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Opinion
Donald Trump’s Tower Envy
Trump believes that being president should remove any barrier to erection of new structures, from arches to paint jobs to statues, no matter the violation of law or taste.
May 17, 2026
In her 1984 book Missile Envy , Helen Caldicott identified the Freudian motivations behind the impetus of Cold Warriors to build bigger bombs and more powerful rockets. President Donald Trump has tower envy, a neurosis over the feeling that other world leaders have larger buildings. Why does Trump insist on putting his name on variously sized structures, commissioning statues of himself, and undertaking misguided and illegal renovations of existing facilities? The reason comes down to a narcissistic fascination with monuments to power such as those erected by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Romanian dictator Nikolai Ceausescu, but dating to Napoleon Bonaparte and his Arc de Triomphe.
Trump has long aimed for the sky with his towers, his Mar-o-Lago castle, and his unfinished great Mexican wall. He first sought to make his name through a failed project for a 150-story skyscraper on New York’s Upper West Side. But Trump rose to the occasion with the Grand Hyatt Hotel that opened in 1980, and next erected the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue with its gaudy interiors. Perhaps suffering from Stendhal syndrome, a transient paranoid psychosis brought on by exposure to cultural objects, Trump began supplication to Soviet leaders in the late 1980s to unveil a Trump tower in Moscow. Russian operatives have since forced his unconscious to contemplate Russian President Vladimir Putin’s scandalous virility as manifested in the $30 billion Sochi Olympics and a $1.4 billion golden palace. The result is rampant tower envy.
His Triumphal Arch
Trump believes that being president should remove any barrier to erection of new structures. These range from arches to paint jobs to statues. Trump is insisting on building “a gold-accented giant victory arch” along the Potomac River, at 250 feet taller than the Lincoln Memorial and the US Capitol. Despite overwhelmingly negative feedback from the public, the “Arc de Trump” gained approval of a commission stacked by Trump loyalists who share his lack of taste, sensibility, and history. Trump commission documents reveal a grotesque, grandiose, disruptive, and unnecessarily impotent structure. The arc may help the president overcome clear feelings of inadequacy like those of Napoleon Bonaparte who died well before his Parisian Arc de Triomphe, at 150 feet, was completed.
Napoleon apparently inspired Trump’s feelings of meager crowd size. Napoleon insisted upon a grand cortege to mark his passage from one palace to another, with immense crowds lining the route. Recalled one observer, “Bonaparte deployed the pomp of royalty … he was preceded by 150 musicians, two thousand guardsmen, gold and silver gleamed on the carriage, the horses decorations and on the guardsmen's uniforms.” (Peter the Great assembled a parade of little people in 1710, but out of jest and love, not out of inferiority.) Trump, however, worries about size, especially crowd size. He ordered government photos retouched to show his inaugural crowd was bigger than Barack Obama’s. He said, “I get the biggest crowd size, and they keep getting bigger.”
He must affix his name to monumentalities to project virility and to deflect attention from corrupt deals with foreign governments, felonies, and alleged pedophilia.
Crowd size envy has its roots in psychological turmoil. Napoleon obviously had the first Napoleon complex. In the search for the source of his many complexes, the doctor who conducted Napoleon’s autopsy in 1821 secretly removed his penis. The member made its way through various collectors, becoming “like a piece of leather or a shriveled eel,” but perhaps bigger than Trump’s who, while tall and obese, is “smaller than average… not freakishly small,” but with “a huge mushroom head. Like a toadstool.”
Painting Over His Inadequacies
Napoleon commissioned the neoclassicist painter Jacques-Louis David commemorate his inauguration with a canvas over 20 by 30 feet. In 2014 Trump illegally used a Trump Foundation check to pay for a massive portrait of Trump in his golf finery at a Trump golf course that was well hung at the Trump Doral golf course bar. The Trump Foundation was closed over this and other fraud. Tower envy.
To inflate his diminished presidency, Trump paints over federal properties. Ignoring aesthetics, rejecting the will of the people, and breaking the law with every stroke, he ordered the painting of the reflecting pool between the Washington and Lincoln Memorials in blue. It may be that Trump has pool envy. Joseph Stalin never saw the finished “Moscow Pool,” the world’s largest outdoor swimming pool. It arose on the site of the demolished Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which the militantly atheist Bolsheviks tore down to erect a 430-foot Palace of the Soviets, with a huge Lenin statue on top. That project was abandoned as too costly, and it became a heated outdoor pool. Trump embraced his pool envy by tearing down the West Wing to build a ballroom.
