump angle and the cynical strategy aspect to this. Former is he doesn't understand any of the details and so this tumbles out as his mangled version. The latter is it's deliberately overshooting what they might actually do, to make their actual attacks seem less extreme.

Setting aside everything else going on here, the term "influencer" has become meaningless and should generally be retired by house style guides. "Social media / online personality" or "content creator" or "podcaster" as the case may be, modified with "political," "right-wing" whatever as applicable.

In the months ahead, Trump will gin up all kinds of lies about so-called election malfeasance. It’s bullshit. All of it. Its sole purpose is to undermine trust in elections as a pretext for extra-constitutional actions. Get the facts. These are voices I trust. go.bsky.app/FxTaZYF

It would be trivially easy to frame this as only their immediate demands in a way that doesn't suggest that's all they ever want, but Chuck Schumer and his people are genuinely, staggeringly incompetent at comms.

Floored by this story. A man wrote a pollite email to a federal prosecutor objecting to the deportation of an Afghan seeking asylum. DHS responded with an administrative warrant to get the man's info from Google, then visited his home to intimidate him.

The federal government imposes (in laws passed by Congress) some rules on state conduct of elections. But a federal takeover and running elections itself isn't a thing. Not just legally; they have no capacity to do anything of the sort. It's a workforce on the order of a million people nationwide.

Nothing even remotely like the modern system of tightly restricted international borders existed in biblical times.

@kenwhite.bsky.social gets at an important point here: the peddlers of this stuff aren't just wrong and muddled about what free speech means. They are actively hostile to it. The whole game is insisting some people's speech is bad for speech so they should be compelled to shut up.

Guaranteed that 99.8% of the people whining about casting a black woman as Helen of Troy are not even aware The Odyssey is not the story of the Trojan War.

Some questions about this b/c it's not been the main opposition talking point and it's not obvious. So to break it down: voter registration drives usually involve people having you fill out the form and then they collect and turn those in. That's essential for it to be done at scale effectively.

This is unreal. An AUSA talking like that in open court is about as close as you can come to a total breakdown. Never heard of anything like it.

More specifically, he's lying that the SAVE Act is "voter ID." It creates a requirement at the time of *registration* to vote which is deliberately calculated to make traditional voter registration drives impossible. It is not what people usually think of and many states have, ID check at the polls.

Fun fact: the Americans didn't actually have much experience with hanging as a method of execution so the Nuremberg ones were rather botched. Ribbentrop died slowly from strangulation.

Most reliable red flag for a certain kind of ostensibly sensible centrist-ish elite is when they dig in their heels insisting Charles Murray is some kind of serious thinker who shouldn't be shunned, rather than a plain old gutter racist substantially on par with David Duke.

Cannot emphasize this enough, federal judges only do this when they're extremely distressed

Not only excessive and gratuitous force, it absolutely does not work for the ostensible purpose. They love using it punitively to feel badass and because they can get away with it, but it only makes the situation worse even if you are properly trying to disperse a for-real riot.

Will's right and these (very few) people are idiots. What the hell is lighting trash cans on fire supposed to accomplish? It looks bad, duh, but it's also just plain dumb. The local sanitation department is not the enemy. It's about defending the community; being anti-social jerks does not do that.

They're literally running out of lawyers in a state where the district judges are practically at war with the administration.

@kenwhite.bsky.social "When the American Civil Liberties Union fought successfully for the rights of Nazis to march at Skokie, it did not convene a public meeting to ask the Nazis to explain why the Jews were so bad, and it did not portray the Nazis as heroic warriors for free expression."

This, from @kenwhite.bsky.social in @theunpopulist.net, is a genuine must-read. If the current state of free speech discourse interests you—and especially if it infuriates you—this is a critical reframe steering us away from the idea that bad-faith actors are actually our free speech heroes.