Show me what democracy looks like
Democracy nerd, DC politics guy, public-interest lawyer, Jewish American. Live Free or Die. Views and puns solely my fault; everything else is fedsoc’s fault.
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Show me what democracy looks like
The Hague is beautiful this time of year
DC Statehood NOW
Free DC, free Chicago, free LA, free America
All the cool kids are coming
Never thought the leopards would eat his face
Can’t believe the President who told us to inject bleach would do this to us
So much greatness.
They're cutting Medicaid and education so they can send the military to occupy our cities, send secret police to abduct our neighbors, and imprison millions of innocents, while taking away vaccines, shredding freedoms, and burning the planet as fast as possible. But Kamala had pronouns in bio, so.
How long until the Gavin Newsom version?
The largest manufacturing project in Georgia history, set to produce batteries for electric vehicles we need to reduce carbon emissions and fight climate change, is being jeopardized--with massive indirect economic implications--because MAGA would rather terrorize immigrants than help Americans
If you think being rich and powerful means you don’t need the rule of law, google Mikhail Khodorkovsky
If i were a billionaire, i’d rather pay marginally higher taxes and deal with business regulation than grovel to a dictator who risks even my cushy billionaire life by destroying freedom, public health, emergency management, international trade, and the climate.
Local cops don’t need Ford Explorers either btw
No i don’t care that it isn’t *technically* a tank, it’s a ridiculous thing to buy or use in civilian law enforcement and you know what i mean
Local cops don’t need tanks
If the MAGA justices aren’t going to bother writing down their legal reasoning when they rubber stamp their wannabe dictator, we don’t need to take them seriously when they tell us what they’re not doing
Same level of seriousness they bring to vaccines and economic data
No Kings Day in June: 5-6 million people 2,169 communities 27 countries The sequel is going to be even bigger.
of course she doesn’t. the (republican) president is rightfully, by her lights, an elected dictator. trump is doing nothing that the constitution does not give him the power to do, according to her and her republican colleagues.
I don't know why I keep reaching in my mind for this analogy but American political culture feels to me right now like what Moses found when he returned from Mt Sinai and everyone had said "screw it" and started worshipping the golden calf.
(Yes, the person with the byline often doesn’t choose the headline. And yes, headlines are incredibly important.)
Reporting that he *is* doing something he lacks authority to do is propaganda. It is actively helping him destroy the rule of law.
Again, a reminder that the law of the United States creates and names executive departments, not the president at any given time. "The Department of Defense is an executive department of the United States." 10 U.S.C § 111
KBJ’s explanation is the only one that makes sense: the two rules are (1) there are no rules and (2) trump always wins
Dems: release all the Epstein files on everyone Republicans:
🚨EXCLUSIVE: Federal judges tell NBC News the Supreme Court has got to do a better job of explaining emergency rulings, with frequent decisions in favor of Trump at least appearing to validate harsh criticism of the judiciary at a time of rising threats: www.nbcnews.com/politics/sup...
Fwiw i agree they wouldn’t let a Dem president do any of this but that’s consistent with unprincipled decisionmaking regardless of whether they bother to write lengthy pretexts
Reasonable argument, but just as reasonable to argue that they simply are on board because they’re Republican partisans who watch Fox and believe the things
Again, I’m not saying they won’t do it, i’m just saying they have set a precedent for rubber stamping without explanation
I’m not saying they won’t do that, but nobody’s forcing them to do anything
SCOTUS doesn’t seem to find justifications necessary for either his or their own actions lately
If you have a problem with billionaires, good. If you’re not into Taylor Swift music, whatever, not everything is for everyone. If you have a problem with Taylor Swift *because* she became a billionaire by making and performing super popular music…that is high school hipsterism, not politics
Murder is bad
SCOTUS, like the US, has a lot of accumulated social capital. But it is not infinite. If they continue not even seriously pretending they’re interpeting the law rather than aiding partisan allies, the deference they treat as a given is going to start fracturing.
Show me a person who wants journalists to let AI write their articles and I’ll show you a person who doesn’t read
As a lawyer, I'll tell you that there's nobody who knows this law better than Ryan and Brian. Sure looks like murder or war crime to me. But as a human, I'll tell you that the Rubio statement -- we could have stopped the boat but we blew it up to send a message -- is sickening and depraved.
Trump must be so mad he wasn’t invited
For the nonlawyers, "arbitrary and capricious" is an important standard federal courts use to decide whether agencies are (1) doing their job under the law or (2) wielding power without principle. The Roberts Court is definitely doing 2 but the only way to stop them is to rebalance the court.
Sounds like this district judge finds the MAGA Justices' shadow docket cases to be...arbitrary and capricious
Fascists are not trying to protect Jews. The fascists are scapegoating Jews for the fascists' own attacks on dissent.
"This is an encroachment on everything we signed up for, and it feels like a violation.”
The ad campaign criticizing the use of masks by federal agents working in Washington, D.C. has expanded to 115 bus stops, per organizers
Students being progressive is not a bigger problem than a sustained assault by an authoritarian president, please get a grip www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
We fought a war against the world's most powerful empire over this very behavior.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
Pritzker: "I refuse to pretend that any of this is normal ... I refuse to fall into the pundit trap that demands we sacrifice vital constitutional rights if it's being done in the fake guise of fighting crime."
