SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
us constitution
SCOTUS as Tyrant: Handmaiden to Corporate America
In exercising its power today, the Supreme Court’s priority is not the state of the nation, but the well-being of corporate enterprise.
Jul 22, 2026
The Supreme Court of the United States today is the final arbiter of public policy—deciding incontestably which laws will stand and which will not—but that power was simply asserted by the court years ago, never bestowed by the Constitution or in law.
Merriam-Webster defines a tyrant this way: an absolute ruler unrestrained by law or constitution; a usurper of sovereignty. Close enough?
In exercising its power today the court’s priority is not the state of the nation, but the well-being of corporate enterprise in America.
A recent example: On June 29, 2026 the court issued its decision in the case of Trump v. Slaughter. It found unconstitutional the statutory isolation of the Federal Trade Commission from partisan political interference. It said President Donald Trump could fire Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter not for cause—inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance, as specified in the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914—but only because she is a Democrat.
By neutering the Voting Rights Act, encouraging gerrymandering, and freeing Trump to gut the Federal Election Assistance Commission, the court is up to its enrobed necks in rigging the upcoming elections.
The largest winner by far was not Donald Trump, but every corporation in America regulated by law. There are dozens of other independent regulatory agencies protecting the American people from harmful activities, conditions, and practices. So critical are these agencies to the health, safety, and welfare of the nation, Congress intentionally set them apart from the executive branch, to insulate them from the back-and-forth of partisan politics. The court has upended that safeguard, exposing the agencies to the whims of Donald Trump—who can staff them now with corporate-friendly Republicans. (Trump wasted no time in decapitating the Federal Election Assistance Commission, the agency funding election security measures at the state level.)
Note how the Supreme Court jeopardized the regulatory agencies. It declared as unconstitutional the provision in the Federal Trade Commission Act protecting commissioners from capricious removal. The court can do this because it holds a power known as judicial review. It measures the laws underlying its cases against the Constitution, and strikes down those it finds inconsistent.
Supreme Court justices were never elected, but they nullify laws enacted by people who were—the Congress and the president. Every time it does so the court literally overrides democracy. Isn’t that tyranny?
This is not remotely what the Framers of the Constitution intended.
Article III Section 2 specifies what the Supreme Court can do. Except for infrequent interstate and international litigation the court functions with appellate jurisdiction. The court can do either of two things: It can uphold a lower court decision, or overturn it. Nothing else. That’s it. The court is empowered to sit in judgment of law cases. Nowhere is it empowered to sit in judgment of the laws.
The Framers meant the court to be subordinate. In Federalist 78 Alexander Hamilton said this:
The Judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of powers... it can never attack with success either of the other two [branches]…
And in Federalist 81 he was explicit:
...there is not a syllable in the plan under consideration [i.e. the Constitution] which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution…
Today’s Supreme Court invalidates laws without a speck of constitutional authority, and it has done so for 233 years.
That takes us back to 1803 and the Supreme Court case of Marbury v. Madison.
Federalist President John Adams in the last days of his term appointed 16 new lower court judges—all of Adams’ Federalist persuasion. Among them was William Marbury. The judges’ commissions were to be delivered by the secretary of state, as specified in the Judiciary Act of 1789, but in the scurry of a departing administration they were not. Then Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson was sworn in as president. Intending to appoint judges of his own party instead, Jefferson ordered his Secretary of State James Madison not to deliver the commissions. Marbury sued for his, citing the 1789 law. John Marshall’s Supreme Court found Madison guilty, but also saw the Judiciary Act as slightly askew of the Constitution. It was the pickiest technicality, but on that basis the court dismissed the case.
Chief Justice Marshall said in the court’s written decision, “It is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is... a law repugnant to the Constitution is void.” So said John Marshall, but nobody else, certainly not the writers of the Constitution.
Marshall claimed judicial review simply by fiat and set the subordinate court on the road to tyranny.
Note where our Supreme Court is today. By neutering the Voting Rights Act, encouraging gerrymandering, and freeing Trump to gut the Federal Election Assistance Commission, the court is up to its enrobed necks in rigging the upcoming elections.
Judicial review was initially benign. After Marbury it wasn’t invoked again for 57 years, and might have remained tolerable had not the court paired it with another appalling action: a decision enabling corporate enterprise eventually to dominate the writing of public policy.
In the 1886 case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, the Supreme Court simply declared chartered corporations were persons as described in the 14th Amendment, with rights guaranteed by the Constitution: free speech, equal protection under the law, etc. The declaration violated the protocols for establishing legal precedents, but later courts cited the case anyway. Corporate personhood—prima facie preposterous—became a matter of stare decisis, “settled law.”
If corporations have constitutional rights and if they can prove in court those rights are violated by a law, they can sue to have the law overturned. They can use judicial review as a weapon.
And after Santa Clara County they did.
The 14th Amendment was meant to grant citizenship to Black Americans, freed from enslavement by the Emancipation Proclamation, and to guarantee their equal treatment under the law.
Three-hundred and seventy-seven cases based on the 14th Amendment were heard by the Supreme Court over the 27 years following Santa Clara County: 19 of them dealt with Black citizens seeking equal protection under the law; 288 were initiated by corporation citizens, also seeking equal protection—primarily to invalidate irksome laws.
As the centuries turned corporations succeeded in overturning minimum wage laws, child labor laws, laws limiting the workday, workmen’s compensation statutes, laws limiting corporate lobbying, and laws regulating utility companies. They sued for and won additional constitutional rights, those granted by the Fourth and Fifth Amendments—rights of privacy and the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. Between 1905 and the mid-1930’s, the Supreme Court found some 200 corporate-restraining laws and regulations to be unconstitutional.
As the 20th century progressed the toxicity grew. The combination of judicial review and corporate personhood would prove in time to be fatal to democracy.
In a 1976 case, Buckley v. Valero, the Supreme Court found unconstitutional the 1910 Corrupt Practices Act, a law strictly limiting the money political candidates could spend campaigning. No, the court said, spending money is a form of free speech, and the Congress cannot abridge that right. Dollars are words? Isn’t that also prima facie preposterous? Two years later in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, the court overturned the 1907 Tilman Act, prohibiting corporations from spending money on political campaigns. Citing Buckley, the court said the equivalence of money and speech applied to corporations as well.
Bellotti, however, clashed with an existing law, not prohibiting but sharply limiting corporate campaign contributions: FECA, the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1972.
In 2010 the case of Citizens United v. FEC resolved the clash. If corporations could not be restrained at all, then how much they spent was immaterial. Section 441b of FECA was unconstitutional. Out with it. Corporations can spend as much as they please.
But not to worry, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority:
...independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption…The appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in democracy.
