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Sam Halpert

@samhalpert.bsky.social
3.6K followers 1.3K following 5.3K posts

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Reposted by Sam Halpert
Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 6h
i’ve noticed recently that when i’m having an in-person conversation, i feel this internal pressure to make my point faster/a perception that the other person is growing impatient. and i realized it’s because we’re so used to getting info in quick clips now that a longer explanation feels foreign.
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Quinn Yeargain @yeargain.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I've grown quite impatient with the utter refusal of some reporters to speak directly and the overreliance on weak, nondescript words like "odd" and "interesting"
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Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa @benjaminschultzfig.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I've seen some debate about whether using the language of interiority for AI is just semantics or not. Again, I think Skinner is informative. He argued that one consequence of this language was to posit a subject as a moral actor who should be punished or rewarded for their actions. So he waged...
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Oh The Urbanity! @ohtheurbanity.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
The case of Canadian ICC judge Kimberly Prost being debanked by the United States — having her credit cards and online accounts frozen — shows why Canada, Europe, and others need to develop their own financial systems outside of US control.
cbc.ca
ANALYSIS | As Canada deepens ties with Europe, could it leave U.S. banks and dollars behind? | CBC News
Prime Minister Mark Carney last week pointed to international payments as a system that "can be used as leverage against you" before telling the EU that he sees this as an area for "deep co-operation....
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Professa Murray @kalimurray.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
DOGE was a coup; DOGE was a coup; DOGE was a coup. None of these people were appointed by the Congress to do any of these acts; it was a criminal coup.
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Julian Davis Mortenson @jdmortenson.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
It's hard to imagine a serious effort to fix the federal government that doesn't include court reform. This is not a generic point about bad faith judges. Successful political reform will require the root-and-branch elimination of interlocking con law doctrines that choke off legislative innovation
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Sarah Tuttle @niais.cryptoanarchy.network · 25/09/2026
IN MINNESOTA.
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Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
The House isn’t even in session now, right? Johnson is still single-handedly holding the doors shut? At some point, MoC need to insist that the Speaker’s decision to prevent them from deliberating during a Constitutional crisis is an unconstitutional violation of his oath of office.
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Mrs. Detective PikaBOO, Esq. @clapifyoulikeme.favrd.social · 24/09/2026
Court orders aren’t something you “defy,” they’re something you violate
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Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
If this is illegal, then they have no right to do it. If a court has ordered them to stop, then they have no right to proceed. Have you considered rallying your constituents to physically assemble at the location and occupy it? If you called on them to do it they might well come. Let me know, sir.
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Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie @audrelawdamercy.blacksky.app · 23/09/2026
yes more of this please ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics...
screenshot of two paragraphs excerpted from the linked article, with the final sentence of the first paragraph highlighted in green. excerpt reads as follows:

In response to Venegas’s lawsuit, the Trump administration contended that the government had a reasonable suspicion to detain him, and that this argument was supported by Kavanaugh’s concurrence in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo. Basically, Kavanaugh said that agents detain and question people when they have reasonable suspicion, and since agents detained and questioned Venegas, they must have had reasonable suspicion to do so. In a September 21 order, though, Trump-appointed district judge Jeffrey Beaverstock wrote that the government offered “no factual support whatsoever” as to why its suspicion was reasonable, and that he was “simply not inclined to take the Government’s word for it.”

