Wednesday’s Supreme Court oral arguments on President Donald Trump’s use of an emergency declaration to apply steep, worldwide tariffs saw liberal justices — and a former Obama-era acting solicitor general, arguing for the plaintiffs — somewhat trollishly embrace two legal theories most often deployed by the court’s right-leaning justices: the so-called major questions and nondelegation doctrines.
Continue reading “Liberal Justices Cheekily Use Conservatives’ Favorite Legal Theories to Push For a Ruling Against Trump On Tariffs”Mamdani Will Need To Continue Explaining to New Yorkers What His Democratic Socialism Is and Is Not
I was excited by Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy, which brought many young and minority voters, who had been turned off by the Biden-Harris years, back into the fold. I have been a democratic socialist since the late 1960s, so I also welcomed his attempt to run as one. That said, I wasn’t crazy about his victory speech.
Continue reading “Mamdani Will Need To Continue Explaining to New Yorkers What His Democratic Socialism Is and Is Not”Emboldened by Election Night Wins, Dem Leadership Asks Trump for Another Sit-Down to Discuss Shutdown
Emboldened by Tuesday’s Election Night wins for Democratic candidates and causes across the nation, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) on Wednesday renewed their request for a meeting with President Donald Trump to discuss the ongoing shutdown — which is on its 36th day, now making it the longest government shutdown in U.S. history
Continue reading “Emboldened by Election Night Wins, Dem Leadership Asks Trump for Another Sit-Down to Discuss Shutdown”A Few Day-After-the-Election Thoughts
The clearest read of what happened last night is that, as far as I can tell, Democrats won every race that was in meaningful contention anywhere in the country. That’s not just high-profile races in New York, New Jersey and Virginia or the redistricting proposition in California. It goes way down into races only obsessives or local observers were watching in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Mississippi and a bunch of other places. Democrats won everywhere, and just about everywhere they won by larger margins than even optimists were expecting.
As I noted last night, some of these were surprises against low expectations which were not realistic. But Democrats did well against realistic expectations too.
Continue reading “A Few Day-After-the-Election Thoughts”In First Chance For Voters to React to Trump II, All Kinds of Democrats Steamrolled Republicans
All kinds of Democrats won all kinds of races Tuesday night, as the party swept governors’ mansions, clinched the New York mayorship and is in the fight for an improbable Miami one, ran up huge margins in state legislatures, dominated critical judicial elections and cruised to victory in California’s redistricting initiative.
Continue reading “In First Chance For Voters to React to Trump II, All Kinds of Democrats Steamrolled Republicans”Chasing the Dress Into the Viral Traffic Abyss
Gawker Media’s Nolita office, where the blog conglomerate was located until the summer of 2015, was always dank and weird: a brick, loft-style room in a former tenement on Elizabeth Street, with lighting so low it was probably reportable to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. I began working there in 2014, as culture editor for the women’s site Jezebel, and while I adapted to the speed of blogging culture, I could never quite get over the fact of the office. It was so dark that our computer monitors emitted more light than the overheads, which were strung across the ceiling with the aplomb of an early 20th century publichouse, and had the useless brown glow of tiny Edison bulbs. Those of us without the wherewithal to get desk lamps, which was most, clacked away in the dark at the long rows of tables where the staffs of its six sites, about a hundred of us, sat side by side. We communicated almost exclusively through internet chat — even coworkers who sat a foot apart — though often the room erupted in gales of laughter at quips known only to those in their particular Slack channel. Everyone got used to that, but otherwise the office was so silent, like a wacky library, that it was almost startling if someone spoke to you aloud.
Except for Feb. 26, 2015, when a viral outfit known as “The Dress” upended the office silence and, probably, the trajectory of the media itself.
Continue reading “Chasing the Dress Into the Viral Traffic Abyss”What a Glorious Time for Criming in America
The Purges: FBI Edition
The MAGA feedback loop continues to decimate the senior career ranks of the FBI.
A quick refresh: Kash Patel provides Hill Republicans with internal FBI documents from the Trump investigations->Hill Republicans cull them for the names of agents->the agents get put on blast by the MAGA propaganda machine->the White House orders the agents to be fired->Patel races to comply.
This is what Trump’s long-threatened investigation of the investigators looks like.
The firings are not being publicly announced, making it more difficult to get a grasp of exact numbers, but from various reports it appears another another five senior agents have been fired. Reuters identifies four of them: Jeremy Desor, Jamie Garman, Blaire Toleman, and David Geist. NBC News identifies one: Aaron Tapp.
At one point, D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro reportedly intervened in four of the latest firings, but that apparently only had the effect of getting them fired Monday and then fired a second time Tuesday.
“The actions yesterday—in which FBI Special Agents were terminated and then reinstated shortly after, and then only to be fired again today—highlight the chaos that occurs when long-standing policies and processes are ignored,” the FBI Agents Association said in a statement. “Director Patel has disregarded the law and launched a campaign of erratic and arbitrary retribution.”
A few reflections:
- By being brought under the thumb of the Trump White House, the FBI has lost its independence, esprit de corps, and significant functional capacity. The senior agent ranks — where taxpayers see the return on years of training and experience — have been ransacked. Agents can’t be quickly replaced, and loyalty will the decisive factor for new hires.
- Combined with the dismantling of DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, the FBI purges have hamstrung the investigation and prosecution of complex white-collar crimes, especially public corruption cases. That’s no accident.
- It can’t be said often enough that before this year, the FBI had one political position: the director. Everyone else held career positions. The purging of career FBI employees without cause or due process is unlawful. There have been dozens (and maybe more) unlawful firings.
