I started this publication when I concluded that the deterioration of our democracy had become a top threat to the future of my children and, especially, my grandchildren. That conclusion is based on a fundamental belief that the type of government that one lives under has profound effects on the quality of one’s life.

When our founders created the United States of America, they determined that government derives its “just powers from the consent of the governed” and established a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”. It was unprecedented. Other attempts had previously been made with varying degrees of success. But none were extant at the time, and none had ever set such lofty goals.

Such a democracy was understood, from the start, to be the most fragile of all governmental structures. As Dennis Rasmussen points out in his book, Fear of a Setting Sun, most of the founders, themselves, with the notable exception of James Madison, expected it to fail prior to their own death. But they thought the noble experiment was worth trying anyway.

I am a genealogist and have spent much of the past year investigating the experiences of my wife’s maternal ancestors, all of whom emigrated from the Herford district of the Kingdom of Prussia (now Germany) in the 1850s. Karl Sieveking, a historian from the area, in his 1988 piece Our emigrants from Herford, described the economic factors that pushed Herford residents to emigrate:

[Changes] put these already poor people under the subsistence level, and bad harvests, price rises and the loss of employment led to the inevitable catastrophe. This was the case in the years 1845-48, when successive bad harvests led to a food shortage of exceptional proportions, and simultaneously the decline of the linen industry began [… leading] to disastrous mass unemployment [and] the worst famine ever known.

For reasons such as these, in the first half of the 19^th century, many emigrated to America where they found success and wrote home encouraging others to follow. However, Sieveking reports that, by the second half of the century, motivation to emigrate had been supplemented with:

the “pulling” forces of America, like success in a career, land ownership, wealth, social improvement and more freedom.

Those very forces had earlier been identified in our founding documents as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. Our immigrant ancestors were so inspired by these ideals that they volunteered (!) to fight in the Civil War within years of immigrating to the “Land of Lincoln” (Illinois) as children. Their children then took up arms against their own homeland, Germany, in WWI. And their grandchildren did the same in WWII. The founders’ noble experiment in government had succeeded to the point that immigrants, with no cultural, historical, religious, or familial bonds to America, would put their lives on the line to defend it!

We just celebrated our 250^th anniversary, a milestone that no other democracy has ever attained. I write these articles because I want my grandchildren to be part of this noble experiment, just as I have been, to live in freedom under a government of their choosing. And because I believe, as history has proven over and over, that there is no guarantee it will happen. Ours is, after all, an aging democracy.

Of course, writing articles on Substack can facilitate my goal only indirectly, at best. My most immediate intent is to drive you to ask yourself the same two crucial questions that I have asked myself:

• What kind of government do you want?

• How important is that to you and why?

Before proceeding, I ask that you think about each of those questions carefully and answer them as honestly as you can. Please take a moment to do so.

If you agree with everything I’ve written in this publication, then I hope, at least, that I’ve been able to provide you with resources to help undergird those beliefs.

But I very much doubt there is even one of you that aligns with me generally, let alone perfectly. Some of you encourage me with affirmations but, even then, I recognize that I differ from you in many ways, some significantly. Just as the founders differed tremendously on even the most mundane of issues, you and I and the other readers of this publication differ. This is the essence of democracy. It is a constant struggle to find a path forward for a diverse population. Democracy gives us a mechanism by which we might find such a path.

If this publication is to be of any value, it cannot be simply a place where I spew my own set of ideas and perceived truths. It needs, instead, to be a place where we can share our varied opinions, concerns, suggestions, and aspirations. I, therefore, encourage you to share your responses to my articles (in the Comments section for each article). And, in particular, I ask that you share your answers to the questions I posed here. If not on Substack, itself, at least with others outside of this platform. We will get what we want only if we make it known.

So, let me now answer those questions to start that conversation.

What kind of government do you want?

A constitution-based representative democracy (aka a republic).

This is a simplistic answer in that there are many possible versions of such a government, each with its own nuances. I have written about some of those nuances in these pages but I think we need to start first with the basics.

How important is that to you and why?

Extremely important. Sufficiently important, in fact, to drive me to make changes in my life this year to try to be part of the solution.

Consider the alternatives:

• Direct democracy

• Monarchy

• Communism

• Authoritarianism

• Oligarchy

• Theocracy

I am frightened when I consider what my life would be like under any of those (yes, even direct democracy). And history teaches me that the government of any nation changes over time between any of these.

My grandchildren, like those everywhere, deserve better.

In my prior article, I asserted that the Republican party is lost.

I observed that America is worse off because ours is a two-party democracy and such democracies break when either party breaks. Similarly, the world is worse off because, as they say, when America sneezes, the whole world catches a cold. This gloomy outlook is, however, based on another assertion that is worth examining in more depth … that ours is a two-party democracy. I return to that topic today because I think it essential that we, the people, understand how our governance system works and be decisive about how we want it to work in the future. This is not something that simply “happens to us” but something that we have chosen.

The constitutionally-aware know that there is nothing in our founding documents about political parties. Political parties are not a part of our government (unlike, for example, Communist China). And there were no political parties when George Washington assumed office in 1789 to lead the very first American administration. However, parties formed quickly during that very first term, growing out of debates about the proper role of the newly formed federal government. Should it create a national bank? (It did.) Should it assume the Revolutionary War debts of the states? (It did not.) And so on. With each new issue it faced, debate swirled around competing political philosophies. The Federalists argued for an empowered federal government which was, in their view, required to build a great nation. They found their voice in Alexander Hamilton, the Secretary of the Treasury. The Anti-Federalists argued against such empowerment, seeking to let the states operate as independently as possible and constrain the federal government to its most critical and minimal functions. They found their voice in Thomas Jefferson, the Secretary of State. That debate was simply an extension of the debate over the Constitution, itself. The guiding principle of the Articles of Confederation, which defined our government prior to adoption of the Constitution, was the preservation of the independence and sovereignty of the states. The Constitution formalized our adoption of federalism, a system in which power is shared between the states and the nation. The question became, and has been ever since, where the balance is to be struck. Think about that question for a minute. There is no right or wrong to either side of the argument. I propose that, because the tension is natural, there will forever be two sides to that argument. Further, assuming the power balance between the nation and its states evolves over time, the proponents on either side will forever be roughly equal in number. We are, after all, continuing to seek the balance between the lived experiences of the founders … both deemed unacceptable: one of absolute national power (in the form of the King of Britain) and one of no national power (in the form of the colonies and the early government under the Articles).

And so, political parties emerged in America’s infancy. James Madison soon acknowledged their inevitability, writing in his Parties essay of 1792:

In every political society parties are unavoidable. A difference of interests, real or supposed, is the most natural and fruitful source of them.

The Federalist Party included the likes of Hamilton, John Adams, and John Jay. The Democratic-Republican Party (not liking the anti-federalist label) included Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, and George Mason. And there have been many more parties over time including famous ones like Bull Moose, Peoples, Reform, and No Labels. In fact, in 2024, the following parties had candidates on the presidential election ballots across America (in order of popular votes received):

• Republican Party

• Democratic Party

• Green Party

• Libertarian Party

• Party for Socialism and Liberation

• American Solidarity Party

• Constitution Party

• Socialist Equality Party

• Socialist Workers Party

• Godliness, Truth, and Justice Party

• Approval Voting Party

• Prohibition Party

• Liberal Party

• Socialist Party

Wow! And, whoa!?! Wait a minute, Abraham. How can you possibly assert that we have a two-party system?

We do not have a two-party system by design. We have one by effect. And we all know this reality. In 2024, as is the norm, the top two parties received 98% of the popular votes and 100% of the electoral votes. There have been exceptions, as was the case in the Wilson/Taft/Roosevelt election of 1912. But it is the rule.

Why?

Let me introduce you to Duverger’s Law of Political Science. Maurice Duverger, a French jurist, sociologist, and political scientist, observed that (per Wikipedia):

In political systems with single-member districts and the first-past-the-post voting system, […] only two powerful political parties tend to control power every election cycle.

It is critically important that you understand that prior statement. It is worth rereading.

By design, our system is one in which the country is divided into 435 districts and the House of Representatives (the body meant to most directly reflect us, the people) is comprised of a single representative from each district. Further, the elections of those representatives are ones in which the candidate receiving the most votes, regardless of whether it is a majority, wins the seat. The same is generally true of our primaries. The Senate and Presidential elections are slightly different, but the differences are nuanced, not fundamental. Duverger’s Law holds that this electoral design leads to the effect of two-party governance. The reason that new political parties fail in America is not necessarily because they are off track or lack commitment. They are destined to fail because the representational and electoral methodologies we have chosen to use prevent them from succeeding.

If you, like me, have supported third-party candidates in the past, you know the futility. If I vote for him/her, I’ll be splitting the vote for one major party and giving the other major party an improved chance to win, an outcome I may detest even more. So, we vote for one of the major party candidates. In the 2024 election, fewer than 2% of us voted for anyone other than the candidates put forward by the two major parties, despite the plethora of alternatives and record-level disenchantment with those two parties. It’s Duverger’s Law.

If you are as frustrated with the Dem and Rep parties as I am, and you want to be an agent for change, you must first decide what it is that needs changing. Most will respond that one or both of the parties need changing. (I think both.) But I write today to make the case that it is the governance system itself that has led us to this place and, therefore, is in the most need of change. Let me explain what I see as the generic, party-agnostic, down-stream effects of two-party democracy (as compared to multiparty democracy which we’ll come to).

First, binary choices drive us to binary thinking. Rep v Dem. Friend v foe. Right v wrong. True v false. Etc. Psychologists Erin Myers and Virgil Zeigler Hill point out that binary thinking, splitting in their vernacular, is a natural defense mechanism that is:

a normal aspect of psychological development during infancy and early childhood, but it is expected to recede once the child has developed.

Putting it simply, binary thinking ignores the shades of grey reality and is, outside of some will-it-kill-me scenarios, unhealthy.

Second, there is the problem of unbalanced representation. As Duverger observed in his Factors in a Two-Party and Multiparty System:

the [party] that wins is favored, and the other suffers. The first one is over-represented--its proportion of seats is greater than its percentage of the votes-while the party that finishes second is usually under-represented--its proportion of seats is smaller than its percentage of the votes.

Third, polarization. In the same piece, Duverger proposed using this psychological term to describe the convergence of voters towards the two strongest parties, as discussed above. But I think we’ve all come to recognize that this partisan polarization has evolved into something much deeper and darker. A Pew Research Center report released in March found that:

Americans are more likely than people in other countries […] to question the morality of their fellow countrymen.

David French, commenting on this same survey in an opinion piece in the New York Times, lamented that:

American hatred is growing so great that partisans, perversely enough, often view kindness and tolerance from political opponents as a threat. The only good people are people who agree with them. The supposedly decent person on the other side? We have a name for him or her: a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Fourth, consider how a party must function in a two-party system in order to survive. As I wrote last week, each party must reevaluate its appeal to voters on a regular basis. Implied in that responsibility is an openness to change. But what is it that might change. Certainly, processes, mechanics, and marketing can change (as the Republican Party did following the publication of the Growth & Opportunity Project in 2013). But, more importantly, principles may change. Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party, by then known simply as the Democratic Party, splintered in the 1850s over its support of slavery and finally, in the 1860 election, lost its hold on government to the fledgling anti-slavery Republican Party and its little-known candidate, Abraham Lincoln. Fast forward to 1964 when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and famously (and possibly in jest) told his Press Secretary, Bill Moyers:

Well, I think we may have lost the south for your lifetime – and mine.

My point is that political parties must be willing to change principles to continue relevance. But I also worry that parties may go principle-shopping in order to attract voters. Politicians and political parties do us no favors when they pander to our worst instincts and desires. In the binary world of a two-party system, there is less motivation to stick to any particular principle than in a multiparty system. In the latter, you need only attract some voters to your cause to survive. In a two-party system, you die unless you can compete at the 50% level. So, you are prone to chase voters instead of attracting them.

Fifth, and possibly most importantly, two-party governance is the root cause of the baneful and anti-democratic practice of gerrymandering … which I’ve written about multiple times. In the past year, our two parties have commenced a gerrymandering war that will leave us with almost no competitive congressional districts. That will be the day that representational government is truly dead.

