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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 30 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump’s corrupt use of state power to persecute his enemies is dramatically ramping up. The Justice Department just indicted former FBI Director James Comey on laughably thin charges. And the Federal Communications Commission chief is escalating his war against ABC due to Trump’s rage at Jimmy Kimmel. These are heinous abuses of power, but we also think they’re likely to backfire on Trump in a major way. If and when they fizzle, the result will be that they don’t even energize the MAGA base for the midterms, and if anything, will likely drive votes against the GOP.We’re digging through all this today with former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade, author of a new book, The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government, which is certainly an apt title given these latest developments. Barb, good to have you on.Barbara McQuade: Thanks, Greg. Great to be here. You know, when I first came up with that title, like a year and a half ago, it felt very novel and now it feels very obvious.Sargent: It’s perfect. You were prescient there. Well done. So let’s start with James Comey. Trump’s effort to prosecute him the first time failed. Now they’re starting again. James Comey has been indicted for an image he put on Instagram last spring showing seashells arranged to depict the numbers 86-47. Barb, can you walk us through what prosecutors are trying to do here and why it’s such a joke?McQuade: Yeah, it’s hard to get into the head of what’s happening at DOJ right now because it’s so far afield from what I saw in my 20 years as a federal prosecutor. We saw the effort to convict James Comey of a crime in the fall fizzle. And so now here we are with this charge based on events that occurred almost a year ago. If this were really such a serious charge, you know, what on earth could explain an almost year-long delay? I know Todd Blanche and Kash Patel said that they’ve been investigating the case, but my gosh, they had the post in May and they interviewed Comey the next day. I don’t know what more is necessary. Go out to sea and find the actual seashells? I don’t think so.And so, this statute is something I’ve charged. Threatening to kill a president is a serious crime and people do get charged with it from time to time. The essence of the charge is it has to be what’s called a true threat. It’s not enough to say, I don’t like the president or even to say the president should die. You have to express a true threat. And what the court has said, as recently as 2023 in a case called Countermann v. Colorado, is that a true threat is—I’m reading here from the case—”a serious expression that the speaker means to convey an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence.” That’s a high standard. And the reason it’s such a high standard is to separate what is a true threat from mere political speech.Of course, in this country, we give a lot of protection under our First Amendment to free speech. And so to make sure that it isn’t just, you said something mean about the president, you said something about your wishes about the president—those are not enough. It has to be a threat to commit an unlawful act of violence against a target. And I just don’t think we have that here.Sargent: So we’ve got the number 86 here, which seems to be at issue. It seems to be getting construed as a threat itself. Let’s listen to Trump talk about that for a sec. Here, a reporter asks Trump if he really thinks Comey’s shell image threatened his life. Listen.Reporter (voiceover): Do you really think that he was endangering your life or threatening your life with that?Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, if anybody knows anything about crime, they know 86, you know, and 86 is a mob term for kill him. You know, you ever see the movies—86 him? The mobster says to one of his wonderful associates, 86 him. That means kill him. It’s—I think of it as a mob term. I don’t know. People think of it as something having to do with disappearing. But the mob uses that term to say when they want to kill somebody, they say 86 the son of a gun.Sargent: Barb, he can’t even bring himself to pretend to believe that’s real, right? I mean, look—so the term 86, you wrote in a piece for MS NOW about this—can you talk about the term 86 in this context and why this construal is so friggin’ ridiculous?McQuade: Yes. So as far as I know, the term comes from the restaurant business, where to 86 means to cancel an order. I know Merriam-Webster says it can mean to remove. I suppose Donald Trump thinks it’s used by the mafia—I guess he would know, I don’t—to mean to kill somebody. But I think it’s a vague term. It’s capable of numerous interpretations. It could mean impeach the president. It could mean remove him from office. It could mean don’t vote for him. It could mean don’t support his—it could mean no kings, right? It could mean a lot of things. Sargent: Is there any planet on which it clears the threshold you laid out just before, which is that it has to be a very clear expression of a deliberate and imminent threat with real intent behind it?McQuade: Yeah, I don’t think it does. And, you know, in addition to the statement itself, I think that if this case were to go to trial, Jim Comey himself would testify and he would get on the stand and say what he told the Secret Service agents the day after the post, which was, I had no idea people viewed this phrase this way, I certainly didn’t intend to express any sort of threat. And he took it down immediately. I think in light of that, combined with the vague nature of the statement itself, there’s just no way a jury unanimously finds 12 people—beyond a reasonable doubt—that this was an effort to convey a serious threat of unlawful violence.Sargent: Right. And we should point out here that Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, is now auditioning for the permanent AG slot, and Trump fired his predecessor, Pam Bondi, because she failed to prosecute and jail enough of Trump’s enemies. And she failed at that—guess why? Because the facts and the law didn’t permit it. The whole reason Trump wants Blanche in there instead is because he will not be constrained by facts and law, correct?McQuade: Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, it’s obviously a little bit of speculation on our part, but it really seems that, you know, there’s a vacancy. Blanche as the acting attorney general no doubt wants the permanent role. If the reason Pam Bondi lost her job is that Trump thought she was not aggressive enough, then guess what Todd Blanche decides he needs to do. Donald Trump has long yearned for his Roy Cohn. Roy Cohn, of course, was the lawyer who represented him in housing discrimination