Archives for 2024

When we left home to escape the flood weeks ago, one of the things I left behind was a vase filled with beautiful tulips. Bill brought them home to me a week before, so I was sad about it, but there wasn’t a practical way to transport them along with all the other crap we had to take, plus two dogs.

After we left, Bill visited the house at least once a week by boat. Last week he got pretty far down the dirt road by truck and walked in wearing waders. This morning, he made it all the way home in the pickup.

Our rental checkout was scheduled for Monday, but we were both anxious to go home, so today we did. There’s still several inches of water downstairs, but the road is passable, and the yard is dry enough for the yappy monsters to do their business.

So I am once again settled in a comfy chair on my beloved porch, gazing out at the river and observing the activities of the waterfowl. The Belted Kingfishers are particularly active just now!

We’re thrilled to be back to the solitude of the woods after our unscheduled adventure in town. I will miss Door Dash, which isn’t a thing in the swamp. But I’m so happy to be home, even though there’s a mind-boggling mess to clean up!

Also, when I walked in the door, I noticed there were tulips in the vase, as pictured up top! Now, we’ve been gone a month, so how the hell are the tulips still fresh, I wondered? They couldn’t be.

Bill brought new ones in this morning when he came to see if the road was dry enough. Because he knew it would make me happy.

If there’s a moral to this story, it’s that even acid-tongued harridans can win the love of a kind and thoughtful man. Sometimes life is a shit sandwich, but also sometimes we get luckier than we deserve.

Totally open thread!

Home Again (Open Thread)Post + Comments (108)

Josh Marshall’s podcast comes out on Wednesdays, but I just got around to listening to it.  I used some AI to transcribe one section about the institutionalism of the Senate.  It’s kind of long, so it’s below the fold.  Also, trigger warning, there is some criticism of Democratic Senators, so move on if that bothers you.

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Speaking of the SenatePost + Comments (124)

I’ve been following Bolts Magazine on Bluesky and I like what I see.  Here’s a good overview of the effect of state Supreme Court elections on the recent election. For example, when the GOP got a majority in North Carolina, they green lighted a gerrymandering plan that flipped three US House seats.

From Lawfare, here’s a discussion of how the Presidential adjournment power could be used to enable recess appointments for Trump.  This idea is floating around Republican legal circles.

It is one thing to say as a senator that in principle you support the president’s ability to use the recess appointment power, as Thune did. It is quite another thing to acquiesce to the engineering of a fake congressional recess in order to facilitate the president’s use of the recess appointment power by way of circumventing one’s own body’s constitutional authority. As [NRO writer Ed] Whelan describes the engineering in question, the Senate could not actually stop this from happening directly, since it requires only Speaker Johnson’s involvement. That means, paradoxically, that if Trump can do this, the scheme Whelan describes would enable any president to evade Senate confirmation for his cabinet for two years so long as his party controls the House of Representatives.

That said, as a functional matter, Senate Republicans could stop it dead in its tracks merely by making clear that they are willing to defend their institutional prerogative and are willing to use their oversight and appropriations powers in an effort to do so. They could, for example, say that cabinet officials who have not gone through Senate confirmation or been appointed during a regular recess should not expect legislative cooperation on key matters. A few phone calls to this effect from a few committee chairs would make the scheme untenable, at least for an administration that wants to do anything.

I have long since stopped expecting senators to put their country or their branch of government over party, and I’m not going to make a plea for that here. My days of such naivete are over.

I am going to say that what goes around comes around, and Republican senators should be at least a little bit careful about creating an infrastructure for a liberal president to install atop federal agencies left-wing activists specifically chosen to antagonize conservatives—and to do so without Senate approval.

It’s a very ingrained Senatorial reflex to avoid tough votes.  I have no doubt that Thune’s caucus has a mix of Senators who would love to vote for Matt Gaetz, RFK Jr. and the rest, along with a good number who would rejoice if there were some way to avoid the vote altogether.  The question is whether someone like Collins, who’s up in 2026 and will be a mere sprite of 73, thinks she can get away with supporting some recess fuckery to elide responsibility for putting an (accused) statutory rapist into the AG spot.  Considering that she won in 2020 even though she was essentially one of Trump’s handmaidens, my guess  is that she’ll go along.  Murkowski is also a question mark.  Thom Tillis is also up in 2026, not that it probably matters.

A Couple of Good ReadsPost + Comments (163)