Summarizing, we didn’t intend to build a two-party democracy, but we have chosen representation and election practices that ensure it. And, though two-party democracy isn’t theoretically wrong, the effects of such governance are progressively more negative. It is time to improve our democracy. That’s why I wrote at the start of the year in support of a House that better represents us.

For those of you who think that proportional representation and multiparty governance is pie-in-the-sky thinking, consider that the United States is one of the few remaining two-party democracies in the world and it only officially adopted this system with the passing of the Uniform Congressional District Act in 1967! It can be changed. In fact, the only other major democracy that shares our system, is the country from which we adopted it in the first place, the United Kingdom. And its days there may be numbered. Britain’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, said just last year that proportional representation’s “time has come”.

Spot on, mate.

I can hear it now …

What are you talking about? The Republican Party holds the Presidency, a majority in the House, a majority in the Senate, a majority of the governorships, and a majority of all seats in the various state legislatures. If anyone is lost, Abraham, it is you! If you really are the objective analyst that you claim to be, you must acknowledge this evidence as proof of success.

I do.

But I did not claim the party was unsuccessful. I said, instead, that the party is lost, and I ask that you hear me out.

In 2012, following Mitt Romney’s election loss to Barack Obama, the Republican National Committee (RNC) feared that the party had lost relevance at the national level. It initiated the Growth & Opportunity Project (aka the ‘RNC autopsy’) “to provide an honest review of the 2012 election cycle and a path forward for the Republican Party to ensure success in winning more elections”. Though I did not consider Obama’s reelection surprising, I thought the RNC’s undertaking commendable. Ours is a two-party democracy (more on that in my next article) and, in a healthy two-party democracy, each party regularly undertakes such self-reflection with the goal of adjusting to the electorate, as well as the times, to attract voters. After all, ours is a government of the people. The party is merely the conduit through which we choose who among us is to represent us and our interests. If the party does not reflect a sufficient number of people in the electorate, it withers and dies. The RNC sought to stave off such a future and published its recommendations in March of 2013.

The question I pose today is whether those efforts are the cause of the party’s successes noted above.

If you read the RNC report, you’ll find that most of their recommended changes were in messaging and election processes. They did not fundamentally change their principles. And this is key. The party stood by its traditional conservative principles (as expressed in the 2012 Republican Party Platform) of economic freedom, fiscal responsibility, national security, and traditional values while acknowledging that the electorate was changing and that they had to be more proactive in showing how these principles were beneficial to people of color and people in poverty.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum …

On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump entered an already crowded Republican presidential race.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, himself a candidate, told the Portsmouth (NH) Rotary Club on December 10, 2015:

You know why Donald Trump is not going to be our [Republican] nominee? Because he is not Republican.

Trump was, of course, registered as a member of the Republican Party, but Graham was right in that Trump did not believe in or espouse Republican principles. But, as we all know, Graham was quite wrong about Trump’s prospects in the election. What did Graham, and many others, miss?

To understand the alternative path to party success, we must turn our attention back to our founders who studied deeply the history of the world, human nature, and prior attempts at democracy. They established a new democracy and warned us of its fragility.

Three years prior to the nation’s Constitutional Convention, Thomas Jefferson, who had helped draft Virginia’s constitution, wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia of the danger that lie ahead:

[Virginia] should look forward to a time, and that not a distant one, when corruption […] will have seized the heads of government, and be spread by them through the body of the people; […] Human nature is the same on every side of the Atlantic […]. The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold on us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.

During the Constitutional Convention, the founders agreed that the government needed a component which would execute the laws of the land … collect taxes, distribute funds, implement policy, maintain security, etc. Further, that component, what they name “the executive branch”, needed a leader. But how were they to ensure that such a leader, with access to immense power, would use that power for the good of the country? This question bedeviled them throughout the convention. The best answer they could devise was a governmental system that included checks and balances on the executive. But, to a man, I think, they recognized that they could not fully immunize our country from its greatest risk, tyranny arising from within the democratic system.

In arguing for the adoption of the proposed Constitution, James Madison acknowledged in Federalist No. 10 that:

Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people.

Similarly, in Federalist No. 1, Alexander Hamilton warned:

Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.

It is here that we find the alternative path to electoral success.

The Greek word, demagogue, literally means people leader. However, long before revolutionary times, the term had come to mean something far more menacing and dangerous. James Fenimore Cooper, in the “On Demagogues” chapter of his political essay of 1838, The American Democrat, described a demagogue as follows:

The true theatre of a demagogue is a democracy.

The peculiar office of a demagogue is to advance his own interests, by affecting a deep devotion to the interests of the people.

The demagogue always puts the people before the constitution and the laws.

While loudest in proclaiming his devotion to the majority, [the demagogue] is, in truth, opposing the will of the entire people, in order to effect his purposes with a part.

[The demagogue] appeals to passions and prejudices rather than to reason, and is in all respects, a man of intrigue and deception, of sly cunning and management.

Months earlier, 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln, in a talk he titled The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions, had warned the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, of the danger that such a person posed to our country:

Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.

In the same speech, just 12 years after the deaths of the last of the founders, Jefferson and John Adams, Lincoln observed that the American people had “found ourselves the legal inheritors of […] fundamental blessings” “conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us”. He then asked, “At what point shall we expect the approach of danger?” and answered presciently:

If [danger] ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

I put it to you that what we have witnessed in the last decade is not the principle-based resurgence of a healthy conservative party, but the rise of the long-forewarned demagogue.

President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner

July 24, 2026

And Lindsey Graham, of all people, called our attention to it in the very same Rotary talk of 2015:

Let your fear go, folks, as Republicans. Stand up for what makes us great. Tell Donald Trump, “You’re wrong.” Don’t be afraid of him leaving [the party] and losing an election. I’m not afraid of losing an election. I’m afraid of losing our soul.

Now consider how Graham became one of President Trump’s most outspoken supporters, a man whom Trump eulogized last week as a “great friend”. One might think that Graham simply had a change of heart as he came to know Trump better over the years. I never believed that. Something else was at play. I finally found the answer in ’s The Corruption of Lindsey Graham (The Bulwark, 2023) which I read upon Graham’s passing last month. It is a story of demagoguery and politics. For the first time, I came to truly understand the founders’ fears.

In the 1836 piece, The American Democrat, Cooper explained that there are few people able to fill the role of demagogue, but there are many at risk of succumbing to it:

There is a large class of political men in this country, who, while they scarcely merit the opprobium of being termed demagogues, are not properly exempt from the imputation of falling into some of their most dangerous vices.

Saletan’s piece makes this clear in exquisite detail. What is a died-in-the-wool Republican, like Graham, to do when the Republican voters choose the demagogue as their preferred candidate? What is a Republican lawmaker to do when that demagogue ascends to the White House? What is a Republican voter to do when faced with a choice between the demagogue of their party and the candidate from the opposition party?

In March 2016, after he had dropped out of the presidential campaign, Graham implored Republican voters to unite against Trump, reminding them of Trump’s “race baiting” and “religious bigotry” and that Trump had “said he would order our soldiers to kill innocent children, civilian noncombatants”. He explained that Trump knew how to “prey on people’s fear” and lamented:

When [Trump] said most illegal immigrants are rapists and drug dealers . . . looking back, we should have basically kicked him out of the party.

He accused the party elders of having “hid in the corner” allowing the danger to “grow”.

But Graham, too, would cave in.

Two years later, Graham told North Korean leader Kim Jong-un why he had better do as Trump wished:

If you play Trump, that’s the end of you.

Similarly, he advised the Chinese ambassador:

If I were y’all, I’d work with [Trump], or else. Do not get on the wrong side of this guy. I’ve been there.”

Graham was not speaking about American politics in these cases, but he had, in my view, succinctly explained how the Republican party had been lost. It was no longer the party of conservative principles, but the party of a demagogue who was now using his newfound powers to enforce his will on anything and everything … or else!

As if to prove my point, when Trump ran for reelection in 2020, the RNC did not even try to develop a Republican Party Platform! This was the first time that had happened for either party in, at least, 124 years.

And what is the effect of this turn away from principles?

Last week, I walked in our county fair parade in support of a lifelong Republican who had recently retired from a 34-year career in the US Navy and is now running for Congress … as a Democrat. She left the Republican Party because it had veered sharply away from much of what she believed in and had fought for and was now “morally lost”.

At that same parade, I struck up a conversation with a gentleman who had been raised in a multi-generation ranch family of North Dakota conservatives, every one of whom, like him, was a lifelong Republican. As a young man, he had served in the US Army at the DMZ in South Korea. He told me that he no longer knew what the Republican Party stood for, that it no longer represented him, that he felt “abandoned”, and that the party lacked “real leadership”. He said, “I can’t believe it, but I find myself voting for more and more Democrats.”

Yesterday, a friend confided that he was a life-long Republican who had changed his registration to independent because neither party stood for the principles that he continues to hold dear, those of fiscal responsibility, limited government, military restraint, and personal freedom. The only policy area in which he aligns somewhat with the Trump administration is that of immigration but he bemoaned the “heavy-handed” way in which the administration was trying to address that problem.

If I were a party-first Democrat, I would rejoice in these affiliation swings. But I am not. And I do not.

Our two-party system only works if the parties stand for timeless, but opposing, principles and compete in the political realm based on those principles. As Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke did. As Hamilton and Jefferson did. Whether we slip fully into tyranny, the common end-state of demagoguery, is yet to be determined. But we have already lost the political balance that has made America the world’s most successful democracy to date. And that is a loss for the entire world.

I am, once again, deeply appalled and saddened by what I learned this morning about how our government is now functioning. I write about it here because I would be surprised if even one of my readers was aware of this important story and because, unless people like us speak up, there will be no consequences for those responsible.

In this case, executive agencies, acting at the direction of President Trump, punished democratic-leaning states for voting against him in the 2024 election. They did so by canceling financial awards (aka grants) destined for those states. You might say, “this is not news”. But it is. Whereas there had previously been only hearsay, rumors, suspicion, and innuendo along these lines, the DOE confessed in court on July 15 to doing just that.

Here’s what happened …

Note: I use “*” below to highlight the information that came to light on July 15 and will clarify in the next section.

Immediately after taking office on January 20, 2025, President Trump established the Department of Governmental Ethics (DOGE). In the ensuing months, various financial awards were terminated under the auspices of DOGE.

On May 15, 2025, Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced a new Policy on Ensuring Responsibility for Financial Assistance “to increase accountability and promote responsible stewardship of American taxpayer dollars.” He noted that a review had been commenced to determine which, if any, financial awards were found to have been inappropriate.

On June 4, 2025, Neeta Thakur, a pulmonary and critical care physician at UC San Francisco, and others filed a class action lawsuit in US District Court, Thakur v. Trump, against the administration asserting that:

On and after January 20, 2025, Defendants Trump and DOGE, through a flurry of Executive Orders and other directives, commanded the federal agencies named as Defendants in this Complaint to terminate thousands of previously awarded research grants.

On June 23, 2025, the District Court granted the Thakur plaintiffs a preliminary injunction and provisional class certification. The government appealed.

*In September 2025, the DOE submitted to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) lists of 2,342 projects to “retain, modify, or terminate”. 624 of those were then designated for termination, but not all would be.

On October 1, 2025, the DOE announced the completion of thier review and “the termination of 321 financial awards supporting 223 projects, resulting in a savings of approximately $7.56 billion dollars for American taxpayers.” The announcement explained:

Using this review process, DOE evaluated each of these awards and determined that they did not meet the economic, national security or energy security standards necessary to justify continued investment.

Secretary Wright expounded:

“President Trump promised to protect taxpayer dollars and expand America’s supply of affordable, reliable, and secure energy. Today’s cancellation’s deliver on that commitment.”

Surprisingly, Russell Vought, Director of the OMB, straying from that line of high-minded reasoning, posted the following on X that same day:

Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled. More info to come from @ENERGY.

The projects are in the following states: CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA

*The DOE subsequently announced that 284 specific grants were terminated in October 2025 and none since.

The bombshell …

All the while, Thakur v. Trump had been winding its way through the appellate process.

Thank goodness for that.

