Note to Greg Abbott, Republican governor of Texas

Please quarantine the concentration camps in your state. To do so:

• State publicly that your administration does not welcome the camps on your territory.
• Set up checkpoints around the camps. Staff checkpoints with members of the Texas national guard.
• Use the checkpoints to monitor everyone who comes and goes from the camps, including guards and prisoners. Take photographs. Record time and date of each departure and arrival.
• Publish names of guards.
• Publish length of stay for prisoners.
• Interview prisoners, and conduct a medical check. Compare medical condition upon entry with medical condition on exit.
• Inform guards that everything they do in the camps is recorded via cameras placed around the perimeter. Distribute video recordings as necessary.
• Send your Board of Health people to the camps every week to conduct health inspections. When the feds deny them entry, publicize it.
• Find a way to give each prisoner a cell phone. Phones must be secret, or feds will confiscate them.
• Fly helicopters over the camps each day. Take photographs. Drop fresh water for the prisoners. When feds object, insist air space belongs to Texas.

That is ten. If you or your staff plan other quarantine measures, or measures to help prisoners, send them, and I will add them to the list.

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Note to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Nancy Pelosi does not ‘single you out’ because you are a woman of color. She singles you out because you are a pain in the ass. She does not single out three of your colleagues because they are women of color. She singles them out because they are pains in the ass as well.

Democratic members of Congress elected your friend Nancy to maintain discipline in the party. You and your Twitter account indicated on your first day in Washington that you do not think well of that concept. Party discipline appears old-fashioned to a woman on the way up. In fact, it is. It is based on a ‘pay your dues, then advance’ kind of idea. If you do not like party discipline or loyalty, you should leave the party. Justin Amash can show you how to do it. So can Bernie.

Everyone likes to look at your picture, or a least journalists think so. You are one of the most photogenic members of Congress ever to hit the streets of Washington. You should use your fame well while it lasts. People come and go. No doubt you made an impression when you arrived.

Your constituents did not elect you to overthrow the party’s leadership, though. Peggy Noonan, in the subtitle to her latest column in the Wall Street Journal, writes, “Ocasio-Cortez emerges as a one-woman Committee to Re-Elect the President.” That’s the kind of headline you get when you focus excessively on narrow, personal goals. Nancy Pelosi wants to keep her job, of course, but she also focuses on what the party must do to defeat President Trump. You do not seem to think a unified party leads to that outcome.

You did the right thing to go to Texas, and observe conditions in the concentration camps. You did the right thing to name them correctly. You did the right thing to vote against the $4.3 billion appropriations bill to keep the camps running. Cast your vote, and let it speak for itself. You do not need to pick fights with your party’s leader in this election season. The Speaker can afford to lose your vote. She cannot afford to have you make her, or her party, look bad in front of the country. Lay off.