Democrats must create a new period of Reconstruction after Donald Trump and maga Republicans are voted out of office

Echo opinion published The New York Times by Jamelle Bouie:

Liberty under attack by Trumpism is in dire need of Reconstruction!

This past week in early June, 2026, I wrote about the need for Democrats to construct a Project 2029 that takes the revolutionary nature of the Trump regime seriously and seeks not to restore what was, but to build something new in the wake of this conjuncture.

In it I refer, as I often do, to the Reconstruction period of American history — the roughly 10 to 15 years following the end of the Civil War — as inspiration for how Democrats might approach that task.

In particular, the Radical Republicans who spearheaded the most far-reaching attempts to reconstruct the South embraced a constitutional vision rooted in the broad authority of Article I of the Constitution. Part of this was by necessity. After Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, they had to contend with President Andrew Johnson, a vicious white supremacist who opposed Black civil rights and sought a speedy end to Reconstruction so that he might build a new political party on a Jacksonian vision of white supremacy. They also had to contend with a Supreme Court that saw itself as a bulwark for a narrow and restrictive vision of the Constitution.

The leading congressmen of the period had their own conception of the relationship between Congress, the presidency, and the courts — shaped in large part by their battles with the slave power. 

But, Reconstruction Republicans were also determined to secure and consolidate the political settlement of the Civil War against their foes in government. Congressional supremacy then was as much about the moment as it was about a deeper political perspective.

Here I want to highlight two things about the way congressional supremacy worked.

First, is that the Reconstruction Congress rejected the Supreme Court’s authority to invalidate its legislation. It was Congress — representing the entire people — that had the right and authority to say what the Constitution meant and it was the duty of the Supreme Court to enforce that meaning on the states. 

To stymie the court, this Congress took steps to limit the court’s jurisdiction, to directly repudiate court rulings with its own laws, and to reshape the Supreme Court itself — including preventing President Johnson from appointing new members when old ones died or left the bench.

The second is that the Reconstruction Congress leveraged a long-dormant part of the Constitution, the Guarantee Clause, which says that all states shall be guaranteed a republican form of government. It was under the Guarantee Clause that Republicans pursued their most far-reaching efforts to reconstruct the South.


As I wrote, should Democrats have control of the White House and both branches of Congress in 2029, they will be faced with a project of reconstruction, not restoration. You could do worse in those circumstances than to ask: What would Charles Sumner do❓

What would Thaddeus Stevens do❓ What would John Bingham do❓

They wouldn’t stand by and allow their project to be destroyed by the hostile forces arrayed against them. They would look to the Constitution which, for all of its flaws, gives Congress the power and authority to make its vision reality.

My column this week was on the prospect of a Project 2029, and why any effort worthy of the name must have a vision for reconstruction, not restoration.

If this is all true, and it is, then any plausible response to Project 2025, must include a larger vision for the future of the American Republic. A Project 2029, cannot be a collection of Democratic Party agenda items. It must articulate a broad new conception (aka, a new Lazarus❗)  of the nation’s political order — one that will guide the way a future Democratic-led government might wield power. 

Above all, Democrats must have a plan for reconstruction — for building something new on the wreckage of what Trump, MAGA and the Republican Party have wrought — not for restoration of what was.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans intend to destroy the equal protection clause provided in the 14th Amendment

Echo opinion published in the New York Times by Jamelle Bouie 

Stephen Miller’s 🤢Latest Low: Nazism 101: 
"You can’t change the masses. They will always be the same: dumb, gluttonous and forgetful.”― Joseph Goebbels

The latest front in evil 👹Stephen Miller’s personal and political war on the 14th Amendment, which began last January with Donald Trump’s executive order targeting birthright citizenship, centers on the equal protection clause.

In 1982, in Plyler v. Doe, a 5-to-4 majority of the Supreme Court held that it was a violation of the equal protection clause for states to deny to undocumented children the free public education they provide to legal immigrants’ children, who are themselves citizens. As Justice William Brennan wrote in his opinion for the court, “The 14th Amendment to the Constitution is not confined to the protection of citizens.”

Miller, whose crusade against immigration knows no bounds, wants Republican-led states to test the court’s commitment to its precedent. My newsroom colleague Lauren McGaughy has the report:


Stephen Miller raised the idea of ending public education funding for undocumented children in a closed-door meeting with Texas lawmakers in Washington last week, a move that would challenge a decades-old U.S. Supreme Court precedent, according to two people who were in the meeting.

Steven Miller doppelganger: Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945) Hitler's Nazi Minister of Propaganda.

Miller, who is Trump’s hard-line immigration terror adviser, and a Joseph Goebbels doppelganger, cited gridlock in Congress as he encouraged the state lawmakers to pass conservative legislation on immigration and other issues that are crucial to Republicans, hoping such action would spur on other red states and federal lawmakers.

The effect of this change, if it were to become law, would be to mark about a million children as members of a subordinate class — a lower caste excluded from mainstream society. Here, again, is Brennan: “By denying these children a basic education, we deny them the ability to live within the structure of our civic institutions, and foreclose any realistic possibility that they will contribute in even the smallest way to the progress of our Nation.”

Miller’s push to weaken the equal protection clause raises an important question: Why is he, and the "maga" right more generally, so intent on whittling down the 14th Amendment to essentially nothing❓

To answer this, we can’t just look at the origins of the amendment — we have to see it in its larger political context. Before the 14th Amendment was a question of law and legal interpretation, it was a political text meant to bring about a particular vision of American society.

It seems obvious to say, but it’s worth emphasizing anyway: The 14th Amendment is tied directly to the 13th. The 13th Amendment states that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” It then adds, in section 2, that “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

Today, as a matter of legal interpretation, we read the 13th quite narrowly; it simply ends slavery. But the authors and ratifiers of the 13th Amendment saw it more expansively. To them, it was the foundation for the society they hoped to build. 

