Brian Highsmith @bd_highsmith Twitter profile | Pikagi

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Brian Highsmith

@bd_highsmith

8,634

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institutions, inequality, geography, power, democracy | @Harvard_Law fellow | social policy PhD candidate | former consumer lawyer & economic policy advisor

Cambridge, MA

https://t.co/Tto3i6hqE4

Joined June 2010

Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

3 months

I’m excited to work w @DukeLawJournal to publish "Regulating Location Incentives"—which draws from Gilded Age / Progressive Era history to show how federal supervision, adopting an antimonopoly approach, can address harms created by location incentive megadeals. Feedback welcome!

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

4 years

👏🏼salsa 👏🏼jars 👏🏼should 👏🏼be 👏🏼the 👏🏼shape 👏🏼of 👏🏼hummus 👏🏼containers, 👏🏼not 👏🏼coffee 👏🏼mugs

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

2 years

the graduate student urge to give up completely

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Brian Highsmith

6 years

This week, I was in a crunch and called my parents; they decided to give me $32k from my grandmother’s recent inheritance. Her father—my great-grandfather—was a member of the KKK. I know we “don’t talk about” either of these things, but you must understand that they are related.

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Brian Highsmith

1 year

Particularly in the context of DC statehood, it cannot be emphasized enough that the historical reason we have "two Dakotas" is—quite literally—bc admitting the territory as separate states helped the (19th century) Republican Party engineer control of the Senate & Supreme Court.

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Kat Abu

@abughazalehkat

1 year

dc statehood is somehow a crazy fantasy and yet this country has two dakotas

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Brian Highsmith

1 year

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Josh Gerstein

1 year

NEW: Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin says he didn't invite Justice Clarence Thomas to testify re ethics because he thought Thomas would ignore the invitation. via @KellyGarrity3

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

3 years

I don't know if there's a deeper point here, but worth saying: it's *entirely* obvious, to everyone during law school, who are the future Josh Hawleys and Ted Cruzes and Tom Cottons. and there’s not much you can do except wait and watch it all play out, just as you knew it would.

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

6 years

I can’t make empirical claims about how common this,but point is: as I worked to stretch my nonprofit salary, I always knew that I could make that call. Many black families don’t have this option, bc of policies/practices that prevented them from ever building this sort of wealth

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

4 years

@realsammishady like: I just want to be able to skim my chip over a beautiful salsa pond, straight from the container

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

6 years

I have benefited from the white supremacy that was a political goal of family members, in ways both direct (like this week, after grammy’s death) and less tangible. It’s uncomfortable to talk about that—but we must acknowledge it to face the reality of how race shapes our lives.

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

7 years

Scout, who I met today, is a Very Good Boy. He thinks affordable healthcare should be available to everyone. I agree with you, Scout.

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

6 years

By many standards, my grandparents were not wealthy people; she was as a teacher, he an engineer in smalltown Indiana. But after WW2, they bought a home—w help of govt programs not available to black families—that, years later, could be sold for $ that passed along to my parents.

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

2 years

I actually find it helpful when pundits reveal what their undefined shorthand references really mean. Calling vaguely for a “Sister Soulja moment” may be easier than saying Biden should “perform some gratuitous public racism”—but we should understand that the meaning is the same.

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

6 years

Last thing: I sincerely appreciate the feedback; I’m learning. I understand that simply acknowledging sources of privilege—while important—will never be enough. The system needs to change. I want to follow behind those leading the fight for racial+economic justice. Sending love.

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

4 months

It’s darkly funny—and certainly revealing—that part of the ostensible “plagiarism” alleged in this bad-faith attack is.. the verbatim QUOTED legislative text of the Voting Rights Act. Like, did you want her to put the legal standard of Section 2 into new prose? Absolutely inane.

@elianayjohnson

Eliana Johnson

@elianayjohnson

4 months

@aaronsibarium With better graphics this time -

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

4 years

This question, on the Harvard PhD application, could really save some time with a link at the top: “If you aren’t white, click here to skip to the next section.”