For the reflecting pool paint job, Trump chose the color and contractor without any review, with a company that has worked for Trump at his private golf club given a no-bid contract, with sevenfold cost overruns before the job began. Trump used AI to make the pool great again: On May 1 the mortally obese Trump posted a fake image of himself, shirtless, but with his bulbous belly and breasts airbrushed away, alongside with several other Trump officials and an unidentified woman, but apparently one over 18 years old, as they lounged in the pool. The impotent creature followed by posting a photo of Presidents Obama and Joe Biden, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in the pool filled with feces.
Trump Tower Tbilisi, Georgia
The diagnosis of tower envy describes all Trump erections. He must affix his name to monumentalities to project virility and to deflect attention from corrupt deals with foreign governments, felonies, and alleged pedophilia. His masculine maneuvers do not always promise results. After he added his name to the Kennedy Center, performing artists cancelled their appearances in droves. This has required its shuttering for two years for “renovations.” Usually, leaders have the good taste to die before being so presumptuous as to put their name on currency, park passes, centers, institutions, buildings, airports, steaks, and centers for the arts.
Trump has no intention of avoiding newer erections as president, even as these actions violate the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. Having pocketed money from Middle East leaders, the Trump family is expanding into Tbilisi, Georgia, with a 70-story Trump Tower” becoming the tallest skyscraper in the country; it will dwarf the 70-foot tall aluminum “Kartlis Deda” (Mother of Georgia, 1958) statue located on Sololaki Hill. Then there’s the Trump Tower Down Under, a $1 billion development at 91 floors, to rise with other real estate projects in Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and perhaps the “Gaza Riviera,” if the president can get Jared Kushner and the Israelis to remove all Palestinians.
Tower envy, brute monumentalism, and cheap cover-up are Trump’s go-to aesthetic design.
Another tacky celebration of the Trumpian legacy is his Garden of American Heroes. The garden involves the creation of 250 statues depicting a list of Trumpian “founding fathers,” activists, political figures, businesspeople, athletes, celebrities, and pop culture icons. Trump ordered the garden to be finished before July 4, 2026, on the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence which, like the Bible, he has never read. Some of the funding will come from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which has a new grant competition to create “up to three statues” at $200,000 per statue, and which “must be life-size and made of marble, granite, bronze, copper, or brass,” but no Botox or orange dyes. Sadly, Elon Musk’s “DOGE” illegally cancelled 1,400 NEH grants, and it remains unclear what impact Trump’s “garden” grants will have on more valuable NEH humanities research programs. In the meantime Trump covered the White House rose garden with concrete pavers because he actually hates gardens.
If You Paint it, They Will Come
Trump loves gloss paints and gold accoutrements to distract attention from his infirm, swollen, and discolored appendages; for them he uses concealer and support socks. He ordered covering the blemishes of the 130-year-old Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street from the White House with white paint. White paint white may help make the building appear larger, but still not as large as Ceausescu’s Palace of Parliament, the second-largest administrative building in the world after the Pentagon, with more than 1,100 rooms and a nuclear bunker underneath. (Three thousand workers died during its construction.) Perhaps in response to Ceausescu’s grandiosity, Trump insists on erecting an ever-growing ballroom, now at $1 billion and with a nuclear bunker of its own.
But an authoritarian paint job will destroy the Eisenhower Building’s exterior of granite (quarried in Vinalhaven, Maine, in America, not like most Trump products that are manufactured abroad). Paint adheres poorly to granite, reveals its imperfections, leads immediately to peeling, chipping, staining, and requires forever high maintenance—which is why no one paints granite kitchen counters. But tower envy, brute monumentalism, and cheap cover-up are Trump’s go-to aesthetic design.
Everything He Touches Turns to Gold
If not his own Lenin-like mausoleum, which was constructed with polished, but not painted granite, there will be a Miami-based excrescence, the Trump Presidential Library, perhaps with a mock-up bathroom to display the secret documents he stole from the White House—modeled on the bathroom he used at Mar-o-Lago to hold them. Also to be interred are the 747 jet that the Qataris gave him in return for favors. An auditorium featuring an already completed 22-foot gold statue of Trump will crown the spectacle. As one of his potent progeny, Eric, wrote, “Over the past six months, I have poured my heart and soul into this project with my incredible team… This landmark… will stand as a lasting testament to an amazing man, an amazing developer, and the greatest President our Nation has ever known.” Sculptor Alan Cottrel manufactured the recently-unveiled statue, but was misled about its purposes and meanings, and he gently called it a “cluster f--k.” Contrell was instructed by the statue’s crypo investors “to alter Trump’s appearance… making him thinner and removing his ‘turkey neck,’” which may be a euphemism for some other appendage.
Whatever the size of the gold president, Trump’s Christian nationalist handlers have forgotten the fact that the 22-foot gold erection recalls the biblical story of the golden calf in the Book of Exodus and the punishment to those who embraced idolatry. Even more, the golden Trump will not rise above the largest bronze statues in the world, the 65-feet tall effigies of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il on Mansu Hill in central Pyongyang. One hopes that Trump does not set his eyes upon the 555-feet tall Washington Monument, the world’s tallest stone (marble) obelisk. We have heard that Trump wants to paint it orange.
If you have any doubt, remember after 9/11 Trump instinctively ejaculated on that day that one of his buildings had become the tallest in downtown Manhattan.
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When A Bully Has a Bomb: Trump’s 'Preventive' War on Iran
With a complete disregard for multilateral diplomatic agreements and international coalition building, the United States has once again entered into a violent conflict in the Middle East, providing no clear objective and contributing to the country’s instability.
May 16, 2026
On May 11, 2026, President Donald Trump spoke in a press conference, dismissing claims of a successful ceasefire deal with Iran, calling the most recent agreement “garbage” and describing the ceasefire agreement as “being on life support.” Trump's rejection of the ceasefire agreement reflects a common theme in his second term: favoring military aggression over diplomatic processes.
Trump has been acting through unilateral strategies as he has failed to work through international institutions (such as the United Nations or the United Arab Emirates) and to secure approval from Congress or the international community regarding going to war with Iran.
Instead, the US has joined hands with Israel, supporting Israel’s over 40-year-old goal to destabilize Iran while discarding their own diplomatic relations with Iran. But the question is, why? Why is it that the US can so quickly withdraw from Iran’s nuclear agreement when the Arms Control Association has reported: “The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released its quarterly report on Iran’s nuclear program June 6, and, unsurprisingly, the report found that Iran is complying with its commitments under the multilateral deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).”
These questions point to a growing issue: Multilateral diplomacy in the Middle East has been weakened and replaced by large-scale combat operations. Trump’s actions reflect a historical pattern in US foreign policy that has persisted since the post-Cold War Era, when the United States emerged as a global superpower. This trend of unilateral intervention by the United States was accelerated after the 9/11 attacks that resulted in the launch of the “War on Terror.”
Powerful leaders are bypassing systems of global cooperation and disregarding international law, undermining multilateral agreements while civilians die as a result.
Donald Trump’s unilateral approach to Iran reflects and intensifies these historical trends.
The partnership between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demonstrated that the United States’ foreign policy is not the result of international consensus but rather a bilateral political agreement between the two leaders, driven by their own self-interests rather than collective security. We are witnessing a dangerous shift away from multilateral decision-making and toward decision-making concentrated in the hands of a few leaders for their own personal and national interests. The dangers of this shift are already coming to fruition. According to Al Jazeera, Iranian civilians are being impacted by the war, with a deadly attack on school children ages 7-12 being one of the most notable of the war. Amnesty International’s senior director of research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns states, “This harrowing attack on a school, with classrooms full of children, is a sickening illustration of the catastrophic and entirely predictable price civilians are paying during this armed conflict.”
There are also negative impacts on Gulf States and their relationship to the US due to the military presence in these regions. Al Jazeera reports: “At their closest points, Israel and Iran are less than 1,000km (620 miles) apart. The distance from Tel-Aviv to Iran’s capital, Tehran, is about 1,600km (1,000 miles). Iran has retaliated by attacking US bases across the Middle East. Most of these attacks have been intercepted.” The United States is now contributing to the region’s instability, as they fear retaliatory attacks from Iran. Without a defined military objective, support from the United Nations, or any international coalition, the potential of another drawn-out and morally corrupt Middle Eastern conflict becomes a frightening reality.