Like Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts said in a March 1864, floor speech in support of the amendment:

"Every word spoken, every line written, every act performed, that keeps the breath of life in slavery for a moment, is against the existence of democratic institutions, against the dignity of the toiling millions, against the liberty, the peace, the honor, the renown and the life of the nation. In the lights of to-day that flash upon us from camp and battlefield, the loyal eye, heart, and brain of America sees and feels and realizes that the death of slavery is the life of the nation❗ The loyal voice of patriotism pronounces, in clear accents, that American slavery must die that the American Republic may live❗"​​​​​​​​​​​​​

To that end, the 13th Amendment was meant to outlaw hereditary caste as much as it was meant to end chattel slavery.

The anti-subordination aims of the 13th Amendment are why, almost immediately after ratifying it, Republicans in Congress leveraged their newfound authority under Section 2 to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which established birthright citizenship, guaranteed equal rights, nullified the “Black Codes” — laws passed by the former rebel states to reimpose the conditions of slavery — and empowered the federal government to prosecute violations of civil rights.


President Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee unionist whose contempt for slaveholders was outweighed only by his hostility to Black Americans, vetoed the bill as both undesirable and beyond the scope of federal power. “In all our history, in all our experience as a people living under Federal and State law, no such system as that contemplated by the details of this bill has ever before been proposed or adopted,” Johnson wrote. “They establish for the security of the colored race safeguards which go infinitely beyond any that the General Government has ever provided for the white race.”

The Republican-led Congress overrode Johnson’s veto. It then began work on a new amendment, meant to embed in the Constitution the provisions and protections of the 1866 law, as well as write its vision of a free and equal society into the Constitution itself.

The resulting 14th Amendment, properly understood, is additive to the 13th. It flows from the vision of Gettysburg and Appomattox, of the Republican Party before, during and after the war: a society of equals, entitled to a broad set of rights and able to pursue their own visions of the good as far as their capabilities would take them.

A straightforward reading of the most important part of the amendment, Section 1, makes this clear. It says, in short: "There will be a national American citizenship. That this citizenship will, except in very select cases, be established by birth. That all such citizens will be entitled to the 'privileges and immunities' of American citizenship, and that — citizen or no — everybody on American soil is to receive the due process of law and the equal protection of the laws."

As Representative John Bingham of Ohio, one of the chief architects of the amendment, would write soon after ratification, Let it be “borne in mind that this is the government of men representing every people and kindred and tongue under the whole heavens, and that in the inception of our national struggle for representative government, in 1776, the declaration of the people was not that all white men are created equal, but that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with the rights of life and liberty.”

The Supreme Court would eventually trim and limit this vision, eventually going, in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, as far as to permit the kind of subordination that the 14th Amendment was explicitly written to forbid. Indeed, this was part of the transformation of this amendment into a merely legal document — of removing its political content and treating it as a bare set of narrow requirements. The court would do the same to both the 13th and 15th Amendments, robbing them of their power to transform the American republic. And it did so as part of a larger political project: to reconcile the white citizens of the United States, to give the white South the power to manage its own “affairs,” and to support a national project of imperial domination. As a promise of equality for all who live under the flag, the 14th Amendment had to be written out of the constitutional order.

Both Miller and the "maga" right are engaged in the same kind of work as their political forebears. It is no wonder, then, that they want to gut the 14th Amendment, which was revitalized by the struggles of Black Americans and other groups throughout the 20th century. Theirs is a project of subordination at home and abroad; of the re-inscription of caste and the recreation of tiered citizenship based on race and nationality. And now, as then, the 14th Amendment stands in the way.

In other words, their project of constitutional change is in the service of a distinct political vision. Opponents should take note. It is not enough, as important as it is, to attack the legal basis of Miller’s efforts or debunk "maga’s" historical arguments. One must also bring a positive political vision to bear against their fantasy of reimposing rigid lines of caste, class and hierarchy.

The good news is that the 14th Amendment, and the larger Reconstruction story, is an important resource about an alternative vision — about an egalitarian society for all who claim this nation as their own.

What I Wrote: In this column,  Jamelle Bouie argued that whether at home or abroad, Donald Trump's pathological narcissism leaves him unable to see that his opponents have agency. As the aphorism goes, the enemy gets a vote, too.

Every presidential administration takes on the character of its principal, and this one is no different. Like Trump, the White House does not in fact seem to understand that other people have agency, too. It sees itself the same way the president sees himself: as the protagonist of the universe, with everyone else acting either as a supporting character or a nonplayable one — extras with no will of their own.

Donald Trump and his political marriage a trois!

Whatever you think of the nature of his win, Donald Trump is still 😩😱😬😡Donald Trump👺💥 An echo opinion by Jamelle Bouie published in The New York Times.

Trump is overbearing in many areas and ruinously deficient in others. 

Most disturbing is how Trump holds so much sway over his supporters that, as he famously put it nearly 10 years ago, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose “any voters.”

In fact, Trump is hardly capable of managing himself or the people around him. His White House was notoriously chaotic and he remains as impulsive, dysfunctional and undisciplined as he was during his first term.

There was, in the first weeks after the election, some notion that this had changed, that we were  somehow looking at a new Trump (❓), ready to lead a united Republican Party. 

But, as we’ve seen over the past few days, this notion was premature. First, the Republican Party is far from unified, as their struggle to pass a bill to continue to fund the government showed. It took days. What’s more, Trump is not alone as a figure of influence among congressional Republicans; the unelected Elon Musk has imposed himself onto the president-elect as a consigliere of sorts and is trying to build a political empire for himself via X, the social media platform he essentially bought for this purpose.

It was from X, in fact, that Musk urged Republicans to kill the continuing resolution, throwing the House into chaos and prompting Trump to escalate the confrontation to save face, demanding a new resolution that suspended or raised the debt limit. 

Then, on Thursday evening before the Christmas recess, the Speaker Mike Johnson tried to pass that bill. But a number of Republicans broke ranks, and unified Democratic opposition meant it was dead on arrival.

