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Ezra Klein says he didn’t find Tom Geoghegan’s argument about the unconstitutionality of the filibuster convincing. Fine. But he just lost my vote for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

But as long as we’re on the subject, let me add one further argument. The following sentence is pretty much the sum total of what the constitution has to say about how the Supreme Court operates:

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.

The constitution does assume that there will be multiple judges on the Supreme Court. However, it doesn’t say that rulings require only a majority vote of the justices. Why? Because it never occurred to the framers that they had to say so. It was such an obvious and common convention that they just assumed it. And if anyone today tried to create a rule that effectively prevented a majority of justices from issuing opinions, they’d be (pardon the expression) laughed out of court.

The same is true for Congress. As Geoghegan notes, the framers specifically spelled out cases where non-majority votes were required, something that pretty clearly demonstrates that majority voting was the baseline they were working from. If it had ever occurred to them that anyone would seriously suggest otherwise, is there really any question that they wouldn’t have made it explicit?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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