The right way for Democrats to address the conservative takeover of the courts is to actually pass bills and try to govern in a way people like. If the courts stop you then you fight them. But the whole pack the court first gets the sequencing backwards.
Democrats haven't come to grips with how the courts are stepping into a void that legislators have left. Sure the courts can create absurd constitutional limits, but more generally the courts interpret legal ambiguities in statute. Congress can just rewrite statute. It doesn't.
Democratic voters do not want to pick leaders who govern. That is why Dianne Feinstein is an 87 year-old incredibly lazy Senator from California dispatching her primary opponents with relative ease. Democratic voters want the status quo protected by their courts.
No they don't, they need to do *work.* It's hard to convey how fundamentally lazy most Democratic leaders are. The contrast is the Antitrust Subcommittee, which has made serious progress because the members do doc review.
Can we admit Obamacare was a disaster and Obama was a bad President yet? Or are we still pretending that Biden is the problem because he’s not cool? time.com/6279937/us-hea…
If the Rs has an alternative beyond ‘feed sick people into a woodchipper’ they would have implemented it already.
1. A lot of people involved in the TikTok debate are saying 'hey but we aren't regulating our own social media firms so going after TikTok is cray cray.' But there is actually a lot Biden is doing to regulate social media and data you just don't know about. So let's take a look.
2. First, the Federal Trade Commission has banned Meta from tracking kids and using surveillance advertising to kids, and Meta is in litigation which it is slowly losing.
3. Second, the Antitrust Division has *two* cases where it is seeking to break up Google, and the FTC has an antitrust case where it is seeking to break up Meta and another where it is trying to break up Amazon. All involve heavy use of data.
Here's WH Press Secretary reading out talking points denying the 20% cut to the Antitrust Division budget. It would be nice if more than 5 people in the administration knew anything about the administration's policies.
It’s also nonsense. DOJ number #2 and ex-Apple lawyer Lisa Monaco’s absurd slush fund got a boost of $2 million from six months ago, the Antitrust Division got gutted.
The most charitable reading is they are dumb and don’t care. The least charitable reading is Lisa Monaco is working on behalf of big tech while at DOJ.
Not to get all Will Stancil, but it is weird how little anyone on Twitter wants to give credit to Biden for doing good stuff. Like he cuts overdraft fees and the response is 'More half measures! Yay. I wonder how watered down this will get if it even happens.' It did happen!
I mean @joebiden and @PeteButtigieg preside over the smoothest travel season in a decade after massively punishing Southwest and there's zero interest, even from Buttigieg fans.
@JoeBiden @PeteButtigieg There was so much shit-talking about Biden after he ended a possible rail strike with a promise of getting workers sick days. Union-buster! they said. But he did help get them sick days just a few months later. theguardian.com/business/2023/…
Media corruption is so obvious. Yesterday there was a historic antitrust win against Google’s monopoly. Does NY magazine cover it? Nope. They release a bad faith hit piece on Lina Khan and anti-monopolists.
“fatal to a once-in-a-generation movement to dramatically transform government antitrust policy, for better or worse”
This is literally published 5am the day after Google lost a historic antitrust case.
This story was published literally the day after the FTC’s historic win against a killer acquisition in biotech, where Khan blocked a monopolist charging $750k a year for treatment from wiping out a possible rival.
This isn't actually wrong. DEI is what a civil rights movement looks like without unions. The ugly truth about racial politics is in the 1970s civil rights leaders gave up on the working class and turned to corporate compliance and 'justice via webinar.'
Sociologist Frank Dobbin wrote up this dynamic in 'Inventing Equal Opportunity,' but he misses the corrupting reality of letting people dispute employer action around narrow identity grievance but under no other terms. press.princeton.edu/books/paperbac…
There has always been a fundamental tension in black politics. Dubois's 'talented tenth' frame is deeply elitist, vs MLK's populist poor people's march. It's no different than every other area of American politics, with a much stronger sense of group identity in black America.