It may be that the most consequential sentence of the Supreme Court’s latest decision in Allen v. Milligan, the ruling that dealt a blow to Black political representation in Alabama, comes in the majority’s opening sentence. There, in an unsigned opinion issued on the Court’s maligned shadow docket, the six-member majority exults “our colorblind Constitution.”

Although individual conservative justices on this Court have often made reference to the concept of colorblindness in concurring or dissenting opinions in various civil rights cases, placing it as the opening pronouncement in Milligan reads as a calculated provocation.

Of course, colorblindness is the basis upon which the Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, struck down race-conscious admissions practices at universities and colleges in 2023, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard . And the refrain has become standard fare in opinions in which the conservatives on the Court join or dissent from decisions upholding or striking down affirmative action remedies.

But by front-loading this statement at the opening of a decision that uses the concept to make remedial efforts to cure racial gerrymandering unconstitutional, the conservatives seemed like an announcement. This is to be the unwavering position of the six members of the right flank on the Court. That the opinion was per curiam further advances the statement of unity as the Court embraces colorblindness as its talisman.

Invoking ‘colorblindness at the opening of the opinion in Milligan was also meant as a kind of brushback pitch, designed to put to those of us ready to call out the Court’s dastardly project, on our back feet.

After all, who could be against a colorblind Constitution? To disagree with the Court on this is to invite that most odious of charges: Only someone who is themselves a racist — a reverse racist, if you will — would reject the principle of colorblindness as a constitutional imperative.

But I reject it. And I do so strenuously and unreservedly. I reject it for the simple reason that our Constitution is not colorblind. And never has been.

The majority borrows this phrase, of course, from Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. In that case, Justice Harlan admirably refused to join the majority in its decision that state-mandated racial segregation does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The majority’s monstrous decision sanctioned Jim Crow legalized apartheid, under which most Black people would then live for well over 60 years, until the Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and the legislative victories of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Since then, individual justices on the Supreme Court have cynically deployed “colorblindness” to oppose efforts to ameliorate or reverse racial exclusion and inequality.1

But our Constitution is not colorblind; for one, the word “colorblind” appears nowhere in the text of our Constitution. And the claim to a “colorblind Constitution” is belied by countless provisions in our founding charter, by the legislative history of the most consequential amendments that deal with equality, and by the principal case that overturned legal apartheid in this country.

Begin with the opening words of the Preamble to our first Constitution — "We the People" — which excluded vast swaths of “people” - namely millions of enslaved Black people who had been present in the colonies for over 200 years from our founding document’s protections and promises. Or consider the method set forth in Article I Section 2 for calculating the population for congressional representation. Or ponder the provision in Article I Section 9 to allow the continuation of our nation’s participation in the international slave trade. In all of these provisions, race is powerful, present, and significant.

The inherent conflict in forming a country based on principles of liberty and freedom, while remaining fully steeped in the buying, selling, and labor exploitation of millions of Black people, was not lost on this country’s constitutional drafters. It is precisely why the words slavery and Black people do not appear in the original document.

But no one doubts to whom the Three-Fifths Clause applied despite the delicacy of the language employed by the drafters to describe who is to be counted as a fraction of a human being (“all other persons”) in calculating congressional representation. The slave trade is delicately referred to in Article I as the “importation of persons,” but it was well understood that this provision by its own terms was meant to constitutionally sanction the continuation of U.S. participation in the grotesque immorality of the international slave trade until 1808.

The framers of our Second Founding who debated and drafted the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments during Reconstruction were not so fastidious. Their work followed a disastrous and devastating Civil War fought over the determination of southern states to continue the system of chattel slavery on which their economy depended, and from which many of their white citizens derived a sense of status and pleasure.

The Reconstruction amendments they drafted were explicitly race-conscious. The purposes of those amendments are clear and unequivocal in the legislative history and in the protections they afford: to ensure the full citizenship of Black people; and to protect the political participation of Black people. The three amendments did precisely that, resulting in the ability of Black people to own land, to obtain public education, and to elect 16 Black men to Congress and many others to state level offices in the 25 years after the war’s end. That progress was undone of course by the turn of the century, aided by Supreme Court decisions that stripped the amendments of their potential power.

“Colorblindness” likewise appears nowhere in the text of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the seminal case our current Court purports to uphold when it insists on colorblindness. And the core civil rights statutes that emanated from the Civil Rights Movement — the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 — were enacted by Congress for the explicit purpose of protecting Black people against ongoing and systemic racial discrimination and inequality. And they were a product of Congress’ explicit enforcement power under the 14th and 15th Amendments.

It is also time to have a more fulsome discussion about Justice Harlan’s use of the term colorblindness in his dissent in Plessy. I have championed Justice Harlan’s admirable opinions during Reconstruction — often in dissent — reinforcing principles of equality for Black Americans, including in the Civil Rights Cases, in which he dissented from the Court’s decision to strike down the Civil Rights Act of 1875. But it seems odd to ignore Justice Harlan’s commentary in Plessy about the Chinese, just a few paragraphs after his statement that our Constitution is colorblind.

Part of Justice Harlan’s critique of the majority’s decision in Plessy is that it would allow discrimination against Black railroad passengers, but not Chinese passengers. It is hard to square Harlan’s colorblindness talk with his statement that

“There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race. But, by the statute in question, a Chinaman can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States….”2

And let us not forget Justice Harlan’s dissent in the 1898 birthright citizenship case United States v. Won Kim Ark, in which he agrees with the proposition that “the President and Senate by treaty, and the Congress by naturalization, have the power, notwithstanding the Fourteenth Amendment, to prescribe that all persons of a particular race, or their children, cannot become citizens.”3 It is worth questioning whether Justice Harlan’s conception of a colorblind Constitution has much applicability to our modern understanding of racial equality. Asian American scholars have long written with tremendous depth and clarity about the anti-Chinese sentiments expressed by Justice Harlan in these opinions.4 The conservative majority’s refusal to address the complicated legacy of Justice Harlan’s embrace of “colorblindness” can only be deliberate at this point.

There are myriad other points of analysis developed over many years by fine scholars that demonstrate with clarity that concept of “our colorblind Constitution” is a legal fiction.

I will not participate in the pretense that colorblindness is a vision for our country grounded in our Constitution. It has become a weapon designed to cloak the Court’s decisions dismantling our civil rights infrastructure with a veneer of principled nobility. It represents at best, the wishful thinking of justices who have declared their sensibilities to be too delicate to concern themselves with, as Chief Justice Roberts once put it, “this sordid business” of “dividing people by race.” At worst, it is a cynical ploy designed to erase the work of activists, lawyers, and Congress who built a civil rights infrastructure to advance Black equality. Or perhaps a long game effort to tie the hands of future Congresses that might be inclined, as Congress was during the Civil Rights Movement, to respond to demands for equality and justice by passing civil rights laws.

The Framers of the Reconstruction amendments sought explicitly to confront the destructive power of white supremacy which had broken our nation in half. They had witnessed the catastrophic consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case, which set us on the pathway to the Civil War. They were struggling against a President Andrew Johnson, who had already vetoed their efforts to statutorily ensure Black citizenship and equality. So they gave Congress alone the power to oversee what they knew would be the long-term work of fulfilling the guarantee of equal protection.

The conservative majority on today’s Court has taken that power from Congress and imposed its own ill-informed and stubborn conception of the parameters permitted by our Constitution for addressing the lasting and destabilizing effects of structural white supremacy. In so doing, this Court may well have destroyed our only chance of becoming a true multiracial democracy.

The Supreme Court’s decision this week in Allen v. Milligan allowing the state of Alabama to erase a majority Black congressional district is as bad as it sounds.

It is in some ways worse than its decision several weeks ago in Louisiana v. Callais precisely because in Callais, the Court took pains to suggest that Alabama v. Milligan would be spared from the Court’s shocking re-write of the test for evaluating Section 2 claims. For the Court to do precisely what it suggested in Callais just a month ago it would not do is a new level of cruel for this Court.

Breaking down every aspect of this decision’s perfidy is for another day. Frankly, what matters more is what the majority signals by this devastating decision: a now irrefutable agenda bent on fully dismantling the constitutional regime created after the Civil War to ensure Black political rights - a regime that only began to live as a result of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

The latest Milligan decision this week was issued by the six right-wing justices on the Court and signed per curiam. That means that they were all joined unanimously in the decision, but no particular justice is identified as the author. This is the majority’s way of telling us that there is no daylight between them on this opinion. They stand united in dismantling the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, and in taking yet another wrecking ball to the Voting Rights Act..

Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, wrote a powerful dissent.

The Callais decision last month was a disaster, to be sure. But the speed with which the majority turns that disastrous decision into an ugly power grab for Republicans in Alabama means that this Court has dispensed with even a veneer of deliberation and integrity as it marches this country’s civil rights laws off a cliff.

To fully appreciate the implications of what the Court has done to break the Voting Rights Act in just a few weeks, you have to go back to the 2023 Milligan decision in which the Court was clear and unequivocal in reaffirming the standard for evaluating claims brought under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, writing that “our precedents and the legislative compromise struck in the 1982 amendments clearly rejected treating discriminatory intent as a requirement for liability under §2.” The majority was written by none other than Chief Justice Roberts himself.

Despite this clear statement, a month ago the majority in Callais (which included Chief Justice Roberts) declared that “ the focus of ,Section 2 must be enforcement of the 15th Amendment’s prohibition on intentional discrimination,” and “§2 imposes liability only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.”

After throwing this rock, the Court attempts to hide its hand by insisting that it is not imposing a test that requires proof of intentional discrimination.

In the 2023 Milligan case, the Court also said that it had “no reason to disturb the factual findings of the District Court” which supported that the plaintiff’s had satisfied the Section 2 standard.

Based on that decision, Alabama moved forward using the map with a second Black majority congressional district. In 2024, Black Alabamans elected Rep. Shomari Figures to fill that new seat. He has now served in Congress for two years.

But this week on the same facts, the Court has now held that neither the Voting Rights Act nor the Constitution compel the state of Alabama to draw a second congressional district from which Black voters in Alabama could elect a representative to Congress.

The only intervening event that can credibly explain the Court overturning itself in this way is the outcome of the 2024 election that returned Trump to the White House and gave the Republicans a razor-thin majority, which hangs by a thread as the midterms approach this year.

Of course the Court claims that there is a legitimate reason for its reversal in Milligan. The facts of Milligan must now be read, the Court explained, through what the Court calls the “updated” legal standards for evaluating Section 2 cases that it announced in Callais a month ago.

To be clear, in Callais the Court did not “update” or spruce up the test for claims brought under Section 2. Instead the Court overturned Congress’s 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act (which Congress enacted to correct the Supreme Court’s misreading of the statute in the 1980 case Mobile v. Bolden), and it overturned the Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Thornburgh v. Gingles, in which the Supreme Court expressly upheld and affirmed the test Congress had set forth in the 1982 amendments that set the standards by which plaintiffs must prove a Section 2 violation. That test has been used in all Section 2 cases since 1986. Until last month.

It is critical that we focus on the consequences that will flow from both Callais and the Court’s decision in Milligan this week.

First, the Court allows Alabama to remove representation for Black voters by dissolving the second majority Black district that would have accurately reflected the Black share of the population in the state. The Court’s decision will compel Alabama to reconfigure of all of the state’s congressional district to actually reduce representation for Alabama’s Black population in Congress.

In so doing, the Court invites any state to do the same because the Court now repeatedly insists that a state can offer any political objective to overcome the claim of minority voters for representation. The state can claim incumbent protection, or even the desire to lock-in permanent electoral advantage for one political party, as sufficient explanation for districting lines that disadvantage Black voters.

This is fundamentally undemocratic. And it sends a powerful and devastating message to Black voters across the country. Any excuse - so long as it is framed as a state’s political objective - carries more constitutional weight and power than the right of Black people to political representation. I am hard-pressed to see any difference between this scenario and the way politics was run in the South during Jim Crow.

Either the Court is cruelly and irresponsibly unaware of the consequences of its decision-making, or a majority of the justices on the current Court are fully aware of the consequences and were anxious to hasten this very outcome.

The Court in this decision has also confirmed the suspicion held by many, that its “Purcell doctrine” exists to allow the Court to strip racial minority voters of the ability to realize the electoral results of voting rights cases they win in court. The Purcell doctrine (to the extent that a legal “doctrine” can be created in a shadow docket case) stands for the principle that courts should not order changes to election rules close to the date of an election. To do so, the Court warned, can result in voter confusion and election administration chaos, and undermines voter confidence in the electoral process.

But the Court has never explained how close to an election is “too close” to make changes. This has proved convenient for the majority, because only the justices know the answer. This week’s decision in the Alabama case shows how the Court is willing to wield the discretion it created for itself.

Concerns about voter confusion or chaotic election administration would appear to have been far from the minds of the majority in this week’s decision. As Justice Sotomayor explains in her dissent, allowing the elimination of the Black majority congressional district as the 2026 midterm primaries are already underway will result in

“…. a chaotic election, held under never-before used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians, that Alabama adopted in unashamed defiance of a prior court order directly affirmed by this Court, and that will require officials to change the voter registrations of hundreds of thousands of voters in just days at best, a task that Alabama previously represented would take months.”

Voters in half the Congressional districts in Alabama already voted in their primary in May. The remaining districts will vote in August. What could cause a greater voter confusion, chaos, and loss of voter confidence in the electoral process than changing the congressional districts of hundreds of thousands of voters who have already voted or are slated to vote in mere weeks?

Justice Sotomayor in her dissent sums up what the Court has done with damning clarity:

“In addition to being wrong on the merits, the Court’s decision inflicts two grave harms on the public. It debases the democratic process by upending Alabama’s entire election in the name of permitting Alabama to discriminate against Black Alabamians. It also corrodes the rule of law by rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship and outright defiance of court orders.”

There can be no question but that this Court’s project to dismantle the civil rights and constitutional infrastructure that has protected Black political voice for over 60 years is near completion. We are now facing the most consequential loss of Black political power since the end of Reconstruction.

The question for all of us is how we will confront this reality. Not how just how “we,” as Black people will confront this moment. But how all Americans who care about democracy will respond. Yes, Black people know that we intensify our work figuring out how we navigate our survival - political and otherwise - in this terrible time with even greater urgency.

But at issue also is how every American who cares about democracy and the integrity of this country’s political system will respond. Our current Supreme Court has opened the door to setting this country on a path that will lead us backwards in time to our worst days as a nation.

We need to hear broad condemnation of the project that the Court has laid bare - especially from the legal community, which should be aghast that the Court so shamelessly flouts principles of stare decisis and separation of powers, and appears so fully bent on erasing the structures Congress erected to protect minority representation. Where are the law firms? The bar associations? The Deans of law schools? The liberties taken by this Court constitute a threat to our legal order. What are you prepared to say or do about it?

Are you prepared to stand and watch as Black political representation is erased? Do you yet understand that this is also your fight if you hope to live in a democracy?

The Supreme Court has rendered the Voting Rights Act a mere shell of its former itself. It serves, just as Brown v. Board of Education increasingly does, as a toothless precedent, flipped upside down to serve the ends of a far right Court. This is a disgrace, and an unforgiveable affront to the bravery, courage, and democratic vision of those who fought hardest to make this country a democracy during the Civil Rights Movement.

I mourn what the Court has done. But I will not accept defeat. I remind myself always that the collapse of repressive systems is almost always precipitated by the overreach of those who believe that they will always be in power.

Our attention must turn now to 1) continuing to use our voices and actions to express our outrage, to condemning those who seek to erase our civil rights gain, to building supporters, and to fighting the plan to permanently freeze Black voters out of the political process with even greater intensity. This moment cannot be met with silence; 2) pressuring your state representatives to protect Black voting strength in your state’s electoral districts; 3) protecting the integrity of the mid-term elections at all cost (no small feat); 3) voting to change control of the House and Senate, and; 4) and moving swiftly towards Supreme Court reform.

I warned last year that things would get worse before they get better. We are only at the beginning of the “worse.” Increase your time reading, dancing, hiking, making art. Link arms with those who care as you do.

And hang on tight.

“But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States….”

-Section 4, 14th Amendment

Over the past two years, we have been witnessing a wholesale effort to nullify the 14th Amendment. Indeed the ideology at the very core of Trump’s presidency is a confrontation with the protections and promise of the 14^th. From the Administration’s anti-DEI thuggery, its attack on birthright citizenship, the racist dismissal of Black public servants in positions of authority in the military and throughout the leadership of federal agencies, the attack on history and recognition of the contributions of Black people to this nation - all are policies undertaken in naked defiance of the language and spirit of the 14^th Amendment’s guarantees.

Indeed Trump’s second go at the presidency – in defiance of Section 3 of the Amendment – is a product of Supreme Court-sanctioned opposition to the clear terms of the Amendment.

Trump’s latest caper – an effort to purloin nearly two billion dollars from the U.S. treasury to pay rewards to his followers who participated in the violent January 6th, 2021 attack on the Capitol – would directly violate the express terms of Section 4 of the 14th Amendment.

It is by now widely understood that the 14^th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship, and protection from state interference with citizenship rights. The Amendment incorporates the concept of equality – racial equality – into our Constitution for the first time. In so doing the 14^th brings our Constitution into harmony with the core principle of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” The drafting and ratification of the 14^th Amendment constituted a stunningly ambitious act of constitutional repair and reconciliation.

But the Amendment does even more. For the first time, our Constitution confronted head-on the destructive forces that live in the DNA of our country that had been laid bare by the Civil War. The powerful force of white supremacist ideology would have to be cabined. But those founders recognized something else – that the strain of insurrection that led to secession and the creation of the Confederacy continued to run strong throughout the South, and it too would need to be disabled.

For these reasons, the 14th Amendment did more than guarantee equality. Section 2 of the Amendment contains a provision designed to punish southern states if they attempted to keep Black (men at the time) from voting. Section 3 bars those who participated in insurrection from serving in public office.

