Editors’ Blog

Most discussions of Florida’s decision to forbid professors at state universities from serving as expert witnesses in cases challenging its voter suppression laws have focused on it as a question of free speech versus the state. And it is certainly that. In every legal sense it is that. It’s an almost comical abuse of power. But I want to highlight a distinction which may seem semantic but I think is more than that.

The danger is less the state than a certain type of political party, the Trumpite GOP.

As I have noted in other recent posts, much of the recent ‘news’ about the insurrection has not been terribly new. It’s repackaged versions of things we knew or additional evidence and detail. This story published last night in the Post is one of the biggest revelations I’ve seen to date. John Eastman is the Federalist Society right wing law professor who wrote up the legal gloss for the President’s coup plot. It created the connective tissue joining the coup plot within the government with the paramilitary violence that broke out on Capitol Hill on January 6th.

The Post has emails – presumably emerging out of the committee investigation – of what happened during the insurrection. As the insurrectionists were storming the Capitol and Pence was holed up in a secure location as they hunted for him and members of Congress, Eastman emailed Pence and his top aide saying that the insurrection was Pence’s fault for not going through with the coup plot. With the President’s supporters ransacking the Capitol Eastman demanded Pence shift course and do the right thing.

On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the way in which Texas’ draconian new abortion law, SB-8, is enforced. This morning, read Kate Riga on the impact that law is having on neighboring states.

We do political news not tech news. So I don’t want to do too many posts about Facebook and its travails. But as we’ve seen in the first decades of this century the tech behemoths, by their scale, economic heft and integration into our lives are very much part of our politics. So I wanted to share a few thoughts on Facebook’s pivot to the “metaverse” and rebranding as “meta”.

What on earth is the “metaverse”? Basically it’s just virtual reality, VR. Take a bunch of the things you now do in your daily life – talk to friends, play a game, watch a movie, have a work meeting – and you’ll do them in a VR headset in a digital ecosystem controlled by Facebook. Sounds great, right? Honestly, it’s hard for me to imagine anything more dystopian since the defining feature of Facebook is its indifference to “externalities”, the downside impacts of what it is and what it does.

A lot happened today, and, at the end of it, it’s not clear how far we’ve come from where we were when we started.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss yet another week where Democrats are close to a reconciliation deal — if they can just circumvent Joe Manchin’s obstinance on a few key proposals.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

I can’t tell whether I’m more miffed at Manchin and Sinema for cutting the reconciliation outline in half or forcing this months long delay and death by a thousand cuts which in addition to being incredibly annoying has greatly damaged Democrats’ and the White House’s political standing. And in case you’re putting the politics up against the policy and finding the former wanting – get real, the politics is what makes it possible to sustain the policy over time. In any case, it’s still not clear to me in what sense this is even a deal or a framework since neither side (“Manchin/Sinema” and “EveryoneElse”) appears to have agreed to it. This is more like what the President probably should have done a while ago which is to say: this is the deal, this is my plan, this is what I want. Now everyone get on board and support it.

Two thoughts on this.

A lot has happened over the last 12 hours, so a quick rundown on where we are:

(A lot going on in that photo beyond what the caption says, on so many levels. It is from June 21, 1947, after Senate Democrats spent the previous night filibustering the eventual GOP override of President Truman’s veto of Taft-Hartley.)

Set aside for a moment the big issues like democracy reform that we know are stymied by the filibuster — it’s a given that its anti-majoritarianism holds up major generational reforms. Its impact goes far beyond that. The ways in which the filibuster infects not just legislating but the basic task of governance is so pervasive that it’s become part of the background noise of Washington. We don’t notice it anymore, but it’s hugely significant.

Democrats appear to be limping their way toward passing a slimmed down version of the President’s agenda. I don’t think we should be overly distressed that the final number is around $2 trillion as opposed to $3.5 trillion. You never get everything you want. And we can’t run from the reality that Democrats control Congress by the most tenuous of margins – in fact, no margin at all in the Senate. But Democrats should be asking themselves why it is that over the last three to four months the President’s public approval has fallen roughly ten points. In a highly partisan and polarized age that is simply a massive drop.

Why has this happened?