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

2 years

I can’t understand how top Dems can watch the havoc this 6-3 Court is now unleashing—threatening not only their entire policy agenda, but also democracy itself—and then prioritize, in their courts strategy, strengthening public confidence in the fantasy of an apolitical SCOTUS.

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Brian Highsmith

6 years

*To clarify, bc I should have worded better: The financial situation I was in was not connected to size of inheritance; it just is the circumstance that led to our having this convo, which happened to be shortly after my grandmother’s passing. Thanks for your thoughtful responses

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

2 years

Sure seems like poor institutional design, from the perspective of political equality, that our system allows anyone who dislikes the laws and regulations that have emerged from our national democratic process to veto them just by filing a short screed as a complaint in N.D. Tex.

@chrisgeidner

Chris “Law Dork” Geidner

2 years

BREAKING: US District Judge Reed O’Connor in Texas rules that requiring employers to provide coverage for PrEP drugs (preventing the transmission of HIV) violates the religious rights of employers under federal law (RFRA).

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Brian Highsmith

4 years

enjoy this video of me starting my PhD

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

4 months

I recall a great many were deeply scandalized when a group of law students, upon Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, signed a public letter predicting that people “would die” from the jurisprudence that would result from his confirmation to the high Court. Anyway!

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Dr. Mary Anne Franks

4 months

The Supreme Court is a death panel.

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

4 years

Every Democrat should support this position. There are many reasons to do so, but here’s a good one you might consider: because people in prison are people.

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Taniel

4 years

Um, how did I not know that Jamaal Bowman ran on entirely abolishing felony disenfranchisement, i.e. giving every citizen the right to vote including if they're in prison.

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Brian Highsmith

3 years

It would be malpractice for Democrats not to do everything in their power to ensure that prospective voters in Georgia understand that marijuana decriminalization is on the ballot in this upcoming Senate special.

@LACaldwellDC

Leigh Ann Caldwell

3 years

The House passed decriminalizing pot. Here's the vote breakdown via @AlexNBCNews and @haleytalbotnbc YAY: Dem 221 GOP 5 IND 1 Total 228 NAY: Dem 6 GOP 158 Total 164

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

3 years

I couldn’t help but wonder... had President Biden been hiring everybody, except me?

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

3 years

oh word

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Brian Highsmith

3 years

sometimes people are “hysterical” because they see, with prescient clarity, truths that most others would prefer to ignore, lest they be inconvenienced to act. thinking about this today.

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Brian Highsmith

3 years

imagine being a cat and checking your calendar in the morning. no meetings, no deadlines. just mealtimes and vibes.

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

7 years

Small in the scheme of things, but still makes me sad to think about the awesome public event that Obama WH would've hosted for this eclipse

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

5 years

Perhaps the two most shocking current legal doctrines I learned about for the first time in law school were qualified immunity and forced arbitration. Even now, I have a hard time accurately describing their effects, in curtailing rights of vulnerable people, w/o sounding crazy.

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Brian Highsmith

2 years

macroeconomics

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Brian Highsmith

4 years

I’ve been informed that the call was at 2:15am; I regret the error.

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Brian Highsmith

4 years

the modern surveillance state:

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Brian Highsmith

2 years

all love obviously but food recommendations in Princeton is like, “take a left on Nassau then keep going until you get to Philadelphia”

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Brian Highsmith

3 years

pandemic makes you lose control.

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Brian Highsmith

1 year

my parents, in their retirement, both plan to “read along” with the seminar I’m teaching in the spring🥹

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Brian Highsmith

4 years

@UditThakur_ wow I have seen many salsa jars in my time, and this is an all-time worst offender

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Brian Highsmith

5 years

so one consistent theme in @ryangrim ‘s new book is that DC Democrats—really going back to Rahm in 2006—have lost winnable races by recruiting moderate (even conservative) pro-business veterans for red state seats, often pushing aside people supported by local community activists

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

2 months

Let’s gooo

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

4 years

the green text thing, frankly, should be an antitrust violation

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

4 years

Life update: This fall, I will start in the Government & Social Policy PhD program at Harvard—hoping to study connections btw residential segregation and the funding of local public goods in poor+oppressed communities. I’m excited, anxious, and grateful :)

gsas.harvard.edu

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Brian Highsmith

3 years

My advice to 1Ls is that the Microsoft Word shortcut for small caps is Command+Shift+K

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

6 years

I know this is an uncomfortable conversation, but progressives must understand+confront role that Big Law—including heroes who’ve done great work serving in Dem admins—has played in undermining legal rights of vulnerable workers and consumers, esp through attack on class actions

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Mark Joseph Stern

6 years

Postscript: Who cowrote Epic System's cert petition asking SCOTUS to eviscerate federal labor rights? That would be @neal_katyal , liberal hero of the travel ban litigation.