Section 4, excerpted above, bars payments to insurrectionists.

These three provisions - Section 2, Section 3, and Section 4 - have largely been forgotten. Section 3 was revived when the state of Colorado removed then former President Trump from the ballot in 2024, hewing to the language and clear intent of Section 3 that no person “having previously taken an oath…as an officer of the United States…to support the Constitution…shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion…or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” shall be permitted to hold any civil or military state or federal office. The Colorado Supreme Court upheld the findings of lower courts that President Trump had participated in an insurrection on January 6th and removed him from the ballot. In Trump v. Anderson, the Supreme Court struck down that decision and ordered Trump returned to the 2024 ballot in Colorado, deeming Section 3 inoperable witout additional congressional legislation.

Section 2 may soon have its moment. Now that the Supreme Court has decided that racial gerrymandering cannot be remedied, in effect sanctioning Trump’s demand that states controlled by Republican legislatures disenfranchise Black voters by gerrymandering congressional districts to ensure an increase in Republicans serving in the House of Representatives, the appropriate response is an activation of Section 2 of the 14th Amendment, which provides a clear and unequivocal punishment for states that deny Black voting rights – the loss of congressional representation.

Section 2 requires that states that deny or abridge voting rights for Black voters, shall have their representation numbers for congressional seats “reduced in the proportion which the number of such citizens shall bear to the whole number of citizens” of voting age in the State. Those framers understood that a crippling loss of power might be the only way to constrain southern white supremacist efforts to politically disempower Black voters.

Recently Section 2 has been the subject of litigation in a case dismissed on standing grounds. A powerful concurrence by a widely respected judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals suggests ongoing possibilities for new litigation brought under Section 2.

Last month students in my 14^th Amendment seminar conducted an educational briefing on Section 2 for some members of the House Judiciary Committee at the invitation of Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md) to explore other potential avenues of Section 2 application.

Howard Law School Spring 2026 seminar students on the way to 14th Amendment, Sec. 2 briefing on Capitol Hill.

And now Trump and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s grotesque scheme to reward January 6^th insurrectionists with payouts from the federal treasury completes the Trump administration’s section-by-section effort to violate the 14^th Amendment. Section 4 of the Amendment bars the United States from paying money to those who participated in insurrection. Congress, the branch of government empowered by Section 5 of the Amendment to enforce the 14^th Amendment’s guarantees, must block this blatantly unconstitutional scheme from moving forward.

The 14^th Amendment is the constitutional tool designed to constrain the very abuses of power that we are confronting at this moment. It was forged in a time of national fracture, widespread white supremacist ideology, and insurrectionist fervor. In other words, its provisions were uniquely created for such a time as this.

It is, if properly enforced, the most powerful tool we have to stave off the total collapse of democracy in this country.

But it requires Congress to enforce its provisions and a Supreme Court willing to recognize and uphold its protections. At the moment, we have neither. And THIS, for those who keep score, is the root and branch of our constitutional crisis.

Our focus must be on applying pressure on members of Congress – both Republicans and Democrats – to reject this unconstitutional scheme cooked up by Trump and Blanche. At the same time, I hope that a team of brilliant litigators to seek to enforce Section 4 and defeat this plan in the courts.

Today marks the 72^nd anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education , the case litigated and developed and tried by a group of brilliant Black lawyers at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In that decision the Supreme Court finally overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 decision in which the Court deemed Jim Crow segregation laws constitutional and transformed the direction of our country in the 20^th century. Deeming state-compelled racial segregation unconstitutional, the Court’s decision constituted the beginning of the end of the Jim Crow system that rendered Black people second-class citizens, whose citizenship was proscribed by the boundaries set by whites.

Brown, and the courageous activism of ordinary Black people during the Civil Rights Movement that followed finally freed the 14^th Amendment from the shackles that had bound its promise since the post-Reconstruction period. At least formally. Because resistance to Brown was strong, relentless, and often violent. Defiance in the face of Brown was so brazen that Brown’s opponents openly called their effort "Massive Resistance." Over one hundred members of Congress signed the Southern Manifesto, vowing to resist Brown using any legal means available.

Many of the constituents of those Congress members chose intimidation, threats, assault, and murder as their means of resisting the end of Jim Crow. They were most often rewarded with impunity by their neighbors and by the tacit support and approval from the leaders in their communities, who did their part through the more “respectable” White Citizens' Councils.

Black people needed power. This is why Black southerners were so laser-focused on the vote. They had the numbers. Black residents outnumbered their white counterparts in counties throughout the south. The ability to elect candidates of their choice to public office would, Black people believed, change the political calculus and create the conditions in which Jim Crow would fall. In other words, they knew that white supremacist control could only be contained when Black voters held a measure of political power.

That is why on the third anniversary of Brown on May 17, 1957, in the face of ongoing recalcitrance to school integration by southern whites, civil rights leaders called for a “Prayer Pilgrimage” to meet on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. There, Black civil rights and faith leaders, advocates, and elected officials demanded compliance with Brown and rallied in favor of Black voting rights. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., fresh from his emergence on the national stage leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott campaign, gave his first national speech at the Pilgrimage. The name of the speech he delivered that day was “Give Us The Ballot.”

King and tens of millions of Black people believed that the vote, and the political power that would come along with it, would allow Black communities to shape their own destiny, transform their communities and the material conditions of their lives, and would empower Black people to politically compel compliance with Brown.

In stirring and repeated demand King intoned, “Give Us the Ballot!” King’s words ring out today, reminding us of the faith that Black people have long believed the vote holds for the protection of our citizenship and dignity:

But even more, all types of conniving methods are still being used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters. The denial of this sacred right is a tragic betrayal of the highest mandates of our democratic tradition. And so our most urgent request to the president of the United States and every member of Congress is to give us the right to vote.

Give us the ballot, and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights.

Give us the ballot (Yes), and we will no longer plead to the federal government for passage of an anti-lynching law; we will by the power of our vote write the law on the statute books of the South (All right) and bring an end to the dastardly acts of the hooded perpetrators of violence.

Give us the ballot, and we will transform the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens.

Give us the ballot, and we will fill our legislative halls with men of goodwill and send to the sacred halls of Congress men who will not sign a “Southern Manifesto” because of their devotion to the manifesto of justice.

Give us the ballot, and we will place judges on the benches of the South who will do justly and love mercy, and we will place at the head of the southern states governors who will, who have felt not only the tang of the human, but the glow of the Divine.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. "Give Us The Ballot." May 17, 1957.

It was not until the passage of the Voting Rights Act eight years later, that Black people across the country would have meaningful access to the ballot. In the first 15 years after the Act’s passage, Black voter registration and participation increased and the number of Black elected officials in the country rose dramatically

It was through Brown and the Voting Rights Act that democracy came to this country. It was bought with the sacrifice and blood of countless activists and ordinary people. This country has never fully acknowledged the debt it owes those Americans whose courage and determination ultimately released this country from the shame and dishonor of legal apartheid and allowed the U.S. to credibly make its claim to democratic integrity on the world stage during the fraught days of the Cold War.

Sixty-one years later – just two weeks ago --in an act of perverse constitutional misinterpretation, the Supreme Court held that the 14^th Amendment – the core Reconstruction Amendment designed to protect the full and first-class citizenship of Black people - prevents legislatures from protecting the ability of Black voters to elect candidates of their choice in racially gerrymandered congressional districts. Racial gerrymandering may exist. It may even be anti-democratic. But in Louisiana v. Callais the Court deployed a version of colorblindness – which the conservative majority on the Court has deemed an imperative of the 14^th Amendment (a non-textual and ahistorical reading of the Amendment) to render racial gerrymandering a problem without a remedy, according to the majority’s reasoning.

In other words, to use race to remedy racism, is itself racist. Or as the Chief Justice said elsewhere years ago (and I’m paraphrasing liberally), the only way to fix racism is to pretend that racism doesn’t exist.1

Almost immediately Republican-controlled state legislatures and Governors throughout the South called legislative sessions to redistrict their congressional districts to reduce or eliminate congressional districts that allow Black people to elect their candidates of choice to the House of Representatives. This will ensure greater power for Republicans in Congress.

The white supremacist of the Republican effort was revealed last week when Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves called for redistricting to end the “reign of terror” of Black Congressman Bennie Thompson, one of Mississippi’s four member2 House delegation. The population of Mississippi is nearly 40% Black – the highest of any state in the country. Mississippi has not elected a statewide officer who is Black since Reconstruction.

But Gov. Reeves deems the mere presence of one member of the four-member congressional delegation sufficiently powerful as able to conduct a “reign of terror” in the state. A core tenet of white supremacy is that merely to share power with Black people is losing, and that Black political participation – no matter how modest – is takeover.

What sane-thinking Americans must now understand is that to eliminate Black political power is to not only consign Black people to second-class citizenship across the South where most Black people live, it will also usher in the end of democracy in this country. It will catapult us back to the 1950s, with all of the ignominy of functioning as a half- apartheid state as part of our national identity once again. And they won’t stop at the South.

That is why it was gratifying to be part of the thousands who gathered in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama on Saturday in an act of solidarity and the shared purpose. I understand from the organizers that this gathering was only the first, and that they will plan similar mobilization efforts in other southern state capitols where legislatures are engaged in eliminating Black political representation in their states.

The energy in Selma and Montgomery was infectious. As these gatherings continue, and as organizers home in on registration, mobilization, turnout and protest, find your way to be a part of these efforts. The chances of turning this around are slim, but we can’t win if we don’t fight.

We are experiencing nothing less than an insurrection against our constitutional order.

The engine that fuels the project – the appeal that has been the pathway to Trump’s rise and Republican hegemony – is the never vanquished hold that white supremacist ideology still holds on much of this country’s white electorate.

When Trump decided to name his movement “Make America Great Again,” many of us immediately understood the nature of the appeal. White supremacy in this country has always been a nostalgic ideology built on the premise of a great past when Black people knew their place, when white people were assured the guarantee of prominence in public life, and could count on being the beneficiaries of the spoils of government policies and programs.

What white supremacy promises its adherents is a life without challenge - the right to be free of competition and judgment, the right to be shielded from new ways of thinking, to be insulated from diverse cultural practices that challenge their hegemony. White supremacy offers the false narrative of superiority. You see it in every facial tick, every desperate boast and sad outburst of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose fast-talking insults and tirades are designed to distract from his incompetence. His purge of Black and women leaders in the military is a textbook white supremacy move. The field of competition must be artificially restricted to keep competition narrow and culturally constrained, so that whiteness itself can become proof of competence.

The myth of white supremacy can only flourish when Black achievement is out of sight and out of mind.

But the deal offered by white supremacy has always been at the cost of democracy in this country. The white supremacist destruction of Reconstruction and hijacking of the promise of democracy after the passage of the post-Civil War amendments to our Constitution - the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments – ensured that the U.S. remained a republic without democracy for the first half of the 20th century. Instead the U.S. became a quasi-apartheid state cosplaying as a democracy.

The Supreme Court played a central role in this tragedy. Beginning in 1873 the Court issued a a series of decisions that stripped the 14^th Amendment of its power and potential, leaving it as a mere shell of its former self by the turn of the 20^th century. At the same time, the Court was careful to manufacture protections for corporations under the 14^th Amendment, even as it betrayed its framers central focus on ensuring the full, first-class citizenship of Black people.

Klan violence and congressional inaction did the rest. The result was that most Black people were stripped of voting rights, economic rights, mobility, and the right to live as free and equal citizens. The labor of Black people was again exploited through sharecropping and domestic work. Black people who had elected members to Congress, and who had registered to vote in exponential numbers during Reconstruction were barred from political participation and left without political voice or power. Black people went from the pinnacle of hope during Reconstruction to the “nadir” of oppression and disenfranchisement in the early 20^th century.

It was the demand and sacrifice of ordinary people – civil rights lawyers and activists who forced change – many at the cost of their livelihood and their lives whose demands and sacrifices ushered in democracy our country. Once you understand this truth, then you can also understand that the decades-long resistance to the successes of the Civil Rights Movement has always been an anti-democracy movement.

That is why the effort by Trump and Republican state leadership to gerrymander Black representation out of Congress must be understood as not only an attack on Black people, but on democracy itself. If the Republican racial gerrymandering effort is successful, the U.S. will lose any claim to democracy for a generation or more.

And the forces that stand today against citizenship and political representation for Black people won’t stop there. They will not tolerate meaningful political representation for any group that opposes their oligarchical Christian nationalist ideology. They seek a one-party political system in a country ruled by authoritarians. The political oppression of Black people is not the end. It is the conduit.

We must work together to dismantle that conduit. We know the formula that is necessary to put rampant, lawless white supremacy and its democracy-destroying force back on the leash. It is the same formula that briefly brought us back from the abyss during Reconstruction and again during the Civil Rights Movement. We need to build a strong, determined, even radical Congress to recreate an infrastructure of laws and protections that cannot be easily undone. And we need a Supreme Court that is prepared to uphold a structure of laws that protect democracy in our country, and that has the integrity and vision to do what is needed to hold democracy in 21^st century America.

That reformed Court will need to be expanded in size, constrained in power, adherent to ethics, and populated with justices who have the legal, intellectual, moral, and experiential skills, combined with the integrity, courage and sophistication to fairly adjudicate the complex array questions and controversies that emerge from a multiracial democracy of three hundred and forty million people in the 21^st century.

At the same time we also need a cultural reset – not a look backwards, but a new cultural vision that invites all of us to imagine and strive for who we might become as a nation.

But we can’t get any of those things without power. And our opponents are moving faster than we imagined. We need to accelerate our work. That means that every American who believes in democracy, who believes in equality and humanity must decide now what they can do and what they must do.

Democrats in Congress and state houses must decide what they are prepared to do. We are facing an insurrection and an attack on our Constitution. What is required of you as leaders at this moment? We did not create the insurrectionist movement that attacks this country, but we are faced with it nonetheless. Do Democrats have the courage and fortitude to truly meet the moment? Or will your fastidiousness, your claim to higher ground, and your fealty to one-sided rules of engagement stand in the way of protecting our country?

Where are American business leaders? Have they so abandoned any commitment to protecting democracy in this country that will be bystanders while the Black population is stripped of congressional representation? Is it really enough that you are obtaining “maximum dividends” for your shareholders? And what of clergy leaders - white clergy leaders. So much of what has been done to us in this country has been done in the name of your faith. How long will you allow this perversion to continue without standing front and center in opposition?

No democracy can survive if tens of millions of its citizens refuse to fight to protect it because they “don’t do politics.”

If you think that the Republican plan to strip Black voters in the South of congressional representation is not your problem because you are white, or because you don’t live in the South, then you have accepted the end of democracy in this country. Are you really prepared to watch as your fellow citizens are disenfranchised in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama?

Will you be in Montgomery this coming weekend to participate in the national mobilization for voting rights? Perhaps you plan to do an action in your city or county. Perhaps you are already calling your red state reps every day demanding that they withdraw from the process of silencing the voice of Black voters and showing up at their district offices to voice your complaints. Maybe you are calling your blue state reps to insist that they use all available tools to fight back against this national take-over. And be sure to call and encourage them when you see them taking bold action.

Whatever (non-violent) actions you can undertake, now is the time to engage. This is not happening to someone else, to some other community, to some other Americans. This is happening ot all of us. They have made their goals clear. Now it’s time for us to be as clear and unequivocal about ours while we still can.

Justice Elena Kagan, in dissent Louisiana v. Callais

The night before the six conservative justices on the Supreme Court issued their decision in a case that betrays the sacrifices, determination, and demand of generations of Black people in this country for political voice and representation, they feasted.

Decked out in tuxedos and formal gowns, they assembled for a State dinner held in a White House controlled by the most explicitly and destructively racist President to serve in 150 years. They dined on Dover Sole “expertly prepared and bathed in a nutty brown butter,” “tender” spring ramps, and potatoes pave. They raised glasses in toast to the British King, Charles.

One justice, Clarence Thomas was, it appears, the only Black guest in the room.

I imagine they slept well after this event. Perhaps Justice Alito was awakened after a few hours to take an antacid tablet, or just to marvel once more in the hours before dawn at his handiwork – an opinion that signals the demise of the most consequential and important civil rights statute to ever be enacted by Congress – the Voting Rights Act. The 1982 Amendment to that Act Congress made clear that electoral practices that result in the diminution or denial of Black voting power violate Section 2 of the Act, which protects against electorial practices or systems that deny Black voters an equal opportunity to elect their candidates of choice.Congress’ adoption of this “effects test” was explicity enacted to overturn the Supreme Court’s 1980 decision in Mobile v. Bolden, in which the Court held that only practices that were intentionally discriminatory could violate the Voting Rights Act.

The “effects test” adopted by Congress in 1982 was upheld by the Supreme Court four years later in the landmark case Thornburgh v. Gingles. But it has been the white whale for a certain generation of conservative lawyers shaped in the crucible of the Reagan Justice Department under the careful tutelage of former Attorney Generals Ed Meese and William French Smith, who had worked assiduously but without success to stop Congress from enacting the amendment.

The 1982 Amendment to the Voting Rights Act was a civil rights triumph. In fact, civil rights groups and their allies on Capitol Hill ran circles around Republicans who were opposed to the Amendment. They won bipartisan support for the Amendment. The civil rights coalition was better organized and brought a range of expertise to lobbying, organizing and litigation, which proved overwhelming. As Lani Guinier, the late civil rights lawyer and scholar who played a principal role as a young lawyer at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in crafting the amendment later explained, “the conservative think tanks…were still new to the business of trying to influence public policy in a coordinated and well-heeled way” in 1982.1

In the Reagan Justice Department, John Roberts, as Special Assistant to the Attorney General and then in White House Counsel’s office was the point person tasked with jettisoning adoption of the “effects test” – even after the House had voted overwhelmingly to support it. Roberts deemed the “effects test” as a “radical experiment,” insisting in copious internal memos that it would create a “quota system” of Black electoral districts. At one point when cautioned about commiting these views to writing, Roberts grew agitated at the momentum building for the bill’s passage, exclaiming, “something must be done!” Justice Alito was also a lawyer working in the Justice Department, as an Assistant to the Solicitor General, at that time.

