Amazing how every developed country on earth except the U.S. provides guaranteed healthcare for everyone, but wealthy people in the U.S., the wealthiest country in human history, keep saying we can't afford healthcare for everyone. How is anyone buying this bullshit?

This is a really useful look at how “company town” has been used to describe a quite diverse, & incommensurate things in US history (a bit like “feudalism”) Highsmith, Brian. “Governing the Company Town.” Stanford Law Review 77, no. 6 (June 2025): 1463–1555. doi.org/10.2139/ssrn....

Indeed, I don’t know how you grasp what’s happening in America now without knowing something about the Gilded Age and labor history

Another reminder: if there exists *any* class of people who don't have due process rights, then *nobody* actually has due process rights because the government can always just say you're in that class.

This is another reason why the only path forward is for Dems to bite the bullet and implement proportional representation via increasing the size of the House and mandating single multi-member districts. You can't have a constitutional democracy in a two-party system if one party is authoritarian.

Want to pass a new Voting Rights Act? It’s not going to do anything if, eg, Neil Gorsuch thinks it’s unconstitutional. A new Women’s Health Protection Act? Same. Climate change? Immigration? Antiwar? Inflation? DOJ independence? Unconstitutional. Court reform is a basic issue for everybody!

I wouldn’t call these reforms “radical.” They’re part of our democratic tradition. If you want Congress to enact literally any law in the next decade to fix our country’s problems, you need a plan for this group of lawyers who *will* say it’s unconstitutional.

Porter's idea is terrible. You can't have a welfare system if only the rich pay. And if you stop taxing most people, it is politically impossible to start taxing them again later. It's not a slippery slope. It's a cliff. The result would be higher regressive consumption taxes...

UC Berkeley Law creates new AI policy that bans AI for "conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit" or exams because "thinking remains the sine qua non of good lawyering (and of a quality legal education)." That's what I'm talking about.

I've been an impeachment 3.0 skeptic, but I think there's a fair argument here that the slush fund is so bad it's worth pulling that trigger for

Just so we're clear, when he talks about "the most violent thing" he's ever seen in politics, he's *not* talking about those who violently attacked the Capitol in his name, while violently clashing with police officers. He's instead talking about efforts to hold them and their allies accountable.

It's hard to imagine a purer combination of the abuse of executive power and naked corruption. In short, this is a quintessential impeachable offense.

This is insane. The terms of DOJ's slush fund appear to transfer control of $1.8 billion beyond US government entirely. Unless I'm misreading this, that would circumvent Congress *entirely* and put the money outside of *any* constitutional and/or legal constraints ofany kind. Straight up theft.

So you CAN get reparations you just have to be a reactionary white person who tries to overthrow the government because black votes shouldn’t count

🚨Trump just named Marc Andreessen’s wife to the SF Presidio Trust board, along with other MAGA allies & ultra-wealthy tech figures. Meanwhile, the Tech Bros have made it clear that they want to build a “Freedom City” in the Presidio. sfstandard.com/2026/05/14/t...

Florida Republicans’ new gerrymandered congressional map violates a voter-approved state ban on partisan gerrymandering, voting advocates argued Friday, asking a court to block the state from using the map in the 2026 elections. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

A point that the great @donmoyn.bsky.social often makes is that the handing out of governing spoils is a signpost on the road to authoritarianism. I think this quote captures this very well, and it's an exclamation point on this madness. 6/6 newrepublic.com/article/2105...

my feeling about this is that Third Way is basically just three guys in an office and should be ignored

I'm working on a piece I'm slightly behind on for @liberalcurrents.com on reconstruction. And I'm always struck by the fact that we only needed the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and Fair Housing Act because the state and federal governments just ignored the Reconstruction Amendments.

Really emphasizes the wealth on Lake Minnetonka and its dozen little fiefdoms vs the Twin Cities Metro Woodland city, Minnesota is on top with a taxable property value per capita of $827,624 and a fiscal capacity ratio of 7.04 relative to the metro as a whole. www.taxbasefragmentation.net

Highlighting super-interesting academic research and trying to make it understandable and useful for a wider audience — without sacrificing nuance and integrity! — is just about my favorite thing I do on my channel

This is a great video overview—from the indispensable @nerd4cities.bsky.social ("CityNerd" on YouTube)—of our research on tax base fragmentation in US metro areas. I particularly appreciate the discussion about fiscal impoverishment in tax-poor jurisdictions. Check it out! youtu.be/hF2gUdG9kU0?...

Mentioning increasing the House, proportional representation, and fusion voting, as he often has: aside from all the other reasons to be a fan, @jamellebouie.net is one of the few prominent commentators who is genuinely well-versed in the ideas about structural electoral reforms.