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Brian Highsmith

3 years

“I’m prepared to go forward" [as a cat lawyer] is far more relatable than I'd like to admit

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

1 year

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Brian Highsmith

3 years

To my knowledge—bc assets are generally taxed only at realization—the only people ever made to report the value of non-housing assets are those applying for antipoverty programs. Our govt doesn’t know how much Jeff Bezos is worth, but requires SNAP applicants to report their car.

@superloafcat

bfa agonistes

3 years

Applying for food stamps, fuck this question. Jesus

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Brian Highsmith

2 years

Like if that’s your recommendation, then say it with your chest and let the debate proceed on those terms. Don’t pretend like you’re calling for Dems to denounce particular excesses or missteps of the left, when what you really want is to traffic some old-fashioned dog whistling.

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Brian Highsmith

2 years

if we can put a man on the moon, surely we can make it possible for reviewers to comment directly on footnotes in Word

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

5 years

me: Senator, you should come over Elizabeth Warren: sorry, im busy me: it’s just that.. Wells Fargo fraudulently opened a fake account in my name in order to charge me bogus fees, and now their CEO (who enabled the scam as CFO) won’t step down 😔 EW:

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Brian Highsmith

4 years

"Preferential treatment for legacy admissions is anti-meritocratic, inhibits social mobility and helps perpetuate a de facto class system. In short, it is an engine of inequity."

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Opinion | End Legacy College Admissions (Published 2019)

A country struggling with deeply rooted inequality need not continue an affirmative action program for successful families.

www.nytimes.com

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

2 years

Life update: I’m excited (and grateful) to spend next year at Princeton’s School of Public & Int’l Affairs as a Fellow in Law, Ethics, and Public Policy. I’ll be working on research—about state constitutions and local democracy—and teaching a course on “Race, Place, and the Law.”

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Brian Highsmith

4 years

Here’s one thing I failed to consider before committing to 5-7 years of rigorous academic study: I may be the world’s slowest reader.

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

7 years

"Trump’s commission has nothing to do w election integrity and everything to do with suppressing votes ahead of the 2018 & 2020 elections."

@AriBerman

Ari Berman

7 years

With Kris Kobach at helm, Trump admin planning unprecedented attack on voting rights. This is national emergency

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Brian Highsmith

3 years

grateful, in moments like these, that Stephen Breyer is here to remind us that the Court is not a political body.

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

5 years

when that “baked goods in the office kitchen” email comes through

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

4 years

It’s be difficult to overstate the amount of Tom Steyer television, social media, and radio advertising I received visiting my family in Greenville, SC, over the holidays. If it were not already obvious: wealth inequality not only harms our economy, it also corrodes democracy.

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Aaron Rupar

4 years

The latest Fox News poll has Tom Steyer ahead of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in South Carolina.

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

3 years

@drlungamam Indeed. I wrote this piece last summer about the structural violence—the hoarding of white wealth, enforced through racial segregation—represented by the enduring visual, just miles from where Michael Brown was killed six years prior. In case of interest:

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The Structural Violence of Municipal Hoarding

High-wealth communities segregate and protect their treasure from municipal redistribution.

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

3 years

i'm laughing about my parents' christmas letter that’s all like: our one son continues to be a nerd [list of exclusively professional updates] then immediately transitions to like, but by far the biggest badass in the family is Eric who fricken CRUSHED this year. like, we get it!

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Brian Highsmith

4 years

If Dems do retake power, I hope they reverse the deep cuts to congressional staff that were enacted during the Gingrich era—the major effect of which has been to empower outside corporate interests. It's neither the sexiest nor most urgent concern, but it affects everything else.

