Mass pardons are coming. There will be no accountability without treating those as null and void. And that means a future administration taking an official position that Trump is not the legitimate president right now because he is disqualified by the 14th Amendment. The two things are inextricable.

Part of me thinks “yeah, primary every last one of these fuckers!!!” And the other part of me thinks “eh, fuck it. We’re gonna need wholesale constitutional reform anyway. Just abolish the damn Senate.”

one thing i find crazy-making is the idea that getting rid of the filibuster would make congress a purely majoritarian institution. bicameralism itself is counter-majoritarian! equal state representation is counter-majoritarian! the fact that senate elections are staggered is counter-majoritarian!

I find this distraction discourse unhelpful. Trump's video was appalling and significant and should be analyzed and denounced, and part of the work of politics is to turn it into a major controversy in its own right, as a symbol of Trump's autocratic disdain for the people.

This. The president can't extort corporations to pay essentially taxes to him personally so that he can use that money at his personal discretion to do government work.

New editorial from me and @keithschnak.bsky.social. “Why Washington University must not sign Trump's 'compact'”

google paid a twenty million dollar bribe to the fucking president to tear down the white house

W/ @genevievelakier.bsky.social, the @aaup.org today released a letter to the Offices of the General Counsel at US colleges & universities. We detail why the Compact violates the Constitution & urge that no one signs it. www.aaup.org/sites/defaul...

“No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” -Article 1, Section 8, US Constitution Not a "norm" violation. A legal and constitutional violation.

No Kings in Sonora, CA (pop. 5000).

Not being even vaguely sarcastic: At some point, a journalist needs to ask Johnson “you regularly claim you have no idea what your own government is doing. If we take you at your word, how are you so poorly informed, and do you this level of ignorance should disqualify you as speaker?”

Agree 100% @stanfordaaup.bsky.social! “When it inevitably comes time for Stanford to choose, we must remember that we owe our loyalty not to any executive branch official but to our own foundational principles. We must be ready, when it’s our turn, to walk away.” stanforddaily.com/2025/10/12/f...

From @gjmartin.bsky.social (writing for @stanfordaaup.bsky.social) laying out why no university should sign Tr*mp’s “Compact” stanforddaily.com/2025/10/12/f...

or we could just move to proportional representation, make one statewide multimember district for Utah, and stop all this goddamn endless litigation.

At the time, scholars of this topic noted that, in Trump's first term, the independence of institutional media orgs from him went with a surge in trust in the media from Democrats. Major media org's cooption and capitulation in Trump's second term has gone with a drop in Democrats' media trust.

They are stealing taxpayer dollars from blue states because Democrats in Congress refuse to give Trump a blank check for his authoritarianism. Corruption. Coercion. Blackmail. Lawlessness.  I won’t bend the knee to a wannabe dictator and his cronies. We will prevail.

Blue cities should tear up the roads in front of ICE facilities and then start decades of community engagement and input sessions to rebuild them. Let's harness our core competencies.

This is a crime. The Supreme Court has foolishly decided that Trump can commit crimes with impunity, but that is NOT true of anyone who works for him. Stephen Miller, Hegseth, Noem and anyone else who declares war on the US and our Constitution must not be let off the hook. Two years in prison

I’m starting to notice a trend in the polling data… —Top Public Worry: Corruption —Biggest problem in Fed Gov: Corruption —Top fear: Corruption —What one word would you use to describe American government?: “Corrupt” It’s almost like voters are trying to tell us something.

The political implications of this cannot be overstated. One of the most important media platforms, now under direct control of the current government and its allies.

In all seriousness, I'd love to see a reporter try to get comments from all of these people about their initial impulse to declare a literal war on half of their fellow citizens and to see if any of them regret it, apologized for it or learned anything at all from it.

“awful people don’t deserve to be killed, but they don’t deserve to be praised, either” is apparently a thought too complex for the pundit mind

Delighted to discover that "Candidate Positions, Responsiveness, and Returns to Extremism" is now available online from JOP 🧵 @thejop.bsky.social Gated: journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/... Ungated: mellissameisels.com/files/MM_PCP...

Brandice Canes-Wrone, Markos Kounalakis and I are co-hosting a conference next spring on “American Political Institutions in a Changing Media Environment” at the Center for Revitalizing American Institutions at Stanford. Submit papers / abstracts here by Nov 1st: forms.gle/iC2RXAsBhwa9...

