There is this belief that tech companies prey upon destitute areas besieged by poverty. Fayetteville is actually a very beautiful and desirable area. It's just black.

i have been writing about the virginia supreme court decision with a certain amount of analytical detachment but if i’m being honest i’m also fucking furious i took the time to go vote and then my ballot got tossed out by these dipshits

This is a crucial point. Since at least 2020, Rs argue that (1) our democracy is under threat (“the election was stolen!”) & (2) this existential risk justifies extreme measures—including the weaponization of typically ceremonial features (“America can still win if Mike Pence has the courage.”)

what i think @hurricanexyz.bsky.social is dead-on in highlighting here is that the VA supreme court ruling was a violation of the VA constitution itself, which quite explicitly notes that the power of the people to reform their constitution is sovereign and inalienable

So @raskin.house.gov, the IRS shakedown is: (1) “a shocking new betrayal of the Constitution” (2) “an outrageous desecration of congressional power of the purse” (3) an effort to compensate insurrectionists But even *if* Dems take the House no word on impeachment? newrepublic.com/article/2105...

yes. the clearest path to deal with the SCVA ruling is just to say that it wasn’t a constitutionally valid exercise of judicial review. because it wasn’t!

Another clear violation of the Constitution, this time of the First Amendment. For a president that repeatedly violates the law, impeachment and conviction is the only sensible solution.

AI firms exploit this contradiction by invoking the collective character of culture when they extract from artists, while relying on private enclosure when they monetize the resulting systems.

interesting the way the VRA is presented as some kind of imposition from above, and not the product of one of the greatest social movements this country has ever seen

This is awful. Jesus. These funds have saved people from getting evicted, fired, and losing custody of their kids. (Also, just to be clear, it doesn’t criminalize the funds’ existence, but it makes them subject to federal insurance regulations, which will effectively kill many of them.)

No, still nothing from SCOTUS on mifepristone. Justice Alito’s administrative stay ends at 5p.

dem politicians always want to solve cooperation problems by appealing to an authority to write wrongs when they are that authority.

Redistricting in response to what the GOP is doing isn’t another wrong. It is *correcting* the wrong that the GOP is inflicting on democracy. Punching someone in self-defense is not the same thing as punching someone unprovoked.

Their votes matter if you enforce them, @abigailspanberger.com. You've chosen instead to be "disappointed" that their votes for the new map meant nothing. You can accept the court's ruling yet validate the vote based on exigency; your constitution provides a right of amendment "whenever" necessary.

One of the VERY FIRST things done after the Constitutional Convention in 1787 was to have the text of the new Constitution translated into Dutch and German, which were at the time the two largest non-English language spoken in the United States. Here's the National Archives making this point:

Whatever legal theory about when our institutions’ powers are at their highest ebb, none of it, by definition, can be a higher ebb than the voice of the sovereign, the source of that power, speaking directly.

"Democrats cannot keep treating the judiciary as a sacred institution while Republicans treat it as a captured one. The conservative legal movement has spent decades building structural advantage, and it has largely succeeded." newrepublic.com/article/2102...

Depending on how you reckon some ambiguous cases, SCOTUS has applied the 'principle' somewhere in the ballpark of 17 to 20 times since Purcell itself twenty years ago. Of those, 15 to 17 (again depending on how you count a few deadlock cases w/ no majority) were wins for Republicans over Dems. 85%+

Fuck yes. Imagine that: Dem politicians are also capable of taking inventory of their powers and duties and affirmatively taking action to uphold democratic processes. If the Boone County Clerk can act, so can @abigailspanberger.com. Politicians try things, now.

Again, any-one, any-one understands that as of 1933, both a far-right alternative of a Republican Party lead by Charles Lindbergh and a creditable party led by the Communist Party of the USA were equally possible instead of FDR? The New Deal was the compromise.

aight I had more to say about this ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics...

@jamellebouie.net is right; Callais pushes even more of our politics into a “Red America / Blue America” frame—& out of the conditions needed to preserve the Union. As Obama put it in 2004, to divide the country into “liberal America & conservative America” is to deny the United States of America.

Watching judges tear up ballots & Rs force resignations from those who dare uphold the law, I ready myself for battle. “The days of Dems unilaterally disarming are over,” I cry, leaping into the breach to…float denying convention speeches to pols who won’t redistrict. www.cnn.com/2026/05/13/p...

Mike Johnson is a person. Congress is an institution. If Mike Johnson is using his power to defeat the constitutional design, he is ineligible to wield it; he’s broken his oath of office. MoC can uphold their oaths by treating Johnson and others similarly acting as disqualified.