Some of the most concerning aspects of this conflict are its ideological drivers. Trump claims that Iran poses an imminent threat to the United States because of its missiles and nuclear program. Trump also claims that he has entered this war to bring about regime change for the Iranian people. According to a video published by Channel 4 News, none of these “concerns” actually hold up. This source reports the US Defense Intelligence Agency saying, as of May 2025, Iran had no missiles capable of striking the US. It is also reported in an Associated Press article that there was no US intelligence indicating a preemptive strike by Iran. These so-called threats are unsupported by available intelligence, which leads us to believe that Trump had different reasons for starting this war, such as distracting the US public from his poor handling of the Epstein files. One speaker, Azadeh Moaveni, in the same Channel 4 News segment, hypothesizes that Trump is acting rashly in war because of his declining popularity in domestic politics. Trump’s disapproval ratings have continued to rise, and with the midterm elections nearing, he is acting out of desperation to gain popularity.
However, this hypothesis is critiqued, as many of his supporters are angered by the hypocrisy in his actions—claiming to put America first while initiating wars in other countries. So even though the war waged with Iran has garnered him even more disapproval, why won’t he stop it? Well, the same speaker hypothesizes that Donald Trump wants Ronald Reagan's political stature. “He wants to be remembered,” she says. The ego of Donald Trump and the United States’ enduring romance with Israel is proving to be a recipe for instability in the Middle East as unilateralism becomes more normalized, international law weakens, and civilians are left in cycles of prolonged violence.
Trump’s war on Iran has exposed how dangerous situations can get when the restraints of multilateralism are not utilized. We are currently living in a period in which the direction of many nations rests in the hands of a few powerful ones—who have proven themselves willing to disregard humanity, order, and the balance of power. This underscores the broader issue at hand, where multilateral diplomatic agreements in the Middle East are being weakened and disregarded in favor of ultimately resorting to military pressure.
Egotistical leaders like Donald Trump, who leads the administration of one of the world's most powerful countries, are proving disastrous for the Middle East. Powerful leaders are bypassing systems of global cooperation and disregarding international law, undermining multilateral agreements while civilians die as a result. The Middle East and other vulnerable regions face perpetual instability as systems of global cooperation are increasingly undermined in favor of powerful nations’ self-interests.
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How to Stop Mega Gerrymandering From Scrambling Democracy
If the Democrats wake up, fire their profiteering consultants, and run on a specific "Compact for America," they could landslide the Trumpitized GOP this November.
May 16, 2026
“Gerrymandering” is the historic term for politicians picking their voters by manipulating congressional and state electoral districts. Redistricting usually happens every 10 years. It is fair to say that most voters don’t want politicians rigging the system to help one party win elections.
Both the Republican and Democratic parties have played this partisan gerrymandering game for years. Recently, the Republicans have become more ruthlessly partisan and have outpaced the Democrats. That is why, for example, in Pennsylvania, Democrats substantially outvote the Republicans but have fewer seats in the House of Representatives.
In the past year, the gerrymandering race has run amok. It was ignited by Tyrant Trump, who told his buddy Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to break with the decennial tradition and get the GOP legislature this year to redistrict Texas to knock out four or five Democrats who are now in Congress.
Then came the tit for tat race. California Gov. Gavin Newsom led a voter referendum that authorized a redistricting that could gain the ruling Democrats an extra four or five seats now held by Republicans. Then more “red states” jumped in along with more “blue states.” The latter mostly did it by voter referendum, such as in Virginia, while the Republicans preferred to do it through GOP-dominated legislatures. Florida’s GOP even disregarded a 2010 state referendum that would have prohibited their recent actions.
The other day, Treacherous Trump emitted this turnoff, “I don’t care about the financial situations of Americans,” as he continues to use the White House to corruptly enrich himself, his family, and cronies.
In Virginia, the state Supreme Court ruled 4 to 3 that the recent redistricting referendum was unconstitutional. The biggest blow came from the six gerrymandering Injustices of the US Supreme Court in the case of Louisiana v. Callais, further gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Their ruling, in effect, outlawed districts drawn to give minority voters a chance to have Black representatives in Congress and in state legislatures. Political pundits are predicting a dramatic decline, as soon as this November’s midterm elections, in the number of Black representatives in the House, presently 59, and Hispanic Representatives, presently 48.
They reflect empirically under-nourished certitude. A couple of them are declaring that the Democrats could win the House of Representatives popular vote by four percentage points and still lose the House to the Republicans in November!
I think these pompous predictors are wrong because they are ignoring too many factors.
First, they are not weighing the prospects of greater voter turnout by minorities due to the indignation they are expressing against the Supreme Court decision and the follow-up by red state legislatures. Many Black voters agree with their leaders that this decision, and others earlier by an unelected court, may drive them back to the Jim Crow years. A 10-20% greater turnout by Black voters could, however, make up for these redrawn districts that favor greater white majorities in the House and state legislatures.