It sometimes feels like the public reaction to the politicization and weaponization of the DOJ and FBI is to compartmentalize it as something happening to people like former FBI Director James Comey, who signed up for or maybe deserve such retribution. (He didn’t and he doesn’t.) But everyone is a potential victim of a federal crime, and no one can count on the FBI to be there now. Once the loyalists are in place, you may not want the FBI involved.
Election 2025: Top Lines
- NYC mayor: Zohran Mamdani trounced Andrew Cuomo in a high turnout race that was called at 9:34 p.m. ET.
- NJ guv: Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D) decisively defeated Jack Ciattarelli (R) despite rumblings of a GOP surge.
- VA guv: Former Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D) romped over Winsome Earle-Sears (R).
- CA Prop 50: Democrats’ counterpunch to the GOP’s red state redistricting blitz passed overwhelmingly, clearing the way for Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) to draw a new congressional district map for the 2026 midterms.
Election 2025: Down Ballot
- VA: Democrats flipped at least 13 seats in the House of Delegates to expand their narrow majority.
- GA: Democrats won two seats on the Public Service Commission, their first statewide wins in non-federal races in Georgia since 2006.
- PA: Three incumbent justices on the state Supreme Court were retained, preserving a liberal majority for another two years.
- ME: A ballot initiative mandating voter ID was resoundingly defeated.
- CO: A ballot initiative to raise taxes on high earners to fund free school breakfasts and lunches passed overwhelmingly.
Election 2025: Headlines
- Punchbowl: Dems Romp: What that means for Washington
- HuffPost: The Backlash To Trump Is Here — And It’s Big
- Politico: Democrats didn’t just rebound. They dominated.
Election 2025: Bottom Lines
- TPM’s Josh Marshall: DC Conventional Wisdom Goes Down to Defeat in State after State
- David Weigel: Blowout state elections offer something for every Democrat
- Jamelle Bouie: Trump Is an Albatross
Taking the Minority Out of Minority Scholarships
Confronted by President Trump’s anti-DEI jihad, universities across the country have been capitulating by revamping, retooling, and rebranding minority scholarships to take out the minority component — but this particular case stands out for bitter irony.
UC San Diego and the San Diego Foundation — sued by a student under the federal anti-KKK statute dating to 1871 — settled the case last month by renaming the Black Alumni Scholarship Fund and making it available to all students, the WaPo reports.
16th Lawless U.S. High Seas Attack
Two people were killed in another U.S. attack on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the eastern Pacific, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced. The death toll from the U.S. campaign of lawless attacks off the coasts of Central and South America now stands at 67.
Dick Cheney Remembrances
Let me gently steer you away from the sanitized Dick Cheney obituaries to the ones that tell it like it is:
- Spencer Ackerman: His Works Completed, Dick Cheney, Mass Murderer of Iraqis and American Democracy, Dies
- Cheney experts Barton Gellman and Marc Fisher: “Former vice president Dick Cheney, who recast an understudy’s job into an engine of White House power, becoming chief architect of a post-9/11 war on terrorism that involved bypassing restrictions against torture and domestic espionage, died Nov. 3.”
- TPM: I dug up an old draft obituary for Cheney that Brian Beutler wrote way back in 2012, shortly after Cheney’s heart transplant. It, like Cheney’s new heart, held up better than I expected.
A Chicago Pope Still Blows My Mind
“Jesus says very clearly at the end of the world, we’re going to be asked, you know, how did you receive the foreigner? Did you receive him and welcome him or not? And I think that there’s a deep reflection that needs to be made in terms of what’s happening.”–Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV, asked by reporters about immigrants detained at the ICE facility in Broadview being refused the opportunity to receive holy Communion
Quote of the Day
“I could smell the onions and mustard.”–Border Patrol agent Gregory Lairmore, testifying in the trial of the D.C. sandwich thrower
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California Voters Approve Measure to Offset Damage of Trump’s Red-State Gerrymandering Blitz
In the first substantial blow to the Trump administration’s redistricting power grab in red states across the country, California voters on Tuesday approved a proposal to redraw the state’s congressional district lines. Governor Gavin Newsom and state Democrats pushed the measure to help offset Trump’s nationwide gerrymandering blitz in red states.
Continue reading “California Voters Approve Measure to Offset Damage of Trump’s Red-State Gerrymandering Blitz”Voters Reject Republican Push for Voter ID and Restricted Vote by Mail in Maine
On Tuesday, Maine voters rejected Question 1, a Republican-backed measure primarily about voter ID, that, if approved, would have restricted absentee voting and ballot access and disenfranchised eligible voters.
Continue reading “Voters Reject Republican Push for Voter ID and Restricted Vote by Mail in Maine”Zohran Mamdani Easily Wins the NYC Mayoral Race. What Comes Next?
By electing Zohran Mamdani, New Yorkers have just launched one of the most high-profile experiments on the future of the Democratic Party and its opposition to Donald Trump. Mamdani, who won a clear-cut victory, is a young Democratic Socialist who vaulted from relative obscurity in the state legislature to City Hall in the span of about a year, thanks to an ambitious policy agenda and a relentless digital offensive tailor-made for the age of TikTok and Instagram.
The Associated Press called the race at 9:34 p.m. ET, with Mamdani pulling in 50.4% of the vote ahead of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo with 41.3% and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa with 7.5%.
Continue reading “Zohran Mamdani Easily Wins the NYC Mayoral Race. What Comes Next?”