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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 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 lost a few big cases at the Supreme Court on Monday. He also won a big one. But judging by the extended eruption of rage that followed after those losses, those are the cases he really cared about. And you can see why. In one of those losses, the court allowed states to continue counting ballots that arrive after Election Day, and that probably cuts off one of the pathways he was eyeing to help steal the midterms. Yet at the same time, his one victory was pretty substantial, and underscored again the long-term crisis that the Supreme Court has thrust us into by continually expanding the power of this president.We’re getting into all of it with Lisa Graves, former counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee, who writes about the Supreme Court. Lisa, good to have you on.Lisa Graves: Greg, thank you so much for inviting me.Sargent: So let’s start with Trump’s losses. The Supreme Court rejected his appeal of a $5 million verdict in favor of E. Jean Carroll after a jury found he’d abused her. It blocked him from firing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook without cause. And in the biggest loss of all, the court upheld a Mississippi provision that counts mail-in ballots that arrive late, which will deliver a real blow to Trump and Republican efforts to invalidate mail ballots in this fall’s midterms in many other states. Lisa, what’s your basic reading on that last one?Graves: The Watson case is one where, had the Roberts court ruled in favor of Trump, it would have caused further chaos for the elections. We’re already seeing some of the chaos the Roberts court has caused through the Callais decision and related rulings this spring into May around the maps and the redrawing of maps in the former Confederate states. But in this instance, the Roberts court said no to the effort of the RNC and Trump to block the counting of ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but that arrive after.Obviously, people don’t have any control over how long it takes for the mail to be delivered. And it’s been increasingly slow in recent years. In numerous other ways, the postmark is the thing that counts. It’s the thing that can’t be altered. It’s a really reliable indicator of whether a ballot is on time based on the postmark. Even though the press covers election night in this sort of horse-race coverage of who won and who lost, those are projections. In many counties across the country, particularly in cities, it takes days to actually count and verify those ballots.Also, there’s an opportunity for people to cure their ballots if they cast provisional ballots—come in later that week with their ID if they didn’t have one with these new ID restrictions. It’s not unusual at all for the counting of ballots that are postmarked by Election Day, and the ballots that are cast on Election Day, to be counted in the days after the election. Trump, as you point out, was counting on the court siding with him and the RNC to try to disrupt the counting of those ballots.Sargent: This loss really triggered Trump’s anger more than anything else. He exploded in an extended rant on Truth Social. He said this: “In light of the tremendous loss in the Supreme Court today concerning Voter’s Rights, and the fact that ‘people’s’ votes are allowed to be counted LONG AFTER an Election is over, it is more important than ever to pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT!”Lisa, it’s very rare that Donald Trump admits that he lost, but there he admitted it. I also thought it was useful that he said straight out that he doesn’t think people’s votes should be counted. That’s very helpful. I think that’s a clear window into how he saw this.Graves: Yeah. Those in the law would call them admissions against interest, that he confessed those things. This idea that he’s concerned about voters’ intent—if he were concerned about voters’ intent, he would try to ensure that those votes get counted when people mailed them on or before Election Day. But as you point out, he also used this to pivot to his pressure campaign to try to get the SAVE Act passed, which is really about trying to save his presidency by making it harder for millions of Americans to vote.A lot of women—not me—took their husbands’ names when they married. Their birth certificate is not the same as their driver’s license. And the SAVE Act would make it harder for millions of American women to vote if they can’t show, at that time or in registration, that they are who they are, even if they’ve been voting for years or decades using either their driver’s license or their residence. That SAVE pressure point is something Trump has been obsessed with over the last few days in particular, because, again, he sees this as a way to try to control the outcome of the election, even though millions of Republican voters would also be affected by this deeply misguided and reckless SAVE Act.Sargent: This ruling—provisions like this one that allow the counting of mail ballots that arrive after Election Day will now remain in place in many states, including ones with big elections in them this fall. This is the critical point. For instance, if Democrats win a couple of crucial House seats in California, their path to the majority becomes easier. There are a few other states, maybe New York and Texas, where the upholding of this provision could really matter in the midterms.It’s obvious Trump and Republicans were hoping to use the slow counting of mail ballots to try to steal those elections outright. They were going to combine this counting of late-arriving votes with an effort to get the Postal Service to slow the delivery of votes, but that’s all been thwarted. That was a big chunk of their plan, wasn’t it?Graves: That’s a great point, Greg. We already saw Trump try to run this game plan in Los Angeles with the attacks on the process for counting ballots after the most recent elections in California, including in the mayoral race. He was itching to deploy that same tactic to discredit elections everywhere by claiming that this is somehow fraudulent, or the results aren’t fair if the votes are counted after Election Day—even though, as you and I both know, votes are almost always counted after Election Day, because that’s how long it takes to count the votes.Sargent: He really hates the counting of votes. I want to dwell a little bit on his use of this moment to push the SAVE Act. It’s really revealing. He responds to this loss on mail ballots by demanding, again, that Republicans pass voter suppression legislation. But the thing is, Lisa, he has explicitly said this voter suppression legislation is necessary to holding power in the midterms. He’s more or less confirming outright that he understood this mail ballot case as a way to block voters from delivering a negative verdict on his presidency, and as a way to block voters from having their say in the midterms. It’s just right out in the open. It’s striking how direct it is.Graves: It really is. And it’s appalling, quite frankly. We’ve never—well, I guess we did in 2020—but before Donald Trump, we never had a president who sought to attack the idea of voting. There was litigation around Bush v. Gore and whether those recounts could continue in the southeastern counties of Florida. But that was couched not as hostility to counting these ballots.The thing about this particular circumstance is that, had the Supreme Court ruled in his favor, it would have cast in doubt early voting across the country. By setting Election Day as a particular day, Congress wasn’t intending to say that only ballots cast that day at the polling place could count. That’s not been the practice in the United States for more than a century. The first real major mailed ballots were during the Civil War, as the Civil War was going on. This is a long-standing part of American history. But Trump doesn’t care about history. What he cares about is power.He’s been joined in this attack on voting by mail, and on the potential outcome of this election, by Mike Johnson, who made really clear the other day how, if Democrats were to win, there would be oversight of Donald Trump. He said out loud something like, I’m your protection—we’re going to protect you from consequences. Which is also really morally appalling.Sargent: Protecting you from accountability is what they mean.Graves: Yes. The fact is, that’s what representative government is about. That’s what House elections are about. Every two years we get a chance—or at least we’re supposed to get a chance—to do a course correction. People seem to want a very real and significant course correction. But between Donald Trump, Mike Johnson, and then the Roberts court’s rulings on Callais and the voting maps cases, what we see are Republican elected officials, or Republican-appointed officials, trying to squeeze and change the rules of the game midway to preserve Donald Trump’s power. Despite all of the extraordinarily outrageous things that Donald Trump has done on an almost daily basis, they seem determined to protect him at any cost—even the cost of representative government itself.Sargent: Absolutely. But now we have to get to the bad part. The court ruled that Trump has the power to fire independent regulators, which is really going to increase Trump’s power over independent agencies and enable him and MAGA to bend agencies to his corrupt will more easily. The court carved out this exception for the Federal Reserve. Putting that aside for a sec, can you explain why this ruling on all the other agencies is such a disaster?Graves: Well, it really is a disaster. I wrote about some of this in my book, Without Precedent, which describes how John Roberts, the chief justice—who made an indelible image in people’s minds during his confirmation process, where he said he was going to be a fair umpire calling balls and strikes—in fact, he’s used the judiciary, used his post on the court, to advance some of these really fringe theories into law. One of those fringe theories is the unitary executive theory.It was invented during the Reagan administration. We know that John Roberts was a Reagan revolutionary. He was at the top of the Justice Department at the beginning of Reagan’s term. He was in the White House counsel’s office. Then he was in the George H.W. Bush administration as the political deputy in the S.G.’s office. Back then, what they were trying to do was to maximize presidential power.Now, as a judge, what we’re seeing is John Roberts overturning decades—nearly a century—of legal precedent. Congress had passed this law saying that they wanted to make sure that there were independent agencies—that if the agency had legislative components to its work, like the Federal Trade Commission, in terms of trying to implement Congress’s will of protecting against these mergers, and now they’re mega-mergers in the twenty-first century—that the president could not just fire someone without cause.The thing about what Roberts has done, along with his fellow Republican appointees in the Slaughter case, is that it has ripped away the power of Congress to create these independent agencies. Remember, the job of the president isn’t to invent the law. His job, the oath he takes, is to faithfully execute the law. Trump, for the most part, is not actually faithfully executing the law. From day one, minute one, after being sworn in, he started basically asserting that he could just change the law.But in this instance, with mergers—this is an area where, going back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Supreme Court had said, No, you cannot fire your predecessors’ appointees. It’s just not allowed. We want these agencies to do their job independent of who is the president. What Roberts has done is change the law radically, dramatically, to empower Trump to have more power than almost any president in the twentieth and twenty-first century has had.Sargent: Let’s step back for a second and really hone in on that bigger point. Trump rages wildly over his losses and he attacks the court over them, but he actually got his way in the manner that’s probably most significant in the long term—not for these midterms, but in the long term. That tension captures where we are, which is that Trump’s expectation is so strong that he’ll get his way from the Supreme Court, that the Supreme Court will continue to give him power, that he treats it as unusual and even outrageous when the court occasionally doesn’t do that.But the big story is that Trump, and his appointees on the Supreme Court, and the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, have conspired to vastly inflate the power of the president, and arguably of the court as well, at the expense of Congress. Isn’t that the big story, that it’s just basically whittled away Congress and reduced it and diminished it while inflating the power of the presidency and inflating the power of the court itself? They’re allied in this effort, it seems to me.Graves: You’re exactly right. What we’re seeing is an imperial president being created by an imperial court. What we have is a cult of judicial supremacy where Roberts is acting like the kingmaker. He is the one who invented and orchestrated his fellow Republican appointees to come together to give Donald Trump unprecedented immunity from criminal prosecution for his so-called official acts, to allow him to commit crimes. That is extraordinary. It was unprecedented, and it has created the sense of entitlement of Donald Trump in this new term.It basically pardoned him when he was not in office, helped sweep him back into power by sending a signal to the American people that he did no wrong—in essence could do no wrong—and then has empowered him. The bookend for that is that this court, through the shadow docket, has ruled in Donald Trump’s favor 90 percent of the time, while the lower courts of different presidential appointments have been ruling against him on a lot of these issues, because they are contrary to the Constitution, to statutes, regulations, legal precedents, and contracts in many instances.What we see here is a Supreme Court majority, six to three—five of them served in the executive branch. They cut their teeth trying to expand and defend presidential power. Now they’re using their posts on the Supreme Court to expand presidential power from the bench, to invent new rules and ignore long-standing precedents to do so. In doing so, they also are carving out for themselves this notion that they are the deciders. They are the real people in power, and they are unaccountable to the American people. Which is why I, and an increasing number of my colleagues, are supporting an all-of-the-above strategy on court reform.Sargent: That is an absolutely awful occurrence, what we’ve seen happen—the big-picture occurrence. I just want to be sure we don’t take away from the importance of Trump losing on mail balloting, because we are going to need a Democratic Congress to challenge the state of affairs. With these rulings, with the ruling on mail ballots, it has become somewhat more likely that we get that Democratic Congress.Graves: The fact that they cannot stop ballots from being counted that are postmarked by Election Day—that is a big victory for the American voter. It also takes place in the context of this court putting its thumb on the scale in these re-gerrymandered maps in ways that may already help Trump. But it’s not a done deal, because Republicans have lost a number of these special elections. And the turnout rates for Democrats versus Republicans in the primaries—there’s been a real disparity in terms of enthusiasm for Democratic candidates and lack of enthusiasm for some of these Republicans.No matter the court’s intervention in general, people are clamoring for change. And this ruling by the Roberts court in the Watson case on mail-in ballots does protect the ability to have ballots be counted as they have been year in and year out for decades before Donald Trump became president.Sargent: So here’s the bottom line, then. With this imperial president getting enabled by this imperial court, as you put it, we’re going to need Congress to discover its power. If Democrats can win one chamber or both chambers—which is hard but possible—they are going to have to use every last shred of power that they can lay their hands on. Lisa Graves, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming on. That was just great stuff.Graves: That was beautifully put. Thank you so much, Greg. It was a joy to be on your show.

The administration is here to terrorize DC dogs and torture parents everywhere.

From war crimes and genocide abroad to moral, constitutional, and debt crises at home: Why Congress must reject the NDAA’s U.S.-Israel military and intelligence merger Dennis Kucinich Against the horrific high- and low-tech butchery of Palestinians and Lebanese by Israeli ethno-nationalist psychopathic killers, this week there will be an effort in Congress to formally merge […]

Jeffrey Wernick ScheerPost Wikipedia states that its articles follow a Neutral Point of View. The policy is the platform’s central promise, the thing that separates an encyclopedia from a brief. The fair way to examine any article is not to ask whether it is generous to its subject, but whether it honors the standard Wikipedia […]

“Under President Donald J. Trump’s leadership, America is safer than it has been in over a century,” a White House press release declared in January, claiming the “monumental turnaround” stemmed from Trump “reversing the chaos and carnage unleashed by Radical Left Democrats” and by his administration “ridding the streets of savage criminal illegal aliens, backing law enforcement, and bringing back order where incompetent Democrat politicians surrendered to anarchy and despair.” Putting aside the racism and xenophobia in that statement, the key word is “reversing.” The administration has been selling hard the idea that Trump, who ran in part on a law-and-order platform, has stepped in and calmed the chaos of our cities, restoring peace to streets made unsafe by naïve Democrats who care more about protecting undocumented immigrants than American citizens. Last week, Trump crowed on Truth Social, “D.C., Memphis, New Orleans, all down to record lows, and quickly!”He and his acolytes not only are taking credit for the drop in crime, but using it to excuse or hand-wave away a host of transgressions, from the National Guard troops that still occupy the streets of D.C. to ICE raids that continue to break up families and trample on human rights. They even use it to rebut critiques that have no relation to public safety. In a recent appearance on ABC’s The View, Vice President JD Vance responded to questions about the administration’s whitewashing of U.S. history and its efforts to dilute minority voting power by arguing that it was actually doing more for minorities because crime in D.C., whose population is around 42 percent Black, is down. And FBI Director Kash Patel, during a Senate hearing last month, responded to a question about his indecorous behavior at the recent Winter Olympics—where he chugged a beer with the U.S. men’s hockey team—by holding up a sheet of arrest and crime stats, stating that the murder rate had fallen around 20 percent last year. (The following day, he was busted by MS NOW for inflating those arrest numbers.)But guess who’s actually responsible for the drop in violent crime? Democrats, by and large—and it predates the Trump administration.Last September, Trump woke up and fired off the following message on Truth Social: “CHICAGO IS THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD!” That’s not true, but no matter. Trump was going to send in the National Guard to clean things up. “We’re going in,” he told the press later that day. “This isn’t a political thing. I have an obligation. When 20 people are killed over the last two and a half weeks, and 75 are shot with bullets, there’s no place in the world, including—you can go to Afghanistan, you can go to places that you would think of—they don’t even come close to this. Chicago is a hellhole right now. Baltimore is a hellhole right now.”Sure enough, a month later, he sent guardsmen into Chicago and kept them there for three months before the Supreme Court intervened.I’m not going to argue that Chicago hasn’t had a crime problem, but the data is very clear: The city has been getting dramatically safer. After hitting a quarter-century peak of 804 murders in 2021, the number fell to 719 in 2022, 623 in 2023, 587 in 2024, and 416 last year. The city not only halved its murder rate in four years, but hit its lowest number since 1965. This was likely achieved in part through Mayor Brandon Johnson’s restructuring of the Chicago Police’s detective bureau, his appointment of an effective superintendent in Larry Snelling, and the increased spending and attention given to mental health care and crime prevention programs.Baltimore witnessed an even more remarkable drop, going from 334 murders in 2022 to 262 in 2023, 202 in 2024, and finally 133 in 2025—a 60 percent decline in just three years. Mayor Brandon Scott, who took office in late 2020, has focused on getting guns off the street and supporting community programs, which target the young people most prone to join gangs and commit violence, providing them with mentors and resources to prevent crimes from ever happening.As for Washington, D.C., which Trump claims to have singlehandedly made safe by deploying the National Guard, the capital did see a 32 percent reduction in homicides from 2024 to 2025. But this followed from the previous year, when the city hit a 30-year low in violent crime, including a 32 percent decline in murders from 2023 to 2024, long before Trump’s troops arrived. Like Chicago and Baltimore, D.C.’s mayor over this period, Muriel Bowser, was a Democrat.These drops are actually part of a larger national trend. Homicides have been falling across the nation since Covid—that is, since well before Trump’s second administration. The greatest decreases have been in cities, and 34 of America’s 40 largest cities are run by “Radical Left Democrats,” as Trump would put it. While the Covid pandemic may have fueled an aberrantly high rate, there’s also no doubt that crime fell drastically under President Joe Biden, and experts, such as Ben Struhl of the University of Pennsylvania’s Crime and Justice Policy Lab, credit Biden-era community-based violence intervention programs, or CVI programs, for making a major difference. “The evidence is strong,” he told The New York Times, “for citywide strategies that contain these programs.” These include community funding programs established in Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.Over $325 billion of ARPA’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package went directly to state, local, and tribal governments. The Biden administration encouraged grant recipients to use some of these funds on public safety, and these governments responded by injecting over $10 billion toward that purpose—not just for enforcement efforts, but for proven CVI programs.Many cities put this to great effect. The most powerful example may be Boston, which is experiencing its lowest crime rate in nearly seven decades under Democratic Mayor Michelle Wu. Police Commissioner Michael Cox largely credited the city’s CVI tactics, declaring, “The Boston Police Department continues to rely on the community as our most valued partner in public safety in the city.” That effort has included over 4,000 officer-attended community events and new programs to empower young people and stop crime before it happens.Adding to ARPA’s impact, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act not only increased funding for prevention programs, but expanded access to mental health facilities, strengthened background checks for gun purchases, and closed the “dating loophole” that allowed perpetrators of domestic violence to get guns.This is all libtard propaganda, though, if you ask the White House. When The Hill’s Sarah Fortinsky dared in February to suggest that Biden’s legislation helped reduce murders, deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson called the claim “absurd,” insisting that “crime is dropping because of President Trump’s law-and-order policies. Any suggestion otherwise is simply not based in reality.” The irony is surely lost on her that the most lawless administration in American history, led by the most criminal U.S. president ever, is trying to take credit for a crime drop that it’s had little or nothing to do with. But that is the reality. The “carnage and chaos” around this country is being largely caused by Trump and his goons, and there is no bigger “hellhole” in America right now than that white neoclassical building at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—the one with the literal hole right next to it.

In 2013, McDonald’s generated some ghastly publicity when it came out that the fast-food giant was advising burger flippers to go on food stamps. Why didn’t McDonald’s, a multinational corporation that generates more than $26 billion in annual revenue, simply pay its burger flippers a living wage? The answer in most (but not all) cases was that, appearances to the contrary, most McDonald’s burger flippers don’t work directly for McDonald’s. They work for McDonald’s franchisees—independent, mostly small businesses that contract with McDonald’s Corporation to lease and operate one or more McDonald’s restaurants according to a mind-bogglingly specific set of rules that guarantees every McDonald’s will be indistinguishable from every other McDonald’s. McDonald’s is not an isolated example. Over the past half-century, corporate America has systematically shed low-wage workers, either by offshoring them, contracting out their work, or designating them as independent contractors. Only rarely today will a large corporation employ someone earning less than $30,000. That’s not because corporations have gotten more generous but because they’ve gotten more wary of assuming responsibility for low-wage workers. Off-loading them spares corporations bad publicity, and in effect allows them to delegate routine labor violations to much smaller companies that can easily liquidate and/or rename themselves if they run into serious legal trouble.The contractors don’t try very hard to disguise the nature of the service they provide. In a Pulitzer-winning series on migrant child labor for The New York Times, Hannah Dreier reported that Packers Sanitation Services Inc. pitched itself on its website as being able to “take the liability and risk off your facility’s record.” Packers was as good as its word when the Labor Department in February 2023 fined it $1.5 million for assigning migrant children to overnight shifts in 13 meatpacking plants in eight states. Packers took nearly all the heat, while most of the Fortune 500 companies that owned the plants involved—Tyson, Cargill, etc.—went unpunished. Packers then “rebranded” itself as Fortrex and moved its corporate headquarters from Kieler, Wisconsin, to Atlanta. Problem solved.The Brandeis economist David Weil labeled this phenomenon “the fissured workplace,” in an influential 2014 book of that name whose thesis was that changes in the structure of corporate hiring that are typically thought of as efficiencies are actually a conscious effort to evade union drives and government-guaranteed labor protections, such as child labor prohibitions and payment of minimum wage, overtime, Social Security tax, and unemployment tax. Weil did his best to reverse that trend when he ran the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division under President Barack Obama. But when President Joe Biden renominated Weil for that post, the International Franchise Association, or IFA, a lobby group founded by franchisors and still dominated by them, campaigned against Weil and won sufficient support from the Senate GOP and three Senate Democrats (Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, who later became independents, plus Senator Mark Kelly) to defeat Weil.The IFA has had a much easier time during President Donald Trump’s two terms in office, as demonstrated by a proposed Labor Department regulation severely limiting the circumstances under which a corporation can be held accountable for work done on its behalf under the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, or FLSA, which governs minimum wage and overtime. (A separate joint-employer standard under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act governs union organizing and other concerted activity, and is enforced by the National Labor Relations Board.) The nonprofit Economic Policy Institute, in a public comment sent last week to the Labor Department, estimates that the proposed rule would affect about 15 million workers in “fissured establishments,” of which about 10 million would be the employees of franchisees, and that the rule would cost these workers almost $1 billion annually.Prior to Trump, the Labor Department followed a guidance document on joint employment drafted in 2015 by Weil. Regarding “vertical joint employment,” wherein an employee works for Company B, which in turn is contracted to Company A, Company A would be designated a joint employer when “the economic realities show that” the worker is “economically dependent on” Company A. This was less an interpretation than a description of what the FLSA actually says. Weil noted that the FLSA defined an employer very broadly as “any person acting directly or indirectly [italics mine] in the interest of an employer in relation to an employee.” (You can look it up.) But after Trump came into office in 2019, his Labor Department tore up Weil’s guidance and issued a regulation that defined an employer as interacting only directly with an employee. If Company A did not hire and fire a worker for Company B, or schedule that worker’s time, or dictate that worker’s specific work conditions, or set that worker’s wages, or maintain that worker’s employment records, then Company A was not a joint employer. This departed quite blatantly from the statutory language—so much so that a federal court later threw the Trump rule out.Now the second Trump administration is taking another whack at a Labor Department joint-employment rule, and if any substantive difference exists between Trump’s earlier version and this new one, I can’t see it. Once again, the regulation contradicts the language of the Fair Labor Standards Act by saying that indirect control over employees isn’t good enough to establish that Company A is a joint employer.The best case the business lobby can make in defense of Trump’s proposed rule is that although it contradicts the statute, it captures the federal government’s past reluctance to enforce it, especially with respect to franchising. In what follows, I rely heavily on an excellent new book, Chains of Command: The Rise and Cruel Reign of the Franchise Economy, by Brian Callaci, chief economist at the nonprofit Open Markets Institute.When fast-food franchising took off in the 1960s and 1970s, it was often judged in violation of antitrust law, which did not permit collusion between Company A and Company B. The franchisors answered that prohibitions on such “vertical restraint” did not apply because Company A and Company B were essentially the same company. Judges didn’t always buy that, but it was kind of true. Indeed, for a long time the Small Business Administration refused to give loans to Company Bs on the grounds that these weren’t small businesses at all but rather the equivalent of branch offices for Company As.Unfortunately, franchisors simultaneously contested responsibility for labor violations at Company B by arguing, no, actually, these are two separate companies … which was kind of not true. Yes, Company B signed a licensing agreement to run a fast-food joint for Company A on certain (quite extensive) terms. But Company A could later change that contract’s terms without requiring any sign-off from Company B. It was essentially sharecropping (Callaci more politely likens it to tenant farming), wherein Company B, after being sucked dry by Company A, eked out razor-thin profit margins by squeezing employees. Company A didn’t have to care very much about whether Company B was profitable because it took its money off the top.Granted, there have been a few franchisee success stories wherein Company B purchased multiple franchises and scaled up sufficiently to earn a real profit. But most Company Bs are single-restaurant operations that barely get by. Callaci quotes one franchise consultant describing the sort of franchisee Company A was looking for:An entrepreneur makes the worst franchisee. You might think that they would do well, but it is just the opposite. For one thing, they’ll never listen to you.… You don’t want any creative thinkers, either. Again, these people will not follow your system, and instead they’ll look for ways to do their own thing. You want someone who follows the rules.Ouch.Fast-food franchising became the behemoth it is today because of an FTC rule in 1979 that gave Company A a get-out-of-antitrust-jail-free card so long as Company A was fully transparent to Company B up front about what a terrible deal it was agreeing to. Franchising also got a boost from the adoption of the “consumer welfare standard,” which said antitrust violations occurred only if consumers were harmed. If franchisees or burger-flippers were harmed, it didn’t matter.Today the consumer welfare standard is on its way out, but that transition is not happening quickly. Fast-food franchisors used to argue that it didn’t matter how much Company B abused its workers because they were just kids working after-school jobs. But that stopped being true some time ago. Now fast-food employees are mostly grown-ups, often with families, and their best recourse, if they can’t make ends meet, is to go on welfare. Trump’s proposed joint-employer rule will impoverish these workers even more.

In the wake of victories by candidates whom New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed, former Senator Joe Manchin complained, “The extremes are driving the conversation while the majority of Americans are being left behind.” Responding to criticism of an article that the paper ran about one of those winning candidates, Darializa Avila Chevalier, The New York Times’ official account said on X, “The Times has been documenting the increasingly extreme viewpoints on both sides of the political spectrum for years.” Centrist Democratic politicians and center-left columnists are urging the country to reject both socialism and MAGA. But the idea that the U.S. now has a far left that is equally dangerous and radical as the far right is entirely wrong, no matter how many powerful people and institutions hint or claim otherwise. America’s extreme right wing is by far the country’s big problem, and it’s hard to address that problem when powerful elites insist that the trouble is with “both sides.”Why is this analogy so far-fetched? First of all and most importantly, the political left in America believes in and practices democracy. Until leftists collectively try to use judicial and then violent means to overturn an election that they clearly lost, as MAGA Republicans did in 2020, I don’t want to hear any bullshit false equivalences between leftists and MAGA conservatives. Conducting free and fair elections and respecting their results is fundamental to democracy. MAGA’s leader, Donald Trump, refused to accept the 2020 results, as did dozens of Republican members of Congress and state officials. To this day, Republicans tiptoe around the issue to the point where they can’t even give a straightforward answer to the question, “Did Joe Biden win the 2020 election?”In contrast, Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialists of America, Avila Chevalier, and other powerful people and groups on the left don’t deny Trump was elected in 2024. And it’s not just ignoring election results. The socialist left is trying to win power the democratic way—getting average Americans to vote for their candidates. The MAGA right is trying to gain and expand its power through gerrymandering, voting restrictions, and other undemocratic means. They’ve spent years making up claims of voter fraud. I’m pretty sure the Times and the centrist Democrats who sing the “both sides” song know all that. It’s unfortunate that they choose not to distinguish between pro-democracy people with bold policy views and antidemocracy people with bold policy views. Let’s move to the allegedly “extreme” agenda of the far left. Avila Chevalier, Mamdani, and other socialist politicians are pushing ideas like abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, cutting U.S. funding for Israel’s military, and limiting corporate monopolies. Much of their agenda is extremely popular because it takes on the rich and big corporations, as Americans desperately want. Some of those ideas are more contested. But guess what? None of that is anywhere as radical as giving an unelected billionaire (Elon Musk) the authority to fire federal workers, unilaterally shuttering federal agencies, and using the presidency to enrich yourself and your family. That’s what Trump has done over the last year and half. At least leftist politicians like Mamdani are open and honest about their controversial ideas. Trump and MAGA Republicans implement a radical agenda that they hide from voters during campaigns—just think back to the president’s constant lying about knowing nothing about Project 2025. Yes, some on the left, including Avila Chevalier in the past, advocate abolishing prisons, police, and borders. These are ideas that are truly radical. But ideas seem less outlandish after they have happened. And the right has managed to turn some extreme notions into U.S policy: the right to a “well regulated” militia in the Second Amendment actually means that virtually any restriction on gun ownership is illegal; the right to free speech means billionaires and corporations can spend almost unlimited funds on political campaigns; the constitutional amendments passed in the wake of the Civil War should be interpreted in ways that make it easier to force Black people from Congress. I am not sure that the wildest dreams of the DSA are much more radical than the policies stated in the aforementioned Project 2025 that are being implemented every day. Finally, any equivalence between the socialist left and the MAGA right falls apart when you consider the huge differences in power between the two sides. There are probably two dozen House Democrats, a dozen mayors, five senators, and two Democratic governors who would attend a DSA conference. And most of them would not call themselves socialists. In contrast, MAGA Republicans control the White House, about half of the seats in Congress, half the governorships, and at least two seats on the U.S. Supreme Court (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito). Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, another socialist who won a congressional primary in New York last week, will be something like the 250th and 251st most powerful Democrats in Washington next year. MAGA Republicans are the president, vice president, and top policy adviser to the president (Stephen Miller). MAGA Republicans are the dominant faction in one party; socialist Democrats are a minority bloc in another party. Anyone suggesting that the two blocs are anywhere close to each other in influence is either stupid or dishonest. The centrists annoyed by the left aren’t stupid. They are conflating the socialist left with the MAGA right as a rhetorical tool. The media, traditional Democrats, and swing voters will reject Mamdani and his ilk if they are convinced that socialists will be as destructive to the U.S. as Trumpists. But this misleading centrist rhetoric has real consequences. What the U.S. desperately needs is socialists, traditional liberals, independents, and pro-democracy conservatives to disagree with one another during Democratic primaries but then join together to defeat the MAGA right in general elections. That unity can’t happen if anytime centrist Democrats lose a primary they act as if a socialist candidate winning is as dangerous as a MAGA candidate winning. It’s not. I plead to those on the center left to stop calling people extreme unless they are trying to end democracy in America.

In late April, Virginia voters narrowly approved an aggressive gerrymander that would have given Democrats a largely unbeatable advantage in 10 of the commonwealth’s 11 U.S. House seats, counteracting GOP power plays in Ohio, Missouri, and North Carolina. Democrats exulted. “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time,” a triumphant House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared. Data nerds proclaimed that Democrats had fought the mid-decade redistricting wars to a draw, and maybe even won. The Bluesky brigades rejoiced that their side had strapped on boxing gloves for a change.The good feelings didn’t even last until May. Eight days after the Virginia vote, the U.S. Supreme Court completed its war on the Voting Rights Act with Louisiana v. Callais, unleashing lawmakers across the South to shatter districts that ensured Black representation across the old Confederacy and carve them into safe seats for Republicans. Florida, anticipating the court’s decision, moved first. Alabama, and Tennessee quickly followed. So did Louisiana, which canceled its congressional primaries after thousands of votes had already been cast.Then, Virginia’s conservative-leaning state Supreme Court delivered the final insult, finding a technicality that allowed it to invalidate the referendum and the new 10–1 map.There are lessons to be learned here, and if Democrats are serious about maximal warfare, or interested in rescuing government by and for the people, they must digest those lessons and stiffen their spines. They will need to fight back and enact big reforms, both locally and nationally, that reinvigorate and strengthen American democracy, all with the same speed and relentless determination that Southern lawmakers bring to ripping apart Black districts.We might have one chance. It’s not now, although what we do now is important. It’s in the first 100 days of a 2029 trifecta, when for once electoral wins, electoral reforms, and political will may all align. But even if Democrats win that 2029 trifecta, they can’t lull themselves into declaring a premature victory. The project of saving American democracy will require a massive lift: redistricting, court expansion, and additional states, at once. Hard as it may be, however, we have no choice. Because if you think the redistricting power play this year is bad, just wait. The road to controlling the U.S. House and the White House after that gets decidedly more difficult.There is a looming time bomb for Democrats hidden in the reapportionment that will follow the 2030 census. Defusing that—overcoming the census, the Supreme Court, and the filibuster with a package that ensures competitive elections and majority rule, just in the nick of time—will require the kind of coordinated, decisive action not seen since Die Hard or Speed.Here’s the problem: Everything that the Democrats do in 2028 to level the redistricting playing field could be negated post-census. They could win or hold the House thanks to new maps in New York, California, and Illinois, then hand all those seats over to Texas and Florida anyway.Winning a trifecta and then enacting redistricting reform through the minoritarian Senate, and protecting it from a court that has spent more than a decade tilting maps and electoral rules toward the GOP, are not merely options. They are existential.Just do the math. Imagine that Democrats in 2028 claim four more seats in California, three in New York, and one apiece in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, and Wisconsin. Then consider the consequences if Democrats hand each of these seats—along with one in Rhode Island—over to Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Utah, and Idaho after the 2030 census. Because if current population projections hold, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.William H. Frey, the legendary Brookings Institution demographer, has developed three different models for what the 2030 census could look like, depending on how population patterns and immigration politics work out over the next five years. They range only in the magnitude of bleakness: Will California lose three or four seats? Will Texas gain four or just three? Will New York lose two, or just one? Will Florida gain three, or just two?Frey cautioned in an interview that much remains unknown, particularly the state-by-state consequences of the Trump administration’s immigration policy that have thrown an historic kill switch on population growth nationwide. But what’s clear is that migration out of New York, California, and the industrial Midwest, coupled with low-to-zero immigration growth, come with what could be a historic migration of political power, almost all of it heading South.“It should be on people’s minds more,” said Democratic strategist Adam Jentleson. “That’s why we need to run up our margins as much as we possibly can in every election, because this is exactly what happened to us in 2010. We had these two great cycles in 2006 and 2008, and then we just got our asses handed to us in 2010 ... and all the power we won, it evaporated.”Somewhere between 12 and 14 seats will move away from states where Democrats are likely to draw the lines. The South, currently mapped almost entirely by the GOP, would have its largest number of House seats ever, some 40 percent of the entire body. The Northeast and industrial Midwest, meanwhile, would reach historic lows, abandoned for warmer climates and cheaper housing.The House math gets more difficult when you add that dozen to the 19 that the GOP could pick up via Callais, which only highlights the urgency of reform. Yet the problem runs deeper than the House. When those seats move toward the Sun Belt and GOP-dominated Western states, presidential electors relocate with them—a shift that will transform the Electoral College map.The brutal math of House apportionment combined with gerrymandering. A Senate weighted toward whiter, rural states, when 70 percent of the nation will soon live in 15 states. Twenty-five states that voted for Donald Trump three times, with 50 GOP senators: Right now, a majority means winning everyplace else, then expanding the map. A conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court will be with us into at least the 2050s, if Republican justices strategically retire and allow Trump and a GOP Senate to name replacements.There is no easy way out of this structural mess that Democrats find themselves in. First, it requires winning elections and taking advantage of a weakened president and unpopular GOP in 2026. Then, it’s adding to those majorities in 2028 while building a mandate for change that restores fairness everywhere, beginning with redistricting and the House. As Democrats learned in 2021, 50 senators and the White House will in no way be enough for the heavy reform lift that will follow. “You’re going to need votes to spare on big-ticket agenda items and structural reforms, like the filibuster itself, or making D.C. a state,” says Jentleson.The good news is that much of what is broken and unrepresentative can be fixed by statute, given a Democratic trifecta and the political will to use it. The good news is that much of what is broken can be fixed by statute, given a Democratic trifecta and the political will to use it. Two Democrats who have introduced far-reaching, visionary reform packages believe that the moment might be now.Moreover, there appears to be significant energy in the party for the project. Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland said that he’s never seen this much interest in proportional representation from his colleagues. Representative Don Beyer of Virginia, along with Raskin and a handful of other legislators, have co-sponsored the Fair Representation Act for almost a decade now. It’s the most complete national solution to end gerrymandering and would create a more proportional House with larger, multimember districts and ranked-choice voting. According to their vision, every district nationwide becomes a swing district, and every delegation would more closely represent the politics and racial demographics of every state. Members who have never wanted to talk about it in the past are now asking Raskin how it works.After years of experiencing a radical restructuring of our constitutional order by way of presidential usurpation and a runaway court, Raskin said, Americans are ready for a pro-democracy restructuring that makes institutions accountable and elections matter. A proportional House is just a matter of passing a law, no constitutional amendment required. The program would protect the right to vote everywhere; add Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as new states; and maybe even include Supreme Court reform. “Ultimately, we need to get to independent nonpartisan commissions with multimember districts and ranked-choice voting all over the country,” Raskin said. “Those are some of the things we need to put on the table along with the national popular vote for president.”Illinois Representative Sean Casten sees all of this as a long overdue corrective that would actually make Congress functional and more representative. “The Founders didn’t actually create a representative democracy,” he pointed out. “They created one representative chamber, another nonrepresentative chamber, a Supreme Court that’s not representative at all, and refused to allow most Americans to vote. The Americans they did allow to vote, they didn’t trust to vote for senators or presidents. We’ve not fixed all that stuff yet.”Under his plan, only 12 additional senators, elected by a national popular vote, would require a constitutional amendment. Everything else is just fixing a statute. Tweak the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, and suddenly the size of the House can be adjusted to the population again, as it was every decade before its passage. It’s effectively undoing the Apportionment Act, he said, and the larger House also negates any GOP reapportionment advantage in the Electoral College. Amend the Judges Act of 1925, and it’s easy to change the mix of cases that the U.S. Supreme Court is allowed to hear. The shadow docket, all of it, gone.For Raskin, the key is to figure out the proper sequencing for all these “powerful and provocative ideas.” But all of them are linked. Everything happens or nothing happens. And if nothing moves through both chambers in the first 100 days of a Democratic trifecta, the likelihood of the reapportionment time bomb detonating—and the GOP’s adding hefty advantages in the House and Electoral College to its control of the Supreme Court and its demographic edge in the Senate—only deepens.The most pressing change may be to abolish the filibuster. As Jentleson suggested, although nothing moves through the Senate without first addressing the filibuster, none of these structural reforms will stick without shifting the balance of the judiciary. “You need to not just win power, but you are going to need to hold those majorities for at least a few years beyond if you are really serious about the structural reforms that are necessary,” he said. Thankfully, the appetite and scope of what even centrist members will consider have been expanded, he pointed out, by the Callais decision and the behavior of the court. It’s now impossible not to see that “if you pass ambitious structural reforms, but the Supreme Court is still six to three, it’s just going to be a matter of time until they undo those reforms.”There seems to be political will for big structural reform. Raskin points to D.C. statehood, the For the People Act, and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act winning near-unanimous majorities among House Democrats as proof that it exists. Those reforms met their end due to the filibuster. “We had a very similar national conversation after the first Trump election, and we had a very similar mass mobilization of people saying, ‘This is unacceptable,’” Casten observed. “We then signed almost none of that into law, because the Senate said it was more important to protect the rights of 40 senators than to protect the rights of 330 million Americans.”There’s one other hardball play, should the Senate block reform again, or if Democrats fail to win the Senate back. What would happen if the president refused to report the census apportionment to the House? If Congress rewrote the statute governing the transmission of the numbers? Or if the clerk of the House simply declined to certify it? These have been ceremonial tasks in the past. But as Republicans have taught us, they need not be. Which is to say: The choice is clear. It is either big, structural reform or a constitutional, existential crisis.  

For most people, one of the highest-funded police departments in the country suing its own city for $67.6 million would sound absurd. In St. Louis, it is reality. This spring, the state-controlled St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners filed a lawsuit claiming that tens of millions of dollars from the city’s settlement with the National Football League over the departure of the Rams should be diverted to the police department. The board argued that the settlement funds, along with city reserves, should count as “general revenue” under Missouri law, which would require the city to divert 25 percent of the settlement to policing under a 2025 law.Earlier this month, a judge rejected that argument, ruling that money received and accounted for in prior years does not suddenly become current-year revenue simply because the police department wants access to it. But the board, joined by Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, intends to appeal the ruling.After the unexpected windfall from the Rams lawsuit, city officials and residents spent years debating how to use the money. Under Board Bill 22, which is advancing through the city’s Board of Aldermen, the funds would go to repairing homes damaged by last year’s tornado, helping displaced residents find housing, demolishing unsafe buildings, rebuilding North St. Louis neighborhoods, repairing sidewalks and streets, upgrading aging water infrastructure, redeveloping vacant properties, and supporting small businesses. The settlement is a rare opportunity to make investments that cities often struggle to afford through ordinary annual budgets, but the police board’s position is that tens of millions of those dollars should be diverted to policing instead. The consequence of a board win in the lawsuit would be less money for rebuilding neighborhoods and more money for an institution that already consumes nearly a third of the city’s general revenue—and generates millions more in legal liabilities, settlements, judgments, and overtime costs.The details are specific to St. Louis, but the underlying dynamic is far more widespread. The lawsuit offers a revealing look at the extraordinary fiscal and political power police departments enjoy in U.S. cities. At a time when local governments are struggling to fund schools, parks, housing programs, public health initiatives, transit systems, and basic infrastructure, a police department that already consumes a substantial portion of municipal resources is attempting to use the courts to suck even more funding away from other city services.The board is pursuing this funding shift even as taxpayers already bear an enormous range of police-related costs that rarely appear in discussions about police budgets. When politicians and police advocates talk about police spending, they usually mean appropriations. They point to the department’s annual budget and argue that officers need more personnel, more equipment, or higher salaries. But policing’s true price tag extends far beyond the amount formally allocated to a department each year.Cities also pay for police misconduct settlements. From judgments entered against officers and departments for excessive force to outside counsel hired to defend misconduct suits, to litigation arising from unconstitutional arrests, wrongful imprisonment, and protest crackdowns, the public bears the consequences of police misconduct long after the underlying incident has faded from public attention.In St. Louis, those costs have been substantial. The city has paid millions of dollars in police misconduct settlements and judgments over the last decade. For example, it paid approximately $5 million to undercover officer Luther Hall after he was beaten by fellow officers during protests following the acquittal of former officer Jason Stockley. Hall was a St. Louis police officer working undercover when members of the department’s notorious “Civil Disobedience Team” attacked him, leaving him with serious injuries. A jury later awarded Hall nearly $24 million in damages against one of the officers involved. The city also paid millions more to settle claims arising from an infamous “kettling” operation in which officers indiscriminately arrested protesters, journalists, legal observers, and bystanders. Publicly documented misconduct settlements and judgments alone amount to tens of millions of dollars.The department has other significant expenses outside of its annual budget. Recent city budget records show policing already consumes close to 30 percent of St. Louis’s general revenue. Meanwhile, police overtime spending has repeatedly blown past budgeted amounts, costing taxpayers millions more than anticipated. Yet none of those costs seem to matter when police officials describe the department’s financial situation. The board’s position is effectively that no matter how much policing already costs the public, the police department is entitled to more. That attitude has become even more striking since Missouri restored state control over the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department in 2024.Supporters of state control argued that local officials could not be trusted to prioritize public safety, and claimed the solution was to exclude key decisions from the oversight of the majority-Democrat city government and place them in the hands of a board appointed by the majority-Republican state government. Under this arrangement, local taxpayers fund the police department but have little control over how that money is spent. When disputes with the city government arise, the board can turn to state officials and the courts to extract additional resources. This current litigation is an example of that dynamic in action.Taxpayers are effectively paying both sides of the dispute, funding the police board’s effort to obtain more money while simultaneously financing the city’s effort to defend itself. At the same time the board has been pursuing $67.6 million from the Rams settlement, it has also proposed double-digit raises for command staff. The proposal includes raises of 16 percent for lieutenants, 18 percent for captains, 20 percent for majors, and 22 percent for lieutenant colonels. City officials have warned that because of pay-parity requirements, the proposal could trigger nearly $6 million in additional spending when corresponding raises for firefighters are included.Every dollar directed toward one function of government is a dollar unavailable for another. That reality applies to housing departments, health departments, libraries, schools, sanitation services, and parks; but in cities across the country, police institutions are often treated as exempt from the tradeoffs that govern every other part of municipal government.Across the country, police unions and departments operate as political actors whose primary objective is securing ever-greater fiscal protection from democratic accountability. When cities attempt to reallocate funds or increase oversight, police organizations mobilize and aim the familiar “weak on crime” rhetoric unrelentingly at any politician who threatens their dominance. Nearly every other public institution is expected to justify its spending, but police budgets are often treated as presumptively legitimate and perpetually insufficient.Public school teachers pay for basic classroom supplies out of their pockets, libraries have to scrape and beg for every scrap of funding, and public infrastructure wastes away, while any attempt to rightsize the police budget is treated like a five-alarm fire. This political asymmetry helps explain why police budgets have often remained resilient even in periods of fiscal stress. It also helps explain why a police board could look at a major municipal settlement and conclude that the money should belong to them.The fight over this $67.6 million is about much more than a budget formula. The lawsuit is a test of whether city residents can decide how to spend their own money or whether the police’s trump card will continue to drain communities of vital services. And the implications are nationwide. For years, debates about policing have focused on questions of crime, accountability, and public safety. The St. Louis lawsuit highlights a different question that deserves equal attention: How much public money is enough?The answer from the police board is pretty simple. Whatever the city has, the police should get more of it. Everyone else can go without.