What the conservative legal elite were unable to defeat on Capitol Hill in the early 80s, they worked to defeat in the Courts over the ensuing decades. The Voting Rights Act has been under attack from those forces with steady and unrelenting challenges for more than 30 years. The ascension of lawyers who were graduates of the school of Justices Rehnquist and Scalia to the highest levels of the federal judiciary began to bear fruit in the early aughts, and peaked with the Court’s decision gutting Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder case. Louisiana v. Callais has now completed the work.

In the forty years after the passage of the 1982 amendments to the Act, Black political representation grew exponentially – largely because of the network of lawyers and activists who could monitor redistricting efforts at the state and local level. That work has not been easy. In every redistricting cycle since 1971, the state of Texas has been found to have engaged in racial gerrymandering. Other southern states have similar patterns of racial redistricting. It has been the determination, hard work, and resources of civil rights groups and lawyers who have held the line, ensuring Black and Hispanic representation in legislatures throughtout the South.

That work has largely been successful despite continued chipping away at the integrity of the core statute that protects voting rights. When the Congressional Black Caucus was formed in 1971 it had thirteen members. It now has sixty-two. In 1981 before the Amendments to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia had no Black congressional representation, although the population of those states were 35%, 26% and 27% at the time.2

There were only 1500 Black elected officials in the entire country in the decade before passage of the 1982 Amendments to the Voting Rights Act. Within 30 years that number grew to 9,000. Today the number stands at well over 10,000 Black elected officials across the country. Those changes are not due to the goodness of the hearts of legislative redistricting committees. That progress is due to continuous vigilance and yes, the threat of litigation under the Voting Rights Act, by local and national activists and lawyers.

But once again, as in the Shelby County decision, this Supreme Court has decided that they have seen enough. From their sheltered perch on First Street in Washington, D.C., they have deemed the hard-fought-for work of ensuring minority representation as done. It is “a cause for celebration,” they tell us in Callais, that no longer requires the protection of the amended statute that President Reagan reluctantly signed, conceding that voting rights is “the crown jewel of American liberties.”

So, what does this all mean?

Can it happen again? Could Black people really be boxed out of the political process? We would do well to remember that there were eight Black members who served in Congress during Reconstruction. By 1900, due to unrestrained voter suppression, an indifferent and even hostile Supreme Court, violence, and a somnabulent Congress, there were none. The number eight was not reached again until 1969. Now think of your city council, your county commission, your school board, your state legislature. The Callais decision applies to those districts as well.

We will not allow it to happen again. But it will take concerted action and a clear recognition of the threats we are facing. We have more power, greater resources, a wider array of allies, and broader experience to draw on in the fight this time around. But we must not rest on (what remains of) our laurels.

The Supreme Court has struck down a critical protection for electoral districts that ensure Black (and presumably Hispanic) political voice. The majority even makes explicitly clear that Black voting strength and representation can be subordinated to an array of state interests including, a state’s interest in protecting white incumbents; a state’s aesthetic interest in drawing districts that are neatly shaped; or even a state’s interest in preserving the political power of one political party in perpetuity. Cloaked in the mystical robes of “colorblindness” the conservative majority can make the most absurd arguments with a straight face.

This is why it is a mistake to consider today’s decision just a blow for the political rights of racial minorities. Today’s decision strikes a blow at the fragile infrastructure of our democracy. It casts aside the precious and noble actions undertaken by countless generations of activists, lawyers, and legislators, who worked to bring this country closer to becoming a true multi-racial democracy. It rides roughshod over the will of Congress. In its place, the Court leaves a bare-fisted zero-sum game of partisan politics and an open door to the return of full-on racial exclusion in political representation. So long as it’s dressed up as partisan gerrymandering or incumbency protection, it’s all good.

The Court’s action today has been undertaken with disregard for the boundaries of judicial power. It dismisses with either arrogance or willful ignorance, the reality of ongoing and revived racism in political life. It runs over its own precedents with reckless haste. And it takes up the pen to rewrite a congressional statute that has been the law of the land for forty-four years. This is the Court that can do it all – judge, legislate, turn back time, erase facts, and rewrite history.

The majority on this Court is unrestrained. Democrats who say they want congressional power in the mid-terms this year, had better be prepared if they are successful to address Supreme Court reform without hesitation.

*Photo of the Inaugural Congressional Black Caucus.

Updated information on the SAVE America Act:

Two weeks ago I wrote about the SAVE Act, the proof of citizenship voter suppression bill that then was slated for a vote in the House of Representatives. The bill passed in the House by a vote of 218-213. Now the bill, renamed the SAVE America Act, is in the Senate.

Republicans have already amassed 50 votes for the SAVE Act in the Senate. But they need 60 Senate votes to pass the legislation because of the filibuster rule. Trump is leaning in hard and heavy on the bill’s passage, and most Republicans have closed ranks in support of the bill. But Republicans hold only 53 seats in the Senate. To get to 60 votes means they will need some Democrats to defect and vote with Republicans for passage. We already know that Sen. Fetterman in Pennsylvania is a “yes” vote for the bill.

Given the unlikelihood that the Republicans can garner 60 votes, Trump is pushing the Republicans to end the filibuster rule and pass the bill with only 51 votes. A number of Republian senators are opposed to ending the filibuster. Of course when Democrats held a majority in the Senate, all Republicans were opposed to ending the filibuster rule. But such is politics.

Will Republicans dismantle the filibuster and crater a longstanding Senate rule for this bill?All things are possible. Republicans in Congress have caved on most of Trump’s demands, save for tariffs. And freshly enraged from the Supreme Court’s rebuke of his lawless tariffs, President Trump is even more aggressively demanding a victory from Republicans on this bill. Keep your eyes on Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD).

If ever there was a week to contact your Senator, this would be the one. You can reach your Senator at 202-224-3121.

First refresh your understanding and learn about some minor changes in what the SAVE America Act will do.

• It will restrict the forms of photo I.D. that are acceptable to vote on Election Day to a prescribed list that is more restrictive than those accepted by all but ten states. This may disproportionately affect elderly voters without driver’s licenses, students (student IDs are not on the list), and tribal members. While tribal identification may have photos, the SAVE America Act also requires that the IDs have an “expiration date.” Most tribal IDs do not include expiration dates;

• Over 20 million American citizens lack ready access to proof of citizenship. The SAVE America Act requires proof of citizenship in order to register to vote which poses unique problems for those without a passport, or a birth certificate, and for married women who have taken the surname of their husbands. Changes to the bill now would require that married women with such surname descrepancies sign an attestation swearing to the accuracy of their former name. Proof of citizenship will also be required by those who register online and by mail, something only 3 states currently require;

• the bill requires frequent purges of state voter rolls, including for so-called “inactive voters,” meaning that states can purge voters from the rolls simply because those registered voters failed to vote;

• this bill requires every state to submit their voter lists to the Department of Homeland Security, an agency that merits no confidence from the American public as to how they might handle this important data and with whom they might share it.

• the bill will increase harassment and intimidation of election officials by adding a “private right of action” allowing individuals to sue election officials who they believe has registered a non-citizen to vote, and includes criminal penalties for election officials who mistakenly register non-citizens to vote.

  Call your Senators this week at 202-224-3121. We have work to do!

This will be a short one. No, I am not writing about the vile, racist image posted on Trump’s Truth Social account last week. It has Donald Trump’s decade-long drumbeat of racism from the White House for me to fully embrace at long last the great Toni Morrison’s brilliant admonition that “the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.”

And yes, I loved Bad Bunny’s performance at the Superbowl. It was spiritually restorative, musically exciting, visually stunning, and just what this country needed. To quote Toni Morrison again, “this is precisely the time when artists go to work.” Bad Bunny went to work!

But we have some urgent work to do this week. And what is the work? Trump’s obsession last week and today is “voter fraud.” In fact voter fraud was the subject of the Truth Social post that ended with Trump’s grotesquely racist meme. Yes I know, Trump always talks about voter fraud. But this time his focus is on moving Republicans in Congress to pass the SAVE Act.

What is the SAVE Act? It is a “proof of citizenship” mandate for voter registration, and is one leg of the three-legged stool Trump is employing to try and manipulate a win for Republicans in this November’s congressional elections (the other two are ICE intimidation and mid-decade redistricting).

I’ve learned that the House is likely to vote on the SAVE Act THIS WEDNESDAY.

By now you likely know that there is no serious “voter fraud” problem in this country. This has has been proven in numerous studies time and time again. Yet claims of fraud remain a Republican canard. The SAVE Act is a voter suppression law cloaked in anti- voter fraud language.

If passed, it is estimated that the SAVE Act law will disenfranchise over 20 million voters. Why? Because the ID required by this law is not just your driver’s license. The SAVE Act will require voters to show proof of CITIZENSHIP in order to register to vote in federal elections. That means that voters will need to have in hand a birth certificate or a passport. Mail-in registration would require in-person proof of citizenship.

It is estimated that just only half of Americans hold a valid U.S. passport. The states in which less than 40% of its citizens hold a U.S. passport include Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Ohio, Michigan, and a dozen others.

Birth certificates are also problematic for many Americans. Some older Americans in rural areas were born at home or by mid-wives and were never issued a birth certificate. Others are unable to locate one because of fire, theft, or loss.

Married women are particularly vulnerable here, because a married woman’s name when she seeks to register, may be different than the name on her birth certficate.

Earlier versions of the bill were even worse. One would have require proof of citizenship - either a passport or birth certificate - at the polling place in order to cast a ballot.

But there’s more. As the Brennan Center for Justice explains, “the [House] bill would require photo ID to vote at the polls, providing a narrow list of acceptable IDs more restrictive that the voter ID laws in every state but Ohio.” The bill would no longer permit the use of most tribal IDs to vote and would require that states conduct voter purges every 30 days. Frequent purges of the voter rolls, routinely result in the removal of legitimate voters from the rolls as well. Of course those who are deceased or who are no longer state residents should be removed from voting lists. But purges are often conducted to purge “inactive voters” - those who have chosen not to vote in recent elections.

This defeats the very purpose of mobilizing disaffected, non-participating citizens to vote. Imagine someone who registered to vote and voted fifteen years ago, but has chosen to sit out elections for the past decade. They live in the same home. Fearing that this year our very democracy is in peril, this citizen decides several days before Election Day that this year they will vote. Voter purges for “inactivity” would make such late-motivated voting for registered voters impossible.

Every one of the restrictive measures in the SAVE Act has been on the Republican voter suppression wish-list for more than a decade.

Trump spoke repeatedly about the need to pass the SAVE Act last week and on Monday, setting it as a priority for Republicans in Congress this week. It is part of his desire to “nationalize elections.”

So you know what you have to do. In every state, get on the horn asap to your Representatives and Senators and let them know your views on the SAVE Act. Visit their district offices and demand a meeting with staff. Tag your Representatives on social media. Make your position clear.

Call your Representatives and Senators at 202-224-3121. We have work to do!

1) Continuing to protest the occupation of our cities is critical. We all owe a debt of gratitude to the resilient and principled stance of the people of Minneapolis and the state of Minnesota who have remained undeterred. They have fought for their neighbors and for themselves. They have stood in proud defense of their city, and their right to peacefully protest. The organizers on the ground have been extraordinary. Every city in a blue state, or where a mayor or governor has defied Trump’s demands, should be on alert. These occupations are an assertion of power and retaliation by Trump, more than an action focused on addressing immigration enforcement. Trump wants to show that he can break cities and elected leaders that oppose him. Start by pushing for the passage of anti-mask legislation and ordinances for law enforcement officers so that prosecutors can identify the perpetrators for investigation.

2) Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has done a superb job of moving quickly to court to try and compel the preservation and access to evidence in the Pretti case. The thorough investigation Minnesota needs to support an indictment of the officers involved in the Pretti and Renee Good killings has been frustrated by the refusal of the federal officials to cooperate with state law enforcement, which is the norm. It is not clear whether the state AG’s office has even yet had access to the car in which Renee Good was killed. Mr. Pretti’s phone should also be shared with state officials. But the video evidence and the eyewitness accounts in both cases are compelling. The AG should feel no hesitation in moving forward if he determines that state charges are warranted against the officers involved, or against ICE and Border Patrol for their concerted actions in removing evidence, impeding investigation, or obstructing justice. Indeed bystander videos of countless ICE assaults against peaceful protesters who were not impeding or threatening officer actions should result in investigations and state prosecutions where warranted by the evidence. Even a Trump pardon will not protect ICE officers against conviction on state charges. It needs to become costly for ICE officers to participate in violating the rights of their fellow citizens.

3) Attorneys at firms (those not compromised by “agreements” with Trump) and non-profits across the country have continued to do exceptional work meeting the moment. Every federal district court decision that slows down our slide into the abyss is critical. These hearings and trials allow the public to learn the facts about the conduct of Trump officials – the lies, the defiance of court orders, and the suffering of victims. People say, “but what about the Supreme Court?” Fair question. But lower courts are courts too – and they have the power to find facts and educate the country and their colleges in the judiciary about the Administration’s excesses, long before cases make their way to the Supreme Court. Most of all these proceedings in district court are slowing down the train, and ensuring that a judicial eye is on the Administration’s illegal activities at an early stage. These district court judges are doing strong work in the face of threats to their families and their staff. In some cases they are issuing injunctions to hold the status quo until they can fully review the cases. Support the attorneys working on these cases. Give to the non-profits litigating civil rights and other democracy cases. Remember to post and share judicial opinions that provide a real window into the excesses of this Administration. And support where you can, those officials and individuals who have been targeted by the Administration for prosecution as retaliation for their opposition.

4) There have been rumors about plans for a General Strike. Maybe they are just rumors. But if such a plan does go forward, the conduits for information will be your local organizations. Stay plugged in with your civic organizations, churches, community centers and clubs - both online and in real life.

5) We should not forget that the world is watching. They have seen the videos, and they have been horrified by Trump’s performance at Davos. Now is the time to push. If Trump and his associates want to make this country like apartheid South Africa, then we need to draw some of our tactics from the movement to end apartheid. One key tactic was the refusal to allow South Africa to “sports-wash” its image by convening international events. The World Cup is slated to come to the U.S. as are the Olympics. The World Cup games will be shared between venues in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Players of color from around the world cannot guarantee their own safety or the safety of families and friends who may travel to the U.S. to view the matches, under the current conditions with DHS officials engaged in blatant racial profiling, kidnapping, assaults, and even killings. Many of the ountries who are slated to participate in the Cup are on Trump’s recent list of countries for which Trump has ordered the suspension of visas. Most of these countries, unsurprisingly for Trump, are in the global south. I am a soccer lover and that encourages me to prioritize the safety of players and their loved ones. If countries pull out of attending the Cup in the U.S. it would be huge. Already officials in Germany and Netherlands are considering boycotting the games. Soccer is the world’s #1 sport. All games should be moved to Mexico and Canada.

6) On the political front, I am gratified to learn that the Democrats appear to be standing pat on not voting for an appropriations bill that includes additional ICE funding. We need to keep the pressure on the Democrats. We need congressional investigations into the actions of ICE and Border Patrol (what is the “training” Kristi Noem insists has instructed officers to behave as they did in the Good and Pretti incidents?), and a bill to dismantle ICE. But more than just pressuring Democrats (who are in the minority) we also need to demand that Republicans do their duty and follow the law. Just because Speaker Mike Johnson and his caucus have shown themselves to be craven, mendacious, and shameless, doesn’t mean we should let them off the hook. They need to feel pressure. And not just about ICE activities. Trump just announced that he will impose 100% tariffs on Canada if they make deals with China. Of course Trump won’t impose such a tariff, but that kind of language must stick in the craw of Republican constituents who are already suffering under Trump’s tariff lunacy. Do not forget that many of the House and Senate Republicans know that their constituents, many farmers, and small business owners are already hurting. And Republicans know that they are facing massive losses in the midterms. We need to pressure them. “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”

7) Democrats do not have the votes to impeach. But pressing Articles of Impeachment against Secretary Noem would convey the seriousness of her abuse of power and mendacity. The impeachment resolution current circulating has nearly 140 Democratic co-sponsors. Without question, Articles of Impeachment are warranted against AG Pam Bondi, and Trump as well. But start with Noem - low-hanging fruit. The Democrats are not in the majority, I know. But pressing forward with Articles of Impeachment is an action that this moment requires. By not doing so, the Democrats would send a signal that the current crisis does not rise to the level of the emergency that it is. Republicans should be compelled to confront a united Democratic front on impeachment. Make them defend these officials who so flagrantly abuse their power. Too often activists presume (correctly) that Republicans will be lawless and unfit. But it is important that we make them show that this is what they are. Pressure your Representatives and Senators - both Democrats and Republicans.

8) I have suggested pressing demands for the invocation of the 25^th Amendment. Given that the 25^th Amendment can only be invoked by the members of the Cabinet it is, most believe, a lost cause. That is true. Many members of the Cabinet are as unhinged and unfit as Trump. But by demanding that the cabinet act on the 25^th Amendment, Democrats will put Trump’s mental state squarely in the center of the national conversation, where it belongs.

9) Finally, the resilience and determination of Minnesotans, and that of the Chicagoans, Portlandians, and Los Angelenos before them, should compel us all to look at ourselves. Do we feel ready to protect our neighbors and our communities with that level of engagement and insistence? Have you received training in non-violent protest and resistance? In bystander intervention? Is your clergy community organized and prepared to participate and lead. Have you asked your rabbi, your pastor, the leaders of your mosque or gurdwara what they intend to when ICE comes to your town? Do you have a whistle? The phone numbers of a few of your neighbors? Are you supporting your local civic organizations that are doing the work? Do you follow independent media outlets to stay informed?