Yes, prima facie preposterous, as documented in a 2026 study by the Brennan Center: 92% of registered voters surveyed said corruption is a major problem in politics and government, citing campaign contributions from corporations and billionaires as the causative factors.
After Citizens United a torrent of corporate money cascaded into the political campaigns of both parties, protected by the right of free speech. And for years corporate lobbying had been protected by their right of petition. The corporate grip tightened in a frontal attack on democracy.
Corporations today outspend citizen interest groups in lobbying by a factor of 86:1. In the 2024 election cycle corporations and their PACs and super PACs contributed 71% of the total of campaign donations, about $10.65 billion. “Large private donors” (read billionaires) contributed another $2.85 billion, 19% of the total. Small individual donations came to $1.5 billion, about 10%.
By any measure corporations and to a lesser extent billionaires are the dominant influencers of federal governance today. Their financing of political campaigns renders elected officials into indentured servitude, open to corporate requests. Then corporate lobbyists specify the details.
Public policy today routinely advances not the well-being of the American people, then, but the preferences of corporate America and its embedded billionaires.
This is what the Supreme Court has enabled, after Marbury, after Santa Clara County, after Buckley, after Bellotti, after Citizens United, after Trump v. Slaughter,
Dollars outweigh votes.
This article is drawn from a book the author is completing, The Triumph of Corporate Oligarchy: How It Defeated Democracy, Normalized Fraudulent Warfare, Devastated a Thriving Nation, and Enabled the Trump Presidencies.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Killing Trust: The Parlor Games of John Roberts’ Court
By relying on the fiction they invented rather than the president we actually have, the Supreme Court has chosen to treat Donald Trump as someone who not only can be, but must be, trusted with yet more unfettered power.
Jul 05, 2026
While driving home on June 30, my head nearly exploded as I listened to the evening news. Reporting on a raft of last-minute decisions passed by the Supreme Court in advance of the summer holidays, the SCOTUS correspondent explained that certain contra-Trump statutes barely managed to hold on for dear life while a more substantial pile of pro-Trump agenda items flew through with room to spare. It was the “you win some, you lose some” tone of the report that set my blood boiling. It felt like I was being told that, on the one hand, SCOTUS had cleared the way for the private purchase of thermonuclear weapons over the internet, exactly as the framers of the Constitution intended, but on the other, that such weapons could not (at least for the moment) be purchased by children under 12 without parental consent. So it’s a win for both sides.
It wasn’t as blatantly bad as that, I admit. But the strained attempt to keep things balanced, if only for old time’s sake, was certainly there. Times being what they are now, it did not sit well with me.
But the single most infuriating moment of the report was when the SCOTUS correspondent quoted Chief Justice Roberts defending the 6-3 decision to strike down a 91-year-old precedent that barred the president from firing members of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) other than for reasons of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.” In writing for the majority, Roberts argued that “the President must have the assistance of officers he can trust.”
It was upon hearing those exact words that my head exploded. Did Chief Justice Roberts actually write what the reporter just claimed he wrote? Could he really have allowed himself to frame the decision in terms of trust?!! The absurdity of the rationale blew my mind. The whole idea of creating multi-member commissions, such as the FTC, as independent agencies in the first place was to ensure that they could be trusted. It is their independence that actually allows the members of the commission to do their work without fear of reprisal. It’s what keeps them from becoming a board of lackeys subservient to the whims of whoever happens to be in power. In a word, the thing that the Supreme Court ruled out by this decision is the one thing that has always allowed us to trust these agencies. Without it, trust disappears.
According to those rules, instead of causing people to tell lies and flatter egos as their best means of survival, the act of investing one man with the power to bully, punish, and fire as he pleases brings about a relationship of “trust.”
One of the biggest problems in states ruled by autocrats is precisely that: Trust goes missing, becoming a rare commodity desperately sought after, but rarely found. During the Hellenistic Period in ancient Greece, regional monarchs would invite Cynic philosophers into their courts so that they might have just one person to talk to who could be counted on to tell them the truth. As impoverished beggars, happy in that condition, the Cynics had nothing to gain by lying, nothing to lose by telling the truth. They were independent.
But Chief Justice Roberts would have us believe that he knows better about such things. He and the wiser minds of his Supreme Court treat their legal interpretations as a kind of parlor game played by experts for the sake of theoretical purity and one-upmanship. Like Medieval scholars arguing over how many thorns were in Christ’s crown, they don their robes, play their game, issue their rulings, and retire to their summer homes. Meanwhile, their decisions have consequences in the world outside the parlor that, somehow, aren’t really their concern. No. Their focus is on the intentions of the Constitution’s framers. They are the ones they want to make sure are happy and well cared for by their decisions. They, the long dead, ghosts of their own invention, are the ones that really matter.
In fact, the one non-dead person whom Chief Justice Roberts expressed a keen interest in helping with his decision was just that: one person. The president. Not the demos of our democracy, the voting citizens of this country, to the tune of several hundred million people who are still very much alive. He worried that that one man’s power might be unduly hampered if he were not allowed to fire whomever he wanted for whatever reason. His rationale amounts to a set of quotes from the rule book of a new game that he and his like-minded friends on the court have invented. They play it within his parlor while sipping brandy. It’s called “The Unitary Executive.”
This is a fantasy game, rather like Dungeons and Dragons. In it, the rules of reality outside the parlor, out in the real world, are called off in favor of the rules of the parlor and of the game itself. According to those rules, instead of causing people to tell lies and flatter egos as their best means of survival, the act of investing one man with the power to bully, punish, and fire as he pleases brings about a relationship of “trust.” It’s all quite wonderful.
To make this game work, Justice Roberts and his parlor friends had to invent an equally fantastical person to do the trusting: a president who has our best interests in mind, one who can always be counted on to act in good faith. This, their game-piece president, is not a vindictive liar, greedy for power. He is a wonderful fiction, good to play with. And so it is that, by relying on the parlor fiction they invented rather than the president we actually have, the Supreme Court has chosen to treat Donald Trump as someone who not only can be, but must be, trusted with yet more unfettered power. But not to worry. They assure us that, according to the rules of the game, nothing bad can come of this.
Keep ReadingShow Less
SCOTUS’ Ruling Spares Birthright Citizenship For Now, But the Battle Is Far From Over
While birthright citizenship survived today, this ruling exposes how fragile its guarantee has become. This fight is far from over—Republicans will try again, and next time they might succeed.
Jun 30, 2026
On June 30, the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship.
This is the obviously correct decision. The 14th Amendment is abundantly clear: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
The Trump administration’s argument that undocumented immigrants and their children are not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” was baseless from the start. Not only did it lack any foundation in the Constitution or statutory law, but the meaning of that phrase was never in dispute. Those “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” include everyone born in the US except the children of foreign diplomats, enemy invaders during a hostile occupation, and those born in unincorporated territories of American Samoa (they are considered “noncitizen nationals”).
