Destroy The FBI; Protect The High-Jump! May 28, 2025 New Yorkers: Consider Whitney Tilson for mayor (7 minutes). Everybody else (including New Yorkers): Trump is Destroying the FBI and trying to destroy Harvard. The FBI tragedy is hugely more important than whether a trans high schooler can compete in the high jump — so I’d urge you to click that link. With luck, he won’t be able to destroy Harvard. It’s hard to see who can stop him from destroying the FBI. As for the trans girl, here’s the story. It’s not boxing or some contact sport — it’s the high jump! And local sports authorities had already arranged for her to get a “duplicate medal” if she won, so no girl-from-birth could be deprived of her rightful recognition. But the United States Government believes this is a matter too important to ignore. (Climate change? A hoax. Violent insurrectionists imprisoned by Trump-appointed judges? Pardon ’em. Stagflation . . . slashing Medicare . . . crippling the IRS . . . eviscerating the Social Security Administration? Fake news. A trans participant in a high school high-jump competition? There is a real and present danger the public demands we confront.) Back to Harvard. You may have missed the end of Tuesday’s post because of a MailChimp glitch. It should have read: And here is the kicker (though Pinker’s whole piece is worth your time): . . . Mr. Trump’s strangling of support [for science] will harm Jews more than any president in my lifetime. Many practicing and aspiring scientists are Jewish, and his funding embargo has them watching in horror as they are laid off, their labs are shut down or their dreams of a career in science go up in smoke. This is immensely more harmful than walking past a “Globalize the Intifada” sign. Worse still is the effect on the far larger number of gentiles in science, who are being told that their labs and careers are being snuffed out to advance Jewish interests. Likewise for the current patients whose experimental treatments will be halted, and the future patients who may be deprived of cures. None of this is good for the Jews. [His] concern for Jews is patently disingenuous, given Mr. Trump’s sympathy for Holocaust deniers and Hitler fans. The obvious motivation is to cripple civil society institutions that serve as loci of influence outside the executive branch. As JD Vance put it in the title of a 2021 speech: “The Universities Are the Enemy.” Join . . . Indivisible! Join Field Team 6! Spread DIS-disinformation! Support the opposition! Join a No Kings protest Saturday, June 14 — or organize your own. Use ChatGPT to make a clever sign; the nearest FedEx to print it on posterboard. You’ll be a star!
George Orwell, Joe, And Carl May 28, 2025 If you’re short on time, the new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson is perfectly summed up in its subtitle: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. A Shakespearean tragedy, complete with an epigraph from King Lear: “They told me I was everything. ‘Tis a lie, I am not ague-proof.” Knowing many of the players first-hand — one has been a friend for more than 30 years — I’ve been riveted. That friend is SO smart, SO decent, SO focused on doing good for the world . . . . . . and it would have been SUCH an obvious win for Joe to have quit while he was ahead, as I wrote after the debate (and would have written much earlier, had I known) . . . . . . that I keep thinking as I turn the pages: how could this have happened? A clue comes right up front, where the author’s quote George Orwell: We are all capable of believing things which we KNOW to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield. It may apply to the people in Joe’s inner circle who didn’t persuade him to step aside sooner . . . . . . and it definitely applies to the tens of millions — like Carl — who believe Trump won the 2020 election. That he had the largest Inaugural crowd in history. That Democrats hate America. Et cetera. (He, of course, would say I have it exactly backwards: that the Orwell quote applies to the tens of millions — like me — who believe Biden won the election. That he made America stronger by passing the infrastructure bill and the CHIPs act and strengthening our alliances. That Biden finally solved the border crisis with a durable bipartisan immigration bill — only to see Trump kill it.) I get emails from Carl after every post — sometimes more than one — where he tries to get me to see the