I remember when Roger Stone was greeted with a standing ovation after Mueller indicted him.

We shouldn't be surprised that the Republican Party will cheer Trump, despite the role he played in the insurrection.

1/

thehill.com/blogs/blog-bri…
The goal of the GOP is to dismantle the federal government and return to that time (before 1920; for others, before 1860) when white men could basically do what they wanted.

On the frontier, they could grab land!
Before modern rape laws, they could grab women!

2/
Before the alphabet-soup regulatory agencies (the "deep state") they could cheat!
🔹They could fix prices and manipulate markets!
🔹They could sell rotten goods and it was the buyer's fault for not inspecting better!
🔹They could pollute rivers!

🎶Those were the days🎶

3/ Image
🔹They could refuse to rent apartments to people if they didn't like the color of their skin.

If you want to dismantle the federal government, the quickest way is with a few human wrecking balls. Hence, their love of Trump.

4/

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More from @Teri_Kanefield

27 Feb
If you have multiple parties in a constitutional democracy with a president, the president can come to power with 33% of the vote— or less if the vote is split multiple ways.

Do you really want that?

A majority requires a big tent, which means compromising.
The drafters of our Constitution deliberately avoided a parliamentary system.
If one party jumps on the crazy train, that's when you need all other people to come together to outnumber the crazy party.

10 parties mean each person gets to find the party that fully embraces that person's views (Purity!)

But then the crazy party seizes power.
Read 6 tweets
27 Feb
Several people recently have used the phrase "broken system."

I'm curious about the thinking behind this term. It seems to me as flawed as MAGA.

Broken implies that it was once functional and working, now then it broke.

Two questions . . .
(1) Was it ever not broken?
(2) If so, when did it break?
In 1870, women couldn't vote.

In many states, they couldn't own property.

It was perfectly legal to have all-white juries, and they often were all white.

There were no worker protections or consumer protections.

Read 20 tweets
27 Feb
All we are seeing so far are pretrial motions for release pending a trial. A judge decides (no jury).

The judge isn't considering a defense to the actual crime or deciding whether a person is guilty.

There are particular factors a judge considers. . .

1/
Incarcerating someone after arrest but before a trial is somewhat problematic because of that whole innocent-until-proven-guilty thing.

If a person is nonviolent and not a flight risk, the person shouldn't be imprisoned without a trial.

2/

justice.gov/archives/jm/cr… Image
One consideration is the probability that the defendant will be convicted and face jail time because otherwise, you run the risk of ruining an innocent person's life.

(A jailed person probably loses his or her job. What if there are kids to support, etc.)

3/ Image
Read 4 tweets
26 Feb
Gideon v. Wainwright, 1963, held that all defendants in criminal matters are entitled to a court-appointed lawyer if they cannot afford one.

Do you want to go back to the days when poor people went from accusation to prison on a conveyor belt, but the rich had good lawyers?
Mr. Gideon was a poor man accused of theft. He represented himself because he couldn't afford a lawyer. He was convicted. He appealed to the Supreme Court on a handwritten letter from prison. The Court heard his case and held that poor people get court-appointed lawyers . . .
. . . he had a new trial with a local lawyer who understood how the false accusation happened. The lawyer did some investigating, presented facts that Gideon has been unable to obtain, and Gideon was acquitted.
Read 6 tweets
25 Feb
(Thread) Lies, Liars, and the Capitol Riot

This is #7 in my video series:

If you’re like me and you prefer to read, here it is on a Twitter thread.

Lying and presenting myths as a way to solidify power goes all the way back to the ancient world.

1/
Take the Behistun Inscription.

In huge lettering on the side of a cliff, King Darius, who was born in 522 BCE, presented the story of his life. mcadams.posc.mu.edu/txt/ah/Persia/…

If you believe him, power was given to him by the gods and he never suffered a single defeat.

2/
Moreover, he single-handedly killed anyone who dared question his authority. Scholars call this a pseudo-autobiography.

Donald Trump came to power with a pseudo-biography, which went like this: “I am a successful businessman.”

3/
Read 28 tweets
24 Feb
A little history.

Our current criminal justice system took form after the Civil War, when the reactionaries and White Supremacists found a way around the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery except in the case of punishment for crimes after conviction.
1/
The solution: Convict lots of Black men, put them in jail, and put them in chain gangs. At the time, there were no limits on what police could do.

So they often beat confessions out of innocent Black men.

Along came Charles Hamilton and his protégé Thurgood Marshall.

2/
As a result of literally decades of work (and one of the few times we had a liberal Supreme Court under Earl Warren), we got rulings that the Fourth Amendment outlaws things like beating confessions out of people.

It was a step forward.

3/
Read 9 tweets

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