Meghan Leonard

@meghanleonard.bsky.social

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Associate Professor - Political Science Illinois State University: judicial politics & state supreme courts she/her

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Meghan Leonard

NEW: Columbus, Ohio, police detailed to the RNC in Milwaukee have shot a Black man in his early 20s a few blocks outside of the security perimeter. Details TK. (via Columbus Dispatch, CBS 58 Milwaukee)

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Meghan Leonard

JD Vance is on the ticket because he wants the government to kill trans people. Vance has been more vocal in his transphobia than just about any other leading VP candidate. That's a deliberate choice by Team Trump.

J.D. Vance's horrendous record of homophobia and transphobiawww.advocate.com Donald Trump's vice-presidential pick hasn't been a senator long — but he's been in the public eye long enough to accrue a strongly anti-LGBTQ+ record.

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Meghan Leonard

A thread on J.D. Vance, From Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive our Appetite for Misinformation: Backstory: To understand J.D. Vance, we have to first understand the concept of "social-sorting" (from @lilymasonphd.bsky.social)... that the 2 major parties have become more...

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Meghan Leonard

This is exactly right. Vance is on the record advocating a breach from constitutional democracy. They plan to end the republic as we know it—and Vance is on board.

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Meghan Leonard

On JD Vance, read @zackbeauchamp.bsky.social: www.vox.com/politics/360...

What J.D. Vance really believeswww.vox.com Trump's choice for vice president comes from the authoritarian wing of an authoritarian GOP.

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Meghan Leonard

The courts are inherently political, but not sure we have seen the combination of a) strong partisan alignment between President and many judges that a second Trump admin would bring during a period where b) the courts have expanded judicial & presidential power for c) radical right wing goals.

Trump appointee comes up with new legal rationale to declare investigation of his misdeeds as unconstitutional, dismisses case. If special counsels now have to be confirmed by the Senate, they will become less likely to be appointed and slower in their operation. www.nytimes.com/2024/07/15/u...

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Meghan Leonard

RE: the Cannon dismissal -->

Definitely quick appeal; extremely likely reversal. Reassignment is somewhat less certain, but at this point Smith's gotta ask for it, and I think he'd have a pretty good shot. That said, reassignment is really rare.

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Meghan Leonard

One of my greatest fears about the election is that Democrats have no strategy to challenge the courts (SCOTUS, ultimately) if/when they try to steal the election through a much more transparently pretextual Bush v. Gore. Unfortunately, the GOP has invested in the infrastructure to do it (gift 🔗):

All the Federalist Society judges gotta go if we're gonna save the country.

Unbowed by Jan. 6 Charges, Republicans Pursue Plans to Contest a Trump Defeatwww.nytimes.com Mr. Trump’s allies are preparing to try to short-circuit the election system, if he does not win.

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Meghan Leonard

Dismissing the case on Appointments Clause grounds is the weakest possible version of this outcome, so it does at least clarify to folks who weren't paying attention to it what was going on there more than a dismissal (or further stalling) would

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Meghan Leonard

Judge Cannon went and did it. She has dismissed the stolen documents case against Trump on Clarence Thomas’s (nonsense) appointments clause rationale.

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Meghan Leonard

“We find that Trump’s use of violent vocabulary has increased over time…He increasingly exemplifies a negative populism, concentrated on denigrating out-groups.” Cc: all the journalists credulously agreeing with Rs that the “temperature” is too hot. Call is coming from inside the house, ya rubes!

Donald Trump's words www.nber.org/papers/w3266... "Trump’s use of violent vocabulary has increased over time and now surpasses that of all other democratic politicians we studied....He increasingly exemplifies a negative populism, concentrated on denigrating out-groups."

Donald Trump's wordswww.nber.org Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

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Meghan Leonard

The Republican line now is that the shooting was caused by Dems saying Trump is a threat to democracy, and they’re doing that because it’s a big and true thing they want Dems to stop saying.

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Meghan Leonard

Listening to Biden rattle off all the incidents of violence against political leaders in recent years sorta suggests that this actually *is* who we are.

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Meghan Leonard

“Its predecessors already produce hundreds or even thousands of words almost instantaneously. Now GPT-5 brings PhD writing skills to the table, meaning it can generate text at a rate of about ten words per day.” www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/cha...

ChatGPT Now Has PhD-Level Intelligence, and the Poor Personal Choices to Prove Itwww.mcsweeneys.net “If you look at the trajectory of improvement, systems like GPT-3 were maybe toddler-level intelligence… and then systems like GPT-4 are more like ...

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Meghan Leonard

A police stop is enough to make someone less likely to vote, recent research found. "Voting is a reflection of our belief that we’re part of the system, that our voice matters." boltsmag.org/a-police-sto...

A Police Stop Is Enough to Make Someone Less Likely to Voteboltsmag.org New research shows how the communities that are most heavily policed are pushed away from politics and from having a say in changing policy.

