Unlike Director Comey, I don't think anyone could make a passes-the-laugh-test argument that that is a true and credible threat directed against a living person. That the allegations against him don't pass the laugh test either is either for another time or an exercise in projective paranoia — and I'm not at all certain which would be worse. (Nor is his utterly noncredible assertion, as a former high-level law-enforcement official, that he didn't know "86" had the reference alleged in the indictment; that, too, is either for another time or an exercise in projective paranoia.)
Or perhaps I'll just make a very Orwellian reference, and suggest shooting some elephants. (And donkeys — I don't like their noise, stubbornness, and herbivore poop, either.) Of course, it might help to actually read the bloody essay first before accusing me of inciting violence against members/candidates/officeholders of one/any particular political party — an effort that seems well beyond the capabilities of the current Department of Just-Us.
- But the big news is that the Supreme Court has decided that political parties — not even just individual (invidious) candidates — own voters. In the end, that's a necessary foundation for the mechanism that led to the (ill-considered, ill-reasoned, and non-evidence-acknowledging) opinion in Callais yesterday. Even outraged-but-still-measured comments from those like leading authority on election law Richard Hasen (UCLA Law) don't go nearly far enough. The concept of a "partisan gerrymander" makes sense if, and only if, the party attempting to gerrymander goes beyond the concept of yellow-dog Democrats (albeit the irony of the racial context of that meme is a bit much in the face of the facile reasoning in the Callais main opinion) to presuming not just loyalty, but control, of the voters.
Any connection between Justice Alito's, umm, defective grasp of both present facts and Bruen-mandated "history and tradition," not to mention the reality that one major party has overtly gone at minimum nativist (and the other major party has largely acquiesced), and especially in light of active suppression of not just "DEI" programs but even college-level academic inquiry and presentations concerning remedies for past race-based injustices, is purely hypothetical.
Not. Why yes, that is the tip of my tongue extending through my cheek across the country and into the mid-Atlantic (probably over the sunken hulks of slave ships).
- Of course, we're far from the only nation with visible campaign-finance/political-contribution problems. This is not a new problem Over Here, either, stretching back to not later than the early 1980s… when a Supreme Court that was even more unrepresentative (and even less intellectually distinguished) than the present one determined that the free-speech rights associated with dead Presidents may, and perhaps must, be allowed to drown out the free speech rights of live indigents. <SARCASM> It's rather beside the point that all of those white dead Presidents can ban together to drown out the disproportionately other-than-Klan-membership-eligible indigents' speech, isn't it? Or perhaps we should just choose a different number to justify indictments, like 9066? </SARCASM>
- Which leads to my modest proposal for preventing the children of poor people from being a burden to their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to politicians: Do away with "districting," which also does away with gerrymandering of all kinds.† Instead, all "wholes" — like, say, "the Cook County Council" or "California's members of the United States House of Representatives" — should be chosen simultaneously across the entire maximum span, with proportional representation and other mechanical measures ensuring that "interest groups" of all types can coelesce in sufficient numbers to elect someone to speak for them. We've learned a lot about "building mechanistic safeguards into elections" since the context of Rogers.
Of course, this modest proposal has just as much probability of adoption as did Swift's, if only because at-large elections don't produce the same (or even predictable) results as single-member districts — not even when those districts are drawn dispassionately. That simply would not satisfy the chattering classes, the political classes, not to mention the gatekeepers (and those who rely upon dead Presidents as a substitute for, like, actual evidence and reasoning). It also does little for the problems of communities divided "more naturally" across jurisdictions that are multidistrict not themselves redrawable — the nation's capital being a prime example with spillover into Virginia and Maryland. So too Philadelphia, New York City, St. Louis, Kansas City, Portland, Cincinnati/Frankfort, Memphis, and a passel of others also demonstrate the increasing probability — now that we're no longer stuck with an eighteenth-century economy, with eighteenth-century travel methods, with eighteenth-century communications, with eighteenth-century consequences of national-government decisions — that a substantial proportion of citizens/voters have core interests divided into multiple districts. There just weren't a lot of commuters in 1787 North Joisey… and complaints that moving away from the present formalized two-party system will lead only to gridlock are rather noncredible compared to the present in any event, leaving aside the underlying presumption that all policy choices are binary in nature.
† Rather incompletely, one must admit: The US Senate, for example, remains permanently gerrymandered by state boundaries. One step at a time, guys; one step at a time. Starting with full statehood for DC and Puerto Rico…