Beaverstock also wrote that Kavanaugh’s concurrence offered no help to the administration, because the immigration stops they carried out looked nothing like the immigration stops that Kavanaugh imagined. “Venegas was not promptly released,” said Beaverstock. “Instead, the officers disregarded the veracity of his documentation and continued to detain him.” Beaverstock concluded that the administration’s warrantless raid and detention policies are likely unconstitutional, and issued an order temporarily blocking them.
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Chris Edelson @chrisedelson.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
yes-trump has effectively gone to war w/Democratic-led states, which he sees as enemy territory. You can't have a president who sees parts of the country as the enemy--even Lincoln was more charitable toward states that actually went to war against the US: 1/2 www.theunpopulist.net/p/trump-is-d...
theunpopulist.net
Trump Is Destroying the U.S. Constitution and Amassing Unprecedented Powers by Sending Federal Troops to Invade American Cities
Lincoln faced a real insurrection and still did not go as far as this president
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Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
It really is. I don’t mean they said, “Congress should do something, in this case”. But I do think they said Congress is the body to enforce this provision: “responsibility for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates rests with Congress.”
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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
It is *vastly* worse to have Hegseth, Blanche, Patel, Mullin, etc. in place than where things stood with those offices Nov-Jan 2020/21.
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Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
In neither case do they come out and say it, but to me both of these significant efforts to shield Trump from accountability lean on the idea that the Court hasn’t raised him above the law because he’s still accountable to Congress (in theory).
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Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
In Anderson, the Court was clear (adding requirements to 14A imo): Congress must act. In Trump v US, they rejected Trump’s attempt to make impeachment a prerequisite for criminal proceedings against a President, leaving the process intact as a tool for Presidential accountability.
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Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I apologize for giving you the impression that the Anderson Court commented on the merits of CO’s insurrection argument. The thing w/both Anderson and Trump v US, imo, is that the Court cuts down efforts to uphold the law against Trump & gestures to Congress as the proper venue for accountability.
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Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
bsky.app/profile/demo...
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Jen Jennings @jenjennings.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Watching the response to the NHJ article, I’m struck by how, when an unequal system becomes a problem for each family to manage, we focus on how they navigated it, scoring the private choice instead of demanding that the public system remedy the inequality.
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David Kaib @davidkaib.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
You should demand they leave.
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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
For some context, this kind of local police to ICE pipeline has been a dream for decades. “Secure Communities” under Bush/Obama was an early iteration, but never got anywhere near the funding ICE has now. It generated enough backlash against Obama that ICE was reined in. Very different times now.
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Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com · 19/09/2026
The whole thing about the "guns don't kill people" narrative is that we have a whole fucking law on the books that prevents us from holding gun manufacturers responsible for the harm caused by their extremely dangerous product. We don't have such a law on the books for AI.
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Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com · 19/09/2026
The truth was that if United Health had an AI that was accepting a shitload of claims with a 90% error rate, United Health would stop using the AI in about 0.2 seconds.
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Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
What was missing in 2020? People generally had confidence in our elections, and rejected Trump’s assertions that the results couldn’t be trusted. So he’s spent two years crowbarring our system, giving people genuine reasons to doubt it. bsky.app/profile/samh...
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Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
This is why it doesn’t make sense to me to speculate about what to do *if* Trump attacks voting. *This* is the attack, on our confidence in the system. The goal is to lay the groundwork for setting aside the result. He’ll argue we can’t trust the election—& many may agree. Bc he’s ensured we can’t.
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Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
If defenses of the US strike on a girl’s school in Iran assume that US commanders didn’t know it was a school, do facts like this shape the strength of that assumption? Is the US entitled to claim ignorance if it also explicitly disavowed its duty to know & dismantled systems intended to inform it?
military.com

At a Pentagon briefing on March 2, 2026, War Secretary Pete Hegseth used blunt language about how the United States would fight, saying there would be "no stupid rules of engagement," "no politically correct wars," and "no nation-building quagmire."

https://www.military.com/feature/2026/03/05/hegseths-stupid-rules-of-engagement-line-and-what-roe-actually-do.html
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A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
The only thing they're persuading voters is they'll back down and fold to whatever fascist nonsense Republicans come up with, abandoning the real people affected by it to abuse, terror, deprivation, exclusion, and death.
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Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
bsky.app/profile/samh...
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Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
You can’t issue an order they can’t pretend to misunderstand; you have to observe that they’re operating in bad faith and ask for sanctions. The previous order was sufficiently clear to any person not seeking to willfully misinterpret it in order to subvert the court. This is a bad faith Presidency.
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Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
bsky.app/profile/samh...
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Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Investigate this? There haven’t been consequences for his destruction of the East Wing, so the precedent stands: this is a thing he can do, that he will keep doing while he has power. Telling him “no” w/o taking his powers only provokes him. Impeachment isn’t a “fetish”. It’s the only practical path
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 16/09/2026
AI has exposed the austerity con game in higher ed. For years, we have been told there is no money for students, faculty, staff, capital improvements, libraries. But somehow universities have suddenly come up with the money to pay for AI services??
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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
You can have lots of arguments about if Jeffries should have forced a vote on Massie's impeachment resolution, but that was a choice. He could have done it. Johnson's procedural gambit only worked with Jeffries' passive acquiescence.
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Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie @audrelawdamercy.blacksky.app · 16/09/2026
according to politico, since Jan. 2025, Trump admin has deported 170+ people “in violation of court orders,” “in defiance of legally mandated due process protections,” or “to countries from which they had sought or received protection from torture and persecution” ballsandstrikes.org/ethics-accou...
ballsandstrikes.org
The Trump Justice Department Is Way Too Comfortable Violating Court Orders
Judges have tools for responding to noncompliance. They just have to use them.
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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
The House can, if it wants, go all Sherlock Holmes on uncovering the hidden smoking gun over many tedious months of investigation. But it's a dumb exercise when the crime was committed in plain daylight, the relevant facts are all publicly known, and everyone's already made up their minds about it.
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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Correct. Anybody else raising a question of privilege like this puts it on a two-day countdown. The minority leader has the perk that he can force the vote immediately, if he wants.
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Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
bsky.app/profile/samh...
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Dan Izzo @izzos.net · 16/09/2026
www.cnn.com/2026/09/16/p... Ohhhhhh Mikey did NOT want to have to hold this vote...
cnn.com
House to adjourn early, stave off Hegseth impeachment vote | CNN Politics
Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday announced he is sending members home from Washington early for their seven-week campaigning recess ahead of the midterm elections, a move that will stave off a vote o...
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Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
bsky.app/profile/samh...
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Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Time for another. In the 1830’s, bipartisan majorities banned MoC from bringing petitions re: slavery to the floor. Rep John Q Adams argued the “gag rule” unconstitutionally violated his 1A duty to his constituents & forced the issue of slavery to the floor *against* the rules. He did it every day.
never lost his self-possession." Exhausted by debate, House members tabled the censure. The former president would not be reprimanded. 21
Satisfied, Adams moved on to other busi-ness. After all, he had another hundred petitions to submit. "The circumstances created much merriment in the House, -Mr.
Adams offering his petitions as demurely as if nothing had occurred. "22
And so it continued, petition after petition, year after year. Proslavery members could no more stop them than "stop the flow of the Niagara."23 Finally, on December 3, 1844, the House voted to remove the gag, one more signal that slavery was losing its hold. 24 In retrospect, Sargent noted the irony: "Had Southern members" allowed the petitions, they would have ceased.
Instead, they stirred the anger between South and the North, triggering the Civil War. 25