On July 15, 2026, 12 days ago, the parties in Thakur v. Trump filed Exhibit F with the appellate court. The document is a “stipulations of fact” agreement between the otherwise adversarial parties. Such agreements are made to speed resolution of the case. There is no need to investigate and prove what both parties already agree to be true. The parties to this particular agreement were the plaintiffs (Thakur et al) and the DOE. The agreement is signed by Jeff Novak, the Principal Deputy General Counsel for the DOE.

Stipulations 2, 3, and 4 in the agreement are the items I denoted with “*” above, all of which are pertinent, though somewhat mundane.

But the agreement also includes the following damning statements of fact about the 624 grants designated for termination in the Portfolio Review Process:

6. With one exception, the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing Senators.

7. The remaining approximately 340 grants proposed for termination were not terminated in October 2025, and they have not since been terminated. All such grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to President Trump in the 2024 election or has at least one Republican-caucusing Senator.

8. DOE accepts that neither the inclusion of the ARCHES grant [of interest to Thakur] nor any other grants in the October [termination] notice tranche was based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factor.

9. DOE accepts that the inclusion of grants in the October notice tranche was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state.

Period.

Full stop.

Fact.

In the record.

Thank goodness we still have a court system where truth can be revealed.

The truth …

Two important truths here deserve our attention.

The first truth is that our government is not being forthright with us, the very people who elected them and entrusted them with serving us. In all official channels, the administration told us that they were protecting taxpayer funds, addressing our nation’s energy needs, expanding our energy supplies, and ensuring our nation’s security. Just as they should. But the truth was that they were instead punishing states whose voters had not helped elect President Trump … voters who very likely feared just such abhorrent behavior.

The second truth is that our government is engaged in such appalling cronyism to start with. If you, as a state, support the president, especially to help him get elected, you are financially rewarded. If you do not help the president, you are financially strangled. These are the same states that President Trump then asks to gerrymander their elections to suppress voices of the opposition. Here we start to understand the deep perniciousness of cronyism.

Thomas Nast’s portrayal of Tammany Hall under Boss Tweed

Of course, most of us will never know such truths because the purveyors of falsehoods do all in their power to prevent the truth from being revealed. I am grateful to for pointing me to this revelation in her daily post on Substack yesterday.

I hope that, in writing this, I have helped enable you to act on knowledge and truth rather than innuendo and lies.

A final note …

The DOE suggested that they were, in at least some cases, correcting the same sort of political cronyism under the Biden administration … as in their October 1 announcement:

Of the 321 financial awards terminated, 26% were awarded between Election Day and Inauguration Day.

If the Biden administration did reward political allies with taxpayer-funded financial awards, it would be just as despicable and worthy of our wrath. But the DOE provided no evidence to back that suggestion. I would absolutely welcome an investigation to determine the veracity of the suggestion. For now, it remains the kind of innuendo that, all too often, turns our head away from truth.

As most of you understand, I am concerned that our Executive is breaking our democracy. I am distressed by specific actions of our current chief executive, Donald Trump, some of which I have written about on these pages. But, as George Will carefully explains in his excellent treatise, The Conservative Sensibility, America’s chief executives have been pushing the limits on their authority, and thereby shifting the balance of power, since the days of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson prior to WWI … more than a century ago.

Our nation’s founders were acutely aware, and fearful, of this eventuality. Most historians that I’ve read report that the most debated topic in the Constitutional Convention was how they might create an effective democracy that would be resilient to aspiring authoritarians. For example, after reviewing the proposed Constitution, Thomas Jefferson wrote separately to James Madison and John Adams expressing his belief that the President should be constrained with a one-year term limit! In the end, they settled for a trilateral system of government (legislative, executive, and judicial) in which the legislative branch was given the most power, by far, as well as multiple avenues through which they could check the executive.

While I am fearful of SCOTUS’ recent shift toward presidential deference, and I disagree with some of their recent rulings, I believe that the judicial branch as a whole has, generally, been fulfilling its constitutional duties.

The legislative branch, aka Congress, on the other hand, has been failing … miserably.

My experience researching and exploring topics for this publication has made it clear to me that Congress’ abdication of its duties has become the most pressing problem that confronts us … assuming we want to retain the democracy bequeathed to us by our forebears … and I do. Putting it more bluntly, Congress is not doing its job.

But just what is its job?

The Constitution’s very first sentence (after the Preamble) is:

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Article 1 goes on, in Section 8, to describe the many responsibilities of Congress including:

• Raising revenue (taxes)

• Borrowing money (debt)

• Regulating commerce

• Naturalizing citizens

• Establishing a currency

• Establishing a postal system

• Managing intellectual property (to promote science and the arts)

• Constituting the judiciary

• Enforcing international law

• Establishing military forces

• Declaring war

• Making “all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers”

The Constitution goes on to task the judiciary with interpretation of the law and to task the executive with implementation of the law. But Congress is to make the law.

Some of you may object and would quickly cite a number of examples where you think it is the President or SCOTUS that has acted inappropriately. But I suggest that many of those problems would be avoided or addressed if Congress fulfilled its responsibilities. Putting it simply, Congress has the ability to hold the President accountable to the law as well as the ability to change the law if SCOTUS interprets it in a way that they had not intended.

This perspective has led me, for the first time in my life, to get involved in our Congressional elections during this midterm cycle. I am actively volunteering (and financially supporting) a candidate for Congress whom I believe understands Congress’ failure in these regards and intends to be a change agent to “right the ship”.

But I remain nervous.

Congressional candidates, including mine, campaign on pledges of benefits to the voters in their district. A military base here. A water project there. A grant to improve this. A program to improve that.

But that is not their job! Their job is not to seek pork for their constituents, but to run the country.

So, the question for this election cycle, as pertains to our national elections, is whether we want them to rededicate themselves to their Constitutionally mandated responsibilities.

Maybe you are inclined to say no because you do not share my concern about the shift of power from Congress to the President. If that’s the case, I urge you to think more long-term. Ask yourself what you’ll say when the President is one of “them”. If we remain a democracy, which is my fervent hope, it will happen. Then ask yourself whether you’ll accept that President having all of these newfound powers and, if the last century is any guide, even more.

Every guardrail that is removed, every barrier that is broken, every precedent that is overturned, and every law that is ignored is another step toward the kind of tyranny that our founders struggled to prevent. I assure you that, just as the founders acknowledged, such power is more safely vested in a Congress of 535 representatives than it is in a single person.

If our democracy is to be saved, Congress must reassert itself. And that will happen only if we, the voters, insist on it. Thankfully, the Constitution requires us to act/react every two years. And that time is, once again, upon us.

So, this year at least, ask not what your Congressional candidate can do for you, but what the candidate is willing to do for our beloved country and our descendants. Then vote as if our future depends on it … because it does.

Reader’s Digest, circa 1920

On Independence Day, I shared my conviction that we, the people, can be change-makers and that we can do so by acting in even very small ways. Mr. Shapiro and I do so by researching, writing, and publishing these articles. Today, I share with you some simple ideas on how you can help us, at The Government I Want, be agents for the kind of changes we want to see in the world.

J. M. Flagg’s depiction of Uncle Sam for WWI recruiting

First, understand that anyone with an email address (i.e., everyone) can subscribe to any Substack, including ours (which is free). They’ll get our published articles in their email Inbox just like you. If they wish to leverage the full power of the Substack platform, they can create a Substack account. But that is purely optional.

So, how might you be able to help us expand our reach?

• Tell someone to check out “The Government I Want” on Substack.

• Credit us when you repeat or expand upon an idea you read about here.

• Forward one of our emails to someone you think might listen.

• Mention our publication in another online community (preferably with a link)!

• “Like” an article or note of ours that you appreciate.

• Better yet, “Restack” it for the benefit of your Substack network.

You can also improve the discussion we are having by doing any of the following:

• “Comment” on one of our articles, sharing your own nuanced views about the topic at hand to expand the conversation.

• Interact with us, and (indirectly) the broader Substack community, by posting, and responding to, notes on our publication’s Notes page.

• Interact with me directly through my dedicated Substack page, perhaps suggesting issues we should tackle.

In whatever you do, we encourage you to accompany the act with a thoughtful comment to let others know that this is a community in which we value respect and honor debate.

So, no, we don’t want your money.

But we do want to raise the level of conversation about our government and increase the likelihood that we’ll build a better democracy for our descendants. And anything you might do along the above lines will help us accomplish that goal. I started this publication in November with a single subscriber, my wife. There are now 112 of you … for which I am very grateful. But I know we could, and would, reach more with your help.

Thanks!

Today, as we celebrate America’s Independence Day, I ask that you take the time to give earnest thought to what we are celebrating, why we are celebrating it, and whether it is worth preserving.

The Founding

On September 5, 1774, following Britain’s blockade of Boston Harbor (itself a response to the Boston Tea Party), the First Continental Congress, convened in Philadelphia. The convention was attended by delegates from 12 of the 13 colonies (Georgia did not participate) and sought to obtain consensus on how the colonies might collectively respond to the British government’s actions.

On October 14, 1774, the Congress adopted the Declaration and Resolves that included the following:

The inhabitants of the English colonies in North-America, by the immutable laws of nature, the principles of the English constitution, and the several charters or compacts, have the following RIGHTS:

That they are entitled to life, liberty and property: and they have never ceded to any foreign power whatever, a right to dispose of either without their consent.

At the time, relatively few colonists advocated for independence from Britain. Most considered themselves loyal Brits who wanted to be treated more fairly but were locked in an ever-escalating spiral of tension and conflict with the Crown and Parliament.

On April 18, 1775, British General Thomas Gage, the military governor of Massachusetts, ordered Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith to destroy colonial military supplies thought to be stored at Concord, Massachusetts. That evening, physician and Patriot leader Joseph Warren informed other Patriots in Boston that British troops were assembling. Robert Newman and John Pulling placed lanterns in the belltower of the Old North Church, per a pre-arranged signal, to (incorrectly) warn Patriots across the harbor in Charlestown that the British troops were going to make a sea-based crossing. Meanwhile, Paul Revere and William Dawes, suspecting an attempt to capture their leaders, set off on their famous midnight ride to Lexington to warn those leaders, John Adams and John Hancock. The next day, April 19, Smith led 700 British troops east toward Concord where they came upon Patriot militias. The ensuing day-long combat came to be known as the Battles of Lexington and Concord and marked the beginning of the Revolutionary War.

On May 10, 1775, representatives from the colonies again convened in Philadelphia, as the Second Continental Congress. As before, they sought ways to manage, in a coordinated manner, the relationships between the Colonies and the British government. But now they also were tasked with taking charge of the de facto war that had commenced.

On January 10, 1776, Thomas Paine published (anonymously) Common Sense which both captured and enflamed growing sentiment for independence. Seven years later, at the end of the War, Paine reflected in The American Crisis, that “It was the cause of America that made me an author” … words that resonate with me today as I write this.

On June 7, 1776, the Congress took up The Resolution of Independence which had been proposed by Richard Henry Lee on behalf of the Virginia delegation and seconded by Adams. Though sentiment for independence was now very strong among the delegates (and growing in the general population), the Congress could not yet vote on the resolution because some of the delegations had not yet received approval to vote on such a resolution. And, of course, they had not yet agreed to the form of an independent nation. So, on June 11, the Congress formed committees to make recommendations on the three parts of Lee’s resolution:

• Independence.

• Foreign alliances.

• Confederation.

On July 1, 1776, the Congress formally considered Lee’s Resolution, but the South Carolina and Pennsylvania delegations were opposed and Delaware’s delegation split. On motion of the South Carolina delegation, the final vote was postponed for a day. Overnight, changes were negotiated and an additional delegate from Delaware’s delegation was sent for to break that delegation’s tie vote.

On July 2, 1776, the delegations to the Congress resolved the following (emphasis added) on an 11-0 vote:

That these United Colonies are, and, of right, ought to be, Free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connexion between them, and the state of Great Britain, is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

New York abstained because it still lacked approval to vote on the matter. Pennsylvania had been persuaded to be absent so that the official vote would be unanimous.

America had declared its independence!

The following day, July 3, Adams presciently wrote to his wife Abigail:

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America.