Get ready. Stay ready. And stay safe.

I needed a few days before I even attempted to write about the event of the last week. I am heartbroken for the family of Alex Pretti, who was executed by DHS officials (hard to make out which ones are ICE, CPB or Border Patrol) on Thursday in Minneapolis. Pretti’s execution was caught on bystander videos. Those videos show that Pretti was attempting to help a woman who was being assaulted by agents, when he did, he was pepper-sprayed, dragged to the ground by six officers, beaten and then shot ten times by more than one of the officers. Another appears to clap his hands in glee once the shooting ended.

The grotesque choreography of law enforcement denial unfolded as expected. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and (now former) ICE supervisor Greg Bovino insisted that Pretti “advanced on the officers with a 9mm gun.” They continue saying this even after multiple videos, a video analysis by the New York Times, and the sworn affidavits of multiple eyewitnesses who attested to what really happened. It is clear that Pretti did not “advance” on any officers. The only weapon he brandished was his iPhone as he videotaped what was unfolding on the street. Pretti is a licensed firearm owner, and Minnesota state law permits concealed carry. Pretti had his weapon holstered. There’s no evidence that he ever reached for it. In any case, one of the officers removed Pretti’s weapon from his holster and stepped back. Pretti is disarmed. This is the point at which shots begin to ring out as multiple officers shoot at Pretti as he remains in the kneeling, crouched position that he had assumed when the six officers began piling on him.

I recount all of this because the persistence of the Administration’s lies in the face of what anyone with eyes can clearly see is part of the assault this Administration doles out on Americans every day. It must be rebuked at every turn. The disgrace of federal officials referring to Pretti – a VA nurse, bicyclist, and decent and deeply-admired human being – as a domestic terrorist to justify what looks like an execution is a measure of the degradation of Trump’s coterie. That these officials were not chastened just a week after offering an account of the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis that was disproved by videos from bystanders and even the video from the Border Patrol agent who killed her, demonstrates the arrogance and shamelessness of this group.

They will say and I fear, do, anything to justify their lawlessness, their brutality, and Trump’s overreach.

I was overcome by a wave of exhaustion by the “kill, justify, demonize the victim, brazen-it-out” dance that unfolded after the killing of Pretti. The macabre choreography is painfully familiar to those of us who have been fighting against police brutality for decades. Amadou Diallo had a gun ( it was his wallet). Terence Crutcher was a “bad dude.” Walter Scott “grabbed my taser” (he didn’t). Laquan McDonald was coming toward us with a knife (he was walking away from the officers). Samuel DuBose was dragging the officer with his car ( he wasn't). The 12-year-old child Tamir Rice – and the 10-year-old child Clifford Glover, forty years earlier – “had a gun” (neither did). Not one person with a brain believes that if a courageous 17-year-old had not filmed the murder of George Floyd, the officer who killed him would have even been charged.

The fundamental refusal to accept accountability for anything is feature not a bug of those bent or exercising power to the exclusion of all else. No matter how preposterous the lie is, they will continue repeating it. Their superpower is their brazenness – their unconscionable, soulless refusal to accept the basic rules of human decency. And every time they do it and get away with it, they feel more powerful.

Now we’re starting to hear horror stories coming out of ICE facilities, and the same preposterous, obscene lying to cover-up what appears to be the death of a legal immigrant who was set upon by multiple officers and suffered a massive head trauma. Agents brought the man to the hospital four hours after his arrest, where he was diagnosed with “life-threatening bilateral skull fractures and hemorrhaging.” ICE’s explanation? The detainee “purposely ran headlong into a brick wall.”

The President has pitched us into the dark night of a police state, using the same tactics of victim-smearing, lies, and justifications for lawless conduct that has been perfected by police officers engaged in brutality for decades in this country. Now it is national policy for anyone who can walk, wear a vest, and who is desperate enough to terrorize their fellow citizens and call it a “job.” In the past, when local police officers engaged in brutality and were not held accountable, we appealed to the federal government – the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. Now that division has been hijacked by Trump loyalists to prosecute what it regards as discrimination against white people.

Coming on the heels of Trump’s ludicrous performance at Davos, his saber-rattling imperialistic ambitions, his smash and grab pillaging of our nation’s treasury, lands and influence for his own enrichment and that of his friends, and his abuse of pardon power to build-out his army of the felonious loyal, the U.S. is also fast becoming a pariah nation.

Our responses must meet the nature and character of the regime that has dragged us into the abyss. We should be overflowing with allies prepared to challenge this regime. After all legions – literally tens of millions of Americans on the right -- had built their worldview on the three-legged stool of state’s rights, gun rights, and ending a constitutional right to abortion. Having achieved the latter, suddenly they appear to have lost interest in the former.

Trump tramples the prerogatives of states, to the point of sending federal officials to occupy a state because he doesn’t like the Governor; withholding state emergency relief because the state’s voters didn’t vote for him; demanding that states bar trans athletes from competition or risk losing education money; and muscling state universities to change curriculum, investigate teachers, and students, and end programs supporting diversity at the gunpoint of federal aid. And when his thugs kill a peaceful bystander, Trump’s Attorney General swings for the fences, sending a laundry list of demands that ends with a demand for the state’s voter rolls – presumably in exchange for ending the occupation. But we hear nary a peep from those individuals and organizations that have maniacally insisted on “state’s rights” as an unshakeable demand.

We have known for some time that the claim of allegiance to gun rights was hollow. We learned that when Philando Castile was killed in his car after telling the officer who pulled him over for a traffic stop that he was a licensed gun owner. And it was reinforced when Atatiana Jefferson, who while babysitting her nephew at her home, was awakened by noises at 2a.m. and went downstairs to investigate, carrying her licensed handgun. She was shot dead in her home by a police officer lurking outside her home. The silence of the gun lobby was deafening.

We knew then that only white people were deemed to truly have Second Amendment rights. But the silence of the NRA and other gun rights advocates in the immediate aftermath of the death of Alex Pretti, tells us that the cult of Trump has now limited gun rights to only those who support this Administration and its lawless policies.

Interestingly in just the last 24 hours gun lobby groups have started to speak out. They are hardly condemning the Administration, but they are speaking their displeasure at the Administration’s rhetoric about what it claims is the right of federal law enforcement to shoot and kill those who are legal gun owners and carriers.

The First Amendment has fared no better among its most ardent defenders on the right. The loony tech lord obsession with their version of First Amendment rights has been deployed to cover the platforming of hate speech, election misinformation, Nazi symbols and memes, misogyny, rank racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia. Now peaceful protest and resistance is left out to dry by these hypocrites, who could use their cash-bought proximity to Trump to press the First Amendment purity to which they have claimed allegiance for years. Instead, Alex Pretti’s First Amendment rights have been left out to dry. Elon Musk did comment on the events in Minneapolis after the killing of Alex Pretti. Musk called for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. Others in the tech cabal joined Trump and his wife at the White House the night after Pretti was executed, to watch a screening of the Amazon film “Melania.”

It is important to underscore that many of these are people who have no sustained belief system. It is futile to count on consistency, truth-telling, or an inner core of principles with this lot. Those who are assembled around Trump are focused on the bottom line. For some that bottom line is financial. For others it is remaining in positions of power. Others in Trump’s coterie are those who could never sustain their current positions of power and influence without him. Even Elon became aggressively involved in the 2024 election because he feared, as he told Tucker Carlson, that if Vice President Harris were elected, he would be deported or imprisoned. Given his dependence on government contracts and subsidies, certainly he faced loss of status at the apex of the billionaire pile.

Bovino, Noem, Homan, Hegseth were drawn from the dregs of those who would sign up for Trump 2.0. Not one of them could have ever dreamed of leading a government department or sitting in cabinet meetings if not for a President so fundamentally corrupt and compromised. Their allegiance is to him. And to staying on the perch where he placed them. They know that there is nowhere to go but down after this. Or to prison.

The good news is that they are hopped up on power and photo ops. Bovino and Noem have overreached in ways that appear to have provoked Trump’s displeasure. This is likely because the Wall Street Journal, Joe Rogan, and some gun groups have denounced the bizarre and expansive statements of Noem, Bovino and Trump’s Assistant Attorney General in California, who posted on social media that, [i]f you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you. Don’t do it!” Now Bovino is getting his ears slapped back by being removed from Minnesota as the front man and being stripped of his made-up fantasy title “Commander at Large” for the Border Patrol. The title will be eliminated apparently. DHS leadership in Minnesota will now be undertaken by Tom “$50,000 in a Cava bag ” Homan. You can’t make this up.

Every week you think it can’t get worse, and it does. And I suspect, it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. I know that it can be no comfort to Mr. Pretti’s family, friends or colleagues, but he and Keith Porter and Renee Good and the other victims of ICE brutality are martyrs - unwilling martyrs to the only pathway out of this nightmare. Through it. Our determination should honor their collective spirit. I believe we will get through it. I believe this because of what I have seen this past week in Minnesota, and before that in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland, in courtrooms around the country, on stages, in the streets, in pulpits, outside detention centers, inside detention centers, in independent media and organizing spaces. We are not having it. We will not acquiesce to this.

I say this not to tamp down the truth of the danger we face. But as a way of remembering that we must sustain this fight for those already martyred to this battle for our lives, our families, our communities, and our country.

In Part II, I share some thoughts about actions for the coming weeks.

King Day is one of my favorite holidays. The very fact that it exists reflects the values that have animated my life and work. A holiday to celebrate a democracy warrior – a Black man who tried with every fiber of his being to show this country the pathway to true democracy, to humanity, and to peace. His dedication to non-violent direct action drew deeply on his Christian faith, on his belief in the Gandhian principle of satyagraha (truth force), and on his profound understanding of the unspeakable and vicious violence of white supremacy. It took courage beyond measure to practice these principles himself, but even more to lead others to embrace it.

Because King was no nihilist. He had no fascination with martyrdom. He valued his own life, and he wanted his people to live. To fight. But to live. He encouraged us to demand in the most powerful ways possible – by putting our bodies on the line, by speaking truth to power, by surfacing the tension that exists wherever there is systemic injustice, by harnessing the power of “truth force,” to demand change.

For this country to celebrate such a man represents a moment when as a nation we chose to lift up to its highest ranks a man – a Black man – not because he was a President, or Cabinet Secretary, not because he felled foreign troops in a battle, or because he built railroads, but because he was a democracy warrior – indeed because he was one of the leaders of a band of the founders of true democracy in this country. Dr. King, Fred Shuttlesworth, Medgar Evers, Bob Moses, Diane Nash, Thurgood Marshall, Robert Carter, Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King, Rev. C.T. Vivian, John Lewis, Constance Baker Motley, Gloria Richardson, Stokely Carmichael, and all of the activists, lawyers, organizers of the Civil Rights Movement advanced one of the most powerful democracy movements this country has ever seen. The King holiday, for me, honors them all.

Lastly, it is a holiday that was created by the people. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, and an array of supporters pressed for the King holiday in the face of strong resistance for 15 years. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) introduced a bill for a King holiday in April 1968, four days after Dr. King’s assassination

Over the next decade and a half, Mrs. King, Conyers, and the other members of the Congressional Black Caucus collaborated with activists to launch a grassroots campaign to build support for the holiday, finally submitting a petition with six million signatures to Congress. They faced formidable resistance principally from Representatives and Senators in southern states. But even the late Senator John McCain (R-AZ) voted against the holiday (a vote he later said he regretted). The principle opponent was President Ronald Reagan, who made clear his opposition to a federal holiday celebrating King. He reluctantly relented in August 1983, some say as a way to lift his dismal approval ratings among Black Americans.

A month after the bill became law it was revealed that Reagan had shared in a letter that he thought the commemoration of King was based “more on image than reality.” And when asked if he thought Dr. King was a communist, Reagan replied “well we’ll find out in about 35 years.” After his remarks were made public, Reagan called Mrs. King to apologize. (Oh, and it’s now been 43 years. We knew then Mr. Reagan, and we know now).

It would be impossible to overemphasize the powerful role of art in this campaign. Stevie Wonder, one of the most respected, acclaimed, and prolific musicians in the world, then and now, worked closely with Mrs. King on the effort for the federal holiday. He wrote a song, “Happy Birthday,” as an anthem of support for the holiday, and it became the rallying cry for the King holiday movement. He included the song on his “Hotter Than July” album guaranteeing it would widely heard.

That song has become the official birthday anthem in the Black community, sung at birthday parties of Black people of all ages all over the United States. When I hear it ring out in restaurants, both fancy and not-so-fancy - where families are celebrating birthday dinners, it makes me smile and reminds me of the staying power of art.

Some people will shop today. Or just sleep in, I know. Of course it would be good to engage in service and advocacy today. But given the difficulty, the unrelenting assault on our spirits of these days, I hope that Americans will, at the very least, take advantage of the opportunity today to reflect on the significance of this day. Because it matters.

It matters that beginning just days after the devastating assassination of Dr. King, in the midst of mind-numbing grief and profound disillusionment, King’s widow Coretta, Black members of Congress and ordinary people across the country determined that he would be remembered as a national figure of monumental importance to this country. It matters that they demanded recognition and celebration of Dr. King’s legacy. It matters that a day is set aside to commemorate the contributions to this country of one of the greatest democracy warriors of the 20th century – one who was descended from enslaved people, who was born and raised under Jim Crow apartheid, who never amassed any wealth, and whose ministry was to fight for full dignity and citizenship of his people, and in so doing throw a lifeline to the drowning soul of America.

With their marching feet and their signs, with relentless demand, with Congressional testimony, protests, and with a song – ordinary Black Americans demanded King’s recognition at the highest level.

The Civil Rights Movement saved America from drowning. Now this country appears to be going under for the fateful third time. King and those involved in the Civil Rights Movement ushered in this country’s last, best chance to become a true democracy. This is the work that today, Trump, and Vance, Mike Johnson, Kristi Noem, Greg Bovino, Pete Hegseth, and the tech bros. seek to dismantle. They are small men and women above whom King’s legacy towers. Their lives are focused on acquisition, artifice, money, theft, deceit, dominance, and control. They wish to unravel the systems created by the sacrifices of those in the Civil Rights Movement – from Claudette Colvin and Diane Nash from Amelia Boynton, and Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses,Dr. King and hundreds more - people who put their lives and bodies on the line for freedom and justice.

Those democracy warriors of the Civil Rights Movement tried to show us the only way forward as a nation. They believed in the possibility of this country – for some, even unto death.

We can celebrate them today. We can recognize that the fruit of their work still lives in this country and in all of us. We have a powerful example before us of how to fight. Relentlessly, with organization and determination, and with the truth force that lives in all of us who allow our souls to connect with our highest calling. Let’s use it today to refresh our spirits for the many battles ahead.

To learn more about the Civil Rights Movement go to:

SNCC Digital Gateway: https://snccdigital.org/

Library of Congress Civil Rights History Project: https://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-rights-history-project/about-this-collection/

For teaching resources, go to the Zinn Education Project:

https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/?_theme=civil-rights-movements

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• obviously ongoing support of protesters, legal observers, marchers on the ground in Minneapolis, D.C. and another cities where ICE is deployed.

• calls to Congress (202-224-3121) in support of:

  • proceedings for impeachment of Noem in the Senate;

  • tell your representatives that they must demand that Congress hold up ICE funding until feds share information wtih Minnesota on the Good killing; and adopt force guidelines, ban masks, require warrants, and other measures to conform ICE conduct with the requirements of the Constitution. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) has proposed a set of demands on which funding would be contingent;

  • support for Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) to re-up effort to subpoena records and records held by DHS in the matter of the ICE officer Jonathan Ross’s killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis;

  • support for bill co-sponsored by Rep. Eric Swallwell (D-CA) and Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) to strip ICE officers of qualified immunity so that they face accountability for the crimes they commit;

  • demand hearings by Homeland Security on ICE activity in Minnesota;

  • release more Epstein files held by Congress; demand Administration compliance with judicial order requiring explanation for mass redactions; keep the pressure on!

  • hands off Greenland; denounce categorically Trump’s imperial interference with Venezuela.

• Support legit gofundme accounts for families of those killed by ICE;

• Reach out to our governors and mayors to ask how they intend to handle ICE deployments if your city or state are targeted, and what directives they plan to give to state and local police regarding compliance with ICE if your city or state are targeted. It’s important to tell them what you expect of them, NOW.

  This has been such a terrible time. We cannot give in to paralysis. Feel free to share your ideas in comments.

If you are not feeling something close to heartbreak this week, you haven’t been paying attention. Trump’s illegal attack on Venezuela and then the killing in broad daylight of Renee Good https://www.startribune.com/she-was-an-amazing-human-being-mother-identifies-woman-shot-killed-by-ice-agent/601559922 , a 37 year-old mom by an ICE agent in Minneapolis are precisely the kind of “it will get worse before it gets better” events so many have warned about. We are not in a good place, and the feeling of it all at the start of a New Year is something like grief.

But many of us are also feeling something like anger and frustration too. Several weeks ago in my piece “Is It Too Late?” https://sherrilyn.substack.com/p/is-it-too-late I wrote about some of the frustration I and many others are feeling at watching the actions of ICE and Border Patrol. I wrote:

Black people warned of the dangers of law enforcement impunity, taking to the streets regularly between 2014 and 2020, relentlessly fighting for real change in policing. We were joined in 2020 by millions of young white people who marched with us. We warned of the dangers of militarized law enforcement in communities. But politicians weaponized calls to “defund the police” (police budgets actually increased in most places) to cow Democrats into abandoning police accountability as a critical issue.

Now the scourge of unaccountable, brutal, and racist law enforcement, armed for war, has metastasized into the creation of a militarized presidential police force that roams our cities targeting peaceful, hardworking residents at will.

