The Supreme Court Is Corrupt. This Is What We Can Do About It.

This is excellent: Jamelle Bouie explains why he thinks the Supreme Court is corrupt and what we (through Congress) can do about it. Not all video transcripts work as text, but this one does, so I’m including his full remarks here:

The Supreme Court is corrupt.

You might hear that and think, “Well, Jamelle, you just disagree with the rulings. They’re not corrupt. They’re doing their jobs.” But I want to posit to you that they’re not doing their jobs. They’re in fact doing something very different. They’re acting as a super legislature, an unelected group of people who have taken it upon themselves to correct Congress. Not when Congress has overstepped its bounds, not when Congress has overstepped its powers, but when the court simply doesn’t like what they’re doing.

Typically when we use the word corruption, we are thinking about monetary corruption, bribes and the like. And it should be said there’s some of this. Clarence Thomas in particular is known for taking large sums, large gifts from his wealthy benefactors. Alito has also been the beneficiary of wealthy friends. So there is that kind of corruption as well.

But corruption also has a broader meaning. It can mean the malign use of power, the substitution of the public trust for your own private will, your own private interest. And that is more than anything else what is happening with the Supreme Court. You can see it in many different ways. The Roberts Court is quite fond of simply ignoring the plain text of the Constitution whenever it gets into the way of their particular political and ideological projects.

The Roberts Court wants to do a few things. It wants to gut the Reconstruction Amendments. It wants to aggrandize presidential power. It wants to free corporate speech. It wants to allow the wealthy to interact with the political system in any way they choose. And it wants to pursue the particular partisan interest of the Republican party. And so when the text of the Constitution gets in the way, they changed the text or they ignore it.

The text of the Constitution clearly gives Congress the power to handle racial discrimination and voting. And when it came up to the court in 2013 in Shelby County, the court simply made up a new doctrine, state sovereignty. All states have to be treated equally in order to undermine a provision that subjected states with histories of voting discrimination to stricter scrutiny by the federal government. When the court wanted to protect its special boy, Donald Trump from criminal prosecution, it invented a doctrine of criminal immunity for core duties found nowhere in the Constitution and frankly contradicted by the text, history, and theory behind the Constitution. More recently, rather than just shutting down Trump’s efforts to unravel birthright citizenship, the court has taken them seriously despite the clear text and history of the 14th amendment. Where the text interferes with partisan political goals, this Supreme Court says to hell with the text.

The other manner in which the court demonstrates corruption is by not having any particularly consistent jurisprudence. Despite grand claims of being originalist or textualist, this court often decides not based on any particular theory of jurisprudence, but simply on whether they have a decided interest in the case in question — a partisan or political interest.

Consider two days in 2022, back to back. On the first of those days, the court held that because you cannot find gun regulation in the annals of American history, therefore there’s no history or tradition supporting New York State’s attempt to regulate individual gun ownership. And then the very next day, the court releases an opinion stating that despite the fact that you cannot find very much evidence of abortion regulation in the American past, that doesn’t mean states can’t regulate abortion or ban it outright. On one hand, gun rights, which the court likes, history is an obstacle. On the other hand, abortion rights, which the court does not like, history is no limit.

In Trump v. Hawaii, the court held that yes, the Trump administration can use race, can use religion, in determining its travel bans — there’s nothing against the Constitution involved in that. Just last year, the court held that you can use race in immigration stops. That’s why we’re calling them Kavanaugh stops. (Brett Kavanaugh wrote that opinion.)

But as it comes to voting, as we’ve just seen, states can’t use race to remedy past discrimination. States can’t consider race to ensure fair minority representation. States can however engage in racial gerrymandering as long as it’s done under the guise of partisan gerrymandering. What’s the difference? Well, the court likes the president’s nativeist policies. It likes the fact that Republicans can try to gerrymander themselves in the permanent majorities. And so, if it needs to use race to do that, the court has no particular problem with it. Only when it comes time to hamper discrimination to protect rights is race impermissible.

The other manner in which we see the court acting in a corrupt way is in its clear preference for Republican presidents and Republican power. Under Trump, aggressive assertions of executive power were given deference. They were allowed to move forward. Aggressive reinterpretations of existing congressional statutes, reinterpretations that may cut against Congress’s intent were given deference, allowed to move forward. Broad policy changes — such as ending agency independence against the clear text of the law and against 90 years of precedence — are given deference under the idea that the president needs to be able to pursue his priorities.

But Barack Obama wants to use the EPA to reduce carbon emissions? Well, that’s a major question. Congress has to deal with that. Joe Biden wants to forgive student loans? Well, that’s another major question. Congress has to deal with that. Under this court, presidential power when held by Republicans is broad and expansive. Under Democrats, it’s cramped, barely legitimate.

I could go on like this, but the last point I’ll make, the last example of the corruption I’ll give, is the total absence of regularity by this court. What makes a court a court is that there are well-defined procedures, processes — they’re predictable. Courts pay attention to precedent. They have the same rules for all plaintiffs and they explain their decisions. Not so much this court.

There’s the shadow docket in which this court issues broad and important rulings with no explanation, shoots down district court decisions with no explanation, and then insists that those courts hew to its new precedents, which it has offered, again, with no explanation.

