You’re acknowledging that rural areas tend to be conservative but making an unsupported leap in assuming small state = rural. Rhode Island, Delaware, and Hawaii are small states whose populations are predominantly urban. If DC were admitted as a state, it would be the most urban state in the nation, but would also be only the 49th most populous state.

There’s nothing inherently conservative about small states. Small states include 1-house representative states like Vermont, Delaware, Maine, and 2-representative states like Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Hawaii, all of which voted for Harris over Trump in 2024. The biggest states, California, Illinois, Texas, and Florida, aren’t necessarily progressive, either.

The conservative/progressive divide comes from rural versus urban, not small versus big.

So even though the Senate is undemocratic, it turns out not to be that big a bias in practice. Especially as we’re in the middle of a realignment of parties in the Trump era, where old demographic coalitions aren’t as reliable of predictor of voting patterns.

Specifically, it removes particular obstacles that the Trump administration has been using to block wind projects, including and especially those that were already permitted.

It’s also targeted at electrical grid upgrades, and transmission infrastructure upgrades in particular is an area that we really do need faster approvals.

I don’t love that this speeds up oil and gas pipeline projects or electrical permitting for big data centers. And on Monday, to encourage Democrats to vote for cloture on this bill, the Trump administration finalized approval for 10 wind projects that had been held up for a while. Except Trump himself said in a statement afterward that this bill, if passed into law, would not convince him to issue any more wind permits.

So it really is a calculation of policy tradeoffs: streamline oil pipelines and AI data center construction, in exchange for taking away the president’s power to block already permitted wind, allowing faster development of electrical infrastructure. During a bad faith presidency where the president will selectively enforce only the parts of the law he likes, but in the last 2 years of a lame duck administration, and where wrongfully denied permits would probably be successfully challenged in courts.

I don’t like it, but I also recognize that this isn’t a fossil fuel giveaway. This is a compromise that includes a fossil fuel giveaway, in exchange for things we really do want in the law.

My hope is that with an unusually high number of Republican elected officials losing their jobs, that the market will be flooded and most of them will struggle to find jobs typically available to former elected officials. Especially the really dumb ones that made enemies in their own party. Is a lobbying firm, media organization, public relations firm, or anything like that actually going to perceive any value in hiring someone like this?

Plus the incoming Lieutenant Governor is a Democrat. And in the Texas governmental system, the Lieutenant Governor has a ton of power over the Senate, akin to the Senate Majority Leader in most other American systems: ability to set committee memberships, control the calendar, etc.

The electoral college is quite literally based on the apportionment of Congress.

Yes, but the disproportionality between electoral votes per voter comes more from the existence of the Senate than it does with the slightly different population sizes of the House districts. Wyoming has almost 4 times the electoral votes per voter than Ohio, whereas right now the widest ratio in House district populations is Delaware’s 980k having 80% higher population compared to Montana’s 542k.

And the genuine unfairness of the electoral college is the winner take all nature of it. Even if the electoral college itself were divided exactly proportionally to the population of the states, there would still be divergence between the national popular vote and the electoral college winner when one candidate wins a disproportionate number of very close states. Apportionment is a separate problem from the electoral college, and both independently need to be fixed.

This is mixing up two related but distinct ideas.

The electoral college system leads to a winner-take-all for the electoral votes of any given state, with the exception of Nebraska. Passing a Wyoming rule or something similar to expand the size of the House, and increasing the number of electoral votes from 538 to 900 or whatever won’t change that basic dynamic.

Yeah, yeah, Wyoming has a house seat elected by a population of 590,000, a little bit smaller than the national average house district population of 780,000, but that’s not nearly as big of a source of voting power discrepancy compared to the existence of the Senate, or the winner-take-all phenomenon that happens in the Electoral College.

So yes, I agree that the Apportionment Act needs to be repealed/modified, but don’t agree it should be as high a priority as electoral college reform.

Yeah, the whole story needs to be told because it’s just so, so much worse than even what you were saying.

lame duck implies that the sitting president would be restrained in some way.