Every inhumane and infuriating excess we see on videos today committed by ICE and border patrol agents, is mirrored in the hundreds of videos of police officers engaging in similar racial profiling, violent attacks, and unwarranted detention of Black people over the past 20 years.

I recount this not to press sour grapes. I raise all of this to warn us against the kind of thinking and discourse that has too often slowed us down, and that has diverted ordinary, democracy-committed Americans from fully understanding the nature of the danger our republic has long faced.

Yes, oppressive systems like authoritarianism and white supremacy slow us down by keeping us in an endless loop, never connecting the dots, resurfacing the same arguments and tropes, and treating each era, episode, or incident of oppression as independent and separate. In this way, we are always starting from the zero, and we never develop enough traction to effectively counter the weight of the oppressive tactics lodged against us.

The past few days I have engaged with people who have admonished me to refrain from referring to ICE as “law enforcement”; who have insisted that they are “not like police because they are not trained,”; who have insisted that the ICE officer who shot and killed Ms. Good in broad daylight, now identified as Jonathan Ross was “not trained” (in fact he was a highly-trained experienced officer). Others have suggested that Ross should not be held accountable for “a split-second decision.” Trump supporters have insisted that Ms. Good tried to “ram the officer with her car.” The Vice President of the United States called Good’s death “a tragedy of her own making.” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem called the incident one of “domestic terrorism.”

This all felt mind-numbingly familiar. All of these arguments were deployed routinely in one form or another in the flurry of high-profile cases caught on video of police officers killing unarmed Black men from 2013-2020. Whether in the case of George Floyd, who was murdered not far from where Ms. Good was killed, or Philando Castile, who was also killed in the Twin Cities while sitting in his car with his fiancée’ and her four-year-old daughter, or Samuel DuBose, who was killed in his car in Cincinnati after being approached by an officer and then shot at point blank range as he attempted to drive away. The officer said he was being “dragged” when DuBose started to drive away. The video of the incident showed that the officer was not dragged, or Walter Scott who was pulled over in his car in North Charleston, South Carolina, and then shot five times in the back as he fled by Officer Michael Slager.

And there are others. Too many others.

The culture of deference to official police narratives, and the same structures of cruelty, of excess, and of impunity that have been allowed to flourish in so many police departments in Black and Latino communities, is the same cultural thread that allows ICE to behave the way they do. And we should confront it as a united front with all of the power and armed with the lessons we have learned from those longstanding struggles.

Allowing law enforcement officers to act with excessive force, brutality, disrespect for the community and, most of all, impunity is a threat to democracy. It was a threat to democracy when permitted by local law enforcement in Baltimore, and New York, and North Charleston. And it is a threat to democracy when committed by federal law enforcement agents in Minneapolis.

That so many failed to see the policing crisis when Black men and women were the victims as a democracy issue during the most volatile years of policing reform efforts is key to understanding what often slows down progressive strategy and alliances.

What I am saying is this: the opportunity of this terrible, terrible moment is the chance for us to see that in this country, to paraphrase Dr. King, we are knit together “in a single garment of destiny ” And that the threads that are first forcefully unraveled from this garment by those bent on oppression are those of the most marginalized among us, those for whom narratives that demonize can be easily made. Anti-democracy measures do not simply arrive and takeover healthy democracies. They are workshopped first – most often on the most vulnerable communities. In this country, with its unique history and the deep narratives of white supremacy that is part of our public discourse, this will almost always be Black communities first.

But the tactics used against Black communities can be transferred to other communities, often with slight modifications. Remember when the New York Times describing teenager Mike Brown who was killed in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 as “no angel”? Or when then-NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 2000 released the sealed juvenile records of Patrick Dorismond, a 26 year-old Black man killed by police, saying of the victim “he was no altar boy.” (For good measure Dorismond, it turned out, had attended the same Catholic high school as Giuliani had in fact, once been an altar boy).

So it was no surprise that within an hour of Ms. Good’s killing, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem described the victim as a “domestic terrorist.” The disgraceful FOX News host Jesse Waters, smugly described Good as “a self-described poet, with pronouns in her bio...[who]… leaves behind a lesbian partner.” In MAGA world that is how they signal to their base to turn off the empathy - that this white woman is not worthy of your sympathy – not worthy of protection.

Sometimes no adjustments are necessary. In all cases when there’s video, you are asked to disbelieve what you can see with your own eyes.

That the brutality, excesses, mendacity, and impunity that have characterized much of law enforcement culture in Black communities for decades, created a set of cultural norms and an infrastructure around law enforcement that would be ripe for amplification simply did not occur to most white Americans. And now a demagogue, who believes that “nothing can stop him,” has come along and used the platform of that infrastructure to create his own super-funded national law enforcement strike force.

We have a systemic law enforcement problem in our country. Yes, of course - not every police officer. Not every ICE officer. But enough that our culture of deference to law enforcement narratives, our overreliance on the use of force to compel “compliance” from disfavored members of our population, the willingness to blur the line between law enforcement and military officers, and our failure to create real systems of screening, training, accountability, and punishment, constitute a serious threat to democracy. And they have for some time.

This country had a chance to check this and to begin a process of transformation in 2020. Sadly, it didn’t.

We develop and strengthen our power and our alliances when we make the connection between like things. That’s how we grow and strengthen our democracy movement. The work of being a civil rights lawyer I have often said is to reveal the “scaffolding” of oppression, the ladders and joints that are connected to create an infrastructure that remains in place and available to accommodate different forms of oppression. But there comes a time when the public must develop this knowledge as well.

We are near democratic collapse. It is past time to demand more from each of us. So I am asking every one of us to take responsibility for connecting the dots in your own mind. Understand that if they can keep you disconnecting the things that are of a piece, treating each injustice as its own separate and independent thing, they are winning. And you are wasting what precious little time we have, and missing the opportunity for deeper and more enduring alliances.

It would be silly to pretend that 2025 was not among the most challenging years this country has faced in modern times. And because we are bracing ourselves for more of the same and maybe worse in 2026, many of us had muted New Year’s celebrations.

2025 was tough. It was painful. This was the year that America broke open.

Now the seedy interior of what lies within so many structures of power in our country has been revealed. It is not pretty. The weakness, the perfidy, the greed, the racism, the anti-semitism and Islamaphobia, the hatred of women, the perversion and indecency, the disregard for the intellectual, physical and spiritual safety of our children; the choice of nihilism over accountability, the absolute disinterest in the values of democracy. Sobering stuff, to be sure - even for those of us who have long known of the profound corruption that exists throughout some areas of government, business and law.

But this “breaking open” has revealed other qualities that live at the core of this country as well. And these we must celebrate. There are many good people in this country. So many of us have responded to this moment with determination and demand. So many of us have taken the time to lift up our families, our communities, great art and music, even our pets, in the midst of it all - putting love at the center of how we navigate this moment. I have deliberately taken time to look at what I’ve written this year, what I’ve accomplished, the loving and joyous moments I’ve experienced with family and friends, in spite of all the challenges.

I have been profoundly heartened by the decency, determination and resilience of so many across the country who have engaged in actions big and small - holding conventions, protesting and marching , challenging, using their cellphones and bodies to bear witness, making phone calls, voting, fighting back, speaking truth to power, praying, standing in the gap , starting boycotts , dancing in the face of trouble, teaching and learning, running, walking, reporting and litigating– all with the demand for justice and equality, and for what is right and true, and humane.

This too is America. And it is growing.

This may be an unpopular view, but I believe that our opponents are on the decline. You can feel it. They are no longer sure of themselves. Naturally this presents as intensified cruelty, racism, and irrational action. That is because cruelty and hate is not a belief system. It is an exhale, a howl of pain, of insecurity, of spiritual emptiness, and of arrested development. It can only be sustained by constant action. This is what lies at the heart of the daily barrage of terrible they keep churning out.

They need to perform their cruelty and hate in order to sustain the energy of their movement. They need to do things, and they need us to see them doing it. That is why there is something new every day - a relentless curriculum of activities to fuel their hollow movement.

But this is also why every time we stop them from action - by standing in their way, by securing judicial injunctions, when juries refuse to indict protesters, even when we just refuse to engage with them - it throws them into confusion. How else to explain the unhinged reaction to the refusal of some of our best artists to perform at the Kennedy Center after Trump added his name to the building.

Yes, they have been relentless. But we have done well by remaining focused on three or four issues, with a little wiggle room to respond to the latest outrage. I am of the belief that we should hold on tenaciously to the third rail issues for Trump – the ones that seem to unravel his focus, his syntax, and those around him. Right now it is the Epstein files and the just-released Congressional testimony of Jack Smith. Don’t let either of these go. Some will say, “let’s move on.” Don’t. Already the Epstein files and Trump’s shameless effort to block their full release has begun to fracture Trump’s congressional coalition. More is on the way. And if I’m reading the earliest reviews of Smith’s testimony correctly, many people in Congress will have some explaining to do it. It will be good to demand answers of these representatives just as they are preparing for primary elections in the Spring.

I have long been of the belief that we focus too much on Trump. We need to force cracks in their front, separation among their troops. We would do well to remind ourselves that Trump’s worst excesses are only possible because of supine Republican leadership in the House and Senate, and his cabinet members, aided by lawyers in the DOJ and other departments, who have abandoned any semblance of ethical leadership.

Impeachment is a readily available tool for cabinet members who abuse power. Democrats are not in control of either chamber of course, but reminding the public that these are impeachable offenses holds the line on the standard of conduct we have the right to expect and demand from sworn government officials - whether or not the electorate “voted for this.” Approval of the public does not absolve illegal or unethical conduct. And most of the public does not approve of these excesses.

Likewise, lawyers are bound by a code of conduct in the jurisdictions where there are admitted and where they practice. Just as Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Jeffrey Clark, and other Trump lawyers learned, membership in our profession demands a standard of professionalism that cannot be surrendered to political loyalty. AG Pam Bondi, AAG Todd Blanche, former DOJ attorney, now federal circuit court judge Emil Bove and others may soon learn the same.

It is true that the Supreme Court will have an outsize influence on how things unfold this year. Frankly, there are several cases before the Court this term that will be consequential to determining whether we will be left with enough of a constitutional infrastructure from which we can fight and overcome authoritarianism, and build a stronger and healthier democracy post-Trump. Among those are: 1) Trump v. Barbara, the case challenging President Trump’s Executive Order that seeks to carve out exceptions to the 14^th Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship; 2) Louisiana v. Callais, the case that will determine whether and how racist redistricting maps can be remedied; 3) Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, , the case challenging Trump’s invocation of emergency powers to impose erratic, arbitrary and extreme tariffs on foreign nations ; 4) Trump v. Slaughter, the case challenging President Trump’s effort to fire the heads of independent, multi-member federal agencies; 5) Watson v. Republican National Committee, the case arising from Mississippi, where the validity of mail-in ballots that arrive after polls close on Election Day is being challenged; and 6) Trump v. Illinois, the case challenging the deployment by the President of National Guard troops in Illinois. Trump suffered a stunning loss in that case on the emergency docket just before Christmas. But a review on the merits will not reach the Court until later this year. And Trump may raise the stakes by attempting to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploying active members of the military (rather than National Guard) to control and intimidate “blue” cities.

Some people think that because the Supreme Court will decide these cases there is nothing for ordinary Americans to do. After all, brilliant lawyers are litigating the cases. But the justices are very much aware of the national zeitgeist, of criticisms, and of public discourse about the cases before them. As we saw last week when Justice Kavanaugh attempted to walk back the zealous and dangerous concurring opinion he issued in Noem v. Vazquez-Perdomo, . Kavanaugh’s Vazquez Perdomo opinion, which appeared to approve racial profiling by ICE agents, gave birth to the viral circulation of the term “Kavanaugh stops” on social media, to describe the brutal and racist interdictions by DHS authorities. Kavanaugh sought to “clarify” his position in a footnote in Trump v. Illinois, insisting that racial profiling is of course unconstitutional.

Ordinary Americans can help shape the environment in which these cases are reviewed and decided. Every video showing the abuses perpetrated by ICE agents on citizens and migrants alike matters. The justices may be cut off from much of this information – especially those who appear to have a Fox News habit. But their clerks are not. And even if it is only to provide a stronger hand for the “democracy wing” of the Court (I’ve decided that that is what they should be called rather than the “liberal wing”), your efforts to put critical information into the public matters.

You can also support the organizations doing the most consequential litigation including, Democracy Forward, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Democracy Docket, Casa of Maryland, the ACLU, CREW and others.

We must also remember that we still have the ability to influence the passage of local legislation. The recently enacted mask ban for law enforcement in California is an example. Petitioning local courts to bar ICE arrests in courthouses is another. Local ordinances and state laws providing special protections for churches and public libraries or day care centers and schools, may also be avenues ripe for local activism.

Protecting our own neighborhoods and community must remain a priority. The bold resistance of Chicagoans to the effort to kidnap and disappear neighbors and community members has set a powerful example for all of us for how we can stand-up as ordinary citizens. As the weather gets colder, ICE and other DHS officials will attempt to enter buildings more than before. We should understand what our rights are as it relates to access to our homes, our businesses, libraries, and schools.

Lastly, mutual aid will become more important as the effects of job losses, the end of healthcare subsidies, retaliatory cessation of funds to blue states, and inflation, intensifies. Churches, temples, gurudwaras, other houses of worship, and grassroots organizations must play a key role in ensuring that people in their communities have food, a roof over their heads and heat to survive the winter.

Yes, this year there is much we must do. But 2025 taught us that we can do it. We know that tens of millions may acquiesce, but we also know that many millions more will fight.And the stakes are too high for us to give up.

Two final notes. First, remember that Democratic and Republican Primary Elections for the House of Representatives begin in some states in March. That is eight weeks away. Check Ballotpedia for all of your election information for federal, statewide, and local offices. https://ballotpedia.org/Main_Page

Second, this past November’s election was indeed a “blue wave.” If you elected some candidates you like in that election, beginning in January, support them, hold their feet to the fire, offer your assistance, attend their meetings, get their number in your phone on speed dial. Stay engaged. Supporting an official should require almost as much work as opposing one. Start doing citizenship differently than you’ve done it in the past. Election Day was just the beginning.

Lastly, hold on to your spiritual and emotional core - especially now when we are tired after a year of relentless attacks. Keep your sense of humor. Do not isolate. Occupy public places - libraries, parks, ice skating rinks, concerts and festivals. Touch base with friends and family often. Share family stories and photos with the kids. Exercise. Read books. Get what vaccinations you can. Keep bottled water in the house. Sleep. Buy a satellite radio. Stock up on batteries.

Most of all, believe that we can do this.

Wishing us all a healthy and democracy-restoring New Year!

- Sherrilyn Ifill, Reviving the Promise of the 14^th Amendment1

Last week the Supreme Court allowed Texas to move forward with a racially gerrymandered congressional district map for the 2026 congressional election. The re-redistricted map was demanded by President Trump and “his” Justice Department to avert the prospect of Democrats taking the House of Representatives next November. In another “shadow docket” decision - made without oral argument and presented with only a brief explanation - the Court stayed the action of the federal district court which found that Texas’ new map constituted a racial gerrymander in violation of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution and enjoined its use for the 2026 elections. The Supreme Court granted Texas’ request for stay of the district court’s preliminary injunction, allowing the election to proceed under the new Trump-demanded map.

The Court also announced last week that it will review on the merits Trump v. Barbara, the case challenging President Trump’s plainly unconstitutional effort to overturn the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship by Executive Order - a presidential claim of authority negated by the very language of the 14th Amendment, and by Supreme Court precedent going back over 120 years.

Also last week, while sitting in the Oval Office with business leaders, President Trump unleashed a grotesque racist screed against Somali Americans, against the country of Somalia, and against a sitting United States Representative, Ilhan Omar, who is Somali American.

We have heard Trump’s racism before and repeatedly. But something about the intensity of his ugly remarks in the Oval Office that day - the hate, the actual hate we could hear in his voice seemed newly sinister. The hideous sneer when he called Somali Americans “garbage.” The momentum that seemed to seize him when, having used the word “garbage,” he used it repeatedly - to describe Rep. Omar, and then also to describe “her friends.” The casualness with which he insisted that they “shouldn’t be allowed to be in this country,” or to serve in Congress, and his petulant insistance that, “we don’t want them here,”, sounding like the Twilight Zone’s soulless 6 year-old, Anthony Fremont who, when confronted by people he didn’t like simply “wished them into the cornfield.”

To top it off, the Administration announced that the National Parks Service will end free admission on Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth. Instead June 14th, President Trump’s birthday (and Flag Day) will now be a free admission day at national parks.

It was a week. We have long since crossed the rubicon of constitutional and democratic crisis, and still last week seemed remarkable and uniquely chilling. We must not become numb to it.

The actions of both the SCOTUS and President Trump, especially taken together with Justice Kavanaugh’s mid-summer gratuitous concurring opinion approving of racial-profiling by ICE in the case brought by Latino U.S. citizens challenging ICE raids in Los Angeles, seemed to take the swift unraveling of democracy on an even more aggressive spiral. Each action seemed to drive home the plan to recreate a tier of second class, impermanent citizens, whose legitimacy and status is subject to the whims of the President.

The birthright citizenship provision of the 14th Amendment, and the entire project of Reconstruction was specifically designed to guard against the creation of such a racial caste system. The clear words of the 14th Amendment are that “all persons” are guaranteed equal protection. Trump clearly does not believe that, and the Supreme Court’s recent decisions have disabled many of the tools we need to protect that promise of equality.

We are in the midst of a full-blown effort to execute an anti-democracy project that seeks to nullify the legal, social, economic and educational apparatus designed to undergird the foundation of a multiracial democracy.

The assault on the 14th Amendment has not generated the kind of moral panic that politicians, journalists, and tech bros successfully created over their claims of First Amendment abuses several years ago. They claimed that the scorn, disparagement, and condemnation they received for posting sexist, racist, and even fascist commentary or for making fascist gestures in public resulted in “cancellation.” Obviously the First Amendment doesn’t protect against people deciding that you are an odious person for publicly posting opinions that embrace eugenicist or misogynistic views, but their outrage was enough to put universities, media platforms, and corporations back on their heels. It was a nasty bit of political manipulation to be sure, but it was effective.