In cases where the justices have clear political or ideological interests, they will make up fact patterns to support their case. A religious liberty dispute where a coach says that he is having a private prayer, but in fact he’s having a large public prayer pressuring other students. Well, Neil Gorsuch will simply pretend that the private prayer is what was happening, not the actual public prayer. A plaintiff sues not because they have any particular injury because of a law, but because they hypothetically might have an injury because of a law, despite the fact that they’re not even engaged in the particular business that would bring them that injury. Well, the court says, “Hey, no problem. We’ll still give you standing and we’ll still decide your case because we have a vested interest in making sure that religious liberty means you can discriminate against LGBTQ people.”

And again, there is the shadow docket. Major decisions made without a whiff and inkling of reasoning. Congressionally mandated agencies disrupted. Tens of thousands of livelihoods destroyed. All without a single bit of explanation, simply deference to the president’s desires and decrees. It is capricious and arbitrary. It is the essence of an anti-democratic action of an anti-constitutional action.

It is abundantly clear that as long as John Roberts has his majority, nothing the left of center in this country wants to do is safe or stable. Everything can be killed by the court. We can have democracy and self-government in this country or we can have the Supreme Court as it exists, but we cannot have both. We cannot have both.

And so what is there to be done about the court? There is a real chance that Democrats will have a trifecta in 2029. They might even have large majorities. And in that environment, court reform must be table stakes. There is no other choice, no other option. The rest of the agenda is simply not possible without court reform.

The usual proposals for court reform are expanding the court. And I think that should be done. Expand the court, expand the entire federal judiciary, expand the number of circuits, expand the number of justices commensurate with the circuits. But I think there’s much more to be done than just court expansion. Because it’s not simply that the court is not on the right side. It’s that the court is too powerful. It’s concentrated too much power in itself and we have to deal with a concentration of power.

So court reform legislation has to be geared towards reducing the court’s power. One of those tools would be what’s called jurisdiction stripping, which is permitted under article 3 section 2 of the Constitution. Congress should say that the court simply cannot adjudicate these particular issues. The Congress should impose ethics reform on the court and it should put sharp limits on justice’s ability to get book deals, go on tours, collect honorariums.

But that’s all small ball stuff. There are more radical options as well. We’re going to talk about those more radical options that really would break up the power of the court and cut the court back down to size to remind it that it doesn’t stand above the entire American system as a council of kings, that it is very much part of the American system, in dialogue with the other branches and accountable to the people.

So we can turn the Supreme Court’s neoclassical building, first and foremost, into a museum of some sort and the court will return to its original place: the basement of Congress. Hell, maybe even an office park in Northern Virginia. I don’t care. Court will lose its ability to select its clerks. We’ll take away a patronage system that has corrupted the legal profession. And the court will lose its ability to choose cases. Remember, much of the court’s procedure is already by statute. The building, the clerks, the ability to choose cases, all of that already determined by Congress, and what Congress can give, Congress can take away. The only thing the Constitution mandates that there shall be a Supreme Court. And it gives it a very narrow original jurisdiction. Disputes between states, disputes involving ambassadors, impeachments, that kind of thing.

So, I know I said I support expanding the court, but I also said that was small ball. The other thing you could do totally constitutionally is restrict the court exclusively to its original jurisdiction — to end its ability to hear appeals and then instead to create a new national appeals court comprised of judges from all the existing circuits. We’re already having full-on judicial expansion and so we’re going to create a couple more circuits. Let’s say we have 15 total circuits and each circuit sends two judges to this national appeals court. A random panel of nine judges chooses cases and a random panel of nine judges hears cases. The original Supreme Court can, again, hear whatever is in its original jurisdiction.

If that sounds too extreme to you, then the other option is just to expand the Supreme Court, give it 20 justices, 21 justices, and have it hear cases based off of randomly selected panels. I’m sure there are other options we can think of here, but the goal is not simply to make the court something that is favorable to my views. The goal is to make the court weaker. The goal is to make it more difficult to game the court’s decision-making. The goal is to uncapture the court, to transform it into an actual court and not some tool of partisan and ideological control. There is simply no other choice here. We can have government by judges or we can have government by the people. But we cannot have both. We cannot have both.

• Jamelle Bouie
• politics
• Supreme Court
• usa
• video

Jamelle Bouie Interview on Work Is Four Letters

GOLIKEHELLMACHINE has an interview series called Work is Four Letters he describes like this:

Most people think their jobs are boring or pointless or bullshit, but I don’t; if you look around you, everything you see was made by someone, somehow, and that’s really interesting to me. Work is Four Letters is an occasional series — edited for brevity and clarity — highlighting what people do for work and why they do it.

The conversations are informative and robust. The latest interview was with NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie and I found both his description of how he thinks about his job and the ways he DOES his job interesting. Also this nugget about our current experience:

I think the big thing that I’d like people to take away is an understanding that not everything we’re experiencing now has happened before — I reject that. The past is truly a different country. Although you can find historical analogies, they’re just that: analogies. They aren’t one-for-one equivalents. But what you can say is that past generations of Americans have had to sort out their own struggles, and have faced similar questions that we face today, similar questions about the nature of our country, the nature of who belongs here, etc., etc.

• interviews
• Jamelle Bouie

Abolish ICE

Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE.

• crime
• Jamelle Bouie
• murder
• USA
• video

Listen to the Cassandras

Toby Buckle for the New Republic: The Americans Who Saw All This Coming — But Were Ignored and Maligned.

