1. Control of the Senate, and thereby the full legislative branch of the United States government, for now.
2. The capacity to reform a judiciary "Constitutionally hardballed" with tremendous hypocrisy into a decades-long supermajority of Republican appointees at its highest level.
3. The capacity to regulate redistricting and thereby prevent a tremendous antidemocratic skew in legislatures at both the state and federal level, for a full decade to come.
In terms of how consequential it will be for the nation as a whole, the Georgia runoffs rivals US Presidential elections. Yet we have less than a month to register voters, only two months to make our case.
My God.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
i am very torn about this stuff, but the issue i don't think @ggreenwald addresses is that leaks themselves constitute a form of selective editing, and an "in the public interest standard" has to consider that, even regarding authentic material. 1/ greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-j…
if (not saying this is the case here and now, but if) one political faction is much more capable of unearthing competitors' private materials than others, when is it in the public interest to cover even the authentic material released? 2/
records of private, "candid" conversations will include things that would be discreditable in a public context, even when actions ultimately taken may be innocent. 3/
people think of nationalization as more radical, more dangerous, than regulation, but for deeply regulated industries that may be misguided. 1/
like nationalization, regulation usurps control. but often clumsily. pervasive regulation blurs lines of accountability, public actors point fingers at private "owners", and vice versa. 2/
obviously it depends on the nature and pervasiveness of the regulation. for industries in which private actors are numerous and diverse in how they behave, where regulation imposes just shared limits and requirements, this is argument doesn't hold. think restaurants. 3/
@csissoko points out the obvious-once-you-think-about-it fact that in a world where institutional money is collateralized, borrowed liquidity (i.e. repo), a change in interest rates amounts to a sharp change in the quantitative money supply… 2/
and immediate in that it does not depend on a reequilibration of investment decisions, which would unfold over time, that is implicit in imagined "hurdle rate" channels. (Interest rate rises, equivalently bond price drops, mechanically destroy collateral value.) 3/
I don't see those divides as purely or even mostly geographic. (In fact, I see them largely as artifacts of the incentives that govern the political parties who n turn reshape our politics and our selves, qua @leedrutmanisbn.nu/0190913851) 2/
So I'm skeptical of devolution as a solution to our deadlocked bitterness. If we became several fully independent nations that kept our current electoral system, we'd soon all become little UKs, bitterly divided within while also scapegoating greater America like an EU. 3/
developed countries fall broadly into two categories, failures w/cumulative mortalities ~1/1000 (within a factor of 1.5) and successful suppressors (NZ, KR, DE etc) with much less death. the US is a failure. 1/
the Trump administration deserves condemnation unequivocally. it sabotaged and undermined all of the tactics successful suppressors employ, ignored pre-existing plans and sidelined experts, intentionally starved the states of resources that might have let them step in. 2/
but was the US well-placed to be a success, if it had not been for this active sabotage by the Trump administration? 3/