Just here to post this again like I do every year, not only because Douglass was one of the founding philosophers of American liberty but because I am so moved by the kids Frederick Douglass’ descendants deliver “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July”

As you read about Bill Pulte purging dozens, probably because they refuse to give him something, remember the story about Trump's desire to have a master list of spies. www.ms.now/news/pulte-f...

They had three choices w/r/t heat and hydration: open and encourage people to bring lots of water, open but limit people to one bottle each for "security" reasons, or close. They started with the least decent, humane option. Glad they have graduated to something better.

HOW CAN YOU TELL

The Supreme Court that upheld birthright citizenship in 1898 was almost the same Court that upheld "separate-but-equal" segregation just a couple of years before. Certainly not racial liberals, but unlike four current justices they could read the plain text of the Constitution.

The irony is the first release had tons of survivors names

In a small village, everyone's opinions matter at least bit and people avoid lying or making indefensible arguments to safeguard their influence in future interactions. But applying that same presumption of legitimacy in larger society to views advanced merely by large wallets leads to disaster.

2/ Each of those involve the *Court* imposing limits on the president in the name of the Constitution. None of them involve Congress constraining the presidency. Indeed, Roberts approvingly cites Chadha in several places.

The campaign against undocumented people was sold as a return to obedience to the law. Yet in all its major particulars, it's been operated as a defiance of the law, including spectacularly clear statutes and constitutional provisions. Almost as if return to legality was never the point...

This!!! "The 2nd Amendment wasn’t intended for weapons of war to murder kids in classrooms, but here we are…" I love and miss you every second of every day Jaime 🧡

Valuable 🧵 on the remarkably dangerous, ahistorical, ghastly theory underlying Justice Alto's dissent. I would add that Justice Alito seems utterly unaware, yet again, of Lockean social contract theory, which was paramount to the Founders. This repeats a glaring mistake made in Heller.

This was correct in 2014, as was "Sotomayor & Kagan should immediately retire in Jan 2021," as was "Thurgood Marshall should have retired in 1978" etc. Pretending Justices were irreplaceable geniuses instead of aging partisan votes in a 9-member super-legislature has been Democrats' fatal error.

you know, when someone says something like "these are the things that need to be done to avert disaster" and your response is "you think democrats will do that?!?" all you're telling me is that you think politics is a spectator sport

Crucial point that Democrats do a terrible job of communicating: both parties have supported initiatives with massive fiscal costs, but Democrats have always paid for theirs apart from pandemic relief and recovery (much of which was bipartisan). Republicans consistently do not pay for theirs.

Slaughter never made any sense. But when the supposed personal responsibility of the President is diluted by term limits and Trump v. U.S., it really is quite silly. Presidential term limits mean we have a system changed from that of the Framers.

The Court claims to be Originalist, yet a great deal of what it presents as evidence is just random old stuff. Trump v CASA demanded rigidity out of the first Congress that would have been extremely strange prior to the merger of law and equity decades later. 1/3

In assessing Supreme Court decisions, we should distinguish those the supermajority could reasonably have felt compelled to make (within its worldview) and those discretionary choices that seek to improve our system of government, in their eyes. 1/3

I will once again remind folks that a very sizable chunk of what looks like Congress not doing anything to push back against the president is in fact a consequence of the Court disabling/destroying all the ways Congress has tried to push back.

I'm sure this will do wonders for the medium- and long-term health of the Russian economy. What could go wrong with a war that guts the labor market (through casualties and men fleeing conscription) and the capital market (by forcing assets to flee the country or get stuffed into mattresses)?

Note that part of why NPS properties are somewhat under-maintained is that the Trump Administration keeps hijacking their maintenance budgets for his vanity projects in D.C.

The alarmist "what if Putin escalates?" hand wringing every time Ukraine gains momentum is tiresome. Putin can't escalate w anything but full mobilization, which is risky for his political grip and might not be as useful in the new drone war. He's increasingly in a no-win situation. That's good

thank you jd vance for helping instigate an ethnic cleansing campaign

If Joe Biden had put his image on the US passport, Republicans would have begun impeachment proceedings.

It’s surreal watching the AFU take mile upon mile of abandoned dugouts as routed Russians fled THREE TIMES since March 2022, and people still say “there’s no military solution” despite watching the liberation of the north, of the east, and of Kherson in almost real-time online

Recall when the GOP was seeking a replacement for Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Rep. Emmer was rejected for being "too moderate".

Impressive legal gymnastics from a Court that, in other settings, treats the Common Law as holy. Would the Framers really have been fine with imputing an intent to block state Common Law from a statute that makes no pretense of doing so?

