The discourse around the Supreme Court term would be much improved, I think, if people focused on the center of the Court as being very much part of the GOP coalition, rather than focusing entirely on whether it is or is not doing Trump’s bidding specifically.

Dem moderates' job right now is to check the far right. the years of left punching are over. your allies are democratic socialists, not republicans. it is a matter of political survival.

It is absolutely true that Dems need to win swing voters to win elections. The misdiagnosis is that swing voters are “moderates.” They are not. They have almost entirely incoherent politics. You don’t win them from the middle. You appeal to your base with conviction and hope swings like the vibes.

No analysis beyond a desire for domination, no morals more mature than the narcissistic striving for cool, no thought beyond "woman bad."

I know this might surprise some of you, but I believe people who treat women badly are unfit for public office (and most things).

the fact is these democratic governors do not have actual control over their own state police forces, and that’s a seriously scary problem that no elected wants to talk about or deal with

Imagine reading this and thinking Gender Studies is an outdated discipline.

So, @edzitron.com ate his Wheatties this morning

Worth noting that this is actually a meta-question-- it's not "what policy do you think is good?" It's "what policy do you think other, imaginary people would think is good?" This encourages the "Everyone Think Like a Pundit Rather Than as a Citizen" disease that plagues political commentary.

one thing that went wrong in our political media culture is that journalists so deeply internalized a backwards version of 'the cover-up is the crime' they assume that anything that's being done out in the open is just 'a thing that happened' that needs to be subjected to the 'objectivity' standard

Birth rate discourse is like “It turns out if you give women more choices, they’re less likely to make ones that make their lives harder.” Which is really helpful in figuring out how we can improve society somewhat. But instead people are like wow giving women more choices was a mistake

my firm take is that any man loudly worried about fertility rates is a fucking creep

Call me when the NYT is ready for a "12 Bitches Who Were Right about Everything" piece.

there was no tragedy here. security stopped a guy. that's the whole point of security

Congress has four major powers: Write the budget, declare war, conduct oversight, debate and enact policy into statute. It's basically given up all four of them at this point.

if Trump nukes Iran it will be because no one powerful in america has ever been seriously punished for anything

Hopefully Ted Lieu isn't the only or even the first politician holding a prominent office to say this, but I think it's the first one I've seen, this explicitly, so I just wanted to highlight it.

i think if you tweet "a whole civilization will die tonight" you shouldn't go to the hague, the hague should get to come to you

remember those other branches of government

If there was anyone in the Republican Party--or conservative movement--who believed in the Constitution, they would be calling for Trump to be impeached over his violations of Congress' Article I spending authority. But, it's crickets. The constitution is just a stick to beat their enemies.

There's nothing more pathetic than people who think a demented old pedophile threatening to commit war crimes and abolish the constitution is A Strong Man. He's a rich kid who inherited money and became a reality TV star. I can't believe there are adults who don't think Trump is a fucking loser.

The founders believed that if a madman became president, members of Congress would serve the country’s interest and remove him from office. That seemed a reliable system to safeguard the republic. Boy, did they screw up.

He'd be real mad if he could understand what was going on.

im still waiting on some ambitious democrat to talk about razing the ballroom. its one of my personal 2028 litmus tests. it cannot be allowed to stand.

This is an enemy of the Constitution bragging about its destruction

👇🎯 The key to solving ~every 21st century policy problem in 🇺🇸 is primarily just re-adopting 20th century policy solutions (immigration, higher marginal tax rates, more public investment) that we discarded/did not extend to everyone because of either Reaganism, racism, or some combination thereof.

republicans are in charge of everything and they are getting everything theyve ever wanted and doing everything theyve ever wanted and the world is on fire and the global world order is collapsing. is there a correlation? who can say

congress sounds cool i wish it was real

Any candidate who doesn’t answer YES to all 3 needs to be flushed like a turd.

Invoking wealthy class solidarity to excuse sex crimes against children is sorta the Epstein Class in a nutshell

So, incredibly, the White House has chosen to escalate in blue Minnesota and retreat in Maine to protect a vulnerable GOP Senator. It's confirmation that Trump-Vance-Miller view ICE as a partisan govt-backed militia to attack blue America while propping up their regime. 1/

Take his personal army away from him while you can, you stupid, stupid assholes. You’re like an armadillo playing dead in the middle of the road so the semi won’t hurt you

/7 Doing so is not inconceivable because we did it 23 years ago when we perceived the existing entities didn’t work. Being brutal and lawless to Americans is as much of a problem, if not more, than failing to protect Americans. ICE is infested with lawless bigoted anti-Americanism.

/6 ICE is a monument to totalitarianism, lawlessness, and bigotry. It should be ripped out and woodchippered root and branch and replaced with something focused on the concept that you can’t defend the rule of law by burning it down.

elites have got no idea just how apocalyptically angry ordinary people are about this shit

I don't see what's hard about telling Americans the truth: The aged lying self-obsessed president who tariffed your stuff while blocking the Epstein Files & taking multiple cognitive tests just started a war you didn't ask for, for no coherent reason other than he thinks it makes him look good on TV

None of us knows exactly what's going to happen next. Too much is being decided by chaotic buffoons. Even if you accurately map what major players would do to best serve their own interests, that's not a reliable map. Uncertainty is difficult and also a real condition.

This from @booker.senate.gov

It would be so cool if the United States Congress still existed.

Trump's cognitive decline is so severe he cannot recognize that speaking about it in this way reveals the deficiencies

Everybody's got their "favorite" Trump anecdote, the one that they think sums him up. This is mine. The fact that nobody did anything to get him off the stage is, to me, even more telling than that he went up there in the first place.

the lesson executives should learn from this whole paramount debacle is that it is extraordinarily corrosive to a functional business environment to have a personalist authoritarian regime, and they should not support that in the future what they will learn is they should get closer to trump

Sham investigations serve the dual purposes of 1) targeting enemies and 2) discrediting the concept of meritorious prosecution when it's time to hold your administration accountable.

"I'm ICE, boys."

The Epstein story gets a something that is tearing at the heart of the electorate: elite impunity. The idea that wealthy and powerful people can do terrible things *at scale* and face no consequences for them. Whatever political party actually stops it could rule the country for a generation.