I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

The Congress then turned its attention to the work of the Committee of Five in regards to that newly-declared independence:

John Trumbull’s 1819 depiction of the presentation of the Declaration with (from left to right):

John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.

On July 4, 1776, after two days of debate by the Congress, “The Declaration being again read, was agreed to as follows”:

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America.

When, in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self -evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these, are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That, to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed.

The Declaration of Independence, as it soon came to be known, goes on (at length!) to justify independence. But it is the soaring words of its first two paragraphs (above) that became familiar, and inspirational, to most every American at the time and in the 250 years since. Adams was correct about America’s memorialization of our independence with an annual celebration but didn’t foresee that the Declaration justifying Congress’ act would supersede the act, itself, as the focal point of that celebration.

But declaring something to be true and it’s actually being true are not the same. Jeremy Bentham, a British philosopher, legal scholar, and social reformer very much of the same ilk as our nation’s founders, spoke for much of the British people when he published his reaction to the Declaration:

[T]he [British] nation will unite as one man, and teach this rebellious people, that it is one thing for them to say, the connection, which bound them to us, is dissolved, another to dissolve it; that to accomplish their independence is not quite so easy as to declare it: that there is no peace with them, but the peace of the King: no war with them, but that war, which offended justice wages against criminals.

In fact, we were already at war with the British … and it would go on for many difficult years. And then there was the small matter of actually establishing a new democratic nation-state which is, for me, the most important reason to celebrate this holiday. Therefore, allow me to share just a bit more history with you.

On November 15, 1877, the Congress finalized the Articles of Confederation, which had been drafted by the committee on confederation with John Dickinson as the principal writer.

On March 1, 1781, after ratification by all thirteen colonies, the Articles of Confederation took effect, and the United States had a formal government for the first time. But the war continued.

On October 17, 1781, British General Charles Cornwallis surrendered his forces at Yorktown to American General George Washington, marking the end of hostilities and the start of years-long negotiations.

On September 3, 1783, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris (negotiated by Franklin, Adams, and John Jay), Britain recognized the independence of the colonies as “to be free sovereign and Independent States”. With newfound independence, however, disputes between the independent states grew rapidly over issues around territory, war pensions, taxation, and trade.

On May 25, 1787, fearing the new country was on the brink of collapse, the Congress of the Confederation convened the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Though tasked with revising the Confederation, some of the delegates, including James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, agitated for a complete do-over. Soon, the Convention had embarked on writing an entirely new constitution with a stronger federal government.

Howard Chandler Christy’s 1940 depiction of the signing of the Constitution

On September 17, 1787, the Convention approved the new Constitution of the United States of America and submitted it to the Congress. On September 28, the Congress voted unanimously to submit the Constitution to the States for ratification.

On June 21, 1788, New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the Constitution, achieving the two-thirds majority required by the Articles.

On September 17, 1788, the Congress certified the ratification of the Constitution and we were on our way.

The Improvements

Take a moment to reconsider all that you just read. Our country was established through tremendous effort, over many years, on the part of a multitude of individuals with a plethora of competing beliefs, wishes, and yearnings. I consider it one of humankind’s greatest achievements. Its greatness is not in the documents that were written long ago but in the establishment of, and commitment to, a dynamic enterprise that, against all odds, would evolve over the ensuing centuries to become “more perfect”, just as those founders had hoped:

• 1791: Adoption of the Bill of Rights.

• 1800s: Popular election of the President implemented (state by state).

• 1865: Slavery abolished.

• 1868: Equal protection under the law adopted.

• 1870: Vote granted to non-white men.

• 1913: Popular election of Senators implemented.

• 1920: Vote granted to women.

• 1924: Citizenship granted to Native Americans.

• 1943: “Chinese Exclusion” to citizenship revoked.

• 1951: Presidential term limits adopted.

• 1964: Civil Rights Act passed.

• 1965: Voting Rights Act passed.

Out of the relative chaos of new-found independence, through tremendous turbulence along the way, we built a nation that became the world’s leader, not by diktat but by the power of ideas about freedom, liberty, justice, and the rule of law.

The Future

However, we are not done. Nor should we be. As Jefferson wrote to Samuel Kercheval in 1816, in words identifying himself as one of our “barbarous ancestors” and later transcribed on the southeast wall of the Jefferson Memorial (emphasis added):

Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.

This is the North Star of this blog, The Government I Want. I write with the hope that our experiment in democracy will continue. I want, as I have previously written, a government of, by, and for the people … for us and, more importantly, for our descendants:

The Government I Want

I Want a Democracy

By Abraham Johannes…

Read more

7 months ago · 6 likes · Abraham Johannes

The Challenge

But, as Major Lawrence told Sherif Ali in the Oscar-winning film, Lawrence of Arabia, “nothing is written”.

Ben Franklin warned us, on the day the Constitution was approved, that our new republic would forever teeter on the edge of despotism and that it would only last as long as we worked at it.

Similarly, physicists inform us that, in a universe where entropy (disorder, if you will) always increases, ordered systems can form, but inevitably exist in a delicate balance between order and disorder. Too much order, the system becomes rigid and can no longer evolve sufficiently to survive. Too much disorder, the system collapses.

So, finally, I ask to answer the following:

• Is our democracy breaking?

• If so, is that something that worries you?

• If so, what are you willing to do about it?

The fact that I created this Substack and am writing this piece is proof that I answer all three questions affirmatively.

You may think, “OK, but what good does that do? Really, what can one person do? You and I don’t have the power.”

But, as long as we still have a democracy, such thinking is wrong. That is the very point of democracy. The people have the power. Every day people like you and me. In the end, our leaders pay attention to the people because they attain their power through elections. If a few people act in a nation of 350 million, little notice is taken. But, when hundreds of millions of people make known their wishes, even in the smallest of ways, it is heard as a roar in Washington. As long as we have the power of the vote, they will listen.

I hope that our semiquincentennial today is not only a day of celebration, but also a day of recommitment and action toward the building of a still more perfect union … one that thrives for another 250 years.

Vasily Arkhipov saved the world on Oct. 27, 1962.

Bikini Atoll Atomic Bomb Test

It was the 5^th day of the Cuban Missile Crisis. US Navy ships enforcing the blockade of Cuba, after four days of pursuit, had trapped Soviet submarine B-59 and began depth charging it in an attempt to force it to surface. Unbeknownst to US forces, during the sub’s submerged effort to avoid detection and capture, its batteries had drained and its AC system shut down. Temperatures inside the sub now exceeded 110 degrees and some crew members had succumbed to the build-up of carbon dioxide. US forces also didn’t know that the sub was armed with a nuclear torpedo (15 kilotons, equivalent to Little Boy which was dropped on Hiroshima). Being submerged, the sub had been out of communication with the world and didn’t know whether WW III had commenced. The sub’s commander, Valentin Grigoryevich Savitsky, believing that his ship was doomed, ordered the firing of the nuke. The sub’s political officer, Ivan Semyonovich Maslennikov, was required by protocol to approve … and did. Fortunately for the world, Vasily Arkhipov, the Chief of Staff of the deployed submarine detachment, happened to be onboard. Because of his rank, he, too, was required to approve. He did not. And a nuclear war with Russia was avoided by the sheer luck of his presence.

Sadly, this is not the only time we’ve come close to nuclear annihilation. In 1983, Stanislov Petrov, a Soviet Air Defense Forces engineer, postponed relaying the report of just such an attack because he did not believe the US would limit a first strike on the Soviet Union to five missiles.

I have heard it said, and believe, that the three most significant inventions in weaponry have been gunpowder, nukes, and AI.

If you do not think AI belongs in that list, ask yourself the following questions:

• Will fully autonomous weapon systems respond faster than those that are not?

• Will fully autonomous weapon systems defeat, in battle, those that are not?

• Will governments (and others) develop and deploy fully autonomous weapon systems?

• What will the outcome be in incidents, like those cited above, when no human is in the loop?

If you think we have time, that there is no rush, then you either missed the following or didn’t understand its significance.

But first, a few facts about AIs:

• AI capability is growing exponentially.

• AIs, at least those developed by responsible actors, are programmed with guardrails to prevent them from being used for unethical purposes.

• Hackers can bypass those guardrails (known as jailbreaking).

• Every AI, so far, has been jailbroke.

On June 9, Anthropic released Claude Fable 5 (their “5th model generation for your most ambitious work”) and Claude Mythos 5 (the same model, with fewer safeguards, which, “given its capabilities”, “is currently only available to a small group of vetted partners” due to its industry-leading cybersecurity capabilities).

On June 11, General Joshua Rudd, who leads the National Security Agency and the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, told the Senate Intelligence Committee, that Mythos “broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours” in red team testing that had just concluded.

Creati.ai, an AI collaboration website, has since published the following about that red team test:

In an era where artificial intelligence deployment is accelerating at an unprecedented pace, a recent, startling disclosure has sent shockwaves through the cybersecurity and national security communities. According to reports, Anthropic’s experimental “Mythos“ AI model successfully compromised nearly all classified systems belonging to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) during a sophisticated red-team stress test. This incident, which reportedly took place over a period of just a few hours, acts as a pivotal moment in our understanding of generative AI capabilities and their inherent risks.

At Creati.ai, we have consistently tracked the rapid evolution of large language models, but the Mythos breach represents a threshold moment. The sheer speed and lateral movement demonstrated by an AI agent within highly fortified, top-secret infrastructure underscore a new dimension of digital warfare—one where machines can identify and exploit vulnerabilities faster than human defenders can patch them.

To put it bluntly, this scared the Trump Administration, an administration that had been actively dismantling AI regulations put in place by the Biden Administration! Recall that, on Dec 11, President Trump issued Executive Order 14365 which stated:

United States AI companies must be free to innovate without cumbersome regulation.

On June 12, in something of an about face, the administration issued an “export control directive” that required Anthropic to remove access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national … a directive that would, presumably (and ironically), include Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah. And, as evidence of just how concerned the adminstration was, it ordered Anthropic to accomplish this impossible request within 90 minutes! Anthropic soon disabled both Fable 5 and Mythos 5, for all users, stating that it was the only way to ensure compliance.

As of June 15, the government had not publicized the order let alone the legal basis for the order. It is understood by most, however, that the Commerce Department issued the order under the Export Controls Reform Act of 2018 in which Commerce is authorized to restrict activity related to “the development of weapons of mass destruction”. The administration is acknowledging AI as a WMD. Wow. The legality of that order and the appropriateness of that action are already coming under fire, as in a lawsuit filed on June 23 by Legion LegalTech, but I sympathize with the administration in their stretch to stop an imminent danger in an environment without regulation.

But, it must be said, governments cannot effectively manage AI through spur-of-the-moment, ad hoc (and, potentially illegal) improvisation.

So, just what are we to do?

I like Fareed Zakaria’s suggestion this past week, that we create a Fed-like institution to oversee AI, one that “combines public authority with private expertise”. (If you haven’t already watched it, I recommend his 12-minute “Take” to more fully understand this issue and his suggestion.) I’ve heard many opinions that the Federal Reserve is arguably one of America’s greatest inventions. Though created in America for America, it has been replicated by other democracies and has brought financial stability and prosperity to much of the world. American banks are well regulated and, because of that, have come to dominate the world’s banking systems.

AI will soon be even more critical to us than our banking systems. We need to regulate AI and we need to do so now. I learned last week that delay is no longer an option.

As I wrote at the end of March:

On January 30, President Trump and Republican lawmakers agreed to a funding deal in which DHS would only be funded for two weeks while they negotiated reforms to ICE and CBP practices.

At the time, Democratic leadership put forward a list of reforms that they wanted negotiated. Those included:

At the time, reacting to anger around the country following the deaths of American citizens during ICE actions in Minnesota, Republican leadership indicated a willingness to engage.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee:

I’m willing to look at their ideas.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), member of the Senate Judiciary Committee:

We’re going to gain the support of the American people if they know we’re really going after the bad guys and executing properly.

Rep. Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), Speaker of the House:

Some of these conditions and requests that they’ve made are obviously reasonable and should happen.

Please read that prior statement again … and reflect on the source.