light. A small recent sampling: > In response to Sunday’s post: You and your heroine Marilyn Kunce conveniently ignore the law-fare your communist Democrats and the bias press put this country through. You and she conveniently ignore the moral depravity of antisemitism your communist Democrats ignore and put this country through. You and she should move and live in the cartel run Mexico. (Carl frequently calls me and others Marxists and communists without, apparently, knowing what Marxism or communism is.) > In response to the one about kids now being able to buy machine guns: This is why Jewish kids need machine guns! [Photo of the terrorist who murdered two outside Washington’s Jewish Museum last week.] But your silence confirms you don’t give a Schiff! And earlier that day: << Kids can now buy machine guns! >> Everyone needs them now since Democrats opened the border and let in millions of unvetted criminals! (Carl believes “millions” of undocumented immigrants are criminals — a wild, preposterous exaggeration. In fact, the undocumented are less likely to commit crimes — and crime is way down from when Carl was in his heyday.) << Ten who got $365 billion richer last year may now get a huge tax cut! >> The top 1% of taxpayers paid 40.4% of all federal income taxes. But you knew all that and just don’t give a Schiff! Andy you’re still a Schmuck and sadly will never change. (The top 1% paid 40.4% of all federal income taxes. But if you add payroll taxes and sales taxes to the total tax collected from Americans each year, their share drops to 22%. And in any event — so what? The top 1% own something like 31% of our collective net worth . . . so should perhaps shoulder 31% of the overall tax burden?* Or even more, because they can so much more easily afford it? And have so much more greatly profited from the America’s system and infrastructure?) > In response to 1.0 Actually Wasn’t That Bad, Other Than . . . (“I don’t know who wrote this,” it began) Carl entirely ignored the endless list of horriblenesses and offered, instead: I don’t know who wrote this… [seashell photo] But THEY do: << The Secret Service is investigating after ex-FBI Director James Comey posted an Instagram photo of seashells arranged to make the numbers “86 47” — a message that White House officials swiftly condemned as an attempt to put out a “hit” against the 47th president. >> And THIS is the type of people you are proud to be associated with! Andy you were so much better than this. What happened? (I’ve never met James Comey but would be proud to be associated with him.) There must be more than a thousand of these — he’s been sending them for years. And I take them to be well-intended. Having accepted the Trump reality, he believes that it is I, not he, to whom Orwell’s observation applies. Carl knows we should have secure borders (and we all agree he’s right) but ignores the fact that Trump killed the bi-partisan bill referenced above . . . and the fact that a decade earlier the Republican House speaker killed the sweeping immigration reform act approved by the Senate 68-32 that Obama was eager to sign and that would have passed the House had he allowed it to come up for a vote. Carl knows crime is bad (and we all agree he’s right) but believes we want to “defund the police.” Many of us want to improve policing — bodycams, for example, have become widely accepted across the political spectrum as a good idea. But defund the police? Virtually no Democrat is or ever was for that. He knows men shouldn’t be allowed to compete against women in sports (and of course, again, we all agree). It’s just around the edges that many of us would rather leave these determinations to the NCAA and the Olympic Committee, for example, than to the federal government. We are not likely to change Carl’s mind. But only 23% of adult Americans voted for Trump. Some who did, believing his promises, now feel betrayed. And the huge percentage who voted for no one — who simply stayed home — might now be motivated to save our precious democracy. We can do this! Join . . . Indivisible! Join Field Team 6! Spread DIS-disinformation! Support the opposition! Join a No Kings protest Saturday, June 14 — or organize one of your own. Use ChatGPT to make a clever sign; then the nearest FedEx to print it on posterboard. You’ll be a star! *Perhaps, in meaningful part, by raising the estate tax on billionheirs and closing generation-skipping loopholes?