My least popular (and most correct) view is that cars should be automatically limited to the local speed limit. Put the pedal to the floor and you still can't go over 25mph in a residential area. (15 in Manhattan btw)

Peter Temin, economic historian at MIT, has passed away. He worked both on problems of understanding the past (e.g. "Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depression?") and how how the past shapes the present (e.g. "The Vanishing Middle Class.") Terrific scholar and mentor, generous critic.

for what it’s worth - the public’s descent into insanity, i believe, is because the stagnate legislature has prevented the democratic mechanism’s primary function, which is trial and error, from informing the voters of the consequences of their choices. the solution is still democracy

My NYC election hot take (from 4 hours away) is that the rent is too damn high, owning a house is too hard, and that is a winning issue in any election in the USA right now where young people exist. The establishment commentariat, all property owners, is materially divided from the electorate.

they’re saying kill the boer. they’re saying it, lots of people actually. my people say Mr Trump we can’t possibly kill the boer. but i say hang on. hang on. [turns to the side, performative shrug] I can kill the boer, right? [pause for applause] but we’re gonna do it and it’ll be bigger than ever

This is the dinner bell being rung for political consultants. All across the country, they have started salivating without knowing why. The more sensitive among them have suddenly felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if billions of dollars have suddenly cried out "some take me."

Econ’s disciplinary imperialism coming back to bite it in the ass. Imagine seeing an offhand one liner in a chemistry paper saying “I use the method of Berry, Levinsohn and Pakes (1995) to measure price elasticities for my sample of 1000 chemical compounds” with no further explanation

“Abolish ICE” is the moderate position. Radical is “prosecute every ICE employee under RICO.”

This comment from Gavin Newsom happens to be some of the dumbest political analysis I've ever seen by a politician, and is also a compelling display of cowardice and moral vacuousness. Not things you can build a successful 2028 presidential campaign on! www.gelliottmorris.com/p/should-dem...

the pollsters, the politicians, anyone in this camp needs to be shown the fucking door

this is such good news. i think it is also an opportunity for democrats to state forthrightly that when they win power again everyone responsible for this crime will be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law and will face the american people to answer for their lawlessness

I've been in El Salvador all day fighting for the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia. The Trump Administration can lie all they want, but the Court said they failed to show he was part of MS-13. This is about bringing home a man they ADMIT should never have been abducted. I won't rest until then.

AGAIN: the kidnapping of students who engaged in protected speech or protest is THE ISSUE that should united universities, including and especially Columbia. It's immoral and illegal, it threatens their mission and their bottom line, and it harms US national security. UNIVERSITIES SHOULD SUE NOW!

if Ritchie fucking Torres can do this and Chris Van Hollen can fly to El Salvador the rest of the Dem caucus can show up too hell, everyone should go on the El Salvador trip now’s the time, folks, this road ends with you in the foreign prison

No one should be above the law, most especially the President. Ignoring a Supreme Court ruling to facilitate Kilmar Abrego Garcia's return isn't just cruel; it's unconstitutional. They're saying the quiet part aloud — if they get away with it now, they'll do it to anyone.

going to need to start hearing from governors what they intend to do to protect residents of their states from the federal government

Every single university president should be asked, in public, why they are not speaking out this way to support all the students currently detained without due process, and all those terrified that they will be next, on every campus in this country. Yes, including Columbia's acting president.

High time for what colleagues have been advocating as a compact of mutual defense and a shared litigation strategy.

What’s incredible is that Trump is doing this based on fake constitutional authorities and made-up emergency powers but because US institutions are so pathetic about capitulating to him no one even thinks of bringing that up, even as he burns our country to the ground

Not only removal an impossibility but even basic forums of democratic accountability in which Trump is forced to defend his insane policies via Congressional hearing, press conference, interview with a non-sycophant, Town Hall, or even a televised address to the nation feels like a pipedream.

Fact check: mostly true academic.oup.com/restud/advan...

Again: The Trump admin is showing you they have capacity constraints -- they can only do this shake-down procedure piecemeal. If these institutions want this to stop, they'll refuse to negotiate and take them to court. Hold the line, create a bottleneck.

There is an extremely good argument for applying strict broken windows policing to American elites

It's too late for *preserving* our democracy. The American democracy that prevailed from 1965—weakened severely since around 2000—definitively ended January 20th, 2025. Now, the task is *restoring* American democracy, hopefully with a better set of institutions (& leaders).