cases against the Department of Justice in the 1970s. He was a lawyer to the mafia, represented many members of crime families in the 1980s. He was also one of Joseph McCarthy’s lead counsel during the Red Scare. He was someone known to play hardball politics, a tenacious, take-no-prisoners style of litigation. And Donald Trump wants that in an attorney general.But let me say that is not the way the Justice Department has traditionally conducted itself. That’s the way maybe lawyers in private practice conduct themselves. They will very zealously advocate for their client because that is who they represent. And that’s fine when it comes to private practice. But when you are a lawyer for the government, you have a higher calling. Your job is to see that justice is done. And a prosecutor should not bring a case under the DOJ’s principles of federal prosecution unless it is probable that they can obtain and sustain a conviction based on admissible evidence. And here, I think it’s completely far-fetched to think that that standard could be met. You can certainly make a person’s life miserable by indicting them. They’ve got to undertake the expense of hiring a lawyer. There’s stress on them and their family. It’s disruptive of their lives. It can harm their reputation. All of those kinds of things will happen to Jim Comey, even if he ultimately is exonerated at trial, which is what I fully expect to happen.Sargent: Well, let’s switch to Jimmy Kimmel for a sec. Trump is in a fury at Kimmel because he did a routine where he played the role of MC at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He didn’t actually show up at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. This was a couple days before—he was acting out the role of MC at it. And then, as if Melania Trump were sitting in the audience, he joked, “Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.” Now, of course, the alleged assassination attempt happened a couple days later. Trump is now demanding his firing. Barb, this is just standard-issue standup ribbing. How is this real?McQuade: Yeah, and we also have now Brendan Carr deciding to review the license of ABC—their broadcast license. He is, of course, the chair of the FCC, and it’s not the first time he has suggested that he could mess around with licenses as an effort to rein in Jimmy Kimmel, right? I mean, Jimmy Kimmel made a joke—not a particularly funny one—but about the reaction of the administration to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, talking about how members of the White House and politicians were trying to exploit that death. At the time there were statements made by Brendan Carr. Remember he said something like, we could do this the easy way or the hard way. Talk about mafia talk. And so, you know, this is a really powerful power that Brendan Carr has as the keeper of licenses for the broadcast media, whether it’s television or radio. And if he is to take those things away, that could be meaningful. And so could he use that power to influence the content of what is aired over ABC? And it seems like that’s exactly what he’s doing. I don’t like what you say about my boss or his wife—I have the power to take away your voice.Sargent: Well, basically that’s exactly it. Trump exploded at Jimmy Kimmel on Truth Social. This is after the assassination attempt. He recounted Kimmel’s routine and said this: “A day later, a lunatic tried entering the ballroom of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner loaded up with a shotgun, handgun, and many knives. He was there for a very obvious and sinister reason. I appreciate that so many people are incensed by Kimmel’s despicable call to violence and normally would not be responsive to anything that he said, but this is something far beyond the pale. Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC.” It’s so shameless, you almost can’t get your head around it. He’s seizing on the shooting to retrofit the claim about Kimmel to accuse him of incitement. That’s beyond absurd, but Barb, seriously—could you rule out, would you be prepared to rule out DOJ trying to prosecute Kimmel for incitement as a result of this?McQuade: Well, there’s what they should do and what they might do. Under no normal administration would you expect there to be any sort of charge of incitement. But in light of the fact that we’ve seen Todd Blanche now bring charges against Jim Comey, the Southern Poverty Law Center—there was the effort to indict the members of Congress for making that video about providing lawful advice to members of the military that they have a right to refuse an unlawful order. They’re investigating Jerome Powell. All of these things suggest that they will take the slightest kernel of a potential crime and turn it into a full-fledged indictment. Because back to this whole name-and-shame theory—they don’t much care if they can obtain a conviction, contrary to those DOJ norms and the ethics of most state bars, for the standards for criminal prosecutors.Sargent: So Barb, here’s what’s mysterious to me, and I think still somewhat unanswered for a lot of ordinary people paying attention to this. Is it legal for Todd Blanche to say, I know that this prosecution is not supported by facts or law, but I’m going to bring it anyway because Trump wants me to, or because Trump will fire me if I don’t, or because I’m auditioning for the job of permanent attorney general. What are the constraints on that? Can he do that?McQuade: Well, can he—I suppose, yes. May he do it permissibly—no. DOJ lawyers are constrained by two things. One is the principles of federal prosecution, which say partisan politics may never factor into a charging decision and a prosecutor should bring a case only if they believe that the evidence makes it probable that they will obtain and sustain a conviction. That means a trial jury will convict them, and on appeal your legal theory is sound and it will be affirmed. Of course, no case is a slam dunk, but you have to believe it’s probable that that will happen. The scenario you described falls short of that standard. Sargent: Is there a good-faith constraint? Like does Todd Blanche have to operate in good faith?McQuade: Yes, absolutely. That’s what that norm is designed to create—that a prosecutor before they bring a case has to believe that this is a winner, that, you know, I may be wrong in the end. It may be that the jury sees things differently than I do. It may be that my witnesses don’t testify exactly the way I expected them to, but based on what I’ve looked at, I fully believe that it is probable that I will obtain a conviction at trial and that it will be upheld on appeal. That’s DOJ policy. In addition, there’s a very similar ethics rule in most states about this good-faith requirement—that the prosecutor believes that this case will result in a conviction. And the reason for that, Greg, makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? We don’t want prosecutors running around bringing charges against people that they think are going to fail, for the reasons we already discussed—it’s a very big burden on a person’s liberty to be charged, even in an indictment, even if they’re not convicted. And so that balance between public safety and individual liberty requires prosecutors to bring cases only when they believe they have evidence sufficient to prove the case. It may even be, I believe you’re guilty, but I don’t think I have the evidence. Even that’s not good enough. I have to not only believe you’re guilty, but believe I can prove it with admissible evidence. And so if Todd Blanche doesn’t believe in this case—and it’s really hard to believe he does—then that is not acting in compliance with DOJ’s own principles or with the ethics rules of most state bars.Sargent: Well, is there any kind of prospect for accountability later for either Todd Blanche or some of the lower prosecutors doing his bidding or anybody else involved? Is there a way Democrats could be getting out there and saying, you know what, guys, maybe you shouldn’t be doing this because you’re going to be held accountable for any breaches and any abuses later. Is there a way to say that?McQuade: Yes, I think so. You know, in terms of any sort of criminal accountability, they all know that Donald Trump has the ability to pardon them on his last day of office. And it seems likely, as long as they stay in his good graces, that that will happen. But that’s not the only remedy, of course. There is the potential for civil lawsuits for money damages. Ordinarily, there is a great deal of immunity that protects prosecutors who operate in good faith in the scope of their duties. But if you operate in bad faith, there could be an exception for that. And I think the thing that’s most likely to provide accountability for people like Todd Blanche is their bar license. Todd Blanche is still a young enough man that I’m sure he envisions practicing law after he has completed his term as attorney general, or at least acting attorney general. And to be disbarred would prevent that. John Eastman was just disbarred from the State Bar of California for his role in the January 6th, 2021 effort to steal an election. And so I think that is something that could be held over the head of Todd Blanche. At the moment he doesn’t seem to much care. It seems that so many of these Trump operatives act as if this is the last administration that’s ever going to be there and they’re going to keep winning elections. Maybe they know something I don’t know, but I think what goes around comes around and that they should be very fearful of losing their licenses to practice law.Sargent: I would agree. So I understand that these types of actions against James Comey will cost them in legal fees and they’ll suffer harassment, as you mentioned, and I’m not minimizing these abuses—they’re horrific. However, there is a high likelihood of backfires, right? Because we all know that in midterms, the GOP absolutely has to get out some of these low-propensity Trump/MAGA voters, low-engagement voters. This stuff with Comey and Kimmel is supposed to accomplish that. But I just don’t see it. If and when these things fail, they could have the opposite effect, dampening enthusiasm, right? It’s the great Trump failing. Well, conversely, it all further energizes the Democrat-aligned, high-engagement voters who do turn out in midterms. And also underscoring that Trump is not at all focused on real people’s regular daily concerns. Is there a high likelihood of this backfiring?McQuade: I don’t know about the political ramifications, but I do think there’s a high probability of it backfiring legally. And that could bring some of the political fallout you describe. But I don’t see how they get a conviction of James Comey. And I think this case will—if it goes to trial—result in an acquittal for James Comey. And, you bet, he’ll be out there all over social media bragging about how he took on Trump and defeated him. I think the other likelihood that we will see is a successful motion to dismiss the case on both First Amendment grounds, as we discussed earlier, and also on the grounds of selective prosecution. Now, this is a defense that rarely prevails because what you have to show is not only that I was impermissibly targeted, but that other people who are similarly situated were not charged with the same crime. And it’s often impossible to prove that second prong, right? How do you prove that somebody else committed the same crime and was not prosecuted? It’s like the dog that didn’t bark. How do you prove that thing? But it’s really easy in this case—just go on Amazon today and you will find all kinds of people selling T-shirts and hats and bumper stickers that say 86-47. You know what else they’ve been out there selling for years? 86-46. Do you think anybody in this administration thought to charge anybody for threatening to kill Joe Biden? Nope, they sure didn’t. And so I think that it will be very easy for James Comey’s lawyers to point to those non-prosecutions to say this is selective prosecution. So one way or the other, Jim Comey is going to win this case. And he still has some respect across the political aisle. He’s, after all, a Republican. He was appointed by George W. Bush to be a U.S. attorney and the deputy attorney general. And so I think he’s got a lot of respect in law enforcement circles. And so I think this one—you know, when you overreach, there is always that risk that it backfires on you. And I think this could be one of those.Sargent: Right. I think it draws a ton of attention to yet another failure on Trump’s part, which will, if anything, turn off MAGA. And simultaneously, it reminds normie voters of the reason they want to check on this lunatic. Barb, just to close out—your book, aptly titled, The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government. What do we need to do to save ourselves from this?McQuade: Yeah, so thanks very much. I’ve got this book coming out June 2nd, The Fix, and, you know, it compares the Trump administration to the mob. I talk about some of the cases that I prosecuted in my career as a prosecutor, some of the lessons learned there about how you deal with corrupt politicians, how you deal with extortionists and other things. But also offering some real solutions about how we can build guardrails around some of what are currently just norms, to help protect us from the next Donald Trump that might come down the road.Sargent: Well, it sounds like it’s going to be a great read. I’m looking forward to it. Barb, thanks so much for coming on with us, folks. Check out the book—The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government. Barb McQuade, thanks so much for coming on.McQuade: Thank you, Greg.