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Meghan Leonard

We should ban the gun an assailant used to try to kill Donald Trump Makes sense right?

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Meghan Leonard

My expert take is I don’t know.

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Meghan Leonard

amplify this not unverified reports until we know more

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Meghan Leonard

Robert Putnam may know why we're lonely, but tellingly it's Putnam's wife who--like millions of other women--does the work of keeping Putnam from falling into loneliness himself. And we wonder why men are pushing marriage and trying to limit divorce. www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/m...

Robert Putnam Knows Why You’re Lonelywww.nytimes.com The author of “Bowling Alone” warned us about social isolation and its effect on democracy a quarter century ago. Things have only gotten worse.

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Meghan Leonard

the 2022 Kansas abortion referendum mobilized an electorate that had more women, young people, & first-time voters. But the relative participation boosts did not extend to the general election when abortion was no longer directly on the ballot journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

All Eyes on Kansas: Voter Turnout and the 2022 Abortion Referendum - Brian Amos, Alexandra T. Middlewood, 2024journals.sagepub.com On August 2nd, 2022, Kansas held a vote to lift state constitutional protections for abortion access. The vote gained national attention, as it was the first st...

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Meghan Leonard

One of the things I found reporting my book was that sheriffs appear to be uniquely bad at their actual jobs despite the political bluster. For example, they do not keep people safe, they do not protect those in their custody, they do not help victims of DV, they do not collect evidence etc etc

I know Greg Abbot is a bad person but independent from that he seems to be an extremely bad governor even in ostensibly non-partisan parts of the job

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Meghan Leonard

It’s the fascist international 2.0 and it’s public and coming to try to end American democracy. Trump is signaling the axis of transnational fascism is awaiting him and the republicans with open arms. This is such a massive threat it’s really hard to describe.

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Meghan Leonard

you're waiting for the climate catastrophe, here it is. grids downed in cities with infrastructures gutted by corporate greed and overtaxed by rising temperatures. people boiling alive in their homes. we'll probably never know how many people die in Houston over this next month due to this hurricane

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Meghan Leonard

An interesting question is why journalists don't see Donald Trump's command of the issues as relevant to the question of which candidate's mental acuity should be centered in media coverage of the campaign.

Whatever the verbal flubs, Biden’s command of the issues is sharp here. www.nytimes.com/live/2024/07...

Update from Michael Crowleywww.nytimes.com

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Meghan Leonard

This is not necessarily an argument for Biden staying; withdrawal might ultimately be the best move. But part of the reason for this is that D (and media) elites have made a self-presentational liability into a social fact in a way that R elites have not for Trump’s *far worse* set of liabilities.

This is where I am. In effect, this is about discomfort with him merely being old and coming off as such, as opposed to any legit cognitive problem. The debate was bad, but it has been turned into a much larger crisis than it had to be by media elites and panicky donor/consultant class types.

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Meghan Leonard

Trump should get grilled on policy questions all the time.

This press conference is just going to confirm everyone’s priors. Biden’s made a few bad flubs but he’s showing a good command of the facts. I’d like to see Trump have to field foreign policy questions like this.

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Meghan Leonard

I don't believe public statements from city officials about the reasons for this sweep, which seek to blame the *possibility* that federal security plans *could* impact the encampment. It has all the appearances of a clean-image sweep. Inventing a different justification for the press is gross.

Ahead of DNC, city officials to close, cordon off one of Chicago's largest, most visible homeless campschicago.suntimes.com Federal officials haven't asked that the "tent city" next to the Dan Ryan Expressway be cleared before the Democratic National Convention, but a mayoral aide says she doesn't want to wait and then scr...

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Meghan Leonard

YES: Senators Ron Wyden and Sheldon Whitehouse call for special counsel to investigate "millions of dollars" in undisclosed gifts that Clarence Thomas received from oligarchs www.cnbc.com/2024/07/09/j...

Senators seek special counsel probe of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomaswww.cnbc.com Justice Clarence Thomas "secretly accepted gifts and income potentially worth millions of dollars," the Democratic senators said evidence suggested.

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Meghan Leonard

Very happy to see Massachusetts taking serious action against fake Christian "abortion centers" that do nothing for women. www.the-express.com/news/us-news...

Massachusetts launches campaign against 'misleading' crisis pregnancy centerswww.the-express.com Massachusetts launched a public awareness campaign to warn of deceptive practices used at crisis pregnancy centers that stop patients from obtaining abortions.

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Cannon is a whack job, but considering the SCOTUS ruling it’s pretty reasonable to request briefing on this. The real issue here is that the SCOTUS ruling is insane.

NEW: Judge Cannon pauses some deadlines in the classified-docs case to allow for further briefing on effects of SCOTUS immunity ruling