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When corporations take over public health care, quality decreases, and patients suffer. Medicaid cuts could lead to the same result. Scott Doerr OtherWords As Americans age, we deserve the peace of mind that we can find nursing care for our parents or ourselves when we need it. But for private equity firms, that need isn’t […]

Sasha Abramsky This article was originally published by Truthout The impact of the loss of knowledge and research will be felt for decades — a legacy of Trump’s war on science. Over the last few weeks, the Trump administration’s relentless war on the U.S.’s scientific infrastructure has picked up speed. The New York Times’s Lisa […]

In an interview with The New York Times last week, Tucker Carlson, once a Trump stalwart, called President Trump’s war with Iran “the single most foolish thing any American president has ever done.” The conservative podcaster no doubt was being intentionally hyperbolic, as his followers expect; it’s hard to argue that this military misadventure already qualifies as a more foolish decision than those that led to the Vietnam and Iraq wars. But Carlson, emphasizing his moral opposition to the war, contended that the administration had been pressured into it by Israel and argued that it would hurt U.S. interests for generations to come—and on those points, he’s correct.Carlson isn’t the only one on the right speaking this way. Before he was killed, Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk warned Trump against war in Iran and was critical of Israel’s war in Gaza. On the more normie side of MAGA world, podcaster Theo Von has been speaking out against the war with Iran, often with visible emotion and distress at the killing of children there. No matter what you think of these characters otherwise—and Carlson is a loathsome scoundrel, to be clear—the crescendo of voices like theirs on the right should serve as a warning to the Democratic Party not to ignore or sideline its own antiwar leaders. After all, Carlson’s antiwar opinions are shared by many across the political spectrum. Multiple recent polls have found that the Iran war is just as unpopular as the nadirs of the Iraq and the Vietnam wars, with around 60 percent of Americans saying the decision to use military force was a mistake—including one in five Republicans. Relatedly, Israel’s war against Gaza has caused a historically significant shift: More Americans now view Israel unfavorably than favorably, including 57 percent of Republican voters under age 49.“The real remaining strong pro-Israel constituency is over-50 Republicans,” Matt Duss, the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, told The Washington Post this week. “That’s not a durable political coalition.”Despite this, leading Democrats are dithering. If opposition to this war, and to all wars driven primarily by our relationship with Israel, doesn’t quickly become central to Democratic messaging, we can expect Carlson—or someone very much like him, such as former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene—to emerge as the antiwar candidate in the 2028 presidential election. There’s a clear hunger among the Democratic base for a dramatic change in foreign policy. Four in five Democratic voters disapprove of Israel, while more than 90 percent oppose the Iran war. So it’s no surprise that candidates who firmly denounce war and refuse money from AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying organization, are attracting support partly on that basis. Graham Platner, an antiwar and anti-genocide oyster farmer, is the presumptive Democratic nominee in Maine’s Senate race. In Michigan’s Democratic primary for Senate, Abdul Al-Sayed, a staunch Israel critic, is running neck and neck with Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel congresswoman, and state Senator Mallory McMorrow, who eventually came around to rejecting AIPAC and accusing Israel of genocide.But the party leadership has not been meeting the moment. In late February, as Trump made daily threats to bomb Iran, Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee reportedly tried to delay a vote on a war powers resolution. “The preferred outcome of many AIPAC-aligned Senate Democrats, according to a senior foreign policy aide to Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, is that Trump acts unilaterally, weakening Iran while absorbing the domestic backlash ahead of the midterms,” reported Capital & Empire’s Aída Chávez, who cites sources saying that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was not whipping votes for the resolution. Four days after that article, Trump launched his war.Schumer and Jeffries have since criticized it, of course, and backed efforts to pass a war powers resolution. They might call this “leading from behind,” but it looks more like belatedly jumping on the bandwagon. After all, both of them were supportive of Trump’s bombing of Iran last summer. Several weeks prior, Schumer even taunted Trump for not bombing Iran hastily enough. In fact, Schumer has a history of jonesing for this conflict. Back in 2015, he criticized the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, President Obama’s landmark deal with Iran, for allegedly not doing enough to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions. In