Fossil fuels will always be subject to easily manipulated chokepoints.

The Supreme Court achieved one of the principal goals of the conservative legal movement by destroying the last remaining pillar of Voting Rights Act of 1965. In Wednesday’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the court’s six-justice conservative majority effectively dismantled its protections against racial gerrymandering, and thus rendered the once-mighty law a hollow shell of itself.“Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was designed to enforce the Constitution—not collide with it,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court. “Unfortunately, lower courts have sometimes applied this Court’s Section 2 precedents in a way that forces states to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.”Alito’s majority opinion fundamentally rewrote the court’s Section 2 precedents and the law itself to achieve the conservative bloc’s goals. It raised numerous new hurdles to racial gerrymandering claims, including some that will likely be insurmountable. It even blessed the use of partisan gerrymandering as an explicit legal defense by states against racial gerrymandering.The effects for American democracy will be corrosive. Southern Republicans will now likely set out to wipe out as many majority-minority congressional districts in the South, some of which were created by past VRA lawsuits, as they feasibly can without diluting other solidly Republican districts. Black representation in Congress will likely plummet, further tilting the House map in favor of the GOP.Something noble and dignified has also been lost. The Voting Rights Act “was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent. “It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality. And it has been repeatedly, and overwhelmingly, reauthorized by the people’s representatives in Congress. Only they have the right to say it is no longer needed—not the members of this Court.”After the 2020 census, every state redrew its congressional map to account for population changes over the previous 10 years. Louisiana’s map was an obvious gerrymander that locked in Republican control of five districts. The sixth one, centered in and around New Orleans, packed most of Louisiana’s Black residents into an ultra-Democratic district.A coalition of Black voters and voting rights groups filed a Section 2 challenge to the new map, arguing that Louisiana lawmakers had diluted their electoral power by packing them into a single district. A federal district court agreed and ordered the state to draw a second majority-minority district. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is generally considered to be the country’s most conservative court, upheld that ruling.Normally, that would be the end of that matter. After Louisiana adopted a revised map to comply with the court order in 2023, however, a separate group of plaintiffs who described themselves as “non–African American voters” filed a separate lawsuit to challenge the new map’s constitutionality. They argued that state lawmakers had impermissibly used race as a factor when drawing the new districts, even though the new map was drawn to remedy racial gerrymandering in the first instance.This upside-down approach already had supporters at the Supreme Court. That same year, the high court upheld a court order for Alabama to draw a second majority-minority district, with the court’s liberals joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh. In a concurring opinion, however, Kavanaugh suggested that he would be open to considering in a future case whether such remedies were themselves a form of racial gerrymandering.Wednesday’s result was hardly a surprise. The high court originally heard Callais during its last term to decide a much narrower question, only to schedule it for reargument this term to allow for a much broader challenge to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Lest there be any doubt about the conservatives’ goals, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote an unusual side opinion where he complained about the court’s delay.That frustration only made sense, as I noted at the time, if Thomas knew that there was already at least a five-justice majority for attacking Section 2 and they could simply do it now. But some of the justices apparently wanted to do things by the book, leading to the yearlong delay and to Wednesday’s decision. Indeed, Alito wrote on Wednesday that the court had delayed the case to avoid upending elections.I am journalistically obligated to note that conservatives’ attack did not fully succeed. Thomas wanted the court to hold that Section 2 does not apply to redistricting at all, which would leave voters with no mechanism whatsoever to challenge racially gerrymandered maps in court. Alito instead left Section 2 nominally intact and framed Callais as a mere tune-up to the court’s preexisting framework for weighing racial gerrymandering claims.“We need only update the framework so it aligns with the statutory text and reflects important developments since we decided Gingles 40 years ago,” Alito wrote, referring to Gingles v. Thornburg, the 1986 case where the court first interpreted a strengthened version of Section 2 passed in the 1980s. The reality is that, thanks to the court’s butchery, it will be nearly impossible for any future racial gerrymandering claim to succeed. Thomas’s concurring opinion, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, lamented that his approach was not followed but celebrated that his preferred outcome was attained. “Today’s decision should largely put an end to this disastrous misadventure in voting-rights jurisprudence,” he crowed.Kagan found this explanation unpersuasive. “Let’s first drop the majority’s misleading label,” she wrote in her dissent. “What the majority gives us today is not an ‘updated Gingles framework.’ It is its own thing, deserving of its own name. Maybe the Callais contrivance? Or if that seems too immediately pejorative, just say that what the majority does today is to impose the Callais requirements.”At the core of the new Callais requirements is backbreaking deference to partisan gerrymandering, the sordid practice where state lawmakers draw maps to dilute a party’s electoral power as much as possible. In the 2019 case Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority held that federal courts could not hear partisan-gerrymandering claims, finding no justiciable standards for them under the Fourteenth Amendment. The justices have traditionally described the practice in negative terms, with Alito noting on Wednesday that “disapproval” of it “dates back to the founding.”Now Rucho has swallowed the court’s racial gerrymandering cases whole. Alito warned that litigants could try to circumvent Rucho by using racial gerrymandering claims to break extreme partisan gerrymanders. “In a state where both parties have substantial support and where race is often correlated with party preference,” he claimed, “a litigant can easily exploit Section 2 for partisan purposes by repackaging a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim.”This is wretched reasoning, driven by a clear desire to avoid handing victories to certain plaintiffs instead of a faithful adherence to law and precedent. The obvious outcome is that states can now, with the court’s blessing, invoke partisan gerrymandering as a legitimate rationale to foil racial gerrymandering claims, especially in states where race and partisanship are closely correlated. “Assuming the State has left behind no smoking-gun evidence of a race-based motive (an almost fanciful prospect), Section 2 will play no role,” Kagan warned in her dissent.Gingles’s first precondition, for example, was that a “community of minority voters” is “sufficiently numerous and compact to constitute a majority in a reasonably configured district.” Section 2 plaintiffs typically accomplished this by drawing an “illustrative map” to show, as Alito put it, “their desired number of majority-minority districts.”Alito revised this prong to require Section 2 plaintiffs to also meet “all of the state’s legitimate districting objectives, including traditional districting criteria and the state’s specified political goals.” The first part basically repeats the existing Gingles precondition: Districts must generally be contiguous and compact. But the second part requires plaintiffs to draw maps that comply with a state’s partisan-gerrymandering aims.“If the State’s aims in drawing a map include a target partisan distribution of voters, a specific margin of victory for certain incumbents, or any other goal not prohibited by the Constitution, the plaintiffs’ illustrative maps must achieve these goals just as well,” he wrote. “If not, the plaintiffs would fail to demonstrate that the State’s chosen map was driven by racial considerations rather than permissible aims.”That also sounds suspiciously like a requirement that Section 2 plaintiffs must prove discriminatory intent by lawmakers. The Supreme Court has been down that road before: In the 1980 case Mobile v. Borden, the justices read an intent requirement into Section 2, only to be overridden by Congress when it passed an updated version of the VRA to explicitly nullify that ruling. Gingles and its preconditions emerged from the aftermath where the court—until now, at least—accepted Congress’s discriminatory-effects test.“The problem, as even the majority recognizes, was ‘that a focus on discriminatory intent, rather than discriminatory effects, would defeat worthy claims because of the difficulty of proving intentional discrimination,’” Kagan wrote, quoting from precedent. “It is the rare legislature, as the history of voting discrimination shows, that cannot camouflage racial targeting with race-neutral justifications.”Alito claimed that he wasn’t simply reintroducing a discriminatory-intent test in his opinion, but it was not convincing. “The dissent states over and over again that our decision requires a Section 2 plaintiff to prove discriminatory intent,” he wrote, referring to Kagan’s dissent. When a discriminatory effect is shown, he continued, plaintiffs must then show that “the circumstances must give rise to a strong inference of racial discrimination.”Kagan, in a footnote, sounded almost surprised to read this portion of Alito’s opinion, “which, if true, would be welcome news. And welcomer still if lower courts took those last words seriously and allowed Section 2 claims to succeed even absent proof of race-based purpose. But I suspect they will not. Because they, like I, will have read the many pages leading up to the majority’s coda.”It was “something of a mystery,” Kagan wrote, to try to figure out what Alito meant to do by disclaiming an intent test. “To try to disguise what it is really doing?” she asked, rhetorically. “To somehow absolve itself of responsibility? Or could it just be that, in responding to this dissent, the majority can do nothing but agree?”Few conservative justices have been honest enough to describe what they have been doing to the VRA. The plot against the VRA was best articulated 13 years ago by Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the principal co-conspirators. He delivered a lengthy monologue on why the Supreme Court had to act, during oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 case where the justices considered the constitutionality of the VRA’s preclearance mechanism.“This Court doesn’t like to get involved in racial questions such as this one,” Scalia claimed. “It’s something that can be left to Congress. The problem here, however, is suggested by the comment I made earlier, that the initial enactment of this legislation in a time when the need for it was so much more abundantly clear was—in the Senate, there—it was double-digits against it. And that was only a 5-year term.”The justice was describing the law’s original passage and the stiff resistance of Southern senators to it. “Then, it is reenacted 5 years later, again for a 5-year term,” Scalia continued. “Double-digits against it in the Senate. Then it was reenacted for 7 years. Single digits against it. Then enacted for 25 years, 8 Senate votes against it. And this last enactment, not a single vote in the Senate against it. And the House is pretty much the same.”What Scalia is describing is factually true. The Voting Rights Act became much more popular over time, and was eventually seen as a celebrated milestone of the nation’s progress in dismantling racial segregation and creating a more equal country. “Today, we renew a bill that helped bring a community on the margins into the life of American democracy,” President George W. Bush told an audience on the White House lawn when signing the 2006 reauthorization.But not everybody was so celebratory. “Now, I don’t think that’s attributable to the fact that it is so much clearer now that we need this,” Scalia continued. “I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement. It’s been written about. Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.”Describing the VRA as a “racial entitlement” for ensuring that Black people in the South can fully participate in American political life needs no further comment. But his ultimate point was that since the Republican Party could not openly oppose the Voting Rights Act without immense political backlash, it must fall to the conservative legal movement and the Roberts court to demolish it.“I don’t think there is anything to be gained by any Senator to vote against continuation of this act,” Scalia explained. “And I am fairly confident it will be reenacted in perpetuity unless a court can say it does not comport with the Constitution. You have to show, when you are treating different States differently, that there’s a good reason for it.”To that end, the court’s conservative majority held in Shelby County that the VRA’s preclearance formula was no longer valid because Congress had not taken changing circumstances into account. “Nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically,” Roberts wrote for the court, in what now sounds less like a celebration of America’s progress toward racial equality and more like a lament—or a threat to reverse it.Then, in the 2021 case Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the Supreme Court struck again, this time by throwing new encumbrances on plaintiffs who wish to invoke Section 2 to challenge election laws with racially discriminatory effects. Alito, writing for the court that time, even managed to invoke concerns about voter fraud—a phantasmal specter in American elections—to hamstring the VRA’s ability to protect Black and Hispanic voters.In her Callais dissent, Kagan noted that Alito’s work in 2021 was so thorough that since Brnovich was handed down, “not a single Section 2 suit has successfully challenged such a restriction on voting, however discriminatory in operation.” The same fate will now likely befall racial gerrymandering claims under Section 2, as well. Thanks to Callais, the Voting Rights Act is dead.So, what is to be done? First, if they are ever able to retake Congress again, Democrats must now abolish single-member districts and adopt proportional representation instead. (I have written about this at some length before.) Only then will the American electorate be free from the antidemocratic poison of gerrymandering—of any kind, in all places, at all times, and for any reason.Second, and perhaps more importantly, there must be consequences for the Supreme Court for its war on the Reconstruction amendments and on multiracial democracy. Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush signed the VRA’s reauthorization into law with civil rights leaders around him, only for two of his Supreme Court appointees to destroy the law and its protections. No civil rights advance, no voting rights protection, no democratic recourse can survive a conservative Supreme Court majority that is determined to stop it.Since the Supreme Court as currently constructed cannot be trusted to protect the egalitarian republic that, as Kagan noted, Union soldiers and civil rights activists fought and died to build, sufficient justices must be appointed to it to remedy the problem. Fortunately, since the conservative justices lacked the courage of their convictions to strike down the VRA altogether, all the liberal justices must do is wipe away the false shackles that bind it: Shelby County, Rucho, Brnovich, and now Callais. The Voting Rights Act may be dead today, but through court reform, it can one day be given new life again.