The Hispanic vote was trending toward President Donald Trump because many Hispanic voters believed his lies and fake promises during the 2024 campaign (read the front-page article in The Washington Post, May 11, 2026, by Teo Armus titled “New Congressional Map Draws Ire Among Puerto Rican Voters in Florida.”) There are, however, millions of Latinos in central Florida alone. Many are expressing their anger by saying, “Our voice shouldn’t get diluted” or that their “community is being torn apart.”
Second, the pundits rarely talk about candidates and supporters highlighting long-overdue, highly-popular reforms, agendas, and social safety nets that improve the lives and livelihoods of all voters where they live, work, and raise their families. Mobilizing voters from the right and left around “common ground” advances, such as raising the minimum wage and unfreezing Social Security benefits or providing adequate child tax credits, could break millions of voters out of their knee-jerk attachment to political labels. I’m circulating, for example, a “Winning Compact for America” of 10 proposals backed by a majority of voters, in some cases, a huge majority of left-right voters.
The Winning Compact for America includes:
- Raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to at least $15 per hour, benefiting 25 million workers.
- Raising all the Social Security benefits, frozen for over 45 years, and paying for it by increasing the Social Security tax on the wealthy, benefiting over 60 million elderly. This was supported by about 200 House Democrats in 2022 but was blocked by the Democratic Speaker from going to the floor. Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), the bill’s champion, can provide additional details.
- Establishing a children’s tax credit, cutting child poverty in half, with over 60 million children benefiting. Very popular with parents regardless of their political party affiliations.
- Instituting Medicare for All, safer, more efficient, and much less stressful than our current approach to healthcare.
- Repealing Trump’s cuts in Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program programs that were benefiting tens of millions of Americans.
- Cracking down on corporate crooks stealing consumer dollars, wages, and worker pensions.
- Adopting social safety nets for families, long available in Western Europe and Canada.
- Passing labor law and campaign finance reforms put forth decades ago.
- Investing in crumbling public services and infrastructures.
- Paying for the above by restoring taxes on the very under-taxed super rich and large corporations (85% approval) and by ending huge corporate welfare giveaways and debloating the runaway, unaudited military budget.
Perhaps the pundits ignore these appealing agendas because the Democratic Party has contracted out too much of their campaigns to corporate-conflicted consultants who subdue such progressive manifestos or "Compacts for America" to avoid upsetting corporate campaign donors.
Another understated factor hails from Trump himself, who every day fuels outrage even among many of his supporters who feel betrayed. The other day, Treacherous Trump emitted this turnoff, “I don’t care about the financial situations of Americans,” as he continues to use the White House to corruptly enrich himself, his family, and cronies. Moreover, going after Pope Leo twice with street language isn’t endearing him to many Catholics. Trump can’t control his fevered mind and mouth.
This entire madness of mega gerrymandering could be ended if members of the House ran at large from their state. Let’s say a state has 10 members of the House. They would run at large, and the top 10 vote-getters would be elected to the House. That is how the first woman elected to Congress in 1916, the great Jeanette Rankin from Montana, won her seat. The two House members ran statewide, and she came in second. Some cities have citywide or at-large elections.
Political scholar Lee Drutman called for Congress to enact a form of proportional representation, which is inherently race-neutral and is operational within other democracies in Western Europe. (See his Substack piece titled, “The Supreme Court Killed Voting Rights and Escalated the Gerrymandering Wars. Here’s What Congress Needs to Do in Response.” May 1, 2026). PR also helps to “break the two-party doom loop that’s driving our insane political death spiral,” he writes.
A more modest existing reform comes from states that have adopted non-partisan electoral commissions, e.g., Iowa and Michigan, by referendum. Voters like this approach better than the politicians’ slicing and dicing their voters to make districts safe for only one party.
Landslide elections—such as Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter in 1980—overwhelmed many gerrymandered districts. If the Democrats wake up, fire their profiteering consultants, and run on a specific "Compact for America," they could landslide the Trumpitized GOP this November.
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Americans Are Fed Up With Reckless Federal Agents; Congress Must Act
A simple law could ensure that no federal agent is above the law.
May 16, 2026
The American public's patience with reckless federal agents has run out—but Congress has yet to act. While members of Congress debate funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, communities across the country remain at risk of further harm from lawless policing.
