We’re very worried about American birth rates. That’s why we are making pregnancy a minefield, hacking away at healthcare and the safety net, increasing the cost of living, and keeping schools dangerous. As a bonus, we’ll adopt policies and culture that make women want to emigrate from the country.

two things. 1. when the trump administration says that something is “illegal DEI” they are saying “you don’t deserve this” 2. the practical effect of destroying the VRA is to make it nearly futile for these americans to get relief from congress

It is wrong and criminal for government agents to kidnap someone, send them to die in a concentration camp, and disappear them, regardless of immigration status. But it's still worth noting she has a green card. The government doesn't even pretend this is about deporting undocumented people.

My reporting finds that sexual violence against Palestinians by Israeli authorities is widespread. I'm grateful to these assault victims for sharing with me the brutality they endured. Whether we're pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian, we should unite in being anti-rape. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/o...

🗳️ In Louisiana, Alabama and South Carolina, Republicans are pushing to redraw congressional maps that strip Black voters of political representation. In the backdrop of these efforts? Ongoing primary elections in which at least 42,000 ballots have already been cast – and could now be thrown out.

Foxman was an amazing guy. I am very sad to hear of his passing. Whether or not you agreed with him, he was ferociously empathetic and always found the heart in everyone. May his memory be a blessing.

Very sad news, the 18 year old that was battling colon cancer has passed away, just a day after being reunited with his parents after a judge ordered their release from ICE custody. Our hearts are with the family, friends and community who knew Kevin and advocates for his parents release.

Voting rights

Write me a book about Xerxes. He is a gigachad with boomer parents who got him a photo shoot. You can just copy the Wikipedia article. Don’t worry about distinguishing him from Darius, basically the same thing. No hallucinations, no errors.

Palmer drought index. Worst ever. Worse than the dust bowl. Fire season is coming.

Good paper on document corruption with LLM’s. They are mean reversion machines. How do we make this more scalable, but mid?

i think he's a little spooked, yeah the GOP base has seen the Court as a partisan actor for my entire lifetime; the Court's remaining legitimacy as a "neutral arbiter" actually rests on moderate institutionalists (mostly Democrats) continuing to support it

i think we are firmly in heighten the contradictions territory in this respect to be clear. making these institutions reveal themselves as corrupt & partisan has real value. just saying we shouldn’t kid ourselves about why state-level GOPers act like they’re playing under different rules: they are

I left Northern Ireland to come here to play soccer in 1981. It was at the height of the troubles. When I left my mates called me a lucky bastard for getting to go live in America. Last month I was home in Ireland for a wedding. The same people told me how sorry they were for me having to live here.

It’s telling that Alabama took 14 years to implement Brown (you MUST desegregate) and < 14 days to implement Callais (you CAN eliminate Black districts if you call them Democratic, but you don’t HAVE to).

Agreed. It's not possible to reconcile "rule of law" with "one week the GOP SCOTUS will nullify a 43-year-old statute so they can allow racial gerrymandering, then the next week the GOP VA SC will block voter-approved redistricting and have themselves a laugh by citing the SCOTUS liberals' dissent."

it’s so crazy that Virginia voters amended the constitution to allow redistricting while Florida voters amended the constitution to ban gerrymandering… but the Republican hacks on both state supreme courts overturned the will of the voters to ensure that republicans get their preferred outcome

Oooh — I can’t wait to see how the 6th Circuit calvinballs this clear, unambiguous statutory language to let Republicans proceed.

We absolutely plan to put her in an Owlet sock once she’s home! Yeah, we want her out of hospital of course. But just being able to hold her again will be so nice. For any other expectant parents owletcare.com?gad_source=1...

ICE arrested the parents of between 27,000 and 32,000 kids during the first seven months of the Trump administration. We sued the government for records and here's what we found... w/ @wcraft.bsky.social @us.theguardian.com

".. Federal government payrolls lowest since May 1966." - Schwab #NFP

“That being said, the legal profession, and especially the legal academy, simply cannot keep going like this. The contradictions have become too great. It is better for everyone if we dispense with them now, and have the courage to deal honestly with one another.”

“None of this drew any objection from the Supreme Court. Some of it they explicitly endorsed. That semester, my professors informed me that the Supreme Court is our nation’s bulwark against strongmen, and its justices are the last great protectors of minority rights and the separation of powers.”

A guide to US elections: +5 R - generational mandate +3 R - clear mandate +1 R - decisive victory +0 - R win +1 D - R win +3 D - narrow, disputed win +5 D - D win

Drutman & Huq: “With the Supreme Court (and many lower courts) likely to stay conservative for at least a decade (if not longer), any approach to political equality that depends on the courts is a losing battle.”