This is not that far from the position many ordinary Americans found themselves in at the start of the Trump era. They weren’t time travelers but saw what was coming clearly enough. They called Trump’s movement fascist from the very start, and often predicted specific milestones of our democratic decline well in advance. They were convinced they were right — and often beside themselves with worry. Accordingly, they did everything they could to get others to listen.

But not enough people did, and many attacked them — even as events proved them right, again and again. As late as February 2025, respected legal commentator Noah Feldman was casually asserting our constitutional system was “working fine” and Jon Stewart was scolding people who used the word “fascist,” claiming all they had done “over the last ten years is cry wolf.”

I’m glad Buckle wrote about this…it’s infuriating. Who were the folks attempting to sound the alarm?

The first thing to say about fascism’s Cassandras is they’re usually women. Not all women are Cassandras (most aren’t), but most Cassandras are women. My sense is that Black Americans, of either gender, are likelier than whites to be Cassandras, and trans and nonbinary people are heavily overrepresented within the group.

I was posting about Trump’s authoritarianism in the months before the 2016 election¹ because I felt it was pretty easy to spot but mostly because I was listening to the sorts of people that Buckle interviews in his piece: predominately Black, many women, many LGBTQ+ folks. And what were they saying? Jamelle Bouie, then a columnist at Slate, stated it plainly in Nov 2015: Donald Trump Is a Fascist. Buckle again:

What were they afraid of? Authoritarianism, political violence, racism, sexism, corruption, as well as threats to bodily autonomy and LGBT rights, were the common themes. Everyone mentioned at least one of those, and the vast majority mentioned multiple. “All the implications that I knew the election would have that have all come true, essentially,” as Emily, a 38-year-old white female writer in Chicago, put it. Cassandras are defined by seeing in MAGA not just policies they disagreed with but a loaded gun pointed at the heart of our politics and culture. “It just felt to me like we were the Weimar Republic; the lying press, the way he was weaponizing American people … the othering of people — Hispanics, they’re rapists, and all of that,” said Sonia, a 52-year-old white woman who works in marketing in Los Angeles.

The anti-alarmists — Buckle lists several of them: Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Bret Stephens, Corey Robin, Jon Stewart, David Brooks, William Watson, John Harris, Simon Jenkins, Zachary Karabell, Josh Barro, and Noah Feldman — scolded and derided the Cassandras. Going forward, we should be skeptical of giving them and others like them our attention when they pooh pooh people fighting against obvious racism, fascism, and kleptocracy; dismiss these dangers as mere partisan differences, culture wars, wokeism, or rhetoric; and argue for what amounts to meeting the nazis halfway.

1. Here’s a post from July 2016 explicitly comparing him to Hitler, which I’m sure I got scolding emails about. And I know I’ve lost quite a few readers over the years because of my “obsession” with Trump.↩

• 2025 Coup
• Donald Trump
• fascism
• Jamelle Bouie
• politics
• Toby Buckle

The Armed Takeover of US Cities by the President Is Not a “Distraction”

Jamelle Bouie on Democratic politicians who maddeningly cannot recognize and acknowledge what is going on in the country.

From my perspective, the story of American politics right now is that the president, who fashions himself a kind of king of America, is attempting to barricade himself in the capital by unleashing a military occupation on its residents. And he’s promised to extend this military occupation to other cities and other states that he views as political opponents.

That to me is the big story of American politics right now: a mad king openly exerting tyrannical power over Americans and threatening further tyrannical power against other Americans, all under a pretext of crime reduction.

• Donald Trump
• Jamelle Bouie
• politics
• USA

Jamelle Bouie on the Death of the Fourth American Republic

This is a great piece from Jamelle Bouie on the likely death of the Voting Rights Act and, zooming out, the end of an era in American society that began with the Act’s signing.

Americans pride ourselves, by contrast, on our undivided history under one Constitution — a single, ongoing experiment in self-government. But look closely at American history and you’ll see that this is an illusion of continuity that belies a reality of change, and sometimes radical transformation, over time. There are several American republics and at least two Constitutions, a first and a second founding. Our first republic began with ratification in 1788 and collapsed at Fort Sumter in 1861. Our second emerged from the wreckage of the Civil War and was dismantled, as the University of Connecticut historian Manisha Sinha argues, by Jim Crow at home and imperial ambition abroad. If the third American republic took shape under the unusual circumstances of the middle decades of the 20th century — what the Vanderbilt historian Jefferson Cowie calls “the great exception” of depression, war and a political system indelibly shaped by immigration restriction and the near-total exclusion of millions of American citizens from the political system — then the fourth began with the achievements of the civil rights movement, which included a newly open door to the world.

America’s fourth republic was one “built on multiracial pluralism” and it’s under siege by the Trump regime, which wants to return control of America to white men.

It’s this America that Donald Trump and his movement hope to condemn to the ash heap of history. It’s this America that they’re fighting to destroy with their attacks on immigration, civil rights laws, higher education and the very notion of a pluralistic society of equals.

• Jamelle Bouie
• politics
• USA

What Was Jim Crow?

This is an excellent video explanation from Jamelle Bouie of what Jim Crow was, how it developed, and how it continues to reverberate in American society and politics today.

If you are an American watching this, and you had a standard social studies or history class in high school, you may think of Jim Crow as more or less simply being separate institutions, separate bathrooms, separate water fountains — various kinds of public disrespect. And those certainly were the symbols of Jim Crow, symbols of outward public disrespect. But that’s not what the system was.