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

4 years

If you're interested in what an abolitionist state budget framework looks like—what it'd mean to start divesting from mass criminalization and incarceration; to support people through public investments that help communities thrive—check out this resource:

@CraigOGilmore

Craig Gilmore

4 years

The biggest newspaper in the biggest state in the US has editorialized: "Pandemic aside, there should be fewer prisons, less of our treasury devoted to incarceration, and less reliance on locking up people for long terms."

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Brian Highsmith

2 years

Thought: Many law students need to write research papers. And legal services organizations all have research questions they're too thinly stretched to tackle. If you're looking for a topic: consider emailing an org doing work in an area you care about, to see if they have ideas!

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

3 years

In @nytopinion I wrote about what we can learn from states+cities’ reliance on regressive fees. Rather than condition access to critical infrastructure on families’ economic means, we should tax wealth—and provide public goods free at point of consumption.

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Opinion | Republicans Want You (Not the Rich) to Pay for Infrastructure (Published 2021)

The privatization of local public services that conservatives are pushing is a tax on all working people.

www.nytimes.com

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

3 years

in law school, you’ll learn many various jurisprudential “balancing tests”—several originating from Justice Breyer opinions. but if you want to understand how those are *actually* applied in courts of law, I really couldn’t think of a better illustration than this perfect quote:

@bradheath

Brad Heath

3 years

CHRIS WALLACE: Why didn't you retire? BREYER: "I didn't retire because, on balance, I decided I wouldn't retire."

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

4 years

the jar that launched a thousand takes:

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

4 years

It's incredibly obvious and will be incredibly hard, but we must flip the Senate in '22 (if we've not done it this time), and then do all the overdue structural reforms—court reform, new states, etc—w/o flinching. Our fight these next 2 years is to create the conditions for that.

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

10 months

Does anyone have a rec for a good (online / at-your-own-pace) "intro to R" course that starts genuinely at scratch and is designed for social science uses? Paid or free. (A.. friend.. is finally getting around to his required quantitative methods course, four years into the PhD.)

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Brian Highsmith

4 years

This is true in an important sense—but it’s not bc the Party lacks a policy agenda. Rather, what drives the dynamic is the GOP’s keen understanding that every aspect of its policy agenda lacks popular support. We must understand the courts as central to the goal of minority rule.

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

4 years

I wrote about what it might look like—amid mass protest against lawless police violence and coming budget austerity—to take seriously abolitionist demands to defund our punishment bureaucracy, while supporting alternative systems that help people thrive.

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Defund Our Punishment Bureaucracy

Alternatives to militarized policing and community trauma exist, and in a time of severe pressure on state and local budgets, they must be adopted.

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

4 years

Seeing confusion so: I’ve never worked for Brooks or the NYT, just had a job once that sometimes required pulling all nighters to respond to NYT columns..

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

4 years

this photo of downtown los angeles was taken yesterday. the earth is healing — we are the virus.

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

2 years

Update: I’ve packed up my life and moved into an upstairs bedroom of a NJ soybean farm 15m outside of Princeton, which I found online. There are LOTS of chickens here—please send your best egg recipes!—as well as two cats and a very kind dog named Lily. Prepare for farm content🐓

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Brian Highsmith

7 years

@Lyncherator @jeremyherb spotted, sitting here on Capitol Hill:

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Brian Highsmith

2 years

Student debt advocates generally support medical debt forgiveness; your beef is not w them! But doing so requires new legislation. By contrast, the fed govt owns 95% of student debt and already has statutory authority to “modify” & “waive, or release” its claims against students.

@BillKristol

Bill Kristol

2 years

Wouldn’t forgiving some percentage of health care debt (on some means-tested basis) seem to make a lot more sense, both as policy and politically, than forgiving student debt?

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Brian Highsmith

4 years

therapist: how are you feeling today? me: just like, incredibly anxious and overwhelmed therapist: and what do we do when we feel this way? me: we open the anxiety app and smash the RT 😌 therapist: wait, no

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Brian Highsmith

4 years

I…went to law school for three years…and…she just…she tweeted it out

@AywaRhiannon

Rhiannon

4 years

Here is how you understand the law: you read the legal question that is posed to the Supreme Court, and you think, what would be the best result for poor people? The Supreme Court will choose the opposite thing. Bam you understand the law.

