Our difficulty with the Court today rises not from the Court as an institution but from human beings within it. But we cannot yield our constitutional destiny to the personal judgement of a few men who, being fearful of the future, would deny us the necessary means of dealing with the present.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. Like Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth showed his contempt for congressional oversight. Asked fair questions about the Iran War, he fired back without offering any answers.
States that have outlawed abortion, like Louisiana, object to their citizens still having access to it via teleprescriptions and the mail. They allege that taking mifepristone at home is unsafe, though that seems to be a pretext.
It’s not clear what the next step in this case is.
and the war
Nothing major seems to be happening, but it’s hard to tell because of conflicting claims and counter-claims by the two sides. The US claims to have escorted two ships through the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians claim to have hit a US warship.
The two sides’ peace proposals continue to be far apart. Iran’s 14 points are all about ending US attacks without any concessions on their part. US proposals want Iran to turn over its nuclear material and swear off future nuclear ambitions without any concessions on our part.
Meanwhile, oil remains around $114 per barrel. Paul Krugman keeps pointing to the physical constraints: The world is burning more oil than is being shipped. If this continues, the stockpiles will run out. At that point, if not before, the price will have to rise high enough that demand falls to equal supply.
and the Comey indictment
Nearly a year ago, James Comey photographed seashells arranged to spell out “86/47”, which Trump and his loyalists exaggerated into a threat of assassination (86) against Trump (47). As soon as Comey heard this interpretation, he took the photo down and apologized.
Now he has been indicted for making a threat and transmitting it over social media. Each count carries a maximum sentence of ten years in prison.
The whole thing is absurd on many levels, and illustrates just how far the current Justice Department will go to harass people Trump views as his enemies.
We’re not sure whether Comey arranged the shells himself, or just found someone else’s arrangement on a beach.
Comey denies he intended the photo as a threat, and no evidence publicly available indicates otherwise.
It’s not clear whether Comey is supposed to have intended to carry out this alleged threat himself, or was saying that someone should do it.
In all previous cases, statements like this unconnected to a specific plan aren’t prosecuted under this statute. Simply saying “Somebody should kill this guy” is just free speech unless you are directly inciting somebody to do it. Ditto for “I’d like to kill this guy” if you have no specific plan to do so.
A judge will throw this out well before a jury hears it.
Isn’t it wonderful that the US is so crime-free that the Justice Department can waste its time on stuff like this?
and you also might be interested in …
The government owes billions in refunds to American businesses that paid Trump’s illegal tariffs. The big corporations have lawyers and other specialists to navigate the refund process, so they’ll probably get their money back. But small businesses probably won’t.
The DHS funding shutdown is over, except for funding Trump’s mass deportation programs. Republicans are preparing a reconciliation measure this summer to fund ICE and the border patrol through the end of Trump’s term, presumably so that next year’s Democratic Congress won’t have any leverage over these rogue agencies.
Democrats objected to funding ICE and CBP without restrictions after the videotaped murders of Alex Pretti and Rene Good in Minneapolis in January. The agents who committed these crimes have faced no charges, and federal agencies have done everything they could to block Minnesota’s investigations.
Democratic senators have been asking Trump’s judicial nominees who won the 2020 election and whether Trump could run for a third term in 2028. They can’t answer clearly, which should make everyone doubt their objectivity and resistance to Trump’s intimidation.
On Star Wars Day, Paul Krugman compares the proposed Trump battleships to the Death Star. The difference: The Death Star actually got built.
Trump’s new surgeon general nominee is yet another Fox News talking head, but at least this one has an active medical license. She says a lot of questionable things, but doesn’t appear to be crazy.
60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi received the Ridenhour Courage Prize for standing up to CBS’ management efforts to alter her piece on El Salvador’s CECOT Prison, where the Trump administration had sent a number of migrants.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. Fear is a funny thing – it can paralyze you, or it can point you to exactly what needs to be protected. Right now, our industry is afraid of the wrong things. We’re afraid of offending power. We’re afraid of losing access. We’re afraid of another baseless lawsuit. But what we should all be afraid of is silence. Because as I learned [at her first job as a waitress], there is a fine line between being a team player and being an accomplice.
The Ridenhour Prizes are named for Ron Ridenhour, who exposed the My Lai massacre. They’ve been awarded since 2004, with the first prize going to Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers.
and let’s close with something wild
If you want to get your mind off the news, The Guardian’s “Week in Wildlife” gallery is a good choice. The squirrel above appears to be adjusting the camera.
Can democracy flourish, or even survive, if two-thirds of the justices on the Supreme Court don’t believe in it?
[A previous version of this post didn’t load for some users, so I republished under a similar title.]
One of the great moments in American politics happened on March 15, 1965. It was barely a week since “Bloody Sunday“, when Alabama state police attacked civil rights demonstrators trying to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma.
Police (and non-police actors like slave patrols or the Ku Klux Klan) had been beating up Black people for over 100 years, but this time it was on TV, where the whole nation could see it. Nonviolent protesters had brought the reality of oppression into the nation’s living rooms: White people could maintain their dominance, but only by being villains, by brutalizing people who posed no threat.
There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. …
What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
And we shall overcome.
Johnson backed those words up by proposing the Voting Rights Act, which he signed into law a few months later.
Immediate and long-term perspectives The decision the Supreme Court released Wednesday, Louisiana v Callais (called just “Callais” in most media coverage), requires explanation both in an immediate and a long-term sense. Immediately, it blesses a practice the VRA was passed to eliminate: “cracking” minority communities and spreading them among multiple districts so that all (or nearly all) districts have a White majority. Or, looked at from the other side, Callais makes illegal the practice of intentionally gathering minority voters into a district where they might form a majority and elect a candidate of their own choosing.
Possibly immediately (if Louisiana can get away with the redistricting it now wants to do even after some absentee votes in its primary have already been mailed, and if other southern states can follow suit), but certainly by 2028, red states in the Deep South will redraw their maps so that maybe ten or so Black congresspeople are gerrymandered out of their jobs. By 2029, the congressional delegations of many Southern states may be as lily-white as they were before the VRA passed in 1965.
Bad as that outcome is, you can’t appreciate the full horror of this decision without seeing the larger context: Callais is the culmination of John Roberts’ 13-year program to repeal the VRA by judicial fiat, in contravention of the intention of the Congresses that passed it and kept renewing it. During those years, a series of corrupt decisions [1] have built on each other to get us where we are today: It is now hard to imagine any state action — no matter how racist — that could be reversed by bringing that state to court under the VRA.
In 2013’s Shelby County decision, Roberts threw out Section 5 of the VRA. Section 5 required a list of states with a history of Jim Crow election practices to get any changes to their election rules pre-cleared by the federal Justice Department. Roberts decided that this provision (which had been re-authorized by Congress as recently as 2006 and had been upheld in numerous Supreme Court precedents) violated the “equal sovereignty of the states”. He got around the precedential history by saying “things have changed dramatically” since the first version of the VRA was passed in 1965.
Here’s what I had to say about that at the time (in a piece I demurely titled “This Court Sucks“):
“Things have changed” is not a legal argument. It’s a fine point to make on a blog or at a dinner party, but a Supreme Court justice has to do better than that.
If Roberts were being a real judge here, he’d spell out what “equal sovereignty” has and hasn’t meant in American legal history. He’d enunciate an abstract standard by which Jim Crow was “exceptional” in 1965 and which justified the steps taken then. He’d explain how that standard was violated by the renewal of the VRA in 2006. And he’d lay down a set of conditions that Congress would need to satisfy to make the VRA acceptable today. (If you want to see what a real legal opinion looks like, read Justice Ginsburg’s dissent. Whether you agree with her or not, she is clearly doing something far more rigorous than what Roberts is doing.)
Roberts doesn’t do any of that. The VRA was vaguely justified in 1965 and is vaguely unjustified now, because “things have changed”. If I were a congressman, I would have no idea how to revise the VRA so that it passes constitutional muster. If Congress does revise it, lower court judges who rule on it will just be guessing about its constitutionality. It will have to go back to the Supreme Court before anyone knows whether it’s really a law again, because there are no standards in Roberts’ opinion by which a revision can be judged.
This isn’t law. It’s politics. It’s mush.