Georgia's governor signs a comically transparent law. It makes local elections in 5 big blue counties nonpartisan, to give GOP candidates a chance to win without a party label in places like Atlanta. And it doesn't change anything in the rest of the state, for red counties to know who's GOP.

I wish I didn’t know as much about the end of Reconstruction as I do. If you understood what is being unleashed now, how it will touch every aspect of our civic life, and how difficult it will be to undo it, you wouldn’t be able to think about anything else.

very good and it zeroes in on a really important dynamic: the way the professionalization of the court and the industry around it serves to insulate the justices from democratic feedback as well as contribute to the idea that the justices are law wizards to whom we *ought* to defer.

Yep. This is the best way to understand the events of the past couple weeks. They have to dispense with the artifice of principle, because the risks of Dems winning and coming to power bent on accountability are simply too great. www.offmessage.net/p/republican...

This is absolutely outrageous. SCOTUS reinstated Texas gerrymander 15 weeks before primary because they claimed it was too close to election to block it but now allowing Alabama to gerrymander one week before primary after trial court found map was intentionally discriminatory against Black voters

It's almost like it was all part of an a-factual ideological project!

america's reactionaries would love nothing more to nullify the reconstruction amendments and render them a dead letter of the constitution. this was as true in 1873 as it is today.

I am struck again and again by how much the language of the anti-Reconstructionists continues to serve as a template for backlash rhetoric.

After the recent court rulings, who's favored to win the House? Via Nate Cohn. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/u...

I'll just note that critical race theory predicts quite a lot about the current racial retrenchment and for being *correct* it was pilloried in the press and by some academics.

You’ll be hard pressed to find a democratizing movement in the US that *didn’t* play constitutional hardball & *didn’t* break unjust laws. That’s literally what democratization is, though it makes some people uncomfortable. If you want a democracy, you have to break the undemocratic system.

And how unready Dems were, for that matter: schemes like California and Virginia sprang up in response to Texas, quite late for Virginia. But it was clear what was going to happen with Callais in June 2025, as soon SCOTUS punted on the prior hearing and ordered expanded one.

"the voters will have their say in the election" is an uninspiring and demoralizing response to a court overturning the result of an election

These things are orchestrated to generate a persecution narrative. But what they don't count on is people taking notes. This is worth reading.

It’s staggering How swiftly states in the South can still move to stymie Black voters And how ready they were to do so

When the federal gov't itself teams up with right-wing activists on X to smear my university by reducing it to a viral video clip, there's a lot of value in reading an account like this one by my colleague Dave Marcus of what actually happened at the latest notorious Fed Soc "free speech" dustup—

✨ New draft up! ✨ Transportation for the Abundant Society, with Jonathan Levine (urban and transportation planning, U. Michigan) Thanks to those who've offered feedback to date (so much, some we're still incorporating!) no charge or login needed: ssrn.com/abstract=538...

Before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, America was not a democracy. It was certainly not what we, in widely accepted parlance today, call “democracy.” It absolutely had no reasonable claim to be considered a *multiracial* democracy.

It’s kind of a metaphor for American democracy in the 2020s. After Jan 6 2021, the coup appeared dead and even GOP elites were looking to oust the authoritarian wing. A few years later the same wing controls all of government and intimidated much of civil society into submission

Constitutional amendments aren't easy. Lots of wishlist items aren't realistically doable (and many probably shouldn't be). But there are some structural reform ideas that are worth seriously pursuing. I make the case for not completely giving up on our power to change the supreme law of the land:

Great piece by @nikobowie.bsky.social & Daphna Renan, also reminding us of the constitutional culture we once had, when the people routinely claimed their authority over the Constitution and refused to let an unrepresentative Court dictate their future. (gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/05/02/o...)

This is excellent. I want to preempt a legit concern, namely that there is no chance that Congress will actually do this. 1. We don’t know that, and shouldn’t assume it. 2. Even talking about this is good because it disrupts the Court’s monopoly on our constitutional imagination.

“But just as we can learn from the consequences of acquiescing to the Supreme Court’s constitutional interpretation, we can also draw upon the tools past Congresses have offered for how to build a more democratic constitutionalism.”

I want every one of my Dem friends to read this piece. The Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act and done so much other damage. The justices want to insist that they get the last word. But don't take for granted that they do. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/02/o...

Callais ought to be clarifying because there is no way to make the statute and Constitution more clear. The VRA was modified by Congress specifically to avoid this result. The VRA is directly authorized by a constitutional amendment. Yet SCOTUS still found a way to destroy it.

Blue Heron deserves all its hype. You must watch when you can. blueheron.film