Gov. Pritzker: Crime is down in Chicago. Murders are down by almost 50% in the last four years. Shootings are down 57%. Robberies down 34%. One violent crime is too many, and we have more work to do. We have made important progress on safety. There is no emergency that warrants deployment of troops
Does X still fill your notifications with posts from Certain Accounts even if you don’t follow them?
Tbh a lot of this stuff seems to be informed by lack of imagination about how much things can change or have changed, not just in the past 9 months or 9 years, but in the last 30 years
We need more discussion of times the US genuinely, responsibly, successfully acted to protect democracy in other countries. Everyone knows about the disaster in Iraq and many know about CIA coups, but how many know Biden stopped a coup in Brazil? Like USAID, this is important stuff we’re losing.
Not driving clicks to this piece but if you really want to find it, you can of course google the text
Sorry to everyone who’s stuck on what worked in 1996 but triangulating when the two sides are Fascism and Not Fascism doesn’t make you sound smart
"The Department of Defense is an executive department of the United States." 10 U.S.C § 111
BREAKING: Judge Charles Breyer finds that the Trump administration violated the Posse Comitatus Act by using the military for domestic law enforcement purpose in Los Angeles. He enjoins further violations of the Posse Comitatus Act ⬇️ storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
The United States is now Putin's deportation partner. Russian political refugees who sought safety in the U.S. are being returned on charter flights. Upon return, they face hours-long interrogations by security services. 🧵Here's what is known about the latest flight:
Fascists do not actually want to protect Jews
However, on the other hand, her emails
a very high proportion of centrist punditry now just boils down to "progressives yell at me on the internet and i don't like it." you would think that getting paid millions of dollars per year would give you thicker skin
Probably more on the writers, directors, and producers than Daniel Craig himself, who is delightful in the Benoit Blanc movies and should keep doing them forever
Daniel Craig is a good actor and some of his Bond movies are good movies, but they are not good at being Bond movies because he’s not having fun. “Seems fun to be that guy” is the premise of the franchise!
One strange advantage of fascism is that a surprising number of intellectuals appear to find talking about it incredibly boring: it’s so facially evil. “Fascism bad” doesn’t seem worth anyone’s time so it often gets attacked only as part of a collateral attack on other, more interesting targets.
FYI www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
The president doesn’t control voting rules
The president doesn’t control voting rules
Congrats again, everyone
This is appalling, criminal, and the GOP plan for everywhere: block cheap renewables in favor of expensive gas turbines. It won't even provide enough power, there's a 3-5 year backlog for turbines. We'll all pay far higher electricity bills to be sicker and to do more environmental damage.
i think about the “do not split” principle from hong kong often
Neutrality in the face of fascism is appeasement, not wisdom.
Nobody is “above the fray” when fascists control the government. If you’re not against him, you’re with him.
These are public employees who decided to leave rather than accept jobs where they actually did nothing. Remember that the next time they tell you that government employees are lazy and inefficient.
tonight has big “it’s mueller time” energy
I’m really sick of the courts finding this administration broke the law in some unprecedented way, but they get to keep doing illegal things for a few months as a little treat. They’re defaulting to rewarding lawbreaking.
Imagine applying this logic to war powers
"legally untested"
Republican AGs want to stop judges from learning about climate—or maybe the polluters who fund their campaigns want that.
Well at least he isn’t making it impossible to get the vaccine for the pandemic he bungled five years ago right?
The Trump administration has cut funding for the Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium, which operates clinical trials for children with brain cancer. The Consortium has been forced to stop enrolling new patients and will soon be phased out.
Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans 20 years ago. Earlier this week, ~180 FEMA workers warned that Trump's cuts are setting the stage for a similar calamity. The next day, dozens of them were punished. This is a perfect summation of Trump's homicidal hurricane policy. Our new report ⬇️has more. 🧵
A friend told me to go get the old one a few weeks ago and i, like an idiot, decided to wait for the new one anyway
And it’s not too late for that! Just incredibly important to help people see both how bad the situation is and the fact that fighting back is still extremely viable
At the same time, the continued widespread expectation (especially among less political normies) that law is real and matters is deeply valuable. we should seek to reinforce that because it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy one way or the other
Donald Trump is doing this to us
He wants Democrats to be harmed
That… is the entire point of the Federal Reserve.
It genuinely melts my mind how so many allegedly smart people are willing to simply discard the utterly crucial differences between the embodied, organic consciousness of human beings (and bees, and dogs, and fish) and the networked, disembodied simulacra of such that is an LLM.
Yeah but the senate never convicts
I’m not a vegetarian i just have good taste
Pineapple belongs on pizza. Meat doesn’t.
Doing their boss's work.
Republican AGs want to stop judges from learning about climate—or maybe the polluters who fund their campaigns want that.
MAGA politicians and judges are now used to compromising any values they once held. But rank and file Republican voters, clerks, etc? Not so much!
Underrated challenge to fascist consolidation is that while MAGA has lots of bad faith actors in all three branches of government, their base of support depends on people who believe themselves to be decent and honest, and might be duped by propaganda but don’t intend to personally lie or cheat
The problem cuts both ways as you said, and i think in both cases it boils down to the fact that tackling the problem is both doable and also very hard, and people don’t want to take responsibility for it
I think about this one a lot
I think people really struggle w partially consolidated authoritarianism, either understating our problem or understating our power It's like we're in a liminal fascist space. And not recognizing how far gone we are or thinking we're simply too far gone are both grave errors we can't afford to make
Republicans do not support free speech Republicans do not support free markets Republicans do not support law and order