Jim Crow the system was something we would recognize today, and describe as today, as authoritarian. And specifically, it was an authoritarian system of labor control and political control. The Jim Crow states sharply limited political participation by large parts of their population — most of them black, but not a small number of them white as well — and the Jim Crow states themselves were largely vehicles for the interest of powerful owners of capital and property: land owners, factory owners — people who had a vested interest in direct control of labor. The social separation, the extreme and atavistic violence, the theft, the plunder — all of these things were downstream of this effort to control political behavior and control labor. They were the mechanisms of that control, the way to keep people in line or keep them bought into the system if they were on the white side of the color line.

The video is long and it gets into some detail that’s not super exciting (but is nevertheless important), but stick with it — I learned a lot.

• history
• Jamelle Bouie
• Jim Crow
• politics
• racism
• USA

Trump’s Tour of Revenge Against the American People

Building on his walk-and-talk video from a couple of days ago, Jamelle Bouie writes about two of the easiest things to understand about Donald Trump. 1. The way in which “his every executive function exists to satisfy his ego”:

One immediate response to all of this is to say that Trump is operating according to some higher-level political and ideological perspective. And there is a cottage industry of observers who have given themselves the unenviable task of transmuting the president’s tics and utterances into something like a calculated strategy — an intellectually defensible set of doctrines rather than the thoughtless patter of an outer-borough confidence man.

But this has always strained credulity. To ask anyone, for instance, to treat the president’s display of childish pique opposite Zelensky in the Oval Office as some return to Teddy Rooseveltian great-power realism — as opposed to the embarrassing tantrum of a grade-school bully — is to demand that readers administer a self-lobotomy.

2. His desire for revenge:

If this is his psychological state, then it stands to reason that Trump would want revenge against the public that denied him a second term as much as he wants revenge against the officials who have tried to make him answer for his illegal actions.

It is hard to describe Trump’s first month and a half in office as something other than a retribution campaign against the American people.

As I wrote a few days ago about Trump’s Oval Office ambush of Zelenskyy:

It occurs to me after reading about the meeting that Trump’s actions here are partially motivated by a desire for personal retribution against Zelenskyy for not helping him smear Biden in 2019. Zelenskyy told Trump no and Trump wants revenge — and he’s gonna turn his back on Ukraine and Europe to get it.

• 2025 Coup
• Donald Trump
• Jamelle Bouie
• politics
• Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Is This the End of the American Constitution?

Jamelle Bouie has started posting video essays on his YouTube channel about the current US political crisis. His latest one is an adaptation of his NY Times piece, There Is No Going Back.

Now, even if Musk had been elected to office, this would still be one of the worst abuses of power in American history. That is unquestionable. No one in the executive branch has the legal authority to unilaterally cancel congressional appropriations. No one has the legal authority to turn the Treasury payment system into a means of political retribution. No one has the authority to summarily dismiss civil servants without cause. No one has the authority to take down and scrub Americans’ data unilaterally. And no private citizen has the authority to access some of the most sensitive data the government collects on private citizens for their own unknown and probably nefarious purposes.

Bouie has also regularly been posting videos to his Instagram (bio: “National program director of the CHUM Group”) and TikTok.

• 2025 Coup
• Donald Trump
• Elon Musk
• Jamelle Bouie
• politics
• USA
• video

Resegregation, Coups, Orwell, and the Importance of Precise Language

Karen Attiah wrote a short opinion piece about how the nationwide assault on diversity, equity and inclusion led by conservatives is actually aimed at resegregation and how being precise in our language about what’s happening is crucial.

These facts, taken together, point to the removal of Black people from academic, corporate and government spaces: resegregation.

People are vowing to push back with their wallets — to shop at Costco and boycott Target, for example. But I believe the fight starts with language. Journalists have a role and an obligation to be precise in naming what we are facing.

Frankly, I wish the media would stop using “DEI” and “diversity hiring” altogether. Any official, including the president, who chooses to blame everything from plane crashes to wildfires on non-White, non-male people should be asked whether they believe that desegregation is to blame. Whether they believe resegregation is the answer. We need to bring back the language that describes what is actually happening.

When I write about difficult or contentious topics where I want to take great care to not be misunderstood and to be as accurate as I can be, I always think about this piece by history professor Michael Todd Landis on the language we use to talk about the Civil War & slavery.

Specifically, let us drop the word “Union” when describing the United States side of the conflagration, as in “Union troops” versus “Confederate troops.” Instead of “Union,” we should say “United States.” By employing “Union” instead of “United States,” we are indirectly supporting the Confederate view of secession wherein the nation of the United States collapsed, having been built on a “sandy foundation” (according to rebel Vice President Alexander Stephens). In reality, however, the United States never ceased to exist. The Constitution continued to operate normally; elections were held; Congress, the presidency, and the courts functioned; diplomacy was conducted; taxes were collected; crimes were punished; etc. Yes, there was a massive, murderous rebellion in at least a dozen states, but that did not mean that the United States disappeared.

Landis notes that scholar Edward Baptist also uses different language:

In his 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books), he rejects “plantations” (a term pregnant with false memory and romantic myths) in favor of “labor camps”; instead of “slave-owners” (which seems to legitimate and rationalize the ownership of human beings), he uses “enslavers.” Small changes with big implications. These far more accurate and appropriate terms serve his argument well, as he re-examines the role of unfree labor in the rise of the United States as an economic powerhouse and its place in the global economy. In order to tear down old myths, he eschews the old language.

