Eric Levitz Profile picture
Sep 20, 2020 5 tweets 2 min read Read on X
1) If I believed that abortion was genocide and that the Clean Air Act was the first step on the road to Stalinism, then I would want McConnell to handle things exactly as he has. But once we drop the pretense of an apolitical judiciary...
2)...Democrats have no obligation to let the timing of various deaths + the biases of Senate and Electoral College award Republicans a high court supermajority for a decade -- despite the fact that their party has lost the popular vote in 6 of 7 presidential elections...
3) And the idea that they are obligated to honor the right's fortuitous triumph is all the more absurd when one considers the profound unpopularity of the conservative judicial agenda (not least on corporate power) and the audacity of the modern right's judicial activism...
4) The court recently came one vote shy of vetoing the a Democratic president's top legislative achievement on grounds that many conservative legal minds had initially thought specious. John Roberts rewrote the Medicaid expansion. Scalia invented a personal right to firearms...
5) It is constitutional for Dems to add justices, and the end result of that action -- the gutting of judicial review -- is preferable to letting the unelected adherents of an extremist ideology dictate what the democratic branches of government can and can't do for a generation.

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More from @EricLevitz

Oct 23, 2023
1) Many have misconstrued this tweet as an apology for Hamas. It isn't; the tweet immediately follows one in which I highlight the fact that Hamas burned families alive. I recently wrote a piece expressing my moral revulsion at leftwing apologias for Hamas nymag.com/intelligencer/…

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2) For weeks, I have argued that the fixation of some leftists on whether Hamas cut off the heads of infants was bizarre, since it isn’t any less morally hideous to shoot or burn an infant to death than to cut off their heads. Here is an excerpt from one such exchange: Image
3) Nevertheless, the question of whether Hamas beheaded infants has been a subject of controversy. Last night, I suggested that the recently published forensic pathologists’ report indicated that Hamas had cut off infants’ heads...
Read 8 tweets
Oct 22, 2023
According to this report, which includes corroborating images, Hamas militants tied a parent and child together and then burned them alive.
Last night, I asserted that this report indicated that babies were beheaded. This was an overstatement. I should have said that the report established that babies were found headless, a fact that lends plausibility to claims of beheading, but which does not prove them.
(The verb behead has multiple definitions, and is sometimes used to mean decapitate; the report indicates that Hamas did behead babies in that sense. But the term can also connote a form of execution using a knife, and we do not have confirmation of beheading in this sense)
Read 4 tweets
Oct 13, 2023
1) I sympathize with @gabrielwinant's concerns here. But my position is not that leftists should prioritize public grieving above politics, but rather that they should prioritize both morality and politics above the performance of iconoclasm.
dissentmagazine.org/online_article…
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2) Gabe’s view is that leftists expressing public grief and outrage at the slaughter of 1,000 Israeli Jews is politically counterproductive, as it helps Israel rationalize its war effort. After all, Jewish grief is the lifeblood of militant Zionism.
3) My view is that when leftists pointedly refuse to condemn the mass murder of Israeli Jews, they undermine their credibility on Israel-Palestine (and on other issues besides), in the eyes of the unconverted.
Read 12 tweets
Oct 4, 2023
The far right gloating over the murder of a progressive young man on his way home from a wedding is among the most morally abominable things I've ever seen on this website.
...It should perhaps go without saying, but the "point" they think they are making is idiotic. No set of criminal justice policies could ever fully eliminate random homicides, and the right is committed to making it easy for criminals to access handguns.
A person is more likely to be murdered in West Virginia than New York City. We would not all be safe from the threat of dying in a freak homicidal incident, if only the progressive movement did not exist
Read 4 tweets
Sep 18, 2023
College-educated voters now express more liberal views than working-class voters on economics (I.e. on questions of taxation, social insurance, redistribution and government intervention in the economy)
I suspect that the causal chain here is: socially conservative working-class voters become Republicans as culture war issues gain salience —> they adjust their economic views to match their partisanship (while socially liberal college grads took the opposite journey)
College attainment is a highly imperfect proxy for socioeconomic status. But some take the point too far. Among white voters, Republicans do much better with those who earn less than 40k than they do with those who earn more than 100k. Image
Read 5 tweets
Sep 12, 2023
Wrote about why I think prisons and policing need to be radically reformed, but not abolished. TLDR on the latter point: nymag.com/intelligencer/…
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I think prison abolitionists get a lot of things right. For one, retribution is not a legitimate function for a carceral system. We should punish people to prevent them from reoffending, or deter other offenders, not to make them suffer for its own sake nymag.com/intelligencer/…
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2) Abolitionists are also right that America's norms for criminal sentencing are likely harsher than necessary for the sake of deterring crime or incapacitating the violent nymag.com/intelligencer/…
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Read 14 tweets

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