Together, Trump and Musk (marriage a trois) have not only walked the Republican Party into an otherwise needless defeat; they also have given Democrats the jump start they apparently needed to behave like a real opposition. According to Axios, House Democrats even broke into chants of “Hell no” when confronted with proposed Republican spending cuts.

That’s more like it.

The absurd battle over the continuing resolution (the CR) should stand as a vivid reminder that Trump is in a much more precarious position than he may have appeared to be in immediately after the election. With a 41 percent favorability rating, he remains unpopular. He cannot count on a functional majority in the House. He has no plan to deliver the main thing, lower prices, that voters want. And one of his most important allies, Musk, is an agent of chaos he can’t seem to control.

There have been enough presidents that there are a few models for what a well-run administration might look like. This is not one of them.

Democrats must strategically educate voters about how Donald Trump will fail. Chaos will damage average people

Voters will witness the metaphoric impact of political Narcan when Donald Trump signs his draconian executive orders and pushes unqualified nominees into public hearings for Senate confirmation.

Democrats may be in the (very slim) minority, but they are not yet an opposition. What’s the difference?

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Jamelle Bouie.

An opposition would use every opportunity it had to demonstrate its resolute stance against the incoming administration. 

Opposition would do everything in its power to try to seize the public’s attention and make hay of the president-elect’s efforts to put lawlessness at the center of American government. 

An opposition would highlight the extent to which Donald Trump has no intention of fulfilling his pledge of lower prices and greater economic prosperity for ordinary people and is openly scheming with the billionaire oligarchs who paid for and ran his campaign to gut the social safety net and bring something like Hooverism back from the ash heap of history.

An opposition would treat the proposed nomination of figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth as an early chance to define a second Trump administration as dangerous to the lives and livelihoods of ordinary Americans. It would prioritize nimble, aggressive leadership over an unbending commitment to seniority and the elevation of whoever is next in line. Above all, an opposition would see that politics is about conflict — or, as Henry Adams famously put it, “the systematic organization of hatreds” — and reject the risk-averse strategies of the past in favor of new blood and new ideas.

The Democratic Party lacks the energy of a determined opposition — it is adrift, listless in the wake of defeat. Too many elected Democrats seem ready to concede that Trump is some kind of avatar for the national spirit — a living embodiment of the American people. They’ve accepted his proposed nominees as legitimate and entertained surrender under the guise of political reconciliation. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, for example, praised Elon Musk, a key Trump lieutenant, as “the champion among big tech executives of First Amendment values and principles.” Senator Chris Coons of Delaware similarly praised Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a glorified blue-ribbon commission, as a potentially worthwhile enterprise — “a constructive undertaking that ought to be embraced.” And a fair number of Democrats have had friendly words for the prospect of Kennedy going to the Department of Health and Human Services, with credulous praise for his interest in “healthy food.”

Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey said last month. “I have concerns, obviously, about people leading in our country who aren’t based in science and fact.” 

And at least two Democrats want President Joe Biden to consider a pardon for incoming President Trump. “The Trump hush money and Hunter Biden cases were both bullshit, and pardons are appropriate,” Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania wrote in his first post on Trump’s social networking website.

Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina also said that Biden should consider a pardon for Trump as a way of “cleaning the slate” for the country. “If we keep digging at things in the past, I’m not too sure the country will not lose its way,” he said in a conversation on MSNBC with Jonathan Capehart. 

But, unmentioned was Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, which did not clean the slate of American politics as much as it made legal and political impunity the lodestar of Republican presidential politics.

Other Democrats have decided, in the wake of Trump’s popular vote victory, that aggressive, full-spectrum opposition to his priorities is a mistake. “Here is what I am not going to do for the next two years and the next four years,” Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, said in a news conference after the election. “I’m not going to deal with ‘It’s Tulsi Gabbard one day, then an hour later it’s Matt Gaetz, then the next day it’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then he says something on Truth Social, and then the people connected to him are doing something outrageous.’ No, that I’m not doing, because that’s all a distraction.”

It seems strange to think that it is not the job of an opposition to oppose — especially when the people in question have little business in government — but Jeffries isn’t alone in thinking that it is to the advantage of Democrats to hold their powder and avoid direct confrontations. He is in line with high-level Democratic strategists who also think that it is a mistake for Democrats to make noise, draw attention and seize the initiative.

“A pollster to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign told top Democratic Party officials recently that they must confront President-elect Donald Trump far differently than they did during his first term,” Holly Otterbein reported in Politico, “urgently pressing them not to focus on every outrage but instead argue that he is hurting voters’ pocketbooks.” According to the pollster, voters don’t care about who he’s putting in cabinet positions and will “give him a pass on the outrageous” if costs come down. (❓- but Trumpzi  already admitted that his fake promise to bring down costs will be difficult❗ to accomplish - ya'think❓. IOW, he lied to voters and they bought the "pig in a poke" message. OMG❗)

At the heart of all of this — whether it comes from congressional leaders, ordinary lawmakers or top pollsters — is the idea that Democrats can float above the fray and reap the political rewards of any chaos and dysfunction. Besides, voters say they want compromise — and what else can Democrats do but follow the polls?

It’s as if Democrats see politics as a stable landscape — a static field with clear rules. They can respond to voters, but they cannot shape the basic orientation of the electorate. 

By this view, most Americans are fixed in place and Democrats must meet them where they are. If voters don’t seem to care about corruption, impropriety and incompetence, then there’s nothing Democrats can do to make them care.

But this is not true. We know as much because Trump just won an election demonstrating that it’s not true. Trump rehabilitated himself through relentless self-promotion. He built a constituency for tariffs and mass deportation through endless repetition connected to some basic concerns. His “stop the steal” obsession put him at the center of Republican Party politics. He captured space in American cultural life and refused to let go, winning political power in the process.