announcing his “no” vote, Schumer wrote that “there is a strong case that we are better off without an agreement than with one.” Trump agreed, and promptly ripped up the deal during his first term. Fast-forward to today, and Trump is now attempting to convince Iran to sign a deal similar to the JCPOA—after spending tens of billions of dollars and killing thousands of people. Schumer deserves a share of blame for that outcome. And of course he remains a staunch ally of Israel, despite its genocide in Gaza: He was not among the record number of Senate Democrats who voted last month to block arms sales to the country. These leaders represent the tired quiescence of the Democratic Party to the American war machine—essentially the same argument Carlson is making about the Republican Party—which makes it hard for them to capitalize on Trump’s disastrous mistake with convincing moral fervor.Even worse, they’ve been slow to embrace their own party’s antiwar candidates. Schumer, brilliant talent scout that he is, recruited Maine Governor Janet Mills to run for Senate against Republican Susan Collins and supported her against Platner. (Mills failed to compete in polls and fundraising, and dropped out last week, at which point Schumer endorsed Platner.) In the Michigan race, Schumer endorsed Stevens, who was booed for being too pro-Israel at the Michigan Democratic Convention last month. The views represented by Schumer and his fellow centrists must not be allowed to prevail in the party in 2028. Democrats have already lost one presidential election for being too supportive of Israel and war: In 2024, voters punished Kamala Harris for the Biden administration’s role in Israel’s genocide. According to polling from the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, Gaza was the number one issue for Biden 2020 voters who voted for someone other than Harris in 2024. Many of them voted for Trump, believing, as Carlson did, that he was genuinely antiwar, while those who couldn’t stomach voting for Trump simply stayed home. Yet the Democratic establishment is still trying to suppress obvious truths. The Democratic National Committee is refusing to release an autopsy of the 2024 election that shows what even Harris herself, in her campaign memoir, has acknowledged: that Gaza was an important factor in her defeat. Just a couple days ago, DNC Chair Ken Martin was still making lame and incomprehensible excuses for keeping the report under wraps, even as Harris reportedly tells donors that the DNC should release it. That election demonstrated that voters will punish the incumbent party for unjustifiable wars. Trump’s war with Iran and his failure to rein in Israel in Gaza are huge liabilities for the Republican Party, in the midterms and in 2028. But we shouldn’t underestimate the Democrats’ capacity to compete with Trump in turning Iran and Israel into losing issues for themselves. If the leadership—and donors—successfully push an insufficiently antiwar nominee, an Israel hawk like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, for example, or a milquetoast candidate unable to articulate a clear critique of either Biden or Trump policy, like Kamala Harris or outgoing California Governor Gavin Newsom, voters may look elsewhere. You do not have to hand it to Tucker Carlson for his recent critiques. You don’t even have to listen to him. But Democratic leadership should take the full-throated antiwar sentiment on the right as a warning to heed their own party’s antiwar voices. Otherwise, they may indeed be handing Carlson and his fellow antiwar rightists something more significant: our future.

On July 1, perhaps the most punitive bathroom ban in the country is set to go into effect in Idaho. The ban threatens people with criminal penalties for being in a public restroom that does not match what the law refers to as their “biological sex” (a term it does not define). A group of transgender Idahoans have now challenged the ban in federal court, in hopes that it will be blocked before it can be enforced. Their lawsuit, filed April 29 by Lambda Legal, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the ACLU of Idaho, argues that the state’s bathroom ban violates the constitutional rights of the plaintiffs, as well as any transgender person in Idaho.The suit argues that the ban, House Bill 752, is both unconstitutionally vague and discriminatory, under the Fourteenth Amendment, and “presents transgender Idahoans with an impossible choice: they can either use a restroom that does not align with their gender identity and risk severe physical and psychological harms, or continue to use restrooms in public in accordance with their gender identity and risk a criminal record and imprisonment.” Through the stories they tell in the suit, the plaintiffs demonstrate that the ban presents an even broader and more insidious risk. In cases where the ban does not result in arrests and imprisonment, it could still turn transgender people into objects of routine suspicion, normalizing surveillance and questioning by police and the public alike, and granting such stigma and harassment the imprimatur of the law.There is little doubt that the ban, one of many anti-trans bills taken up by the Idaho state legislature in this year’s session, was meant to criminalize the mere presence of a trans person in any public bathroom in the state, including restrooms in private businesses, with penalties ranging from one to five years in jail or prison. “If you’re trans, this creates a crime for who you are,” said state Senator James Ruchti, who opposed the ban. Those supporting it claimed that transgender people do not exist, that trans women specifically are “men” and “need to be treated as such.”The Idaho case offers a particularly clear example of the animus behind these laws, as well as how expansive their harm can be. The ban is not confined to the bathroom; it extends to nearly every facet of public life. “H.B. 752’s shadow will endanger my ability to operate effectively in my job,” said Amelia Milette, one of the plaintiffs, in a statement provided by Lambda Legal to The New Republic. She is 50 years old, has lived in Idaho for her whole life, and has had her job for nine years. “In my role, I travel to multiple offices and locations, so I can’t anticipate what restrooms I’ll have access to on a daily basis. If I don’t have access to a restroom I can use safely and without disruption while working with a client, I will have to interrupt my work to find one and I may encounter confusion and discrimination.” Diego Fable, another plaintiff, also risks repercussions in his employment. The 32-year-old, who has lived in Idaho for 10 years, plans to move out of state if the ban goes into effect; he could keep his job, but if he becomes an out-of-state worker, his employer will classify him as a contractor, a designation that will affect his benefits and job protections.Employment issues, Milette said, “are just the thinnest edge of what is on the horizon for transgender individuals, like me, in Idaho.” The ban also risks isolating an already isolated community. While living in Idaho, Fable has “enjoyed hikes put together for the queer community,” he said in a statement to TNR, as well as “birding every day in Boise’s vibrant parks and green spaces.” In anticipation of the ban going into effect, he said, “I’ve begun scouting bathrooms I pass by, recently, but I fear how others would respond if I were to use the women’s restroom in a public park as a transgender man. It would be safest to stay home—which sounds pretty miserable for me. I would rather be out enjoying the birds as I always have, without all this extra anxiety foisted on me by this law.”The complaint highlights how quickly the law was foisted on Idaho, as well as the disingenuous rhetoric of the bill’s sponsor, state Representative Cornel Rasor, who claimed that the bathroom ban “extends” what he called “proven biological sex protections,” while also claiming that it protected “privacy, safety, and dignity, especially for women and girls.” At the same time, as the complaint summarized, “several legislators referred to transgender people as presumptively criminal, used harmful and inaccurate stereotypes, and speculated that legislators would commit violence if their family members encountered a transgender person in a sex-designated space.” As state Representative Dale R. Hawkins had said at the time, “If someone followed my daughter into a shower room, my family would have to come visit me somewhere because I wouldn’t be waiting for police.” (Meanwhile, the legal challenge notes, a number of law enforcement organizations in the state, such as the Idaho Chiefs of Police Association and the Idaho Fraternal Order of Police, opposed the bathroom ban, on the grounds that it would put officers in “impossible situations” and would be “difficult to enforce.”)One thing the debate over the ban made clear was that some Idaho lawmakers have no qualms about making trans people feel afraid. Nor do they appear the least bit embarrassed to put their threats on the record. Openly pledging to engage in vigilantism, as Hawkins did during a hearing in the state legislature, is now apparently just part of the lawmaking process in Idaho. It would be fair to ask why, when such people are willing to take the law into their own hands, they believe a law is needed at all. For a lot of transgender people in Idaho, explained Kell Olson, counsel and strategist at Lambda Legal, “if they comply with the law, then they are likely to be seen as violating the law—because they are going to look like a man in a woman’s bathroom, or vice versa.” As the law has been set up, the only way for a trans person to comply would amount to forcing them to unmake themselves, in public, subject to humiliation and exposed to danger. It is as if the law itself is secondary; what lawmakers really want is the stamp of the purported democratic process to elevate violent rhetoric and threats against a community that already faces an extreme deprivation of rights.“When you pass a law as if trans people don’t exist, the only way it will work is if transgender people go away altogether—disappear from society—and that’s what this law is calling for,” Olson said. When Republican state Senator Brandon Shippy called transgender people “a myth,” when he stated that “we have to keep reminding ourselves that there is no oppressed community that we’re dealing with here,” it sounded like he was describing the future he intended the law to bring about: one in which trans Idahoans either go back in the closet or leave the state. Those who brought this challenge refuse that unjust choice.

Last week, the Supreme Court’s 6–3, party-line decision in Louisiana v. Callais gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the law Congress enacted to stop politicians from drawing district maps that erase the political power of Black and brown voters. The ruling is the latest salvo in the Roberts court’s antidemocracy project. It is a partisan, ideological judicial campaign with a long paper trail that began with Citizens United, when the Roberts court opened the floodgates to corporate money in politics. Another important milestone in the court’s broader shift to the right was Trump v. United States, in which the court declared President Trump above the law by granting him immunity from criminal prosecution for “official” acts. The pro-democracy community is sounding the alarm that we desperately need judicial reforms. The reproductive rights and gun safety advocacy communities have also recognized this, in the wake of devastating losses when the Roberts court stripped women of rights to bodily autonomy and ordained that the Constitution effectively renders elected leaders powerless to stop school shootings.One group, though, has been largely silent on the court’s direction and how to fight it. It is time for the progressive economic policy community to make court reform a “must do” governing priority for them too. No economic agenda is complete without a plan to fix the courts, because the same broken courts that are dismantling multiracial democracy are also a major structural obstacle to reining in corporate power and delivering economic relief for working Americans.It’s not just that the Supreme Court is protecting President Trump. It is also standing in the way of any meaningful economic reform. Just like Chief Justice Roberts embarked on a decades-long crusade to dismantle the Voting Rights Act, under his leadership the court has also steadily worked to entrench our K-shaped economy. Citizens United flooded our politics with corporate money, making it harder to pass the laws that would curb corporate power in the first place. For workers and consumers who try to fight back in court, the Roberts court has also spent decades systematically making it harder to enforce the existing laws on the books—including raising the bar to bringing antitrust suits, blessing fine-print forced arbitration clauses that deprive workers of their day in court, and gutting the class actions that once allowed ordinary people to pool their claims against powerful corporations. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper tracked every economically significant Supreme Court case from 1953 to the present and found the partisan gap in pro-wealthy rulings has grown to 47 percentage points by 2022, up from near zero in the 1950s. And we don’t just have a Supreme Court problem. The lower courts have also blocked hundreds of billions of dollars in relief for working families before it ever had a chance to reach them. For example, courts threw out the Federal Trade Commission’s ban on noncompete clauses, which would have freed 30 million workers to change jobs and boosted wages by over $400 billion over the next decade. They blocked the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s crackdown on credit card late fees, handing card companies an estimated $10 billion in profits. Courts blocked or defanged rules on nursing home safety, overtime pay, medical debt, and more. None of it ever came into effect.Corporate lawyers have mastered this playbook. Thanks to forum shopping—filing in the single most favorable district court—combined with the ability of single judges to grant nationwide relief, individual lower court judges in regional courthouses have become de facto veto-holders over national policy. Indeed, in all of the examples above, a single Trump-appointed judge in Texas, acting alone, was able to issue an order that blocked pocketbook relief for millions of working-class Americans across the country. The result is a judicial system in which monied interests increasingly use courts as the tool of choice to block any attempt to limit corporate rent-seeking and abuse. NYU’s Institute for Policy Integrity tracked over 2,300 major federal rules issued since 1996. They found that courts struck down major rules only about one-tenth of the time in the 1990s but now invalidate over half.  For some, a call to rein in the courts might seem counterintuitive at a time when it often feels as if rulings from brave district judges are the only thing keeping the rule of law from fully unraveling. But the data suggests otherwise: The Supreme Court has sided with the Trump administration 80 percent of the time on emergency shadow docket rulings, often with no explanation at all. And courts have let Trump administration policies take effect while cases wind through the courts about 70 percent of the time. The judiciary is not saving us. It needs saving.In fact, alarm bells are going off inside the judiciary itself. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has accused her colleagues of “Calvinball jurisprudence,” with one rule: “This Administration always wins.” She’s not alone. Last October, The New York Times surveyed federal district court judges and found dozens willing to speak out: One compared their court’s relationship with the Supreme Court to “a war zone”; another called it flatly a “judicial crisis.” So what do we do?Anyone who cares about a fair economy should demand that their elected leaders have a clear, specific plan for court reform. No policymaker can credibly promise working-class Americans economic relief without a plan to prevent courts from blocking its delivery. And don’t accept promises of a “commission” or “task force” as an answer. That’s D.C.-speak for I feel no urgency, and in this moment, no urgency is itself a policy choice.As for specific reforms, on the Supreme Court, there are at least three serious options, which are not mutually exclusive: Use Congress’s constitutional authority to strip it of jurisdiction over certain categories of cases, adopt a supermajority requirement for constitutional rulings, or expand its size with staggered term limits—after which justices could continue to hear cases in the lower courts, preserving the life tenure required by the Constitution. If we expand, go big. Don’t just stop at three or four seats, which continues the cycle of high-stakes partisan battles. Go to 20, 30, or 50 seats, with justices hearing cases in randomly selected smaller panels. At that scale, no single nomination becomes a constitutional crisis, and no justice is a famous politician in robes. Do the same for the courts of appeals.On forum shopping: Create a specialized circuit for challenges to federal rules of national scope like the noncompete rule, or a nationwide lottery to assign such cases. This is a fix that could be genuinely bipartisan, since Democrats objected when Texas judges blocked President Biden’s policies and the right now objects when blue-district judges are blocking President Trump’s.On regulatory litigation, reform the Administrative Procedure Act. The APA was written in 1946 to ensure federal agencies followed fair procedures. It has since been weaponized by corporate lawyers into a tool for killing policies on procedural technicalities, while relief like wage increases and consumer protections never reaches the people it was designed to help. When an agency acts within the statutory authority Congress granted it, courts should defer to those policy judgments. Congress wrote the law. Congress delegated the authority. Unelected judges shouldn’t get the last word. The reproductive rights, gun safety, and pro-democracy communities recognize that court reform is a prerequisite for their agenda. The economic policy community is still catching up. Callais is a reminder that this is the same fight. You cannot have a democracy that delivers for working people without courts that allow democracy to function.Court reform is not a boutique legal argument. It must be a governing priority.

Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues have a problem on their hands. Americans have an increasingly low opinion of the Supreme Court. Thanks to its aggressive and corrosive rulings, a growing number of voters and elected officials favor structural reforms to rein in the conservative justices—by expanding its size, narrowing its jurisdiction, and other major changes. The chief justice rose to the court’s defense during a legal conference on Wednesday. “I think at a very basic level, people think we’re making policy decisions, [that] we’re saying we think this is what things should be as opposed to this is what the law provides,” Roberts said, according to NBC’s Lawrence Hurley. “I think they view us as truly political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do. I would say that’s the main difficulty.” While Roberts reportedly acknowledged that people have a right to criticize the court and its rulings, the chief justice also claimed that the court’s decisions were not political in nature. “We’re not simply part of the political process, and there’s a reason for that, and I’m not sure people grasp that as much as is appropriate,” he told the audience.Let’s start by clarifying the terminology here, since it matters more than it might seem at first glance. There is a strong tendency in American parlance to use the term political in a purely pejorative sense, often with the implication of unsavoriness, partiality, or even a whiff of corruption or bias. Sometimes people use it when they actually mean “partisan,” or merely to describe something that expresses an opinion or viewpoint with which they disagree. Politics is merely the term for how we order our lives and our society. In its broadest sense, everything is political. Where you buy groceries or clothes can be a political act. Paying (or not paying) your taxes is a political act, as well. Voting and speaking out are obviously political acts, but they are not the only forms of political expression. Abstaining from politics—by which people often mean electoral politics and civic participation—is also itself a deeply political choice.This negative connotation of politics is so deeply ingrained that it’s not worth challenging people about it in passing conversation. When someone says, “I don’t want to talk about