The full-on hijacking of the 14th Amendment has not been challenged with commensurate concerted outrage and political clarity. That is because far too many white Americans associate the 14th Amendment’s guarantees of birthright citizenship and equality, as provisions that only protect Black people, migrants, Latino people, and other marginalized groups, rather than as core democracy infrastructure of our Constitution.

Everyone should be on full alert. The 14th Amendment protects the citizenship and equality rights of every American. Nothing says “cancellation” quite like threats to your citizenship status at the whim of the President simply because he doesn’t want you here.

And if the Supreme Court gives the President license to tamper with the explicit protections of the 14th Amendment, what other constitutional protections will be picked over by this or the next President, with the sanction of the conservatives on the Court?

What makes this moment particularly dangerous is that all of the stars have aligned. The white supremacist, anti-14th Amendment, post-Brown movement has the complicity or active engagement of all three branches of government as it works to undo the constitutional infrastructure of Reconstruction and the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement.

And so here we are. The agenda has been laid bare for any sentient person to see. It is a the literal hijacking of our democracy. The truth of this project and its danger have been the clanging bells that could easily have been heard by those best-positioned to derail it. But it so happens that those most positioned to have headed off this moment of Constitution-defying, democracy-defying, collapse have refused to believe it.

I confess this bothers me. Because we are late. Perhaps too late. Far too many leaders (including those in law, journalism, and business) have wasted precious time - pretending that this or that justice is an “institutionalist.” Insisting that support for Trump was stoked by “economic anxiety,” that it’s “class,” rather than white supremacist panic and moral collapse. Pretending that Trump was a “disrupter” rather than a destroyer of norms, of decency, of law. Indulging the fantasy of bipartisan solutions with a political party that has fully submitted itself to authoritarianism. Hoping that the MAGA fever will “break” in time. Counting on the business community to “wake-up” once the economy tanks, or the effects of the tariffs kick in. Refusing to see what is right before our eyes.

This is an oligarchic and authoritarian takeover of our democracy, yes. But it is fueled by white supremacist ideology. That is the seductive messaging through which so many have been lured into participating in this national betrayal. We can continue cutting off the many heads of the hydra. Or we can get to the source.

The work I spend much of my time doing is creating a blueprint to help us do that deep and necessary work. I admit that it is a long-term project.

But right now, there is urgent work to do. Because if the momentum of this anti-democratic takeover is not slowed, it is hard to imagine what will be left to build on a year from now. And frankly we may not be able to overcome Trump’s state gerrymanders next November - especially now that the Supreme Court has all but given the green light to this.

Our expert pundits are slow learners, refusing to accept that the world of politics, law, and elite institutions that they mastered has been taken over, and that white supremacist ideology, unfettered greed, and cowardice, are what is driving Republican Party policy. Most continue to use a social media platform that has become a Nazi cesspool because, they contend, we must “talk with people who disagree with us.” They continue to try and find the angles, to give the benefit of the doubt to voters who have thrown in their lot with authoritarianism. Leading politicians tell Democrats to talk to “real Americans,” and not to talk so much about “identity” in the face of an opposition that talks about identity every day. Many of those with the biggest platforms know very little about race, so they protect their status as experts by insisting that race is not the issue.

But you cannot claim to analyze the threat to our democracy and refuse to confront the single greatest force that has threatened democracy in this country since its founding. So we must expanding the voices in the conversation.

AI scientists like Timnit Gebru and Emil Torres warned years ago about how tech leaders in Silicon Valley had become captured by the “religion” of longtermism, and how closely aligned longtermism is with traditional Anglo-American eugenics. They were treated as extremists and conspiracy theorists Today the white supremacist views of many of the wealthiest and politically ambitious tech billionaires is on display almost daily. The recent release of some of the Epstein emails and files has confirmed the explicit nature of some of these connections.

In 2018 after the release of the Mueller report, I wrote in the Washington Post that racism is a national security vulnerability. Even Russia understood that manipulating racism on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter would be effective in shifting some pockets of the electorate towards Donald Trump. Their manipulation was successful in 2016 and still going strong in 2020. And yet so many Americans with influence and power in journalism, law, business and politics, continue to demand that we look away from this truth, even as the Russians are likely continuing to sow election disinformation and racial manipulation.

Adam Serwer warned us that “the cruelty is the point” in 2018, but we are warned to today by influential podcasters that it is more important to show explicit racists that we “like” them in the hopes of winning their votes, rather than to defend the dignity and safety of the base of Americans who fuel Democratic victories, and whose communities sacrificed to the point of death to strengthen democracy in this country in the Civil Rights Movement.

Black people warned of the dangers of law enforcement impunity, taking to the streets regularly between 2014 and 2020, relentlessly fighting for real change in policing. We were joined in 2020 by millions of young white people who marched with us. We warned of the dangers of militarized law enforcement in communities. But politicians weaponized calls to “defund the police” (police budgets actually increased in most places) to cow Democrats into abandoning police accountability as a critical issue.

Now the scourge of unaccountable, brutal and racist law enforcement, armed for war, has metastasized into the creation of a militarized presidential police force that roams our cities targeting peaceful, hardworking residents at will.

Every inhumane and infuriating excess we see on videos today committed by ICE and border patrol agents, is mirrored in the hundreds of videos of police officers engaging in similar racial profiling, violent attacks, and unwarranted detention of Black people over the past 20 years.

I recount this not to press sour grapes. I raise all of this to warn us against the kind of thinking and discourse that has too often slowed us down, and that has diverted ordinary, democracy-committed Americans from fully understanding the nature of the danger our republic has long faced.

Is it too late? I don’t believe so. There are serious cracks in the Trump firmament. But I do know that we cannot waste any more time refusing to listen to the voices of those who understand the nature of what we are facing at a deep, existential, and historical level. History is not a distraction. It is a critical source of information. The patterns revealed in our historical experiences can help us face the truth of what we are confronting. History urges us to move quickly, and to resist with greater intensity.

There are extraordinary scholars, activists and journalists getting to the heart of the matter and writing thoughtfully about complex issues. Be sure your information diet includes them. Rebecca Traister, Sarah Kendzior, Rashad Robinson, Rev. William Barber, LaTosha Brown, Joy-Ann Reid, Kim Crenshaw, Adam Serwer, the law professors on the Strict Scrutiny Podcast, Dr. Renita Weems, and many more.

We need to heighten the level of consciousness of those who want to live in a democracy. That means we need our leaders to unapologetically stand against the threat to our core constitutional values. There is no shortage of defenders who publicly fight for the First Amendment. And the Second Amendment. Where are the 14th Amendment fighters?

Every Democratic member of the House should have been on the steps of the Capitol affirming support for their colleague Ilhan Omar and for the Somali-American community after the President’s Oval Office attack, and when Rep. Adelita Grijalva was pepper-sprayed last week, and when Latino Senator Padilla was attacked and wrestled to the floor for asking a question of Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem at DHS press conference. Solidarity is critical during this period - especially when the Trump Administration launches targeted attacks.

The silence of corporate leaders, who have no trouble accepting the benefits of “personhood” under the 14th Amendment, but remained mute and complicit in the face of President Trump’s disgraceful attacks on the very principles that the 14th Amendment advances in the Oval Office, was shameful and unacceptable. Worse, in dismantling their DEI commitments (an action that is not compelled by the Supreme Court’s decision in the SSFA v. Harvard case, by the way), far too many corporate leaders have cast their lots with the anti-democratic forces that seek to dismantle the protections of the 14th Amendment.

We must demand more and better. It really is that serious. And we’re running out of time.

So what do we do now? First, Democratic voters and those who turned out for the “No Kings” marches, who have been building community, organizing, and finding ways to resist the rise of authoritarianism and who voted in last Tuesday’s elections, must not allow frustration to overtake us. Too many people are suffering and will suffer unless we find ways to contain Trump and his coterie.

We are facing incipient fascism. We know who the villains are, and Trump and his team have shown us how much harm they can wreak in the lives of ordinary Americans. Walking away is not an option, no matter how frustrated we feel. Nothing the Democrats have done or not done compares to the reality of the monstrous cruelty, racism, and corruption of the Trump Administration. We cannot take our eyes off the prize.

So we keep resisting. Lawsuits challenging Trump policies have shown that standing up to Trump does work. The President has a remarkable loss rate in cases challenging his illegal policies.[i] As bad as it is, it would be so much worse if lawyers were not posted up and ready to resist. Every day we watch tens of thousands of ordinary people out on the street, protecting their neighbors, facing off against armed, masked federal agents kidnapping men, women and children off the street. The courage, the resilience and decency they have shown has strengthened resistance overall.

Last Tuesday’s election results show that we are on the rise. We must not lose that sense of momentum. We need to continue to organize and march. We need to litigate and resist. Economic boycotts are planned for this holiday season. Most of all, we must not abandon voting as our pathway to restoring checks and balances on this out-of-control Administration. We need the Democrats to overtake Congress next year.

Real talk? Deciding that you will become an “independent” voter is not the smart move in response to your frustration. All that will do is disqualify you from voting in Democratic primary elections. That means you will have forfeited the opportunity to transform the Party, and to vote for representatives who are willing and equipped to meet the moment. Don’t give up on the Party. Work to make it more responsive.

Here’s more real talk. Advocacy groups must get their ducks in a row, as well. We need greater unity, a clear agreement on strategy, and a willingness to communicate that strategy to our representatives on a regular basis. Consistent communication and demonstrated strategic thinking are essential. If we want change, we must press for it consistently and clearly and demonstrate that we have the muscle of “people power” to back up our demands. The fact that negotiations have been happening had been reported by Politico for weeks. Where were the advocacy groups, loudly demanding that Democrats hold the line and mobilizing the base?

And finally, real talk for Democratic leadership in Congress. I recognize that many of our most seasoned leaders on Capitol Hill have been essential to navigating this moment, and that many are true, dedicated public servants. They know the rules of the House and Senate, how to work Committees, and where the bodies are buried with their colleagues. They have shrewd insights and deep knowledge.

But creating avenues for succession is a critical part of leadership. It is not ageist to recognize that new leaders encourage new thinking, new ideas, and new ways of engaging and communicating. Succession maintains the long-term strength and vitality of the party. Democratic leaders must absorb this truth.

Seasoned leaders in the House and Senate must be prepared to make changes. Those at the top must prepare to cede some leadership positions to a new cadre of leaders. Members like Chris Murphy, Alex Padilla, Chris Van Hollen, Madeline Dean, Jamie Raskin, Angela Alsobrooks, Jasmine Crockett, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Joe Neguse, Maxwell Frost, Dan Goldman, and Melanie Stansbury, are just some of the Democrats in the House and Senate who have demonstrated that they have the fighter’s spirit, the discipline, the subject matter mastery, and the communications skills to meet this moment. Allow these stars to lead as well. Allowing seniority alone to dictate leadership is just not working. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) who stepped down from chairing the House Judiciary Committee to allow Jamie Raskin (D-MD) to take up the role of Ranking Member, showed that it can be done. More of this.

Second, we are in a crisis. Spines must be stiffened. Democratic leaders must show tat they can stand unwaveringly by what they say they believe in. Voters want to see conviction and strategy. Dealing with the mendacity and cruelty of Trump and his truly dastardly band of Republican lawmakers will require taking tough stances and following them through. Sometimes intimidation will be necessary. A unified front is critical, as is a willingness to call a bluff and even throw a punch (metaphorically). We need to see that from our leaders. Give people something to fight for, not just fight against.

Third, the Democratic leadership must set about strengthening their relationship with voters. Sacrificing your base, or the values of the party to pursue the mythical “Reagan Democrats” is weakening the unity of the party. The enthusiasm of Party’s base is critical for organizing, registering voters, fundraising, and high turnout. Secure and broaden that first. Seek new voters, yes, but not at the expense of the Party’s values, and not by forcing the issues of critical importance to some of your most loyal voters (Black people), or your most vulnerable (trans people) to the edges of the tent.

We are not just “identities” or “special interests.” We are the heart and soul of the Democratic Party, holding it to the standard of inclusiveness and respect for the dignity of all that is as much a part of the Party’s modern brand as support for unions and the working class.

Respect your voters enough to believe that we have knowledge and instincts that are critical to strategy. Donors are important. Polls provide critical information. Pundits are sometimes wise. But prioritizing the advice of donors, polling firms, and pundits and treating the advice of the Party’s voters and grassroots groups with suspicion, is a recipe for failure. Remember that the wealthiest and poorest among your constituency still each have one vote. And voters actually live in the communities where the Democrats need to drive turnout.

Lastly, Democratic leadership must engage a modern, cutting edge, professional communications firm to provide a framework for the messaging that will be persuasive and effective. Less “fifteen leaders standing in front of a microphone spouting talking points,” more tik tok explainers, young influencers (paid), independent media, dispatches from on-site within communities, more social media, and even paid television PSAs. Most of all, plain speaking and the willingness to call it as we can all see it.

The 2026 election cycle will be here before we know it. We need unity, clarity, and strategy. Failure is simply not an option.

[i] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/07/09/trumps-success-rate-in-the-courts-so-far-31/

The release of a tranche of emails related to the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein has appropriately overtaken the news cycle. It remains to be seen whether this load of devastating communiques demonstrating the depth of Epstein’s engagement with the President and other prominent figures will awaken the remnants of morality and self-respect that has so far been absent among Republican leaders and most Trump followers, but it has the potential to be a political and national game-changer.

But we must not allow ourselves to forget what happened immediately prior to the release. I refer to the embarrassing surrender of Senate Democrats in agreeing to a “deal” with Republicans to end the government shutdown.

Just days before the deal was announced Democratic voters showed out in an off-year election that produced stunning wins across the country from school boards in Buck’s County, Pennsylvania[i] to ballot initiatives in California[ii] and Maine.[iii] Democratic voters flipped the Virginia Governor’s seat,[iv] and held onto the New Jersey Governor’s seat.[v] Democratic voters flipped enough seats in the Mississippi Senate to break the Republican supermajority in what the Mississippi Democratic Party called, “a historic rebuke of extremism.”[vi]

Trump was so shaken that he called an emergency meeting with Republican Senators the following morning. He blamed the shutdown for Republican losses and distanced himself from the shellacking Republicans received, insisting “I wasn’t on the ballot.”[vii] But of course, he was.

This meant that Democrats seeking to negotiate an end to the shutdown had the wind at their backs. Even just to extend the long overdue feeling of exultation among those who are fighting to hold democracy in this country, and to frighten Republicans into believing that Democrats were prepared to go the distance, their negotiating position couldn’t have been better One week of marinating in catastrophic losses across the country would help loosen the resolve of Republicans, many believed. Especially because polls showed that most Americans blamed the Republicans and Donald Trump for the shutdown.[viii]

Instead Senate Democrats – and surely more than the eight who voted “yes” on the “deal” to end the shutdown – ran roughshod over the moment and caved. There are those who say that this was the “smart move” to stop the bleeding and get the government up and running again. And certainly the pain of federal workers who were not getting paid, and airtraffic controllers who were working short-staffed and without pay was much on the minds of all of the Senate Democrats.

But Democrats had claimed that the entire shutdown was about the need to extend healthcare subsidies. They predicted the catastrophic increase in health care premiums due to start shortly without an extension of federal subsidies would devastate millions of American families. They were right about that. Now, suddenly, that didn’t matter. This made the Senate Democrats look feckless and craven.

What is worse are the bizarre terms of the so-called “deal.” The Senate Democrats were willing to end the shutdown on the promise of a vote sometime in December on the ACA subsidies. Not an actual vote, but the promise of a vote in the Senate. And not even the promise of a vote in the House as well. In fact Speaker Mike Johnson was quick to insist that he was not promising anything.

Most important of all, the Senate Democrats failed to provide a coherent narrative to explain their actions. Instead they allowed various members of the negotiating group to wander out to mics and bury any hope of salvaging the self-respect of Democrats who had just days earlier forcefully insisted that they would not cave.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) one of the lead negotiators (go figure!) seemed to inhabit the spirit of Susan Collins, offering that “maybe the Republicans will listen to us this time.” When asked, what if the Republicans don’t, Hassan retorted, “well shame on them.” Angus King, the Independent from Maine who caucuses with the Democrats and who also apparently was part of the cracker jack negotiating team, declared “standing up to Trump didn’t work.” [ix]

For Democratic leader Chuck Schumer explained that he opposed the deal and voted against it. Some sources confirmed that Schumer in fact did work hard to hold the caucus, and while he knew about the negotiation with the Republicans, he did not support the terms of the capitulation. I’m not sure which is worse, Schumer perhaps supporting the deal while denying it publicly, or Schumer getting rolled over by the likes of Jeanne Shaheen, Maggie Hassan, and Angus King (one insider called them “the big three.”[x] Go figure). All of this has raised questions about Schumer’s ability to impose order and discipline in his caucus.

I get it. Democratic leaders have a tough job. Their caucuses are full of smart, determined, experienced legislators. The rank and file of the party is made up of savvy, passionate, often zealous organizers, advocates, teachers, blue collar workers, union members, business owners, students, artists, intellectuals, ordinary working-class folks, the super-wealthy, the middle class, and the poor. The party is racially diverse, ethnically diverse, and religiously diverse. It truly is a big tent. Often the pylons holding up the tent are pitched so far apart that the canopy of the Party is strained to breaking point. Holding together the Democratic caucus is a tougher job than uniting the modern Republican congressional caucus or its rank-and-file. The Republican Party today is sustained by the closely positioned pillars of white supremacy, religious extremism, business interests, isolationism, and tax opposition.