Democrats can’t replicate this behavior, but there are lessons to learn from it — the first and foremost being that the public will not make connections and draw conclusions unless you do it for them. And that takes a willingness, again, to seize attention, to throw everything at the wall with the hope that something will stick. 

If Democrats, following the pocketbook strategy, want voters to blame Trump for any price hikes during his administration, they need to do everything they can now, in as dramatic a fashion as they can manage, to make Trump the culprit — to give voters a language with which they can express their anger at the status quo.

If Democrats want voters to blame Trump for any potential foreign policy failures, they must work now to highlight and emphasize the extent to which the president-elect - Trumpzi- wants a more or less inexperienced set of hacks and dilettantes to lead the nation’s national security establishment. 

Even something as obvious as the connection between Trump’s billionaire allies and his support for large, upper-income tax cuts has to be dramatized and made apparent to the voting electorate.

At this stage, there’s little evidence that Democrats are willing to do any of this. Given the opportunity, for example, to effect a changing of the guard — to promote younger and more aggressive voices like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to leadership, even if it upsets the usual rules of seniority, as I mentioned earlier — Democrats said, in effect, No thanks.

This is a grave mistake. Trump’s hand is not as strong as it looks. He has a narrow, and potentially unstable, Republican majority in the House of Representatives and a small, but far from filibuster-proof, majority in the Senate. He’ll start his term a lame duck, with less than 18 months to make progress before the start of the next election cycle. And his great ambition — to impose a form of autarky on the United States — is poised to spark a thermostatic reaction from a public that elevated him to deal with high prices and restore a kind of normalcy. But Democrats won’t reap the full rewards of a backlash if they do nothing to prime the country for their message.

There are other reasons for Democrats to try to take the initiative. There are still many Americans rightfully concerned with an authoritarian turn in the United States. Again, just over half the electorate did not vote for Trump. They deserve leadership, too. Indeed, the party’s refusal to fight sends ripples through civic life. If Democratic leaders won’t fight, then it’s hard to expect civil society, or just ordinary people, to pick up the slack. Either democracy was on the ballot in November or it wasn’t, and if it was, it makes no political, ethical or strategic sense to act as if we live in normal times.

It is not a distraction to vocally oppose Trump’s would-be nominees or highlight his extreme intentions. Democrats should look at every aspect of the next Trump administration as an opportunity to do, well, politics — to demonstrate their values and show the extent to which this president has no plan to pursue the public good. The quiet and supposedly responsible approach of the past four years is a dead end. Attention is the only currency that matters, and Democrats need some to spend.

Abraham Lincoln was assisted in his first campaign for president by a cadre of young, costumed men who campaigned, marched in the streets and showed militant enthusiasm for the Republican Party. These “Wide Awakes” were as flamboyant and provocative as any movement that has ever emerged in the history of American politics, and they soon held the attention of the entire nation, friend and foe alike. The 1860 election was not, the historian Jon Grinspan wrote, “a dry government process but a public confrontation, and the Wide Awakes had formed to help Republicans fight back.”

So it was and so it is. American politics has always been a game of performance and spectacle, from the whiskey-fueled street debates of the early Republic to the raucous conventions of the first Gilded Age. To be sterile and sober-minded in this arena is to be, for the most part, a loser.

Donald Trump and his dangerous revenge agenda

Echo opinion letter pubished in the Pierce County Journal a Wisconsin newspaper:

To the editor, It is already clear, based on his statements and actions, that Donald Trump’s only concerns as President will be revenge on his political enemies and enrichment for himself and the richest Americans. The greed of those who possess most of the wealth and now want it all is beyond belief.

Trump is hand-picking his administration to serve those ends. Where we have traditionally relied on the conscientiousness of civil servants, we will now have only servants of Trump.

How much of our government Trump will be able, with the help of his hard-right friends, to dismantle is anybody’s guess. With figures like Tulsi Gabbard, a vocal Putin supporter, heading National Intelligence and Matt Gaetz, under investigation for child sex trafficking and drug use, as Attorney General, we are justified in feeling deeply uneasy about our continued safety internationally and domestically. Even Trump’s hawkish former National Security adviser John Bolton has called Gabbard’s nomination a threat to security and the sleazy Gaetz’s nomination “the worst” in American history.

I sympathize with fellow voters who saw economic issues as of paramount importance in the election. Nevertheless, I do not think relief for them is in store when Trump’s tariffs raise prices on domestic goods.

There is no excusing the normalization of Trump by the media that have portrayed him as even marginally acceptable as candidate. After the 2016 election there may have been some justification in giving Trump the benefit of the doubt to see what he would actually do once in office. Today there can be no doubt and no honeymoon. We know what he is and what he would like to do.

For the sake of our own moral and ethical integrity we can never accept as legitimate a liar, a felon convicted on 34 counts, and sexual predator occupying our highest office, the most powerful and formerly respected in the world. What in heaven’s name are parents to tell their children looking toward the President for an example of honorable adult leadership?

By surrounding himself with corrupt and incompetent loyalists, Trump has made crystal clear that his allegiance is not to the people, half of whom he has branded as an “enemy within,” but to his own lust for power and retribution. His reckless appointments appear to signal an intent to push American government to the breaking point. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie writes, “Neither chaos nor dysfunction nor incompetence is an obstacle to Trump’s lawless intentions. If anything, they’re assets.”

Our democratic system of government, imperfect as it may be, is the fragile product of nearly 250 years’ thought, work, and sacrifice of some of our most patriotic Americans. Do we really want to squander that inheritance on an unhinged man’s destructive rages❗ and vendettas?

From Thomas R. Smith in  River Falls, Wisconsin

Americans who avoided civics 101 class are in a learn as we go mode- IOW Trump cannot be allowed to think and act like a king

Trump’s Crown Doesn’t Fit👑😔😒

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Jamelle Bouie

"Donald Trump proposed for nomination — to key agencies, including the Department of Defense, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice — a group of unqualified apparatchiks, sycophants and conspiracy theorists."