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Brian Highsmith

2 years

one time in college I went to a Taco Bell drive-through and when we pulled up they told us "sorry our meat hose is broken" and I still think about it weekly.

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Brian Highsmith

3 years

thinking about the time when I forgot the word “obsolete” and recommended, on a webinar, the classic text “Are Prisons Overrated?”

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

6 months

Indeed: the company town is coming back with a resurgence (if it ever left)—come learn about them next semester with me! I’ll post a syllabus when I’ve got it finalized.

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@JStein_WaPo

Jeff Stein

6 months

Housing shortages are so bad employers are increasingly making living accommodations part of their job offers, @rachsieg reports. This was I also believe part of the feudal model

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Brian Highsmith

4 years

My honest guess is that it’s a production thing: glass salsa jars are vacuum sealed; the fresh stuff actually does come in the plastic hummus-style containers (as many here have pointed out!). Maybe something about glass jar production makes this other shape hard to produce+seal?

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Brian Highsmith

4 years

pouring a big cup of coffee at 9:20pm and settling in for a long night of overdue work is good, actually; it’s a sign your life is together and that you are thriving. definitely no future adjustments or self-reflection needed.

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Brian Highsmith

3 years

Lawyers at large law firms, in their majestic equality, protect the rights of poor and rich alike to engage in insider trading, commit wage theft, and defraud consumers without fear of legal consequence.

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Brian Highsmith

3 years

This Ezra Klein column today is genuinely excellent; worth reading in full. It’s one of those I wish I could beam every word from, directly into the brains of the full Democratic Senate caucus and our new President.

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

4 years

For no reason I can figure out, Seal—like, “Kiss from a Rose” Seal—watched all nine posts to my Insta story today (which were just random oil portraits I liked). Most of my friends didn’t stick around for the full series, but Seal took the time to view every one. Thank you, Seal.

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

3 years

I feel sure we will look back on Senators’ failure to act now to end the legislative filibuster—and then use the current governing trifecta to enact permanent democratizing reforms—in the same way as we now understand the stakes of RBG’s decision to stay on the bench before 2016.

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

1 year

As my time at @PrincetonSPIA comes to an end, I wanted to share: I’m moving back to Boston to start a two-year academic fellowship in Law & Political Economy at @Harvard_Law . I’ll be writing about state democracy and the public law of local fiscal policy—say hi if you’re in town!

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

4 years

I wrote about the St Louis gun couple, how residential segregation is weaponized to protect white wealth from redistribution for public use, and why municipal hoarding is a form of structural violence—inflicting enduring harms on excluded Black communities

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The Structural Violence of Municipal Hoarding

High-wealth communities segregate and protect their treasure from municipal redistribution.

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

2 years

The tremendous—practically unreviewable—power exercised by our judiciary is unique among rich democracies. Kathy Thelen ( @thelenkathleen1 ) and I suggest that comparatively distinctive features of US courts are best understood as structurally conservative:

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The Role of Courts in American Political Economy

By studying American courts from a comparative perspective, an important truth emerges: our judiciary is not simply compositionally conservative, at particular moments in history…

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

4 years

Beyond underage drinking or drug use, what are compelling examples of criminalized behavior that many privileged people—in neighborhoods that aren't heavily-policed—have done w/o legal penalty? (Not asking for personal stories; just illustrating a point about selective policing.)

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@bd_highsmith

Brian Highsmith

4 years

Those who expected Republicans to yield to the political costs of blocking Garland, or standing behind Kavanaugh, failed to grasp what McConnell has always understood: once you have ensured that the referees of our democracy are reliably Team Republican, politics ceases to matter

@mjs_DC

Mark Joseph Stern

4 years

WOW: By a 5–4 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court reverses a lower court order extending the deadline for mail-in ballots in Wisconsin. All four liberals dissent. The conservative majority just effectively threw out thousands of ballots. Incredible. Link coming soon.