I don’t think Republicans have thought out what it’ll mean if they engineer a bleached-out neoconfederate Congressional majority that will have won less than half of the country’s votes per the orders of their Copperhead cult leader and a hackpartisan SCOTUS majority living its best Dred Scott life.

One especially infuriating part of this ruling is that past GOP gerrymandering may have enabled it. Democrats narrowly lost Virginia’s House in 2021 using the prior GOP-drawn map. That gave the GOP the power to appoint two justices under Gov. Glenn Youngkin—one of whom was in the 4-3 majority here

Just reminding everyone that Black political representation has material effects on policy. It’s so effective that the last time Black politicians were run out of office (Reconstruction), it was with violent force. They paid with their lives for their success. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

I, uhhh, I dunno, I really think there's a social contract theory problem with overruling a popular referendum after it happens because of a slight technical deficiency in the process whereby it was placed before the People

I think a lot of people are underestimating just how politically radicalizing this stuff is, when you see what the right is getting away with, including with the blessing of the Supreme Court majority

Most states in the deep south have had permanent republican rule since the 90s and there's no hope to change it for generations given the polarization along racial lines. This is despite rampant corruption, dysfunction, and disasters in all these states. It'll take near collapse to dislodge them.

People point to Hungary but it took 15 years to get Orban out and that's after he destroyed the country and made it the poorest in the EU with a massive brain drain. Unfortunately, that's the only way out. Republicans have to fuck up so badly that the voters finally say enough, and even then...

And now they're using that structural bias in the system to turn it into a permanent advantage that will make it nearly impossible to vote them out of power. It's turning us into an illiberal democracy with a permanent ruling class dominated by white men.

My entire lifetime has seen Republicans benefit from every structural bias in the system: two republican presidents elected while losing the popular vote,the senate being biased towards small rural conservative states,house and state legislatures being heavily gerrymandered, and a captured SCOTUS.

Ohio Republicans Are Just Ignoring The State Supreme Court’s Anti-Gerrymandering Rulings. It’s Working. talkingpointsmemo.com/news/ohio-re...

Kaine puts out a statement saying "If the Virginia Supreme Court had legitimate concerns about this referendum, the time to stop it would have been before three million Virginians cast their ballots."

Biden made a bet that improving the material conditions of the middle class would stop Trumpism without the need for structural reforms. He was very very wrong and everything we're seeing now is a direct consequence of that.

Voting in an overwhelming wave this fall is vital, but it's also important to understand that Republicans are no longer wedded to electoral outcomes or committed to liberal democracy. They have already begun using force to exercise power and alter democratic behavior. It's going to intensify. 🧵

The majority's holding is: "election" doesn't mean what it says in the Virginia Code and how it has always been interpreted, it has a new amorphous meaning we sharked up from every other source we could imagine.

We've reached the point where one party has so obliterated the rule of law that everyone else continuing to abide by it will only hasten the end of our democracy. That's a recipe for chaos and violence. It's terrifying, and I don't know what we do about it.

Virginia's Supreme Court overturns Virginia's gerrymander Meanwhile... Florida's lap dog Supreme Court has already refused to enforce the state's explicit ban on partisan gerrymandering regarding the current map and We'll see if Louisiana's Supreme Court allows the governor to cancel elections

After SCOTUS gutted the VRA, the GOP is set to target 2-4 more Black Dems in AL and LA. They could add 1 each in MS and SC for 2-6 more targets in 2026. Dems are out of options for 2026 but could target up to 23 currently GOP-held seats by 2028. Click this link for details bsky.app/profile/step...

“it is useful to interrogate why the justices continue to put on their bravest faces and make this case in public. They like making bad decisions, and want to continue doing so unabated.” Also notice who is NOT defending the court

It is still likelier than not Dems will win by enough to take the House. But if they come up short by some single-digit number of seats and it was... all this... that made the difference, that's a pretty huge leap towards full-blown legitimacy crisis territory.

The rules of redistricting are simple: Republicans are free to do whatever they want, and Democrats are also free to do whatever Republicans want.

This is particularly maddening because the court allowed the election to go ahead when all the legal facts were exactly the same. The only real new information they have now is what the result was.

More from @kateriga.bsky.social on state courts: "In a perfect world, every state would have nonpartisan state courts and we would have a real democracy. But we don’t." talkingpointsmemo.com/live-blog-up...

The problem—which both the GOP and the milquetoast institutionalists seem to not be grappling with here—is that the more you close off avenues of political change through the democratic process, the more you push people to see extra-institutional mechanisms as their only option

did the Virginia Supreme Court stop Republicans from gerrymandering the piss out of VA state and congressional districts in 2012 without asking the voters at all? they did not