Matt Glassman

Coming into the week, Republicans had intended to move the reconciliation bill containing the multi-year funding for CBP and ICE through both chambers. They were aiming to have the vote-a-rama in the Senate on Wednesday, and perhaps move a rule and the bill through the House as early as Thursday. But now they have bailed and will head home for the Memorial Day recess without further action on the bill, and won't be back until June, after the (artificial) deadline the president had previously…

President Trump endorsed Ken Paxton in his Texas Republican Senate primary yesterday against incumbent Senator John Cornyn. Already an underdog, Cornyn's chances of winning the primary dropped to just 6% on the betting markets after the endorsement. Some notes: Paxton is a poor general election candidate, with a laundry list of political and personal scandals. He is roughly a coin-flip right now against Democrat James Talarico on the betting markets, but almost everyone believes that (a) Cornyn…

I was thinking about Van Buren yesterday because he's the answer to my favorite piece of presidential trivia—which president's first language wasn't English?1—and thus my contribution to the viral Twitter post about true pieces of history that sound fake. The other fun fact about Van Buren is that he was the first president born after the revolution—his birthday is December 5th, 1782—and he is often described as the "first president born a citizen of the United States." That's certainly correct…

Here's Zac Hill's excellent new substack, Manual Transmission, and here's Nate Meyvis' Bear blog. These are two of my favorite writers on the internet right now. Highly recommended.1 Both of them generally write about a world I am largely ignorant about—AI in some broad sense, Nate closer to the programming-level and Zac more in the big-picture deployment level—but usually seem much more widely applicable. Zac is longform, and Nate is shortform, but I find insights about politics, for instance,…

This week, a large number of prominent progressive politicians and commentators have called for high-level institutional change. Here's Representative Khanna proposing an expanded Supreme Court and term limits for Justices. Here's Michael Cohen agreeing that Court packing should be a top priority for Democrats. Here's Lee Drutman, Mark Copelovitch, and Perry Bacon talking about systemic reform. And here's Kamala Harris agreeing, and also proposing statehood for DC and Puerto Rico. Jonathan…

Every time there's a controversial judicial decision, we get an outpouring of aggrieved commentators declaring that the decision was political and therefore illegitimate, and a corresponding set of responses that courts are not political actors but neutral interpreters of law, usually from people happy with the decision. Both of these groups are wrong. Courts are political actors, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. The idea that judges aren't political actors strikes me as plain…

A lot of people demand way too much evidence for things before they will believe them. Some of this is related to a desire for certainty, rather than a probabilistic view of the world. You can get caught up in frequentist statistics and take it way too far. Conditional probability and/or Bayesian logic is much more useful. Even conditional on that (lol), most people don’t update their beliefs nearly enough when they get new information. A small amount of information often moves conditional…

There's a genre of clickbait social media posts all about comparisons of elite professional athletes and YMCA recreational players. A lot of the time, the underlying questions is about the gap between the worst top-level professionals and typical recreational players. Here's an example: There are people who think the gap between the NBA benchwarmers and the hotshots down at the Y isn't that big, and I'm here to tell you those people are fucking insane. The worst players in the NBA dominated…

I'm seeing a lot of political actors and commentators advocating for hardball strategies right now, while lamenting that what they are advocating for isn't ideal. Here's Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), on why Republicans need to nuke the filibuster to pass the SAVE Act: "I completely understand my colleagues who want to maintain the filibuster. We all want to maintain the filibuster, honestly,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said. "But I know the Democrats won’t. That’s the only division here.” “When…

I had a meeting with a local elected official today, which I had requested to discuss a specific issue. We got chitchatting about some other, unrelated local politics issues, and the official asked me my opinion on a few of them. I gave my opinion, and we had an interesting discussion about one of them. And I’m near-certain I influenced the officials thinking. This was all of 20 minutes. This, not elections, is the essence of politics. Governance choices. Electoral politics of important, but…

Relocating to a new legal jurisdictions to alter the government policies that affect you is extremely common behavior. People flee high tax areas. Parents move to better school districts. Thousands of Americans picked up and moved westward in the 19th century in search of opportunity in the territories. Sometimes the movement is defensive. Refugees come here fleeing oppressive foreign regimes. Mormons set off and created Desert and later Utah to shield themselves from persecution in the east.…

I like markets. Properly implemented and regulatged, I think they are generally the best fundamental arrangement of society, in both private and public, for maximizing human flourishing. I like online retailer competition. I like free trade. I dislike tariffs. I like congestion pricing for highway tolls. I dislike exclusionary zoning. I like prediction markets. I like airline deregulation. I like no-fee DIY online brokerage accounts. I like popular elections for governments. But like many other…

My middle daughter's birthday is today, May 2. My youngest daughter was born on April 30. And my oldest daughter was born on April 27. Some thoughts: The birthdays themselves are more of a group thing for us. They look forward to them together. They plan them together. We can have one big family party. Some fraction of the individuality is probably lost. Not like having a twin, of course. But something. There's a Christmas-in-April feel to it all. Birthday Season is A Thing. I have a hunch the…

You may have heard that we are in a very partisan age. You may have also heard that there's a mid-decade gerrymandering race to the bottom. And you may have heard that the Supreme Court has significantly altered the Voting Rights Act this week. Some notes: This is not a great state of affairs. And all of these things are in some way linked. There's nothing wrong per se with strong partisanship---it's more the norm than the exception in republics, across both time and space. But when you combine…

Many people, understandably frustrated with Congress, think a way to improve the place would be to increase the size of the House. Here's Chuck Todd arguing for it today on Twitter: I'm very skeptical. There are good reasons to maybe expand the House a few dozen seats, but the calls to add hundreds of seats or double it seem very much misguided to me. It's absolutely true that the House districts have grown in population. The House has not been expanded from 435 Members since the…

My oldest daughter, Anna, turned 18 today. Some notes: Everything they say is true. All of it. One of the most disconcerting things about being a parent is the way you come to better understand your own parents and your own childhood. I was in high school for what seemed like eternity; the realization that it flew by for my parents puts a new lens on so many of my family memories. I've known this for a while, but it is now hitting home more than ever: 18 year-olds just aren't adults in most…

Congressional approval stands at 10% in the monthly Gallup poll, just one point above it's record low. Congress has never fared well in the Gallup poll. But since 2007, it has fared even worse than usual. We only have good polling going back to roughly world war II, but we have plenty of anecdotal evidence from the 19th century that Congress was just as unpopular then. People will give you all sorts of reasons for why they dislike Congress, but in my view, it all reflects one underlying…

Viktor Orbán's party has lost in a landslide and he has conceded the election. An opposition party will form a government in Hungary. How should we update our priors about Orbán and his time in power, in light of this information? A few relevant thoughts: A bunch of prominent conservative commentators (Ross Douthat, Tyler Cowen) suggested it was evidence that Orbán's Hungary was a democracy after all. This led to a strong (to put it mildly) counter-reaction from many liberals. In a Bayesian…

Here's the ballot question we are deciding today in the Old Dominion: Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections, while ensuring Virginia's standard redistricting process resumes for all future redistricting after the 2030 census? Here's a decent non-partisan explainer. Here's my gist: back in 2020, in a 65-35% statewide, vote we took the redistricting of…

I'm strongly considering it. They are almost useless to me now as a way to share things I'm writing or thinking. It's much easier to reach people on Substack, I think. The Twitter algorithm are just garbage now. And I was defending them a year ago as not as bad as people said. The network effect is disappearing. Fewer people I care about are using it as their base platform, and that quickly creates a downward spiral, especially when combined with Twitter's bias against links to external…