Harvard – UPDATED May 27, 2025May 27, 2025 [Sorry . . . I added one more not-to-be-missed Pinker passage at the end.] Steven Pinker, long-time Harvard critic: In my 22 years as a Harvard professor, I have not been afraid to bite the hand that feeds me. [Numerous examples . . .]. So I’m hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged. According to its critics, Harvard is a “national disgrace,” a “woke madrasa,” a “Maoist indoctrination camp,” a “ship of fools,” a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” a “cesspool of extremist riots” and an “Islamist outpost” in which the “dominant view on campus” is “destroy the Jews, and you’ve destroyed the root of Western civilization.” And that’s before we get to President Trump’s opinion that Harvard is “an Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institution,” a “Liberal mess” and a “threat to Democracy,” which has been “hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’ who are only capable of teaching FAILURE to students and so-called future leaders.” This is not just trash talk. On top of its savage slashing of research funding across the board, the Trump administration has singled out Harvard to receive no federal grants at all. Not satisfied with these punishments, the administration just moved to stop Harvard from enrolling foreign students and has threatened to multiply the tax on its endowment as much as fifteenfold, as well as to remove its tax-free nonprofit status. . . . Worth reading in full. Including Pinker’s criticisms of Harvard. Former Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust concludes her Memorial Day op-ed: We Are Not Being Asked to Run Into Cannon Fire. We Just Need to Speak Up. The “new birth of freedom” Lincoln promised in the Gettysburg Address all but faded with the overturning of Reconstruction and the re-establishment of white supremacy in the era of Jim Crow. Only a century later, with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, did the United States at last fully commit itself to multiracial democracy and the war’s emancipationist vision. But even this belated progress is now being reversed with voter suppression efforts, challenges to the 14th Amendment’s establishment of birthright citizenship and the evisceration of the Civil Rights Act, most recently with an executive order abandoning the regulations that have been central to its enforcement. The unfinished work of freedom seems to be in full-throttle reverse. Douglass invoked the “eloquence” of the dead. We should listen to them. As a historian, I have read dozens of these men’s letters and diaries, windows into why they fought, into what and whom they loved and what they hoped for at the end of a war they knew they might not survive. Together they did save the Union, the nation that has given me and so many others opportunities that the war-born imperative of ever-expanding freedom has offered. These men made our lives possible. They were impelled to risk all by a sense of obligation to the future. We possess a reciprocal obligation to the past. We must not squander what they bequeathed to us. This debt and this duty should be at the forefront of our minds this Memorial Day. We must honor these men, their bravery, their sacrifice, and especially their purposes. We are being asked not to charge into a hail of Minié balls and artillery fire but only to speak up and to stand up in the face of foundational threats to the principles for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. We have been entrusted with their legacy. Can we trust ourselves to uphold it? Trump’s war on Harvard is ostensibly being waged to root out anti-Semitism, notwithstanding the fact that the University’s 2024-minted (Jewish) president, Alan Garber, launched his Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias months before Trump’s election . . . . . . the 311-page Final Report of which clearly acknowledges the problems Harvard had begun to confront before Trump was elected. “You had me at hello,” as they say (great clip!) — or, in this case, months before “hello.” And yet Trump is waging war on scientists, many of them Jewish, because that’s where the great bulk of the government’s grants to and contracts with Harvard goes — science. Principally, life-saving medical research. Not to obscure courses, sparsely attended, of the kind Professor Pinker references further on in his op-ed: Of course, Harvard also has plenty of offerings like Queer Ethnography and Decolonizing the Gaze, but they tend to be boutique courses with small enrollments. One of my students has developed an artificial-intelligence-based “Woke-o-Meter” that assesses course descriptions for Marxist, postmodernist and critical social justice themes (signaled by terms like “heteronormativity,” “intersectionality,” “systemic racism,” “late-stage capitalism” and “deconstruction”). He estimates that they make up at most 3 percent of the 5,000 courses in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ 2025-26 course catalog and 6 percent of its larger General Education courses (though about a third of these had a discernible leftward tilt). More typical are offerings like Cellular Basis of Neuronal Function, Beginning German (Intensive) and The Fall of the Roman Empire. And if Harvard is teaching its students to “despise the free-market system,” we’re not doing a very good job. The most popular undergraduate concentrations are economics and computer science, and half of our graduates march from their commencement ceremony straight into jobs in finance, consulting and technology. And here is the kicker (though, again: the whole piece is worth your time): . . . Mr. Trump’s strangling of support [for science] will harm Jews more than any president in my lifetime. Many practicing and aspiring scientists are Jewish, and his funding embargo has them watching in horror as they are laid off, their labs are shut down or their dreams of a career in science go up in smoke. This is immensely more harmful than walking past a “Globalize the Intifada” sign. Worse still is the effect on the far larger number of gentiles in science, who are being told that their labs and careers are being snuffed out to advance Jewish interests. Likewise for the current patients whose experimental treatments will be halted, and the future patients who may be deprived of cures. None of this is good for the Jews. The concern for Jews is patently disingenuous, given Mr. Trump’s sympathy for Holocaust deniers and Hitler fans. The obvious motivation is to cripple civil society institutions that serve as loci of influence outside the executive branch. As JD Vance put it in the title of a 2021 speech: “The Universities Are the Enemy.” Join Indivisible! Join Field Team 6! Spread dis-disinformation! Support the opposition!
Harvard — UPDATED May 27, 2025May 27, 2025 [Sorry . . . I added one more really good passage from Pinker, at the end.] Steven Pinker, long-time Harvard critic: In my 22 years as a Harvard professor, I have not been afraid to bite the hand that feeds me. [Numerous examples . . .]. So I’m hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged. According to its critics, Harvard is a “national disgrace,” a “woke madrasa,” a “Maoist indoctrination camp,” a “ship of fools,” a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” a “cesspool of extremist riots” and an “Islamist outpost” in which the “dominant view on campus” is “destroy the Jews, and you’ve destroyed the root of Western civilization.” And that’s before we get to President Trump’s opinion that Harvard is “an Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institution,” a “Liberal mess” and a “threat to Democracy,” which has been “hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’ who are only capable of teaching FAILURE to students and so-called future leaders.” This is not just trash talk. On top of its savage slashing of research funding across the board, the Trump administration has singled out Harvard to receive no federal grants at all. Not satisfied with these punishments, the administration just moved to stop Harvard from enrolling foreign students and has threatened to multiply the tax on its endowment as much as fifteenfold, as well as to remove its tax-free nonprofit status. . . . Worth reading in full. Including Pinker’s criticisms of Harvard. Former Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust concludes her Memorial Day op-ed: We Are Not Being Asked to Run Into Cannon Fire. We Just Need to Speak Up. The “new birth of freedom” Lincoln promised in the Gettysburg Address all but faded with the overturning of Reconstruction and the re-establishment of white supremacy in the era of Jim Crow. Only a century later, with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, did the United States at last fully commit itself to multiracial democracy and the war’s emancipationist vision. But even this belated progress is now being reversed with voter suppression efforts, challenges to the 14th Amendment’s establishment of birthright citizenship and the evisceration of the Civil Rights Act, most recently with an executive order abandoning the regulations that have been central to its enforcement. The unfinished work of freedom seems to be in full-throttle reverse. Douglass invoked the “eloquence” of the dead. We should listen to them. As a historian, I have read dozens of these men’s letters and diaries, windows into why they fought, into what and whom they loved and what they hoped for at the end of a war they knew they might not survive. Together they did save the Union, the nation that has given me and so many others opportunities that the war-born imperative of ever-expanding freedom has offered. These men made our lives possible. They were impelled to risk all by a sense of obligation to the future. We possess a reciprocal obligation to the past. We must not squander what they bequeathed to us. This debt and this duty should be at the forefront of our minds this Memorial Day. We must honor these men, their bravery, their sacrifice, and especially their purposes. We are being asked not to charge into a hail of Minié balls and artillery fire but only to speak up and to stand up in the face of foundational threats to the principles for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. We have been entrusted with their legacy. Can we trust ourselves to uphold it? Trump’s war on Harvard is ostensibly being waged to root out anti-Semitism, notwithstanding the fact that the University’s 2024-minted (Jewish) president, Alan Garber, launched his Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias months before Trump’s election . . . . . . the 311-page Final Report of which clearly acknowledges the problems Harvard had begun to confront before Trump was elected. “You had me at hello,” as they say (great clip!) — or, in this case, months before “hello.” And yet Trump is waging war on scientists, many of them Jewish, because that’s where the great bulk of the government’s grants to and contracts with Harvard goes — science. Principally, life-saving medical research. Not to obscure courses, sparsely attended, of the kind Professor Pinker references further on in his op-ed: Of course, Harvard also has plenty of offerings like Queer Ethnography and Decolonizing the Gaze, but they tend to be boutique courses with small enrollments. One of my students has developed an artificial-intelligence-based “Woke-o-Meter” that assesses course descriptions for Marxist, postmodernist and critical social justice themes (signaled by terms like “heteronormativity,” “intersectionality,” “systemic racism,” “late-stage capitalism” and “deconstruction”). He estimates that they make up at most 3 percent of the 5,000 courses in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ 2025-26 course catalog and 6 percent of its larger General Education