as long as john roberts has his majority, there is simply no pro democracy reform that will survive the supreme court. none.

look at this baby beaver and feel better briefly (@ wildheartrescue on TT)

It's not going to work, but when the new House meets on Jan 3, there is a good chance Republicans will make bogus objections to seating the delegations of entire states, most likely CA and VA, on flim-flam arguments that their maps were illegal. It needs to be gamed out and prepared for.

"You can only challenge the racial gerrymander if you preserve the partisan gerrymander that was the reason for the racial gerrymander" is tortured logic befitting Redemption or Jim Crow. The court effectively deemed the VRA and the 15th Amendment unconstitutional while pretending they didn't

It’s the 250th year of American independence, and the Pope and the King of England are reminding Americans of their revolutionary values, principles, and ideals Somewhere, John Adams is confused as fuck

Racism is over says the Supreme Court, which you can tell because it took literally a matter of minutes after they gutted the Voting Rights Act for Republicans in the South to start moving to make sure Black people in their states get no representation in Congress

Supreme Court Overturns ‘Right v. Wrong’ https://theonion.com/supreme-court-overturns-right-v-wrong-1819573211/

Fortunato (coughing): You’re certain the Criterion Closet is down here Montresor (picking up a trowel): Definitely. Have you thought about your picks yet

Starfruit Weather Change

When we retake the House put @aoc.bsky.social on Ways and Means, please and thank you, Signed, Your area tax professor

I will eat the hot honey ricotta pizza and wash it down with a hazy IPA. I’m basic and I don’t care. In the words of Dr. Seuss: These things are fun, and fun is good.

JFC. Callais says that precedents from before the Roberts Court essentially don't count because they come from a time when "this Court often paid insufficient attention to the language of statutory provisions"; i.e., they weren't drafted by right-wing loons under the banner of originalism.

Thought I'd do a quick share of something I enjoy about my classroom. Here's a video about our #STEM person of the week, Dr. Gladys West. She wrote the mathematical model of the earth that formed the basis for GPS. Also, my CS joke of the week: I'd tell you a UDP joke, but you might not get it.

The practical result of adding the sum rev from yesterday to today's decision in Callais seems to be that use of race in partisan gerrymandering is permitted (because hard to prove it was race, not politics) *unless* the state is doing it to remedy a VRA violation. This is Bizarro 14th Amendment.

We also should not assume Democratic partisan gerrymanders that are challenged as racial gerrymanders have the same change of survival as Republican ones.

The idea that plaintiffs can't win under the VRA if the only alternative maps they can produce would threaten the legislature's political goals could not possibly be more antithetical to the VRA.

The court has simply recreated the pre-Brown world in allowing racial discrimination across a broad number fields as long as it is “facially neutral,” gutting the Reconstruction Amendments in the process.

This is coming from a place of warmth and acceptance… -It’s ‘sleight of hand’ -It’s ‘bated breath’ -It’s ‘lo and behold’ -It’s ‘one fell swoop’ -It’s ‘brass tacks’ -It’s ‘free rein’

DON'T START SMOKING BECAUSE THE WORLD IS ENDING THE WORLD WON'T END AND THEN YOU'LL HAVE EMPHYSEMA

ANALYSIS: son of a bitch

This is good news and a little surprising to me (both that police leave their cameras on and that the footage makes a difference to prosecutors and judges).

We need to re-legalize the very cheap, bare bones housing that keeps people off the street. More broadly, we need policymakers to be ok with letting people build types of housing that they would not particularly want to live in.

6/ Where's the line? Is there an argument so preposterous, so stupid, so obviously false that this administration won't make it and this Supreme Court won't treat it seriously? If there is, we haven't found it yet.

And all of them should be categorically barred for life from ever holding any government job again, aside from how many of them should also go to prison.

This is so terrible. The third country removals are human rights catastrophes; South Americans fleeing persecution in their homes, then being dumped in Kinshasa and told they can’t stay and must go… somewhere. Preferably right back to where they fled.

I mean, actually, I would have resigned. But if I were a prosecutor with a non-frivolous seashell-based threat case, I would probably try to deemphasize the medium in which the threat was delivered.

One of my neighbors has the last name of Pope, and they keep missing their FedEx package so the delivery driver apparently has time on their hands

I would very much like to see this (and will be nowhere near DC, so you should go instead and tell me about it)

Supplemental Song for the Day: 867-5309 - Tommy Tutone www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WTd...

Is the Trump administration proposing to keep James Comey's seashells?? storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

In any criminal case that ends in a dismissal or acquittal, the government should have to pay your legal expenses. Just by right, automatically, no exceptions.

The number of people who responded to this with a Life of Brian reference is very encouraging

the British monarch gives a regular speech to parliament and in the room where they make them wait before going on there’s a framed copy of Charles I’s death warrant. just a fun historical fact, no reason to bring it up

Just spit out my coffee. "I concur fully with the main opinion, which I authored."

More evidence for my theory that capybaras are just big guinea pigs, so baby capybaras are small big guinea pigs

The idea that "86 47" is not protected free speech is so insulting that a copy of the First Amendment in the National Archives spontaneously combusted upon the filing of this indictment.

My opposing counsel's office has started pluralizing "mens rea" as "mens reae," because it makes them feel fancy. Two problems here. First, this is totally unnecessary; just rephrase the sentence to avoid it. Second, it's not right. The plural would be "mentes reae."

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It is literally a maxim among appellate practioners that DOJ writes in "government grey." (Named, in part, for the color of all of DOJ's #SCOTUS briefs). Competent, well-researched, clear, but not flashy or combative. Now there is this.

/4 DoJ recruits selectively, trains fairly intensively, and demands a high level of writing. So to see DoJ product that looks like a YouTube comment is freakish and shocking. Even if all of that was a pretense (and I think it’s more complicated than that), abandonment of the pretense is horrifying.

My father loves this movie and decided that I should see it when I was 12. I did not understand it at all.

The Persistence of Memory, by Salvador Dalí, 1931, 📸 by David Ramos

Once again: you could do worse than live your life according to the corporal works of mercy

This whole presidency is just bouncing back and forth between murder and money laundering with occasional unholy mashups of the two

to take this further, most ppl genuinely do not fathom just how much alcohol consumption has reduced over the last 200 years or so. those mfs were downing ale at breakfast, beer at lunch, burgundy and spirits all night and between all of this they were doing glasses of sherry and claret

A rule 62.1 indicative ruling is a real thing. Everything else is nuts. I can't imagine writing something to a judge like this on any topic.

An “indicative ruling,” which is a thing that I, a lawyer, have definitely heard of

I used to have a T-shirt from an event called Guactacular that said ‘CHOS BEFORE HOS on it, with a picture of a nacho. I stopped wearing it because it took too much effort to explain.

I used to be good at Computer. Now Computer thinks it is good at me. But it actually isn’t??????