Where everything is bipartisan until it is not.
A government-provided safety net of financial assistance designed to keep citizens from hitting absolute rock bottom. It's the economic equivalent of a airbag that deploys when life goes sideways.
To control, administer, or influence behavior and policy through authority and restraint. The verb form of 'governance,' often used by people who enjoy having power over others' decisions.
Congress (the House and Senate) and its responsibility to write laws—the slow-moving deliberative body where bills go to die quietly.
A gerrymandering technique that concentrates voters of a particular party into a single district, wasting their votes by creating an overwhelming majority—like locking millions of people into one unbeatable fortress while ceding everything else.
To refrain from voting on a measure—the cowardly middle ground that allows politicians to avoid going on record while pretending they didn't vote.
Official orders handed down by authority figures who've decided democracy is exhausting. These are legally binding pronouncements that make something law whether you like it or not—think royal edicts but with more paperwork and legal citations.
That magical moment when someone officially verifies that yes, the thing you asked about is actually happening and you didn't misunderstand the entire email. In some contexts, it's also a religious rite where teenagers make promises they'll totally remember forever.
A politician's reversal of a previously stated position—the cardinal sin of politics, because voters apparently prefer consistency to evolving views based on new information.
The practice of granting favors (like government jobs) to political allies as rewards for support—basically organized nepotism with a government paycheck.
A political approach claiming to represent the interests of ordinary people against an elite establishment—essentially harnessing anger and resentment into a coherent governing philosophy.
A specific gerrymandering technique that spreads voters of a particular party across multiple districts, diluting their voting power—the surgical precision version of political dilution.