House rules of parliamentary procedure are unconstitutional if they provide no avenue for challenging the authority of a Speaker who is disinterested in persevering the separation of powers and upholding his oath-bound Constitutional duties. Insist Johnson has openly violated his oath of office.

Again: At some point, Dems will need to call bullshit on the idea that courts can overturn elections & manipulate them in nakedly partisan fashion. Failing to do so for an isolated referendum in a state (VA) where they control the executive and the legislature is a catastrophic error.

Hoskins is openly slow-rolling certification of petitions and salivating over the prospect of stripping political representation from the Black population of St. Louis.

“Speaker of the TN House Cameron Sexton just removed me and every Democrat — and therefore every Black elected official in the state legislature from any committee we served on," Rep. Pearson said. Fascist reprisals for protesting.

The Tennessee Speaker of the House will remove all Democratic Caucus members from standing committees and subcommittees as punishment for their redistricting protests. Democracy dies in Nashville.

Just calling balls & strikes like they used to back before 1947

FWIW this is why, in The Originalism Trap, I say it's imperative for us to reject the idea that the Court has a monopoly on constitutional interpretation we can push for an emancipatory vision of the Constitution instead of the Supreme Court's neoconfederate nonsense bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

The sole Democratic delegate from Alabama should move that the Alabama delegation not be recognized in the next Congress. Deadly serious.

A big part of this is members of Congress watching him commit hundreds of impeachable offenses while refusing to say the word impeachment. It normalizes the malfeasance. It give the impression that the heinous corruption is no big deal.

Respect for Process over the lives of their constituents. Over the political power of their citizens. Over the futures of their children. Unconscionable. Disqualifying for office.

The inevitable implication of this, and what's effectively their position, is that the president has all of the power to start a war whenever he wants and Congress has no say in the matter and can't do anything about it.

This is such a vital point so beautifully put. Across the country, Dem leaders behave as though the only legitimate opposition is an appeal to judges, & if R’s acts are non-justiciable they are acceptable. Pols are obligated to form their own constitutional theories & act on them! Uphold your oaths

Anger isn’t the right word. The judges speciously invalidated an act of the sovereign people, done to counteract work at the natl level to impose 1-party rule in service of white supremacy. Their perceived legitimacy cannot be more impt than the Republic. If it is, the Republic cannot survive.

hard to make it the most important election of all time if your base can't vote wouldn't it be nice to have an opposition party

I’ve reached out to NY AG James’ office and Mayor Mamdani’s office to find out how they plan on responding to this gross overreach.

Why haven't we heard from a SINGLE Democratic state about steps they're taking to counteract the post-VRA GOP power grabs in Louisiana and Alabama and South Carolina and Tennessee? Do you think this is going to fix itself? Why is it so fucking difficult for Democrats to fight back?

As Justice Sotomayor's dissent notes, the district court's finding of unconstitutional discrimination is unaffected by Callais. But if the dist. ct. now reinstates that finding on remand, the state will run to SCOTUS and say Purcell forbids the court to do so. You can guess what happens next.

If the Democratic response here is limited to channeling its objections back into the same court system that is producing these results, their response amounts to a surrender. The Supreme “Court” won’t heed arguments, & they make up their own facts. This is *their* project. Appeal to the people.

Could the Official Politics Knowers call it a fucking coup before we lose our whole country? Or could everyone at least mute those freaks & start listening to people who get it? SCOTUS IS ALREADY STEALING THE ELECTION. You think the heist will stop here? We need massive resistance from blue states.

🚨BREAKING: The U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) has allowed Alabama to select a different map for this year’s congressional elections in a stunning, last-minute move to interfere with another state primary election that has already begun. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

Reading about the gag rule and how John Q. Adams relentlessly trolled his colleagues was fun AF. You're not wrong. We need to revive the right to petition in legislative politics.

"The Court is not the sole legitimate arbiter of what the Constitution means. And any path to multiracial democracy will require asserting an alternative, inclusive constitutional vision and reforming the Court." As @beaubaumann.bsky.social put it, we need a new constitutional politics of the left.

hey i mighta been on to something: "The Court is not the sole legitimate arbiter of what the Constitution means. And any path to multiracial democracy will require asserting an alternative, inclusive constitutional vision and reforming the Court."

Ds are doing great with voters right now. but elites are still reluctant to do shit to crush fascism, and that is the problem.

We need an orientation document for the next House. I certainly can’t write it, but I’d love to help make it happen & I have specific thoughts with respect to restoring the Right of Petition & its ability to provide a Constitutional justification for dismantling leadership’s control over the agenda.