I try not to share ideas or theories that I suspect, by the odds, are not likely true. But sometimes I’m curious enough about one that I want to share it with that proviso. Here’s one. Like almost everyone else I’ve being trying to make sense of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent arc. Mostly I’ve come up totally dry. I can’t make sense of it. I’ve seen various theories, that she’s making a long play for the future leadership of the post-Trump MAGA movement or other cunning and ambition-driven theories. But none of them really explain what I’ve seen.
One of my instrument panel watchwords for understanding politics is that all power is unitary. In the case of presidents, you don’t have one bundle of power in one area and a siloed, distinct and unaffected bundle in another. A president’s power is a uniform commodity wherever he reaches. What boosts it or drags it down in one area affects it everywhere else. That’s the best way to understand President Trump’s position 10 months into his second term. It’s hard to know whether it was the five-week government shutdown which focused public attention on draconian cuts to health care, the election night shellacking, the first signs of MAGA diehards defecting from the president, the grotesque and absurd Epstein cat-and-mouse game or a dozen other comparable examples. What makes it both hard to pick apart the different drivers of a president’s decline and perilous for the president himself is that the different drivers feed on themselves. They become both cause and effect in a mounting spiral.
After I wrote this “status interview” piece on Tuesday, I heard from TPM Reader AP who said, amidst general agreement, that he would either add to the list or replace DC/PR statehood with expanding the House of Representatives. I’m just seeing now that I hadn’t had a chance to respond yet to AP (I thought I had). But my response was going to be that I basically agree. And as I suggested in the original piece, despite presenting it as a checklist of five questions/agenda items, everything after the first two (filibuster and Supreme Court reform) might have been reclassified as ‘super important things that really need to be done.’ And to that list many more could be added. To go back to the original concept, the thinking behind that list wasn’t that it would be exhaustive but that it was a good list for determining who was serious and who was not, who is worth supporting and who needs to go.
But this potential addition gives me an opportunity to expand what a future era of reformism would need to accomplish because the House of Representatives is a good case study of a number of key trends that got us to this moment. The number of representatives was capped at 435 members in 1929 when the U.S. population stood at roughly 122 million people. That’s about a third of the current population. House districts now average a population of just over 750,000 of a million people. That’s a lot of people. The number was fixed when House districts had a bit over over 250,000 of a million people. Now it’s 750,000. That’s a huge difference and it matters since the House is meant to be the body closest to the people.
I was in federal court this morning in Alexandria, Virginia, for a hearing on the motions to disqualify interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan filed by former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Today, November 13th, is actually the first 25 anniversary of TPM. The first post, for a fortuitous set of reasons, was written in New Haven, Connecticut on November 13th, 2000.
TPM’s Khaya Himmelman has a report here on the state of the Trump White House’s national gerrymandering campaign. The upshot is that it’s not going great. Republicans have had a series of reverses of late, each with its own backstory ranging from legal difficulties to lack of legislative votes to resistance from established officeholders in very conservative states. Meanwhile Democrats’ counteroffensive is going surprisingly well. All told, the whole thing may end up as a wash.
There’s a second order part of this story I want to highlight. If you’ve been watching politics for a long time you know of a basic feature or pattern of American politics. Republicans are generally willing to act more boldly, audaciously, or even borderline criminally than Democrats are willing or able to do. The examples are legion. Because of this difference in how the parties operate, Republicans are almost always rewarded for this norm-breaking behavior. That’s how their strong-arm gerrymandering push looked likely to turn out. But now it looks like it won’t. Most analysts figure it will end up as more of a wash. Some of this is due to these contingent setbacks, the most recent of which is an apparently decisive court reversal in Utah. But the game change is how aggressively Democratic governors have moved to gerrymander their own states.
The extent of the prosecutorial and investigative misconduct in the James Comey case is even greater than previously known, a federal magistrate judge revealed in an extraordinary new ruling today.
Take a trip into the Wayback machine in this bonus episode, as part of TPM’s 25th Anniversary! Executive Editor John Light and Deputy Editor for News Nicole Lafond co-moderate a panel with current and former TPMers, including TPM editor-at-large David Kurtz, ProPublica reporter Paul Kiel, NOTUS reporter Evan McMorris-Santoro, and The Cut feature editor Catherine Thompson. They provide a kind of oral history of the past 25 years of TPM.
