This is how you storm the Capitol legally

Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported the Kennedy family, without the one in the administration, has filed a lawsuit to stop the construction of the nasty guy’s arch. Their objection is that the arch would interfere with the sightlines from the President John F Kennedy Memorial and Eternal Flame in Arlington National Cemetery to the Lincoln Memorial. The Kennedy memorial was placed where it is and the flame designed as it because the planning report said it “must be large enough to be visible at night from the Lincoln Memorial end of the Memorial Bridge.” And the arch would block that view. Thankfully, the courts have already blocked the arch from being built, at least for now. I’ve been to Washington DC a few times. I haven’t been to Arlington Cemetery. So I took a look at Google Street View. And from the plaza near the JFK Memorial one can indeed see down Memorial Ave, across the Arlington Memorial Bridge, and to the Lincoln Memorial. Alix Breeden of Kos reported that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an Anti-DEI bill. Delray Beach was forced to cancel its Pride Parade. It was also forced to cancel its St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Many other cities across the state had to do the same. Delray Beach residents are quite angry. The city said it hopes that outside private interests will step forward to sponsor the parades. Yesterday I wrote about the House’s attempt to impeach Pete Hegseth. Kos community member sepiasiren referenced a TikTok video which sepiasiren summarized as saying if the House vote had passed the current Republican led Senate could have acquitted him. That would have prevented Democrats from doing it next year with higher Senate majorities, though Democrats would still need about a dozen Republican votes to convict. So this effort was too soon. In the comments Onomastic posted a tweet from Morgan J. Freeman of No Kings that said the vote was not for impeachment, but to refer it to committee, a standard way to postpone a vote.

It didn’t fail because of missing Democrats. It failed because Republicans had the votes to send the resolution to committee, which effectively ended the push for now.

I’ve also heard several Republicans also missed the vote. Even if this vote isn’t a reason, I still think Democrats would do better with someone else as Speaker instead of Hakeem Jeffries. On Monday Emily Singer of Kos reported the nasty guy started tweeting about election denialism. Before then he had appeared to make peace with the loss.

But now that he realizes this means Congress will investigate his corrupt actions, thwart his unconstitutional moves, and put legislation on his desk that is popular among the electorate writ large but will anger his MAGA base, he is spinning with rage. So far, it’s unclear if Trump will act on his lies about a stolen election.

But we would be foolish to assume he would not direct federal agencies and his MAGA minions to act. So far, three days later, he hasn’t acted. Also on Monday Kos of Kos discussed the current crop of election deniers, perhaps encouraged by the nasty guy’s comments. They’re still dumb. Or dishonest. A tweet calls the Texas vote fraudulent and shows five state maps from recent elections, all mostly red, and the last one all blue. Readers called foul, saying the last map is colored by a different metric. Another tweet claims Paxton winning Galveston but Talarico winning the whole state implies fraud. A third tweet compares the 2022 vote with the 2026 and says no way Democrats “materialized” another 20 million votes. But add in the 2024 vote count and the Democrats total then was a bit higher than this year. Thee are a couple more examples. Kos summarized:

Keep telling your supporters that elections are rigged—that their votes don’t matter and even GOP control can’t stop Democrats from stealing victories—and they may eventually take you at your word. Why keep voting in a system you believe can never deliver an honest result? Why keep supporting Republicans who supposedly know about the theft but do nothing to stop it? So if they want to conspiracy theory themselves out of the electorate, by all means, please proceed.

Bill Scher, politics editor for the Washington Monthly tweeted a comment by Jacob Rubashkin:

The 2026 midterms marked the first time since the advent of the two-party system that Democrats have fielded candidates in every single House race across the country.

Kos also wrote about voters connecting high prices to corruption. In 2024 the nasty guy ran the campaign ad, “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” At the time Kos wrote voters heard that Democrats were more interested in the culture war instead of making their lives better. But since that election voters have watched the nasty guy, his family, and his administration openly cash in. They also heard him say he didn’t, “think about people’s financial situations.” That was while Republicans ran endless ads about trans people. Voters saw Republicans were interested in the culture war and enriching themselves instead of making their lives better. Democrats can change things up by pursuing both affordability and corruption. But they also need to impose ethics to end the belief that all politicians are corrupt. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos for Tuesday included a tweet showing a diagram of the House with the 435 dots colored by the estimated number of seats each party won, showing 259 for Democrats (the current tally is 258 with 13 seats still to call). The chart’s caption: “Just for point of clarification, this is how you storm the Capitol legally.” On Sunday Chitown Kev couldn’t post a pundit roundup for Kos, so the usual post is just the comments. A tweet posted by randym77 and from wongmjane:

BREAKING: Muslim Senator Abdul El-Sayed backs plan to teach Arabic numerals in public schools.