This opinion essay reminds me about how important it is for Americans to learn about our government in 5th grade civics class. 

It sure seems like those who missed out on this primary school curriculum are now in "learn as we go along" mode, where journalists are trying to fill in the educational gaps. In other words, Americans should all "already" know this stuff.....but Bouie gives a refresher class.  

The Constitution is not a grant of power for a king.

It is, instead, a grant of authority from the sovereign people to establish a republican form of government — a representative democracy of limited and enumerated powers. And the republican character of American constitutional government is expressed in the way it divides the executive, legislative and judicial powers among separate institutions.

“In the establishment of a free government,” a 19th-century Supreme Court justice, Joseph Story, observes in his “Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States,” this division “has by many been deemed a maxim of vital importance, that these powers should for ever be kept separate and distinct.” When those powers are mixed in a single individual, “such a form of government is denominated a despotism, as the whole sovereignty of the state is vested in him.”

It is not, as Story continues, that the “departments of government” should have “no common link of connection or dependence, the one upon the other, in the slightest degree.” Rather, it is that “the whole power of one of these departments should not be exercised by the same hands, which possess the whole power of either of the other departments; and that such exercise of the whole would subvert the principles of a free constitution.”

In our system, the executive branch cannot exercise the full power of the legislature. It cannot act as a monarch would. The sovereign people did not imbue their power into a leviathan. The upshot of this is that any interpretation of the Constitution that grants the president monarchical power is wrong. The structure of the Constitution precludes a royal prerogative and the ethos of American democracy forbids it. Otherwise, the revolution was for nothing.

Last week, Donald Trump proposed for nomination — to key agencies, including the Department of Defense, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice — a group of unqualified apparatchiks, sycophants and conspiracy theorists.

As loyalists, they were picked as agents of Trump’s will, less independent administrators than a group of glorified Renfields. The problem for Trump is that his nominees are so unqualified that they may not have the votes to be confirmed, even in a Republican-led Senate. One of them, the former Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, has already dropped out of contention for the role of attorney general in the wake of new evidence of sexual misconduct with a minor at a party. Gaetz has denied any wrongdoing, and the Justice Department declined to charge him last year.

Gaetz aside, Trump has let it be known that he would like to adjourn Congress and install his nominees as recess appointments, to avoid the humiliation of losing a confirmation battle and to assert dominance over the Senate. 

To do this, Trump would invoke an unused power found in an obscure provision of Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, which states that the president may “on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper.”

Under one theory of the case, Trump would push the Republican House majority under Speaker Mike Johnson — another loyal ally of the president — to adjourn the House of Representatives. Either the Senate majority would agree to enter recess or it would not, at which point Trump would claim disagreement and adjourn Congress himself.

There are a few good reasons this would not work the way Trump wants. The relevant clause connects the power to adjourn Congress to the power to “convene both Houses, or either of them,” on “extraordinary occasions.” Read as a whole, Section 3 states that the president can only adjourn Congress after calling such a session and when it cannot agree on the time of adjournment. The president, in this reading, has no power to adjourn Congress when it is in regular session.

There is another way to read the text as well. Suppose the president’s power to adjourn is separate from his power to call an extraordinary session. Even then, the power to adjourn Congress activates only when the House and Senate disagree as to the time of adjournment, not whether to adjourn. In which case, neither inaction nor an outright refusal to adjourn triggers the president’s power to act. This, it is interesting to note, was President Andrew Jackson’s understanding of his power to adjourn Congress. As he wrote in an 1836 veto message to the Senate, his power is “confined to fixing the adjournment of Congress whose branches have disagreed. The question of adjournment is obviously to be decided by each Congress for itself.”

It is worth taking a moment to explain why this power even exists. “The power to convene Congress on extraordinary occasions is indispensable to the proper operations, and even safety of the government,” writes Story, who placed the convening power in the context of “vigorous measures to repel foreign aggressions, depredations and direct hostilities; to provide adequate means to mitigate, or overcome unexpected calamities” and to “provide for innumerable other exigencies.” Story then describes the adjournment power as “equally indispensable; since it is the only peaceable way of terminating a controversy, which can lead to nothing but distraction in the public councils.”

But this parsing of the text is almost beside the point. The power to unilaterally adjourn Congress and then govern without its input does not exist in the Constitution, regardless of the wording of Article II, Section 3. This is because that power would be an act of sovereign will. In a republic, the people represented assemble in a legislature and only the people represented can adjourn themselves. The Congress is “self-moving and self-dependent,” William Rawle writes in his 1825 commentary, “A View of the Constitution of the United States.” “Although it may be convened by the executive,” he continues, “it cannot be adjourned or dissolved by it.”

It is the power of a sovereign monarch to call and dissolve a representative body at will. To use an example that would have been relevant to the framers of the Constitution, when Charles I dissolved Parliament in 1629 for a third and decisive time — and imposed personal rule on England — he did so on a claim of royal prerogative, extending from divine right. But our Constitution does not affirm divine right. It does not grant royal prerogative. Donald Trump cannot adjourn Congress like a king because the Constitution does not recognize kings or any sovereignty other than that of the people.

Now, obviously, this will not stop Trump from trying to assert a power to adjourn Congress and appoint his nominees. And while key senators have voiced their intent to fulfill their constitutional duty, there is still some chance that enough Republicans would roll over and grant Trump his recess. Nonetheless, it is still important that opponents of Trump assert that the power Trump is claiming does not exist, that it is an illegitimate and unconstitutional exercise of authority, and that he would be doing it to install loyalists who will act in his interest, and those of his billionaire donors, and no one else.

The reason it is important to make this point gets to a critical fact about the 2024, presidential election. Donald Trump did not win a mandate for autocracy. He hardly won a mandate at all, despite his claims to the contrary. He didn’t win a majority of votes cast, although he came close, and he carried the critical battleground states by slim margins. Overall, Trump won one of the narrowest victories in American political history.

