Massie voted straight GOP the vast majority of the time. His only real break with Trump was over the Epstein files. Kentucky voters rejected the guy who wanted to expose the truth about a sex offender because Trump told them to. Think about what that means.

Pedophilia is a plank of the Republican Party, a very real policy goal that they work towards on a consistent basis, from the President to the primary electorate. The Republican Party's countless exposed sexual predators simply represent the party's view, which is that children should be molested.

So the thing about Thomas Massie is that he’s what you would THINK is the worst case scenario for a public servant. Has horrendous politics and supports awful stuff but at least has the tiniest shred of humanity that he opposes sex trafficking kids. That makes him the best Republican somehow!

Trump is shooting people on 5th Avenue and daring anyone to stop him.

one thing that went wrong in our political media culture is that journalists so deeply internalized a backwards version of 'the cover-up is the crime' they assume that anything that's being done out in the open is just 'a thing that happened' that needs to be subjected to the 'objectivity' standard

This honestly bugs me a bunch re: Odyssey critique. A lot of the Iliad and the Odyssey is Goofy Fun. People turn into pigs! Nestor gives long speeches about how he doesn't give long speeches! Trying to treat them with reverence is itself a desecration.

In my lifetime, voters nationwide have only given Democrats a trifecta for two years or less every decade or so. It’s like only giving firefighters a hose for a few minutes every hour and being mad at them for not fully extinguishing the blaze.

We all have occassion to say this a lot in this era, but seriously this is the craziest goddamn thing I've read in a very very long time abcnews.com/US/trump-poi...

How come whenever someone fails to kill the president, the whole conservative establishment blames us for correctly labeling him a fascist, but when trans women are murdered there isn’t a single call to “tone down the rhetoric?”

Supreme Court Holds, 6-3, That Black People Voting Violates Rights Of White Voters

Alito’s logic in this case—that characteristics that correlate with racial identity, like partisanship, aren’t constitutionally protected and can be used to disenfranchise legally is *the exact thinking* that gave us poll taxes and literacy tests.

we don’t talk enough about how Chicago is the most gorgeous city in the country

just unbelievably spitting mad at this garbage fuck these people, rewrite all the rules and lock every one of these white supremacist assholes out of power forever

I don’t think it’s sufficient for Democratic officials to treat these rulings like partisan acts from an out of control activist court. They should be regarded as part of a criminal conspiracy against the republic.

Virginia Gov @abigailspanberger.com and Democratic legislature should pass immediate legislation to redistrict anyway. If the old confederate states can do it post Callais - so can Dems in Virginia if they care about saving our democracy.

virginia voters should call their delegates and senators and demand that they ignore this illegitimate ruling

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.

Virginia Supreme Court declaring Democratic gerrymandering illegal while Republicans are literally wrapping themselves in Trump flags while disenfranchising black southerners is the most on brand moment for the modern USA.

I don’t think it was a myth, I just think we need to update our mental models from “everybody agreed that Jim Crow was wrong” to “there remain people who think Jim Crow is right, and stopping them is an active, ongoing effort.”

In December, SCOTUS stayed a district court ruling blocking TX from using its new maps because the lower court ruled "on the eve of an election." That district court ruling was issued 15 weeks before the TX primaries. Callais was issued *17 days* before the LA primaries.

whole states have stopped their election processes faster than the Biden administration was able to respond to an opinion that had already been leaked months earlier. i don't mean this as a random jab; republicans just understand power in a way that dems do not.

FDR’s Fireside chat on March 9, 1937 explaining his proposal to expand the Supreme Court stands up surprisingly well. “We have reached the point as a nation where we must take action to save the Constitution from the Court and the Court from itself.”/1

as long as john roberts has his majority, there is simply no pro democracy reform that will survive the supreme court. none.

Members of both parties are egging on a nationwide tax revolt—and if the economy were to tank, the country could end up with a toxic combination of widespread joblessness and rampant inflation, @annielowrey.bsky.social argues.