Mainly restrained by the fact that they’re running low on time remaining in office. No matter how you slice it, time keeps marching forward, and people who want to continue to have careers after January 20, 2029 will start making moves to move up after Trump moves out.

For the unique dynamic in the Trump administration of requiring absolute loyalty to a particular man, that means that the expiration date will cause significantly more turmoil and turnover in his inner circle, as they position for the 2028 campaigns, where they maneuver to inherit Trump’s power he’s never been keen on sharing anyway.

He went to jail and her mother took his side.

No, he was facing criminal charges for raping her from the ages of 9 to 12, so her mother actively helped him flee the state and hide from justice until he died 25 years later. The mother chose to stand by her child’s rapist, moving states with him and leaving her children behind, so the state where they were left behind had to take the abandoned children into custody.

Ramaswamy tracked down the mother and said “yeah, let’s get her on camera to call Acton a liar.”

I’m celebrating this result. It’s not about the money, because as everyone else is saying, this is chump change to him.

But what’s beautiful is the blow to the ego. The reminder that all the money in the world can’t buy popularity or adoration. The suspicion that he might be getting taken advantage of by others taking his money. The confirmation that he’s not fully in control, and never will be.

That is worth celebrating.

This is just another flavor of that lazy “both parties are the same” nonsense. We are in the midst of a Trump-driven party realignment, and that means both parties are moving in different directions on different issues, and there are debates within both parties about where to go.

A generation ago, it was an active debate about whether sex acts between two people of the same sex should be a crime punishable by prison. We pushed real reforms through, from decriminalization to allowing them to hold security clearances and serve in the military, legalizing same sex marriage and recognizing their parenthood of children. We made it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or transgender status. In all this time, these positions on LGBT rights shifted from far left fringes to internal divisions within the Democratic Party to mainstream views within the Democratic Party to influencing divisions in the Republican party. And although I’m disappointed in many Democrats not doing more to defend against active hostility towards transgender people, their positions aren’t actually less transgender friendly than the norm even 10 years ago (much less 25).

On abortion, we’ve moved the party towards pro-choice, even as we’ve lost ground on the battlegrounds in the courts and in state legislatures. It used to be a fairly normal view to be a pro-life Democrat. Not necessarily the party majority, but there were enough elected Democrats who would vote against abortion rights, and compromises with them led to at least federal funding restrictions of abortions. At this point, pretty much any elected Democrat will not only fight for abortion rights, but are ready to bring the fight on putting government resources behind abortion access.

The active debate right now, within the Democratic Party, about Israel and Palestine, is so much further pro-Palestine than would be recognizable 20 years ago. For the first time, we have elected officials who are publicly against military aid for Israel, and in favor of prosecuting war crimes against senior Israeli government officials.

It’s not every issue like this, though. Union membership is no longer a reliable indicator of Democratic Party support, and labor rights are a bit more muddled within the party. Lots of economic issues have gone from being partisan coded to mixed coalitions (tariffs and trade, environmental and energy policy, financial markets and banking regulation, health policy). And Democrats have backslid on immigration/border issues, much to my disappointment.

But most of it is just that Democrats have lost on policy issues over the last 10 years, and so the debate between Democrats on lots of these issues feel only theoretical rather than practical. Are there Democrats fighting for reducing carbon emissions, shoring up social security and the safety net, raising taxes, replenishing the middle class? Yes, sure, but they don’t have the opportunity to actual discuss the details because they’re mostly an opposition minority party fighting to stop the bleeding on destructive Republican policies going the other way.

Let’s win some fucking elections so that we can actually have the debate. I’d love to see Democrats control a trifecta so that the coalition can churn out something like what Pelosi/Reid/Obama accomplished between 2009-2011 and listen to the left complain that the sausage making was too corporate/neolib/etc. That’s the debate I’d like to have, from the position of having actually won back power.

I would share the Mac and Me wheelchair cliff scene in celebration, but out of respect for Josh Turek winning Iowa, I’m gonna lay off the wheelchair jokes.