The mush has continued since. If Shelby County eliminated blocking racist election laws before they take effect, the Brnovich decision in 2021 made it harder to use Section 2 of the VRA to challenge such laws after they take effect. On a parallel track, the Rucho decision in 2019 said that partisan gerrymandering cases were “nonjusticiable”. In other words, partisan gerrymandering might be an unsavory practice, but neither the laws nor the Constitution give the courts power to do anything about it.
Sleight of hand. And that brings us to Wednesday’s Callais decision, written by Justice Alito. Once again, we are told that “things have changed”, so laws protecting minority voting rights are no longer necessary. [2] That sets up two legal sleights of hand: intent, and the confusion of partisan with racial gerrymandering.
One issue has run through the history of the VRA’s interpretation: Does the VRA only outlaw intentionally racist election practices? Or does it outlaw practices that have the effect of disenfranchising minority voters or diminishing their power, regardless of motive? The difference is important, because intent can be hard to prove in court. Many of the Jim Crow practices didn’t explicitly mention race: Poll taxes might be justified as a way to raise revenue, and the effect of discouraging poor people from voting, or the fact that Black voters are disproportionately poor — that might be portrayed as entirely accidental. Literacy tests might simply be a means of raising the quality of the average voter, unrelated to an educational system that favors White children. And so on.
This kind of thing was well understood even in 1965. [3]
As Justice Kagan explains in her dissent, the Court hobbled VRA enforcement by shifting to an “intent” interpretation in a 1980 decision. So Congress rewrote the VRA in 1982 to specify an “effects” interpretation. Alito denies that he is reinstating the “intent” view in contravention of Congress, but he is. He explicitly writes:
§2 of the VRA requires evidence giving rise to a strong inference of intentional discrimination.
The second sleight-of-hand makes use of the corrupt Rucho decision on partisan gerrymandering.
The upshot of Rucho was that, as far as federal law is concerned, a state legislature may use partisan advantage as a factor in redistricting. And litigants cannot circumvent that rule by dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb. Imposing liability “based on the racial effects of a political gerrymander in a jurisdiction in which race and partisan preference are very closely correlated . . . would, if accepted, provide a convenient way for future litigants and lower courts to sidestep our holding in Rucho that partisan-gerrymandering claims are not justiciable in federal court.” Alexander, 602 U. S., at 21. “Instead of claiming that a State impermissibly set a target Republican-Democratic breakdown, a plaintiff could simply reverse-engineer the partisan data into racial data and argue that the State impermissibly set a particular [racial] target. Our decisions cannot be evaded with such ease.”
Since intent is what matters, and a pro-Republican gerrymander looks just like a White-racist gerrymander, it’s impossible to prove racist (rather than partisan) intent. So the VRA’s protection against racial gerrymanders — effectively the last piece of the VRA still standing — is effectively dead.
But Kagan’s dissent calls Alito on his shenanigans:
[T]o its (modest) credit, the Rucho Court did not pretend that partisan gerrymanders were something in need of safeguarding. To the contrary, the Court conceded that they were “incompatible with democratic principles” and “lead to results that reasonably seem unjust.” (The Court’s rationale was only that federal courts lack competence to deal with gerrymanders, not that they were protected by law or beneficial as policy.) Today, though, the majority straight-facedly holds that the Voting Rights Act must be brought low to make the world safe for partisan gerrymanders. For how else, the majority reasons, can we preserve the authority of States to engage in this practice than by stripping minority citizens of their rights to an equal political process?
Rucho wrung its hands over partisan gerrymandering as a disreputable practice, and claimed only that the Court had no power to interfere with it. But now, Alito presents partisan gerrymandering as a state’s right, which Congress dare not impinge on and the Court is obligated to protect. There is, of course, no legal argument to back up that claim. It’s just how the Court’s Republican majority wants things to be, so Alito has slipped it between the lines. [4]
In fact, Alito has the logic exactly backwards: He says courts can’t throw out racial gerrymanders because they might accidentally throw out partisan gerrymanders. But the VRA says courts must throw out partisan gerrymanders if they have the same effect as a racial gerrymander. That’s the law as written, but under this Court, written law doesn’t mean much.
How to handle a corrupt court. Not long ago, when Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, some members of the party suggested expanding the Supreme Court to 13 justices, so that four new justices could outvote the corrupt Republican ones. This proposal never got close to implementation, because it was widely viewed as too radical. The party’s center saw raw exercises of power like that distasteful, as something dirty that we needed to keep clear of if we ever wanted to restore purity to our government.
In view of what Trump has been doing in his second term, and the increasingly aggressive partisanship of the current Supreme Court majority, that view now seems naive.
The purity viewpoint has already begun to change, as we have seen in the recent gerrymandering battle. Democrats could have clutched their pearls and held onto their purity as Texas made five Democratic seats in Congress vanish. But Gavin Newsom decided to fight fire with fire in California, and the state’s voters backed him up. More recently in Virginia, “centrist” Governor Abigail Spanberger made the same choice, and the electorate of her swing state agreed.
Legal purists worry about the Supreme Court losing authority if it is seen as just another political branch of government. But that’s what it already is, and public respect for it is waning, for good reasons.
We’ve been here before. In 1937, FDR called for a plan to expand the Supreme Court, which had been invalidating just about everything he tried to do. That proposal failed, in that it did not pass Congress. But it also succeeded in making the Court back off.
If Democrats take power again in 2029, a similar strategy is called for: Immediately pass legislation to restore voting rights, and to undo the other excesses of this corrupt Supreme Court. And have a court-expansion proposal ready to vote on if the Court tries to interfere.
The Roberts Court has become the enemy of multi-racial democracy. If we’re going to make up the ground that we’ve lost, and someday go beyond our previous accomplishments to achieve the democratic republic Americans have long envisioned, we’re not just going to have to overcome white supremacists or Republicans or oligarchs. We’re going to have to overcome a corrupt, partisan, racist Supreme Court as well.
And we shall overcome.
[1] I use the word corrupt carefully. It would be one thing if Roberts and the conservative majority that has been built around him professed some different-but-arguable legal theory that made the VRA unconstitutional or unenforceable. But I’ve been reading these decisions since Shelby County in 2013, and none of them make a recognizable legal argument. They are simply results that the Court majority wants. Josh Marshall explains:
In our thinned out political discourse people often use the term “corruption” to refer only to venal corruption – bribes, conflicts of interest mostly involving money, kept Justices like Clarence Thomas. That is neither the only nor the most significant form of corruption. In most cases venal corruption is significantly self-correcting. It gets exposed and prosecuted. The more general meaning of corruption is when a form of rot takes over an office or institution because of systemic and ingrained abuses of power. That is the case with the Supreme Court and it’s especially dangerous with the Supreme Court because a mix of history and restraint have left very few checks on its abuses. The Supreme Court is given specific powers to achieve specific ends. Over the last 15 years it has assumed vast new powers and used them consistently for anti-constitutional ends. Far from interpreting or defending the constitution it is at war with it.
[2] Justice Kagan’s dissent nails this perfectly:
So the majority moves on again, now to a grab-bag of “developments” that it somehow thinks license it to rewrite a statute. The majority first summons the slogan of Shelby County, in which the Court ordained itself the arbiter of when civil rights laws are no longer needed. “ ‘[T]hings have changed dramatically,’ ” today’s majority echoes, pointing to increases in African American voting registration and to the success of “ ‘African-Americans attain[ing] political office’ ”—“particularly in the South, where many §2 suits arise.” No doubt that is so, in large measure because of the Voting Rights Act. But it is a separate question whether those gains will endure once the Act’s protections are gone. See Shelby County, 570 U. S., at 590 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting) (noting the fallacy of “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet”). And surely—but apparently not—the proper actor to answer that question is Congress. … It is for the people’s representatives in Congress to decide when the Nation need no longer worry about the dilution of minority voting strength.
Every device of which human ingenuity is capable has been used to deny this right. The Negro citizen may go to register only to be told that the day is wrong, or the hour is late, or the official in charge is absent. And if he persists, and if he manages to present himself to the registrar, he may be disqualified because he did not spell out his middle name or because he abbreviated a word on the application. And if he manages to fill out an application he is given a test. The registrar is the sole judge of whether he passes this test. He may be asked to recite the entire Constitution, or explain the most complex provisions of state law. And even a college degree cannot be used to prove that he can read and write. For the fact is that the only way to pass these barriers is to show a white skin.