German museums and public remembrances of the Holocaust use similarly precise language:

Just as important, the language they used on the displays in these places was clear and direct, at least in the English translations. It was almost never mealy-mouthed language like “this person died at Treblinka”…like they’d succumbed to natural causes or something. Instead it was “this person was murdered at Treblinka”, which is much stronger and explicitly places blame on the Nazis for these deaths.

This is why I’ve been so insistent on describing the events of January 6, 2021 as an attack on Congress and as a coup attempt:

This was not an attack on the Capitol Building. This was an attack on Congress, the United States Government, and elected members of our government. It was a coup attempt. Can you imagine what the mob in those videos would have done had they found Nancy Pelosi? Kidnapping or a hostage situation at the very least, assassination in the worst case. Saying that this was an “attack on the Capitol” is such an anodyne way of describing what happened on January 6th that it’s misleading. Words matter and we should use the correct ones when describing this consequential event.

In writing about the 2025 Coup, I’ve been careful to call it a coup because it is. I’ve been repeating words like “illegal” and “unconstitutional” because these actions attacks by Trump and Musk are just that. Our government’s computing systems have been “seized” or “broken into to” or “hacked” (illegal!) rather than “accessed” (sounds routine). In his piece yesterday, Jamelle Bouie argued for more precision in how we describe the coup:

To describe the current situation in the executive branch as merely a constitutional crisis is to understate the significance of what we’re experiencing. “Constitutional crisis” does not even begin to capture the radicalism of what is unfolding in the federal bureaucracy and of what Congress’s decision not to act may liquidate in terms of constitutional meaning.

One of the reason people get so upset at media like the NY Times and Washington Post is because the language they often use is so watered down that it’s actually not truthful. Take the initial opening paragraph to this NYT piece about Trump’s statement about wanting to ethnically cleanse Gaza:

President Trump declared on Tuesday that he would seek to permanently displace the entire Palestinian population of Gaza and take over the devastated seaside enclave as a U.S. territory, one of the most audacious ideas that any American leader has advanced in years.

(They later changed “audacious” to “brazen”.) Audacious? Brazen? Advanced? Ideas? These words all have meanings! And when you put them together, it makes Trump sound like some genius superhero statesman. And “seaside enclave”? That is technically correct but it sounds like they’re talking about fucking Montauk. This is terrible writing that fails to communicate the truth of the situation.

Here’s why this matters: imprecise and euphemistic language is the language of fascists, authoritarians, and oppressors — power-craving leaders who either don’t want people to know what they are doing or don’t want them to think too hard about the illegality or immorality of their actions. The Nazis had all kinds of euphemisms — the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”, “protective custody”, “work-shy”, “enhanced interrogation” — to mask their mass imprisonment activities and mass murder.

In 1946, Nineteen Eighty-Four author George Orwell published an essay called Politics and the English Language in which he decried the “lack of precision” of political writing:

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

And from his concluding paragraph:

…one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits…

You can read Orwell’s whole essay here.

I don’t always succeed, but I try really hard to use precise, concrete language in my writing. As Attiah urges, we should want and expect our media to do the same — anything less is an abdication of their duty to their readers to tell them the truth.

• 2025 Coup
• Donald Trump
• Elon Musk
• George Orwell
• Jamelle Bouie
• journalism
• Karen Attiah
• language
• NY Times
• politics
• racism
• USA
• Washington Post

This Changes Everything

This is a great piece by Jamelle Bouie, which lays out in plain language what Musk and Trump are doing to the federal government, why it matters, and what can be done about it.

To describe the current situation in the executive branch as merely a constitutional crisis is to understate the significance of what we’re experiencing. “Constitutional crisis” does not even begin to capture the radicalism of what is unfolding in the federal bureaucracy and of what Congress’s decision not to act may liquidate in terms of constitutional meaning.

Together, Trump and Musk are trying to rewrite the rules of the American system. They are trying to instantiate an anti-constitutional theory of executive power that would make the president supreme over all other branches of government. They are doing so in service of a plutocratic agenda of austerity and the upward redistribution of wealth. And the longer Congress stands by, the more this is fixed in place.

If Trump, Musk and their allies — like Russell Vought, the president’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget and a vocal advocate of an autocratic “radical constitutionalism” that treats the president is an elected despot — succeed, then the question of American politics won’t be if they’ll win the next election, but whether the Constitution as we know it is still in effect.

Very much worth reading the whole thing — I found his conclusion somewhat unexpected (but IMO correct).

• 2025 Coup
• Donald Trump
• Elon Musk
• Jamelle Bouie
• politics
• USA

“Was Anyone Going to Say Anything?”