After several disastrous Supreme Court rulings on Temporary Protected Status (TPS), asylum entries, transgender athletes, campaign finance restrictions, and presidential firing power, it may be tempting to see this decision on birthright as a glimmer of hope. Unfortunately, there are reasons to be concerned.
The Supreme Court is effectively one vote away from fundamentally changing who is entitled to US citizenship and what it means to be an American.
While six justices found Trump’s executive order to be unlawful, only five justices—John Roberts, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Amy Coney Barrett—believe that it violates the Constitution.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh argues that it only violates federal law. He writes: “In my view, the Executive Order does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. But the Order does contravene a federal statute, 8 U.S.C. §1401(a). Congress could—consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment—amend §1401(a) or otherwise enact new legislation establishing exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country. But Congress has not yet done so.”
In his dissenting opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch argues that the 14th Amendment clearly does not extend to children of temporary visitors. Yet, he “harbor doubts” whether the same is true for children of undocumented immigrants “who have long chosen to make this Nation their permanent home.”
The issue of a “permanent home” (or “domicile”) was a core component of Trump’s anti-birthright argument. The Trump administration argued that to be “completely subject” to the “jurisdiction” of the US means one must owe “direct and immediate allegiance” and receive “protection” from it. The children of US citizens, permanent residents, and formerly enslaved persons meet this standard because they “have a permanent domicile.” By contrast, the children of undocumented immigrants “do not owe primary allegiance to the United States by virtue of domicile, for illegal aliens lack the legal capacity to establish domicile here.”
Before the Supreme Court, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that the Trump administration’s “point [is] that allegiance is what the word jurisdiction means.” He further contended that, “For aliens, lawful domicile is the status that creates the requisite allegiance and the text of the [Citizenship] Clause presupposes domicile.”
Notably, Gorsuch does not explicitly reject this argument. What’s more, he, along with Justice Clarence Thomas, believes that the Citizenship Clause does not immediately extend to everyone born on US soil. It requires, as the Trump administration argues, possessing a “permanent domicile.”
Justice Samuel Alito likewise concurs with the Trump administration’s argument but emphasizes the allegiance component. In his view, “the Fourteenth Amendment confers citizenship on only those children who, at birth, owe allegiance solely to this country.” Being born in the US is not enough.
Where this leaves us is at a far more precarious crossroads. Only five justices believe that the plain text of the 14th Amendment automatically guarantees citizenship to everyone born in the US.
Kavanaugh believes that Congress could limit birthright citizenship themselves. A constitutional amendment would not be needed.
The same is arguably true for Gorsuch, Thomas, and Alito. If Congress were to pass legislation that codifies Trump’s Executive Order and formally defines “domicile” status in a way that excludes undocumented immigrants and temporary visitors, then those four justices would likely uphold it.
Ultimately, the problem is that this decision does not settle the issue once and for all. What we needed was a clear 7-2 decision (Thomas and Alito were always going to dissent). One that acknowledged what the Constitution plainly says and what it obviously grants—namely, that if you are born here, you are from here. Nothing else matters; not “domicile” or “allegiance.”
As things stand, however, the Supreme Court is effectively one vote away from fundamentally changing who is entitled to US citizenship and what it means to be an American. While birthright citizenship survived today, this ruling exposes how fragile its guarantee has become. This fight is far from over—Republicans will try again, and next time they might succeed.
We cannot let this happen. Now more than ever we need a left-wing wall in Congress to stop Trump’s assault on our rights, protect birthright citizenship, and defend the Constitution.
Keep ReadingShow Less
JD Vance's Drunk History
On June 25, Vice President JD Vance told his audience at the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Museum that Nixon got a bum rap. The uncontested historical record proves otherwise.
Jun 30, 2026
The Watergate scandal revealed President Richard Nixon’s contempt for the Constitution and his systematic abuse of power. At the time, it was one of the darkest chapters in US history, resulting in the first-ever resignation of an American president.
But on June 25, Vice President JD Vance told his audience at the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Museum that Nixon got a bum rap. The uncontested historical record proves otherwise. Vance’s contrary view demonstrates the depths to which he and President Donald Trump have taken the country.
“Facts Are Stubborn Things”
- In May 1972, a group of men connected with the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) burglarized and wiretapped the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex. One of the wiretaps didn’t work, so on June 17, 1972, they broke in again with a new microphone. A security guard saw door locks that had been taped open and called the DC police, which caught them red-handed. Among the burglars’ possessions was a White House phone number.
- After declaring falsely that no one on the White House staff was involved in the crime, Nixon acquiesced as his aides provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in “hush money” to the burglars. Then Nixon and his top advisers developed a plan to get the CIA to obstruct the FBI’s investigation into the matter.
- As Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein pursued the story, a DC grand jury summoned witnesses who cracked. Nixon aides—including White House counsel John Dean—testified in nationally televised hearings where Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) asked, “What did the President know and when did he know it?” The answer was “a lot.”
- With the revelation that Nixon had taped his conversations about the cover-up in the Oval Office, the president sought valiantly to block their production.
- When special prosecutor Archibald Cox sued to obtain the tapes, Nixon instructed Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire him. In what became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” Richardson refused and resigned. Nixon then told Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox, but he resigned too. Finally, Nixon turned to the third highest official in the Justice Department, Solicitor General Robert Bork, who carried out the order.
- Firing Cox was the futile act of a desperate man. Bork appointed Leon Jaworski as Cox’s successor, and Jaworski continued to press his case to the US Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision, the court ordered Nixon to release the tapes, and the public could hear Nixon’s own voice incriminate him.
- On July 27, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee recommended articles of impeachment. On August 7, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.), Sen. Hugh Scott (R-Pa.), and Rep. John Rhodes (R-Ariz.) visited the White House to give Nixon the bad news: The full House was going to impeach him, and the Senate would convict him. The next day, Nixon resigned.
Vance’s “Deep State” Fantasies
Vance claimed that Nixon was the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy.
“If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon,” Vance continued, “it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.”
But the supposed “deep state” actors to which Vance referred consisted of Nixon’s top advisers who turned on him, the most conservative Republicans in Congress, a unanimous US Supreme Court, and two intrepid reporters at The Washington Post.
Timothy Naftali, a historian at Columbia University’s School of International Public Affairs and the former director of the Nixon library, told The New York Times: “We have more than enough information from the Nixon era to know that there was no intelligence conspiracy against Richard Nixon. He brought his house of cards down upon himself.”
