Thread by @marty_lederman

A handful of reactions to what might well become the most-read Student Note in a generation (or longer):

1. I concur with what Mark Tushnet wrote about it as a work "in the genre of comedy, with a serious point" (balkin.blogspot.com/2020/01/commen…).

harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/upl…

2. We obviously need a new term, for something harder than constitutional hardball. Impenetra-ball?

3. It's hardly the first such recent provocation (see, e.g., thinkprogress.org/wp-content/upl…; texaslawreview.org/wp-content/upl…). Unlike those predecessors, however, its objectives are laudable.

4. It's important to stress that the absurd-sounding 127-new-states solution would be *very* temporary--only long enough to fix the more systemic problems (see note 103, which shouldn't have been relegated to a footnote!).

One thing it doesn't address, though: What's to guarantee that the note 103 "reconsolidation" would happen?

5. The first ten pages or so are as good a summary of our present constitutional dysfunction and its profound, "deeply undemocratic" costs as you're likely to find.

6. It also includes a nice, bracing reminder (pp. 1064-67) of other instances in our history when similarly radical "workarounds" (to put the matter gently) were used to fix serious constitutional defects and to address national crises.

7. It won't take as long to learn the author's identity as it was to discover that Joe Klein was the author of Primary Colors. I won't be surprised if it written by someone (at least partly) responsible for the most entertaining legal Twitter-feed in a long while (@HLCentrists).

8. Yesterday's (anticipatory?) @HLCentrists tweet: "We live in a republic, not a democracy. I don’t know what that means, but it is very useful in arguments."