Will Stancil on Bluesky:

I don’t know how to say this any louder

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION IS MORE RADICAL, MORE FASCIST, MORE VIOLENT THAN ANYONE IN MAINSTREAM POLITICS OR MEDIA IS WILLING TO ADMIT OUT LOUD

THEY ARE FULLY IN THRALL TO A MOVEMENT OF ONLINE NAZIS THAT WANT TO END AMERICA AND KILL MANY, MANY PEOPLE

They do not care about fixing anything. They do not care about running the government. They want to set the Constitution on fire, destroy the federal government, and torture and murder their enemies for fun. This is their only true political commitment

It’s beyond insane - it’s suicidal - that our leaders and our commentators and our media won’t talk about what’s really going on here. They maintain the pretense that this is all about policy differences, but MAGA is barely even bothering with the pretense of a mask anymore

I agree 100% with Stancil here — it is so completely obvious what Trump and the Republicans are trying to do (they are not hiding it!) and it’s maddening to watch the media and Democratic politicians treat this like any other political situation: “that this is all about policy differences”. They are trying to destroy American democracy and amass power for themselves and the oligarchs that support them — that’s what autocracies are for and it’s why Trump and Republicans want one.

We’ve seen this happen with brittle governments all over the world for the past century — it’s not a novel situation — and Republicans have decided that now is the moment to strike our teetering democracy. They convinced voters to roll a wooden horse covered in MAGA stickers inside the city walls and now they are going to hollow it out from within. That’s the game and the sooner everyone wakes up to this truth, the sooner we can try to fix the situation.

Update: Jamelle Bouie: If All This Sounds Delusional, That’s Because It Is.

Put another way, the American system of government is not one in which the people imbue the president with their sovereign authority. He is a servant of the Constitution, bound by its demands. Most presidents in our history have understood this, even as they inevitably pushed for more and greater authority. Not Trump. He sees no distinction between himself and the office, and he sees the office as a grant of unlimited power, or as he once said himself, “I have an Article 2 where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

The freeze, then, is Trump’s attempt to make this fanciful claim to limitless power a reality. He wants to usurp the power of the purse for himself. He wants to make the Constitution a grant of absolute and unchecked authority. He wants to remake the government in his image. He wants to be king.

💯 Bouie is one of the few traditional media folks who sees this situation clearly.

Title quote courtesy of Bishop Mariann Budde.

• Donald Trump
• Jamelle Bouie
• journalism
• Mariann Budde
• politics
• USA
• Will Stancil

No Fate But What We Make

This is a great piece by Jamelle Bouie: Donald Trump Is Done With Checks and Balances. The first half is a short lesson on how our present Constitution came to be, which might differ slightly from the version you learned in school:

It is important to remember that the Constitution was neither written nor ratified with democracy in mind. Just the opposite: It was written to restrain — and contain — the democratic impulses of Americans shaped in the hothouse of revolutionary fervor.

“Most of the men who assembled at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 were also convinced that the national government under the Articles of Confederation was too weak to counter the rising tide of democracy in the states,” the historian Terry Bouton writes in “Taming Democracy: ‘The People,’ the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution.”

The second part of the piece plainly and succinctly lays out the stakes of a second Trump presidency (emphasis mine):

America got lucky. It won’t get lucky again. Free of the guardrails that kept him in place the first time, affirmed by the Supreme Court and backed by allies and apparatchiks in the conservative movement, Trump will merge the office of the presidency with himself. He will shake it from its moorings in the Constitution and rebuild it as an instrument of his will, wielded for his friends and against his enemies. In doing so, he will erode the democratic assumptions that undergird our current constitutional order. And he will have the total loyalty of a Republican Party that itself is twisting and abusing the counter-majoritarian features of the American system to undermine and unravel democracy in the states it controls.

What a sentence that is.

See also The Guardrails Failed. Now It’s Down to Us., also by Bouie.

We don’t, in 2024, hear much talk of guardrails anymore. And for good reason. The guardrails failed. Every single one of them. The Republican Party failed to police its own boundaries, welcoming Trump when it should have done everything it could to expel him. The impeachment process, designed to remove a rogue president, was short-circuited, unable to work in a world of rigid partisan loyalty. The criminal legal system tried to hold Trump accountable, but this was slow-walked and sabotaged by sympathetic judges (and justices) appointed by Trump or committed to the Republican Party.

When the states tried to take matters into their own hands, citing the clear text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, a Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court stepped in to rewrite the amendment, turning a self-executing prohibition on insurrectionists in office into a mechanism that required a congressional vote those justices knew would never come.

• Donald Trump
• Jamelle Bouie
• politics
• USA

The Mainstream Press Has Failed to Meet This Political Moment

Rebecca Solnit writes about how the mainstream political press is failing the American public they claim to serve.

These critics are responding to how the behemoths of the industry seem intent on bending the facts to fit their frameworks and agendas. In pursuit of clickbait content centered on conflicts and personalities, they follow each other into informational stampedes and confirmation bubbles.

They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over. They neglect, again and again, important stories with real consequences. This is not entirely new — in a scathing analysis of 2016 election coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election” — but it’s gotten worse, and a lot of insiders have gotten sick of it.

It’s really disheartening and maddening to witness how the press has failed to meet this important moment in history.