I am unspeakably angry about this turnout gap figure, and it gives insight into the whole ballgame for gutting the VRA. Alito points out that Black turnout exceeded White turnout twice in 5 elections. The argument is garbage 1/x

They think they're ripping up artificial constraints on the deeper, truer US republic & no they're actually knocking down essential structural supports of the American compact without which our modern society cannot function. We had to put in those supports to keep the Founders' house in one piece.

I suspect those feelings are also intensified by just how rapid social change has been over the last 30-odd years leaving folks feeling quite unmoored. Like, the social change is good, but I think folks - especially my age and younger - sometimes do not appreciate how massive the shift was.

For the vast majority of American history, the Supreme Court has been a bastion of white supremacy and oligarchy. There was a brief exception during the Warren Court—but that’s the exception, not the rule. We shouldn’t look to the court to protect our rights or our democracy.

Judicial review is not in the constitution. High courts shouldn’t have the right to veto acts of Congress. The country could have a high court that consults on the constitutionality of laws Congress is considering. But, we shouldn’t have another veto over what the people voted for.

I have spent my entire career listening to FedSoc types complain about liberal “activist judges” who “legislate from the bench,” and none of them are going to say a single blessed thing about Sam Alito rewriting the Voting Rights Act to say what he thinks Congress ought to have said

The court has simply recreated the pre-Brown world in allowing racial discrimination across a broad number fields as long as it is “facially neutral,” gutting the Reconstruction Amendments in the process.

There's just really no way to exaggerate how dumb & pathetic & offputting I find everything about this.

Big win for the plaintiffs today in Confederacy v. U.S.

There is no equivalent on the Democratic side for the pure, undiluted nihilism coming from the federal government right now. We basically have one party of technocrats and one party of Branch Davidians.

The Iranian schoolgirl, the cancer patient whose clinical trial was cancelled, the African AIDS patient who can't get treatment anymore — none of these are "real" to our media elites. Can't imagine themselves in that situation or visualize it. But "panic at the fancy gala!" on the other hand,

we're not even pushing the downright punitive taxes yet and they're shitting their pants. these are modest revenue-raisers and they're losing their fucking minds! all the more reason to go whole hog and destroy these people who oppose even our most moderate plans

The mainstream media constantly draws false equivalence between Dem gerrymandering retaliation and GOP gerrymandering without ever noting the Dem efforts are happening because of voter referendums and the GOP ones in defiance of them

The dystopia of inequality--that high table for the lords and ladies; the dystopia of violence--all the federal guns suddenly on display; the dystopia of incompetence (they had one job: to keep a shooter out); the dystopia of normalization.

A professional deceiver replacing a professional truthteller is pretty on the nose

yet another bare minimum qualification for the next dem SECDEF: all these fucks need to be booted out at 1201 EST 20 Jan 29

This is treating Trump v. United States as law. It is not law. It is anti-law. It belongs in that category of Supreme Court decisions which were not merely wrong, they were illegitimate and non-binding from the day they were issued. It is owed no more respect than Lincoln gave Dred Scott.

it is very funny how these people are so accustomed to essentially bullying democratic politicians that they meltdown when met with appropriate pushback. in any case, the process to amend the virginia constitution has multiple stages where, at any point, an amendment can be defeated.

So much false equivalence in media on gerrymandering in Texas vs California & Virginia. California and Virginia maps approved by the voters. That's a huge difference not enough people pointing out

flipping through a proof of yet another book from a somewhat well known liberal voice diagnosing “where the left went wrong” and i’m struck, again, by the fact that a large part (if not most) of the liberal commentariat simply does not believe that the political right has agency.

Conservatives think the state should protect them from the traumatizing experience of encountering people unlike them. For some reason this never came up in the heyday of “snowflake,” “trigger warning” or “safe space” discourse bsky.app/profile/kiss...