Experience has clearly shown that the existing process of law cannot overcome systematic and ingenious discrimination. No law that we now have on the books–and I have helped to put three of them there–can ensure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny it.
So the VRA was designed to go beyond “the existing process of law”. That is precisely what Roberts, Alito, and their allies have undone, because (in their judgment and their judgment alone) “things have changed”.
[4] It’s tempting to give a pass to the Republican judges who didn’t write on this topic: Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett. But they had to see the logical holes in this argument, and they then chose to vote for it without posting a dissent on any particular.
Can democracy flourish, or even survive, if two-thirds of the justices on the Supreme Court don’t believe in it?
One of the great moments in American politics happened on March 15, 1965. It was barely a week since “Bloody Sunday“, when Alabama state police attacked civil rights demonstrators trying to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma.
Police (and non-police actors like slave patrols or the Ku Klux Klan) had been beating up Black people for over 100 years, but this time it was on TV, where the whole nation could see it. Nonviolent protesters had brought the reality of oppression into the nation’s living rooms: White people could maintain their dominance, but only by being villains, by brutalizing people who posed no threat.
There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. …
What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
And we shall overcome.
Johnson backed those words up by proposing the Voting Rights Act, which he signed into law a few months later.
Immediate and long-term perspectives The decision the Supreme Court released Wednesday, Louisiana v Callais (called just “Callais” in most media coverage), requires explanation both in an immediate and a long-term sense. Immediately, it blesses a practice the VRA was passed to eliminate: “cracking” minority communities and spreading them among multiple districts so that all (or nearly all) districts have a White majority. Or, looked at from the other side, Callais makes illegal the practice of intentionally gathering minority voters into a district where they might form a majority and elect a candidate of their own choosing.
Possibly immediately (if Louisiana can get away with the redistricting it now wants to do even after some absentee votes in its primary have already been mailed, and if other southern states can follow suit), but certainly by 2028, red states in the Deep South will redraw their maps so that maybe ten or so Black congresspeople are gerrymandered out of their jobs. By 2029, the congressional delegations of many Southern states may be as lily-white as they were before the VRA passed in 1965.
Bad as that outcome is, you can’t appreciate the full horror of this decision without seeing the larger context: Callais is the culmination of John Roberts’ 13-year program to repeal the VRA by judicial fiat, in contravention of the intention of the Congresses that passed it and kept renewing it. During those years, a series of corrupt decisions [1] have built on each other to get us where we are today: It is now hard to imagine any state action — no matter how racist — that could be reversed by bringing that state to court under the VRA.
In 2013’s Shelby County decision, Roberts threw out Section 5 of the VRA. Section 5 required a list of states with a history of Jim Crow election practices to get any changes to their election rules pre-cleared by the federal Justice Department. Roberts decided that this provision (which had been re-authorized by Congress as recently as 2006 and had been upheld in numerous Supreme Court precedents) violated the “equal sovereignty of the states”. He got around the precedential history by saying “things have changed dramatically” since the first version of the VRA was passed in 1965.
Here’s what I had to say about that at the time (in a piece I demurely titled “This Court Sucks“):
“Things have changed” is not a legal argument. It’s a fine point to make on a blog or at a dinner party, but a Supreme Court justice has to do better than that.
If Roberts were being a real judge here, he’d spell out what “equal sovereignty” has and hasn’t meant in American legal history. He’d enunciate an abstract standard by which Jim Crow was “exceptional” in 1965 and which justified the steps taken then. He’d explain how that standard was violated by the renewal of the VRA in 2006. And he’d lay down a set of conditions that Congress would need to satisfy to make the VRA acceptable today. (If you want to see what a real legal opinion looks like, read Justice Ginsburg’s dissent. Whether you agree with her or not, she is clearly doing something far more rigorous than what Roberts is doing.)
Roberts doesn’t do any of that. The VRA was vaguely justified in 1965 and is vaguely unjustified now, because “things have changed”. If I were a congressman, I would have no idea how to revise the VRA so that it passes constitutional muster. If Congress does revise it, lower court judges who rule on it will just be guessing about its constitutionality. It will have to go back to the Supreme Court before anyone knows whether it’s really a law again, because there are no standards in Roberts’ opinion by which a revision can be judged.
This isn’t law. It’s politics. It’s mush.
The mush has continued since. If Shelby County eliminated blocking racist election laws before they take effect, the Brnovich decision in 2021 made it harder to use Section 2 of the VRA to challenge such laws after they take effect. On a parallel track, the Rucho decision in 2019 said that partisan gerrymandering cases were “nonjusticiable”. In other words, partisan gerrymandering might be an unsavory practice, but neither the laws nor the Constitution give the courts power to do anything about it.
Sleight of hand. And that brings us to Wednesday’s Callais decision, written by Justice Alito. Once again, we are told that “things have changed”, so laws protecting minority voting rights are no longer necessary. [2] That sets up two legal sleights of hand: intent, and the confusion of partisan with racial gerrymandering.
One issue has run through the history of the VRA’s interpretation: Does the VRA only outlaw intentionally racist election practices? Or does it outlaw practices that have the effect of disenfranchising minority voters or diminishing their power, regardless of motive? The difference is important, because intent can be hard to prove in court. Many of the Jim Crow practices didn’t explicitly mention race: Poll taxes might be justified as a way to raise revenue, and the effect of discouraging poor people from voting, or the fact that Black voters are disproportionately poor — that might be portrayed as entirely accidental. Literacy tests might simply be a means of raising the quality of the average voter, unrelated to an educational system that favors White children. And so on.
This kind of thing was well understood even in 1965. [3]
As Justice Kagan explains in her dissent, the Court hobbled VRA enforcement by shifting to an “intent” interpretation in a 1980 decision. So Congress rewrote the VRA in 1982 to specify an “effects” interpretation. Alito denies that he is reinstating the “intent” view in contravention of Congress, but he is. He explicitly writes:
§2 of the VRA requires evidence giving rise to a strong inference of intentional discrimination.
The second sleight-of-hand makes use of the corrupt Rucho decision on partisan gerrymandering.
The upshot of Rucho was that, as far as federal law is concerned, a state legislature may use partisan advantage as a factor in redistricting. And litigants cannot circumvent that rule by dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb. Imposing liability “based on the racial effects of a political gerrymander in a jurisdiction in which race and partisan preference are very closely correlated . . . would, if accepted, provide a convenient way for future litigants and lower courts to sidestep our holding in Rucho that partisan-gerrymandering claims are not justiciable in federal court.” Alexander, 602 U. S., at 21. “Instead of claiming that a State impermissibly set a target Republican-Democratic breakdown, a plaintiff could simply reverse-engineer the partisan data into racial data and argue that the State impermissibly set a particular [racial] target. Our decisions cannot be evaded with such ease.”
Since intent is what matters, and a pro-Republican gerrymander looks just like a White-racist gerrymander, it’s impossible to prove racist (rather than partisan) intent. So the VRA’s protection against racial gerrymanders — effectively the last piece of the VRA still standing — is effectively dead.
But Kagan’s dissent calls Alito on his shenanigans:
[T]o its (modest) credit, the Rucho Court did not pretend that partisan gerrymanders were something in need of safeguarding. To the contrary, the Court conceded that they were “incompatible with democratic principles” and “lead to results that reasonably seem unjust.” (The Court’s rationale was only that federal courts lack competence to deal with gerrymanders, not that they were protected by law or beneficial as policy.) Today, though, the majority straight-facedly holds that the Voting Rights Act must be brought low to make the world safe for partisan gerrymanders. For how else, the majority reasons, can we preserve the authority of States to engage in this practice than by stripping minority citizens of their rights to an equal political process?
Rucho wrung its hands over partisan gerrymandering as a disreputable practice, and claimed only that the Court had no power to interfere with it. But now, Alito presents partisan gerrymandering as a state’s right, which Congress dare not impinge on and the Court is obligated to protect. There is, of course, no legal argument to back up that claim. It’s just how the Court’s Republican majority wants things to be, so Alito has slipped it between the lines. [4]
In fact, Alito has the logic exactly backwards: He says courts can’t throw out racial gerrymanders because they might accidentally throw out partisan gerrymanders. But the VRA says courts must throw out partisan gerrymanders if they have the same effect as a racial gerrymander. That’s the law as written, but under this Court, written law doesn’t mean much.
