Roberts dropping that “we’re not political actors” quote and doing this 96 hours later is nasty work

very good and it zeroes in on a really important dynamic: the way the professionalization of the court and the industry around it serves to insulate the justices from democratic feedback as well as contribute to the idea that the justices are law wizards to whom we *ought* to defer.

We need to stop presenting OLC opinions as anything significant. OLC has long been too ambitious in its assessment of executive claims. Given what Trump has done to the entire administration, Bondi initially did to DOJ, and Blanche has done since, they’ve rendered OLC opinions meaningless.

Republicans removed every Black person in the Tennessee state legislature from every committee.

The central reason that trust in health professionals dropped during covid is that the president intentionally and explicitly used doctors as scapegoats for the economic damage the pandemic caused. What irritated overly online center-right pundits is a smaller factor.

america's reactionaries would love nothing more to nullify the reconstruction amendments and render them a dead letter of the constitution. this was as true in 1873 as it is today.

very much of the view that a democratic congress should wield the guarantee clause against ad hoc, mid-decade redistricting, a practice which is an end run against representative government itself

gonna have an essay in the reconstruction papers about this exactly: the idea that courts are the sole interpreters of constitutions is a doctrine fundamentally lethal to democracy. we all--and legislatures especially--are equally allowed to interpret and execute constitutions.

the answer to why republicans seem to be able to blow past procedural hurdles is because SCOTUS and other courts are partisan republican bodies thanks for coming to my ted talk

It's enraging to watch people who aren't firmly on the left talk about this because it so quickly becomes accepted as normal. It should not be a radical left position that the party who wins more votes in an election should win, yet at every turn that's not true in the US.

a steady state where the partisan numbers wash out in gerrymandering but blacks lose the franchise in the south would be a massive loss

Ever since I had an unexpected postpartum hemorrhage immediately after my youngest child was born I view all birth stories through a "okay would I have died if I'd had to give birth that way" lens.

actually to put a T on this, the reason democracy works so well is that no loser is forever because democracy never stops, but once you lose that... it starts to fall apart

We cannot continue to have a situation where states led by one party are bound by the law and states led by another party are not.

Blue states having less partisan courts while red states can stack their courts with partisan Republicans is kind of a disaster.

Welllll shit

“Simply wearing a small red letter A is no great burden, and it would infringe upon the free speech of the rest of the town were Hester Prynne not to wear it.” www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/exc...

This is the only Odyssey adaptation that understands that the hero is an impulsive himbo who deserves his many ass whoopings. It is entirely believable that this Odysseus would get a bunch of his guys turned into pigs by a sexy witch.

this is also one of my hobbyhorses. you want a better caliber of lawmaker? you want to reduce the odds of corruption? pay them more. a lot more.

I doubt you could find a single law governing voting and elections in 1935 Louisiana that Samuel Alito would have a problem with.

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court will say anything. "We're apolitical jurists just following the law." No you aren't. That isn't true.

There's been a running theme in Roberts & co's thought wherein the political process is corrupt and distasteful and the judicial process is not.

At this point it’s almost routine: Almost every time Donald Trump makes a major announcement about the Iran War, that announcement is preceded — sometimes by only a few minutes — by huge and hugely profitable bets in the oil market. — @pkrugman.bsky.social

If you had asked people in 2010 what sorts of presidential behavior should obviously get you impeached and removed this conduct would make everyone's top 5

Keeping it all nice and subtle

When you're definitely winning your war of choice:

I'm trying something a bit outside of my hobby comfort zone: yellow and sci fi:

In 2022, SCOTUS considered February too late to make Alabama change its (then illegal) maps. They didn’t have to change them until 2024. And will probably get to change them back this year even though the primary is May 19. This isn’t tolerable.

"the singularity is real and it happened two hundred years ago" is really a key thing to understanding how i think about the world

In case you were wondering what kind of kid I was, I took private trombone lessons for a couple years and once brought in a CD so I could ask my teacher what time signature Schism was in

I dunno if it's good enough to explain how much of a cultural phenomenon it is, but my May 4th take is that Star Wars is a really good movie.

I don't see how ten different pictures of my parents fighting could possibly be a useful diagnostic tool

Salad Fingers. Charlie the Unicorn. Badger Badger Badger Badger. All Your Base Are Belong to Us. You're The Man Now, Dog. O RLY? Numa Numa. Leeroy Jenkins. They're Taking the Hobbits to Isengard. This is Sparta. It's over 9000. Rickroll. The Cake is a lie. Chocolate Rain Don't LIE to me I was THERE

Look, this is not a defense of Platner, but a lot of people engaging in never ending Maine primary discourse have cooked their brains. Dude sucks, plenty should have been disqualifying, but some of you are throwing around “He IS a Nazi” in a way that’s false and irresponsible and devalues the label.

thank you sam alito for ending the unconstitutional racial discrimination against white conservatives and allowing them to obliterate federal representation for as many black people as they can manage, as the reconstruction congress intended

Q: How will the new SSI rules impact your family? A: I have no clue Q: But you're something of an expert? A: I know, now imagine how everyone else must feel. Q: Why is it like this? A: Because Republicans love administrative burdens and do it on purpose. from @ms.now

Zeke's three step guide to American politics for the moderately-to-severely brain poisoned: 1) the GOP is the party of Donald Trump, an extremely bad person, and wants to do lots of bad things. 2) Voting is a thing you do to try to change how the government behaves.

this other angle, is also something that should be well known

Of all the buck wild things the Court's conservatives have said to justify themselves over the years this might be the worst.

Wildly, to the extent the previous Trump Administration succeeded (which even now they get too much credit for) it was because a bunch of boring old right-wingers ended their careers making sure that Trump & his buddies weren't left to their own devices. This was the only failsafe & it's *been* gone

Ok there's a lot of incorrect information going around on this, so I want to be clear that the problem with the Big 3 and EV's isn't that the Big 3 didn't want to make EV's. The problem, as with so many things, is Trump. I'm gonna do a little thread on this because people don't seem to be aware. 1/x

Very broadly speaking, the Court leaves its biggest cases to the end of the term. Shelby County was June 25, 2013. Brnovich, July 1, 2021. Those dates would be too late for Callais to matter. But with midterms looming and a GOP House majority looking fragile, this decision came in late April. Huh!

Callais ought to be clarifying because there is no way to make the statute and Constitution more clear. The VRA was modified by Congress specifically to avoid this result. The VRA is directly authorized by a constitutional amendment. Yet SCOTUS still found a way to destroy it.

Philadelphia reported 39 murders through April which is the fewest reported there since 1963. New York City reported 75 murders through April 26 which is on track to be the fewest murders through April ever reported (previous low was 86 in 2018).

my formative yimby experience was being priced out of the neighborhood i wished to live in, and realizing that this meant i in turn would price someone else out of the neighborhood i settled for my conclusion was not that any renter involved was evil, but that we should stop playing musical chairs

“Voting is a privilege, not a right” is maybe the most axiomatically perverted thing someone can say in the context of a representative democracy. It’s not just a matter of degree, it’s that it completely inverts the source and recipient of power in a democracy.

On top of everything else about the circumstances what kind of election law lets you redraw the districts after people have started voting?

That’s actually a wonderful analogy for it. There’s social dark matter and we know this because we can see it pulling on public opinion in ways our models don’t predict. What it is, how it works, how it changes - well, that’s a matter of speculation and debate.

Multiracial democracy in the American South has briefly existed twice in American history, both times enforced from outside, and both times has lapsed the instant the rest of the country lost interest.