“You can hear him suborn perjury on the tapes,” Naftali told The Washington Post. “He’s telling an intermediary, what to tell someone who’s about to be interviewed by the FBI, what to say and what not to say. You can hear Nixon being told that money had been found to hire teamsters to go and break the bones of demonstrators. That’s all illegal.”
Lies Reveal Character
Prof. Naftali observed that, curiously, Vance had likened Trump to a president who had directed the CIA to subvert the Constitution.
“It’s not as if [Watergate] is a matter of partisan interpretation,” Naftali said. “The evidence is overwhelming. If [Vance] does know all of this, he’s telegraphing the kind of president he hopes to be.”
Vance also claimed that Watergate would have been a 12-hour news story today. He may be correct, but that does not diminish the seriousness of Nixon’s crimes.
As prof. Naftali observed, “It’s not that Nixon looks better in retrospect, it’s that we look worse.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
If Congress Can No Longer Stop an Unauthorized War, Whose Job Is It Now?
For half a century, federal courts have waved away the war-powers question as a “political question” the elected branches would settle among themselves. Late June proved they cannot. That is precisely why the Supreme Court must finally take the case.
Jun 27, 2026
For one day in late June, it looked as though the Constitution had won. For the first time in the 53-year life of the War Powers Resolution, both chambers of Congress voted to order a president to remove US forces from a war he had never asked them to authorize. The House carried the measure on June 3. The Senate followed on June 23. After more than half a century of the legislature flinching from its own authority, here at last was a majority in both houses saying, on the record, that the war in Iran was not theirs and would not be waged in their name.
It lasted about 24 hours.
The resolution that passed was a concurrent resolution—a vehicle that, by design, never reaches the president’s desk and carries no force of law. The measure with teeth, the one that would have required his signature, reached the Senate floor the very next day, June 24. By then the president had summoned Senate Republicans to a closed-door lunch, turned it into a confrontation over the war, and sent at least one wavering senator to a same-day White House briefing. When the binding resolution was called, it failed. Two senators who had voted to constrain the war on Tuesday declined to do so on Wednesday. A war-powers majority had been assembled and dismantled inside a single news cycle—not by argument on the merits, but by a luncheon and a briefing.
Set aside, for a moment, the conduct of any one senator. The deeper fact is structural, and it should trouble anyone who believes the decision to go to war belongs to the people through their representatives. If Congress can pass a war-powers resolution and then refuse to enforce it within a day, the question is no longer whether Congress will check this president. The question is whether it can—and what is supposed to happen when it cannot.
A Congress that can be moved from a war-powers majority to a war-powers minority overnight is not a Congress that is merely choosing not to act. It is a Congress that has shown it cannot make its own action stick.
The administration has not been coy about its view. The war in Iran began in late February without a congressional vote. The Resolution’s 60-day clock expired on May 1, and the president answered with a letter declaring the hostilities “terminated” even as a naval blockade remained in force. His secretary of state told a White House briefing that the War Powers Act is “unconstitutional, 100%,” adding that the administration honors it only as a courtesy, to preserve good relations with Congress. The vice president had earlier dismissed the statute as “a fake and unconstitutional law.” Strip away the “show,” and one proposition remains: that a duly enacted federal law binds the executive only when, and only so far as, the executive cares to be bound. That is not a war-powers position. It is a position about whether laws are laws.
Nor did the threats subside. Even after a memorandum of understanding was signed in mid-June to extend the ceasefire and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the president warned that he would “bomb the hell out of” Iran if it failed to comply—a threat of force in open tension with the very agreement he had just concluded. Days earlier, discussing Iran’s nuclear stockpile, he reached for “the ultimate alternative, hopefully never to be used again,” the unmistakable register of nuclear menace from the leader of the only nation ever to have used such weapons against a civilian population. As I have argued previously in these pages, language like this is not loose talk. It is the rhetorical scaffolding of a war the public was never asked to approve.
Here is where the courts enter—or rather, where they have declined to. For 50 years, whenever members of Congress have asked federal judges to enforce the war-powers framework, the judiciary has turned them away, most often by invoking the “political question” doctrine: the notion that disputes between the political branches over war are committed to those branches to resolve, not to courts. That doctrine has always rested on an empirical assumption—that the political process can correct itself, that Congress has tools enough to defend its own prerogatives if only it chooses to use them.
June 23 and 24 are the clearest refutation of that assumption in a generation. The political branches did not resolve this. They demonstrated, in real time and on camera, that the institutional machinery the doctrine relies upon no longer holds under pressure. A Congress that can be moved from a war-powers majority to a war-powers minority overnight is not a Congress that is merely choosing not to act. It is a Congress that has shown it cannot make its own action stick. When the premise of a doctrine collapses, the doctrine built upon it should not survive untouched.
So whose job is it now? The answer the Constitution supplies, once the political branches have failed, points to the one branch that has spent half a century looking away: the judiciary. The Supreme Court has never squarely decided whether a president may wage sustained, unauthorized hostilities past the 60-day deadline in defiance of an explicit statute. It has had reasons, prudential and real, to avoid the question. Those reasons weaken by the week. When an administration pronounces a federal statute void from the podium, complies only as “good relations,” and a Congress that votes to end the war cannot keep the vote alive for a day, the case for judicial abstention has run out. The framework Justice Robert Jackson set down in Youngstown—that a president acts at the “lowest ebb” of his power when he moves against the expressed will of Congress—was written for precisely this situation. It is waiting to be applied.
None of this is simple. Standing is a genuine hurdle; the path to the court runs most plausibly through members of Congress, or a chamber, suing in their institutional capacity rather than through any single citizen. The political-question doctrine will be raised again. But “political question” was always a choice the courts made, not a command the Constitution issued—and the conditions that once made the choice defensible no longer hold. A controversy is ripe for decision when it is concrete and when withholding review inflicts real harm. A war waged in the country’s name without its consent; a statute openly nullified; a legislature unable to enforce its own majority: If that is not ripe, nothing is. And Iran, for all its starkness, is not the only theater in which force has lately preceded authorization rather than followed it.
The Framers placed the war power in Article I—the first article, the people’s article—for a reason that does not age. They had watched kings march nations into war on their own word, and they meant to make that impossible here. The power “to declare War” was given to Congress alone. The War Powers Act did not invent that allocation; it merely tried to make it work in an age of undeclared wars. If Congress can no longer make it work, and the courts will not look, then the war power has quietly migrated to wherever the president happens to be standing when he decides to use it. That is the exact outcome the Constitution was written to prevent.
The stalemate is not an accident of partisanship; it has hardened into a feature of the system, and this president has learned to exploit it with unusual skill. Breaking stalemates between the political branches is what a court of last resort exists to do. It is time for the Supreme Court to take up the question it has avoided for 50 years—and to say, before the next war begins without a vote, who in this country actually holds the power to start one.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Stop Waiting on the 25th Amendment to Save Us From Trump
Trump is not in office despite being out of his fucking mind—he occupies the seat of supreme power precisely because he is off the charts berserk and the only people who matter in the Crumbling States of America are making bank on it.