See also Jamelle Bouie’s NY Times piece this morning, straining against the normalizing currents at his own publication to actually call out Trump’s “incoherence” and “gibberish” and parse out what he’s actually trying to tell us about his plans for a second term:

Trump, in his usual, deranged way, is elaborating on one of the key promises of his campaign: retribution against his political enemies. Elect Trump in November, and he will try to use the power of the federal government to threaten, harass and even arrest his opponents. If his promise to deport more than 20 million people from the United State is his policy for rooting out supposedly “foreign” enemies in the body politic, then this promise to prosecute his opponents is his corresponding plan to handle the nation’s domestic foes, as he sees them. Or, as he said last year in New Hampshire, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

• Donald Trump
• Jamelle Bouie
• journalism
• politics
• Rebecca Solnit

Race Is a Fiction, Racism Is Real

No surprise that Jamelle Bouie’s short videos are as interesting and informative as his NY Times columns. In a recent TikTok video (mirrored on Instagram), Bouie recommended a book called Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by sociologist Karen Fields and historian Barbara Fields and nutshelled the premise:

The way the Fields sisters see it, and I think they’re right: race is a fiction, it doesn’t exist biologically, it’s a social construction, it’s designed to categorize, and it often obscures far more than it explains. But racism is real, right? Racism, the action, is real, it’s material, it affects people’s lives, it has life or death stakes, it structures the way that we engage in, and are received by, the society in which we live.

The example they give in the beginning of the book is: imagine a Black police officer is killed by one of his white colleagues. He’s undercover and he’s shot and killed. The news would say that this police officer was killed because he was Black. But the Fields sisters would say, wait a sec. Did the white officer shoot because he was white? That the Blackness caused the death, that the whiteness caused the shooting? No, of course not. What happened was that a white officer relied on racist assumptions about people of African descent to come to a set of conclusions, then acted on those conclusions.

• books
• Jamelle Bouie
• Racecraft
• racism
• USA

The Four Republican “Freedoms”

For the NY Times, Jamelle Bouie takes a look at the legislation that Republicans around the country are pushing and, in the style of FDR’s Four Freedoms speech, outlines what goals they are attempting to achieve.

There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.

There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.

There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.

And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.

That sounds about right, and it reminds me, as Republican “governance” often does these days, of Frank Wilhoit’s definition of conservatism:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

• Jamelle Bouie
• lists
• politics
• USA

Hypocrisy and the Filibuster

For the NY Times, Jamelle Bouie writes about the history of the filibuster in the Senate and how it (unsurprisingly) differs from Mitch McConnell’s comments about it.

The truth is that the filibuster was an accident; an extra-constitutional innovation that lay dormant for a generation after its unintentional creation during the Jefferson administration. For most of the Senate’s history after the Civil War, filibusters were rare, deployed as the Southern weapon of choice against civil rights legislation, and an occasional tool of partisan obstruction.

Far from necessary, the filibuster is extraneous. Everything it is said to encourage — debate, deliberation, consensus building — is already accomplished by the structure of the chamber itself, insofar as it happens at all.

In the form it takes today, the filibuster doesn’t make the Senate work the way the framers intended. Instead, it makes the Senate a nearly insurmountable obstacle to most legislative business. And that, in turn, has made Congress inert and dysfunctional to the point of disrupting the constitutional balance of power.

I’d like to highlight something else from the article’s title and reiterated in the text by Bouie: “I’m not actually that interested in McConnell’s hypocrisy.” Yes, exactly. I see a lot of calling-out of the hypocrisies of “the other side”¹ on social media and it just seems worthless to me at this point. This sort of thing just doesn’t work when you’re dealing with people who are cynical and without shame in a very polarized media environment. Like, if you’ve read anything about McConnell at all, you know that he cares about power and he’s going to say what he needs to say to get it or keep it, regardless of self-contradiction. Pointing out his flip-flops doesn’t accomplish anything because he’s not actually switching his position! He didn’t really believe the thing he said before and he doesn’t really believe the thing he’s saying now. He just wants what he wants. Focusing on the facts and historical context of the issue, as Bouie does here (and in his explanation of the Electoral College on You’re Wrong About), is the way to go.

1. Examples: “The ‘pro life’ party did nothing while 400,000 people died from the pandemic.” and “If you’re ‘pro choice’, why do you want to limit the 2nd amendment right of people to carry guns?” Etc. etc.↩

• Jamelle Bouie
• Mitch McConnell
• politics

Neither Snow nor Rain nor Heat nor Dip of Shit

An anonymous USPS employee has written about the recent changes at the Post Office since new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy (“a lifelong Republican, a Trump mega-donor/fundraiser, and a high ranking RNC official”) took over and has set about gutting it from the inside.

All of the potential angles for corruption make DeJoy’s aims pretty tough to figure out. He’s a small market conservative from the private sector running a massive government agency. He’s a Trump ally running the agency responsible for ballots during an election year. He also has a direct financial interest in seeing us fail. Take your pick. You’re probably right no matter what. And judging by the chaos he’s unleashed into USPS in just his first two months, “all of the above” might be your best bet.

See, up until just two months ago, every letter carrier, clerk, mail handler, truck driver, etc, worked under one pretty simple philosophy: every piece, every address, every day. Everyone in the chain of custody for mail made sure every piece got as far along in the system as it could, and if it made it to my hands, in my office, it was getting delivered. That’s how I’ve done it for my career, how the guys who have been doing it for forty years have always done it, and that’s literally how Ben Fucking Franklin’s guys did it. You can almost hear Aaron Sorkin’s orgasm as he punches up the Bradley Whitford speech about the majesty of it all.

But two months ago is also when that abruptly stopped. After a couple hundred years, it just…stopped. On the ground floor, there’s a lot of arguing about who is ordering what, and what’s going to be permanent, and what’s going to be a trial run, but at the end of the day, the result is obvious: I go into my job, every single morning, and don’t deliver hundreds of pieces of available mail that used to get delivered. The only reason given is some vague nonsense about “operational efficiency” and “cost savings.”