courses (though about a third of these had a discernible leftward tilt). More typical are offerings like Cellular Basis of Neuronal Function, Beginning German (Intensive) and The Fall of the Roman Empire. And if Harvard is teaching its students to “despise the free-market system,” we’re not doing a very good job. The most popular undergraduate concentrations are economics and computer science, and half of our graduates march from their commencement ceremony straight into jobs in finance, consulting and technology. And here is the kicker (though, again: the whole piece is worth your time): . . . Mr. Trump’s strangling of support [for science] will harm Jews more than any president in my lifetime. Many practicing and aspiring scientists are Jewish, and his funding embargo has them watching in horror as they are laid off, their labs are shut down or their dreams of a career in science go up in smoke. This is immensely more harmful than walking past a “Globalize the Intifada” sign. Worse still is the effect on the far larger number of gentiles in science, who are being told that their labs and careers are being snuffed out to advance Jewish interests. Likewise for the current patients whose experimental treatments will be halted, and the future patients who may be deprived of cures. None of this is good for the Jews. The concern for Jews is patently disingenuous, given Mr. Trump’s sympathy for Holocaust deniers and Hitler fans. The obvious motivation is to cripple civil society institutions that serve as loci of influence outside the executive branch. As JD Vance put it in the title of a 2021 speech: “The Universities Are the Enemy.” Join Indivisible! Join Field Team 6! Spread dis-disinformation! Support the opposition!
Happy Memorial Day May 26, 2025 I couldn’t say it nearly as well as Heather Cox Richardson — read it here. Or Robert Hubbell — here. Both, so worth reading as you fire up the grill.
Echos Of 1859 May 25, 2025May 26, 2025 Historian Heather Cox Richardson is always good, but Thursday’s post, I thought, was particularly worth your attention (listen here, if you prefer): Just before 7:00 this morning, the House of Representatives passed the Republicans’ megabill by a vote of 215 to 214. All Democrats voted no. Two Republicans, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio, joined the Democrats in voting no. Chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus Andy Harris of Maryland voted “present.” The measure now advances to the Senate. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says the bill cuts at least $715 billion in healthcare spending, mostly from Medicaid, and $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, causing more than 2.7 million American households to lose benefits. Because the massive debt increase in the measure triggers a 2010 law requiring offsets, it will cut Medicare, as well, by an estimated $500 billion. Economist Robert Reich points out that Americans making between about $17,000 and $51,000 will lose about $700 a year. On average, Americans with incomes of less than $17,000 will lose more than $1,000 a year. But if you are among the top 0.1% of earners, you’re in luck: you’ll gain nearly $390,000 a year. The measure . . . increases ICE’s detention budget from $3.4 billion a year to $45 billion through September 2029 [and] increases ICE’s budget for transportation and removal operations . . . from the current $721 million to $14.4 billion. . . . This bill highlights a truism: In the United States, racism has always gone hand in hand with the concentration of wealth among the very richest people. By driving white fear of a darker-skinned other, elite southern enslavers convinced the poor white farmers who lost their land in the cotton boom of the 1850s to vote for politicians who insisted that the primary responsibility of the federal government was to protect human enslavement. In an extraordinary meeting with South African president Cyril Ramaphosa at the Oval Office yesterday, President Donald J. Trump echoed the language of enslavers in 1859 almost explicitly when he insisted—falsely—that white South Africans are facing white genocide. As Tim Cocks and Nellie Peyton of Reuters explain, the conspiracy theory of white genocide in South Africa has circulated among fringe groups of white South Africans since the end of apartheid in 1994. It claims white deaths in a country with a high murder rate are deliberate ethnic cleansing, although data collected by white farmers themselves shows that since 1990, murders of white people make up only 1% of the total number of murders. But Trump sidekick Elon Musk has embraced the theory, and Trump is pushing it, offering a fast track for asylum to white South African “refugees.” Yesterday, with Musk in the Oval Office, Trump showed to the cameras a picture of people moving body bags, and said “[t]hese are all white farmers that are being buried.” In fact, it was a picture from Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo, showing humanitarian workers burying bodies in a war zone. The administration’s