Bernie never strayed from his battle cry around fighting wealth inequality and corruption - the perfect public servant to administer the oath of office to Zohran Mamdani.

Serious question: have any high-profile evangelical or tradcath leaders spoken publicly about the moral imperative of funding SNAP?

By a 2-1 opinion, the Ninth Circuit just held that the president can federalize the National Guard forces and deploy them when protesters shine flashlights in the eyes of ICE officers. It’s one of the most dangerous and legally flawed court decisions I’ve seen this year. 1/23

I ❤️ NY

Times Square

Sam Ezersky understood the assignment for today’s pangram.

State and local officials can take steps now to prepare for federal interference in the midterms.

Canada. Australia. France. Brazil. Germany. The UK. Spain. Romania.

Yes, Presidents do have to uphold the Constitution. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

The dream is dead

🚨 The House will vote on the SAVE Act - a vote suppression bill that could block 21 million American citizens from voting - this morning 🚨 Call your members of Congress and tell them to vote no: secure.brennancenter.org/content/call...

A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die. Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.

Don’t dismiss the power of mass protest to rein in an authoritarian leader whose power depends on individuals remaining passive.

A masterclass in public speaking.

The administration's executive order and the SAVE Act could both have the same effect: *blocking millions of eligible U.S. citizens from voting*. Get informed and get involved:

Bluff: called. Well done, @theatlantic.com

My feed is increasingly looking like the pre-credit montage of headlines in a post apocalyptic action movie.

History will not look kindly upon this.

This won’t stop at green card holders.

Being a historian, people ask me if I think the US is living through Germany 1933. I answer no, analogies are always imperfect but to me it feels more like Russia 1999: a blatant theft of state assets and liberals in a fugue state, refusing to believe the arc of progress is bending against them.

Don’t let the fox guard the henhouse.

While we were sleeping: A federal judge in New York issued an aggressive order against the DOGE goon squad at the Treasury Department barring them from any and all access to the Bureau of Fiscal Services and ordering them “to immediately destroy” anything they may have downloaded from the systems.

The fix continues to be in. www.propublica.org/article/elon...

Trump’s cronies can’t shut down the Internet Archive. Donate here: archive.org/donate

Federal employees make this country function and keep Americans safe. This administration is putting us all at risk.

I ran @USAID health programs for the last 3 years. Trump’s 90 day Stop Work Order on foreign assistance does serious damage to the world and the US. Examples:🧵

Talk of rescinding birthright citizenship is just that: Talk. Presidents can't rescind it, because the Constitution expressly guarantees it. The Constitution's text reflects a basic American principle: Being born here comes with citizenship. Any executive order won't survive the court fights. 🧵⬇️

The new president swore to uphold the Constitution, and within minutes, he began to undermine it. Declaring a national emergency at the southern border is an abuse of emergency powers. 1/2

"Audio problems in the rotunda" = incredible array of awkward glances

May our better angels prevail in the end.

When Donald Trump says he wants to dismantle the deep state he means firing federal employees and civil servants, and then taking those jobs and outsourcing them to his tech billionaire buddies.

Obama (along with a couple of million of us) toughed it out in subzero temps in 2009, just sayin' www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/u...

This whole 2020 ProPublica piece is worth reading, and climate change is coming for all of us. But I’m again struck by how effectively social media has been exploited to convince swaths of the Southwest & South to vote against their own survival. projects.propublica.org/climate-migr...

Your regular reminder that the Supreme Court’s opinion immunizing presidents from criminal prosecution isn’t a serious ruling for a serious democracy: It’s an epochal dereliction of duty. @brennancenter.bsky.social www.brennancenter.org/our-work/ana...

Learning from history/not being doomed to repeat it requires maintaining fidelity to the memory of January 6, 2021. Don’t let the raw truth of it slip away.

The Oval Office is back on the market…

I cannot fathom how a Cybertruck buyer could see coverage of deadly fires, recalls of failed recalls, dropped insurance coverage, and wildly shoddy build quality and think to themselves, “yep - THAT’S the car for me”

Despite never getting a SCOTUS appointment, Jimmy Carter left a major imprint on the federal judiciary. He appointed Ginsburg and Breyer to lower court seats and broke down the existing old boys network in order to bring greater diversity to the bench. An important (and often overlooked) legacy.

One of the laws used for WWII-era Japanese internment is still on the books, and now some want to use it to deport immigrants on a massive scale.

The astroturf campaign against Blake Lively was terrifyingly successful - every dark corner of the internet saw those stories. And malevolent forces can just as easily destabilize a democracy as trash a career.

Mm. Especially satisfying Wikipedia donation.

Just as a treat here's some fun news "According to a recent report from Brand Finance, X's brand is now worth 673 million. The brand was valued at $5.7 billion before Musk's takeover in 2022. When it comes to revenue, X's revenue fell by 40 percent"

Soon-Shiong’s so-called “Reasoning Engine” is an incredibly grim journalistic rabbit hole. Perhaps closer to an event horizon. www.latimes.com/california/s...

Why stop at polio?? Let's bring back all of the classics: Diphtheria! Smallpox! Typhoid! Tuberculosis! www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/h...

German phrase of the day: vorauseilender Gehorsam. "Rushing ahead" into anticipatory obedience.

Citizens United, tech bro edition. amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2024...

Would love to read some scholarly research on the convergence of the broligarchy and the Dunning-Kruger effect.

This particular trick was brought to you by one of the more obscure but important federal campaign loopholes: unlike campaigns, super PACs aren’t required to disclose their late donors until after the election. A lot of money is spent in those last weeks, so this amounts to a huge gap.