And this was written before reports of sorting machines being removed without explanation ahead of a presumed huge surge of election-related mail. I think we should actually be pretty alarmed by this. Here’s Jamelle Bouie on Trump’s election night strategy (and how to counter it: vote in person):

There’s no mystery about what President Trump intends to do if he holds a lead on election night in November. He’s practically broadcasting it.

First, he’ll claim victory. Then, having spent most of the year denouncing vote-by-mail as corrupt, fraudulent and prone to abuse, he’ll demand that authorities stop counting mail-in and absentee ballots. He’ll have teams of lawyers challenging counts and ballots across the country.

He also seems to be counting on having the advantage of mail slowdowns, engineered by the recently installed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Fewer pickups and deliveries could mean more late-arriving ballots and a better shot at dismissing votes before they’re even opened, especially if the campaign has successfully sued to block states from extending deadlines. We might even see a Brooks Brothers riot or two, where well-heeled Republican operatives stage angry and voluble protests against ballot counts and recounts.

(via waxy)

• 2020 election
• Donald Trump
• Jamelle Bouie
• Louis DeJoy
• politics
• USPS

The 1619 Project

The first Africans to be brought as slaves to British North America landed in Port Comfort, Virginia in 1619. Thus began America’s 400-year history with slavery and its effects, which continue to reverberate today. With The 1619 Project, the NY Times is exploring that legacy with a series of essays and other works that “aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” The Columbia Journalism Review explains:

Contributors consider various modern quandaries — rush hour traffic, mass incarceration, an inequitable healthcare system, even American overconsumption of sugar (the highest rate in the Western world) — and trace the origins back to slavery. Literary and visual artists drew from a timeline chronicling the past 400 years of Black history in America; their work is presented chronologically throughout the magazine. Taken together, the issue is an attempt to guide readers not just toward a richer understanding of today’s racial dilemmas, but to tell them the truth.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, who came up with the idea for the project, writes in an essay:

The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4, 1776, proclaims that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst. “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves — black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.

Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different — it might not be a democracy at all.

Bryan Stevenson writes about America’s criminal justice system:

The 13th Amendment is credited with ending slavery, but it stopped short of that: It made an exception for those convicted of crimes. After emancipation, black people, once seen as less than fully human “slaves,” were seen as less than fully human “criminals.” The provisional governor of South Carolina declared in 1865 that they had to be “restrained from theft, idleness, vagrancy and crime.” Laws governing slavery were replaced with Black Codes governing free black people — making the criminal-justice system central to new strategies of racial control.

These strategies intensified whenever black people asserted their independence or achieved any measure of success. During Reconstruction, the emergence of black elected officials and entrepreneurs was countered by convict leasing, a scheme in which white policymakers invented offenses used to target black people: vagrancy, loitering, being a group of black people out after dark, seeking employment without a note from a former enslaver. The imprisoned were then “leased” to businesses and farms, where they labored under brutal conditions.

And Jamelle Bouie on power in America:

There is a homegrown ideology of reaction in the United States, inextricably tied to our system of slavery. And while the racial content of that ideology has attenuated over time, the basic framework remains: fear of rival political majorities; of demographic “replacement”; of a government that threatens privilege and hierarchy.

The past 10 years of Republican extremism is emblematic. The Tea Party billed itself as a reaction to debt and spending, but a close look shows it was actually a reaction to an ascendant majority of black people, Latinos, Asian-Americans and liberal white people. In their survey-based study of the movement, the political scientists Christopher S. Parker and Matt A. Barreto show that Tea Party Republicans were motivated “by the fear and anxiety associated with the perception that ‘real’ Americans are losing their country.”

Update: The Pulitzer Center has a study guide to go with The 1619 Project, including a free download of the entire magazine issue (no subscription necessary).

Update: The 1619 Project is now a podcast series as well.

• Bryan Stevenson
• Jamelle Bouie
• Nikole Hannah-Jones
• racism
• slavery
• The 1619 Project
• USA

SNL’s Black Jeopardy

This SNL Black Jeopardy skit with Tom Hanks is as good as everyone says it is. And it’s not just funny either…it’s the rare SNL skit that works brilliantly as cultural commentary. Kudos to the writers on this one.

Update: Writing for Slate, Jamelle Bouie details why the Black Jeopardy sketch was so good; the title of the piece asks, “The Most Astute Analysis of American Politics in 2016?”

When Thompson reads a second clue for that category — “They out here saying that every vote counts” — Doug answers again, and again correctly: “What is, come on, they already decided who wins even ‘fore it happens.’” With each correct answer, Doug gets cheers and applause from Thompson, the black contestants, and the black audience. They all seem to understand the world in similar ways. “I really appreciate you saying that,” says Thompson after Doug praises Tyler Perry’s Madea movies, leading to an awkward moment where Hanks’ character recoils in fear as Thompson tries to shake his hand, but then relaxes and accepts the gesture.

By this point, the message is clear. On this episode of “Black Jeopardy!”, the questions are rooted in feelings of disempowerment, suspicion of authority, and working-class identity-experiences that cut across racial lines. Thompson and the guests are black, but they can appreciate the things they share with Doug, and in turn, Doug grows more and more comfortable in their presence, such that he gets a “pass” from the group after he refers to them as “you people.”

• Jamelle Bouie
• Jeopardy
• politics
• racism
• Saturday Night Live
• Tom Hanks
• TV
• video