Two months after that promising start, I wrote:

ICE must be funded. And it must act within the law while fulfilling its mission. It should follow the best practices and proven methods of all of our other law enforcement agencies. This is not rocket science. Surely there is bipartisan agreement on most of this. How is it that an agreement has not been reached? And why is it that we hear nothing about those negotiations? What has been agreed to? What are the remaining sticking points? What are the arguments for and against the remaining proposals? Who is making those arguments?

Another two months passed without a peep about such negotiations. And I now have my answers.

On June 9, four days after the Senate acted, the House passed, on a razor-thin 214-212 vote, a budget reconciliation bill that provides $70 billion to fund ICE and CBP for three years (FYs 2026-2028) without any reforms. This on top of the $140 billion that was allocated to them under the OBBBA of 2025. Understand that these are agencies whose combined budgets had previously been about $26 billion per year.

My first objection is that the budget reconciliation process, which was enacted as Section 310 of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, was used at all. The process is intended to facilitate the passing of laws that are required to effect the policies of an agreed upon budget. Here, the process is being used to establish the budget, itself! Unfortunately, with each passing year of increasing polarization and lawfare, this process has been inappropriately leveraged more and more frequently by small partisan majorities to implement substantial policy changes that do not draw support from any portion of the opposing party. This is one-party rule, which I am adamantly against.

My second objection is that this funding covers the rest of President Trump’s term, three years. This is very abnormal. The rest of the government is funded year-to-year, as were these agencies in the past. That annual process allows for reviews and adjustments based on the perspectives, priorities, revenue, and needs of the time. ICE and CBP, the very agencies whose practices caused the concerns that led to the funding breakdown to start with, are now insulated for multiple years in the future from any meaningful review. It is a horrible precedent to set.

My final, and most concerning objection, is that there were no reforms adopted. I held off writing all week while attempting to learn whether this was really the case. Surely, something good came of all this. I got my answer on Monday when a US Senator, who asked that I not identify them by name, told me that:

• There were never any negotiations on the proposed reforms.

• There was never a good-faith intent by the administration to negotiate any of this.

• Republican Representatives and Senators are genuinely afraid of the political repercussions of crossing President Trump.

The government I want is the one that our founders imagined and attempted to provide to us, one in which Congress makes the law (representing us) and the President implements that law (as chief executive).

Where is this President taking us? There is something amiss, something wrong, and I’m not talking about policy choices. I think that there is a long game in what he is doing, but it’s not conservative and it’s not liberal. It’s not that kind of political philosophy.

Remember that he told us long ago that he intends to “flood the zone with shit” as a deliberate strategy. Well, actually, he didn’t tell us. Steve Bannon, his bridge troll, gave us that prediction, with on brand class and dignity. I used to think that meant that Trump planned to keep his opponents so busy running to and fro they would lose the focus needed to effectively oppose any of his initiatives.

But I no longer think that is what he meant. I think that what might, at the beginning, have seemed chaotic is actually not chaos. It is, instead, a strategy from sophisticated political actors, using the presidency to dismantle our existing political and social order in a particular way.

Every outrage that this administration launches into the flow of our lives, each violation of our broadly shared American sense of how it ought to be, is followed by another attack on our sensibilities, before we can rally in opposition to the one before. We can’t quite fasten on to any one thing, and so, because of the flow of events, we don’t fasten on to anything.

It is a mess, all of the time, until, finally, we just want order. We want to live our lives, which, for the most part, are pretty comfortable and nice.

Acculturation. It is “the dynamic, psychological and social process of adapting to a new culture”. We are, at Trump’s behest, knowingly or not, growing a callous over our moral selves in response to, in order to live with, the moral confusion and challenges that he endlessly generates.

We are being worn down. Our moral sense, our code, is being worn away.

Consider our very recent past.

Why have we not mounted an effective response to a government that has deliberately injected enough doubt into the public conversation so that children are now dying of the measles? Why have we allowed this?

Why have we allowed, without much of a stir, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of children to die of starvation and disease because our government, in our name, has simply stopped feeding and caring for needy populations in the poorest parts of the globe? It is, according to Bill Gates, “…a picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children….” What have we done about it?

Why is there no consequential outrage in response to the deliberate squandering of alliances around the world that have brought stability and prosperity to our day to day lives, and that were paid for with the lives of real patriots, over hundreds of years?

How can it be that we don’t have much at all to say about the fact that the federal Department of Justice has been mobilized to harass E. Jean Carroll, the woman who proved by a preponderance of the evidence in civil court that Trump sexually assaulted her?

How are we allowing, right now, a violent war, waged in our name, to be prosecuted with an incompetence that seems nearly deliberate and would not be tolerated for even two minutes by any sentient board of directors if its CEO were executing this poorly on a holiday sales strategy? (Do not misunderstand me to say that I oppose war on Iran. That is not my point. It is the grotesque malpractice in implementation that is immoral.)

Why have we cut back funding for basic scientific research on life threatening diseases? Can you even comprehend a ‘why’ behind this? Is there a disease lobby at work? It’s done. Was there any real opposition?

Nearly every week it is something new, and confounding, and head scratching. These are not mistakes. They are deliberate, disorienting, intentional acts. If nothing else, the man does what he says he is going to do. If you say that you are going to “flood the zone with shit”, then there will be a conveyor belt of “shit”. And we are living that.

Have you stopped paying attention to your government yet? Somewhat? Entirely? Are you numb? Does the big stuff make the relatively small stuff not quite worth your time? Will you just catch the next bus to outrage? Is that your plan? It’s coming along in a moment.

Are Trump and his crew changing – and preparing to change - our society to suit their tastes and interests in ways that our ethical and moral selves would never have accepted or allowed but for a program of extensive desensitization? I think that we have to consider that he, or at least his government, is clearing that way.

Maybe for Trump personally, it’s about ego. Domination. Or money. Maybe for Hegseth it’s religion. And for that spooky “2025” crowd – the people who wrote that long report demanding retrograde social change, the report that in the campaign Trump claimed he never read, and perhaps he didn’t – maybe it’s about sending us back to 1955. Etcetera. Who knows.

Trump and his crew are creating a moral void. The void is the point.

This crew is not the first to take a run at this.

Hannah Arendt, a brilliant historian and philosopher, was born in Germany in 1906. She was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1933, and then, before the war and before the “Final Solution” began, she left Germany and came to the United States.

In 1964, she wrote of that prewar period,

…[W]hat disturbed us was the behavior not of our enemies but of our friends….[I] think this early moral disintegration in German society… was like a kind of dress rehearsal for its total breakdown, which was to occur during the war years….[T]he extermination of the Jews was preceded by a very gradual sequence of anti-Jewish measures, each of which was accepted with the argument that refusal to cooperate would make things worse – until a stage was reached where nothing worse could possibly have happened….It was as though morality, at the very moment of its total collapse within an old and highly civilized nation, stood revealed…as a set of mores, of customs and manners, which could be exchanged for another set with no more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of a whole people.

I’m not saying that our government is a threat to Jews, or that the Nazis are again upon us. But just as we have to be extremely careful when using 1930s Germany as an example of anything, I don’t think we are obligated to ignore it either. I am making a different, much broader point. I am saying that when morality is systematically compromised, all sorts of evil becomes possible. All sorts. Read history. I think that the Trump crowd has.

Each insult to our public morality that is accepted without meaningful opposition erodes, incrementally, our moral code.

What to do?

From Arendt, in that 1964 piece, words that turned out to be prophetic in light of the civil unrest that followed in the next few years:

[W]e have only for a moment to imagine what would happen…if enough people would…refuse to support, even without active resistance and rebellion, to see how effective a weapon this could be. It is in fact one of many variations of nonviolent action and resistance – for instance the power that is potential in civil disobedience – which are being discovered in our century.

Where do I start?

What is it that I want to say?

I often wrestle with these questions.

For the last two weeks, I have found myself at a loss, floundering in a murky morass that, frankly, frightens me because of what it portends. But I remain motivated to speak of the events of May 18 and 19 with the hope that it will bring clarity to me and motivate you to think more deeply about the multitude of issues related to the events immediately following the dismissal of Trump v IRS.

Before proceeding, here is a summary of the original crime based on the defendant’s plea of guilt:

• During the first Trump administration, Charles Littlejohn was an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, a contractor working for the IRS.

• In Nov 2018, Littlejohn stole tax return information for President Donald Trump and “related entities”.

• In Sept 2019, Littlejohn provided that information to the New York Times.

• In spring 2020, Littlejohn stole additional information about Trump and provided that to the New York Times.

• In Aug 2020, Littlejohn stole “IRS data associated with thousands of the nation’s wealthiest individuals”.

• In Sept 2020, the New York Times published information about Trump’s returns. (A story well worth rereading.)

• In Nov 2020, Littlejohn provided the broader tax information to ProPublica.

• In the ensuing year, ProPublica published multiple articles based on the leaked information about many individuals.

• In Sept 2023, Littlejohn was charged by the Biden administration for disclosing tax return information about Trump.

• In Oct 2023, Littlejohn pled guilty and was sentenced to the statutory maximum of five years in prison, where he remains.

And here is a summary of the civil suit, itself:

• On Jan 29, 2026, Donald Trump (filing as a private citizen while serving as President), his sons, and 419 Trump-related businesses (collectively referred to as the Trump Organization) sued the IRS, an agency under his administration, for failure to “take mandatory precautions” to prevent Littlejohn’s actions.

  • Rupa Bhattacharyya, a former Justice Department lawyer who evaluated these kinds of allegations, told NPR that, even for outcomes like death related to the 9/11 attacks or malpractice at the VA hospitals, “payouts almost never amounted to more than $10 million”. Here, the plaintiffs sought 1,000 times those maximums from an agency run by Trump, himself, for an action, the release of his “very big” and “beautiful” tax returns, that Trump had assured us for years that he wanted to happen. Unsurprisingly, this is the first known instance of a President suing the government he leads.

• On April 24, US District Court Judge Kathleen Williams ordered both sides to submit arguments by May 20 on whether the case met Constitutional standards to be considered a genuine legal dispute.

• On May 18, 2026, the plaintiffs filed for, and were granted, a dismissal of the case with prejudice (meaning that they could never again pursue similar actions).

That’s it.

Judge Williams pointedly observed that, “there was no settlement of record.” A settlement would have been reviewable by the judge to assure that its terms addressed the issues raised in the suit (and no more!) and given each of the adversarial parties the opportunity to have the court ensure that those terms were carried out. There was none of that. The case was simply dropped by the Trumps.

As of that moment, the IRS was totally and forever off the hook.

Sanity, right?

Sadly, no. Instead, it was the start of insanity.

Within hours of the case’s dismissal, the administration released a purported Settlement Agreement that had not been filed with the court and began a disinformation campaign that there had been a settlement after all. Legal experts quickly pointed out that, having not been filed with the court prior to the dismissal, the document was a contract between consenting parties as opposed to a settlement between adversarial parties.

Frank Bisignano, the CEO of the IRS (a newly created position to which he had been appointed in October), and Stanley Woodward, the Associate Attorney General for the DoJ (a Trump appointee who started in that role in November), had signed a contract with their mutual boss to redress:

the sustained use of the levers of government power by Democrat elected officials, political and career federal employees, contractors, and agents in order to target individuals, groups, and entities for improper and unlawful political, personal, and/or ideological reasons (“Lawfare’ and “Weaponization”).

Note that the reported wrongs here occurred under the Biden Administration, which had nothing to do with the supposed failure of the Trump Administration that is at the heart of the lawsuit.

Specifically, the Attorney General was to create “The Anti-Weaponization Fund”:

• Funded to the “projected valuation of future claimants’ claims” … which was quickly revealed to be (coincidentally!) $1.776 billion.

• Managed by five appointees of the AG’s choosing (one with Congressional “consultation”) any of whom the President could remove without cause.

• Run by rules of their own making that need not be made public.

The terms “Lawfare” and “Weaponization” are used throughout the document to describe the victimization that they are seeking to redress but they never, as far as I know, released a Definition of Terms in the agreement that would make clear the meaning of those words and, therefore, the scope of the Fund.

I had originally thought that I should take the time to point out all of the concerning aspects of this agreement. But I now think that most of them, at least, are pretty clear to most observers. So, I’ll simply summarize by saying that Trump and two of his appointees decided to create a commission, that Trump fully controls, to dole out nearly $2 billion of our tax money to anti-Democrat people of their choosing under rules that we are not to know.