If you’re not chuckling, you may have forgotten the numerals used by the Western world for likely more than a thousand years came from the Arab world. A reply from swimbikerrunmd1:

Yea, but watch out for the radical group Al-Gebra and their weapons of maths destruction.

Yup, the Arab world also invented algebra. Way down in the comments Rambler797 included a video posted by James Tate. This video is from deardata1 and shows through color how various groups voted. White men voted Republican in nearly every state. Women voted Democratic in nearly every state, though white women were closer to divided. Independents went almost entirely blue. Rural voters were red in 41 states. We get to suburban voters and we see a ring of red around Montana that also shows up for voters 30-44 and Latino voters. Voters under 30 went blue in every state, as did black voters. There are a few more categories. In Wednesday’s pundit roundup Greg Dworkin quoted Sarah Posner of Talking Points Memo:

With the blue tsunami that inundated Texas on Election Day, the Christian right has lost the state that made it one of the most powerful forces in modern American politics. Since forging an unbreakable pact with the Republican Party in the Reagan era, for decades the Christian right purposefully notched its national successes by building robust state-level legislative and electoral machinery across the country. Texas was the crown jewel of this strategy, where operatives and elected officials together hatched plans to kill off church-state separation, Christianize the public schools, criminalize abortion, and eviscerate the civil rights of LGBTQ people. For three decades, Republicans with close ties with the Christian right — George W. Bush, Rick Perry, and the outgoing Greg Abbott — have occupied the governor’s mansion. The latter two, in particular, have worked hand in glove with the Christian right to make the country’s second most populous state the proving ground for a white Christian nationalist agenda. Abbott’s lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, who was first elected to the office in 2014, wielded enormous power over the state legislature to enact it. Like Abbott, he went down to defeat, on Tuesday, losing, like Abbott, to a woman. Up and down the ballot, those decades of calculated power consolidation throughout the state government collapsed. What comes next will be crucial to watch. The Christian right is a movement with formidable staying power, owing to the determination of its funders and dedication of its foot soldiers. That is why this is not, by any means, a column about the demise of the Christian right. But it is about what we learn about how movements consolidate and later lose control.

EJ Dionne of the New York Times discussed various iterations of a “New South.” One was declared in 1886, in the 1930s, in 1949, and in the 1970s and 1980s.

This history ought to inspire humility in anyone tempted to declare yet another new era in the South. But something truly new did happen in the states of the Old Confederacy in last week’s elections. The elections of 2026 could be remembered as the moment when the Republican Party’s “red wall” of Southern states came tumbling down

. In today’s pundit roundup Chitown Kev quoted Patrician Caro of El País in English discussing the new members of Congress going through orientation.

“It really is like high school — but it’s fun high school,” representative-elect Dan Koh (Democrat from Massachusetts) told the political outlet Roll Call. The back-to-school analogy has been repeated often since the lawmakers arrived in the nation’s capital on Sunday. This week and next they have a packed orientation schedule with briefings, seminars, office selection, lessons on team building, and how to navigate the labyrinthine halls at the political heart of the U.S.

In the comments Doctor Who posted his favorite photo of these midterms and orientation. It shows Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan talking to Rev. Adam Hamilton of Kansas. Doctor Who wrote, “It exemplifies both religious freedom and religious tolerance, two core principles upon which this country was founded.” Greg Dworkin posted a tweet by Parker Butler with a campaign ad by Scott Colom of Mississippi. The ad starts with incumbent Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith saying yeah, the price of beef is high, so pick a different meat. That is followed by a few people saying variations of, “Pick another protein? I’d rather pick another senator.” It was very effective. After a week of counting Colom was recently declared the winner, the first black senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction.