Andrew Blevins

Here to occasionally scream into the void when scrolling past bad takes. Policy work with Retirement Savings Project @pewtrusts. Tweets & opinions are my own.

[Andrew Blevins @Andrew_CBlevins]

@mattyglesias In 2024 only 13% knew about the UK election and 4–5% knew about Pakistan or Indonesia (and I’m shocked it was that high). https://t.co/UIoZKQ1TmR

[Andrew Blevins @Andrew_CBlevins]

@mattyglesias I would agree if it were a broad position, but this is a Twitter phenomenon, isn’t it? The number of Americans who know there was an election in Brazil or Serbia, let alone with a routing interest, has to be <2% of the population?

[Andrew Blevins @Andrew_CBlevins]

@kaymsanto 👻

[Andrew Blevins @Andrew_CBlevins]

@mattyglesias Dude, yes.

[Andrew Blevins @Andrew_CBlevins]

@mattyglesias The English version of the poll.
https://t.co/mDntU6W1eY

[Andrew Blevins @Andrew_CBlevins]

@planet4589 Wish we’d been able to give you more reason to stay/less reason to leave. Best of luck to you and the library in your new home.

[Andrew Blevins @Andrew_CBlevins]

@Britonomist As an aside, including savings in M1 has confused so many would be chart admirers.

[Avi Roy @agingroy]

Stop a statin and your LDL cholesterol rises 30% in four days. Nobody writes a WSJ feature about it. Stop certain blood pressure medications and your BP can spike within hours. Nobody calls it a design flaw.

Levothyroxine, antidepressants, insulin, metformin, antihistamines. Chronic treatments for chronic conditions, and all of them stop working when you stop taking them. None of them generate think-pieces questioning whether patients should have started.

The AMA classified obesity as a disease in 2013. Thirteen years later, it’s still the only chronic condition where “you have to take it forever” is framed as an argument against treatment rather than a description of how medicine works.

[Andrew Blevins @Andrew_CBlevins]

@mattyglesias Yeah. And you used to be able to buy beers at the convenience store off South Cap and drink them in the empty parking lot before a Nats game by that lone shipping container that reeked of urine.

[Andrew Blevins @Andrew_CBlevins]

@MundoMan4 @thejackbeyer @DJSnM @TheCinesthetic I have the DVD box set too. The Earth/moon hologram on the box is pretty slick. They rereleased it on Blu-ray/digitally like five years ago with some slightly updated CGI which is more enjoyable on modern TVs.

[Andrew Blevins @Andrew_CBlevins]

@thejackbeyer @DJSnM @TheCinesthetic Limited series, but Chernobyl and From the Earth to the Moon.

[Rep. Don Bacon 🇺🇸✈️🏍️⭐️🎖️ @RepDonBacon]

Went straight to the source.
The Constitution is clear.
Article I, Section 8 gives Congress authority over taxes and tariffs.

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

Can you, the people, “vote your way out of this?”

Honestly, not if you get your news from these folks.

The swamp has tricks for deceiving the public, and most even work on congressmen. Here’s an example of how Laura and Greg played along as happy tools of the swamp.

Please ask yourself why your own congressman has never talked about this. He either hasn’t gotten this far in the game (80% chance), or he likes the way the swamp obscures what’s going on (10% chance), or he dislikes the system but the price he’d pay for telling you is too high (10% chance). If a congressman sees this post and wants to debate me, I accept!

The House has rules we adopt at the beginning of each Congress. Honestly we should just use those - some go all the way back to Thomas Jefferson. Some are like Robert’s Rules of Order which branched from House rules a century ago. But we have a rules committee that modifies the rules every week. I served on the rules committee for two years. When I was on the committee, I refused to vote for rules changes if the purpose was to mislead or obscure. Every week, the rules committee bends the rules to suit the Speaker, but you can’t place the blame just on the committee or the Speaker. Every rules change must be approved by the whole House with a majority vote.

Rank and file congressmen are told to vote for these rules modifications each week for the sake of party loyalty because the rules are temporarily modified by the majority to keep the minority from using the permanent rules against us. This is partly true, so most congressmen never question beyond this.

Typically, every week the rules committee meets before other committees and writes a rules package to protect bills that will come to the floor that week. Then the whole house votes on this rules package early in the week before significant legislation comes to the floor. The vote is typically on party lines. Sometimes a block of congressmen in the majority will take the rules package hostage and withhold their vote to get something else that has nothing to do with the rules. I’m not a big fan of this, but after 13 years, my hands aren’t completely clean of this tactic.

The high-road position that I try to maintain is that if the rules package is bad, you shouldn’t vote for the rules package, and in general you shouldn’t withhold your vote from a rules package if there’s nothing wrong with the rules package… even if you disagree with the policy that is enabled to come to the floor by the rules package.

There are more details, but that’s all you need to know to understand what I’m going to explain next.

This week the Speaker wanted to do two things outside of our base rules, so he put those inside of the rules package that also had the rules for bringing bills like the popular SAVE Act to the floor, knowing members would be afraid to vote against something associated with SAVE. THIS IS INTENTIONAL.

The Speaker wanted to circumvent the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to avoid voting on tariffs and he wanted to turn off the ban on bringing a spending bill to the floor the same day it’s introduced.

The first rules package that came to the floor this week failed because myself and other republicans objected to it. The rules committee met again, wrote a new rules package without the tariff-trick, and we voted on the second rules package. I voted no but internet goons, like clockwork, characterized this as a vote against the SAVE Act.

The swamp used that second rules package to give them authority to pass a bill before anyone could read it. They hid that authority inside the rule for the SAVE act because they knew people like Laura and Greg would help them disparage anyone who didn’t go along.

If you fell for Laura and Greg’s slop you were cheering for the Pelosi doctrine that we should pass bills to see what’s in them. If the rules package had failed, the rules committee would have written a better one and SAVE Act would have still come to the floor.

[Jerusalem @JerusalemDemsas]

Jon Stewart's most viral moment is going on Crossfire and confronting Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala for producing substanceless theater.

20 years later, that criticism could just as easily be leveled against himself.

https://t.co/NhOX08gBXk

[Andrew Blevins @Andrew_CBlevins]

@arindube “This is my moat.” - builder of the last physical moat, probably

[Andrew Blevins @Andrew_CBlevins]

@arindube “Fortunately, what I do is unique, simultaneously genuinely valuable but also too boring for any frontier AI to be deployed on.”

[Andrew Blevins @Andrew_CBlevins]

@CartoonsHateHer I’m glad someone has the courage to say it.

[Andrew Blevins @Andrew_CBlevins]

@NateSilver538 They have the “Dies in Darkness” playbook that made them financially successful during Trump 1 and Bezos refuses to run it. People are upset he’s squandering it/dismantling the paper to curry favor with the administration (and because it’s the local paper for many politicos).

[Andrew Blevins @Andrew_CBlevins]

@NateSilver538 Not saying rich guys should have to spend money on things they don’t want to, and WaPo should be as revenue-positive as possible. But Bezos didn’t buy it to make money. He bought it for prestige. And he’s personally responsible for the huge subscriber decline.