If I could imagine 2,000 such people, which is very hard to do, each would be getting, on average, a nearly $1 million pay out.

Astonishing and disgusting.

To make matters worse, when pressed by Congress the next day as to whether such payouts might go to people previously convicted of felonies for the January 6 insurrection (before Trump pardoned them), acting Attorney General Todd Blanche would not rule it out! Oh, man.

As if all that wasn’t enough, on the very next day, acting AG Blanche announced, seemingly out of the blue via a half page memo nominally related to the prior day’s settlement, that:

The United States is … FOREVER BARRED … from prosecuting … any and all claims … known or unknown … that … could have been asserted … against any of the Plaintiffs or affiliated individuals … or parties … by reason of … any matters that … could have been raised in the Case … or any matters that could be pending … before [the IRS] or other agencies or departments.

What? Where did this come from? Who did this? Why?

Todd Blanche, formerly a defense attorney for President Trump who Trump had appointed as Assistant Attorney General in 2025 and had become acting Attorney General last month following the dismissal of AG Pam Bondi, issued a proclamation with no apparent Constitutional basis, protecting Trump, his family, his business interests, and an extended network of related entities and people from prosecution for any federal offenses they may have committed in the past. The breadth and brazenness of the announcement is breathtaking. And this only hours after asserting that President Trump did not benefit in any material way from the “settlement”.

Terry Moran wrote on his Substack last week that:

The audacity [of the corruption] is the tell. They are not hiding it. They are not ashamed of it. They want us to see it. Get used to it. And accommodate ourselves to the new order of things.

I have been exceedingly upset since, wondering how we fight such grift, remembering my parents’ lives under Richard Daley’s partisan (Democratic) “machine” in Chicago.

There is nothing in these bizarre events that even remotely approximates the kind of government I want for us.

But hope, for me at least, arose yesterday when I read that Judge Williams had reopened the lawsuit citing possible misconduct and fraud as well as “grievous allegations” that the settlement process may have been “premised on deception” … i.e., lawfare and weaponization.

The Supreme Court decided the case of Callais v. Louisiana just a few weeks ago. It is an important opinion. Many are saying that the Court has used this opportunity to reverse victories won in the racial justice battles of the 1950s and 60s that cost many people their lives, and that this is yet another display of hard right politics by the Court’s conservative majority.

Is this true? Did the Court in this opinion use gerrymandering to deliberately suppress the representation in Congress of Black and Hispanic Americans?

Sadly, the media has done a poor and, I think, a remarkably irresponsible job of properly framing the issues or providing ‘analysis’ that does anything more than incite emotions and promote division.

In truth, if properly understood, Callais can serve as a jumping off point in the ongoing project of working to get the government we want. It will very likely wind up being a necessary step forward.

But there is work to be done.

The first step is to understand the opinion.

It takes a few not very long paragraphs to explain what Callais really says, and what should happen next.

So…

Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing congressional district maps – those are the maps used to vote on and select the 435 members of the House of Representatives - to deliberately manipulate the power of a particular voting block, for better or worse. When that manipulation is used to discriminate against a minority group – generally Black or Hispanic – the discrimination can be accomplished in two different ways. The first discriminatory gerrymandering technique is called “packing”. This is when the boundaries of a particular district are mapped out to pick up an unnaturally heavy concentration of a particular group of minority voters. In this way, those voters will control one congressional district, but at the same time they lose population and therefore voting power in another district or districts. Basically, the idea is, let’s push all the minority voters into one district. Yeah, it gives them one district for sure, but at least they won’t get two.

The second way of using map drawing to lessen voting power is the opposite of “packing”. It’s called “cracking”. This is where the Black vote, for example, is split into geographic slivers and each of those is then attached to a different congressional district. In this way, the concentration of that minority vote in any one district is diluted. The minority thereby loses the ability to decide the outcome in any single district.

There is a third way that gerrymandering is used, also discriminatory, but in the opposite direction – to discriminate in favor of a minority. A congressional map can be drawn to assure that there is Black or Hispanic representation in Congress by assuring that there are “majority minority” districts. That is, concentrating the minority vote in a district, not to “put them all in one place” to limit their influence, but to put enough of those voters in one place to assure that they can elect a representative.

It is important to understand what the Supreme Court in Callais decided, and what it did not decide. It decided that, under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, congressional maps may not be drawn to achieve racial objectives. Race can’t be used to discriminate against voters – “cracking” and “packing” are out – but neither may race be used to discriminate in favor of minorities, deliberately creating majority minority districts. Race as a consideration in map drawing is not allowed. That’s the new ground rule, after the Callais opinion.

To make this harder, but necessarily so, the Court also found that because gerrymandering is an inherently political practice, map drawing to achieve partisan political ends is ok, just as long as it is not race driven.

Where racial considerations end and partisan political considerations begin is not a puzzle that the Court solved in its opinion. It is an undoubtedly fuzzy line. Basically, the Court cleaned up one sort of mess, but created another.

And, to make matters a bit worse, the Court has already said that it will not act as a referee in the political process of designing congressional districts. It is simply not in the business of deciding political questions. Those are, by definition, political, not legal matters.

So, congressional districts can’t be drawn based on race, but they can be drawn based on partisan politics. And the courts are not going to police political activity. As long as it’s not race based.

Well, ok, but what happens next? What’s race based? What’s not? Even assuming gerrymandering is only driven by partisan politics, what are the rules for that going to be?

It’s a mess, right? Yes, it is. And I believe that the Court was basically saying – yelling, actually - that it’s a mess because Congress has not had the courage or the will to do its job. These are essentially political issues, and that makes this the province of the legislature.

Citizens – voters - need to force this issue.

This is all in the Callais decision, but that opinion is 92 pages long. It’s way more difficult than “conservative v. liberal”. But some problems are that way – hard. And they need to be understood before there is any hope of a solution.

I typed into ChatGPT the query of whether there have been any studies or surveys to measure the frequency of public readership of U.S. Supreme Court opinions. The answer was this:

“There has been a fair amount of research on public attitudes toward the Supreme Court, but surprisingly little direct research on the narrower question: “How many people actually read Supreme Court opinions?” … . [The] evidence strongly suggests…that the number of Americans who read actual opinions is extremely small … .”

The Callais opinion is not a fun or easy read. And, in the real world, not many people will slog through it. The reality is that the media translates for us. They tell us what the Supreme Court said and did. But they don’t do that in long, complicated written opinions. They do it in a few paragraphs on your news feed, or in a minute or two on television. And on this difficult and complicated issue, the media has failed. Honestly, they haven’t even really tried.

Instead of getting a substantive understanding of the real issues, we are herded into thinking about the Court as a panel of 9 old, out of touch lawyers, split into factions of racist conservatives vs. knee jerk liberals. But, the truth is that there is a very good chance that none of the Supreme Court justices want to suppress any voters, or discriminate against anyone based on race. These are not wicked people. They are, I believe, trying to do the right thing. They are, I suspect, trying to navigate how to follow the law, within the parameters of the statutes and case law that constrain them.

If the media bothered doing their jobs, they might find a way to explain what is actually going on here, and maybe amp up the idea that perhaps it is time for a serious popular movement that will push for remedial legislation to fix this electoral mess. To fix gerrymandering. The courts won’t do it.

And one more question which calls much into question. What happens to self- governance – what happens to democracy - when the majority of the population is so well fed and comfortable that they just don’t bother to understand the issues of the day – including gerrymandering - and they don’t much care that the much vaunted media actively and cynically caters to their laziness.

I have written earlier, in Legislatures That Better Represent Us, about the insidious and anti-democratic practice of gerrymandering and, in A House That Better Represents Us, about a potential solution to that flaw in our democracy. But I am compelled to write on this topic again in the wake of last week’s SCOTUS ruling on Louisiana’s congressional map.

Understand, first, that this case arises solely from the practice of gerrymandering. Following the 2020 census, as is common practice among states, Louisiana redrew its congressional districts resulting in what, to my eye, are insignificant changes:

It left in place the bizarre CD2 (both heavily Democratic and majority Black) running through the southeast part of the state from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, cutting through the center of both CD1 and CD3. Some Louisianians, having hoped for a map that would more closely reflect the fact that one third of the state’s population is Black, filed suit against the state. In Robinson v. Ardoin, the US District Court concluded:

that Plaintiffs are substantially likely to prevail on the merits of their claims brought under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

That court ordered:

a remedial congressional redistricting plan that includes an additional majority-Black congressional district.

The state complied and, in 2024, implemented the following map with a second majority black district, this one snaking district through the northwest part of the state from Baton Rouge to Shreveport:

That led a different group of Louisianians, this time expressly “non-African American”, to sue the state on, essentially, the same grounds … that the new map was racially unfair. In Louisiana v. Callais, SCOTUS affirmed a federal court ruling that barred Louisiana from using the new map, concluding (ironically) “that map is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander”.

Both cases turned on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA), which was landmark legislation that outlawed discriminatory voting practices such as poll taxes and literacy tests in an effort to “enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution”. Most pertinent to each case was Section 2 of the VRA which states (emphasis added):

No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.

Other gerrymandering cases have similarly turned on Section 2. In 1980, SCOTUS ruled in Mobile v. Bolden that Section 2 prohibited only intentional discrimination. In 1982, Congress responded by amending the VRA to cover practices that had the effect of discrimination, even if it had not been intentional.

Before continuing, I ask you to stop and think about those events for a moment. Congress passed a historic law. A challenge to that law resulted in SCOTUS ruling that the law was limited as written. Congress then (quickly!) amended the law to better reflect its intentions. Each branch was fulfilling their responsibilities to establish law. Beautiful.

The result of those earlier events was a legal standard under which gerrymandering could (and would) be challenged if it had the effect of disenfranchising voters on the basis of race. Some observers had hoped that, in Callais, SCOTUS would declare Section 2 unconstitutional. But the plaintiffs had not asked the court for that remedy and the court did not make such a ruling. Justice Alito, who wrote the majority opinion in the 6-3 ruling, would say that the court clarified Section 2. Justice Kagan, who wrote the dissent, claimed that it has been eviscerated. However, understanding the legal nuances of these differing opinions is not the important thing here. What is important is the use of Section 2 to prevent race-based gerrymandering to start with. Whereas poll taxes and literacy tests prevented citizens from casting a vote, gerrymandering does not. Justice Thomas wrote, in a concurring opinion, that Section 2 “does not regulate districting at all” and declared that:

[SCOTUS] should never have interpreted §2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to effectively give racial groups ‘an entitlement to roughly proportional representation’.

The amended law of 1982, in fact, expressly declared that members of a protected class do not have a right to be proportionately represented.

So, while SCOTUS (barely) left open the possibility that congressional redistricting could be declared unconstitutional as racial gerrymandering, it reinforced the long-held standard that political gerrymandering was acceptable. Therefore, when any gerrymandering is done, the gerrymanderer is protected as long as they can make a reasonable claim that the gerrymander was done for political reasons. And, of course, it is political gain that drives gerrymandering to start with. The fact that racial groups tend to vote for one particular party over another is, legally, incidental. So, Justice Kagan is correct in concluding that a “State need do nothing more than announce a partisan gerrymander” and that:

Today’s decision returns Section 2 to what it was [before the 1982 amendment]. Now, as then, vote-dilution plaintiffs will have to show more than vote dilution: They will have to show, as well, race-based motive. Now, as then, that requirement will make success in their suits nearly impossible.

What is not said in all of this, and what drives me crazy, is that political gerrymandering is legal to start with. If it were not legal, this would all be beautifully moot.

Gerrymandering is not protected by the Constitution. Our founders did not imagine the existence of political parties to start with. Gerrymandering is allowed only because it is not forbidden. It should be banned. By definition, gerrymandering is counter to the most fundamental principle of democracy … that of rule by the people. A congressional district is made up of people from all walks of life and all political parties. A representative of that district is duty-bound to represent those people. The moment those representatives attempt to rig future elections on behalf of one particular subset of those people, they have violated their oath, the Constitution, and us.

I want a government of the people, not a government of a party.

Until we ban gerrymandering, itself, we will live in a democracy corrupted by it.

