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Austin D. Sarat ScheerPost The Supreme Court’s MAGA majority has done almost all it can to turn the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom into one of the Constitution’s most important provisions. It has been used to override claims for equal treatment by gays and lesbians, to insist that employers provide accommodations for religious practices, and to […]

Section 219 creates a framework for permanent military integration that weakens American sovereignty, blurs constitutional accountability, and places the nation’s independent decision making at risk. Dennis Kucinich and Elizabeth Kucinich This article is Part 2 in a three part series on the proposed merger of U.S and Israeli intelligence, military and biotechnology. Read Part 1 here Prior to […]

Hosting the FIFA World Cup games can prove a propaganda win for authoritarian nations. But the data suggests the tournament favors democracies.

The following is a transcript of a conversation between election rights lawyer Marc Elias, TNR’s Win McCormack, and Carol Butler. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.Marc Elias: Donald Trump’s going to impose provisions [attacking voting rights] through executive orders. He issued a voting executive order last year that we were successful in striking down, and we will succeed in striking [the next] one down.… The Department of Justice right now is operating like his private law firm and is seeking to obtain confidential voter data from all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia. Win McCormack: Oh, I thought it had stopped with Georgia and Arizona.Marc Elias: No, no. So those are the ballots that they’re seeking from 2020. They have seized the ballots from Georgia from 2020, and they have [sued to get] the ballots from Arizona from 2020, but the Department of Justice is suing to get access, essentially, to the unredacted voter rolls in all 50 states. And they’re suing 30 of those states, and we have intervened to oppose them in all those states. And so I think that’s one of the big battles to focus on, because if you want to run a voter-turnout program, you need the voter files, but if you also want to run a voter suppression operation at scale, you need the voter files. We’re entering the season in which we will see lots of different state laws by Republican legislatures try to suppress voting rights, and we’re litigating against those. We’re going to see more efforts by the administration, perhaps, to deploy federal paramilitary like [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. And we’ll have to be prepared to litigate against that. It’s just gonna be a knife fight from here to the end.Carol Butler: Can I ask a question on the private voter roll data? I know that a lot of [states’ attorneys general] have been filing lawsuits. Have some A.G.s been beaten in court anywhere on this yet? Have there been any victories on that?Elias: Seventeen states turned them over voluntarily. Thirty states and D.C. have fought [back]. In the 30 states that have fought, we have intervened to defend voters in all 30. We have won alongside the A.G.s in Oregon, California, and … Michigan. There are three states that have dismissed their claims. So we are awaiting decisions in the other statesMcCormack: And is there anything in the law that actually gives [Republicans] the right to have what they want?Elias: No. [Laughter.] They’re claiming their versions of the law that let them have access to this, but this is unprecedented, and there’s a reason why we’re 3 and 0, and soon to be 4 and 0, then 5 and 0, and then 6 and 0. Look, they are trying to bully these states in ways that you see them try to bully states in other arenas. The challenges are that the Department of Justice can literally litigate everywhere. But for every state that opposes this, we also have states like Florida, Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi that are voluntarily complying with these requests. And that’s going to be a challenge as we go forward, because we assume—everyone assumes—that where there is voter suppression, we are necessarily fighting against the federal government. But remember, most voter suppression is actually fighting against states where either the state itself or the Republican National Committee or Republicans are doing it.McCormack: So the Republican National Committee can come in and intervene in states?Elias: Well, the RNC runs voter suppression programs to try to prevent people from voting, and they also bring litigation to try to make voting harder. There’s a case [Watson v. Republican National Committee] that was just argued in the U.S. Supreme Court, in which the RNC sued Mississippi to try to make mail-in voting more difficult.McCormack: Well, I heard somebody on MS NOW last night saying that, regardless of what happens with the Save America Act [a suppressive “voter ID” bill that would also give the Trump administration a federal surveillance system of voters], they have a very well-worked-out plan for doing what they want to do. Is that what you were referring to before, or is there more to what they said?Elias: There’s more to it. What we’ve seen from Donald Trump in the past is that he starts with lies, then he increases the rhetoric behind the lies, then you see the legal process, and then when he fails in the legal process, we have violence. We are on that progression. He has lied about voting, he has now upped the rhetoric for all of the SAVE Act, which began as a proof-of-citizenship law. It’s now become a voter suppression, voter purge, ban on mail-in voting, trans-targeting law. So when he loses in court in the cases I referenced, and he’s not able to pass this law through Congress, as we’ve discussed, I think he’s going to escalate further. Ultimately we’ll see some type of violence, I fear. Whether it’s what we saw after the 2020 election or what we saw in Minneapolis with ICE agents, Donald Trump’s rhetoric never tries to take the temperature down, and he knows that if there are free and fair elections, his side will lose. McCormack: Is it true, though, that he could send ICE in—but he couldn’t send them in bearing guns? Elias: If he sends ICE to the polls at all, there are going to be lawsuits to try to prevent it. Just as we saw in Minneapolis, there’ll be legal efforts to try to stop it. So I don’t want anyone to lose hope. We’ll fight back.And just to be clear, I’m not just worried about armed ICE officials at the polls. In some respects, if there were armed ICE officials at your local polling place, it probably wouldn’t prevent you from voting. But let’s just imagine a counter-hypothetical. Let’s assume that they’re not at the polling place, but rather, they are occupying all the parking lots, and they are closing off the streets. Now you’re not facing the prospect of parking and then going into a poll where there’s armed ICE agents. You’re now being told you’re gonna have to park a mile away and walk to the polls. Don’t underestimate the amount of voter suppression that they can impose simply through the chaos and contrived inconvenience. You saw that in Minneapolis. It’s not just where ICE was operating, engaging in efforts to do enforcement. It was blocking streets. It was breaking the windows of cars. It was harassing and swearing at law-abiding citizens. It was the tear gas. It was all of that—if you imagine, around Election Day, [that] would have a really big impact on voting, having nothing to do with guns at the actual polls themselves.McCormack: I can see that. I can particularly see them trying to interfere with people getting to the polls. There was a little bit of that in Florida, in 2000, trying to prevent people from getting [to] vote. Elias: So this is the thing. The Republican Party, as a private organization, has been running voter suppression programs for decades. What’s different is that, in addition to the RNC running voter suppression programs and their right-wing allies running voter suppression programs, we may very well have the federal government running a voter suppression program.McCormack: We could have violence at the polls. [Trump] is willing to go that far. I’m going to write a series of columns on this. I just wrote one wherein I said that Minneapolis showed that he would back down if enough agitation were organized against him.Elias: I think that’s true. He’s not immune from public opinion. Don’t get me wrong, no politician is immune from public opinion. The question is, though, how quickly did he back down? The thing about elections is they’re very temporal events. Generally, the period from early voting to vote counting, even in a state with a lot of early voting, is really narrow. And every day that goes by—as Carol knows from her days running Senate campaigns when I first met her—the one thing every campaign has the least of is time. You hit Election Day, and it’s over. I worry that even if public pressure is against him, it still doesn’t mean that it’s not going to create some amount of voter suppression in the meantime.Butler: Can I ask a question? Having spent a lot of time now in Oregon using its great vote-by-mail system—say we win in the courts. Isn’t there an awful lot of other nonsense [Republicans] can get up to that interferes with vote by mail? I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I don’t even trust the post office anymore.Elias: The truth is that every kind of voting system has its pluses and its minuses. One of the downsides with voting by mail is, obviously, it is dependent on the mail. You have a U.S. Postal Service that continues to cut back on mail service, continues to extend the delays for mail service, and as you point out, Donald Trump has, at this point, appointed not just [the] Postmaster General but others on the board of governors. That is not to say people shouldn’t vote by mail. It’s just to say that we need to go into the next few months understanding that whatever Donald Trump can weaponize, he will try to weaponize. We need to just understand that this is a feature of the era in which we live and not put our head in the sand and act like it doesn’t exist.Butler: So, Mark, you’re going to be battling in court, and obviously anything that people can do to support you in that is a good thing. What else do all of us need to be thinking about doing? How do we best fight back?Elias: I always say this to every audience I speak to: Obviously, there are things that lawyers can do which are unique to lawyers. There are things that elected officials can do