How to handle a corrupt court. Not long ago, when Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, some members of the party suggested expanding the Supreme Court to 13 justices, so that four new justices could outvote the corrupt Republican ones. This proposal never got close to implementation, because it was widely viewed as too radical. The party’s center saw raw exercises of power like that distasteful, as something dirty that we needed to keep clear of if we ever wanted to restore purity to our government.
In view of what Trump has been doing in his second term, and the increasingly aggressive partisanship of the current Supreme Court majority, that view now seems naive.
The purity viewpoint has already begun to change, as we have seen in the recent gerrymandering battle. Democrats could have clutched their pearls and held onto their purity as Texas made five Democratic seats in Congress vanish. But Gavin Newsom decided to fight fire with fire in California, and the state’s voters backed him up. More recently in Virginia, “centrist” Governor Abigail Spanberger made the same choice, and the electorate of her swing state agreed.
Legal purists worry about the Supreme Court losing authority if it is seen as just another political branch of government. But that’s what it already is, and public respect for it is waning, for good reasons.
We’ve been here before. In 1937, FDR called for a plan to expand the Supreme Court, which had been invalidating just about everything he tried to do. That proposal failed, in that it did not pass Congress. But it also succeeded in making the Court back off.
If Democrats take power again in 2029, a similar strategy is called for: Immediately pass legislation to restore voting rights, and to undo the other excesses of this corrupt Supreme Court. And have a court-expansion proposal ready to vote on if the Court tries to interfere.
The Roberts Court has become the enemy of multi-racial democracy. If we’re going to make up the ground that we’ve lost, and someday go beyond our previous accomplishmens to achieve the democratic republic Americans have long envisioned, we’re not just going to have to overcome white supremacists or Republicans or oligarchs. We’re going to have to overcome a corrupt, partisan, racist Supreme Court as well.
And we shall overcome.
[1] I use the word corrupt carefully. It would be one thing if Roberts and the conservative majority that has been built around him professed some different-but-arguable legal theory that made the VRA unconstitutional or unenforceable. But I’ve been reading these decisions since Shelby County in 2013, and none of them make a recognizable legal argument. They are simply results that the Court majority wants. Josh Marshall explains:
In our thinned out political discourse people often use the term “corruption” to refer only to venal corruption – bribes, conflicts of interest mostly involving money, kept Justices like Clarence Thomas. That is neither the only nor the most significant form of corruption. In most cases venal corruption is significantly self-correcting. It gets exposed and prosecuted. The more general meaning of corruption is when a form of rot takes over an office or institution because of systemic and ingrained abuses of power. That is the case with the Supreme Court and it’s especially dangerous with the Supreme Court because a mix of history and restraint have left very few checks on its abuses. The Supreme Court is given specific powers to achieve specific ends. Over the last 15 years it has assumed vast new powers and used them consistently for anti-constitutional ends. Far from interpreting or defending the constitution it is at war with it.
[2] Justice Kagan’s dissent nails this perfectly:
So the majority moves on again, now to a grab-bag of “developments” that it somehow thinks license it to rewrite a statute. The majority first summons the slogan of Shelby County, in which the Court ordained itself the arbiter of when civil rights laws are no longer needed. “ ‘[T]hings have changed dramatically,’ ” today’s majority echoes, pointing to increases in African American voting registration and to the success of “ ‘African-Americans attain[ing] political office’ ”—“particularly in the South, where many §2 suits arise.” No doubt that is so, in large measure because of the Voting Rights Act. But it is a separate question whether those gains will endure once the Act’s protections are gone. See Shelby County, 570 U. S., at 590 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting) (noting the fallacy of “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet”). And surely—but apparently not—the proper actor to answer that question is Congress. … It is for the people’s representatives in Congress to decide when the Nation need no longer worry about the dilution of minority voting strength.
Every device of which human ingenuity is capable has been used to deny this right. The Negro citizen may go to register only to be told that the day is wrong, or the hour is late, or the official in charge is absent. And if he persists, and if he manages to present himself to the registrar, he may be disqualified because he did not spell out his middle name or because he abbreviated a word on the application. And if he manages to fill out an application he is given a test. The registrar is the sole judge of whether he passes this test. He may be asked to recite the entire Constitution, or explain the most complex provisions of state law. And even a college degree cannot be used to prove that he can read and write. For the fact is that the only way to pass these barriers is to show a white skin.
Experience has clearly shown that the existing process of law cannot overcome systematic and ingenious discrimination. No law that we now have on the books–and I have helped to put three of them there–can ensure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny it.
So the VRA was designed to go beyond “the existing process of law”. That is precisely what Roberts, Alito, and their allies have undone, because (in their judgment and their judgment alone) “things have changed”.
[4] It’s tempting to give a pass to the Republican judges who didn’t write on this topic: Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett. But they had to see the logical holes in this argument, and they then chose to vote for it without posting a dissent on any particular.
Ordinarily, things that you see coming aren’t shocking. Tax day, your best friend’s wedding, the visit your mother booked in March — whether you’re looking forward to it or dreading it, it’s not going to be shocking.
People who watch the Supreme Court like I do have seen the Callais decision coming for a long time. John Roberts and his conservative majority have been out to scuttle the Voting Rights Act for more than a decade. They’ve been chipping away at this section, then that one — always reassuring the public that it didn’t really matter, because the rest of the VRA was still there to protect minority rights, at least until the next case.
It was only a matter of time before they finished it off, and Calais looked like the case to do it. And yet, reading Justice Alito’s majority opinion this week was shocking all the same. The bad history, the gaping holes in his logic, the complete non sequiturs, but most of all the arrogation of Congress’ power into the Supreme Court — I could still be shocked by the level of corruption that has gotten into our highest court. They’re not even trying to do law any more, or to convince us that they are.
So I had to write about it. This week’s featured post “What to do about a lawless Supreme Court?” should be out by around 10 or so EDT.
The weekly summary has another court case to discuss: the Fifth Circuit’s attempt to keep the primary abortion drug from passing through the mail. And then there’s the complete joke Todd Blanche is making of the Justice Department with its absurd indictment of James Comey for posting a picture of seashells on a beach. The Iran War continues to drag on, because Trump can neither win it nor admit defeat. And that means gas prices will continue to rise and the economy will suffer. Trump’s popularity will continue to tank and it will become ever more essential for him to find ways to cheat in the fall elections.
Expect to see the weekly summary around noon or so.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. Now that gerrymandering has failed as a strategy for hanging onto power, I eagerly await Trump’s next move.
Climate change. Check out George Manbiot’s column on the possible collapse of the the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.
The Iran/Lebanon War. Formal peace talks aren’t happening. Saturday, Trump told Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to stay home for now. Iran is offering to re-open the Strait of Hormuz to end the war, essentially offering Trump no gain from it.
Ukraine. Here’s the Institute for the Study of War’s current update.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about gerrymandering
and the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner
Saturday, a gunman fired several shots during the dinner, which President Trump and many other administration officials were attending. The shots were audible inside the ballroom, but none of the guests were injured.
From a pure how-could-this-happen point of view, I found the analysis at the Doomsday Scenario blog informative and down to Earth. Garrett Graff is a journalist who has attended past WHC dinners and has written extensively about presidential security. He thinks the security plan worked pretty well: It’s unreasonable to expect the Secret Service to lock down an entire hotel that has multiple unrelated events and guests, so the goal is to stop would-be attackers well before they get within range of the president. That’s what happened Saturday.
My political response is that I’m glad the attack was unsuccessful. Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I consider the Trump regime to be the greatest threat to American democracy since the Civil War, and I have no great affection for Trump as a person. But I think we’re on track to restore the constitutional order through the electoral system, as the Founders intended and as Hungary has recently done. Anything that sends us off on a violent trajectory is a risk I’d rather not take.
Speaking frankly, the attack was fortuitously timed for Trump, perhaps breaking a cycle that sees his popularity touch new lows with each poll. Given the boost his 2024 campaign got from a failed assassination attempt, it’s hard not to be suspicious. But I’m not going to push any conspiracy theories unless substantial evidence presents itself. I’d be far more suspicious if the shooter hadn’t survived to tell his own story.
