Steph

Worker power in action! Let's get it!💜

The only effective opposition is through the language of morality and documented harm—not legal technicalities that can be swept away with a 6–3 vote.” The text is centered on a neutral background, with “morality” and “documented harm” slightly emphasized to underscore the moral and empirical contrast with “legal technicalities.”

As the Supreme Court term begins, keep this framework in mind: Autocratic Legalism.

Instead of “rule of law” (law constrains the power), we get “rule by law” (law as a weapon for power).

Authoritarians usually have to install allies. Trump started his second term with that step already complete.

An independent court doesn’t help one man evade justice.

An independent court doesn’t silence voters, ban abortion, and purge independent agency watchdogs.

This court has chosen sides—and it's not the people.

We must remind them. This country is FOR and BY the people.

And the fact that the system creates greater incentive for these folks to act as representatives of a national political party than as representatives of a geographic area or as leaders of a separate, co-equal branch of government only underscores the Article I failure hiding in plain sight.

The fact that their

I was back at 26 Federal Plaza today, where an ICE agent violently threw this bereft woman to the ground in front of her kids. She had not touched him. She did not pose any threat. She had to be taken to the hospital. (🎥: Elias Eliahu)

Congress js a dead letter, because upper chamber bicameralism is an outdated relic, and the two-party system fails to represent most Americans. We are experiencing a system-wide failure.

generally speaking, and with the glaring exception of november 2024, the more directly democratic an institution has been, the better it has checked Trump (eg grand and petit juries); the more elite and insular, the less effective (the Senate, the Supreme Court, big business)

Not crazy!

👇🎯 Folks look at you like you’re crazy when you say we’re in the midst of the worst Article I constitutional crisis in 🇺🇸 history, & then, well, 👇🤷‍♂️

It's almost like the fact that the US political system gives white, rural voters way, way more representational power than the rest of us has some kind of distorting effect on our national discourse.

Once again, we are in the midst of the worst, most unprecedented Article I constitutional crisis in 🇺🇸 history

On the slate gabfest this week, she discussed a revealing part of their strategy, which is to find takes that will generate engagement and reach, especially through arguments that generate intra-left conflict. I suspect you can create a successful business on this premise, but not so much a polity

Having a plurality of extremists in your electoral coalition is a huge problem when institutions empower them directly

I’m a fan of the fight in @chrismurphyct.bsky.social — but I live here, and it doesn’t feel like a distraction to me. It feels like they are preparing to occupy the city so it’s easier to maintain power after they lose the election.

Yep. As I try to argue in this pod chat, Trump's military occupation of DC and LA, his threat to end vote-by-mail via executive order, and the corrupt Texas gerrymandering scheme are part of the same big story.

checkpoints are by definition stops made without reasonable suspicion. They are presumptively unconstitutional. I don’t know what they’re saying this is about, but I’m certain whatever they say will be a pretext for general crime-detection and that that is not ok.

Watching video today of ICE agents roaming the streets of American cities and reading about the anger and fear of Bostonians during the Fugitive Slave crisis is a reminder of why it is so important that the institutions charged with interpreting the past be allowed to do so without interference.

lol

the thing everyone is going to have to accept is that the post-trump period, whenever it comes, will not and cannot be a project of national unity, it must be a project of partisan project of renewal, in the same way that reconstruction and the new deal were partisan projects of renewal.

"Strength lies in organisation, in careful long-range planning
and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite
period of years, in the scale of financing available only through
joint effort, and in the political power available only through
united action and national organizations."

The reason for this asymmetry is in part because rural voters' votes are worth more than urban voters' votes. They count more than we do in our political system. In fact, they count disproportionately more than any other country in the world. www.economist.com/graphic-deta...

I got thoughts

👇🎯 A lot of folks don't seem to understand that 90+% of our authoritarian problem is the total failure of Article I of the Constitution, not Article III.

From a director at the … American Enterprise Institute

I guess it will at least be amusing to watch the Roberts Court twist itself into knots to declare the new Texas map legal, moral, and virtuous, and the new California map a brazen perversion of democracy.

Again, the platform needs to be institutional reform. None of the policies can get through our failed, broken, incredibly anti-democratic electoral, legislative, & judicial institutions. And the guardrails of democracy have failed. Fixing that is first, second, & third order. 👆 is simply not it.

👇🎯 Norms and duct tape worked for a long time. Sort of. But we’re all out of norms, & we’ve shredded our last rolls of tape.

Folks look at you like you’re crazy when you say we’re in the midst of the worst, most unprecedented Article I constitutional crisis in American history, & then, well, 👇🤷‍♂️🤦‍♂️

What are we left with? An Art I that does all the bad stuff and none of the good stuff. It's gonna need a rewrite.