For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.
- Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
No Sift next week. The next new posts will appear on November 3.
This week's featured post is "The Resistance Stiffens".
Ongoing stories
- Trump's assault on American democracy. The American People pushed back a little this week. That's the subject of the featured post.
- Climate change. Lots of statistics get thrown around about climate change, but the most important one is the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere. In 2024, atmospheric CO2 jumped by a record 3.5 parts per million, to reach a record 424 ppm.
- Gaza. The ceasefire didn't last long.
- Ukraine. Over the last few weeks, Trump did what he does so often: floated an idea to support Ukraine (by supplying it with long-range Tomahawk missiles), got a lot of positive headlines for it, but then backed down after talking to Vladimir Putin. Now he's planning to meet Putin in Budapest, a move that supports not just Putin, but Hungary's authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán, Putin's only ally in the EU. Trump likes to appear independent of Putin, but remains incapable of standing up to him.
This week's developments
This week's theme: resisting the regime
That's the topic of the featured post, which covers the No Kings rallies, the revolt of the Pentagon press corps, universities refusing to sign Trump's compact, Democrats standing firm on the budget, and an appeals court ruling keeping troops out of Chicago.
One minor bit of resistance: Juries are refusing to convict people the regime should never have charged.
Yesterday the NYT published the most clueless article I've seen in some while: "It’s 2025, and Democrats Are Still Running Against Trump". Apparently, we're supposed to ignore the fascist takeover that's happening and talk about more normal political issues.
I also love the idea that we should take advice from "a veteran Republican admaker and political strategist" who says "If I were running a Democratic campaign, I would be attempting to broaden my coalition beyond a visceral hatred of Trump".
Maybe seeing democracy collapsing before their very eyes can change the minds of previously uncommitted voters. Anti-Trump might become a very broad coalition indeed.
and voting rights
John Roberts has been chipping away at the Voting Rights Act for years, enabling a great many voter suppression laws in red states. Now he seems ready to finish the job.
Basically, Roberts wants every government action to be color-blind. That sounds good if you don't think about it too hard. But when generations of racism has created a problem, how do you address that problem without mentioning race?
Wednesday, the Court heard arguments in Louisiana v Callais, and the issue in question is whether states can engage in racial gerrymandering -- the only kind of gerrymandering that current interpretations of the law bans.
Not only is this the kind of thing Roberts has wanted to do his whole career, it might have the side benefit of making it virtually impossible for Democrats to recapture the House in 2026, or maybe ever. An analysis in the NYT says that in some scenarios, Democrats would have to win the national popular vote by 5% or more in order to get a majority of House seats.
and the shutdown
Republicans are claiming that Democrats just didn't want to fold before the No Kings rallies, but that they will now that the rallies are over. I'm not seeing it.
At stake here is the narrative of Trump's invincibility: If he has to offer a concession, even a popular one, then resistance is productive. If Democrats cave without getting anything, then they're useless.
A local TV station suggests five dates that are pressure points for the shutdown: three paycheck dates, the open-enrollment starting date for the ObamaCare exchanges (November 1), and Thanksgiving, when millions of Americans will try to travel and air-traffic controllers would still be working without pay.
I hear a lot of speculation of the form: "They'll have to resolve this by X, because otherwise this painful thing will happen." But which side does the pain move? Either Trump makes a concession or he doesn't, so there's no obvious compromise on that.
The only way out I see is for Republicans to nuke the filibuster in the Senate. Then they can run over Democrats without giving up anything.
and the Navy murdering Venezuelan fishermen
From the beginning, I've been appalled by the policy of blowing up boats in the Caribbean because someone suspects they might be carrying drugs. Appalled, but also puzzled: What's the point here? Even if the suspicions are true, drug smuggling is not a capital offense, and the people on the boats have been denied due process, or any kind of process at all. The boats could have been stopped by the Coast Guard and the drugs confiscated. And boats from Venezuela are not the main avenue for drug smuggling anyway. So who is better off because the boats are destroyed and the people on it dead?