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Brian Highsmith

5 years

I wrote in @washmonthly about why the latest ACA challenge is a reminder that every progressive achievement in our lifetime is likely to be subject to the whims of conservative justices nominated precisely bc of their demonstrated hostility to such goals.

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Brian Highsmith

2 years

For folks who haven’t taken the bar exam, some clarity on the legalese here: “interpreting law” is when appointed judges do something that you like, whereas “making law” is when they do something you don’t like.

@seungminkim

Seung Min Kim

2 years

. @ChuckGrassley on his meeting with Biden on the Supreme Court vacancy: “I had a chance to tell him that I want somebody that's going to interpret law, not make law.”

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Brian Highsmith

3 years

It��s not remotely the most grating aspect of this, but what’s always bothered me is how wrong this is even on its own terms. Like: every third Harvard alum you meet at YLS has a famous father—whereas the typical state school grad was inevitably valedictorian while working 2 jobs.

@jessetripathi

jesse

3 years

fun fact yale wont let one if its most famous scholars near admitted students because he keeps telling kids from state schools that they dont deserve to be there

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Brian Highsmith

3 years

Nestlé USA’s “we unequivocally condemn child slavery, in all its forms, everywhere” brief is raising a lot of questions already answered by its brief.

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Brian Highsmith

4 years

Mayor Pete is a white, male, Harvard-educated, Rhodes scholar who's been running for POTUS his entire life—most recently on a platform of protecting donors from progressive policy that'd increase their tax burden. He's not the kind of person who needs help getting a fancy DC job.

@samstein

Sam Stein

4 years

Biden tonight pitching himself as a bridge to the future of the Democratic Party: “I view myself as a transition candidate…My job is…to bring the Mayor Petes of the world into this administration."

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Brian Highsmith

2 years

awfully gutting to recognize that, as horrible as everything is now, this period may likely be the best it will ever be for many years—a high-water mark as we enter a new dark chapter of history, all warning signs ignored and possible off-ramps rejected.

@politico

POLITICO

2 years

West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin says he cannot support President Joe Biden’s sweeping social and climate spending bill, dooming the House-passed version of the bill and putting the rest of Biden’s agenda in jeopardy

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Brian Highsmith

5 years

so far my thirties has mainly been shouting, over and over, into a speaker phone, “hi, did someone just join the call?”

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Brian Highsmith

7 years

100% chance he would have been out on the lawn, nerding goofy-like in his eclipse glasses, talking to students about importance of science

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Brian Highsmith

3 years

whole family in rapt attention for two hours while my little brother shares his slideshow from the 2,650 mile Pacific Crest Trail hike, and yet when I offer to present the early results from my empirical analysis of congressional voting behavior it’s crickets.. 🙄

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Brian Highsmith

3 years

stressed about the bar exam? don’t be! remember: at the rate of our current descent into authoritarianism, any semblance of rule of law won’t last much beyond your first annual bar membership. Law will then be whatever the ruling party dictates—saving you the trouble of bar prep!

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Brian Highsmith

4 months

@SargonAlmighty yeah, by citing.. the statutory text.. that she is directly quoting.. which is indicated by the quotation marks :)

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Brian Highsmith

8 months

Indeed. Here’s what I wrote in 2020: “there is no justification for sparing police functions from—at minimum—the same scrutiny to which policymakers are now subjecting other critical public goods &services.. We should [instead] fund what works to improve public health & safety..”

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@RottenInDenmark

Michael Hobbes

@RottenInDenmark

8 months

hard yep. Wild how months of centrist scolding managed to distract people from this obvious reality.

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Brian Highsmith

3 years

My life changed—that’s no exaggeration—when I got a WH internship after college. Only reason I could accept is bc my Army parents happened to be stationed in VA at the time, so I could live at home. If we’re to meet our commitment to inclusion, WH internships cannot remain unpaid

@payourinterns

Pay Our Interns

3 years

If the White House offered paid internships starting in 2021. Would you apply to intern?

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Brian Highsmith

4 years

@JakeMGrumbach This is almost exactly how Angela Davis phrased it earlier this week:

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