Dean Blundell (who is a little too rabidly anti-Trump for my taste) noted that it only took minutes to start the talking point that “This is why the White House needs its own ballroom.”
Predictably, the media is asking Democrats if they regret their anti-Trump rhetoric, and completely ignoring the overall rhetorical environment. Trump himself is by far the greatest source of inflammatory rhetoric, often referring to his opponents or critics as insane or treasonous.
and the war
Not much new to say. Trump continues to want to dictate terms to Iran as if he had won the war. Iran doesn’t feel defeated and won’t be dictated to. The Obama agreement that Trump tore up looks better and better all the time.
Everyone more-or-less agrees on the basic facts: The SPLC paid people to infiltrate various right-wing and white-supremacist groups, as it has done for decades. Since their agents were undercover, the SPLC didn’t publicize their work. DOJ is charging that this was a fraud against SPLC’s contributors. I haven’t given money to the SPLC in years, but I’m still probably fairly representative of their donors. I would not feel defrauded.
Remember the Afghans who are in trouble with the Taliban because they helped us? We’ve got 1100 of them housed at a military base in Qatar, and we’ve made them this amazing offer: Go to the Congo or go home to the Taliban.
Canary Media makes the case against biofuels, which sound like a great idea but often aren’t. Not only do biofuel crops (like corn) have a high carbon footprint in the US, but internationally they encourage cropland expansion that results in deforestation. Sadly, both parties have latched onto biofuels as a good idea.
Democrats need a new approach to agriculture, focused less on the 1% of Americans who farm and more on the 100% who eat. That would mean redistributing less money from ordinary taxpayers to the biggest farmers who grow the most common row crops, while also opposing the tariffs, price supports, and biofuel mandates that raise prices at the supermarket. Let Trump stand for giving farmers “much better than a level playing field.” Democrats should stand with everybody else.
Small farmers are in trouble this year: Thanks to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, fertilizer and diesel fuel costs are way up. Most farmers voted for Trump.
Trump and his allies have been having a hard time in court. Laura Loomer’s $150 million lawsuit against Bill Maher (for saying on his comedy show that Trump “might be” f**king Loomer) was thrown out — at least partly because of evidence the claim was true.
And a federal judge appears skeptical of Trump’s $10 billion shake-down of the Treasury. He’s suing the IRS because some of his tax information got leaked to the media during his first term. Conceivably there might be damage there, but nothing like $10 billion. But that’s not what’s bothering the judge: Since Trump oversees the IRS, he controls both sides of the litigation. He is essentially in a position to award himself money.
The No Kings protester who dressed as a penis holding a “No Dick Tater” sign is not guilty of whatever police in Fairhope, Alabama tried to charge her with. Attempting to show the woman was trying to get arrested, the prosecution called her husband to the stand as a surprise witness, and asked if he had brought bail money to the protest.
“I always make sure I have bail money!” Fletcher replied emphatically, as if this should be the most obvious thing in the world. Did he have bail money on him now? “Yeah!” Fletcher exclaimed, then gestured broadly. “With this many cops around? Come on.” The room erupted with laughter.
One of the first things President Trump did in his second term was to “declare that an invasion is ongoing at the southern border” and respond by directing “that entry into the United States of such aliens be suspended until I issue a finding that the invasion at the southern border has ceased.” His order also denied the right of migrants at the border or having entered the US to contest removal by applying for asylum.
A federal court previously found that the president had overstepped the bounds of his power, and Friday the DC Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.
we hold that the Proclamation and Guidance are unlawful insofar as they circumvent Congress’s carefully crafted removal procedures and cast aside federal laws that afford individuals the opportunity to apply and be considered for a grant of asylum or withholding of removal.
This topic is a bit messy to discuss, because several things are true at the same time.
Our laws about asylum exist for very good reasons.
Our current asylum process doesn’t work well and is open to abuse.
Processes established by law need to be changed by Congress, not by the President.
Why do we grant asylum? Asylum allows people escaping oppression in one country to seek refuge in another.
Any discussion of asylum needs to start with the voyage of the St. Louis, an ocean liner in the Hamburg-Amerika fleet. After Kristallnacht, many German Jews decided that it was not safe to stay in Germany. The St. Louis left Hamburg on May 13, 1939 with 937 passengers, nearly all of them Jews. The original destination was Havana, where many of the passengers hoped to wait until they could be granted admission to the United States. But the Cuban government allowed only 28 of them to land. The rest remained on the ship, which then tried to go to Miami, where the passengers were also denied entry. (Direct appeals to President Roosevelt went unanswered.) The St. Louis then returned to Europe. Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France accepted most of the passengers, at least temporarily. But few managed to get out of Belgium, the Netherlands, and France before the Germans conquered those countries. Eventually, 254 of the St. Louis passengers died in the Holocaust.
Often when we look back at the Holocaust, we ask “Why didn’t more Jews leave while they could?” The answer is that many did try, but had nowhere to go. Hundreds of Jews who would ultimately die in the Holocaust made it as far as Miami’s harbor, but were sent back.
Much of the world made a Never Again pledge in response to the horror of the Holocaust. That sentiment got institutionalized in several international agreements, like the Convention on Refugees, the Convention Against Torture, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The United States is party to all these agreements, and Congress has passed laws to implement the promises we made there. When the Trump regime announced that it would no longer accept applications for asylum, it was violating not only US laws, but the treaties we had signed.
I think now in the year 2025 – we’re a quarter of the way through the 21st century – we take a step back and we see that there are massive migratory flows taking place, and a lot of times massive amounts of people are claiming asylum. In our system at least, when these claims get adjudicated, 90-plus percent of people are found not to be eligible for asylum. And we all know this kind of abuse is happening, frankly. And people who are economic migrants are coming in, in our country, saying that they are – that they should be given asylum. Our problem is when you have hundreds of thousands of people who arrive all at once and claim this, that really requires an individualized adjudication.
So now, we are in a sense saying, okay, well, please, you take a number and we will be back for your individualized interview in six years. And in the meantime, people can live in our country legally. They can start – they might get married. They can work. And so in a sense the migration – the asylum system has become a huge loophole in our migration laws. And we just have to be realistic about this, right? And I think the UN has a responsibility – just as it was instrumental, I think, in encouraging countries to adopt these kind of laws, I think we have to be realistic that these laws are now being abused. And we have to just acknowledge that.
Now, this is a Trump official, and the Trump regime is famous for fudging numbers. So ignore some of Landau’s specifics, like the 90% and the six years. But here’s the liberal Brookings Institute saying something similar:
Further complicating the task of managing the southern border was an historic change in the nature and sources of unauthorized border crossers. During the final decades of the 20th century, most of such crossers were working-age young Mexican men. But during the current century, the mix shifted to families from Central America and beyond who sought asylum in the United States by claiming a “reasonable fear of persecution” in their country of origin.
The evidence suggests that most asylum seekers were fleeing poverty, lack of economic mobility, crime, and political disorder — all good reasons for leaving but these do not meet the standard for being granted asylum. Nevertheless, the law requires that asylum claims be assessed on a case-by-case basis, and as the number of cases rose sharply, the institutions responsible for adjudicating them were overwhelmed. During the past decade, the share of immigration cases resolved each year has fallen by half, and the backlog of pending cases rose from about 400,000 in 2013 to more than 3.1 million by the end of 2023. Few were held in detention for long periods; most were released into the U.S. with court dates far in the future, a policy that critics denounced as “catch and release.”
So the gist is: Yes, you’re poor and you long for the kinds of economic opportunity you might find in the US. But you’re not the future Holocaust victim our asylum laws were meant for.
The problem with a system like this is that once the problem becomes known, it gets worse: The swamped immigration courts result in longer delays, which encourage more people to apply even if they don’t have a good case. And that swamps the courts further.
What to do. Obviously, we need to process asylum cases faster. If we could do that, the motivation to file a flimsy asylum case would diminish, reversing the vicious cycle we’re currently in.
There are two ways to do this:
Create more immigration courts to work through the backlog faster.
Streamline the process so that each case takes less court time.