For months, polling has shown cratering support for ICE and the agency’s aggressive tactics, including a 30 point collapse in a single year. Recent YouGov and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) polling shows that Americans don’t think federal law enforcement should be above the law: 93% of voters—including 89% of Trump voters—believe that agents who violate people's rights must be held accountable. Former MAGA influencers have criticized ICE and compared the agency’s tactics to the Gestapo. Even current Department of Homeland Security agents have told reporters that they’re troubled by the agency’s tactics. And in cities across the country, the response has been unmistakable: massive demonstrations in response to violent raids and multiple fatal shootings by federal agents.
Americans have been demanding accountability because when agents can violently attack and kill community members without consequence, everyone is less safe.
Consider what happened to one ACLU client in Maine earlier this year.
When federal agents face no consequences, that impunity invites more wrongdoing, turns our freedoms into empty promises, and leaves us all unprotected.
On the morning of January 22, Juan Sebastián Carvajal-Muñoz was abducted in broad daylight by federal agents. A civil engineer, Mr. Carvajal-Muñoz was driving to his job when a dark SUV cut in front of his car, forcing it to stop. Three people approached his window and demanded to see his papers. He showed his driver’s license through the window, and the agents ordered him to get out of his car. When he reached for his phone to call for help and to record the interaction, agents violently smashed his car window, forced his car open, and dragged him out. Mr. Carvajal-Muñoz’s car was left running with the door open, and his phone was left lying on the street.
Mr. Carvajal-Muñoz was racially profiled and targeted as part of an immigration crackdown in Maine callously called “Operation Catch of the Day.” Mr. Carvajal-Munoz was caught, but for what? He was legally working in the United States on an H1-B visa, was not breaking a single law, and was simply driving as a Latino man. Mr. Carvajal-Munoz was able to sue for these constitutional violations under Maine’s Civil Rights Act, but people in most states cannot.
That’s because there’s an alarming accountability gap between federal and state officers. For example, after Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in 2020, Mr. Floyd’s family sued the City of Minneapolis and police officers for violating his constitutional rights, ultimately securing a $27 million settlement. Federal law, however, does not allow the families of Alex Pretti and Renee Good to file that type of lawsuit against the federal agents who shot and killed them just miles from where Mr. Floyd was murdered.
This illogical gap stems from a historical omission. After the Civil War, in response to pro-Confederate state and local officials’ widespread violations of the rights of Black people and Union sympathizers, the Reconstruction Congress passed a law allowing people to sue state and local officers for damages or other relief when their rights were violated. Unfortunately, that law, commonly known as Section 1983, did not cover federal officers.
In 1971, the Supreme Court filled that accountability gap, ruling in Bivens v. Six Unknown Federal Narcotics Agents that the logic of the Constitution demanded that federal officers could be sued for constitutional violations, too. For decades afterward, people sued federal agents over constitutional violations in what were known as Bivens actions. But in 2017, the Supreme Court severely limited when people can bring Bivens actions, and now it’s nearly impossible to sue federal officers for violating people’s rights. For example, in 2021, a federal court rejected Bivens claims against federal officers who were sued for attacking peaceful civil rights demonstrators with tear gas, rubber bullets, and a baton charge at Lafayette Square Park across the street from the White House. At the same time, the same court ruled that local officers could be sued for those same constitutional violations, which the court held “would have been clear to every reasonable officer.”
When federal agents face no consequences, that impunity invites more wrongdoing, turns our freedoms into empty promises, and leaves us all unprotected. US courts have long recognized the fundamental legal principle that where there is a right, there must be a remedy. In other words, a right that you can’t enforce is just a suggestion that government actors can ignore when it suits them. We are now seeing the very real results that follow when a right lacks remedies: Officers can terrorize and abuse people without repercussions.
Congress has the power to close this dangerous accountability gap and restore a basic promise: If a federal officer violates your rights, you can seek justice, just like you can when a state officer crosses the line. All Congress has to do is pass the Bivens Act, which would fix the historical omission by explicitly stating that, like state and local officials, federal officers can be sued when they violate our constitutional rights. As the Supreme Court pointed out in a 1980 case applying Bivens, “The ‘constitutional design’ would be stood on its head if federal officials did not face at least the same liability as state officials guilty of the same constitutional transgression.”
The weight of our constitutional rights is becoming clearer every day: None of us is safe when federal agents can harm people at will. Congress can and must pass the Bivens Act, a simple law that would restore accountability, compensate victims and their families, and deter the unchecked government violence that has become a hallmark of this administration.
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