For our mega-survey on populist attitudes, we asked whether people would prefer a more multi-party system or a two-party system. The former blew the latter out of the water. Asked about specific reforms to get there, people are less sure. Also, Trump populists are the most fond of the status quo.

I don't think it gets that far, she's not going to be successfully denaturalized. But it's yet another onion layer on how many ways this is an assault on the Constitution.

She would also still be a member of Congress because only the House itself can say otherwise. And for once the constitutional privilege from arrest would actually kick in, because civil immigration enforcement such as trying to deport her isn't "treason, felony, [or] breach of the peace."

JR: On what universe did anyone in your office think that was acceptable? DOJ: Your honor, we did our best -- JR: No, you did not do your best. You did your absolute worst.

Yeah this is why takes about how a dem congress should assert its power against trump via “achievable” asks seems wrong.

DOJ said in its statement that it's part of an "ongoing criminal investigation." I'm sure they have some crackpot theory about how she somehow perpetuated the "fraud" as an adult in more recent years and so has some ludicrous criminal exposure herself. And/or possibly her ex-husband as a target.

Trump does not accept Congress is the legitimately elected and constitutionally empowered legislative body in this country. He is waging a yearslong, escalating campaign of rebellion, violence, and state terrorism against its authority and will stop at nothing short of its total disempowerment.

This is a significant worsening of our current state of constitutional collapse. I know it feels like there are so many, and there are, but in terms of crossing the Rubicon moments this one's up there.

Additionally, it's an attempt to usurp the power to judge the qualifications of members of the House, which the Constitution vests solely in the House itself. And there's no reason to assume she will be the last member of Congress he goes after like this. It's a direct attack on the legislature.

It matters that she's a member of Congress. This is an extreme escalation. He is attacking a member of the one body with the constitutional power to hold him accountable and check his crimes. And he's doing so trying to gin up a fake basis to strip her of her eligibility to be in Congress.

Doing a pre-dawn house raid is obviously being done as thuggish intimidation and as a literally violent assault on her and her family. Overaggressive raids happen in other contexts but in this case it's going out of their way to do politically targeted state terrorism.

*Even if* there was some factual basis for that suspicion, and there is absolutely none, there is no plausible basis to think any related evidence could be at her home all these years later. And the statute of limitations would have long expired even for any theoretically possible criminal charge.

The supposed basis of this "criminal investigation" is a twitter-grifter conspiracy theory about her immigration and naturalization, paperwork filled out by her father when she was a child.

This obviously violates the longstanding DOJ policy about a lockout on taking actions against candidates in the weeks leading up to an election.

To start with, this is happening because the president has targeted a member of Congress as part of a broader explicitly racist hate campaign against Americans of a particular ethnic origin. There's no other way to put it.

There will be a lot of equivocating about all the times search warrants have been executed on members of Congress for corruption investigations and the like, and it can't be stressed enough in how many ways HSI raiding Ilhan Omar is extremely not like that.

Just kidding.

A fun thing about Columbus statues is they're all made up on what he looked like. There's no contemporaneous portrait. We have only a few sparse written mentions of any physical attributes. His own contemporaries didn't think him important or admirable enough to memorialize any depictions of him.

This is why people yelling at Kaul about it were off the mark. He did what he could but prosecuting it wasn't within his jurisdiction.

It's not up to the AG in Wisconsin. Kaul tried civil litigation but criminal prosecution is up to the local district attorney, and the Brown County DA (Green Bay, where Musk did it) is a Republican.

Paxton is a case of how you can be scandal-plagued but a flamboyant teflon sort of character, or you can be a boring competent workhorse with little stage presence, and either of those are electable, but the worst possible combination is to be hideously corrupt while also having negative charisma.