Each way has a downside: More courts require more money, and a streamlined process may not give asylum seekers a fair opportunity to present their cases. So a certain amount of care needs to be taken. But both are preferable to just shutting the door, as Trump wants to do.
In any case, the solution needs to take account of our treaty obligations and the laws Congress has already passed. And that means that Congress has to pass the solution; it can’t just be imposed by the President.
What stands in the way of a legislative solution is that Trump does not know how to make a win-win deal. He wants what he wants, and he wants to get it without giving up anything. But Democrats are going to want things too, like a path to citizenship for the Dreamers and limits on mass deportation. Congress is a place for compromise, and Trump hates compromise.
Partly that’s just him, but it also represents the people who elected him. In 2024, a compromise immigration bill was ready to go through Congress, but Trump urged Republicans to pull out of the deal so that he could have a better issue to run on against Biden or Harris. And before Trump, back in 2013 a carefully crafted bipartisan compromise passed the Senate before House conservatives rejected it. (Arguably, his role in crafting the compromise was what scuttled Marco Rubio’s presidential candidacy in 2016.)
Above all, we need to do something. There are still oppressive governments in the world and still people in need of refuge. When the next St. Louis liner arrives in Miami, we don’t want to turn it away.
Iran is not the only war Trump started, but appears to be losing.
Virginia became the latest state to gerrymander its congressional districts ahead of the midterm elections. Tuesday, a referendum to redraw the state’s maps passed by 3%, 51.5%-48.5%. The likely effect is to turn the current 6-5 Democratic majority in Virginia’s US House delegation into a 10-1 advantage.
Vox estimates that this result puts the Democrats one seat ahead in the redistricting battle that Trump started in Texas. Florida could still tip the balance in the GOP’s favor, but probably not by much. [1]
Prior to the current round, partisan gerrymandering had more or less balanced out: In 2024, Republican House candidates got a small majority of the votes and their party wound up with a small majority of the seats, as they should have.
Republicans have gone to court to prevent Virginia’s new map from taking effect. A circuit-court judge blocked implementation, but was overturned by an appeals court. The case goes to the Virginia Supreme Court today. The deadline for candidates to file to be on the ballot is May 26, so this process can’t take long.
Republicans are asking the courts to throw out 3 million votes in an election that they lost.
For Republicans, democracy is nothing more than a word.
They are content if every person who waited in line to vote or took time off from work to cast their ballot did it for naught. They seek a result that would mean that every election worker who worked the polls wasted their time. They want the people who knocked doors or canvassed on either side of this question to feel as though they have accomplished nothing.
Meanwhile, here’s how the so-called “liberal media” has covered this story.
When Trump started this battle by pushing Texas to redraw it already-gerrymandered maps, hoping to gain five Republican House seats, The Washington Post characterized Democratic opposition as a “freakout”, and reassured its readers that “What’s happening in the Lone Star State is not a threat to democracy.”
But there’s no mystery here, and no hypocrisy to expose. AOC summed up the Republican reaction to the vote as “Wah, wah, wah” and explained the larger context:
Listen, Democrats have attempted and asked Republicans for 10 years to ban partisan gerrymandering. And for 10 years, Republicans have said no. Republicans have fought for partisan gerrymanders across the United States of America, and these are the rules that they have set.
One notable attempt to end gerrymandering was the For the People Act, which Nancy Pelosi pushed through the House, but Republicans filibustered in the Senate. AOC says that deal is still available. [2]
If Republicans decide that they would like to revisit a ban on partisan gerrymandering, I welcome them. We have the bill right here to end this all today. But they don’t want to, because they like pursuing and continuing to enact an unfair electoral landscape, and so we have an obligation to defend ourselves.
This obligation to “defend ourselves” represents a major change in Democratic tactics, beginning with Gavin Newsom’s aggressive response to the Texas gerrymander. Previously, Democrats had tried to cast themselves as the good-government party, avoiding the bad-faith tactics that Republicans have used to seek power. [3]
But perversely, joining Republicans in the gutter may ultimately work a good-government purpose. Now that Republicans realize they could lose too, perhaps a bipartisan consensus against gerrymandering will finally develop.
[1] All such estimates are iffy, because voters may not vote the same way they have in recent elections.
Gerrymandering works by spreading a party’s majority thin to stretch it over more districts. So a miscalculation could result in a previously safe seat flipping.
For example: Suppose a state has a 51-49 partisan majority. The majority party could gerrymander its congressional districts so that each district gives it the same 51-49 advantage, setting up the possibility that it could win all the House seats. However, even a small shift in the political winds could turn the situation around and give the other party all the seats.
This question arises particularly in Texas, where the new maps are based on the 2024 results. However, polls indicate that many Hispanics who voted for Trump in 2024 may regret their vote, or may not see themselves as Republican voters generally. So trying to gain five seats conceivably could result in losing a few seats the GOP had thought were safe.
[2] AOC might have added that liberal Supreme Court judges have tried to find gerrymandering unconstitutional, but conservative justices have supported it, arguing that district maps are a “political question” to be decided perhaps by the very legislatures that have been gerrymandered to lock in one-party rule.
A related court case should be decided soon: In Louisiana v Callais, the Court appears to be ready to drive the final nail into the coffin of the Voting Rights Act. Current interpretations of the VRA require states to draw a certain number of minority-majority districts, so that Black or Hispanic voters have a chance to elect congresspeople to represent their interests. Without this stipulation, a state could spread its minority populations across multiple districts and elect White-only congressional delegations. While this change would likely not take effect until the 2028 elections, it could result in as many as 15 Black House members in the South losing their seats.
[3] For example, Biden re-established the wall between the White House and the Justice Department that Trump had torn down in his first term. Arguably, Merrick Garland’s desire to end DOJ’s politicization is the reason that the Trump indictments appeared so slowly, which allowed him and the partisan Supreme Court to run out the clock.
For the last couple of days, the news has been dominated by the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ dinner Saturday night. But I’m going to just note that event without dwelling on it, because I think we all understand it. And since the shooter failed to get off a shot at the President or any other major official, his attack shouldn’t have any lasting consequences.
More significant was the election result in Virginia, where Democrats passed a redistricting map that is expected to net them four House seats in the fall election. This makes the recent gerrymandering tally just about even, or maybe gives Democrats a small advantage. The entire redistricting battle marks a major change in Democratic strategy, which used to revolve around trying to maintain good-government norms even as Republicans changed the rules around them. So this will be the focus of the first featured post, “Where the Gerrymandering Battle Stands After Virginia”, which should be out shortly.
Something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while is the process for refugees to seek asylum in the US, which has been broken for some while. This has given Trump an opening to fix the problem by breaking the rule of law, in a two-wrongs-should-make-a-right manner. Democrats wind up in a complicated position, because the previous status quo is indefensible, but dictatorship is not the right answer.
This week an appeals court rejected Trump’s asylum-limiting executive order. Ultimately, the Supreme Court will have to decide this issue, but the appellate decision gives me a hook to raise the topic. So the second featured post will discuss asylum, starting with the Holocaust-based reasons our asylum laws exist. That should be out between 10 and 11 EDT.
Finally, the weekly summary will note the WHC dinner shooting, summarize the lack of progress in the Iran War, list a few of the other court cases the Trump regime has lost recently, and cover a few other things. I’ll try to get that out by noon, but it may slip.
Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. The Justice Department is working increasingly hard to support Trump’s conspiracy theories about rigged elections.
Climate change. Rising sea levels is looking like a bigger problem than previously thought.
The Iran/Lebanon war. The Strait is closed again. Trump wants us to believe that he’ll achieve a victory-like peace any day now. But it’s not happening.
Ukraine. Ukraine is coping with its shortage of soldiers by fielding more robots.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about the war
Last week I predicted that Trump’s anti-blockade-blockade would fail to convince Iran’s leaders they are defeated.
In a few days it will be clear that this move didn’t work either, so Trump will go back to threatening to kill Iran’s “whole civilization“.
We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!
I see no end in sight here. Trump won’t stop the bombing until he has an agreement he can spin as a victory, and there is no victory to be had. So he will keep doing what he’s been doing: destroying stuff and killing people, then stopping the bombing and announcing that Iran has made concessions it hasn’t actually made, then getting angry when Iran doesn’t do what he said they would do, then resuming the destruction and killing.
I am amazed the news media and the stock market keep taking Trump’s statements seriously. Thursday, for example, he claimed Iran had agreed to give up its enriched uranium. The claim got lots of headlines and a rise out of the stock market, which set records on Friday. But it was just a fantasy, so Sunday we’re back to threatening to commit war crimes.
Meanwhile, Trump’s approval is not exactly “cratering”, as some claim. Rather, it’s just inexorably headed downward, week by week. It’s not any one development that’s turning people around. Rather, it’s the unending bad decisions and outrageous behavior. Every day brings something new. Half the country now disapproves “strongly” of his overall performance, with another 13% disapproving “somewhat”.
and Trump vs. the Pope
I would like to ignore the Trump-versus-Pope story, because it’s another one of those stories that gets people wound up for no real purpose. (I mean: If Trump were generally governing justly and well, but just couldn’t get along with the Pope, it wouldn’t bother me.) But I have to comment on the ridiculous ways Trump’s sycophants have tried to support him. Nominally a Catholic himself, J. D. Vance warned:
I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.
To understand why the USA is where it is today, all you need to do is see that Trump cannot tolerate even the mildest, insightful criticism from the Pope, but Trump will allow Putin to humiliate him deeply and constantly, while still craving Putin’s approval.
and you also might be interested in …
As predicted last week, Eric Swalwell hasn’t just ended his campaign for governor of California, he has resigned from Congress. Simultaneously, Republican Tony Gonzales resigned. He’s the guy whose female staffer committed suicide after Gonzales pressured her for sex. The cases proceeded at very different speeds: The Swalwell allegations only surfaced about a week before his resignation. Gonzales had been in trouble since September.
Remember the Dreamers, undocumented people who were brought to America as small children and know no other country? Giving them a path to citizenship has been popular since the Obama administration first offered them protection. Well, Trump’s ICE has deported 174 of them.
ICE is doing a better job of avoiding headlines than it did pre-Minneapolis. But it is still a lawless gang of thugs. A federal judge in the Eastern District of New York explains his release order for two men unlawfully detained:
Respondents [i.e., ICE] have arrested individuals, detained them, and then afterwards issued arrest warrants that document the basis for the arrest. Sadly, ICE’s own “testimony confirmed that this illegal practice has become standard procedure for ICE enforcement efforts in this district.” … Police and law enforcement cannot operate as roving bands, detaining individuals, figuring out the reasons later, and papering over their failures afterwards. This sadly is the practice in many other parts of the world. But in the United States, the law prohibits such conduct.
Charter schools have to maintain a lot of public school standards (like admitting anyone), but they benefit from massive donations from rich supporters. They have better, newer facilities than legacy public schools.
Private schools can pick and choose students, so they get state money while avoiding expensive special ed students and students considered “disruptive”. They grow, and also become a destination for white flight, as well as for parents who consider the public schools dangerous.
Public schools lose students and funding, and have to worry about closing.
The Trump regime is stacking the deck in order to get more indictments of his perceived enemies. They have defined a “grand conspiracy” case that claims all the investigations of Trump’s illegal acts were part of a single plot, and they are pushing that case in a Florida district where corrupt Trump judge Aileen Cannon can oversee it. They’ve fired the career prosecutor and replaced her with a Trump puppet.
Utah is constructing a 1300-bed facility for the homeless. It’s seven miles from Salt Lake City’s center and isn’t planned to include public transportation. Common Dreams fears it could become a forced-labor camp.
Trump voters are beginning to regret their decisions. But that doesn’t automatically mean they’ll turn around. What Hungary can teach us about the full process.
I could list a dozen articles making these points, and you’ve probably seen a number without my pointing them out. But the most interesting to me was Patrice Mersault’s “I Lied My Way into a MAGA Focus Group” (parts 1 and 2).
In a nutshell, Mersault (a pseudonym taken from a Camus novel) kept getting rejected for focus groups when he (the Camus character is male, so I’ll use male pronouns) answered questionnaires honestly, so he created an imaginary MAGAt in his mind and answered as that character. He got in, with the idea that he would pretend to turn against Trump and see how many members of the focus group he could take with him.
Not a good plan, exactly. More of a concept of a plan. The idea was to blend in, say the right things, earn a little credibility, and then, at the right moment, turn. Say what I actually think. Disrupt the room.
But once the conversation moved past why everyone in the room voted for Trump—the familiar grievances: the immigrants, the stolen elections, the belief that cruelty is somehow a form of patriotism—the room didn’t behave the way I expected it to.
It turned out that the other 11 members of the group were fed up with Trump too, even though they had all voted for him three times. (I suppose we have to consider the possibility that Mersault’s entire account is a fiction, but I’ve decided to take it seriously.) Asked to give Trump a letter grade, the participants gave him six D’s and six F’s.
Why? Food and gas prices. The war. Worries about maintaining Social Security and Medicare. Lack of jobs. Epstein.
Who knows how they felt about Trump’s outrageous tweets and behaviors a year ago? But now that they were criticizing him, they didn’t like his manner either. The rudeness, the divisiveness, seeing everyone who doesn’t agree as an enemy. The sense that everything is about him. They didn’t try to defend it; instead, they brought up those criticisms themselves.
So far, so good. But Mersault points out that the voters themselves don’t seem to have changed. He characterized them at the beginning as having a vague and inchoate sense of grievance:
The sense that something had been taken from them. Or was being taken. Or was about to be taken any minute now, unless someone stepped in and stopped it.
The grievances manifested as discontent with a familiar set of issues:
The pandemic. The border. The economy. Woke culture. The various Democratic alternatives, all described with varying degrees of contempt.
None of that has reversed. Nobody had seen the light of liberal wokeness and was saying, “I see now that Black and brown immigrants really don’t do me harm” or “I guess transgender folks aren’t as different as I thought they were” or “Women and minorities do need some government protection”.
They had looked at Trump as “a tool”, someone who would fight back against the forces that they think are taking away their country and their future. They still have that sense of grievance, and they are still looking for a tool to break a system that they see working against them.
The question is: What will they do now? The focus group showed no enthusiasm for a Trump successor like Vance or Rubio. But what are their alternatives? Find some new hero? Stay home? Switch parties?
The Hungarian example. For years, the Orbán regime in Hungary has been a model for the American Right: Get into office and start changing the rules. Get control of the media. Corrupt the courts. Destroy the independence of the universities. Use government favors and regulations as carrots and sticks to make businesses line up with you. Gerrymander. Make voting easy for your voters but hard for opposition voters.
For a long time the Orbán program worked. But then it stopped. On April 12, Hungarian voters decisively rejected Orbán’s party, in such numbers that the tilted playing field couldn’t save him.
The opposition leader Peter Magyar did something American Democrats would like to do: He didn’t just raise dissatisfaction with the Orbán regime. (In fact, he didn’t have to, it was already there.) And he didn’t just get dissatisfied Orbán voters to stay home. He got some large number of those voters to vote for him.
Americans have been trying to read that election for clues about strategy. Maybe, after years of being a model of how a right-wing authoritarian regime rises, Hungary could provide an example of how a right-wing authoritarian regime falls.
She makes a few salient points about how Orbán came to power and stayed there: Hungarians were really fed up with the previous government, so Orbán represented a genuine uprising. And once he got into power and controlled the media, he made sure that every potential opposition leader was “pre-smeared”. Simply proposing to run so-and-so evoked a reaction of “Oh, not him again.”
But Magyar came from nowhere and represented no previous political movement.
Magyar Péter broke this because there was nothing to work with. He was, until early 2024, essentially unknown — a private citizen with no political career, no failed government, no scandal that could be weaponized. When the attacks came, as they did immediately and ferociously, they simply didn’t stick. Not because he was beyond criticism, but because what was said about him was, from the beginning, simply false. Without a kernel of truth at the center, the whole construction kept collapsing. Voters could feel the difference, even when they couldn’t articulate it. …
He also did something that sounds simple and is extraordinarily hard: he showed up. Over two years, he visited more than 700 settlements, some of them six times. Exhausting just to watch: the energy he put into it was extraordinary. He went to places the opposition had never reached, and talked to people who had never heard an alternative from someone standing in front of them, looking them in the eye. You cannot fact-check someone out of a worldview. But presence, over time, creates the conditions where doubt becomes possible. That is slower and less satisfying than a viral moment. It is also what actually works.
