Week 75
By 
The Supreme Six, with Samuel Alito speaking for them, took some more constitutional rights away from the nation this week.
Republican Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio knows that this will empower Stephen Miller to deport Haitians from Springfield, and he’s not happy about it. He sees immigrants as essential to Ohio’s industrial recovery.
The Reflecting Pool continues to be a mess, and Donald Trump had a tantrum before signing a bipartisan (85 to 5 in the Senate!) bill to make housing more available. So the bill sits there until Trump slavey and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson formally sends it to Trump for signature. Once he does that, Trump’s got ten days to veto it or it goes into law without his signature. So of course little Mikey isn’t doing it.
Heather Cox Richardson made a good point about all this on her videos this week, a little less sharply in her column for yesterday: What the DSA candidates who won in New York this week are offering is very centrist, if you take “centrist” to be based on the Declaration of Independence. That all people are created equal and are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It’s the Republicans who have gone radical, to disenfranchise large chunks of the population and make things miserable for most of us. What about domestic tranquility, huh?
Naturally, after the DSA wins, some Democrats clutched their pearls, some more obnoxiously than others. If we accept the formulation in the preceding paragraph, those “centrist” Democrats who want to triangulate with the Republicans at one pole are simply saying that we need to become more fascist. Once upon a time, they could argue that that made candidates more electable, but with those wins, that argument becomes weaker.
Different approaches will work in different congressional districts, along with different candidate personalities. But if we want to take the country back and make it better, I’ll take centrism in the DSA mode. And we need to remind the crabby centrists “Vote Blue No Matter Who” along with keeping in mind that anyone who opposes Trump and the Republicans is on our side.
The reaction of the “centrists” in the Democratic Party has been much less than I thought it would be, although it’s not even a week yet.
What should be more entertaining is the crackup in the Republican Party as senile Grandpa continues to pursue his own resentments as they conflict with the electoral prospects of everyone else in the Party.
Follow the court-watchers for the details of the lawsuits. Chris Geidner (LawDork, Bluesky), Roger Parloff (Lawfare, Bluesky), and the Just Security tracker.
Let’s stay away from hypotheticals, as usual. Post your pets.
133 more weeks to go. What are you doing?
Previous weeks: Week 10, Week 20, Week 30, Week 40, Week 50, Week 60, Week 70, Week 71, Week 72, Week 73, Week 74