Thread by @matt_cam

"Can he do that?" is the wrong question, & I should know!

7 yrs ago, our grassroots #EastBoston @NoEastieCasino movement beat a massive casino at the polls.

It was illegally back on the ballot within weeks.

The lesson? These laws/norms are for us. Not them.

#macasinos #mapoli

I've also learned this lesson many times over in the US immigration system as law & norms constantly shift underneath me and my clients, often on a total whim.

But seeing it happen after a democratic election in my own neighborhood changed me. It changed me forever.

#mapoli

I'm not going to spin out some lengthy Seth Abramson-style theory on exactly how it could happen. I'm just going to trust that the people who want it already have...and that thousands of heavily armed Americans & millions more Fox/OANN/Breitbart news consumers would welcome it.

If you've already been primed to believe in "ANTIFA," "American Carnage," "radical-left Democrats" (lol), "Obama judges," "fake news," non-citizen voting fraud, etc--let alone the rank idiocy of the Q cult!--you're more than primed for whatever this executive order will be

I can clearly remember a @NoEastieCasino strategy meeting after our 2013 election win to review where things might go from there. I'm embarrassed to say that no one even floated the possibility that they'd find a way back on the ballot after we'd sent them packing.

#mapoli

And that's the fundamental problem right there: it is extremely difficult for people who approach democratic government in good faith on its own terms to imagine the ways that bad actors acting in bad faith might come at it *on their own terms.*

The R-held House is chock-full of people acting in the worst possible faith rn. Think Jordan/Collins/Gaetz's fake outrage over impeachment, or Louie Gohmert banging away on his desk like a fucking toddler to keep a witness from explaining DOJ corruption

politico.com/video/2020/06/…

These fools are the leading lights of something we still call "conservatism" for some reason. But that would require a consistent and reasonably reliable application of philosophy in practical terms, and that's just not how fascists do things. Dems like rules. Rs like power.

This detailed letter to the MA Inspector General explains the most glaring illegalities of the Eastie/Revere #macasino mess in painful legal & factual detail. It's some of my best legal work!

Amazing to me now I ever believed anyone in power would care.

commonwealthmagazine.org/opinion/012-no…

I'd learned the lesson we may all be about to learn in the next few months before I went to the trouble of writing all of that, but was still just naive enough to believe that the Gaming Commission was some kind of independent arbiter bound to follow controlling law & regs. LOL

After losing in an election in which they outspent us 100s of times over, Mohegan Sun & Suffolk Downs decided to proceed as if the election had never happened, & one of the US's bluest states went right along with it.

It *can* happen. Idk how. I don't even care how.

But it can

CORRECTION: idk why I said "R-held" here! But that has been the practical effect of their jackassery anyway