Michael Mann demands a court packing litmus test for all Democratic candidates, joining Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg in the push to reshape the court.
Page A4From§Eachthe milkman edition — 31 August 2026
Greene calls Loomer's rhetoric the new Republican Party as a Fox op-ed demands a loyalty test for Democrats.
As it ran on the front
In fairness to everyone involved, let's start with what was actually said. A sitting member of Congress from her own party's right flank looked at a colleague's public rhetoric this week and said, on the record, this is Trump's new MAGA and Republican Party. Not a rogue actor. Not a fringe account. The party, as she named it. That is a member of the majority describing her own coalition's current temperature, and she used the word new, which means she is telling you it used to be something else.
Now, in the same week, an op-ed ran calling for a litmus test to be applied to all Democratic candidates before the next cycle - a formal screening, a standard, a bar to clear, proposed for the other party's field, not her own. I want to be fair to the argument here: every party runs some version of a platform test. Primaries exist. Endorsement questionnaires exist. That's not new, and it's not, on its own, sinister.…
…(cont) What I can't get past is the order these two things arrived in. The internal warning came first - this is what we've become - and the external demand came right behind it, aimed entirely outward, asking the other side to prove itself against a standard nobody in the piece proposed applying at home. I started this column planning to defend the litmus test as ordinary primary politics, and I still think a litmus test, in isolation, is defensible. But defending it in the same week your own colleague is naming your party's rhetoric problem, out loud, without being asked - that's not a coincidence I can spin my way around today.
The honest read isn't that either of these stories is disqualifying by itself. It's that a party willing to name its own rhetoric problem in public, the same week it's demanding a purity standard from the other side, has told you which direction the mirror is pointed and which direction it isn't. I said this was about transparency a minute ago. I'm walking that back. It's about where the scrutiny goes, and this week it went everywhere except home.
“One Republican looks at her own party's rhetoric and says out loud that this is what the party has become now. In the same week, a Fox op-ed is demanding a loyalty test - not for her party, for the other one. Physician, heal thyself, but send the bill to the Democrats.”
“The litmus test proposal is simply about knowing where candidates stand on core issues before voters cast a ballot, that's transparency, not a purity test. Greene's comments were about one individual's rhetoric, not a party-wide problem - although she did say 'this is Trump's new MAGA and Republican Party,' which is, I'll grant, a party-wide statement, so maybe I'm overstating the individual part.”
The receipts
Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Sunday slammed right-wing influencer Laura Loomer's remarks posted on social media, condemning them as President Trump's "new MAGA and Republican Party." Greene reacted to an inflammatory post…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.