This election was not a grand public affirmation for his most expansive plans and aggressive schemes. The electorate was as close to evenly divided as is possible (Trump is ahead by less than two percentage points in the popular vote) in a system where someone has to win. The marginal Trump voter — that is, the person who put him over the top — wants lower prices and cheaper homes, not chaos, dysfunction and autocratic, strongman government. But there are no real Trump plans to improve life for most Americans.

If there is such a thing as favorable terrain for a fight, this is it. This is the opportunity to weaken Trump and make his administration even less effective than it is already shaping up to be.

The 2024, election was the end of one iteration of the American republic. But the new one is still gestating — still formless, its outlines still unclear. And we, as free and equal citizens, have the capacity to shape it.

Yes, Trump will fight to try to impose his vision of the new world. Yes, he will lay claim to the powers of a monarch. Yes, he will speak as if he has royal prerogative. 

Yes, he will work to undermine our revolutionary heritage. But there is a large gap between a stated intention and an accomplished fact. And it is within that space that politics happens.

Donald Trump's immigration deportation is plan will terrorize all minorites!

Echo opinion by Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times:

Trump's failed border wall!  Now he wants export all immigrants. 

Among the worst episodes in American history are those moments when the federal government deploys the full weight of its power against the most vulnerable people in the country: the Trail of Tears and the Fugitive Slave Act in the 19th century and Japanese internment in the middle of the 20th, to name three.

If he is granted a second term in the White House, Donald Trump hopes to add his own entry to this ignominious book of national shame.

Trump’s signature promise, during the 2016, presidential election, was that he would build a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. 

Worse! His signature promise, this time around, is that he’ll use his power as president to deport as many as 20 million people from the United States.

“Following the Eisenhower model,” he told a crowd in Iowa last September, “we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

It cannot be overstated how Trump’s deportation plan would surely rank as one of the worst crimes perpetrated by the federal government on the people of this country. 

Most of the millions of unauthorized and undocumented immigrants in the United States are essentially permanent residents. They raise families, own homes and businesses, pay taxes and contribute to their communities. For the most part, they are as embedded in the fabric of this nation as native-born and naturalized American citizens are.

"Mexico will pay for it❓" IDTS❗ 

What Trump and his aide Stephen Miller hope to do is to tear those lives apart, rip those communities to shreds and fracture the entire country in the process.

“The Trump immigration plan,” notes Radley Balko, a journalist who writes primarily on civil liberties, in his Substack newsletter, “would be the second-largest forced displacement of human beings in human history, on par with Britain’s disastrous partition of India, and second only to total forced displacement during World War II.”

What is the plan, exactly? It begins, as Miller explained in an interview with Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk last year, with creating a national deportation force consisting of agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Border Patrol and other federal agencies, as well as the National Guard and local law enforcement officials. The administration would empower this deportation force to scour the country for unauthorized and undocumented immigrants. It would move from state to state, city to city, neighborhood to neighborhood and, finally, house to house, looking for people who, according to Trump and Miller, do not belong. This deportation force would raid workplaces and stage public roundups, to create a climate of fear and intimidation.

Of course, in the heat of the moment, it isn’t actually all that easy to determine who may be an unauthorized or undocumented immigrant. But these won’t be selective apprehensions. How could they be? Instead, what we’ll see in practice is an indiscriminate roundup of anyone who might appear to be an immigrant — a mass campaign of racial and ethnic profiling.

Because it would be beyond the capacity of the federal government to immediately return detainees to their “home” countries, the Trump team also plans to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for immigrants on land near the Texas border. Internment camps, essentially.

It is worth remembering here that in addition to its wanton cruelty, Trump’s policy of child separation was also noteworthy for the poor conditions suffered by separated families living in government facilities. Child detainees lacked adequate food, water and sanitation. There were also reports of mistreatment, as in the case of the Border Patrol agents who were accused of telling detained women to drink out of toilet bowls.

Now, imagine the conditions that might prevail for hundreds of thousands of people crammed into hastily constructed camps, the targets of a vicious campaign of demonization meant to build support for their detention and deportation. If undocumented immigrants really are, as Trump says, “poisoning the blood of our country,” then how do we respond? What do we do about poison? Well, we neutralize it.

There are roughly 10.5 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States, according to a recent estimate by the Pew Research Center. Trump’s number of “probably 15 million and maybe as many as 20 million” is pulled from nowhere — an assumption based on the inchoate sense that the official numbers are wrong and there must be more “illegals” to apprehend than anyone truly realizes.

To reach this goal, Miller and Trump would almost certainly have to round up citizens as well. But that is also part of the plan. On the first day of his second term, the campaign has let it be known, Trump will sign an executive order “to withhold passports, Social Security numbers and other government benefits from children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States.”




Neither Trump nor Miller appears to have made any distinction between the undocumented children of undocumented immigrants and the native-born children of undocumented immigrants, which fits their opposition to the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship through the 14th Amendment. Under the Trump deportation plan, citizenship will not save those who have the wrong background.

The Trump campaign’s promise to detain and deport millions of immigrants, along with many American citizens, is a promise to plunge the country into an authoritarian nightmare. It is also a promise of strife and pervasive civil conflict.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Americans responded to an effort of this sort with violence. With the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which essentially deputized all authorities and private citizens in free states as slave catchers required to return all escaped slaves to their enslavers, came widespread, armed resistance to efforts to carry out the law. You did not have to be sympathetic to the plight of the enslaved to be outraged by the notion that you could be dragooned into acting as a bounty hunter for state-sanctioned human traffickers.

The political consequence of the Fugitive Slave Act, to the dismay of Southern lawmakers, was to radicalize countless Northerners against the so-called Slave Power and raise sectional tensions to a point of almost no return. The law did not cause the Civil War, but it was the provocation that set the stage for a decade of conflict that led, inexorably, to war.

