If the Senate flips this year, according to the rules is it possible to have Mike Lee’s assigned desk be located in a custodial closet in the basement?

/2 Page lost in the trial and appellate courts and nobody thinks he has a good case. It’s paying big bucks to settle a loser. It’s a gift of public funds.

Moreover:

We would have to expand the House to accommodate that idea, of course, and state legislatures would also have to expand. And it would be somewhat complicated, although not a whole lot more than having three reps in Congress already (one House member and two senators).

And yet as soon as you draw geographical boundaries, the problem of gerrymandering comes into play. It’s a conundrum.

I try to square the circle by imagining a hybrid system, where some seats are proportional and some are geographically defined with reasonable nonpartisan criteria.

Great thoughts; appreciate the discussion. I think PR solves a lot of issues but one reservation I have is that geography does matter in political representation. Land doesn’t vote, it’s true, but people’s interests are often coupled to where they live. Great Salt Lake is an example.

That’s a tremendous headline

I suspect also a fear of being labeled a naysayer, crying wolf, etc. if the worst doesn’t materialize (or is just ignored and rewritten as with Covid). Warning of what’s ahead is riskier than being shocked and outraged after the fact.

Every once in a while, I peer back into the world of campaign finance and am amazed to rediscover what a cesspool it remains. The corruption wrought by money in politics is easily one of the most illegitimate features of American politics.

The number of House Representatives has not changed since the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, which capped House Reps at 435, even though the population now is close to 3x what it was then, and we have two additional states.

It's time to uncap the House.

Maybe even shoot for a constitutional amendment that will override the awful SCOTUS decision that said partisan gerrymandering is not justiciable.

Do it now, while there’s a balance and the Republicans are smarting from their setbacks. Give everyone in all states their due representation back.

The time is ripe for another shot at a federal anti-gerrymandering bill. Prohibit the use of partisan data during the process of drawing districts. Give citizens of a state legal standing to challenge partisan maps. Require nonpartisan criteria.

CREW statement on Cherfilus-McCormick resignation - CREW | Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington Rep. Cherfilus-McCormick did the right thing by stepping down, but she shouldn't have waited until the moment before potential expulsion to do so.

NEW: Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick has finally resigned, after months of dragging the scandal on while cashing paychecks from American taxpayers. You don’t get credit for doing the right thing only when forced to, after repeatedly doing the wrong thing.

I can’t really think of a military policy that, even deliberately tailored for the objective, could undermine military readiness more. This is so reckless as to raise the question if it isn’t sabotage.

The top-two primary needs to be abolished. Every election cycle it leads to races where one party risks getting shut out of a general election it would likely win.

It forces parties to pick favorites in primaries just to avoid shutouts. It fails to do what its proponents intended—often the opposite

The stats here are kind of remarkable. BART's new fare gates have led to a 1,000-hour decline in clean up time; 41% drop in crime; and $10 million increase in projected revenue. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Plenty of criticism on the right of the #SCOTUS leaker and the Times’s reporting, but has anyone actually responded to the argument that Roberts’s assessment of “irreparable harm” and his refusal to balance the equities is completely inconsistent with his subsequent behavior in all the Trump cases?

A 🧵about the history and context of the 68 average IQ score attributed to Somalis. TL;DR: It's racist BS from unreliable data but has been cited by academics and long-appeared on a prominent, commonly-used website. 1/

Sea Salt and Paper is a lovely card game

for an idea of how big a deal this is, my mom was in great shape when she got diagnosed and she lasted less than sixty days. six years is insane.

Nothing wrong with a good satire, but when there’s a good chance of it being mistaken for the real thing, the responsible thing to do is to flag it as satire. As you say, we don’t want to have to get TS accounts just to be able to tell what’s authentic or fake.

Why are you talking about the speech and not the events at the Capitol? It was a violent, armed uprising aimed at stopping the constitutional transfer of power. That meets the textbook definition of insurrection. You would have to argue that it wasn’t violent or didn’t try to thwart Congress’s duty.

And the person who posted it has blocked me even though I didn’t say anything about her, just about the falsity of the post.

Apparently it’s a fake post

PSA: The depicted TS post is a fake.

So. You won’t call them insurrectionists because they weren’t charged with insurrection, but you will invent a fiction about others who instigated it even though nobody was charged with instigation. And you won’t call Epstein a rapist. You can’t speak truths anymore, just rehearse worn-out lies.

One quick thought is that in recent decisions in Trump’s favor there’s a lot of talk about the government automatically facing irreparable harm when its policies are blocked but here all the talk from Roberts is the irreparable harm facing those challenging the plan.

We have a serious problem with appellate courts not having district courts' backs on things like fact-intensive injunctions.

The Trump administration literally lied about the need for ballroom construction, and the appeals court is saying we like to be lied to.

I think the absurdly large amount is tactically chosen to make any lesser settlement amount falsely appear to be more justifiable. “I graciously agreed to settle for merely half of what I demanded.”

Allegations may have surfaced, but evidence for them has not.
bsky.app/profile/alan...

The grift never ends. Most corrupt regime in history