Dear readers,

Once again, I share with you a piece by my colleague, D. Shapiro. As before, with his full permission, I am pleased to share his unabridged thoughts for your consideration.

AJ

By D. Shapiro (guest contributor)

I sat in a courtroom many years ago, early in my career, waiting for my client’s case to be called. I rehearsed, in my mind, what I was going to say when it was my turn to step before the judge. I was nervous because I hadn’t been doing this long enough yet to feel confident that I would do well. What if the judge asked me a question I hadn’t anticipated? What if opposing counsel took me in a direction that I hadn’t prepared for? What if I just flat out forgot what I needed to say? I was young, and I was sweating profusely.

But what comes to mind about that courtroom now – what made the greatest impression on me - is what I saw before it was my turn to step up.

I watched from the pews as a middle aged black woman stood at the lectern, looking up at the judge on his elevated bench, in his black, flowing robes. She was representing herself in her claim against a large company – she had no lawyer. She wore ordinary, civilian clothing, nothing that matched a room full of men and women in suits. And she had a quiet voice.

There was an opposing lawyer, but he was careful to not seem overbearing or exploit his advantage of skill and experience. I suspect that he had calculated that this behavior was both becoming of him and more generally in his best interest. Still, she was outmatched and seemed uncomfortable. Frightened, I think. She finished explaining why she was there and what she wanted. I don’t remember the particulars of what she said, or the nature of the defense offered by the other side.

When they were finished making their presentations, the judge, a man in his late 50s who was highly regarded in the legal community, even revered – his name was Prentice Marshall - spoke directly to her. His tone was not soft, but it was understanding and respectful. He sought to put her at some ease while still doing the business of the court. As I recall, he even helped her on a legal point or two. There was a dignified back and forth between them. My recollection is that the judge pretty much ignored the opposing lawyer, and, in the end, he asked that she submit certain additional documents for his consideration. Then he scheduled another day for both parties to return to court, after he had reviewed her additional submissions. He would rule on her case then, he said.

It was not a spectacular case or a spectacular result, but I remember thinking how important it was, what I had just seen. She had been treated with dignity and respect, and the judge made sure to send the message that, whatever the merits of her case, or lack thereof, he would take care with her case and she was going to get a fair shake in that courtroom.

When the hearing ended, she said what all well trained lawyers say to the judge at the conclusion of a hearing, no matter the outcome. “Thank you, your Honor.” When she uttered that phrase, there was nothing perfunctory about it. It sounded as though she sincerely meant it, and I believe that she did. He had earned her confidence. The system had earned her confidence.

As she turned and walked past me on her way out, the expression on her face was a slight smile. She had no reason to believe from what had just happened that her prospects of success were particularly good or bad. I suspect that the smile was because she had come downtown for justice in her fight against a big company, and she left believing that she was going to get that very thing.

Fairness and a place to be heard is what most people truly expect from our justice system. No other promises are made, except fairness. I think that when she went home that day, she told her friends about her experience.

And she might have mentioned in those conversations that she had experienced a judge who is what a judge, most fundamentally, must be. Someone who she expected would call balls and strikes to the best of their ability, under the law, on the merits, without room for any other considerations. Without compromise.

This, I have believed for my life as a lawyer, is the bedrock of our system of justice and the rule of law. We cannot have a society without the rule of law. It is what keeps citizens engaged in our established system of dispute resolution. It is what we have instead of living in a corrupt state where people are left to take matters into their own hands, or live lives that are twisted by cynicism and frustration.

Yesterday, I watched the video replay of a United States Senate hearing where nominees for the federal bench were being questioned by US Senators. The question being asked on the video was whether the nominees believed that President Trump had won the popular vote in 2020. None of the three nominees were willing to answer the question. The clear implication was that, having been nominated by now President Trump, they would not go on record making an admission that was inconsistent with the President’s preferred response. They were reflecting the President’s will, not their honest views.

A couple of things happened in that moment. First, I had a deep sinking feeling. It was a truly shocking thing to see. And then I slowed down for a moment to understand why it hit me so hard.

When those nominees refused to answer the questions from the Senators, they were essentially saying that they would not do their duty to participate honestly in the process by which their nominations would be lawfully considered. They breached their obligation of honesty because Trump didn’t want them to answer those questions. He had, directly or indirectly, reached into the Constitutional process whereby judicial nominees are considered by Congress, and he compromised that process. And, in the same stroke, and with their participation, he compromised the integrity of those future judges. Sacrificed, really, because they will never remove the stain of that moment.

By interfering with their testimony, Trump made a public record of the fact that these particular judges, and maybe the entire system, can be shaped to his will. And if they can be had, then what is their value as a judge? What is a judge without integrity, without an unconditional guaranty of impartiality? Without that promise of fairness? What would that woman I watched in court that day think if she knew that one of the judges on TV yesterday was hearing her case?

Our institutions are under attack by this man. Those aren’t just words. Damage is being done.

Shame on them all.

The Line

We live in a democracy … meaning that we, the governed, are vested with the power of government. More specifically, we live in a republican democracy … meaning that we, the governed, exercise our power through representatives of our choosing.

Ours is a government of choice by the governed. It is the government our founders bequeathed to us. It is the type of government that I want. The alternative is, by definition, authoritarian … a government under which the governed do not get to choose.

Sadly, despite the near universal desire for democracy, less than 7% of the world’s population lives in a full democracy per the 2024 Democracy Index Report by the Economist Intelligence Unit (and US citizens are not among them):

As is made clear in the EIU’s data, governments span a spectrum from the most democratic (Norway) to the most authoritarian (Afghanistan) and more than half of the world’s population lives under authoritarian rule. Authoritarianism is the norm, not the exception.

Elections, being the very act of choosing one’s government, are the definitive dividing line between democracy and authoritarianism. If elections are free and fair, the people can change their government. The alternative is authoritarianism where the people lack the ability to impose their will.

The Risk

While it is true that some authoritarians gain power quickly through a revolution or a coup, others arise through far less apparent processes that Ian Bassin, the Executive Director of Protect Democracy, describes as democratic Trojan Horses:

“Typically, their leader comes to power through an election. Then, once inside, dismantles the system from within.”

Authoritarians who have attained power through democratic means include Mussolini, Hitler, Marcos, Chávez, Putin and more. It is critical that we recognize and accept that authoritarianism can arise from democracy, any democracy. It is why Benjamin Franklin warned us that we had been bequeathed:

“A republic if you can keep it.”

The power of high office naturally attracts authoritarians. Even those who are not authoritarian by nature to begin with can easily be corrupted by such power once attained. Authoritarians then, naturally, seek to amass and consolidate their power by following the proven playbook that Copilot, Microsoft Bing’s AI engine, reports to be:

1. Delegitimize opponents

2. Consolidate power

3. Criminalize dissent

4. Co-op institutions

5. Erode democracy

But an authoritarian regime cannot stand, as was proven this past week in Hungary, until and unless it sufficiently subverts the mechanism by which it came to power in the first place … elections.

So, the question today is whether our elections are under assault.

The Signs

Since before he was elected to his first term as President of the US, Donald Trump has been attacking our elections and those attacks are becoming more aggressive and frequent and, because he is President, more consequential.

Throughout his first presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly asserted that the election was rigged against him as in this October 17, 2026, post on Twitter:

“The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary - but also at many polling places - SAD.”

In a 2020 interview with Fox & Friends, President Trump explained his opposition to a bill that proposed to increase voting protections and ballot access:

“They had levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

On January 2, 2021, President Trump called Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, pressuring him to “find 11,780 votes” to flip the 2020 election result and threatening him with criminal action if he didn’t comply:

“you know what they did and you’re not reporting it -- that’s the -- you know, that’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense.”

On January 6, 2021, President Trump told his supporters who had gathered on the Ellipse and were minutes later going to assault the Capitol in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election:

“if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”

On January 20, 2025, the first day of his second term, President Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people convicted of or awaiting trial or sentencing for offenses related to the January 6 assault on the Capitol.

On March 25, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order mandating changes to voter registration standards, the timing of voting, and more. (Though the matter has yet to be fully litigated, multiple federal courts have deemed the EO unconstitutional.)

In July 2025, the Texas Legislature undertook a surprise, mid-decade redistricting effort and President Trump leaned in to that effort urging them to establish five new GOP-safe congressional districts to increase his party’s chances of retaining control of Congress in the 2026 mid-term elections.

On January 15, 2026, when asked about the possibility of his party losing control of Congress during the mid-terms, President Trump told Reuters:

“we shouldn’t even have an election.”

On January 28, 2026, the FBI executed a search warrant at the Fulton County (Georgia) elections office, seizing ballots, tapes from vote-tabulating machines, ballot images, and voter rolls related to the 2020 election. Oddly, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was present. When questioned by Congress about her presence, she explained that President Trump had ordered her to participate and acknowledged that she had facilitated a phone call between President Trump and the agents involved in the raid as it occurred. Further, it has now come to light, in subsequent court proceedings, that the raid was ordered by Kurt Olson, one of the lawyers that assisted President Trump in his original challenge to the 2020 election results and is now working for the President as the “Presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity” (per the affidavit on which the raid was based).

On January 30, 2026, US Representative Chip Roy (Texas) introduced the SAVE America Act that would require documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote. President Trump has been pushing this bill because, as he told House Republicans on March 9, with its passage:

“you will win the midterms and you will win every election for a long time.”

The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that 21 million American citizens lack such documentation. My wife, a 5^th-generation citizen, could struggle because the hospital nurse who filled out her birth certificate misspelled her first name and because she changed her last name when she and I were married.

On February 2, 2026, President Trump told Dan Bongino, his former deputy director of the FBI, on Bongino’s podcast:

“We should take over the voting in at least many - 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

On March 31, 2026, President Trump issued an executive order to restrict the use of mail-in ballots, directing DHS to create a list of confirmed US citizens who are eligible to vote and directing the USPS to deliver ballots only to people on that list. Yet another attempt to exercise Executive control over elections that Article 1, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution expressly reserves to the states and Congress.

I could, of course, go on.

My takeaway

It is clear to me that our elections, the last line of defense against authoritarianism, are under attack and, therefore, that our democracy is in danger.

I can’t even count the ways in which I am offended by this post from President Trump last night:

All this while we are waging a war against a theocracy in Iran.

Do you want a justice system that presumes you innocent until proven guilty … or the other way around?

Seriously.

I am certain you will choose the former but ask you to take a moment to think through the implications. Who else is such protection to be afforded to? What is the fate of those who have no such protection?

Now ask yourself what you would do if a group of armed, masked men in quasi-military attire (emblazoned only with initials that you do not recognize like HSI or ERO) enter your home, without your permission, without identifying themselves other than to say they are with ICE, and without presenting a warrant (even when you ask to see one). They shackle your wrists and ankles and move you into an unmarked vehicle waiting outside. You’re not allowed to dress or grab your medications, let alone contact anyone, before you are driven to an ICE detention facility and put in a holding cell that does not meet the standards of a prison. Hours later, with no notice, you are shackled again, loaded into another unmarked vehicle, and transferred to privately owned detention facility … in another state. Your family and friends don’t know where you are.

This is the other world … the one in which a person is presumed guilty. If you can be presumed to be guilty, what prevents this fate from befalling you?

Now ask yourself how you might go about affecting your release if you are innocent (i.e., in the US legally). The agency holding you, ICE, is certainly not going to facilitate that. They would not have detained you to start with if they thought that the case. Your only recourse is to seek help from other parts of the legal system by filing a habeus petition so that a court can determine whether you are being held legally. (English King John’s Magna Carta of 1215 guaranteed immunity from illegal imprisonment and has been a basis for personal liberty in Western law ever since.) Even if you are lucky enough to find a lawyer to file such a petition on your behalf and lucky enough to have the petition filed in the appropriate court (which is not at all clear because of the facility transfers), you are not likely to have your case heard because the courts have been inundated with such requests:

Finally, even if it is heard and you are ordered released by the court, it may not happen. At the end of January, the Chief Judge of the US District Court for Minnesota, Patrick Schiltz, published a list of 96 violations of court orders by ICE which had occurred in that court’s jurisdiction alone! He further explained:

“[the] extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated. This list is confined to orders issued since January 1, 2026, and the list was hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges.”

