Because this is making the rounds, it’s important to understand the broader context, and also how Texas Republicans did something foolish then tried to clean it up by doing something that also looks foolish.
When Texas Republicans passed their H.B. 3979, they tried to balance it’s misguided awfulness—and assuage critics—with a list of *positive* civil rights topics for teachers to continue to teach. It’s a good list! legiscan.com/TX/text/HB3979…
It’s also a ridiculously detailed and lengthy list in an already-confusing bill. Is every social studies class in Texas supposed to include every name, document, & event—in this bill? Does it supplement existing state standards? What gets cut to make room? Why these & not others?
Obviously, this was a poorly thought out way to make social studies curricula. It’s bad for schools & teachers and a bad precedent for the future. Set aside that Texas’s school curricula are already highly centralized & politicized. At least they are made through a known process.
So now Texas Republican are trying to pull the excessive details from state law. And it looks like they are trying to remove teaching about civil rights itself. They’re not, but they have only themselves to blame for this situation This is what moral panic creates.
*its—sorry I’m sitting outside and it’s a nice day and I’m not proofreading my tweets.

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More from @pashulman

16 Jul
My best understanding of the confusing nature of multiple universes within a single "Sacred Timeline" in the MCU: because of the efforts of the TVA, time is a circle (flat or otherwise). It repeats endlessly.
There are always tendencies to create branches–presumably every time something different could have happened, branch timelines form. For an unknown number of cycles, these have been pruned by the TVA.
But each loop–each arbitrarily chosen Sacred Timeline (well, arbitrary in that it's not uniquely good but the one He Who Remains/Immortus chose to privledge, perhaps because it led to him)–can be different so long as key things happen.
Read 13 tweets
16 Jul
If you're not in Ohio, the legislature passed a bill at the 11th hour of its session to ban most public K-12 & colleges from requiring any vaccine only on an emergency authorization by the FDA (the covid vaccines). The governor said he's veto but at *his* 11th hour, signed it.
No definitive explanation publicly as to why, but presumably if he had, he believed the legislature would come back with something even worse. He's also hoping the EUAs become permanent FDA approval soon enough that the issue is moot.
Read 6 tweets
25 Jun
If Graham ends up leading the charge to tank the bipartisan infrastructure bill, there’s a strong chance the inevitable partisan reconciliation bill will just suck it up and amp it up along with all the things Dems could do alone anyway.
Sure Republicans could argue for a political win (?) but it doesn’t actually decrease the chances of passing the reconciliation bill *and* they’ll be able to take no credit for the things they actually want. Oops.
Dems actually have the leverage here.
Read 6 tweets
9 Jun
I haven’t tweeted much about the origins of covid question because what do I know?
But it seems that short of some unlikely definitive proof it came from a lab (an admission by someone who was there, the announcement of stored samples there matching the SARS-CoV-2 genome), we’re never going to know for sure and this will always keep the lab theory alive.
Even if it’s wrong. Or unlikely.
Read 7 tweets
8 Jun
““There’s no threat to the voting rights law. It’s against the law to discriminate in voting on the basis of race already,” the Kentucky Republican said Tuesday at a weekly press conference when asked about the legislation.”

Sure. The VRA is still there. But no pre-clearance.
That means that states and localities can’t be prevented from enacting voting restrictions and the Justice Department has to use its very limited resources to sue, one case at a time. Sure the VRA still exists. But it’s two orders of magnitude harder to enforce.
And Republican administrations just won’t bring VRA cases.
Read 4 tweets
6 Jun
“I have always said, “If I can’t go home and explain it, I can’t vote for it.” And I cannot explain strictly partisan election reform or blowing up the Senate rules to expedite one party’s agenda.”

Nowhere does he explain what in the bill Republicans object to, or what he does.
Is the bottom line that this is just good electoral politics for Joe Manchin in West Virginia? It’s just that, right?
Also the VRA reauthorizations with overwhelming bipartisan majorities were because few conservatives wanted to look like they were taking away voting access along a racial dimension—but the Supreme Court changed the status quo, and states have no problem being maximally partisan.
Read 4 tweets

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