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Jacqueline Luqman, Black Agenda Report. That Could Rattle Venezuela Long After The Earthquakes. The U.S. has attacked Venezuela through various means for decades and kidnapped President Maduro but is now claiming to assist with earthquake relief. If it’s role in Haiti is any guide, that so-called aid from the U.S. is a Trojan Horse bringing more […]

“Religion is back in our country, bigger and stronger than it has been in many, many years,” President Donald Trump announced to the Faith and Freedom Coalition on June 26. “Religion’s really …”—he made a rocket-ship sound effect and thrust his finger skyward—“going up. If that were a stock, we’d be very, very rich, all of us.” Great nations have God and religion, and, he added, “if you don’t have that, it just doesn’t seem to work out, does it?” It sounded almost like a threat.That same day, Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission delivered a full draft of its 224-page report, the centerpiece of which is “12 Recommendations to Strengthen Religious Liberty for All Americans.” Those recommendations include the creation of a Justice Department “religious liberty task force,” production of “Know Your Rights” posters, repealing the Johnson Amendment, and creating “religious liberty violation reporting hotlines/online portals.”The commission, housed in the DOJ, was established via executive order last year to advise the White House Faith Office and Domestic Policy Council by offering suggestions for how to “preserve and enhance religious liberty” in U.S. law and public life. Chaired by Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and vice-chaired by Ben Carson, it is primarily composed of right-wing activists. A few have legal experience; others are prominent religious leaders, politicians, authors—and Dr. Phil. The report itself is, as legal scholar Micah Schwartzman has put it, “an embarrassing document” (although “shameless” might be more fitting). Still, as we have learned and relearned over the past decade, government officials do not have to be thoughtful, competent, or serious to do real damage. Slapdash and unserious as the report might be, it does its job: laying out how to use the cause of religious liberty to advance right-wing goals.For over two decades, the Christian conservative legal movement, led by well-funded groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom and with help from the Roberts court, has transformed the idea of religious freedom. The era of “high separation” between church and state is over, and free exercise is a tool reserved primarily for conservative Christians. If the commission’s recommendations are implemented with the DOJ’s backing, they will be the next steps in this broader project. Religious liberty is a banner under which the administration and its allies will continue to undermine other civil rights, dismantle public goods, and insulate certain favored citizens from public accountability.The commission’s report offers many legal and policy suggestions, but it also seeks a broader cultural shift. “Safeguarding religious liberty,” it claims, “requires more than defending legal rights after they have been violated. It requires cultivating a culture that understands why those rights exist in the first place.” This mission demands that Americans respect religious liberty and the rights it affords, but first they must celebrate and value religion itself. The premise of the commission’s work is “a simple but profound truth: religious liberty is essential because religion itself is indispensable to a flourishing society.” In recent decades, high-profile cases have dramatized the conflict between individual religious freedom and the public good. The religious belief and speech of cake bakers, website designers, and licensed counselors—to refer to three Supreme Court cases in which ADF successfully sought exemption from or contested Colorado’s civil rights laws—come into conflict with the civil rights of others, particularly LGBTQ people. But, the commission argues, the “Founding Fathers recognized that religious liberty is not merely a private benefit for believers, but a public good for the nation.” Here, they sidestep the fact that private benefits do in fact conflict with public goods—when business owners discriminate against their potential clients, when tax dollars are funneled to discriminatory private institutions and away from public schools, or when religious groups flout public health mandates during a pandemic—and instead assert that, because religion is ultimately good, religious liberty benefits everyone. If religion is “an essential aspect of what it means to be human,” as the report claims, then it follows that it would be privileged at least as much as, if not more than, other aspects of one’s humanity. Thus, those institutions that foster religion are not at odds with, or even really separate from, state institutions: Church and state should not be completely separate but, “in reality,” should “strengthen and support one another.” There is no wall between the two, the commission concludes, but a “bridge.”The report is divided into 14 chapters, most of which are devoted to a particular issue or arena of public life. Chapter titles include “Students Don’t Check their Rights at the Schoolhouse Gate,” “The Rights and Roles of Parents and Teachers,” and “Anti-Semitism.” The content of each is drawn largely from the commission’s seven hearings held over the past year. These hearings primarily served as platforms for supposedly persecuted believers—each one