Democratic leaders have the harder job. But this is what makes it more important for Democratic leadership to effectively communicate. Unfortunately the Democrats have shown an appalling lack of aptitude for this. The seniority system means that at critical moments we are often hearing from the leaders of the party who are not the best communicators for a social media-driven, 24-hour news cycle. Especially in competition with an opposition party committed to entertainment as politics.

But it is not only outward communication that needs help. Democrats need to more effectively communicate with the various elements of the party rank-and-file. Communication is a way of respecting your constituents. Putting effort into explaining difficult decisions and doing so in a way that can persuade factions in the party to commit to strategy is critical to holding together such a diverse and headstrong electorate.

It is essential that leadership has a unified message, especially for decisions they know will draw fire. But time and again Democratic leadership is all over the place. Or they hide the ball from us – making consequential decisions that we are just supposed to swallow without comment, with little effort to bring the base into the fold before the decisions are set. The ugly back and forth over Biden’s withdrawal and the effort by some to ensure that Vice President Harris would not be the nominee is another example of this. We shouldn’t find out via George Clooney that there is a serious leadership plan afoot to compel the Party’s presidential nominee to withdraw.

The decision in March to keep the government open also suffered from a similar internal communications failure, leaving Schumer to face withering criticism from many Democratic rank-and-file members, for a decision that many came to believe was the right one. But after 48 hours of mixed signals, Schumer finally explained after the decision was made to keep the government open, because he was convinced that “we can get a better deal in the Fall.” And here we are.

I like Chuck Schumer. Always have. I have seen him behind closed doors, and I know that he is a smart, strategic thinker and committed public servant. But far too many of those in Democratic leadership possess skills that were honed within the crucible of a kind of politics that no longer exists.

When Democratic leaders in Congress parrot talking points about finding “bipartisan” solutions to problems Americans are facing, knowing full well that this Republican Party will not enter negotiations to achieve this end in good faith, it is maddening. It does not make the Democrats appear as the more reasonable party when they show they are willing to keep hitting their collective heads up against a brick wall. Nor is it admirable to seek “bipartisanship” with a party that has embraced the authoritarian ambitions of this President, and thrown in its lot with fascism.

When the feckless Republican leader of the House of Representatives has literally and figuratively handed his gavel to over to an unstable, unhinged, and utterly mendacious dictator-in-the-making President, then we are not really practicing politics. We are in survival mode, which requires confronting with clear eyes the truth about one’s adversaries.

The Republican Party and its base have suffered a complete and total moral collapse. Perhaps the Epstein revelations will awaken some from their morally somnolent state. But negotiating with people who have no shame requires a sturdier representative than Jeanne Shaheen. And anyone who believes, like Angus King, that resisting Trump is futile should be disqualified from any role representing the interests of Democrats. That is why this moment will also require leaders who are prepared to bring more muscle to holding accountable caucus members who go rogue.

The 2026 primaries are only a few months away, so we don’t have time to wallow in this confusion. We all need to get to work making the changes that will be necessary to restore the momentum of last week’s Election Day and pull that energy into 2026.

So what do we need to do? Read Part II, “NOW WHAT?”

*Consider a paid subscription to support this work.

[i] https://www.wesa.fm/education/2025-11-05/pennsylvania-pittsburgh-school-board-election-results

[ii] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1lqr30l246o

[iii] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/maine-voters-defeat-voter-id-ballot-initiative-approve-red-flag-gun-restrictions

[iv] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/04/us/elections/results-virginia-governor.html

[v] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/democratic-rep-mikie-sherrill-wins-new-jersey-governors-race

[vi] https://www.mississippifreepress.org/mississippi-democrats-break-republican-senate-supermajority-flipping-3-legislative-seats/

[vii] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/05/us/politics/republicans-elections-trump.html

[viii] https://navigatorresearch.org/how-americans-views-of-the-shutdown-changed/ ; https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3938

[ix] https://www.mainepublic.org/politics/2025-11-13/angus-king-broke-ranks-to-help-end-the-government-shutdown-the-backlash-has-been-withering

[x] https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/news/democrats-backroom-negotiations-shutdown-rcna243352

Yesterday’s elections produced important wins for Democrats across the country. We should feel encouraged and refreshed by the range, depth, and breadth of the wins. From Mississippi[i] to California,[ii] from school boards[iii] to Public Service Commissions,[iv] to ballot initiatives,[v] Democrats were fully “in array.” Organized, determined, and fed up,

And these wins came not a moment too soon. The brutality and fast pace of Trump’s destructive policies had begun to create an air of inevitability about his march towards full authoritarian rule. Conversations about resistance strategy had increasingly become reduced to a few rounds of desperate ranting ending with “but the Republicans in Congress won’t do anything,” or “but then it will end up at the Supreme Court and we know they will do,” or, “you think there will even be elections?”

But if the result of yesterday’s election tells us anything, it reminds us that we must reject this thinking. There is yet life kicking in this broken democracy. It is our job to coax the fragile remains of the systems of resistance still available to us into a force that can effectively fight Trumpism. I do not know if Trump’s march to full-on dictatorship can be stopped. But I am certain that if we stop fighting, it will not be stopped.

That is why although we should rightly feel gratified at the outcome of elections across the country yesterday, we must not let down our fight. In fact, having made a bold and aggressive statement with this election, we must press our advantage. Because this impressive Democratic electoral success comes just as cracks were already beginning to show in the MAGA infrastructure surrounding Trump. There are power struggles within Trump’s circle. Embarrassing incompetence, arrogant overreach, dissension in the ranks, and Trump’s own increasingly disconnected rambling, makes this a critical moment to lean in.

As exhausted and overwhelmed as we feel, we should remember that they likely feel the same. They have taken on the extraordinary project of destroying one of the most powerful nations in the world – a nation with a national government, fifty state governments, tens of thousands of cities and local governments, a Supreme Court, hundreds of federal trial and appellate courts, fifty state court systems, and tens of thousands of courts within those systems. And they are attempting to do this with a skeleton crew - well-trained in harsh rhetoric, insults, petulance, and cruelty -- but almost entirely inexperienced in running anything of substance.

They are destroying the apparatus of government because they know cannot manage it. The ranks of those with even marginal competence available to work at a high level in this Administration are severely diminished. This is why embarrassingly subpar attorneys like Lindsey Halligan and Alina Habba are put in charge of key U.S. attorneys’ offices to prosecute Trump’s enemies, where they and their assistants stumble through the choreography of litigation, garnering ever-increasing impatience from federal district court judges.[vi] The Trump administration fires thousands of workers, and then hires back those same workers as agency heads realize that they’ve left no one sufficiently competent to log on to manage critical functions.

Trump is deeply unpopular. His poll ratings remain underwater.[vii] He has even lost podcast king Joe Rogan.[viii] This does not mean that these constituencies are prepared to vote for Democrats. It does mean that Trump is losing his ability to marshal the kind of unshakeable support that so cowed Republicans into fear of the very people they represent. As SNAP benefits dry up in red states and rural areas, and MAGA constituents grow more economically desperate, expect more grumbling and anger from Trump’s base.

Farmers and small businesses have been devastated by Trump’s tariffs and are speaking out increasingly about their sense of betrayal.[ix] If you are a Republican President and the Chamber of Commerce is filing briefs in opposition to your trade policies,[x] you are probably out over your skis. And judging by the tenor of today’s oral argument in the case challenging Trump’s sweeping and irrational tariffs,[xi] Trump may find himself coming down that mountain faster than he anticipated.[xii]

Moreover, Trump is looking even more enfeebled than usual. He is mocked and sub-tweeted on the world stage by leaders who play to his vanity in the place of trying to negotiate with the erratic and unserious U.S. leader.

Yes, J.D. Vance is waiting in the wings. But as a graduate of the Peter Thiel School of Charm and Deportment, he has neither the charisma nor the people instincts needed to garner the kind of support that Trump has enjoyed. Vance’s attempt to take up the mantle of Charlie Kirk by courting the TPUSA folks is interesting. It will be dangerous if Kirk’s widow allies with him in a professional partnership. But Mrs. Kirk may well decide that she has more power without Vance than with him, given the continued distrust he garners among MAGA faithful.

Trump’s lack of vigor has forced the egos that surround him to the top. No longer satisfied with being the ghoul behind the scenes, Stephen Miller wants everyone to know that he is in charge and that the plans being advanced are his. That is why we are seeing and hearing him more frequently, as he pauses for interviews outside the White House as though he is the President, shows up on news programs with regularity and even dispatches his wife as a (very uninformed and ineffective) talking head.

But Miller is repulsive by any impartial standard. Watching him spew bile at endlessly increasing levels of manic zeal – has the effect of holding up a mirror to the worst of MAGA. It cannot be pleasant to look in the mirror when the image looking back at you is Stephen Miller.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is a disaster. Twice now Trump has had to check Hegseth over his ill-judged overreach. First this Spring, Hegseth planned to provide Elon Musk with a classified briefing about China – without Trump’s knowledge. Trump reportedly was furious when he found out and scuttled the briefing.[xiii] That was also the beginning of the end of Trump’s love affair with Musk.

Then Hegseth’s October command performance before U.S. generals and admirals which Trump hastily decided that he too would attend,[xiv] was an unforced error. The conservative Washington Times published a report with quotes from high level military officials saying that Hegseth has “lost” the confidence (if he ever had it) of the Generals and Admirals.[xv] “Losing” the confidence of the top brass of the military is nothing to fool around with. Trump knows it.

The Supreme Court has handed Trump some big wins. And there are more likely to come. But even members of the Court must be feeling the pressure of association with the images we are all seeing every day of masked ICE agents patrolling suburbs while dressed for battle in Fallujah. Anil Kahlan’s brilliant coining of the term “Kavanaugh Stops,” [xvi] -branding the racial profiling and violent ICE attacks after the Supreme Court justice who (I suspect against the counsel of his conservative colleagues on the Court) defended and whitewashed them in an infamous shadow docket opinion in October,[xvii] - makes it clear to the justices that should they ultimately cover this conduct in constitutional protection, they will forever own the images and violence associated with it.

The key pressure point for us remains Congress. Trump’s power grab – overriding congressional appropriations, closing agencies, firing hundreds of thousands of federal workers, blowing up boats in the Caribbean without evidence of threat, could not happen without the prostration of Congress – and especially that of the maddeningly underwhelming Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.

The shutdown has starkly revealed the flaccid and feckless leadership of Speaker Johnson. So far, he has held his caucus together. But given the unpopularity of the shut-down, and now the Democrat’s run on yesterday’s elections, Republican members in the House will increasingly bring pressure on Johnson to put the interests of the caucus ahead of Trump’s.

It cannot be good that Johnson now knows that behind closed doors Trump has been mocking Johnson’s malleability. Being called a “puppet” by the President,[xviii] who has also claimed your job title (Trump: “I’m the Speaker”[xix]) must rattle even the damaged and Lilliputian ego of Mike Johnson. And surely the devastating compilation videos of the man who purports to lead the U.S. House of Representatives repeating over and over again when confronted by questions about the state of the shutdown or about the President’s leadership repeats “I haven’t seen that” and “I never heard that” has to kindle a measure of resentment in Johnson, who after all hasn’t been given permission by Trump to substantively answer these questions.

And this is why it is important that now we focus more of our attention on Congress. We have little hope of influencing the other two branches of our government. But Congress remains the place where we have representatives who in our constitutional order have the power to check Trump’s excesses. And as I have often said, the abiding obsession of Republican House members is keeping their jobs. Yesterday’s election was a wake-up call. Next year every seat in the House is on the ballot. No matter what they say before the cameras today, Republicans in the House are seeing the writing on the wall this week and they are feeling queasy. We should be prepared to challenge Republican incumbents. Show up and out at town halls. Democrats living in Republican districts should apply pressure to their Republican representatives.

The refusal of the Speaker to swear in a duly elected Democratic member of the House is an issue that should rally Democrats across the country. Every one of us should be writing, calling and protesting Johnson’s actions. Keep after Speaker Johnson until he feels the pressure.

Everyday people who believe in decency and democracy have grown bolder and more engaged. Millions participated in the “No Kings” rally in October.[xx] Ordinary Chicagoans have been giving ICE a run for its money protesting, filming unconstitutional stops, shouting down, and denigrating masked officers who assault and kidnap residents off the streets for detention. That resistance has gotten so far under the thin skin of Stephen Miller that he has unleashed a shake-up at DHS.

Oppression inevitably creates heroes, and we are witnessing that in real time. We see it in the grassroots groups in Chicago and Portland who are protesting (often quite creatively in Portland), and even more powerfully in the ordinary Americans who attempt to protect their neighbors from violent ICE kidnapping. We see it in the coterie of faith leaders who are lifting their voices,[xxi] and even standing in the line of fire outside ICE detention facilities.[xxii] We see it in the bold independent media outlets, from L.A. Taco to Tribe that have become essential sources of real time news about ICE raids and assaults. We see it in a new and vigorous coterie of Democratic leaders like Chicago Mayor Brandon Jacobs, in Governors like Gavin Newson, J.D. Pritzker and Wes Moore, and in Mayors like Michelle Wu (Boston) and Brandon Scott (Baltimore), and the new Mayor-elect of New York, Zohran Mamdani.

Yesterday’s election outcomes provided some critical lessons for Democratic leadership and donors. The Party’s base is not an optional constituency. Black women continue to power Democratic wins around the country. Democrats who stand by their convictions and the constituencies in our “big tent” do better that those who run on being “Republican-light” and who sacrifice inclusion to chase the white whale of “centrist voters.” The wins came in California and in New York City, but also in Bucks County, Pennsylvania,[xxiii] Mississippi,[xxiv] and Cincinnati, Ohio.[xxv]

None of this guarantees that we will be saved from the abyss. But these are all encouraging signs that the fight is not finished. In the words of Yogi Berra, “it’s not over ‘til it’s over.” And even then, we fight.

We need to keep the pressure on. Protesting, boycotting, speaking out, recording unconstitutional stops, protecting our neighbors, demanding that our leaders stand strong and not blink. Yesterday’s impressive electoral wins by Democrats will encourage more recklessness from Trump and Republicans. But I am betting that some Republicans in the House will now hesitate before obeying Trump’s every command lockstep if they believe that their seats may be at risk in 2026.

One other point. Remember that this period is often when lame duck Republican state legislatures, school boards, Mayors, and City Councils get up to mischief, passing bills and creating new rules that will limit the power of their successors. Monitor the work of your local officials closely over the next few months, especially in places where Democratic voters have successfully flipped control with yesterday’s election. There will be some outgoing elected officials who will attempt to make their mark as they head for the door, leaving some offices with diminished powers, or passing harmful ordinances and rules.

Like you, I am heartened by the outcome of this week’s elections. But I understand that we still remain in deep peril as a nation. So let us all stay vigilant and on offense and demand the same of our leaders. We have flexed our muscles. We have demonstrated resilience and determination, and that’s good. Because this battle is far from over.

[i] https://www.mississippifreepress.org/mississippi-special-election-results-democrats-flip-3-legislative-seats/

[ii] https://apnews.com/article/california-redistricting-prop-50-gavin-newsom-839193bfc2a817086acca7365315f26f

[iii] https://www.newsweek.com/democrat-backed-candidates-flip-3-texas-school-board-seats-10999063

[iv] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/us/georgia-election-utility-board-results.html

[v] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/maine-voters-defeat-voter-id-ballot-initiative-approve-red-flag-gun-restrictions

[vi] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/11/05/justice-department-prosecution-james-comey/

[vii] https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/10/29/trump-approval-rating-hits-second-term-low-in-latest-poll-despite-his-claims-of-highest-numbers-ever/

[viii]https://www.newsweek.com/joe-rogan-declares-disagreement-donald-trumph-nut-10898874

[ix] https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/23/economy/trump-argentina-beef-deal-farmer-impact

[x] https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24-1287/380604/20251024160303037_2025-10-24%20SCt%20No.%2025-250%20Chamber%20Amici%20brief.pdf

[xi] https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/11/court-appears-dubious-of-trumps-tariffs/

[xii] https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/audio/2025/24-1287

[xiii] https://www.axios.com/2025/04/16/trump-block-elon-musk-pentagon-briefing-china

[xiv] https://time.com/7321305/trump-meeting-generals-hegseth/

[xv] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/oct/20/pentagon-insiders-say-defense-secretary-pete-hegseth-lost-trust/

[xvi]

Law Dork

Talking about “Kavanaugh stops” with law prof Anil Kalhan, who coined the term

Thank you, all, for tuning into my live video with Drexel University School of Law Professor Anil Kalhan — who coined the term “Kavanaugh stop” in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s September 8 decision allowing the Trump administration to racially profile Latinos in low-wage jobs. I’ve written about the decision repeatedly…

Listen now

8 months ago · 87 likes · 4 comments · Chris Geidner and Anil Kalhan

[xvii] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/25a169_5h25.pdf

[xviii] https://www.thedailybeast.com/president-donald-trump-humiliates-house-speaker-mike-johnson-behind-closed-doors/

[xix] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/25/us/politics/mike-johnson-speaker-congress.html

[xx] https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/no-kings-protests-trump-news-10-18-25

[xxi]https://www.ncronline.org/news/faith-leaders-join-democrats-decry-health-care-cuts-expiring-snap-benefits; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/18/los-angeles-faith-leaders-ice-raid

[xxii] https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/another-pastor-hit-pepper-shot-team-trumps-clashes-faith-community-wor-rcna240271

[xxiii] https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/bucks-county-to-see-transfer-of-power-as-top-seats-go-blue-on-election-night/4297551/

[xxiv] https://www.mississippifreepress.org/mississippi-democrats-break-republican-senate-supermajority-flipping-3-legislative-seats/

[xxv] https://www.wcpo.com/news/government/elections-local/aftab-pureval-wins-reelection-beating-challenger-cory-bowman-in-cincinnati-mayoral-race

(*a version of this article appears on The Refounding, the Medium newletter of the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy)

On Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the question of whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act violates the 14^th and 15^th Amendments to the Constitution.