Ukraine offered absurdly generous terms to Russia if it would not launch the full-scale invasion. Russia launched this pointless slaughter in violation of its prior commitments anyway. If you want to support diplomacy, support Russia's expulsion from Ukraine so that countries learn to accept offers.

Whenever I hear someone claiming that USAID was evil from a leftist perspective, I hear someone saying “yes, millions ARE dying because Musk and Trump killed USAID, but at least they’ll die free of American imperialism.” Notably it is never the people saying this who are dying.

Just remember, though, that anytime the Trump administration wants to use race as a basis to persecute vulnerable people, the Supreme Court swiftly suspends its "colorblindness" principle. The Constitution is only colorblind as needed to subjugate racial minorities. slate.com/news-and-pol...

If there are a million people yelling that tax cuts caused the debt problem, then I'm one of them. If there is one person yelling that tax cuts caused the debt problem, then I'm THAT ONE. If no one is yelling that tax cuts caused the debt problem, that means I'm dead.

I can’t tell anymore if we’re talking about Iran or algae.

I quite agree: no doubt at all. When leaders of parliamentary parties are suggesting seizing all bank accounts to close the budget gap, all stability is lost.

One of the many tactical errors and weak links of Trump's MOU. Waiving oil sanctions on Iran before basic commitments or steps made to contain and catalogue their nuclear potential is a mistake. Now Iran has every incentive to drag out the talks for a long time. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/06...

The right-wing Abelardo De la Espriella owes his razor-thin victory in the presidential election not least to Donald Trump. Will he now transforming Colombia into a Trump-style autocracy? One thing is odd: Trump claims to be battling the drug lords, but almost everything he does aligns with them.

"I have accepted Keir Starmer's resignation as my chief servant and have invited Andy Burnham to lay out details for how many meals a day he'll give me"

Very interesting paper finds that when South Korea suspended its “low-skilled” guest worker program, the result was not a rise in wages for native Koreans doing those jobs, it was the opposite; current employees got reassigned to those jobs and took pay cuts and firms went under.

Iran has two massive advantages: 1) Trump is desperate to stanch the economic damage the war has done and will make all kinds of insane concessions & 2) "negotiators" who are in way over their heads and bore easily. JCPOA took *two years* to finalize! We're so screwed.

So Iran is taking care not to lose out of ignorance: not to accept something that doesn't genuinely meet its needs but also not reject something that does. Very smart. By contrast, the U.S. sends people that have already made plenty of mistakes and are going on gut feelings rather than understanding

My latest on how President Trump's seizure of the Power of the Purse is beginning to allow him to overcome blue states' resistance to his policies. Balkinization: Power of the Purse V: How Transformations at the National Level Threaten Federalism share.google/LBNRSWrWu59I...

Thoughtful 🧵 on how to persuade voters in these difficult times. I wish persuasion would become a much more prominent theme in progressive discourse. It's the only path to something better.

In the eight months since Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill passed, SNAP enrollment has declined by 4.7 million, according to USDA data. In states where demographic data are available, about half the decline comes from kids losing food aid. The Trump administration describes this as a success story

A fitting metaphor for our Government's ability to deliver for the people. Indeed for our society as a whole.

Lovely and inspiring people. I have been deeply fortunate to have had the chance to work with and learn from the Barbers. You won't find more tenacious - or funnier - champions of justice.

Useful 🧵 on the need to disregard short-term excuses offered for China's feeble domestic consumption. From a simple-minded perspective, China's model is paradoxical: prioritizing investment over consumption is supposedly about building for the future, but the debt load required will cause great pain

From the beginning of the Reflecting Pool job. They must not have asked anyone who knew anything. And yet they let a no-bid contract with a guaranteed profit margin far above the usual for government contracts. They certainly ought to sue but surely are afraid of what would come out in litigation.

Excellent. We need more of this. Democrats can show these districts what having an actual representative would be like.

Bizarre. Also note that the 2011 sequester, which is their example of how Democrats cannot be trusted with the national security, was a Republican initiative. Republicans forced it in an effort to force huge cuts in anti-poverty programs. Maybe they are the party we should be worrying about?

The Administration's only defenses of this agreement have relied on the fuzziness of the war's goals. That, in turn, is the clearest possible evidence that we should never use force abroad without clearly stated goals upfront. They are in effect arguing that their war had no goals and so didn't fail

The art of the deal

Excellent 🧵 on the lessons apparent from the U.S. failure in Iran and the Russian failure in Ukraine. Future world stability depends on these countries, and China, learning that their 19th Century fantasies are dangerous and wrong.