Zach Courser
@zcourser
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Professor of the Practice; Director, Policy Lab, Claremont McKenna College @CMCNews. Fellow, Bipartisan Policy Center @BPC_Bipartisan
Claremont, CA
Joined July 2012
If democracy is a conversation, then what happened when the conversation moved onto social media platforms designed to maximize "engagement"? Increased polarization, which is a major threat to liberal democracies.
A new PNAS paper finds that polarization increased immediately after the invention of smartphones and the advent of social media, which both appeared around the same year, 2008. Both profoundly changed the way humans communicate and this rise of connectivity may have fueled
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There's been some confusion out there about how @CookPolitical PVI works. A PVI score of R+10, for example, means that an R candidate should expect to get ~60% in a district if Trump won 50% of the vote nationally. Read our full explainer: https://t.co/qEWB5dxAjf
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Blocking the transmission of legislation is among the worst abuses of power by any Speaker in House history. It's become very common under Johnson.
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Let me repeat this - The House has been in session for just 20 days over nearly 5 months @jamiedupree
It's official. The House will be out again next week. That will make 20 work days in 19 weeks.
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If Dems win 63+ HoD seats, it would be consistent w/ a lot of strong overperformances we've seen for Dems in downballot races so far in '25 and indicate that Dems should be considered favorites for House control in '26.
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This is a striking sight. The US House committee calendars for the month of October Completely empty ===>
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My comments w @AGTheodoridis on unique survey of former members of Congress, which indicates how far views of former GOP officeholders differ from Republican electorate on democratic norms @BrookingsGov
brookings.edu
There is a divergence in how current and former lawmakers talk about the issues facing American democracy.
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I asked ICE where the “413% increase in assaults” justification for its officers using masks came from. They didn’t answer. So I dug into it, and what I found … did not boost their argument. Gift link:
washingtonpost.com
ICE officials keep touting a 413 percent increase in assaults on officers to justify officers masking their identities.
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Good frame for getting attention and maybe even shaking up the process for this bill, but "spending" and "pork" are incidental to the costs. Heck, outside of the tax policy realm, it's $1T+ in net savings.
I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.
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Los Angeles used to have a lot of inexpensive older housing stock. It doesn’t anymore because we downzoned the whole city and new construction fell off a cliff.l Now 60 year old 1 bedroom costs $2,700/month. The solution is to build more homes.
@dajpearl Actually, holding hundreds of thousands of housing units vacant juices the rents. Angelenos came here, created cool stuff that changed the world, because we had "abundant" affordable older housing stock. Still do, but nobody can access it, and it keeps burning down.
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Just a senior White House advisor approvingly retweeting an apparent Russian asset to the effect that we live in a post Constitutional moment requiring extreme action by the president...
Yes
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🚨 OMG 🚨 The Senate budget would Congress to add more to the debt than the American Rescue Plan, CARES Act, TCJA, and Infrastructure Law combined! Link to follow…
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On the whole, Trump is not sneaky. He is relatively transparent. All that stuff he said during campaign rallies, hour after hour? If you didn't believe him -- well, you should have.
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It's because of a series of bad policy choices made decades ago when policymakers were worried about a physician surplus. So instead, we got a physician shortage, which has *definitely* made health care more expensive while putting American lives at risk.
one of the strangest things about medicine that I'll never understand is residency match. 47K people applied and only 38K ppl matched. So, almost 10K qualified people who have completed medical school now don't have a program despite the major provider shortages? makes no sense.
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We're entering a potentially dark phase here on deportations.
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Former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson -- the Simpson of Simpson-Bowles -- dies at age 93 “We have two political parties in this country, the Stupid Party and the Evil Party. I belong to the Stupid Party,” was among Simpson’s many well-known quips.
nbcnews.com
Simpson died early Friday after struggling to recover from a broken hip in December, according to a statement from his family and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.
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Explain to me the point of NATO when the President of its most powerful member threatens to invade the territory of another member, and the NATO Secretary General hears it all and treats it as a joke.
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73% of French polled recently found America wasn’t an ally. We’ll be at an easy 100% by the weekend.
Trump on NATO: "If the United States was in trouble and we called them. We said, 'We got a problem, France.' Do you think they're gonna come and protect us? Hmm. They're supposed to. I'm not so sure." (Literally the only time NATO Article 5 was invoked was after 9/11 on behalf of
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Reporter: “Are you going to make that U.S. policy that the U.S. wouldn’t defend NATO countries that don’t pay?” Trump: “I think it’s common sense, if they don’t pay, I’m not gonna defend them.”
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@olliecarroll EVERY country ordering (or planning to order) HIMARS must very carefully rethink this idea. US could cancel this ability any time during the hottest war. It is NOT just theory, we have precedent. https://t.co/bPWnnmaWQW
America cut a key intel link for alerts at 2pm Kyiv. Before that: targeting data for HIMARS. Ukraine also isn’t receiving realtime information for long-range strikes. “Trump wanted a thank you,” says a source. “We will be writing it on graves of dead Ukrainians”
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