Will Bunch:
South Jersey guy becomes the face of ICE resistance
Last Friday, “an average Joe who grew up in Haddon Heights” named Joseph Zobel was at work when he saw a viral video from the nearby South Jersey town of Lindenwold that shocked the nation, and shocked him.
The clip from a Ring doorbell camera showed a gaggle of fourth and fifth graders running in a panic, screaming, “ICE! ICE!” as masked federal immigration agents had approached their morning bus stop the day before.
“I just thought, ‘How can that be happening here in the United States?’” Zobel told me Monday in his first media interview, conducted by email. When he got home from work, he saw online that the group Cooper River Indivisible was holding an “ICE Out” protest at the Lindenwold municipal building at 4 p.m.
Early vote in Texas is underway:
Why is a+ number for R good? Well, it’s a Republican state so you have to compare if you can to previous elections.
Bolts:
The Feds Targeted Charlotte. Now a Local Democrat Who Helped ICE Faces Voters.
North Carolina lawmaker Carla Cunningham voted to mandate compliance with ICE, and derided immigrants on the House floor. The Democrat faces an intense March primary.
Last July, North Carolina state Representative Carla Cunningham, a seven-term Democratic lawmaker from Mecklenburg County, startled party members when she stood on the state House floor and said “all cultures are not equal” and suggested immigrants “must assimilate” and “adapt to the culture of the country they wish to live in.”
Cunningham’s floor speech came after she cast the lone Democratic vote to override North Carolina Governor Josh Stein’s veto of a Republican-backed bill forcing local law enforcement agencies to work more closely with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The override succeeded thanks to her crossover vote. Cunningham, whose safely Democratic district includes part of Charlotte, a city that has been singled-out by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, had already voted in 2024 to override the veto of another bill requiring sheriffs to cooperate with ICE.
Jill Lawrence/The Bulwark:
The Disastrous First Year of RFK Jr.
The damage the HHS secretary has done to science and public health is appalling—and it could have been avoided.
[Lousiana Senator Bill] Cassidy is 68 and he
is running, but he shouldn’t be. Since voting to convict Trump of “incitement of insurrection” in his 2021 Senate impeachment trial, and earning an
instant censure from the Louisiana GOP, Cassidy has done his cringeworthy best to simulate diehard devotion to Trump.
He cast the deciding vote on the Finance Committee last year to send Kennedy’s nomination to the Senate floor, and voted yes on his confirmation. In August, he praised Trump for his leadership fighting fentanyl (he had signed a Cassidy bill into law). In October, Cassidy posted on Instagram: “In the Oval Office with President Trump today. He signed this terrific ‘Gulf of America’ hat for me. Made in the USA, of course. Nobody supports American manufacturing like our President.”
All the kissing up isn’t working. At Trump’s urging, and with his advance endorsement, Rep. Julia Letlow jumped in to challenge Cassidy last month. “You can’t represent Louisiana if you voted to impeach President Trump. We deserve a Senator who can work with the President and deliver results,” she wrote recently.
The Baton Rouge Advocate put a photo of Letlow with Trump on its front page last week, under a headline about her endorsement from Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement—a Trump-backed effort that encourages healthy eating and exercise but that also believes there is a chronic disease “epidemic” and promotes conspiracy theories about vaccines, wi-fi, and autism.
The Colbert thing is a big story, and if it drives favorable Talarico coverage, that’s the way it goes. No offense to Jasmine Crockett.
If you haven’t read it yet, Henry Farrell has this week’s must read:
The Median Voter Theorem is a Clarity Trap
What the Democratic party needs - what it demands - is bold, persistent experimentation
In particular - and finally we begin to get to the meat of the post - electoral political strategy is increasingly driven by metrics and related simplifications. This has many advantages. It forces people to put their pet theories of what will work and what will not to the test, and makes it easier for everyone to coordinate around the same approach and message. But it has substantial drawbacks too, along the lines that Nguyen suggests. If everything gets reorganized around the metric, then all the important things that the metric hides are likely to rear their heads and devour you. Metrics are lossy abstractions of complex wholes. As Maxim Raginsky puts it, “abstraction hides a great deal of complexity from view, and this is both its main virtue and its primary peril.”
So first, I want to talk about a fight that is happening right now within the Democratic Party that conceals a more fundamental conflict about metrics and abstractions. Then, I’ll explain how the median voter theorem fits into this fight, and how it has become what Nguyen calls a “clarity trap.” Then, finally, I will talk about ways to maybe escape that trap and find something better.
POLITICO:
Massie says he’s lost confidence in Pam Bondi after congressional hearing
The Attorney General sparred with Rep. Thomas Massie and other lawmakers over her handling of the Epstein files.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said Sunday he does not have confidence in Attorney General Pam Bondi after a combative congressional hearing during which she sparred with lawmakers over her handling of the Epstein files.
Massie, who led the charge to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act along with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), said Bondi failed to provide any of the answers he sought from her during testimony before the House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday.
POLITICO:
Trump’s second year: Whiplash
“Even proposals that don’t ultimately move forward have consequences.”
The public, increasingly, appears less comfortable with the whiplash.
Trump’s overall approval rating sits at 40 percent, according to a New York Times daily average of polls. His disapproval is at 56 percent.
“He is currently at his lowest point in the second term. There’s a sense that this is a pretty chaotic administration and seems to remind people of the pandemic period in the first term,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster in Washington who noted that, historically, presidential approval ratings have been predictive of midterm results. “When it’s above 50 percent, the party loses seats but not that many. When the president’s job approval is below, the average loss of seats is 32.
