The Founders never intended for Indiana to be a state and yet here we are. https://t.co/zf2jbhy9x0
— Peter A. Shulman ?? (@pashulman) August 9, 2021
The Founders intended senators not to be directly elected — are you going to resign?
The Founders intended the Senate to be run on simple majorities — are you going to push to end the filibuster?
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) August 9, 2021
Wanna feel old? From the Washington Post:
… Ever since White House operatives broke into the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate office in 1972, employing the suffix “-gate” has been an irresistible way to name a scandal. The Wikipedia page on “-gate” controversies lists more than 240, from the well-known — such as 1976’s Koreagate — to the lesser-known. I had somehow missed Ponytailgate, the scandal that erupted in 2015 when New Zealand Prime Minister John Key pulled a waitress’s hair…
Around the time of Ponytailgate, Amy Marquez was teaching a business presentations class at a university in the South, where her night school students ranged from recent high school graduates to at least one retiree. The semester’s last major assignment was a team presentation on a crisis that a business had made significantly better or worse because of the communication choices the company made.
One pair of students, both recently out of high school, gave their presentation on Antennagate, the controversy that erupted in 2010 when users of Apple’s iPhone 4 found that calls were being dropped. The cause? If the phone was gripped in a certain way, its antenna could be blocked, weakening the signal. (Another name for the problem was Gripgate.)…
… “They said that the word ‘antenna’ was obvious because the problem with the phone was related to the antennas. Then they said the ‘gate’ part of the word was referring to the shape a person’s hand made when they held a phone.”
Amy let them continue. When the presentation was over and it was time for questions, she asked whether they had found that particular definition for “gate” somewhere in their research. They told her they had.
After class, Amy pressed them on where they had they found that definition.
“At that point, they admitted they hadn’t seen the term defined anywhere and had just decided that was what it meant,” she wrote. “I asked if either of them had ever heard of ‘Watergate.’ Neither had. Which kind of made me want to cry.”…
“Both students were really irritated about this,” she wrote. “One asked me how they were supposed to know about things that happened before they were even born…