Well, it seems like the officer in charge has some of the same doubts. Admiral Alvin Holsey, the head of the U.S. Southern Command that oversees operations in the Caribbean, quit his job one year into a three-year assignment, and will retire after a 37-year career.
Thursday was the sixth such attack, and the first one to leave survivors, who have been captured.
The strike, which President Donald Trump confirmed Friday, was the sixth known strike on a boat allegedly involved in drug trafficking. But it appeared to mark the first time an attack had not killed everyone on board.
The detention marks the first time that the Trump administration’s military campaign targeting drug traffickers has resulted in the US holding prisoners, and it sets up a complicated legal and policy situation for the administration. ... The men held by the US Navy could hypothetically petition the courts to rule on the legality of their detention in what’s known as a habeas corpus claim, Finucane noted — a pathway followed by a number of detainees in the past that could reveal more information about the Trump administration’s secretive legal rationale for the strikes.
We may also finally find out what evidence the regime has that these boats are smuggling drugs. It's a serious question whether these are actually drug smugglers, or just fishermen in the wrong place.
and you also might be interested in ...
Montana has come up with a creative proposal to get corporate money out of politics. Prior to the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision in 2010, governments controlled corporate contributions directly, by passing campaign-finance laws. Jay Kuo:
The High Court’s decision rested on the notion that corporations, long defined as “legal persons,” are entitled to First Amendment protections just like actual people. Therefore, they held, it is a violation of their “freedom of speech” to put restrictions on what their money can say and do, even in politics.
We know what happened next. Big corporations, through super PACs and outside groups, flooded the system, drowning out individuals’ voices. And there seemed no way to stop it, short of a constitutional amendment that would allow limits on corporate political spending.
Just this summer, a federal court citing Citizens United struck down a Maine law that limited contributions to political action committees to $5,000 per donor, whether that donor was an individual or a corporation.
Critics of Citizens United like to talk about "corporate personhood", the idea that a corporation has the rights of a human being. A constitutional amendment eliminating corporate personhood (a right invented by the Supreme Court itself) seemed to be the only way out.
But a new idea is being pushed in Montana: Even if corporations are people, they are still defined by the state that incorporates them, and only have the powers their charters give them. Organizers hope to have a ballot initiative in 2026 that revises Montana's corporate code to take away corporations' power to contribute to political campaigns. Further, it would allow corporations incorporated in other states to have only the same powers as Montana corporations when they operate in Montana.
Unless the Supreme Court comes up with some new oligarchic doctrine knocking this down, other states could imitate it.
Vox' Ian Milhiser lists the five safeguards we used to have against rogue government agencies like ICE, and how the Supreme Court has blocked them.
Is anyone really surprised to discover that when Young Republicans chat among themselves, the conversation turns racist and fascist?
One more reason why Pete Hegseth should never have been allowed anywhere near the SecDef office: He OK'd a plan to celebrate the birthday of the Marine Corps by firing live artillery shells over Interstate 5 in California.
Governor Newsom ordered I-5 closed, and the administration widely criticized him for doing so. But then a shell misfired, and shrapnel rained down on J. D. Vance's security detail.
Trump commuted the 7-year prison sentence of former congressman George Santos. There has never been any question about Santos' guilt, so I can only surmise two justifications: (1) Trump doesn't think Trump supporters should be punished for committing crimes. (2) Being a fraudster himself, Trump identifies with fraudsters.
Vox' Bryan Walsh writes an optimistic piece about cities becoming more bike-able. Grist has an article on the same topic.
and let's close with something unique
I don't normally do much sports coverage, but it's worth noting that in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series, Shohei Ohtani produced what is probably the greatest single-game performance in the history of baseball. Ohtani pitched six scoreless innings and hit three home runs in a 5-1 victory that sent the LA Dodgers to the World Series.
The only player comparable to Ohtani, Babe Ruth, had two 3-homer games in his career and also had scoreless pitching starts in the post-season, but never both in the same game.
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