I largely agree with this thread. Having said that I do think McConnell did his best to make it *feel* like something new and unprecedented was happening in 2016 and that has played no small part in fueling liberal fury over this.
In my view the 2016 situation should really be understood as the modern partisan polarized Senate’s first reckoning with a problem: what happens when a Supreme Court vacancy opens up, and the president and Senate majority are different parties?
That problem hadn't arisen since the 1990s, in a very different political era.
McConnell had to decide how to respond. He did so by making up some BS about how a SCOTUS nominee shouldn't be confirmed in an election year.
(He's since qualified that "rule," but didn't initially)
Garland was surely headed for defeat if he got a vote. Remember it took 60 votes at the time, so 14 Republican senators would have had to vote for him. Absolutely not happening.
But McConnell wanted to go a step further and shield his vulnerable senators from even taking a vote
Hence the blockade. McConnell liked it because it concentrated all the credit/blame on himself, even though it likely didn't change the outcome for Garland.
But it also, to liberals, made McConnell into the villain who "stole" the seat, fueling cries for court-packing
Where would we be if McConnell had let the Garland nomination fail "normally" — by being filibustered or in an up or down vote?
I don't know. But when you openly taunt or troll people (as McConnell has here), they get very angry. Where that anger will lead, we'll have to see
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Here’s how I think about Project 2025’s policies - in 3 groups.
1.) Centralizing presidential authority over the executive branch
2.) Longtime conservative priorities
3.) A very aggressive religious right agenda, especially on abortion
The Heritage Foundation has been doing Project 2025-esque stuff for decades but there are some different dynamics this cycle due to Trump’s close ties with Heritage, and his own former appointees lying in wait to return to office and correct his first term mistakes
That’s particularly evident in the Project’s focus on amping up the number and power of political appointees (relative to career civil servants) throughout the executive branch, especially at the Justice Department
The tangled, nearly 7-year saga of the Stormy Daniels hush money scandal and investigations that has resulted in Trump now being on the verge of indictment, explained
THE PAYOFF: The month before the 2016 election, Stormy Daniels prepared to come forward alleging a consensual sexual encounter with Trump 10 years prior — but let it be known she'd accept payment for her silent.
Michael Cohen sent the payment, $130,000, on October 27, 2016.
INVESTIGATION 1 (FEDS): When SDNY prosecutors investigated Cohen, they argued the $130,000 payment violated federal campaign finance laws, since it was meant to help Trump win the election.
Cohen pleaded guilty to this and other charges. But the theory was never tested in court
Hunter Biden has filed a countersuit against the computer repair store owner who provided his emails and files to Trump allies.
It's interesting to look very closely at which claims Hunter explicitly denies and which he claims not to have knowledge sufficient to confirm or deny
Hunter denies he was referred to the repair store.
Hunter says he lacks the knowledge to confirm or deny whether he asked the repairman to recover info from damaged computers and whether he himself returned to the shop the next day
So this is not an outright denial that Hunter dropped his laptops off at the repair store. Instead it seems to point to a "I don't remember" (implicitly: "I was too wasted" defense)
Here we have the same exercise, "Whom to Leave Behind," but with different identities. Race is only explicitly mentioned for one person on the list. It's dated 1998 at the bottom.
Thoughtful @henrygrabar piece on how the city-dwellers worrying about a "crime" problem seem to actually be worrying about a "public disorder" problem.
You can imagine a spectrum from “total anarchy” to “authoritarian clampdown."
Current debate is between those who think cities have gotten too disorderly and need more order, vs. those suspicious attempts to enforce more order will inevitably be discriminatory & authoritarian
Another installment of the debate here.
The reason the tide seems to be turning somewhat toward the "more order" camp, it seems to me, is that the "less order" camp doesn't seem to have a solution, focusing instead on denying there's any problem
I wrote about the most consistent throughline to Ron DeSantis's career — his enthusiastic self-reinventions toward whichever political cause is in vogue and whichever persona could help him achieve his next ambition.
This tendency of DeSantis’s was evident back in 2019 when @reihan pointed out that he had shifted from a spending-cutting Tea Partier to a Trump superfan to (early in his governorship) a surprisingly uncontroversial pragmatist. But he wouldn't stop there.