Jun 08, 2026
In a famous fable a group of mice discuss the catastrophic death toll from the local cat. One mouse has an epiphany—“We simply have to put a collar with a bell on the cat, and we’ll be warned every time she draws near.” The mice erupt in celebration. But suddenly one doleful rodent interrupts the celebrants with a shy question: "Who’s going to bell the cat?"
As an avid reader of lefty alternative media essays, I would venture that “bell the cat” polemics have become a prominent strategy employed by far too many writers. We bell cats in our daydreams, and then write about it with a triumphant brushing of the hands. How many pieces have we all read that call for removing President Donald Trump via the 25th Amendment?
I, personally, am easily convinced that Donald J Trump is... uh... unfit. His twitchy little evil finger on the so-called nuclear button defines a new plateau of dystopian absurdity that no past writer of dark fiction could have ever imagined. Do we need to clarify just how close to the stroke of doomsday this vapid monster brings us daily? His genocidal intent; his criminal impulses; his senseless drivel; his delusional narcissism; his racism; his sexism; and his urge to brag, attack, and threaten ought to make him a prime candidate for a golden sunset behind bars.
Most of the calls for the 25th Amendment rather coalesce around the aesthetics of Trump’s alleged mental decline—his malapropisms; his stumbling gait; his ridiculous boasting about “acing” a dementia screening exam; his late-night posting binges of misspelled, all-caps incoherent rage; his nodding off to sleep in meetings; and the sheer sight of his grotesque, sneering, confused, melting jowls seem to be enough of an argument.
In the Numbed States of America we have gravely limited capacity to respond to extinction threats. Some atavistic fantasy of reprieve keeps people mutely indoors.
Some calls for the 25th Amendment solution merely focus on Trump’s dwindling physical health—his mysterious hospital visits; his bruises; his enormously swollen ankles; his tiny eye slits peering in a senile, comatose manner from the drooping folds of a face that precariously hovers somewhere between a living visage and a death mask.
It seems odd, however, to argue that Trump ought to be seen as a broken shell of a man, eaten from the inside by diseases associated with aging. Do we really want him removed from office because of illness, or because he has spearheaded an assault against the environment, a new age of unregulated capitalist plunder, a total commitment to eviscerate human rights, and the intent to wage war as a matter of reflexive masculinist expression? Where have US bombs fallen, and where will they imminently rain down on hapless civilians?
Are Mogadishu and Copenhagen on the list? Havana? Have we blown Cuba up yet, or is that just a coming attraction scheduled for August or November? Donald J Trump’s trembling, tiny phallic finger nuzzling the button of eternal extinction seems like a surefire image to summon massive levels of public panic, to send hysterical crowds into the streets as if the Chicxulub Meteor had been scheduled for an encore. But in the Numbed States of America we have gravely limited capacity to respond to extinction threats. Some atavistic fantasy of reprieve keeps people mutely indoors. We have guardrails, constitutional guarantees—like the oft mentioned 25th Amendment. Why go crazy in an existential panic, when the Constitution has our back?
The 25th Amendment is not some hoary remnant of our overly esteemed Founding Fathers. No such Revolutionary War icons stared wisely into the crystal ball of future contingencies, and asked the question, “What do we do when a batshit lunatic captures the presidency?” No, the Founding Fathers had not imagined a president as being anything other than a generic advocate for the interests of the wealthy—a role that carried an implicit assumption of sanity in their constitutional eyes. The 25th Amendment was passed by congress in 1965, and ratified in 1967, perhaps inspired by the unraveling, warmongering man of the moment, Lyndon Baines Johnson. But more likely, the amendment shuffled itself into the Constitution as a matter of legislative busywork, a footnote barely acknowledged at the time. The 25th gives some clarity as to when the vice president steps into a presidential role, usually for a day or two when a presidential colonoscopy creates a window of momentary confusion. Congress voted on the amendment only two years after JFK’s assassination—fearful politicians had, one imagines, a lurking sense of unpredictable events.
The 25th Amendment, however, also creates a new protocol for the permanent removal of an unfit president—the vice-president along with the members of the Cabinet must vote to toss the leader out of office with a simple majority. From there, the decision to remove an unfit president passes to both houses of Congress where a two-thirds majority of each chamber must vote to remove the spiraling executive. In other words (at least in Trump’s case), a collection of morally deformed misfits must pool their distaste for the unravelling psychopath who appointed them. And then a collection of party sycophants must rise up against the leader who fills their trembling hearts with utter terror.
Maybe you believe that Trump should be removed because he is: 1) corrupt, 2) demented, 3) insane, 4) stupid, and 5) evil. Obviously, while all of these allegations rest on mountains of evidence; none of it resonates with a single cabinet member. The 25th Amendment is not a public plebiscite. You and I might easily agree that tearing up the White House to build a ballroom-bomb-shelter for a nuclear fetishizing war criminal might be an awful idea. But so what? The 25th Amendment is a private matter, a means of protection for the ruling class. If a president goes cuckoo for coco-puffs, the oligarchs can set things right. One might aptly assume that none of Trump’s shenanigans trouble the billionaire class.
So you and I do not get a vote according to 25th Amendment protocol. Here is an abbreviated list of those authorized to vote: 1) RFK Jr., 2) Linda McMahon, 3) Howard Lutnick, 4) Doug Burgum, 5) Chris Wright, 6) Pete Hegseth, 7) Marco Rubio... and so forth. If you believe that any of these names might vote to remove Trump, I suggest that you hurry (if you still have medical insurance) to take The Montreal Cognitive Assessment.
Trump is not in office despite being out of his fucking mind—he occupies the seat of supreme power precisely because he is off the charts berserk. The only people who matter in the Crumbling States of America make bank on Trump’s presidency. The oil executives, nuclear weapons manufacturers, planet destroying Big Tech moguls, insurance profiteers, and chemical poisoners are carving up the Earth like famished vultures alighting on a putrid carcass. If these predators don’t care about Trump’s decaying brain, it really doesn’t matter what you and I believe.
There is a means of removal—a real one, not a self-indulgent fantasy. It is called The 3.5% Rule, a theory that argues that regime change requires massive resistance involving 3.5% of the population taking to the streets until a resolution has been reached. It involves daily mobilization, not a two hour street festival every two months. In the US that means at least 11 million angry, undeterred resistors willing to endure a measure of personal inconvenience. It involves blocking traffic, getting arrested, boycotts, strikes, and international connections. We should be calling for foreign nationals to boycott and divest from US corporations. Or we can day dream about the 25th Amendment until Trump dies and hands over the throne to JD Vance.