This week, Ezra Klein invited on his podcast his Abundance co-author, Derek Thompson, and Marc Dunkelman, the scholar and author of Why Nothing Works, to talk about the movement their books launched. It was good timing: The shadow primary for the 2028 Democratic nomination for president is already underway, and for some, it’s a battle between the “abundance” movement—which is often shorthand for a deregulatory, centrist agenda—and the populists. Two early Democratic front-runners have adopted at least some of the language of the abundance agenda: Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is touting his record of cutting regulation and building quickly—his mantra is “Get Stuff Done”—and California Governor Gavin Newsom has an aggressive plan to build more housing in the state. How unions fit into that agenda has been a central question. Newsom’s housing push has stalled over some concerns from unions, while Shapiro has argued that there’s no reason unions can’t be part of an effort to speed up building.A new report on Thursday from the Roosevelt Institute argues that unions form a key ally in the abundance movement, and makes the case for what its authors, Columbia University labor experts Kate Andrias and Alex Hertel-Fernandez, call “democratic abundance.” Unions are important in bringing workers’ rights to the table in any discussion, they say. The report comes as the mammoth No Kings movement around the country is joining forces with workers for May Day on Friday, and as workers are showing a renewed interest in forming and joining unions.“We thought it was really important to take a step back and ask where are workers in this story, and in particular, to think about why organized labor needs to be part of the conversation when it comes to abundance … to get the kind of things that abundance seekers want,” Hertel-Fernandez said.Their report pushes back on some of the criticisms of unions from the abundance movement, mainly that they slow down and raise the costs of building, especially when it comes to housing. The authors point out that construction costs in the U.S. are higher than in countries with higher union density, and have gone up in states that don’t have a strong union presence, indicating that other forces are at play. They also argue that unions are unusually democratic—their electoral and governance structures are actually required by law—and so they aren’t subject to some of the criticisms abundance proponents lob at other “interest groups,” which is that they don’t truly represent the ideals and desires of the people they say they represent.But the report is much more forceful about the benefits its authors say unions can bring to a strong abundance movement. Unions are a source of skilled labor and have some of the best training programs for the trades that building the country’s physical infrastructure requires. And, as democratic organizations, unions can also work to get more buy-in from the communities they’re in to make sure projects reflect community needs and that lawsuits and other objections don’t slow projects down. The quickest way to launch an abundance agenda that builds more infrastructure and housing, then, would be to get unions on your side early for any project or program.More than that, though, any abundance agenda that doesn’t include workers’ representatives won’t benefit everyone. “What we saw in some of the more specific policy conversations … is that policymakers and academics who are in the mix in these conversations really aren’t centering the needs of workers or the participation ability of workers,” Andrias said. “It’s also important to have organizations participating in the public policymaking process that are focused on the rights of workers, making sure that working conditions are safe, that wages are fair, as well as increasing jobs and providing and building in an efficient way.” Otherwise, who is abundance for?This comes at a time of renewed interest in rebuilding union power in the U.S. Earlier this month, New York State Assemblymember Claire Valdez, a candidate for Congress in New York’s 7th district who has been endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, launched an agenda that would make it easier for workers to join unions and give them more power. “I think unions are essential, not just for winning on the affordability agenda and winning the material things that workers deserve, but for really building our democracy and fighting back against the people who want to strip us of our rights,” she said.The note on building democracy was also important to Andrias and Hertel-Fernandez, who write that workers who feel disempowered and displaced are more likely to be swayed by the right-wing populism of President Donald Trump. Unions can be a countervailing, democratizing force. That may explain why the organizers of the No Kings protest movement against Trump are also joining forces with labor unions to expand their actions on May Day. “Worker solidarity and progress are going to be incredibly important, because we are at this potential breaking point for a democracy and for our economy if we don’t realign ourselves in favor of the people this country was made to represent,” said Hunter Dunn, one of the organizers of 50501 in Los Angeles, which is helping to organize May Day actions.For the Roosevelt report’s authors, unions are part of the fight over not just how well a Democratic government might perform and respond to the infrastructure needs in the U.S. but also a more existential question about how to rebuild our political system—and perhaps even democracy itself. “On multiple levels, having a strong labor movement and bringing workers into the governing process is a way of strengthening some of the Democratic muscles that are so weakened in our society,” Andrias said.

As the chaos of Trump’s war on Iran and the stilted, tumultuous ceasefire negotiations drag on, the world has been watching with steep concern over the short- and long-term economic and energy ramifications. Most visibly, Iran has for weeks limited access to the Strait of Hormuz, recently attacking several ships transiting the crucial channel even as the U.S. attempts its own blockade.The war has further strained U.S. relationships with global allies like the EU and Japan, and the discord has spilled over into Gulf States like the United Arab Emirates that had once considered themselves relatively insulated from regional conflicts and are now reevaluating their security, economic approach, and global ties. Beyond fuel, the conflict has led to a global shortage of fertilizer, leading to fears of food insecurity.There is, however, one dimension to the conflicts in Iran and Lebanon that has been overshadowed by the overlapping energy, military, and diplomatic crises: human displacement. Per the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, some 3.2 million people are already internally displaced within Iran. While a trickle has already headed to the relative safety of neighboring Turkey, this remains an issue mostly contained within Iran itself, but that could easily change under a set of very plausible scenarios.There are, broadly speaking, at least two relatively likely outcomes that could lead to significant refugee outflows from Iran: In one, the regime remains broadly in charge and viable, likely with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps occupying an even more influential role in the country’s governance, and with a freer hand to to crack down far harder on pro-democracy protesters and others who may be emboldened to more publicly stake out opposition in the wake of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s death and Trump’s encouragement.Prior to the start of this conflict, Iranian security forces had killed what a network of medical providers in the country estimated could be up to 30,000 people as they tamped down on public discontent and demonstrations. In a now wartime situation in which the IRGC moved to fully consolidate power as opposition groups—perhaps supported by external players like the U.S.—tried to topple the regime, millions of people could get caught in the middle and decide their best bet lay in greener pastures elsewhere. There are already parallels: Of the Iranians who have fled to Turkey, many have signaled that their decision was sparked by the regime crackdown more than by the war.In the other, more acute scenario, Trump and his allies could succeed in a campaign of making life untenable in Iran altogether. Should he follow through on promises to strike civilian infrastructure, including energy production and desalination facilities, the resulting damage could quickly make life in large parts of the country of 92 million unsustainable. After another Trump social media post promising to “knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge” in Iran, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz said the threat was “perfectly acceptable” and “all options are on the table.”Naturally, this approach would fit the definition of a war crime, but that’s something the administration has been building toward for months in Iran and other theaters; the plainly illegal military strikes against alleged drug-ferrying boats in Latin American waters are continuing even now in spite of their obvious illegality. A collapse in the viability of civilian life across large swaths of Iran and the greater Middle East would trigger a much more widespread and rapid exodus, first to neighboring countries such as Iraq and Pakistan but inevitably spilling over to a broader area, including the Gulf States, Europe, and, yes, eventually the United States.In either case, while they are not direct parallels and have their own contexts, it’s instructive to look at the Syrian refugee crisis that started building up with the start of the civil war in 2011, part of the broader Arab Spring. By 2014, some 3.7 million Syrians had fled the country, mostly ending up in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon as Western governments pledged to take limited numbers of refugees while committing significant funding to effectively pay other countries to help accommodate them (though they still received asylum-seekers who arrived outside of standard refugee channels).At the time, Lebanon absorbed over a million Syrian refugees, many of whom remain there. Now, not only is Lebanon likely incapable of accommodating additional outflows, it is itself on the verge of destabilization as Israel’s attacks and demands for the functionally impossible Lebanese disarmament of Hezbollah spark fears of civil war. In that scenario, some portion of the Syrian refugees already there would be likely to pick up and move on again, along with some number of Lebanese themselves.Where would they go? While Turkey took in the largest number of Syrian refugees during the peak of the crisis and has already received some Iranians, Ankara has been cracking down on “irregular” migration flows. Last month, Interior Minister Mustafa ‌Ciftci said that the country was drawing up plans to contend with Iranian outflows, including potential border buffer zones. He added that Turkey was prepared to accommodate “up ‌to ⁠90,000 people” in the event of a sudden influx, which is, in the context of the total collapse of a country four times the size of Syria, a paltry number. The Gulf States, having been targets of Iranian military strikes and with a generally hostile posture toward refugees, are unlikely to step up; they infamously declined any formal Syrian refugee resettlement, instead absorbing some through myriad temporary programs.Aside from the pure practicalities of a potential refugee crisis, migration in the mid-2010s, from Syria and elsewhere, more or less reshaped politics globally. Fears of mass migration and its (real or imagined) cultural and economic consequences were arguably the preeminent driver of the resurgence of a new far right in Europe and at least a part explanation for specific policy outcomes like Brexit, despite what were comparatively tiny numbers of resettlements. In the United States, immigration hysteria was the main foothold for the first Trump campaign, and the post-Covid so-called migrant crisis of asylum-seekers arriving at the southern border became a dominant narrative in the lead-up to the 2024 election despite border arrivals falling to four-year lows in the run-up to voting.Even the relatively middling post-withdrawal resettlement of Afghans who had literally assisted in the U.S. war effort and civil society building in Afghanistan sparked backlash among the MAGA crowd, which spread to the remaining moderate GOP, particularly after a mass shooting by an Afghan asylee last year. Now the Trump administration is reportedly planning to send some Afghan refugees who have been stranded on a U.S. base in Doha, Qatar, to Congo. If that’s the plan for wartime allies, I don’t imagine there’ll be much effort to assist Iranians the administration has spent weeks demonizing. If Trump’s catastrophic decisions in Iran and inability to rein in Israel’s attacks on Lebanon spark a refugee crisis, he’s likely to try to use that to his advantage to regain public opinion ground lost, including on immigration, by fearmongering about refugees.Already, Trump has set something of a trap for pro-immigrant advocates and political opposition, similar to the one created by his Title 42 restrictions during his first term: Humanitarian migration has been effectively shut off entirely, which makes even a return to the status quo of accepting asylum applications at all seem like a bleeding-heart capitulation by comparison. That’ll be especially severe in a situation where Trump engineers significant additional global need for refugee resettlement. Ideally, that won’t happen, but now’s the time for civil society and liberal leaders here and in EU capitals to think through a humane response—and to understand that a right-wing backlash is primed.