a potential “religious freedom celebrity”—to offer testimonials, with occasional subject-area experts adding their analysis. Some were claimants in well-publicized disputes, including cases brought by conservative Christian legal organizations, such as ADF and First Liberty Institute, whose Kelly Shackelford and Allyson Ho are on the commission. These anecdotes make up much of the report, the final recommendation of which is: “Honor the courage of religious liberty heroes through creating a Presidential Medal of Religious Liberty and First Freedom Hero Awards to recognize Americans who stand up for religious freedom and play an indispensable role in protecting citizens’ Constitutional rights.” Chapters conclude with pictures from the hearings of these heroes. It reads like a book of martyrs with policy recommendations. The testimonies reveal their uses. Twelve-year-old Shea Encinas testified that in fifth grade, his “school forced [him] to teach [his] kindergarten buddy about changing his gender using a book called My Shadow Is Pink.” Shea did not refuse. However, his family “spoke up” afterward, and, according to Shea, “the school treated us badly and kids started bullying me and my brother because of our faith and the school did nothing to stop it.” The school did not offer an opt-out of certain readings. Later, the school hosted a “Pink Out the Hate” day, on which students would wear pink to show solidarity with LGBTQ students. According to Shea, he “felt like the entire school …[was] standing against me and ridiculing my beliefs.” When he arrived, he was dismayed to see that “over half the school wore pink. I felt completely alone.” Shea and his brother were ostracized, and the family “felt they had no choice” but to enroll in a private school. Without discounting (or taking too seriously) Shea’s feelings, there is something poignant in stating so starkly that when he was not in the majority he “felt completely alone.” In the nation the commission hopes to create, Shea’s rights would not simply be protected; so too would his feelings. The commission wants Americans to be proud of religion, and of religious liberty. Perhaps even more than wanting to feel pride, they want some people not to feel shame. They want anti-sociality without consequent social stigma. As religious studies scholar Donovan Schaefer has written, for some conservatives, “it becomes easier to repudiate shame altogether than respond to the moral demands placed on them.” Following this line of argument, religious studies scholar Finbarr Curtis explains, “Trumpism is the response to the fear that someone somewhere is threatening to take something that is rightfully yours. As a vigorous response to threats, Trump’s illiberalism makes his supporters feel safe.” The message of the commission’s report is that these threats abound, from vaccine mandates and “transgenderism” and “bad actors in the government and within institutions,” but the Department of Justice will protect you. There will be posters reminding everyone to “Know Your Rights.” Your teachers will undergo religious liberty training. If anyone does violate your rights or make you feel unsafe, there will be an online portal where you can report the threat. They will be investigated.Even in this boom time for religious liberty, with religion’s stock going up, some claimants still lose their cases. In fact, the named claimant in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections, the most recent religious freedom case at the Supreme Court, lost. And a landmark law—2000’s Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, or RLUIPA—was significantly restricted. Naturally, it was a case that spelled out exactly who could expect to enjoy religious freedom and who should not.Damon Landor, by all accounts a devout Rastafarian, did not cut his hair in keeping with his faith. When incarcerated, he explained and documented this practice. For a while, his religious rights were honored. When he was transferred to a new facility, he handed them his paperwork stating his religious exemption. Prison guards threw it in the trash and then held Landor down and shaved his head. He sued the prison officials in their individual capacity, which the court found was beyond the scope of RLUIPA. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, held that prison employees could not be sued here because they had not “voluntarily and knowingly consent[ed] to answer lawsuits” under RLUIPA. As lawyer and legal scholar Elizabeth Reiner Platt noted, this is a standard that “employees are unlikely to agree to.” Why would they?The Religious Liberty Commission’s report—in a draft issued three days after the Landor decision—says DOJ “should issue updated guidance on how [RLUIPA] provides incarcerated individual with the right to receive reasonable religious accommodations while incarcerated.” To what end? With what effect? Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her Landor dissent that “state-empowered prison officials will have little incentive to abide by federal law.” It is hard to imagine that DOJ will effectively cultivate a culture of respect for religion and religious liberty in a case like this. Will prisons hang “Know Your Rights” posters in common spaces? Will wardens undergo religious liberty trainings that would prevent such an incident? Will incarcerated persons call the hotline? The recommendations seem to be for Shea Encinas and his parents more than Damon Landor.Some critics, such as Sarah Posner, a journalist and expert on the Christian right, have called the commission’s report “an homage to Christian nationalism.” As Posner notes, a multi-religious coalition legally challenged the commission, based on its nearly entirely Christian composition and clearly biased framing. Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said that the commission is “not about religious liberty, it is about pursuing a culture of Christian Nationalism that seeks to divide and isolate people across our nation.” The Public Religion Research Institute has found that 11 percent of Americans are “adherents” to Christian nationalist ideas and 21 percent are “sympathizers.” Christian nationalism is correlated with support for religion in general and “Judeo-Christian values.” In a 2021 poll on religious liberty, PRRI found that 10 percent of Americans completely agree and 21 percent somewhat agree with the statement, “In the U.S., when there is a conflict, the rights and religious freedom of Christians have priority over the rights and religious freedom of non-Christians and non-religious Americans.” Perhaps this is the “culture of Christian Nationalism” of which Perryman warns. About a third of Americans, then, support some kinds of favorable treatment for Christians. It is reasonable to think that the hotlines are for them—or, at least, that they’ll be frequent users.While Christian nationalist ideology might be a factor, the Religious Liberty Commission is better understood as a right-wing project. If its goal is to install Christian supremacy, it is only as a route to empower private actors to subvert the public good. It seeks to exempt certain people—Christians, yes, but more importantly conservatives—from public accountability, and from feeling bad about abridging the civil rights of disfavored groups. It advocates siphoning funds from public schools and rerouting them toward private institutions, or “creating a robust system of universal school choice” and “securing parental rights.” It encourages citizens to surveil and report, rather than tolerate, their neighbors. It recommends that DOJ “develop a dedicated Religious Liberty Task Force,” whose tasks would include issuing cease-and-desist letters to public school districts with trans-inclusive policies. It seeks to create a culture of fear and suspicion and, in so doing, alleviate the fears of anti-pluralists, their feelings of loneliness, exclusion, and shame. Throughout, the message is clear: Get religion. If you don’t, the commission suggests, it just doesn’t seem to work out, does it?

After the Supreme Court handed Donald Trump a major defeat by upholding birthright citizenship last month, an angry Trump took to Truth Social to urge Republican lawmakers to overturn it with legislation. “Congress should start TODAY,” Trump demanded, adding: “No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary!”That’s nonsense—five justices affirmed that just about all children born on U.S. soil, including those with undocumented parents, are citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. But House Speaker Mike Johnson knows he must appear prepared to obey Trump’s command, so on Fox News Sunday, he declared that House Republicans are examining ways to undo what the Constitution says.“If there’s some legislative fix, we’ll advance that immediately,” Johnson insisted. Note the word “immediately,” which seems to mean “between now and Election Day.” Is this something vulnerable House Republicans will really want to vote on?Doubtful. Indeed, look carefully and you’ll see the beginnings of a pattern: Republicans like Johnson—who know this would be extremely unpopular—are conjuring up a new tone and new language designed to recast it as a modest step, and not as the radical upheaval it would truly represent. Just watch Johnson’s full quote on this matter:🚨 IT'S OFFICIAL: Speaker Johnson announces he's coming up with legislation to STRIKE DOWN rampant birthright citizenship and tourism scams for illegal aliensGOOD! Act fast!"I really enjoyed Justice Clarence Thomas' dissent, everybody should read that. And he explained that… pic.twitter.com/GT2z3kgeV6— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) July 5, 2026Birthright citizenship might require a mere “legislative fix,” Johnson says, because under it, citizenship has been “devalued” by “birth tourism.” That last phrase has long been a noxious rallying cry on the anti-immigrant right. But in Johnson’s hands, it’s meant to portray the birthright citizenship “problem” as no biggie, as a trivial matter that just needs a little patching up. And note the oh-so-casual tone he strikes throughout, as if he’s discussing an adjustment to marginal tax rates.Or take Vice President JD Vance, who recently described ending birthright citizenship in similarly bland terms. “It’s fundamentally a loophole that exists in our immigration system that rewards illegal aliens,” Vance said on Fox News Sunday. “There are a number of things that we’re already looking at to close that loophole.” Note Vance’s repetition of the word “loophole,” which seems suspiciously deliberate. Why, this would be a mere tweak—akin to a new coat of paint on the garage door or oiling a squeaky hinge, you see.Theoretically, Johnson and Republicans could write legislation that, say, prohibits the grant of citizenship to any babies born to one or two parents who entered illegally and/or were undocumented at the time of the birth. Right now, such a bill would presumably be upheld as constitutional by “only” four Supreme Court justices: Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch voted to overturn birthright citizenship on constitutional grounds, and Brett Kavanaugh sided with the majority but only on a statutory basis, not a constitutional one.That’s alarming. It means only five justices now believe birthright citizenship is a “foundational guarantee,” explains Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern, so opponents need only to “nab one more vote” on the court to create a majority to uphold a congressional statute ending it. So Republicans might try to pass something that might be invalidated now but could test the court again—and lay the groundwork for more efforts later, similar to how Roe v. Wade foes chipped away at it for years before succeeding.The irony to Johnson’s effort to make all this sound trivial is that the problem he identifies—people coming into our country solely to have a baby and scam the system into letting them stay—actually is very insignificant. A brief in the case by over 100 specialists in social science, demography, and other fields notes that the government’s own numbers put such births at far less than 1 percent of overall U.S. births. And even that low figure is almost certainly wrong: The real total, they detail, is far more “infinitesimal.”But the change that Republicans are contemplating would be a moral, substantive, humanitarian, and constitutional earthquake. As Amanda Frost explains, ending birthright citizenship could lead to hundreds of thousands of newborn babies per year going forward remaining undocumented. That would mean they have less earning power as adults, harming the economy. Alternatively, if they are removed (or not born here at all), that means a future of national demographic decline.Here it’s critical to stress that the overwhelming majority of those people would not be the children of “birth tourists.” They wouldn’t be the children of people who came here solely to have babies and are getting “rewarded” for this, as it doesn’t earn the parents legal status in any case. Instead, the parents constitute families already in the process of immigrating here for the same reasons immigrants long have done—to participate productively in our economy and communities and, ultimately, in our democracy.So while Johnson and Vance are aiming their rhetoric at “birth tourists”—an easy-to-demonize group—their actual concern is with the much larger class of people who want to settle here for reasons that are recognizably American. That’s who they want to keep out.Further underscoring the point, don’t overlook Johnson’s assertion that our citizenship is being “devalued” by birthright citizenship. Two of the justices—Thomas and Alito—used similar terms, insisting the children of undocumented immigrants “devalue” and “degrade” American citizenship more broadly. That’s extremely loaded language: As Adam Serwer notes, it echoes Civil War–era language about freedom for enslaved people “degrading” the white race, thus casting all those undocumented children as fundamentally “inferior” to other American-born children.Which is ultimately why all this strikes so hard at our constitutional order. Ketanji Brown Jackson’s concurrence forcefully points out that birthright citizenship enshrines the promise of equality in part precisely by overturning “bloodline” as the “marker” of belonging. The key is that the child’s status should not be hereditary. Vance and Johnson want to undo that, reversing what Jackson calls the Fourteenth Amendment’s destruction of “racial caste.”So let’s step back and really appreciate Johnson’s vile two-step. He claims in passing that birthright citizenship “devalues” American citizenship, casually endorsing a disgusting attack on the hallowed principle that a child’s status should depend on birthplace, not heritage or inheritance. Undoing this would be seismic, yet he frames it as a mere “fix” to “birth tourism,” making it sound benign to those who might not immediately appreciate the grand principles at stake here.“The new quote-unquote ‘fixes’ try to shift the public’s focus to the legal status of the parents, away from the geographical birthplace of the child,” Anna O. Law, a historian of immigration law, tells me. “For people who don’t know the history of the Fourteenth Amendment, it might sound plausible. But it would blow a huge hole in the U.S. Constitution. It’s deeply cynical.”It would also be deeply, deeply unpopular. A recent Fox News poll found that 69 percent of Americans think a kid born to an “illegal immigrant” (Fox’s language) should “automatically become a U.S. citizen.” That includes 65 percent of noncollege white voters, 61 percent of rural whites, and even 57 percent of white evangelicals. As Fox quietly reported in March (how often do you hear this finding on the network?), relative to previous years, support for it is up.To be sure, now that Trump and MAGA have taken up this cause, it might shift some Republican voters their way. Focus-grouping by The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell shows some Trump voters are now echoing his own language about it. But still: It’s very, very doubtful that Johnson really wants vulnerable House Republicans to vote on such legislation before the midterms. Yet he’s now been pushed into the position of keeping expectations for a legislative “fix” alive with MAGA—all because he’s required to pretend Trump’s command for legislation is rooted in something real. And Vance will have to champion this when his presidential run starts next year, no matter how unpopular it remains. When he does, he’ll use euphemisms like “loophole” to mask how wildly radical and destructive it is. And it’ll be squarely on us to prevent him, at all costs, from getting away with it.

Every summer, the Supreme Court hands down its most consequential rulings, and every summer, the conservative majority assures us that whatever it decided was compelled by history and the original meaning of the Constitution, and not partisan preferences. This most recent term was no different, except for one thing: The justices have never been less convincing.Make no mistake, originalism has always been a sham—and always applied selectively in the pursuit of reactionary ends—but this term’s opinions put on display a methodology that’s in crisis, unworkable even for the justices who claim to be its most ardent proponents.Let’s start with Trump v. Slaughter, which dismantled the century-long practice of Congress restricting the president’s power to fire the heads of certain agencies. The ruling had been a longtime goal of the right-wing legal movement, but standing in its way was not only decades of precedent but also some inconveniently conclusive evidence from the Founders themselves.Take a line from Federalist, Number 77, where Alexander Hamilton noted the Senate’s consent would be required “to displace as well as to appoint an officer,” so as to prevent the president from becoming “the sole disposer of offices.” When it comes to founding-era evidence, it’s hard to get better than that—the most forceful and influential advocate for a strong executive among the founding generation answering your question directly on point.The conservative majority’s response? To call this a “passing comment,” bizarrely suggesting the word “displace” doesn’t necessarily mean “remove,” and instead demanding that we consult the “logic of The Federalist as a whole.” It’s one thing to completely ignore inconvenient evidence in pursuit of a sought-after goal; surely we’ve seen that move employed before. It’s another for this group of jurists, who so dogmatically scold those who diverge even slightly from the historical record, to so brazenly toss aside the plain meaning of words spoken directly by one of the Founders themselves in the name of “logic as a whole.”Still, that alone would be a fine, if familiar, example of conservatives editing the record to achieve their predetermined outcome. But it’s in Barbara v. Trump, the ruling that blocked President Trump’s abominable effort to eviscerate birthright citizenship, where things take another turn.The majority in Barbara is an unlikely pairing of the liberal justices with two conservatives, so the result provides a unique window into the unstable nature of the right’s methodology. Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred in the judgment, but wrote separately to state that the constitutional definition of birthright citizenship is not set in stone, and opened the door for Congress to create “exceptions” to birthright citizenship “recognized based on new developments after 1868.”“Exceptions”? “New developments”? You might be wondering where this guy was when gun rights activists questioned the logic of blocking assault rifle restrictions based on words written centuries before those weapons existed, or when reproductive rights activists asked whether eighteenth-century history should govern modern medical procedures. You’re right to be confused. It’s people like Kavanaugh who laugh progressives out of the room for suggesting that two people separated by two centuries might read the same words differently.Archconservative Justice Samuel Alito, in dissent, takes things even further, developing a citizenship test so strict that virtually all children born to foreign parents would fail. But recognizing how absurd this result will be, Alito just stops his historical inquiry right there, developing an exception out of thin air for parents who have “done everything within their power … to become American.”In response, a fellow originalist, Chief Justice John Roberts, scolds Alito for creating this “ad hoc exception,” simply because he cannot “stomach” the result of his supposedly historical exercise. Alito, he writes, “does not explain how that exception can be squared with his view of the text.” As for Kavanaugh, Roberts writes that his willy-nilly reasoning is “at war with his supposedly unifying principle of the Clause.”If this seems like a mess, it is. And that’s the tell. Originalism was never marketed to the public as just one interpretive tool among many. It was marketed as a discipline, the thing that would keep judges from substituting their own values for the Constitution’s plain original meaning. But here we are, answering some of the most momentous constitutional questions ever posed to this nation’s high court, and the method that promised to provide clarity and stability is instead producing some of the more incoherent, nonsensical gobbledygook ever published.Indeed, a method that can’t generate internal agreement among its own adherents—let alone a coherent logic behind its conclusions—is not a method at all. It’s just a vocabulary. What was once sold as a mission to develop clear, consistent, stable jurisprudence has instead rendered constitutional law in this country a foolish and exhausting exercise, completely divorced from logic, philosophy, or common sense; a petty game of jurisprudential grab bag to determine who has the best quote from an eighteenth-century slave owner.None of this is an argument that the justices are reasoning badly, exactly. Every judge, on every court, has always had to decide which evidence matters and which doesn’t. That is simply what judging is. Even Antonin Scalia, the godfather of originalism, reserved the right to set aside historical evidence when the results struck him as too absurd to accept, famously noting that “I’m an originalist and a textualist, not a nut.”It was a tell even then—an admission that the method bends whenever it has to. But the scandal was never the bending. It was the pretense that a stable, principled method existed at all, one capable of producing consistent results regardless of who was applying it. Slaughter and Barbara show that even the people who invented that pretense can no longer keep it up among themselves. It might be time for the rest of us to stop pretending as well.

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