As a general theme, we US citizens have far too much faith in alleged democratic process, and far too little passion for collective agency.
Keep ReadingShow Less
States Have Found a Way to Fight Back Against Citizens United
Federal attempts to overturn the ruling by amending the US Constitution or legislating against corporate spending have repeatedly failed. But now several states are experimenting with new ways to get this flood of corporate money out of politics.
Jun 05, 2026
More than 15 years ago, the Supreme Court removed limits on corporate political spending in its notorious Citizens United decision, ushering in an era of unprecedented influence by moneyed interests.
As a result, a small group of ultra-wealthy donors have skewed the political system to their advantage—and today, social scientists link the growing gap between rich and poor to that seminal 2010 decision.
Federal attempts to overturn the ruling by amending the US Constitution or legislating against corporate spending have repeatedly failed. But now several states are experimenting with new ways to get this flood of corporate money out of politics.
The state of Hawaii just passed a first-of-its-kind law redefining corporations as entities that aren’t allowed to spend money in elections anywhere within the state. The effort could kick off a powerful state-by-state pushback that succeeds where federal efforts failed.
Curtailing corporate influence on the political system is essential at a time when corporations are thriving while ordinary Americans struggle to make ends meet.
This simple idea is the brainchild of Tom Moore, senior fellow for democracy policy at the Center for American Progress. “It’s not regulation; it’s redefinition,” Moore told me. “States create corporations, and they give powers to all the corporations that operate within their states.”
So if the federal government and the Supreme Court enable corporations to influence elections, states can counter that merely by changing the definition of a corporation. And that’s precisely what Hawaii did. Effective starting July 2027, corporations doing business in the state are redefined to “not include the power to spend money or contribute anything of value to influence elections or ballot measures.”
The novel approach is well-protected against legal challenges. Moore explained, “The Supreme Court has said consistently for 200 years that [the power to define corporations] is a matter of state law, that the federal courts don’t have anything to do with that.”
The impact of this on Hawaii’s politics are likely to be monumental. “Basically, in Hawaii politics, local, state, and federal, every dollar that’s spent will be from an individual human being,” said Moore. “It’ll be disclosed, it’ll be voluntary. And that is a gigantic difference from what we have right now.”
Hawaii’s law doesn’t overturn Citizens United—it makes the 2010 ruling meaningless within its borders.
Residents of Montana are pushing a similar effort. Activists there are gathering signatures to place a measure on the November ballot to similarly redefine corporations so they can’t spend money in elections. If the measure passes, it will go into effect in January 2027, six months before Hawaii’s law takes effect.
In fact, according to Moore, Hawaii’s legislators borrowed the language for their bill from Montana’s ballot measure and sped it through their legislative process, pleasantly surprising advocates. Moore is confident the Montana effort will succeed. “They’re in very, very good shape, they’re incredibly well-organized,” he said.
At least 14 states, including New York and California, are currently considering similar bills, and Hawaii’s new law prompted interested lawmakers from two other states to contact Moore. “We’ve had outreach from folks in almost every state,” he said. Given the fact that it’s been less than a year since Moore first published his idea, the speed at which it’s caught on has been remarkable.
Curtailing corporate influence on the political system is essential at a time when corporations are thriving while ordinary Americans struggle to make ends meet. “At the end of the day, corporations don’t actually work for their shareholders, they work for us because we create them through our legislatures, through our laws,” said Moore.
“And if corporations are doing something in our state that we don’t like, we have the power as citizens and working through our legislators to do something about that."
Keep ReadingShow Less
The 14th Amendment Is 160 Years Old Today—And We Are in Serious Trouble
From the courageous radicalism of Thaddeus Stevens to the tragic depths Donald Trump has brought us, our nation has become horribly lost on what it means to be a citizen and why this democratic republican was created in the first.
May 06, 2026
On May 6, 1866, exactly one hundred and sixty years ago today, Thaddeus Stevens, US Congressman from Pennsylvania and the leading Radical Republican in the House of Representatives, rose to introduce the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution on the floor of the. Stevens, chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, was also co-chair of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction set up by Congress, in late 1865, to promote a radical Reconstruction, a program advanced over the consistent objections of President Andrew Johnson.
Here is how Stevens introduced the Amendment:
Congress tasked the committee with reconstructing the nation and setting new constitutional baselines for post-Civil War America; this is difficult work; above all, we are trying to write the Declaration of Independence’s promise of freedom and equality into the Constitution. But I beg gentlemen to consider the magnitude of the task which was imposed upon the committee. They were expected to suggest a plan for rebuilding a shattered nation—a nation which though not dissevered was yet shaken and riven by the gigantic and persistent efforts of six million able and ardent men; of bitter rebels striving through four years of bloody war. It cannot be denied that this terrible struggle sprang from the vicious principles incorporated into the institutions of our country. Our fathers had been compelled to postpone the principles of their great Declaration, and wait for the full establishment till a more propitious time. That time ought to be present now. But the public mind has been educated in error for a century. How difficult in a day to unlearn it. In rebuilding, it is necessary to clear away the rotten and defective portions of the old foundations, and to sink deep and found the repaired edifice upon the firm foundation of eternal justice. If, perchance, the accumulated quicksands render it impossible to reach in every part so firm a basis, then it becomes our duty to drive deep and solid the substituted piles on which to build. It would not be wise to prevent the raising of the structure because some corner of it might be founded upon materials subject to the inevitable laws of mortal decay. It were better to shelter the household and trust to the advancing progress of a higher morality and a purer and more intelligent principle to underpin the defective corner.
The Amendment passed in the House on June 13, by a vote of 138 in favor and 36 opposed, having passed in the Senate five days earlier, on June 8, by a vote of 33 in favor and 11 opposed. In other words, roughly a quarter of US Representatives and Senators, serving in houses of Congress that did not include representatives from the seceded Confederate states, voted against the amendment.
It is tempting to imagine that the establishment of egalitarian citizenship in the aftermath of a bloody Civil War fought in its name proceeded as a matter of course. But it did not. It was bitterly contested, by everyone aligned with the Confederacy, but also by many Northern Democrats, who rallied behind Andrew Johnson’s efforts to quickly reincorporate the eleven defeated Southern states without substantially empowering emancipated formerly enslaved people or enforcing any form of retributive justice. And it is been bitterly contested ever since.