immigration policies exacerbate racism, using it to undermine the rule of law on which the Constitution rests. Notably, the administration has ignored the concept of due process guaranteed by the Constitution, with rendition of migrants to prison in El Salvador based not on a review of their cases but simply on the claim—without evidence—that individuals are gang members. Stories of immigrants arrested by ICE without any criminal history continue to surface, even as administration officials insist those individuals are dangerous criminals. . . . Taking down the rule of law would permit MAGA officials to persecute their political opponents, indicting congressional representatives, for example, as it has recently done to Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ). It would also permit the concentration of wealth and power without fear of breaking the law. There is the open corruption, as when the Trump administration officially accepted a 747 as a gift from the Qatari government yesterday, despite the constitutional prohibition against taking gifts from foreign governments. . . . And then there is the more hidden corruption. Last week, David Yaffe-Bellany and Eric Lipton of the New York Times called attention to the announcement by a struggling technology company with ties to China that it had secured funding to buy $300 million of Trump’s cryptocurrency $TRUMP. It appears the company is hoping to curry favor with the president. Zach Everson of Forbes noted that the Trump family controls about 60% of World Liberty Financial, a decentralized financial platform that produces the USD1 stablecoin, a kind of cryptocurrency that fluctuates less than most cryptocurrencies because it’s pegged to the dollar. World Liberty Financial’s USD1 stablecoin began trading yesterday on KuCoin, an exchange headquartered in the Seychelles and banned in the United States after it admitted to violating laws against money laundering and agreed to pay a $300 million fine. A spokesperson for KuCoin told Everson that it had reached out about carrying USD1 after the coin “demonstrated strong demand in certain regions.” The racism and the corruption are coming together tonight as the top 220 holders of the $TRUMP coin join the president at a private dinner. A Bloomberg analysis of the top 25 wallets shows that 19 are owned by individuals from outside the United States, and many of the winners are companies looking for access to the president. Many of them dumped their $TRUMP coins as soon as they made the cut for the dinner. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reported today that 50 of the people attending Trump’s dinner tonight hold crypto assets with names from the alt-right, including Pepe the Frog and swastikas, or that have names that are racist or antisemitic, including the n-word and “F*CK THE JEWS.” Their language echoes that of the elite enslavers of the 1850s—and for that matter, the Ku Klux Klan members of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the American Nazis of the 1920s and 1930s, and the segregationists of the years after World War II. And just like the elite enslavers in the 1850s, MAGA leaders want to get rid of laws that make it harder for them to monopolize the nation’s wealth and power and are using racism to get voters to support them. Also like their predecessors, MAGA leaders are getting a significant boost from the United States Supreme Court. In a decision made today on the so-called “shadow docket”—the emergency docket in which the court makes decisions without arguments or briefs and which previously wasn’t used for major rulings—the court made it clear it is willing to abandon the idea of independent agencies. Since 1935, the court has upheld Congress’s right to appoint the heads of independent agencies and has said that the president cannot fire them without cause. Today, in an unsigned two-page order, the court [reversed that]. This is an extraordinary step toward the idea of the “unitary executive,” a theory Republicans began to embrace in the 1980s that because the president is the head of one of the three unique branches of government, any oversight of that office by Congress or the courts is unconstitutional, although in fact presidents since George Washington have accepted congressional oversight. . . . The dissent, written by Justice Elena Kagan and joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, notes that “the majority’s order…is nothing short of extraordinary” and “favors the President over our precedent.” The court has abandoned 90 years of precedent under the emergency docket, and misrepresents the case as one about the interests of two employees in keeping their job. In fact, the liberal justices say, “the interest at stake is in maintaining Congress’s idea of independent agencies: bodies of specialists balanced along partisan lines, which will make sound judgments precisely because not fully controlled by the White House.” Ms. Richardson has more than 2.5 million readers. If you’re not already one of them, you might want to subscribe.