The question raises a brazen proposition. Does a core provision of the most consequential of all civil rights statutes conflict with the constitutional amendments ratified to ensure Black citizenship rights?

It’s an odd question, to say the least. But this is an odd Court. After briefing and hearing oral argument on the merits of the case last Spring, the Term closed without an opinion in Louisiana v. Callais,^[1] the challenge to racial gerrymandering in Louisiana’s 2020 congressional redistricting map. Then on August 1^st, the Court issued an order^[2] asking for briefing on the question of Section 2’s constitutionality. Coming 13 years after the Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder^[3] hollowed out the preclearance provision of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and unleashed a wave of voter suppression laws across the nation,^[4] the Court’s interest in teeing up a direct challenge to Section 2 is ominous, to say the least. But in some ways, the challenge to the constitutionality of Section 2 rests on even shakier grounds than the Court’s decision to strike down the preclearance formula of Section 5.

The 14^th and 15^th Amendments to the Constitution, ratified during Reconstruction, were designed to protect and ensure the full citizenship of Black people, to eliminate caste as a marker of citizenship, and to protect both the nation and its citizens against usurpation of power by states. The 14^th Amendment guaranteed birthright citizenship, due process, and equal protection of laws.^[5] The 15^th Amendment outlawed state laws and practices that denied the right to vote based on race or color.^[6] Both amendments contain a provision that we call the Enforcement Clauses. In the 14^th Amendment, it reads: “the Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

The enforcement provisions are a critical part of the structure of the 14^th and 15^th Amendments. They are a powerful expression of the framers’ post-Civil War understanding of the limits of federalism. The framers knew that despite the Confederacy’s defeat, most whites in southern states were not prepared to accept Black people as equal citizens. White southerners deemed racial subordination as the natural order of things. They fully expected to resume their domination over the Black population.

The Republicans in Congress in the early days of Reconstruction had seen the arrogance of former Confederates who wished to be restored to power, despite their disloyalty to the Union.^[7] The enactment of Black Codes – vagrancy laws that allowed for the arrest and imprisonment of Black people for minor infractions, including the crime of being unable to prove that they were employed by a white person – demonstrated the intention of southern whites. Once imprisoned, Black people convicted pursuant to those vagrancy laws could be “hired out” to white plantation owners and other whites looking for cheap and easily exploitable labor.

Physical brutality against Black people in southern states was rampant during this period, and white southerners were merely biding their time until federal troops would leave the South,^[8] and thus leave them to deal with Black people as they wished.

In sum, the framers of the Reconstruction Amendments understood the states could not be trusted to protect the citizenship rights of formerly enslaved Black people. Black enfranchisement was a direct threat to white political supremacy, especially in those counties where the Black population outnumbered that of whites. Keeping Black people politically disenfranchised was the key to reestablishing and maintaining white supremacy.

Although the 15^th Amendment speaks most directly to this concern, the 14^th does as well. Section 2 of the 14^th Amendment is a powerful and too-often-overlooked provision that demonstrates the framers’ clear and explicit effort to ensure Black political representation.

In drafting Section 2 of the 14th Amendment, the Framers undertook what historian Mark Graber correctly describes as “apportionment reform”^[9] — a task vital to the project of re-founding our republic after Emancipation.

First, the Framers overturned the odious “three-fifths Compromise” that was the devastating handiwork of the Framers of the 1789 Constitution. That provision in Article I, Section 2^[10] allowed white southerners to augment their population numbers, and thus their representation in Congress, by counting their enslaved population, albeit fractionally. The “three-fifths compromise” betrayed the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, constitutionalized the brand of inhumanity on the Black population, and rewarded white southerners with political power premised on the population they held in bondage.

The 14^th Amendment overturned the odious political measurement of human beings in fractions.

The first sentence of Section 2 of the 14^th Amendment reversed the “three-fifths compromise,” decreeing that, “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.”

But Section 2 did even more.

The question of Black enfranchisement hung over the project of the 14^th Amendment from the earliest days after the Civil War. In 1865, Frederick Douglass wrote What the Black Man Wants^[11] - a passionate plea for Black voting rights. He predicted that without political power, Black people would simply have called down “not only upon ourselves, but upon our children’s children, the deadly hate of the entire Southern people,” with no means to protect themselves. For that reason, Douglass warned that “this war shall not cease until every freedman in the South has the right to vote.” Douglass was particularly exercised by the notion that loyal Black men would be denied the vote, while white former Confederates, who had been disloyal to the Union, would enjoy full voting rights.

Word that the draft of the 14^th Amendment failed to include an affirmative right to vote for Black people was met with widespread condemnation among abolitionists and activists. Radical Republicans in Congress, including Rep. Thaddeus Stevens, among the most passionate congressional champions of full Black citizenship and voting, conceded that the Amendment “fell short.” Senator Charles Sumner, a leading congressional abolitionist and framer of the Reconstruction Amendments, came to regard the 14th Amendment as “an installment, not a finality.”

No affirmative right to vote was included in the 14^th Amendment. But the Amendment was not silent about the importance of Black political representation. The framers drafted a provision that they hoped would discourage southern whites from disenfranchising Black men. In Section 2 of the 14^th Amendment, the framers set forth a regime that would exact political punishment for southern states that denied or interfered with Black voting.

The punishment scheme was simple. Southern states risked losing seats in Congress if they denied or abridged voting for eligible Black men. In fact, the representation count for states engaged in racial disenfranchisement would be reduced in proportion to the number of Black men they disenfranchised. Section 2 reads:

But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

There was no question that the reference to men meant Black men.

Southerners understood the threat. They objected to the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equality, but they also objected to the 14th Amendment on the grounds that it contemplated a “loss of representation because of denying Blacks the right to vote.”

The compromise language was passed and ratified.

Obviously, the hope that potential for representational punishment would deter attacks on Black voting proved naïve. After a brief period when Black when voted in plentiful numbers and elected a record number of Black representatives to Congress and to other offices, the white backlash – marked by intense violence – successfully disenfranchised Black people for nearly 100 years. Frederick Douglass and other Black abolitionists were right.

When, a century later after courageous demand by civil rights activists, Congress exercised its enforcement power to pass the Voting Rights Act, its authority rested not only on the explicit guarantees of the 15^th Amendment but also on the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. It did so, undergirded by the clear intentions of the apportionment clause of Section 2 of the 14^th Amendment.

In fact, the use of the Voting Rights Act to confront congressional racial gerrymanders, as in Louisiana v. Callais, is a particularly appropriate expression of congressional enforcement power under the 14^th Amendment because “representatives in Congress” are among the explicitly enumerated offices identified in the punishment clause.

Should the Supreme Court use the Louisiana racial gerrymandering case to usurp Congress’s express enforcement power to protect Black voting strength, it will constitute a devastating and dastardly usurpation of congressional power outlined in the 14^th Amendment.

Such a decision should be met with immediate field hearings convened by voting rights advocacy groups in states with racial gerrymanders, followed by congressional hearings - all focused on charting a path to quick implementation of the punishment scheme of Section 2 – reducing the size of the congressional delegations of those states that abridge the rightful measure of political representation for Black people.

Wednesday’s argument will reveal more about what the conservatives are imagining might be the basis for striking down or limiting the reach of Section 2. But we should be clear that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is firmly grounded in both the 14^th and 15^th Amendments, and any limitations on its reach, or on the duration of its power, fall into the exclusive power of Congress, not the Supreme Court.

Consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter to help defray costs of time and research. Thanks!

^[1] https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/10/supreme-court-to-hear-arguments-in-pivotal-case-on-the-voting-rights-act/

^[2] https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/080125zr_i4dk.pdf

^[3] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/570/529/

^[4] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/effects-shelby-county-v-holder-voting-rights-act

^[5] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-14/

^[6] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-15/

^[7] Joint Committee on Reconstruction (1866), at p. 16, https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/JointCommitteeonReconstruction1866.pdf

^[8] Carl Schurz, Report on Conditions of the South (1865).

^[9] Mark A. Graber, Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty: The Forgotten Goals of Constitutional Reform After the Civil War, (University Press of Kansas 2023) at 132.

^[10] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-1/

^[11] https://blackpast.org/african-american-history/1865-frederick-douglass-what-black-man-wants/

There is a lot one can say about today’s Supreme Court order lifting the stay issued by a federal district court in Noem v Vasquez Perdomo,[i]. This is the case that challenges the constitutionality of DHS immigration raids in California in which officers appear to rely on racial and language profiling to justify stops and arrests of suspected undocumented migrants. The District Court issued a stay, pausing the raids while the merits of the Administration’s policy are litigated. The Trump Administration of course appealed the stay order. Today the Supreme Court lifted the stay, allowing the raids to continue during the pendency of the litigation.

It’s important to note that the Court lifted the stay without explaining its rationale for doing so – another consequential decision on the Court’s “shadow docket,” that defers to President Trump’s policy decisions before a full trial on the merits. But what we do have is a “concurring opinion” offered solely by Justice Kavanaugh. And it is a doozy.

Here’s Kavanaugh’s recitation of the practices that have been challenged by the plaintiffs in this case. He assures us that:

The Government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs; who work or appear to work in jobs such as construction, landscaping, agriculture, or car washes that often do not require paperwork and are therefore attractive illegal immigrants; and who do not speak much if any English. If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go. If the individual is illegally in the United States, the officers may arrest the individual and initiative the process for removal.[ii]

Every aspect of this description is belied by the reality that appears on our televisions and online every day. But who are you going to believe – Justice Kavanaugh or your lying eyes? Kavanaugh’s description reads as though it were downloaded from the Department of Homeland Security’s website. Almost every word of this is preposterous. “Brief investigative stops” at places where undocumented immigrants are likely to work? What we have seen repeatedly are not “stops.” They are grabs and kidnapping. Most often, no questions are asked. Even when colleagues have insisted that the person targeted by ICE agents are here legally, or that they are citizens, ICE agents proceed to tackle, beat, cuff, and spirit away individuals they have targeted. And we have seen migrants detained and forcibly taken into custody as often in courthouses after immigration hearings, or in neighborhoods cutting lawns as at Home Depot.

Kavanaugh’s claim that if ICE officers learn that you are in the country legally the officials “promptly let the individual go”? Really? Is three months “prompt”?[iii] Two months?[iv] One month?[v] Does he care at all what ICE detention is like? Does he know what 24 hours in those facilities are like?

That Kavanaugh could so haplessly could make this statement just days after South Korean nationals authorized to work as engineers at a Georgia EV battery plant were arrested, shackled and taken into custody by ICE after an immigration raid in what has become an international incident, demonstrates how utterly out of touch he is.[vi]

Kavanaugh assures us that it is no problem to be apprehended, taken to a facility – perhaps several states away – until you can prove that you are a legal resident or citizen. This is his idea of democracy – a country in which citizens and legal residents who are Black, Latino or Asian, and who happen to work in “locations where people are hired for day jobs” must carry proof of citizenship (their “freedom papers,” if you will) or risk apprehension by masked thugs who will hold them perhaps for months.

The fantasy world Kavanaugh describes is the kind of world in which clueless white men (or deliberately obtuse white men) in positions of power were permitted to languish before the Civil Rights Movement brought the reality of life for marginalized people into American living rooms in technicolor. Indeed one wonders whether the conservative justices on the Court watch television channels where they might see what ICE raids really look like.

But we shouldn’t need television. We have trial court proceedings. They allow judges to be exposed to realities they otherwise do not know. Through complaints and answers, testimony and evidence, judges actually learn. For civil rights lawyers, trials are essential tools of education for judges who are ignorant of, or actively resistant to the truth about racism in this country. We know that without the annoying inconvenience of facts, justices can create the kind of world Kavanaugh flagrantly manufactures. A world in which ICE agents respectfully “inquire” about legal status during “brief stops.” Without facts (and sometimes photographs) they can decide that a football coach offered “a quite prayer of thanks…while his students were otherwise occupied.”[vii] They can decide that Asian American students are harmed by race-conscious admissions.[viii] They can claim that a “Muslim ban” isn’t a Muslim ban.[ix]

Facts make it difficult. And this, I’m convinced, is why the conservatives on the Court have all but declared war on district court judges. Trial courts are mucking up the works for a majority bent on the outcomes it prefers. Inconvenient facts expose the game.

Just contrast Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence with Justice Sotomayor’s dissent in Noem v Vazquez Perdomo. Both are Supreme Court justices who are supposed to be experts in “what the law is.” They are not factfinders. But that does not mean that facts are irrelevant. Facts are especially important when the Supreme Court is deciding whether to lift an injunction. Evaluating that question requires the Court to “balance the equities” of the two parties. SCOTUS justices have always been well-able to assess the potential harms to the U.S. government. Most of them have done a turn as government lawyers in the past. But often SCOTUS justices are blithely unaware of the consequences and effects of government policy and decisions on the lives of ordinary people who may appear before them in these cases.

Justice Sotomayor engages this evaluation carefully – forswearing the official story of how immigration raids are conducted, to pull from the evidence before the District Court about how these raids take place. Her recitation of the violent encounters during these ICE raids is critical to understanding what is at stake for those who are the targets of ICE activity. Masked agents jumping out of cars and grabbing every person who looks Latino on a job site or outside a Home Depot, violently subduing the individuals and taking them away is the stuff of nightmares – not of democracy. Sotomayor recognizes the “’panic and fear’ across Los Angeles,” as Latino U.S. citizens feel the need to carry their passports and fear picking up their children from school.[x]

The facts matter for the Court’s standing analysis as well (the determination of whether the plaintiffs are properly before the Court as injured and interested parties). Kavanaugh says that it is unlikely that the plaintiffs in this case – Latino U.S. citizens who work in the categories of workplaces targeted by DHS – can satisfy that they have standing to bring these claims. Citing one of the most discredited standing decisions ever issued by the Supreme Court, City of Los Angeles vs. Lyons[xi], Kavanaugh tells us that “[w]hat matters is the ‘reality of the threat of repeated injury,’ not ‘subjective apprehensions.’” (J., Kavanaugh, concurring at 4, citing Lyons at 107, n.8).

Leaving aside for a minute the utter embarrassment of refreshing the Lyons decision which, to coin a phrase was, “gravely wrong on the day it was decided,”[xii] the scenario that undergirded the Court’s standing analysis in Lyons is simply not on all fours with this case. As Justice Sotomayor points out, it is one thing to fear that you may be pulled over by law enforcement and encounter an officer who would, in violation of the department’s policy, apply a chokehold. Here the racial profiling, and violent, random arrests are the official policy of DHS. The encounters at issues are not aberrations. They are conducted with the full support and authorization of DHS leadership. The findings “show that the plaintiffs, by doing nothing more than going to work every day, are likely to be seized by agents who are targeting their specific workplaces in accordance with government practice.” (J. Sotomayor concurring at 15).

I am reminded when I read Justice Kavanaugh’s tone-deaf opinion in this case of what Justice Byron White said in a tribute to Justice Thurgood Marshall about how Marshall’s presence influenced the Court’s conferences: “he would tell us things we know but would rather forget, and he told us much that we did not know due to the limitations of our own experience.”[xiii] The work of trial courts can do the same. But the conservative majority on this Court believes they have no limitations. Instead the insistence of federal district courts in doing their job – eliciting facts that are relevant to the case at hand, facts that courts may not know or would rather forget and applying them to the law – has provoked from the conservative majority a series of rebukes, and a concerted campaign to discredit the legitimacy of the work of the trial courts. Kavanaugh ham-fistedly piles on that project here as well, purporting to remind us of the “proper role of the Judiciary.”

We can take some comfort from the fact that none of the five other conservatives on the Court signed on to Justice Kavanaugh’s unfortunate concurrence. But at least four of them must have agreed with Kavanaugh’s ultimate conclusion that the stay should be lifted. That decision required a determination by at least five of the justices that the second-class citizenship imposed on citizens of color who now must accept that their status may be considered illegitimate by their government until they can prove otherwise, and that they must accept being seized by masked men and women, and detained perhaps for months on end until officials are satisfied of their citizenship - is not an irreparable harm that outweighs President Trump and Stephen Miller’s anti-immigrant zeal.

And that makes this a terrible decision. It is a watermark in the dissolution of what we had come to believe we had a right to expect as citizens in a democracy.

[i] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/25a169_5h25.pdf, 606, U.S. __(2025).

[ii] Id. Slip Opinion at 2. (J., Kavanaugh concurring).

[iii] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/ice-releases-health-worker-us-legally-50-years-rcna209975

[iv] https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2025-05-09/ice-releases-fabian-schmidt-n-h-green-card-holder-in-detention-for-2-months ; https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/maximo-londonio-released-two-months-ice-detention/281-16aa9148-9e04-4acc-8448-00d1ff615d1d

[v]https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/u-s-citizen-who-says-he-was-held-in-ice-custody-for-more-than-a-month-wants-accountability/2780842/

[vi] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/09/08/south-korea-us-immigration-raid-tensions/

[vii] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/597/21-418/#tab-opinion-4601251

[viii] Fisher v. University of Texas, 570 U.S. 297 (2013) (J., Thomas, concurring). In subsequent trials in SSFA v. Harvard & University of North Carolina, district courts found that race conscious admissions do not discriminate against Asian American students. https://www.harvard.edu/federal-lawsuits/wp-content/uploads/sites/17/2025/09/gov.uscourts.mad_.283718.238.0_1.pdf

[ix] Trump v. Hawaii, 138 S.Ct. 2392 (2018).

[x] (J., Sotomayor dissenting at p. 2-4).

[xi] 461 U.S. 95 (1983).

[xii][xii] Trump v. Hawaii, 138 S. Ct. 2392 at 2423 (2018) (referring to the infamous Korematsu case).

[xiii] Byron White, A Tribute to Justice Thurgood Marshall, 44 Stan.L.Rev. 1215, 1216 (1992).