https://capitolhistory.org/USCHS-Capitol-Stories-files/USCHS-Capitol-Stories-John-Quincy-Adams.pdf
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
One of the coolest things about people who don't have a lot of power taking a principled stand is it lays bare the complete cowardice of the ones who actually *do* have power when they fail to do even a fraction as much.
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Will Bunch @willbunch.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Cops sign 287(g) deal with ICE to nab immigrants No council vote. No public hearing or input No democracy, a police state
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Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Yeah; the first argument I saw from someone on this observed that SCOTUS is explicitly not a court of original jurisdiction (in most cases), and the Roberts Court often assumes the functions of such a court by developing its own facts. But I’m wondering how best to communicate the problem publicly.
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Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Does it make sense to conceive of his act here (& in similar cases) as “fabricating evidence”? I don’t mean in a criminal sense, but is it conceptually useful as a way to frame an impeachable offense? Alito needn’t *know* Fox News is false; he is oath-bound to use the record established below.
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Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
www.cnn.com/2026/09/13/p...
cnn.com
Democrats eye a new tool to hold Trump accountable if they win the House | CNN Politics
With two months until the midterm elections, Democrats are laying the groundwork to launch far-reaching investigations into the Trump administration and preparing for high-stakes court battles if they...
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Sam Halpert @samhalpert.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
@raskin.house.gov it’s wild to claim you haven’t heard this from even “a single person” when Rep. Green is making it the defining point of his 20-year career in Congress. You’re entitled to your judgment, sir. But please be honest about it: you haven’t heard a single person *who you think matters*.
cnn.com

"I've not heard a single person say to me that they think our top priority should be impeachment of Donald Trump," Raskin told CNN. "He hasn't been
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Liz Dye @lizdye.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Trump sued IRS, insists there's no collusive fraud on the court bc parties are totally different. Now his personal attys are getting sanctioned, DOJ is riding to the rescue. Because THESE TWO PARTIES ARE THE SAME. with @andrewtorrez.bsky.social www.lawandchaospod.com/p/trumps-doj...
lawandchaospod.com
Trump’s DOJ Lawyers Leap In To Save Trump’s Personal Lawyers
Because these two things are the same.
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U.S. Representative Al Green @algreen.house.gov · 15/09/2026
Rep. Al Green Votes to Impeach Trump for Covering Up the Deaths of Renee, Alex, Lorenzo, & Johan. You can watch Rep. Al Green’s remarks on the floor of the House by clicking here: youtu.be/BAj8JYJWUm8?...
youtu.be
Rep. Al Green Votes to Impeach Trump for Covering Up the Deaths of Renee, Alex, Lorenzo, & Johan
YouTube video by Rep. Al Green
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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
So that's two explicit votes for immediately ending democracy plus Kavanaugh signaling not now but maybe after the midterms. I don't feel great about how this is going to go when they keep pushing the USPS ballot ban in time for 2028.
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