Stevens and his Radical Republican allies in Congress understood the strength of the opposition to their vision of a multi-racial and non-racist democracy, and they fought a decade-long battle on its behalf, centered on both enforceable legal and civic equality and land reform designed to empower formerly-enslaved agricultural laborers. They succeeded in many ways, passing numerous bills designed to support the civil rights and economic opportunities of emancipated Blacks, and securing passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Yet the gains were short-lived, betrayed by the infamous Compromise of 1877 that placed Republican Rutherford Hayes in the White House and ending the final remnants of the Union’s military occupation of the South, leading in short order to the reinstitution of Black subordination via the new Jim Crow system of racial segregation and extortionate share-cropping. (While there have been many fine histories of this period, to my mind the best is Eric Foner’s award-winning Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.)
The Fourteenth Amendment was the cornerstone of the effort to truly reconstruct the postwar nation on the foundations of non-racial citizenship. In the words of historian T.J. Stiles, it was “The Constitutional Amendment That Reinvented Freedom”: “It established birthright citizenship, required ‘due process’ and ‘equal protection’ of the law for everyone, and put the federal government in the business of policing liberty. It removed race and ethnicity from the legal definition of American identity.”
Stevens was one of the principal legislative proponents of the Amendment. And, as President Johnson consistently sought to obstruct such efforts, he was one of the ring leaders of the 1868 effort to impeach Johnson. Indeed, he succeeded in this effort—Johnson was famously impeached by the House on February 24, 1868, by a vote of 126-47-- though Johnson was eventually acquitted in the Senate by the narrow margin of 35-19, one short of the 2/3 majority necessary to convict.
As Bruce Levine notes in his terrific 2021 political biography, Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice, Stevens was reviled and calumnied by opponents of Reconstruction, both in his lifetime and long into the 20th century. William A. Dunning, the dean of “Lost Cause” historians, described Stevens in 1907 as “truculent, vindictive, and cynical.” Writing in 1931, James Truslow Adams called Stevens “the most despicable, malevolent and morally deformed character who has ever risen to power in America.” James G, Randall, writing in his influential 1937 The Civil War and Reconstruction, similarly described him as “filled with ‘vindictive ugliness, unfairness, intolerance, and hatefulness,’” a view carried over into the 1969 edition of the book, co-edited with David Donald, the textbook assigned in the Civil War class I took at Queens College in 1976. The most enduring image of Stevens was produced not in a book but in a film, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 “Birth of a Nation,” one of whose chief protagonists, Austin Stoneman—an ugly, club-footed, lecherous hypocrite—was clearly modeled on Stevens.
Woodrow Wilson was only slightly less harsh, writing on “The Reconstruction of the Southern States” in The Atlantic in 1901: “He had no timidity, no scruples about keeping to constitutional lines of policy, no regard or thought for the sensibilities of the minority, — being rough-hewn and without embarrassing sensibilities himself, — an ideal radical for the service of the moment.”
It is true that Stevens seemed to have little timidity, and appears to have been something of a pit bull in his refusal to let the cause of Reconstruction go. It is also true that he had “no scruples about keeping to constitutional lines of policy,” but only in this sense: he sought, with his colleagues, to revolutionize the “constitutional lines of policy” that had already been decimated by a Civil War, and to use the Constitution’s own Article V process to amend the Constitution. Stevens was a constitutional revolutionary—the point of Levine’s brilliant book--and thus “an ideal radical for the service of the moment.”
Like everything about the Constitution, the Fourteenth Amendment was hardly self-enforcing. This was understood by its drafters, which is why they included the language of Section 5: “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article” (both the Thirteen and the Fifteenth Amendments contain similar language). Every aspect of the Amendment remained hotly contested for a century after its passage. But in the 1960’s, after decades of intense struggle by a civil rights movement that faced daily attacks on life and limb, Congress finally passed two pieces of legislation designed to enforce the 14th and the 15th Amendments—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Like the above-mentioned amendments, these landmark pieces of legislation faced strong opposition, and did not pass without legislative battle. The first passed in the House by a vote of 290-130 and in the Senate by a vote of 73-27; the second passed the House by a vote of 328-74 and the Senate by a vote of 79-18. And as is well known, the passage of these laws helped to generate a powerful backlash against any form of racial liberalism.
That said, both the basic intent behind the acts, and the federal bureaucracies established to enforce them, became more or less settled features of US law for the past half-century—until now.
To be fair, the Voting Rights Act has been besieged ever since the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision. The Court’s 6-3 decision this week in Louisiana v. Callais further eviscerated the Act.
At the same time, we are currently witnessing a wholesale assault on the 14th Amendment, and the entire legal system established to enforce it, by the Trump administration. The examples are loud and clear: the outright attack on birthright citizenship, which is currently before the Court; the obvious suspension of due process by the DHS-ICE regime of arrest, detention, and deportation that in the past year has swept up well over 500,000 Americans; and the use of the Justice Department—first established in 1870 to oversee the rule of law in the formerly-Confederate states—to threaten and punish “political enemies.”
Perhaps nothing better symbolizes this Trumpist rejection of the 14th Amendment than the second Trump presidency itself. We should not forget that very powerful arguments were advanced, by numerous reputable conservative legal scholars, including J. Michael Luttig, to justify keeping Trump off several state ballots in 2024, on the grounds that his incitement of the January 6, 2021 insurrection violated the 14th Amendment’s Section 3. In spite of these arguments, the Supreme Court ruled against such moves in March 2024, holding that only Congress could attempt such a maneuver. Trump, his candidacy bolstered, went on to win the 2024 election, and then proceeded, on day one of his second term, to pardon or commute the sentences of every one of the over 1200 people who had been convicted of crimes on for their role in the January 6 insurrection.
Under Trump 20.0, even the barest lip service to the notion of equal justice under the law has been abandoned with contempt.
It is a sad irony of history that this is all happening as the nation prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and that Trump goes about the task of destroying constitutional democracy even as he makes extravagant plans to celebrate “America 250.”
And it is simply sad, and outrageous, that 160 years after Thaddeus Stevens announced the intention “to write the Declaration of Independence’s promise of freedom and equality into the Constitution,” Donald Trump is doing his best to trample on the Declaration, the Constitution, and the very idea of liberal democracy.
Keep ReadingShow Less
‘Really Chilling’: Trump Judicial Nominees Refuse to Say He's Not Eligible for 3rd Term
"The language of the constitutional amendment... makes it clear that no, he is not eligible for a third term," Sen. Chris Coons informed one Trump judicial nominee.
May 05, 2026
Political observers are expressing alarm after several of President Donald Trump's lifetime judicial nominees refused to say whether he is eligible to run for a third term.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday, Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) asked Trump judicial nominee John Marck to describe the 22nd Amendment of the US Constitution, which states that "no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice."
"The 22nd Amendment... senator, my career has mostly been in criminal prosecution, I haven't had an opportunity to use that one, specifically," Marck replied.
JUST IN: A Trump judicial nominee was asked point blank: is Trump eligible to run for a third term?
