volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@csgraves That's really all Trump and Vance have at the moment: talk.

Trump's not in Congress, so he can't introduce bills or vote for them. He can, though, use his microphone to drive the issue forward and keep focus on it, rallying his supporters to push their congresspeople to work on it.

And that's what he was doing. He COULD have let it just fade away, but he kept talking about the need for reform.

Yes, he is a stupid piece of garbage. But that doesn't change that he was promoting the effort.

@markmetz

@stevevladeck.bsky.social an administrative stay is pretty normal in a case like this just to give the rest of the justices a chance to have a look at it.

In other words, it's not that Texas needed the administrative stay but that the Court needed the administrative stay.

@Nonilex In this case the order comes as the court is about to release a ruling in another case that is very related.

There's a good chance the LA redistricting case would impact this one, so they might hold this one until that ruling is handed down.

@sand yep, and there is even polling and economic data to support that. The reputational damage is real, and it will hurt the US economy.

On the other hand, there are an awful lot of people in the US who are willing to make that trade for what they see as security and cultural problems of international visitation.

I'm not among them, but I understand them, and I wish they didn't feel that way.

@w7voa What I don't see addressed in the piece is that DOGE was the retasking of an existing office with its own legal mandate, and that legal mandate doesn't just disappear.

Maybe they mean that the office is pausing its work and moving resources elsewhere, but DOGE itself should still be there in some form as part of a bureaucracy that predated Trump.

The press often pays too little attention to these technical details that are so important to how the government actually operates.

@rhys I think it's important to hold responsible people accountable, including the Democratic Party for not having run a candidate able to beat even the amazingly weak Trump.

It was all so predictable when they made that choice.

We need to call them out so they don't make such a mistake again. And we need to stop reelecting the same ineffective Democrats who backed that plan and then couldn't hold firm in Congress.

@CindyWeinstein you have it backwards: Trump's dementia mean he doesn't really know what he's saying or doing, so it's those guys behind him that are really making the decisions, playing Trump like a puppet.

They aren't kowtowing. They're fighting over the remote control to control Trump.

@jackwilliambell It's not because billionaires.

The general public didn't want to go that direction.

It's easy to blame billionaires, but this is about the general public. Yes, it's harder to get a lot of people over to a different perspective, but nonetheless, that is the challenge.

Blaming billionaires won't fix it. It just distracts from the actual challenge.

@denisedwheeler.bsky.social

The key to remember is that a whole lot of people voted for Trump. Unfortunately, a functioning democracy reflects the will of people even when those people are kind of gross.

The downside of democracy is that often people kind of suck.

@hstone519

My sense was that he just doesn't understand even basic math with the comparison to the total wealth of the US versus trade levels, but you're right, maybe he does think tariffs are just magic.

I don't know which is worse.

Either way, the guy has a distinguished history of being a complete moron after he got into politics.

I hear he was good at football though.

@ontheidiots.bsky.social

@Lyle just because DC isn't imposing a determination of affordability doesn't mean services won't be affordable.

Heck, in many cases it would mean more affordable plans that DC regulators would have otherwise nixed or hung up in red tape.

But yeah, I'd say if we're going to do the subsidy it should be done with state money where it can be managed more closely to the people it's meant to help.

@tsyum I think you're missing that the answer to why is probably going to be exactly BECAUSE they lost in 2024 to DT.

There just isn't enough support for DT in the country, so moving in that direction lost them moderate and independent votes while there just aren't enough DT-aligned voters to replace the lost independents.

DT needs to grow before there will be the number of voters to win elections broadly.

@enbrown.bsky.social well it's because regardless of a decade of jurisprudence, 230 remains a political calling card with little understanding in the public about what it actually says, much less understanding of the litigation history.

Politicians will continue to use 230 in their rhetoric in the political sphere.

@light

It may be challenging to determine whether an order is lawful or not but given that an order is unlawful, in general it shouldn't be followed and often the servicemember would be legally required NOT to carry it out.
@ontheidiots.bsky.social