She identifies two deadly ideas: that the regime is inevitable, and that society is irreparably broken into two enemy camps.
The [authoritarian] method is consistent everywhere it has been deployed. Find the genuine fault lines in a society: urban versus rural, educated versus working class, the people who feel left behind versus the people who seem not to notice. Pry those lines open. Make sure every election is a referendum on identity and culture rather than on whether the pension is adequate or the hospital is functional. Keep the two halves of society furious at each other, convinced the other half is the enemy, and make sure your coalition is always the slightly larger half. The culture war is not a byproduct of this politics. It is the mechanism.
Like Trump, Orbán had no authentic convictions.
This is worth understanding, because it changes what you’re actually fighting. You are not fighting a true believer. You are fighting a machine that is very good at finding the line that divides society just enough – and parking itself on the larger side of it.
And this seems like the key point:
The grievances that get exploited are real – that is what makes it work. The sense of being left behind, of being looked down on, of watching your children leave and not come back – that is not manufactured resentment. It is legitimate. The autocrat does not invent it. He finds it, names it, and then aims it in a direction that serves him rather than the people experiencing it. … You cannot say that grievance doesn’t exist because it doesn’t affect you. The autocrat has a ready-made answer for it – simple, emotionally satisfying, and wrong. The alternative is to have a better answer, not to pretend the question isn’t being asked.
The opposition also has to avoid “the performance of contempt”.
The moment you hate your fellow citizen more than you hate the system that is robbing you both, the system has already half-won. … The lesson, though, is not simply that these systems can be beaten. It is about how. You cannot win by playing from their script. The moment you accept their frame – that your society is divided into two enemy camps, one good and one irredeemably wrong – you have lost something you won’t easily recover. The autocrat wins not just when he stays in power, but when he gets you to see your neighbor as your enemy. When the hatred flows horizontally, between citizens, rather than upward, toward the people actually responsible.
The alternative is simpler and harder to hold onto: we belong to each other. We love the same country. We want it to be better. We disagree -sometimes bitterly, sometimes irreconcilably- about how. That disagreement is not a war: it is politics, it is normal and it is supposed to happen.
What I learned in Europe. I spent the first week or so of April on a Viking Danube cruise. I went to Prague, Nuremberg, Vienna, Budapest, and a few other places. I walked through a lot of museums and talked to a lot of tour guides, but I’m going to resist the temptation to claim that I’ve become some kind of expert on Central Europe. I speak only a smattering of German, and no Czech or Hungarian at all. Most of the locals I spoke to (in English) probably aren’t typical or representative. So don’t interpret my trip as some kind of research project. I certainly don’t.
But the Danube trip did give me a good opportunity to meditate on America, and to see patterns in other societies that I should have recognized in my own.
On a walking tour of Prague, we eventually wound up at the castle that had been the seat of the German-speaking Habsburg emperor for a number of years around 1600 or so. The castle itself goes back well into the Middle Ages. While recounting some medieval transfer of power, the guide said, “And that was the last of our kings who spoke Czech.”
That sentence stuck in my mind. One perpetual theme of MAGA influencers is that the ruling elite (whoever you might imagine them to be) don’t understand ordinary Americans. That, they claim, is how you wind up with affirmative action programs and men playing women’s sports and vaccine mandates.
But in Czech history, that sentiment is literal: The kings can’t understand the ordinary people, because they don’t speak Czech. After the Habsburgs fell in 1918, there was briefly a Czechoslovakian democracy. But that fell into dictatorship, and then the Germans took over, and then the Russians. Today, the Czech Republic governs itself, but the transnational European Union is always looking over its shoulder. Czechs are probably fairly suspicious of this, and maybe that’s why they’re one of the few EU nations that don’t use the euro.
When I tried to imagine myself as a small-town Czech nationalist, I looked at Prague with great suspicion. The whole city is subtitled in English for the benefit of travelers. Lots of shops and other businesses seem not to have a Czech name at all. Places that ought to be sacred to Czechs (like that castle complex) are barely accessible, because they’re overrun with tourists speaking every known language. I might question whether Prague is Czech at all any more; it seems a lot like Czech territory occupied by some globalist empire.
That vision gave me a new appreciation of MAGA in America. There is real grievance in rural and small-town America, something I’ve written about before. It’s a sense that the place you live, which is maybe the place you grew up, has no obvious path into the future. The jobs are leaving, the talented young people are leaving, and there seems to be no end to it.
If that were the whole grievance, though, rural and small-town anger might focus where it really belongs: on the big corporations who rig the system in their favor and don’t care where they build things; and on the billionaires who get big tax breaks and leave no money behind for schools and roads and local investment. But laid over the economic grievance is a sense of dislocation: The America I grew up in isn’t just endangered, it’s already gone in lots of places. This gets you to the demonization of immigrants and people whose lifestyles diverge from what was socially acceptable in the past.
So often, when I run into conservatives obsessed with culture-war issues, I want to ask “Why do you care?” If someone with a penis wants to wear skirts and makeup and start using a name like Susan, what’s it to you that you should feel so incensed about it? If two men or two women want to marry, and to live a life not all that different from the one you live with your opposite-sex spouse, how are you harmed?
The dislocation theory makes sense of this. They aren’t harmed in any material sense, but the culture-war issues are symbols of their grievance: This is not their world any more. They used to know how they (and their children and their communities) could thrive, but now they don’t. The culture-war issue isn’t itself a grievance, but they’ve been trained to see it as a signpost pointing to grievances.
It also explains the hostility to cities. The new world, the world where they don’t belong and can’t succeed, has already taken the cities. The cities are territory occupied by a globalist empire.
It also explains the conspiracy theories. When you feel something, any story that explains and justifies the feeling seems plausible. Fact-checking the narrative doesn’t affect that sense of plausibility.
Progressive vs. centrist. At least since the Clinton administration, conflict has been raging between two theories of why Democrats lose and how they can win. The centrist theory says that Democrats lose when they become too liberal and alienate moderate swing voters. The progressive theory says that Democrats lose when they seem inauthentic and fail to give voters a clear new vision of where the country should go.
When they actually get into office, though, the two kinds of Democrats agree on a great deal. Centrists want to focus on proposals that are immediately achievable, while progressives see those same proposals as first steps on their path into the future.
Both factions want to spin current events in their favor. But if I take the lessons of Mersault and Zsofi to heart, I think both framings miss the point: what the reachable voters are looking for is not fundamentally a more liberal or conservative policy. They’re looking for authenticity and for someone they can trust. They want candidates who care about them enough to show up, to learn what they care about, and to speak to them as if they were intelligent people with real concerns. If you do that, you can get away with taking some principled stands they disagree with.
Look at candidates who are surviving or even thriving in what should be hostile environments. Andy Beshear is popular in Kentucky, but he still gets away with vetoing an anti-trans-rights bill. (“My faith teaches me that all children are children of God and Senate Bill 150 will endanger the children of Kentucky. … I heard from children that believe this bill is picking on them, and asking — in many ways — why? I told them that I was going to show them that there is at least one person in Frankfort that cares for all of our children in the commonwealth, no matter what.”) In Texas, James Talarico’s Christianity takes him different places than MAGA Christianity does, but so far he hasn’t compromised his vision. Jon Ossoff is doing well in Georgia, largely because of his way of speaking in terms voters identify with. (Listen to him make the case against Trump’s corruption.) Pete Buttigieg isn’t currently running for anything, but he goes into enemy territory (like Fox News) and holds his own — and not by throwing unpopular Democrats or Democratic constituencies to the wolves.
Of course Democrats, like all politicians, should focus on their popular positions. But they should put themselves in positions to be challenged on unpopular positions, and they should be ready to defend those positions in easily understandable terms, tracing them back to core values that are widely shared, or at least widely appreciated. They need to answer criticism without denigrating the critic.
Most of all, Democrats need to send the message that they will look out for the country, and not just for their own voters.
The moment you hate your fellow citizen more than you hate the system that is robbing you both, the system has already half-won.
But the right path is not to pander to those you disagree with, but to address them honestly, intelligently, and respectfully
Disagreement is not a war: it is politics, it is normal and it is supposed to happen.
The Weekly Sift 