Their answer: “I would have to review the actual wording…”
Sen. Chris Coons then asked every nominee in the room to confirm the Constitution bars a third term.
Silence.
Every… pic.twitter.com/LzUZxFzaOL
— Brian Allen (@allenanalysis) May 4, 2026
"Anyone able to help on the 22nd Amendment?" Coons asked the other judicial nominees at the hearing, one of whom explained that it was the amendment that sets a two-term limit for the presidency.
"Correct," Coons replied. "It states that no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice. Mr. Marck, is President Trump eligible to run again for president in 2028?"
"Senator, without considering all the facts and looking at everything, depending on what the situation is, this, to me, strikes as something more of a hypothetical..."
"It's not a hypothetical," Coons interjected. "Has President Trump been elected president twice?"
"President Trump has been certified as president of the United States two times," Marck acknowledged.
"Is he eligible to run for a third term under our Constitution?" Coons asked.
"Uhm, I would have to review the..." Marck began before Coons again interjected.
"All I need to tell you is the language of the constitutional amendment that makes it clear that no, he is not eligible for a third term," the senator said.
Coons then challenged other Trump judicial nominees at the hearing—Southern District of Florida nominee Jeffrey Kuntz, Southern District of Texas nominee Arthur Roberts Jones, and Northern District of Ohio nominee Michael Hendershot—to say if they believed the Constitution barred Trump from running for a third term, and none of them did.
After watching video of Coons' exchange with Trump judicial nominees, investigative journalist and author Nick Bryant declared the whole episode to be "really chilling."
"Like a scene from a dystopian movie, and alarming for anyone who cares about democracy," Bryant wrote in a Monday social media post. "A judicial nominee flagrantly flouting the Constitution about Trump's eligibility for a third term. The Constitution is unambiguous. He is not eligible."
Former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson noted that the Trump nominees were "not even pretending to honor the Constitution" during the hearing, while former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) simply declared the entire exchange "unreal."
While the chances of Trump being allowed to stand for an unconstitutional third term at the moment are very low, the president has repeatedly teased plans to run for president again in 2028, telling an audience on Monday that he would be leaving the White House "eight or nine years from now."
Joyce Vance, a former federal prosecutor and current professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, said that Trump's declared intention to run for a third term should not be brushed off as mere trolling.
"This is how he started with the whole 'if I lose the election is fraudulent' shtick," she wrote. "If we don’t listen to this, shame on us. That man isn’t building a ballroom for the next guy."
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Most Sacred Place in America? The Voting Booth
The voting booth is where private belief becomes public direction. Where individual dignity translates into collective decision-making. Where democracy is not debated, but practiced.
May 03, 2026
When asked to name America’s most sacred place, what comes to mind?
Perhaps the 9/11 Memorial, where grief and resilience coexist in quiet reflection. Or Arlington National Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, honoring sacrifice beyond name or rank. For some, sacredness is rooted in heritage. The Black Hills of South Dakota, revered by the Sioux Nation. Seattle's Sakya Monastery. Newport's Touro Synagogue (the nation's first). The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, DC, or perhaps a bar in New York City called Stonewall, where a marginalized group refused to remain invisible.
All are worthy answers.
But for me, the most sacred place in America is far less grand, far less visible, and far more powerful.
This moment is not simply about policy differences. It is about how, and how well, our democratic system functions at its core.
It is the voting booth.
I came to understand this not through theory, but through experience.
In 1971, just two weeks after my 18th birthday, the 26th Amendment was ratified, granting 18-year-olds the right to vote. My generation had watched young men drafted into the Vietnam War, sent to fight and die, without having a voice in the democracy they were asked to defend.
That changed overnight.
I was among the first to step into that new reality.
My first voting booth was simple, a small curtained space with metal levers and switches. As I pulled the close-curtain lever, it made a unique sound, punctuating a sense of autonomy, privacy, freedom, personal power, and my passage into responsible adulthood.
That moment has stayed with me ever since.
Today, as we approach another pivotal election, that sacred space feels more important, and more fragile, than ever.
The six-month countdown to the midterms has begun.
This election carries a different kind of weight. In recent years, the balance of power that defines our system of government has shown visible strain. A legislative branch often mired in gridlock has struggled to provide consistent oversight of the executive. At the same time, a Supreme Court reshaped by a series of deeply consequential appointments has issued rulings that revisit and, in some cases, reverse long-settled precedents, altering the landscape of rights and federal authority. Layer onto that ongoing disputes over election integrity and the certification of results, and it becomes clear that this moment is not simply about policy differences. It is about how, and how well, our democratic system functions at its core.
Across the country, we are witnessing debates and decisions that directly affect who can vote, how they vote, and whether those votes are counted without interference. In some states, new legislation has shortened early voting periods, limited the use of ballot drop boxes, or imposed stricter identification requirements that can make participation more difficult. Court decisions have reshaped long-standing protections related to privacy and bodily autonomy, raising broader questions about how constitutional rights are interpreted and applied. We have also seen documented efforts to challenge certified election results and pressure officials to overturn outcomes, actions that test the durability of norms once considered settled.
This is not about party. It is about participation.
The voting booth remains one of the last places where power is perfectly equal. No wealth, status, or platform can amplify one person’s vote over another’s. Inside that space, each voice carries the same weight.
The voting booth.
A place where a mother of six in Jackson, Wyoming can vote her conscience without fearing a husband who prefers her silent and pregnant.
A place where a senior in a Florida group home can vote his mind despite the cable news chatter and groupthink that dominate the evening dining table.
A place where a devout Christian can still feel safe, without judgment, following her beliefs by supporting a woman’s right to choose.
A place where an assembly line worker from West Virginia can go against the grain and cast a vote that supports his gay nephew, a kid he knows deserves basic human rights just as much as any guy on his bowling team.
The voting booth is where private belief becomes public direction. Where individual dignity translates into collective decision-making. Where democracy is not debated, but practiced.
And yet, participation is not guaranteed.
Even in recent high-turnout elections, tens of millions of eligible Americans chose not to vote. Some out of frustration. Some out of disillusionment. Some out of the belief that their voice does not matter.
But absence has consequences.
A sacred place means nothing if it stands empty.
The voting booth does not defend itself. It does not speak unless we do. It does not protect rights, norms, or institutions on its own. It simply offers the opportunity.
What we do with that opportunity is everything.
This election, like many before it, will shape policies, priorities, and the direction of the country. Reasonable people will disagree on outcomes, candidates, and solutions. That is not a weakness of democracy. It is its design.
But participation is not optional if democracy is to endure.
The most sacred place in America is still there, waiting, quiet, unassuming, and powerful as ever.
The question is whether we will show up.
Vote.
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy