Massie is talking about inherent contempt, which should be revived, but... I don't think the House can use contempt to coerce compliance with the EFTA statute. That's not obstructing the House as such. The House should first issue a subpoena identical in scope to EFTA and then it can enforce that.

People are rightly disgusted by this speech, but it’s a measure of fascism’s normalization that many see this as more of the awful same rather than what I think most of us who’ve been reporting this beat hear it as: a significant calculated escalation. Full alert stuff.

Timothy McVeigh would be loving this.

The vice president, singling out for overtly racist abuse a natural-born US citizen whose only non-racial political relevance is he recently lost a primary for mayor of the country's 46th largest municipality.

Grotesque as he is, Trump has his sense of humor. Too much of one, if anything. But he knows, or did back when he knew things, how his shtick's a self-parody persona. Vance otoh is a debate me bro twitter reply guy, the smarmy tone of a guy who's cloyingly desperate to be the chad in a soyjack meme.

it is almost Christmas which means it’s Muppet Christmas Carol season and that, in turn, means it is time to revisit this delightful interview with Michael Caine, who loves everything about that movie even more than you do

also, these "WAR" values (a) are derived from a statistical model that produces ideologically convenient results that no other open-source model replicates, (b) lack controls for important factors like fundraising and candidate experience, and (c) completely ignore uncertainty in the data. not good!

The person charged with enforcing the laws is an open lawbreaker, assisted by a team of open lawbreakers, backed by a Congressional majority indifferent to lawbreaking, supported by a Supreme Court that privileges them to break the law. It has no legitimacy whatsoever.

scientist who’s published papers on statistical theory here: yes, this

Biden ran a point and a half ahead of House Dems generally. But more relevant: you know what winning a seat by 13 points instead of 8 points gets you? Absolutely nothing. Even if Casten traded away a few points he didn't need anyway in order to go further on whatever issue, that's rational behavior!

They really went in and tried to delete this photo in particular because they'd missed that it had Trump in it. Incredible.

Of course, Claudius was famously a historian. Also famously dribbled snot and was socially inept and his own mother was ashamed to let him be seen in public. tbh not the strongest Roman reference to invoke in your branding

Here's Andrew Johnson's impeachment resolution text, in the handwriting of Rep John Covode, who introduced it (later modified to add the words "while in office"). This was voted on and resulted in Johnson's impeachment. Articles came after. Trump Imp 3.0 could be done in days.

That was fast.

So... any kind of plausible deniability that somebody might have really had an innocent or unaware relationship with this guy rather falls apart when you see the full scale of how it was literally all he ever did and talked about, every waking moment of his life and to everyone he knew.

*taps sign* Any individual member of the House can force a vote on impeachments and anything impeachment-related.

JUST IMPEACH TRUMP FOR THE LOVE OF GOD

Aside from all the sex crimes, who the hell takes this many pictures all the time? Grand total if I went back 15+ years, I probably have... I dunno, 50, maybe 100 photos of me with friends and such, at most. It seems Epstein had that many taken every time every time he walked into a room.

The list of "masseuses" is completely redacted (victim information, makes sense), but…it is 254 entries long. www.justice.gov/multimedia/D...

He didn't even match the existing font!

I guess the idea is they can drop the extra "the" when it happens.

It's difficult to overstate how stupid these young men are. Like, yes, their values and beliefs are vile. But they're also just exceptionally dumb, no doubt fancying themselves paragons of critical thinking while saying the most moronic stuff imaginable.

Spanish is effectively the second language of the United States and has been since whatever point in the 19th C. when the number of Spanish speakers we'd annexed surpassed the number of French speakers we'd annexed. About 1 in 5 can speak it and a large chunk more have some rudimentary familiarity.

Per the announcement and apparently also the signage on the building, it's "The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Center," with a grammatically inexplicable surplus of definite articles.

i have never quite understood the praise for deneen's work because he honestly just seems like a crank

Deneen misrepresents liberalism’s fundamental principles and presents a warped history of liberalism that dismisses its achievements and exaggerates its weaknesses. @mattjj89.bsky.social

HARRY LITMAN (@harrylitman.bsky.social): The Supreme Court's overruling of Humphrey’s Executor will be a constitutional and practical earthquake.

🗳️ At a recent panel hosted by University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Law School, politicians and legal experts dug into the future of fusion in WI — a system banned since 1897 that would allow multiple parties to endorse the same candidate. @dailycardinal.bsky.social www.dailycardinal.com/article/2025...

He's wrong in very basic ways about how the EC and contingent elections work. But the actual expert brings up succeeding from Speaker. One nitpick about that: I don't think the commonly repeated idea that the House can technically choose a non-member as Speaker is correct, pres. succession aside.

“The embrace of the unitary executive theory by both the president and the court has given us the worst of all worlds: an ultrapowerful presidency without an actual president at the helm.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/o...

I know it's irrational racism, but this is also stupid as a factual matter. If no duplicates, 11th-great grandparents plus intervening descendants = 16,382 ancestors. Astronomically unlikely no 19th/20th C. immigrants. Patrilineal surnames are just a social convention, that's not your only ancestry.

It'd be bad enough just on how Watterson famously doesn't want this kind of thing, leave him alone man. But also there's no way anybody could make a Calvin and Hobbes movie that wouldn't be absolutely terrible anyway.

All you really need to understand about water usage in the western United States is that every single use - even the ones that sound egregiously wasteful like AI data centers - rounds down to 0 compared to what irrigated agriculture uses

Kennedy Center absurdity is another example of how many laws are on the books but don't have any actionable remedy because Congress just assumed, especially on something so mundane and obvious as "what is the name of this thing we're creating?," that the law would of course be followed on its face.

It almost goes without saying, but this is illegal. The name "John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts" is established by law and the board doesn't have the power to change it. 20 USC 3 §§ 76h - 76s.

The problem with this model is the Republicans also exist. You can't just sit back and ignore their signature issue, letting them frame it as their great positive with zero rebuttal. Weakening your opponent's advantage on their perceived strongest issue is a necessary tactic, and has been working.

California Democrats should be turning on and moving more aggressively to change a system that has a substantial chance of producing a general election ballot next year with two Republican candidates for governor and nobody else.

And ditto in return! Liberal Currents is an incredible and important voice. Be the media ecosystem you want to see in the world.

We can compare him to George III, but when that king went mad and started babbling gibberish, at least the British did something about it and transferred his powers to the next in line.

A sign of how structurally weak the national committees are, how we've hollowed them out and stripped them of any real power. Not only does the DNC not have much ability to make anybody (PACs, candidates, etc.) listen to this, it's so politically impotent it can't even publish such a report.

Deciding when to recess the House to "district work periods" isn't some inherent or longstanding power of the Speaker. It was only added to the rules for the first time in this Congress. Otherwise this would have required the full House to vote on it, which could have been defeated.

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This is possible but it also wouldn't be the first time Trump has done an "address to the nation" which turned out to just be his usual meandering gibberish on no particular topic.

That we just keep rolling along with pretending he's not manifestly non compos mentis will be studied by future generations as a kind of mass psychosis.

The Vanity Fair photographer knew what he was doing. (I doubt I’m the first to notice this but it hasn’t graced my TL)

Dershowitz is also totally wrong about how this works. House can only pick somebody who’s in the top three from the Electoral College. A candidate’s electors all abstaining, even setting aside how state binding laws wouldn’t let them do that, would mean they’re not eligible in a contingent election.

Everyone is understandably sharing the Miller quote, but I found this response from photographer Christopher Anderson to be notable, too.