politics,” for example, what they often mean is “I don’t want to be disagreeable in a social setting.” That’s perfectly fine. But sometimes people think “politics” is just what other people are doing or saying, while their own views and beliefs are “common sense.”The problem is that Roberts appears to be transposing that popular understanding onto the three branches of the federal government. In his apparent view, Congress and the presidency—the elected branches—are engaged in the grubby, sordid, and demeaning day-to-day work of politics, which he describes as the “political process.” The Supreme Court, on the other hand, serenely stands above the fray in its marble palace in Washington, D.C.Some legal scholars have described this worldview as “judicial self-aggrandizement.” In 2023, Georgetown University law professor Josh Chafetz argued that the justices “hold themselves out as a pure, reason-based alternative to the messy business of the ‘political branches’” as a means to empower themselves. “In the judges’ presentation, it is not the courts taking power for themselves; the courts are simply neutral conduits for the law, which happens to limit the powers of the other institutions,” he explained.There are strong echoes of this in the Roberts court’s jurisprudence. The chief justice and his colleagues, particularly the conservatives, have often treated electoral politics as inherently corrupt and self-serving. They have even done so while removing constraints on actual corruption, making the American electoral system less responsive to the public, and imposing subjective judicial vetoes across the nation’s policymaking apparatus.In a line of cases starting with 2016’s McDonnell v. United States, for example, the court has all but recognized a First Amendment right to pay-to-play politics by narrowing federal bribery laws to only “official acts” in their most literal form. The justices could have upheld the conviction on narrow grounds while signaling that more innocuous gifts, like taking someone out to lunch, would not qualify. They chose otherwise.Two years ago in Snyder v. United States, the conservative majority also decriminalized “gratuities”—bribes given to state and local officials after an official act is performed, instead of before it—because it feared that the law could criminalize “gift cards, lunches, plaques, books, framed photos, or the like.” It cited no cases where federal prosecutors had done that, nor did it reckon with the actual facts of the case. Instead the high court relied on amorphous federalism concerns, even though Congress had tied it to officials who spend federal funds, and it second-guessed Congress’s intent over the plain text of the statute.This freewheeling approach only applies to the other branches. In 2015, the Supreme Court upheld a Florida law that bars elected judges and judicial candidates from personally soliciting campaign donations. If Congress had passed an identical law that imposed the same restrictions on congressional and presidential candidates, I have little doubt that it would be struck down by this court in a heartbeat on First Amendment grounds.Courts are special, Roberts instead wrote in his majority opinion. “Judges are not politicians, even when they come to the bench by way of the ballot,” he wrote. “And a state’s decision to elect its judiciary does not compel it to treat judicial candidates like campaigners for political office. A state may assure its people that judges will apply the law without fear or favor—and without having personally asked anyone for money.”The message from all these rulings is that Americans have no right to expect honest services from other government officials. They should not assume that lawmakers, governors, or presidents will ever act in the public interest, exercise their best independent judgment, or conduct themselves with any sense of civic integrity. Nor should Americans count on the law to punish public officials for misconduct. If ordinary people want to get something out of their government, they should tip early and tip often. Even then, you might be out of luck. The Supreme Court has spent the last 20 years making America nearly ungovernable. This trend can also be traced to the court’s self-aggrandizement, particularly when it comes to Democratic presidents. Thanks to the court’s embrace of partisan gerrymandering since 2019, most Americans no longer live in competitive House districts. The lawmakers who are elected are increasingly extreme figures who can pass purity tests in primary elections, where any remaining competitiveness takes place. Combined with the gutting of campaign finance laws, this means that lawmakers—and particularly GOP lawmakers—are beholden not to the voters but to well-funded special interests who can tip a primary race (early and often) one way or the other with super PAC money. Congressional dysfunction is not entirely the Supreme Court’s fault, but it has made it nearly impossible to fix.Even if Congress were more functional, the Supreme Court has given itself free rein to second-guess the legislative branch’s judgment and discretion. The “major questions doctrine” mainly curbs executive policymaking, but it substantively narrows Congress’s power, as well. To survive its vague and subjective terms, lawmakers must pass new laws for new circumstances instead of allowing existing laws to be applied in novel ways. The Supreme Court has only ever applied this doctrine to Democratic presidents; half of them refused to use it to strike down Trump’s tariffs despite the clear opportunity to do so.Take, for example, how Justice Samuel Alito wrote about the Clean Water Act in a 2023 case. Congress enacted the CWA to clean up pollution in the nation’s waterways and protect them from further despoiling. It was the will of the American people, expressed through their legislature, that these waterways be protected. Congress has not repealed the CWA or amended its scope more narrowly. Alito, however, thought differently. The law, he complained, imposed “crushing consequences” on “property owners” for often “mundane” violations like “moving dirt.”His own policy preferences led him to sharply narrow the scope of waters protected by the CWA. “Congress, the majority scolds, has unleashed the EPA to regulate ‘swimming pools and puddles,’ wreaking untold havoc on ‘a staggering array of landowners,’” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a separate opinion that castigated Alito’s framing. “Surely something has to be done; and who else to do it but this Court? It must rescue property owners from Congress’s too-ambitious program of pollution control.”Time and time again, this court has killed off public policy decisions for reasons that appear driven by the court’s own sentiments rather than the law itself. Scalia, I noted recently, described the Voting Rights Act as a “racial entitlement” during oral arguments in a 2013 case. When the court heard a challenge to the Biden administration’s student debt relief plan in 2023, Roberts questioned at oral arguments whether it was fair to provide relief to college students but not to a hypothetical small-business owner’s loan—and whether that perceived unfairness should factor into the court’s decision.Nor is it hard to conclude that the justices’ policy preferences are warping their procedures. Starting with Roberts’s own intervention in an Environmental Protection Agency case in 2016, the conservative justices have routinely used the shadow docket to freeze progressive policies and, especially in Trump’s second term, accelerate conservative ones. They spent the entire Biden administration affirming nationwide injunctions from federal courts in Texas, only to nix them as an option for lower court judges a few months after Trump returned to power.To describe the cumulative effect of the court’s rulings, especially in recent years, is to lose confidence in it. One cannot reasonably claim to be a nonpolitical force in American life when habitually tilting the scales of American power in favor of the rich, the powerful, and the corrupt. Nor can you extract the court’s work from the extrajudicial forces that have shaped it.Six of the court’s nine justices sit there because their predecessor timed their retirement to ensure an ideologically compatible replacement. Roberts himself owes his seat to a conservative legal movement that spent decades identifying potential nominees who could bring a particular ideological vision to the high court. They worked hard to elect senators and presidents to bring that vision about. Their labors have paid off.Just last month, for example, Thomas gave an hour-long speech at a law school in Texas where he described American progressivism as an existential threat to our constitutional order and fundamentally incompatible with the Declaration of Independence’s values. He attributed to it the worst horrors of the twentieth century, including the Nazi conquest of Europe and the injustices of Soviet and Maoist dictatorships.His historically illiterate remarks validated every mote of skepticism that anyone left of center might have toward the high court. Indeed, Roberts’s challenge isn’t that Americans misunderstand the Supreme Court; it’s that a growing number of them understand it all too well. Americans are bound to obey the court’s rulings as a matter of law, but they are not obligated to respect or have confidence in an institution that does not respect them or the Constitution.For many years, there were moderate and liberal court watchers who defended the Supreme Court as an institution even as it drifted further and further to the right. I myself argued against adding more justices during the first Trump administration. Expanding the court, I reasoned, was a temporary solution at best that would not address the underlying factors that were fueling the court’s growing legitimacy crisis.I have deeply regretted that stance ever since the Supreme Court held, two years ago, that presidents can commit crimes in office—a blasphemous and indefensible reading of the Constitution and a betrayal of our nation’s fundamental principles. Since then, I have concluded that expanding the court and breaking the conservative justices’ grip on American society is not only a necessity, but a moral imperative. Thanks to Roberts and his colleagues, I am far from alone.

It has come to this. Every year a completely inoffensive nonprofit called the Partnership for Public Service hosts a ceremony to hand out awards to civil servants who excel at their jobs. The awards are called the “Sammies,” after the roofing magnate and philanthropist Samuel J. Heyman (1939–2009), who put up $45 million to create the Partnership for Public Service in 2001. The Sammies have won bipartisan praise over the years, and at the latest gala, held May 6, former Presidents George W. Bush and Joe Biden made video appearances.But the Trump administration doesn’t want excellent civil servants. It made that plain last year when it pushed out Dave Lebryk, fiscal assistant treasury secretary, who at last year’s Sammies ceremony won the highest honor, “federal employee of the year.” Lebryk was cashiered for denying Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency access to the government’s payment system. (That’s also what won him his Sammie.) Indeed, Trump doesn’t seem to want civil servants at all. Last year he either fired or harassed into quitting 317,000 of them, and this year he’s poised to reclassify 50,000 more as “at will” employees with no civil service protection. White House budget director Russell “Project 2025” Vought famously said in a 2024 speech, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.” The only reason Vought would ever show up at a Sammies ceremony would be to scribble down license plate numbers like a police detective at a Mafia funeral.In light of all this, it’s hardly surprising that attendance was way down at this year’s Sammies ceremony, according to Meryl Kornfield of The Washington Post. Participation was also down among the federal agencies that nominate employees for Sammies. In 2024, 70 agencies nominated about 500 federal bureaucrats for Sammies. In 2025, 65 agencies nominated about 350. This year, 39 agencies nominated about 140. Several Cabinet members explicitly refused to participate in the survey, and many others declined more quietly. “There was nervousness about nominating anyone,” Max Stier, chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, told The New York Times’ Elizabeth Williamson, “nervousness about accepting, a culture of fear and subbasement morale.” Last year, the Partnership awarded 19 Sammies; this year, only four. I’m going to withhold their names because I don’t want to put a target on their backs. Fear may not be the only factor driving down the number of Sammies awarded this year. Another reason may be that there are 317,000 fewer civil servants to choose from. Conservative rhetoric to the contrary, the civil service isn’t that big; it’s only about 2.1 million people, which is significantly fewer than there were 50 years ago. The total went down because about half those people worked for the Defense Department, which downsized after the Cold War ended. Even so, the three defense agencies—the Defense Department, the Veterans Affairs Department, and the Homeland Security Department—today employ the majority of civil servants. Civil servants at non-defense government departments—the departments where Musk and Vought concentrated their bloodletting—number only about 725,000. That suggests that in the last year we lost somewhere between one-third and one-half of all non-defense civil servants.Were some of the 317,000 fired civil servants incompetent? With a sample that large, there’s bound to have been some clock-watchers and dumbbells. But all available evidence suggests that it wasn’t the incompetents who got targeted, but rather the smarter, harder-working, and more dedicated employees, who weren’t afraid to get in Musk’s and Vought’s way. Incompetents tend to be compliant and try not to draw attention to themselves. If I’m right, then the one-third-to-one-half of all civil servants fired last year included a disproportionate number of Sammie prospects. It’s a terrible brain drain for the country—and, whether he knows it or not, for Trump. As my colleague Grace Segers reported last month, one reason (among many) that the conflict with Iran is going so badly is that the experienced staff who would normally help manage it are no longer there. Last year, Michael Lewis published Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service, an excellent anthology of profiles of stellar civil servants that originated as a Washington Post series under the stewardship of opinion editor David Shipley (who quit rather than adhere to Jeff Bezos’s policy that the Post publish only opinions with which Bezos agreed). As best I can tell, all of the government workers celebrated by Lewis and Co. still seem to be in the employ of the federal government, and one of them, Jarod Koopman of the IRS, actually got promoted last fall to acting chief tax compliance officer. (To read my Democracy review of Lewis’s book, click here, and to read my 2022 celebration of public servants in TNR, click here.) Or maybe Koopman got kicked upstairs. In Lewis’s anthology, Geraldine Brooks wrote about Koopman’s derring-do as director of the IRS’s Cyber Crimes section. Among the achievements Brooks celebrated was the prosecution of one Dread Pirate Roberts, a 29-year-old drug dealer named Ross Ulbricht. But the day after Trump was re- inaugurated in 2025, he pardoned Ulbricht, saying on Truth Social, “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.”  So much for excellence.The Pulitzer Prize for public-service journalism was awarded earlier this week to a different Washington Post series about civil servants, this one focused on how they’ve been abused under Trump. After the pieces ran, the FBI raided the home of the principal author of the series, Hannah Natanson. If that’s what happens to big-time journalists who write sympathetically about civil servants, you can imagine what happens to the civil servants themselves. The price these days of winning a Sammie would appear to be too high. If you’re doing the people’s work effectively, best to keep quiet about it and to ask your friends and colleagues to clam up about it too, until the present Cultural Revolution in Washington ends.

Burying your child is a nightmare from which no parent ever fully wakes. Burying your child who died in prison is something worse than a nightmare Kwaneta Harris for Prism This essay was co-published with Solitary Watch and contains mentions of child sexual assault, self-harm, and suicide. It is against the laws of nature for parents […]

Fear in the industry is as good a reason to block the merger as any, writes Ruffalo.