Do we not think that a mass deportation program, with roving bands of armed agents, would result in similar upheaval? Do we not think that there would be violent resistance to agents storming homes, churches and businesses to seize and detain people? And do we not think that a Trump who wanted, during his first term, to shoot protesters would see this as an opportunity to do so — a hoped-for chance to invoke the Insurrection Act, mobilize the military and crush his political opponents?

We talk often, these days, of illiberalism. It is has become a bit of a buzzword. Often the focus is illiberalism in elite spaces, usually the classrooms and common areas of selective colleges. Sometimes the focus is on particular politicians. But what we are seeing here from Trump isn’t simply a distaste for liberal values; it is a taste for genuine tyranny and bona fide despotism, one that complements his endless praise for dictators and strongmen.

Rhetoric matters, and what candidates say is not simply for show. 

At every opportunity, Trump has placed the mass deportation of millions of people at the center of his campaign. It is a promise. And the promises a presidential candidate makes while on the trail are the promises a president tries to keep.

Donald Trump has zero understanding about what NATO is or the meaning of the acronym

Echo opinion by Jamelle Bouie published in The New York Times:

Trump is losing it❗ 😟😡😮

It is unclear whether Donald Trump forgot the precise nature of NATO, or whether he ever fully grasped it in the first place.

(Maine Writer IMO-  Dumpzi-tRumpzi has no understanding about the meaning of simple alphabetic acronyms.  NATO, to Trump, has no meaning whatsover. Trump does not know the meaning of the acronym North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Too many big words.)

What is clear, however, is that Trump — who ostensibly spent four years as president of the United States — has little clue about what NATO is or what NATO does. And when he spoke on the subject at a rally in South Carolina over the weekend, what he said was less a cogent discussion of foreign policy than it was gibberish — the kind of outrageous nonsense that flows without interruption from an empty and unreflective mind.

“One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay, and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’” Trump said, recalling an implausible conversation with an unnamed, presumably European head of state. “‘You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?’” Trump recounted responding. “‘No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.’”

The former president’s message was clear: If NATO members do not pay up, then he will leave them to the mercy of a continental aggressor who has already plunged one European country into death, destruction and devastation.

Except NATO isn’t a mafia protection racket❗ NATO, in case anyone needs to be reminded, is a mutual defense organization, formed by treaty in 1949, as tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union hardened into conflict. “The parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all,” states Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.

According to the terms of an agreement reached last year, member states will work to spend at least 2 percent of national G.D.P. on military investment.

But let’s set this bit of fact-checking aside for a moment and look at the big picture.

It is not just that Trump is ignorant on this and other vital questions; it is that he is incoherent.

Consider his remarks at a recent gathering of the National Rifle Association in Harrisburg, Pa. “We have to win in November, or we’re not going to have Pennsylvania. They’ll change the name. They’re going to change the name of Pennsylvania,” Trump said.

Who, exactly, is going to change the name of Pennsylvania? And to what? I don’t know. I doubt Trump does either.

Or consider the time, last November, when Trump confused China and North Korea, telling an audience of supporters in Florida that “Kim Jong Un leads 1.4 billion people, and there is no doubt about who the boss is. And they want me to say he’s not an intelligent man.”

There was also the time that Trump mistook Nikki Haley, his former ambassador to the United Nations, for Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House.

“Nikki Haley, you know they, do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it. All of it, because of lots of things like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guard, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that. These are very dishonest people,” Trump said, repeating his false claim that Pelosi was responsible for the failure of Capitol security on January 6.

If you would like, you can also try to make sense of the former president’s recent attempt to describe a missile defense system:

“I will build an Iron Dome over our country, a state-of-the-art missile defense shield made in the U.S.A.,” Trump said, before taking an unusual detour. “These are not muscle guys here, they’re muscle guys up here, right,” he continued, gesturing to his arms and his head to emphasize, I guess, that the people responsible for building such systems are capable and intelligent.

“And they calmly walk to us, and ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. They’ve only got 17 seconds to figure this whole thing out. Boom. OK. Missile launch. Whoosh. Boom,” he added.

I assume Trump is describing the pressure of actually manning a missile defense system. Even so, one would think that a former president — currently vying to be the next president — would at least try to be a little more articulate.

But this gets to one of the oddest things about this election cycle so far. There is no shortage of coverage of President Biden’s age, even if there’s no evidence that his age has been an obstacle to his ability to perform his duties. Indeed, it is plainly true that Biden has been an unusually successful president in areas, like legislative negotiations, that require skill and mental acuity.

Coverage of Biden’s age, in other words, has more to do with the vibes of an “elderly” president — he isn’t as outwardly vigorous and robust as we would like — than it does with any particular issue with his performance.

In contrast to the obsessive coverage of Biden’s age, there is comparatively little coverage of Trump’s obvious deficiencies in that department. If we are going to use public comments as the measure of mental fitness, then the former president is clearly at a disadvantage.

Unfortunately for Biden, Trump benefits from something akin to the soft bigotry of low expectations. Because no one expected Trump, in the 2016, election, to speak and behave like a normal candidate, he was held to a lower effective standard than his rivals in both parties. Because no one expected him, during his presidency, to be orderly and responsible, his endless scandals were framed as business as usual. And because no one now expects him to be a responsible political figure with a coherent vision for the country, it’s as if no one blinks an eye when he rants and raves on the campaign trail.

It’s not that there aren’t legitimate reasons to be concerned about Biden’s age. He is already the oldest person to serve in the Oval Office. The issue here is one of proportion and consequence. Biden may (perhaps 😑😒) be unable to do the job, at some point in the future; but Trump, it seems to me, already is. (IOW- Trump is crazy!)

One of those is a lot more concerning than the other.

Consider his remarks at a recent gathering of the National Rifle Association in Harrisburg, Pa. “We have to win in November, or we’re not going to have Pennsylvania. They’ll change the name. They’re going to change the name of Pennsylvania,” Trump said.

Who, exactly, is going to change the name of Pennsylvania? And to what? I don’t know. I doubt Trump does either.