Yup. Mathematically, gerrymandering is a combination of packing (putting as many as you can of the opposing side into a concentrated district you lose) and cracking (spreading the opposing side among the remaining districts so that they can’t get a majority of any of them).

If you try to grab too many seats, though, your gerrymandering advantage is diluted in any given district so that you may actually lose a lot in a wave year, more than if you even didn’t gerrymander.

So imagine a state that has 10 districts of 100 usual voters each, 500 of each party. Most years, each party gets 5 out of the 10 seats. But if you’re gerrymandering, you can pack 2 districts 90/10 and build a 60-40 advantage in the other 8, which holds your 8-2 advantage unless the population swings 20 points. Or you can get greedy and try to pack one district 90/10 and build only a 55-45 advantage in the other 9, good for most years but vulnerable to a swing of 10%. At that point, you might have accidentally given the other side a 10-seat sweep in a year where the popular vote goes 560-440, with one district going 99-1 and the other 9 going 52-48 or so.

Most real world gerrymandering isn’t that clean, but the intended goal was to create a bunch of 55-45 districts. And now those districts might actually swing.

I am a lawyer, but not a trademark lawyer. Just knowledgeable enough to be dangerously wrong, I guess.

But trademark protection must be tied to a product, and don’t provide protection against a word or phrase being used at all.

And so the strength of a trademark description relies on where it lies on the spectrum between totally fanciful words invented specifically for the trademarked use (Xerox, Exxon, Pepsi), arbitrary words that are normal words but have nothing to do with the product (Apple computers, Monster energy drinks), suggestive words that have something to do with the product (Coppertone for suntan lotion, Airbnb for an online service for BnB listings), descriptive words (Quarter Pounder for a burger that is a quarter pound in weight), to fully generic words for products that can’t be limited to one producer/seller (bicycle, automobile, hamburger).

Common terms can be trademarked, but the scope of protection is necessarily much narrower. Apple can enforce its trademark in computers and electronics. Monster Energy Drink can enforce its trademark in beverages.

Crowder’s “Change my mind” trademark seems pretty tough to enforce. It’s at best a descriptive mark, and descriptive marks are hard to enforce unless the mark is so distinctive in commerce (like McDonald’s Quarter Pounder) that a consumer might be confused about who is producing it. I don’t think any regular person on the street will assume that a CNN-produced town hall with James Talarico is sponsored or licensed or produced by Crowder’s team, so there’s no risk of consumer confusion.

But like I said, I’m not a trademark lawyer so I wouldn’t put too much weight in what I say.

I would be 100% in favor of an amendment that clearly spells out that the rights enumerated in the Constitution are limited to actual humans, and any corporation or other group of people are not entitled to any more inherent rights than the humans who make up the corporation are entitled to collectively.

How does that change the current law, though?

I’d be in favor of a rule that explains that organizing into associations doesn’t change the rights of the individuals who form the association, but also that the association would only have rights that relate to the actual purpose of forming the association in the first place (whether it’s a corporation, LLC, partnership, joint venture, other unincorporated associations).

So a church gets religious freedom. But a sandwich shop does not. A newspaper gets freedom of speech and may exercise editorial discretion on what goes on its pages. A telephone company does not, and cannot discriminate against the viewpoints expressed over its phone lines.

There are trickier issues: can a government ban halal slaughter, and would a Muslim-owned butcher shop be entitled to a religious exemption (if, assuming, individuals were granted that exemption)? I’d argue you have to look to the nature of the business or organization to determine whether that particular right applies to that organization, so the butcher shop can invoke the religion of the human butcher, and possibly even the human customers who want to buy halal meat.

But the framework makes sense to me, and is closely related to the principle of organizational standing, where something like a nonprofit association of apple growers can sue on behalf of apple grower rights, despite not being an organization that actually directly grows apples. That’s how corporate rights should work: look to the reason for incorporating and the nature of the organization, and how it relates to the nature of the right at issue.