Again, I ask you to seriously consider whether you deem this acceptable.

Democratic lawmakers in DC decided it was not and that they would use their leverage in budget funding negotiations to demand better. On January 30, President Trump and Republican lawmakers agreed to a funding deal in which DHS would only be funded for two weeks while they negotiated reforms to ICE and CBP practices. House Democratic Leader Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Schumer presented House Speaker Johnson and Senate Majority Leader Thune the following list of reforms they sought as the basis for those negotiations:

1. Ending warrantless searches.

2. Prohibiting agent use of face masks.

3. Requiring agents to display their agency and identity.

4. Limiting enforcement actions in sensitive locations like schools, churches, and hospitals.

5. Ceasing racial profiling.

6. Implementing use of force standards.

7. Allowing law enforcement agencies to investigate potential crimes related to enforcement operations.

8. Requiring detention facilities to allow access to a detainee’s attorney.

9. Requiring use of body cameras on agents.

10. Requiring agents to be uniformed.

The two weeks came and went and funding lapsed. Another six weeks (and counting) has passed. And Congress has now gone on leave for two weeks.

What’s happening? All we have heard about is TSA (which falls under DHS). But TSA has nothing to do with the problematic practices of ICE. It has been used as a political lever and as a distraction. Long waits for a flight are annoying. They get headlines. But airport waits are nothing when compared to your safety and liberty. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution asserts:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

I am fuming these days, wondering why an agreement has not been reached. ICE is the problem, not TSA. ICE is an important part of our law enforcement landscape. ICE must be funded. And it must act within the law while fulfilling its mission. It should follow the best practices and proven methods of all of our other law enforcement agencies. This is not rocket science. Surely there is bipartisan agreement on most of this. How is it that an agreement has not been reached? And why is it that we hear nothing about those negotiations? What has been agreed to? What are the remaining sticking points? What are the arguments for and against the remaining proposals? Who is making those arguments?

I want this brought out into the open so that I can judge whether our elected representatives are doing what I hope … and want.

Article II, Section 1, Clause 8 of the Constitution requires the incoming President to take the following oath of office:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Regarding that oath, SCOTUS Justice Joseph Story said (in the early 19^th century) that:

“No man can well doubt the propriety of placing a president of the United States under the most solemn obligations.”

Donald Trump swore this oath on January 20, 2025, and appended, as most of his predecessors had, “so help me God”.

Duncan Hosie, an academic fellow at the Stanford Constitutional Law Center, shared an insightful opinion piece (published today in the NYT) where he points out that, in contract and criminal law, the judicial system constrains bad actors through the imposition of penalties … the loss of treasure in the former case and the loss of freedom in the latter. In constitutional law, however, the judicial system has no such constraints. It presumes compliance. The only thing constraining a President is that oath and their own conscience. (There is the threat of impeachment, of course, but that mechanism is outside of the judicial system.)

I’ve previously written about this administration’s thumbing its nose at legislative authority. As for Constitutional authority, I recall being appalled by the response last year of a White House spokesperson, I believe Karoline Leavitt, when asked by a reporter what the administration would do if the Supreme Court ruled against them on the particular issue of interest that day. The spokesperson’s response (which I wish I had captured at the time) was more or less, “Who cares? So, what, is someone going to slap us on the wrist, again?”

Hosie recommended:

“We should place less hope in the courts and more faith in politics.”

“A constitutional order ultimately depends less on what judges are willing to say than on what people are willing to do.”

I agree. Our Constitution is not sufficient in, and of, itself. We must act if we want change. We must exert political pressure on both the administration and our elected representatives. I, for one, will be joining the No Kings 3 rally on March 28 and carrying my sign that says, “He swore an oath.” Not because I hate America, as Speaker Johnson accused me of in November, but because I love it. I urge you to join me and what I expect will be more than 10 million other concerned Americans on that pivotal day.

Dear readers,

Mr. Shapiro recently shared with me some of his thoughts on truth. His message prompted me to reflect on my increasing complacency about, and acceptance of, lying in the public sphere. It speaks to a fundamental principle that I, for one, want as a foundation of my government ... yet it is one that I have heretofore neglected. Today, with his full permission, I am pleased to share his unabridged thoughts for your consideration.

AJ

By D. Shapiro (guest contributor)

It is objectively the case that President Trump will say what serves his purpose in the moment without worrying too much, or perhaps at all, about the truth of his statements.

He does this with regard to matters big and small, and he does so fairly often, and without shame or remorse. Or consequence. This is not disputed, or even mentioned much any more. It has become a part of the reality of Trump. It is one of the fundamental characteristics of his presidency and of the man. This matters to some people. It doesn’t matter to others. It gives permission to many in his orbit to lie the way the boss does. It actually often requires that they do so. In fact, it is hard to know how far that permission structure, a new more, extends. And life goes on.

But leaving it there – as has been the case - moving on without serious and careful consideration of this new reality and its consequences - is a significant mistake. I would argue that this may be the decisive mistake of the times we are in. It is possible that, even after all of the consultants have been paid, they just don’t quite know how to talk about it. It is so outrageous that it is, in a sense, too big to really grasp. Every school child knows that lying is bad. It’s not nice. It is not an admired quality, to be a liar. True enough. But, to get at this issue, you have to talk about the why. Why is it bad?

There is an answer to that question that is on point.

To get our arms around it, we will have to reach back in time. And that is part of the problem. We are remote from the source material. By now, we have to reach back quite a distance to see what actually happens when the truth is so regularly supplanted by false words from the person at the top. It’s doable, but it takes a moment.

In order to get at the guts of this very large concept, I will go to a very small memory. Small, but persistent. Bear with me.

When I was a young boy, in the early and mid 1960s, in a middle class American suburb, there was a television program called Superman, or the Adventures of Superman. I don’t recall exactly. What I do recall clearly is the sound of the narrator’s voice as each episode began, announcing in a stern voice a few words that explained what Superman was about. He wasn’t just a good guy with super powers. He was a guy with a particular moral code. He was, we were told every week, engaged in the ongoing battle for “truth, justice and the American Way”. I can still quite clearly hear those words in that baritone voice. Pause for a moment and hear those words in your mind. Truth, justice and the American way. Just say them. They were not intended to be ironic, and they were not corny or arrogant or imperialist. Those words were the articulation of a value system. What does that even mean, a “value system”? And why was it being force fed to children on the television, mixed in with their entertainment? Why was it that important?

This was the early/mid 1960s, before drugs and civil rights and Vietnam became the dominant cultural headlines a little bit later. The headlines were about the cold war. The movie Dr. Strangelove was released in 1964. Remember the time. Importantly, the Second World War, and a wave of totalitarian/authoritarian governments, had ended not too long before and the memory of all of that had shaped not just a generation and not just this country (and the men who led it), but the world.

And that memory was not romantic or nostalgic. For the people who lived through the war and what brought it on, the memory was horrific. That war killed an estimated 80 million people. Over the approximately five years that it lasted, that was about 40,000 people a day. Every day. And many millions more had either left their homes in the late 1930s in anticipation of hostilities, or were left with no homes to go back to in mid 1945 when hostilities ended. A common catch phrase now is that “this”, whatever the “this” might be, “will change everything”. But World War II actually did. For everyone. The world had convulsed for five years, and when the convulsions ended, nothing, in fact, was the same.

What had changed? For purposes of this conversation, two aspects of our existence.

First, the war had demonstrated the human genius – I’m speaking here of raw technical, scientific genius - for mass death and the destruction of property and infrastructure that was so vast and efficient that our new found capacity to end everything – all of us who were or would ever be - terrified everyone, and rightly so.

The second change was that the war had taught us about the human capacity for depravity on an industrial, state sponsored scale, the likes of which had never been seen before. World War I had caused between 15-22 million deaths, but without the creation of nuclear weapons, and without the Holocaust. World War II was unique. It redefined not only our actual experience of mass destruction, but the boundaries of our imagination.

So, not only had we shown ourselves to be incredibly good at death and destruction in a way that had never before been possible, we also had made a convincing case that we were morally, spiritually and intellectually defective enough as a species that our own annihilation – using our awesome death skills - was now a credible and terrifying threat.

Violent conflict remained a very real possibility. In fact, because we seem to love this stuff at some level, and are clever if nothing else, humans found a way to conduct proxy wars that threw acceptably small numbers of bodies into the cauldron, but in places far from home, so that we could have war without quite risking oblivion. Korea. Vietnam. The Congo.

We were still very much in the fight. And what were we fighting for? How did we, as Americans, distinguish and explain ourselves? Truth, justice and The American Way. Why? Because, these were the emblems of our national character, and the bulwarks against the madness of the authoritarians. These were the words that were our code, for the forces of good and right. No more Hobbesian nightmares where the strong rule the weak and life is nasty, brutish and short. No more Hitlers. My God, we had just seen that play out. 80 million people, and whole countries and cities were gone. No more of that.

And “truth” was not in there by accident. This is key: the expression and understanding of what is true is absolutely required for honest and useful debate, and, thereby, for people to reason with each other. Reason distinguishes us from the beasts, and it is the voice of our good selves. Our bad selves come out when truth has been corrupted. When reason gives way to raw power. It is no mistake that Trump rules by threat and coercion. By force. He is not a reason kind of guy. He wants what he wants. Do it or you might have an accident. You might get a tariff. You might be removed from power by my greater power. It is thuggish compulsion, not reasoned persuasion. It is not truth based. And that very much leaves room for the whims of a single, charismatic person, because truth, and therefore reason, have become quaint and optional.

This should be a no brainer. Truth, justice and the American Way - our value system - has been a magnificent success. We have seen – in the USA and because of the USA over the past 80 years – the spread of democracy, the absence of a global conflagration, lower poverty, higher education, longer lives, greater prosperity, better health and more equality than at any time in human history.

But maybe 80 years is too long a time. Maybe it is too long to expect that we would keep front of mind the wickedness that is possible by our own hand. Of what can happen when we forsake our good selves. When we forfeit reason. When the thugs ascend.

This is the message that seems to have been left behind, untended. Those Superman folks were clever enough to package a value system in a few words and then pump it out to the rest of us. How do we reinvigorate that now? Because, we must. It is the lynchpin of our civilization.

“Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective. So the only way he figures that he’s going to get re-elected, and as sure as you’re sitting there, is to start a war with Iran.”

That was Donald Trump criticizing President Obama in November, 2011.

Ten days ago, now-President Trump made his hypocrisy crystal clear when he initiated a war with Iran. But we need to acknowledge that Mr. Trump had spoken, in 2011, to a fundamental truth that James Madison explained in The Pacificus-Helvidius Debates of 1793-1794 (co-written with Alexander Hamilton):

“War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war a physical force is to be created, and it is the executive will which is to direct it. In war the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions, and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.”

The founding fathers agreed and attempted to address these dangers in Constitution …

In Article I, Section 8, Clause 11, they gave Congress the power to declare war:

[The Congress shall have Power …] To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

In Article II, Section 2, Clause 1, they gave the President the power to execute a declared war:

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.

In The Pacificus-Helvidius Debates, Mr. Madison spoke to the criticality of this delineation of powers:

“In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department.”

In a self-governing state, the people and their representatives must have a say in the most consequential decision a state makes. It cannot be left to the impulses of a single person who will, in the short term, be granted extraordinary power and, in the long term, be written into history books should such a decision be made.

The government I want is well-defined in our Constitution.

Unfortunately, that government has steadily been degraded by each American President since the end of WWII.

Toward the end of what I see as our first “forever war” (Viet Nam), Congress passed (over the veto of President Nixon) the War Powers Resolution to constrain the President by requiring notification of Congress within 48 hours of committing armed forces to military action and forbidding continuance of such efforts for more than 60 days without congressional action (either an authorization for use of military force or a declaration of war). Our Presidents have, in my view, adhered to that Resolution but it has failed to accomplish its goal. Each President since has initiated acts of war and notified Congress. But Congress (which has not declared a war since 1942) is unable to unwind the already-in-motion actions of the President.

The government I want, regarding warfare, finally collapsed last week when a single man committed us to war without even the pretense of gaining the support of Congress much less the American people.