Or consider the time, last November, when Trump confused China and North Korea, telling an audience of supporters in Florida that “Kim Jong Un leads 1.4 billion people, and there is no doubt about who the boss is. And they want me to say he’s not an intelligent man.”

There was also the time that Trump mistook Nikki Haley, his former ambassador to the United Nations, for Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House.

“Nikki Haley, you know they, do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it. All of it, because of lots of things like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guard, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that. These are very dishonest people,” Trump said, repeating his false claim that Pelosi was responsible for the failure of Capitol security on Jan. 6.

If you would like, you can also try to make sense of the former president’s recent attempt to describe a missile defense system:

“I will build an Iron Dome over our country, a state-of-the-art missile defense shield made in the U.S.A.,” Trump said, before taking an unusual detour. “These are not muscle guys here, they’re muscle guys up here, right,” he continued, gesturing to his arms and his head to emphasize, I guess, that the people responsible for building such systems are capable and intelligent.

“And they calmly walk to us, and ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. They’ve only got 17 seconds to figure this whole thing out. Boom. OK. Missile launch. Whoosh. Boom,” he added.

I assume Trump is describing the pressure of actually manning a missile defense system. Even so, one would think that a former president — currently vying to be the next president — would at least try to be a little more articulate.

But this gets to one of the oddest things about this election cycle so far. There is no shortage of coverage of President Biden’s age, even if there’s no evidence that his age has been an obstacle to his ability to perform his duties. Indeed, it is plainly true that Biden has been an unusually successful president in areas, like legislative negotiations, that require skill and mental acuity.

Coverage of Biden’s age, in other words, has more to do with the vibes of an “elderly” president — he isn’t as outwardly vigorous and robust as we would like — than it does with any particular issue with his performance.

In contrast to the obsessive coverage of Biden’s age, there is comparatively little coverage of Trump’s obvious deficiencies in that department. If we are going to use public comments as the measure of mental fitness, then the former president is clearly at a disadvantage.

Unfortunately for Biden, Trump benefits from something akin to the soft bigotry of low expectations. Because no one expected Trump, in the 2016 election, to speak and behave like a normal candidate, he was held to a lower effective standard than his rivals in both parties. Because no one expected him, during his presidency, to be orderly and responsible, his endless scandals were framed as business as usual. And because no one now expects him to be a responsible political figure with a coherent vision for the country, it’s as if no one blinks an eye when he rants and raves on the campaign trail.

It’s not that there aren’t legitimate reasons to be concerned about Biden’s age. He is already the oldest person to serve in the Oval Office. The issue here is one of proportion and consequence. Biden may be unable to do the job at some point in the future; Trump, it seems to me, already is.

One of those is a lot more concerning than the other.

Right wing cultist "MAGAism Trumpzis" are rooted in George Wallace racism politics

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Jamelle Bouie 

In a post for the new Opinion blog — which you should read! — I argued that there’s nothing mysterious or hard to "get" about Donald Trump’s appeal to a large segment of (MAGA cult extremist❗ ) American right wing voters. 

Racist George Wallace Has an Heir Apparent

It is not hard to find, throughout American history, Trump-like demagogues (like the KuKlux Klan) with (cult ) loyal followings. And these men tend to represent, most often, the popular expression of a certain will to power — the freedom to dominate. In practical terms, this means the freedom of the settler to seize the land around him and expel its original inhabitants, or it can mean the freedom of the master to expropriate the labor of others. Either way, these demagogues stand for a supposed right to exclude and exploit, always in defense of one hierarchy or another.

Beyond the obvious reasons, I’ve been thinking about this freedom to dominate because I have been reading “Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power” by the historian Jefferson Cowie. The book, which won the Pulitzer Prize last year, is essentially a history of the freedom to dominate in the United States, told through the story of Barbour County, Ala., an unusually consequential place in the nation’s history.

I am just about done with the book, which is to say I am at the point where Cowie turns the focus to George Wallace, a native of Barbour County and one of the most repellent, politically gifted and, well, interesting Americans of the middle of the 20th century.

I have to admit, I am fascinated by Wallace, ever since I read Dan T. Carter’s excellent biography, “The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism and the Transformation of American Politics.” 

Wallace was, without question, one of the most talented politicians of his generation, a man who could turn, as Cowie observes, defeat on the policy into victory on the politics. 

Unfortunately for the country, Wallace’s many talents were tethered to an amorality that led him over just a few years to drop the racial moderation of his early career and embrace the most virulently segregationist views imaginable.

MAGA Trumpzi is a NAZI and a right wing demogogue (a political leader who seeks support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument.)

In going through Cowie’s account of Wallace’s (bigot❗😡) career, I was struck by how skillfully the demagogue articulated this freedom to dominate, weaving it into a narrative that leveraged the sacred symbols of American democracy. 

Specifically, here is Wallace confronting the deputy attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach as federal authorities attempt to carry out a court order to integrate the University of Alabama. Wallace, Cowie writes, began what amounted to a five-minute diatribe on states’ rights. “The unwelcomed, unwanted, unwarranted, and force-induced intrusion upon the campus of the University of Alabama today of the might of the Central Government offers frightful example of the oppression of the rights, privileges and sovereignty of this state by officers of the federal government.” The “threat of force” from the feds lay outside of law and justice. He lectured everyone on the import of the Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” It was only because he was there, Wallace claimed, that thousands of angry Alabamians were not there in his stead. He would not accept trampling on “the exercise of the heritage of freedom and liberty under the law.”

Reading this, it is not all that hard to see how Wallace was able to bring his message to the nation at large, blending anti-Black racism together with opposition to the federal state into a new, potent brew.

A final thought: Wallace was a smart, clever and intellectually agile man. We are probably lucky that our Trump MAGA demagogue, dangerous as he is, lacks those particular attributes. Even so, if Wallace has a legacy in national politics, it is very clearly Trump.