Here’s The Thing: It Doesn’t Have To GO That Way May 25, 2025 Marilyn Kunce: I’ve Seen This Playbook Before—And It Doesn’t End Well I grew up believing that American democracy, for all its flaws, was unshakable. I grew up in Mexico, where we watched American democracy like the north star: a place where institutions held firm, where presidents were figures to look up to, and where the rule of law meant something. Messy, yes, but solid. In Latin America, checks and balances and peaceful transitions of power were not realities we lived, but ideals we hoped to one day reach. I believed it when I worked in spaces where people still fight for the right to be heard. And I still believed in American Democracy during the chaos of the 2020 election, when institutions strained under pressure but—just barely—held. But I’ve also worked closely with partners in Latin America, and let me tell you something we didn’t want to admit, but are slowly realizing: what’s happening here in the U.S. isn’t new. It’s not even surprising. To Latin Americans, it’s familiar. Latin America has lived through the very crises we now flirt with in the United States. And it is a clear warning to us that our future risks looking like their past. . . . . . . the echoes are chilling . . . Here is the thing: it doesn’t have to go that way. History doesn’t just warn us, it gives us a way out. Democracy can be defended; it can even emerge stronger. But it won’t happen if people keep clinging to the idea that this country is too exceptional to fail. It’s not. If anything, the comfort of that idea—the sense that America is somehow beyond the reach of history—makes it more vulnerable. Join . . . Indivisible. Defend the rule of law.
Joe Biden In Perspective May 22, 2025May 22, 2025 Handing the microphone to Jennifer Rubin. Her report from Spain is good context for our mass deportations, but her reflections on Joe Biden are what I want to highlight. People need to get a grip . . . . . . On his worst day as president, he was more insightful, knowledgeable, productive, and effective than not only Donald Trump (as would be any sentient being) but many other presidents. . . . none of this excuses those around him and, yes, Biden himself, for failing to recognize sooner that he lacked the verbal acuity and forceful presentation skills needed to run a successful campaign. He should not have decided to run. . . . Recriminations about the past and idle speculation about 2028 distract us. Only if we focus on ripping out the MAGA menace root and branch will we spare ourselves of the horrors that Europeans have experienced over millennia. Perhaps that is why EU countries have consistently chosen center-left leaders in the Trump era. They know exactly what is at stake. Worth reading in full. Join Indivisible! Join Field Team 6! Support the opposition!
Great News! May 21, 2025 1. Kids can now buy machine guns! 2. Ten who got $365 billion richer last year may now get a huge tax cut! 3. Ten new VA health care facilities open! Amy McGrath is a Marine Corps fighter pilot flew 89 missions against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Doug Collins served as an Air Force reserves chaplain. Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State called him “a liar” and a “charlatan.” His misappropriation of credit from Biden to Trump reminds one of this possibly even more egregious example. BONUS 4. We got the plane! Finally — an Air Force One fit for a king.
Whom We Lost May 20, 2025 Only for the political junkies in the crowd: A Comprehensive New Data Analysis Into Why Harris Lost in 2024 | Cook Political Report Otherwise, I’m taking a day or two off.