that are unique to elected officials. There are things that philanthropy can do that are unique to philanthropy. But everyone, no matter who they are, no matter what their job, no matter how much they have or don’t have, they do have a town square that they can stand out in and speak out.Now, some people have really big town squares. They own major media publications. Other people have smaller town squares. It may be just their social media feed, it may be their dinner table, it may be their bridge club or the bowling league they belong to, but everybody’s got some place where they can speak out and be heard. What everyone needs to do is to use that town square to call out what Donald Trump is up to and what is happening to our democracy. No Kings Day is a great opportunity for people to do that, but it is only one day out of a year. My ask for everyone is to use every opportunity you have to speak out on the issues of democracy and free and fair elections, because without free and fair elections, you’re not going to solve any other problems. You’re not going to solve the problems of climate change, the economy, reproductive health—none of those things are going to be solved if we don’t have a functioning democracy. I think if we have free and fair elections, Democrats are going to take control of the House and the Senate, and they’ll do quite well downballot. But if Donald Trump is able to, in the darkness of the night, rig the elections through unfair districts, or suppress the vote through executive orders that go unchallenged, or make it impossible for people who have hourly jobs to be able to vote because there are long lines or because the streets are closed off, then he will have won. All of us can call that out. All of us can become ambassadors for access to voting by posting on social media, calling their friends, or texting their text chain with their college roommates. That’s the thing that I ask everyone to do.Butler: You were talking about him doing stuff in the darkness of the night. How big a problem is it, in your mind, what’s happened to the media and media coverage? Elias: I could talk endlessly about the failures of the corporate-owned legacy media. They have completely normalized what he has done in two respects. When he says Republicans “should take over” voting, that should be front-page news. That is not just a normal thing to say. It violates his oath of office; it violates the Constitution. If it was happening in any other country, it would receive the treatment by our media that it should, and instead, it largely gets treated as, “Well, Donald Trump said this, and Democrats say that,” and so forth. The second thing is that they just don’t cover democracy issues and the threats that are posed to our electoral system in the way in which they cover other items that are much less important but which don’t offend the people who are buying CBS News and now CNN and others like that. You cannot be paying tens of millions of dollars to settle bullshit lawsuits against Donald Trump and also have people believe that you’re actually standing up for democracy against him.

American progressives may have felt a twinge of sympathy or even support last week for Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as she became the umpteenth target of one of Donald Trump’s churlish social media fusillades. Trump claimed she “begged” him for a photo op; she fired back that that was ridiculous.It was amusing, but it was also a bit aberrational, because in general, the right-wing Meloni is Trump’s ideological ally. After all, her party, the Brothers of Italy, partly hails from Benito Mussolini’s old party, with the other two strains from former media tycoon and right-wing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, along with a more typical conservative party. Also, she may be forced to align with a hard-right, racist party that is gaining ground in Italy.Instead, it’s the 41-year-old leader of the Italian opposition (an official role), socialist Elly Schlein, whom progressives in the United States and elsewhere should be learning about. Schlein hopes to beat Meloni in Italian national elections, which must be held before the end of 2027.We’re involved in a global battle between left and right, liberal democracy and populist authoritarianism. And the reality is that the global right has been much better at aligning together than the left. Steve Bannon is an architect of this, starting early in the first Trump term to organize international forces to do his bidding. With Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán felled by democratic forces in his own country, Meloni now stands as the most important right-wing leader in Europe. The U.K. will elect a new prime minister this year. Italy will be the next big one. Meloni’s defeat in 2027, a year before the U.S. presidential elections, would send a powerful message to Republican leaders in the U.S. and to corporate interests so closely aligned with the right wing in Europe and here at home.Schlein, who won her party’s leadership unexpectedly in 2023, is hardly the prototype of an Italian politician. A gay woman with a Jewish Ukrainian American father and an Italian mother, she was raised in Lugano, Switzerland. She holds triple citizenship: American, Italian, and Swiss. She attended the University of Bologna, the oldest university in the world, engaging there in left-wing movement politics as she built a base of support outside the traditional party structure before surprising the old guard with her leadership victory of the Partido Democratico (Democratic Party, or PD) three years ago. She began that leadership campaign 20 points behind. “When I was elected, we had just hit our historically lowest in the polls,” she said in an interview. “There were many people betting on the end of the party or a split.” Schlein says she sought to “rebuild the credibility of the party on two basic issues: the defense of the public health care system and minimum wage, and the fight against precarious jobs.” I sat with her recently on a sweltering early summer day in the Central Rome party headquarters, where we talked for nearly two hours as she covered a range of topics with no notes. The PD is an amalgam of previously large parties in Italy that includes the former Communist Party of Italy, or PCI; the Socialist Party; and the Christian Democrats (the latter two are former ruling parties, while the PCI was once the largest Communist party in the Western world). Today, the PD is the largest party in a coalition including smaller parties with diverse political positions that Schlein must corral to succeed, especially on foreign policy and defense spending. Warm, wonkish, and unpretentious, Schlein is passionate about politics and ideology, weaving a narrative completely opposite to that of her nemesis, Meloni. Her international collaborators include Senator Bernie Sanders, Brazilian President Luis Inácio Lula de Silva, and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. She’s quite familiar with U.S. politics, having volunteered twice for Barack Obama’s presidential races. Schlein’s base mirrors much of the Italian left (and much of the international left), with core support coming not from working-class voters but from the intellectual elite in the big cities. “It’s a huge problem for them to speak to the voters who are living in the small cities in the rural zone,” Professor Marc Lazar, of Rome’s Luiss University, told me. But capturing the working class and poorer sectors of Italian society from Meloni is a must for Schlein if she is to be victorious for a party that hasn’t won a national election since 2016. Italy is Europe’s third-largest economy, yet it is also one of the continent’s poorer nations. Largely dependent on exports, it’s been hard hit by Trump’s tariffs policy and the Iran war. Think Italian wine, pasta, olive oil, and designer fashion—all of which rely on the U.S. as the largest market. The choice for producers is to earn less on each product or charge more. But the most critical vulnerability for Italy’s economy is the mess created by Trump in the Strait of Hormuz, an avenue through which most of Italy’s imported gas flows. The Italian economy is overly dependent on natural gas imports.All of this should make Meloni vulnerable for reelection in 2027. Her pro-market policies have proven problematic for Italy. She expanded privatization of Italy’s health care system, already one of the weakest public systems on the continent. She is privatizing higher education, expanding the casual workforce, and opening detention centers for migrants—though in Albania, not Italy, using outsourced Italian police. This latter project of Meloni’s, according to Schlein, underscores Meloni’s ill-conceived policies. The somersaults she has turned to try to keep her initial idea intact would put Trump to shame. “Understand how she works with propaganda while facts are somewhere else,” Schlein told me. “She said they would host asylum-seekers in these centers—36,000 migrants a year. It was clearly against European law and the Italian Constitution.” After the European courts ruled that Meloni’s government couldn’t wholly reject asylum-seekers inside Italy, Schlein said that Meloni, “instead of declaring failure,” moved already detained migrants from Italy to Albania. “With taxpayer money for her propaganda, she prolongs the suffering” and subcontracts the work at a much higher cost.And the numbers are ridiculously low: “not 36,000 a year, but 536 migrants in two years,” Schlein said, quoting data from the Italian president’s office. “Since these detainees can’t be returned to their home countries directly from Albania, Italy will have to pay to have them come to Italy and then deport them,” she added.Meanwhile, Schlein has her governing agenda ready with “five main priorities: health, education, decent jobs, industrial policies, digital, and the ecological transition, in a way that redistributes the benefits of renewable energies.” Employment opportunities for Italian youth are minimal, as are incentives for women in the workforce. “After four years of Meloni, our growth rate is at zero,” Schlein says. “It’s the image of the complete failure of the economic and social policies of a right-wing nationalist government.… Progressives cannot accept this. We must readapt those rules to fight a new form of exploitation, especially of the young generation.” It’s an understatement to point out that a national campaign between two women is unprecedented in heavily patriarchal, Catholic Italy. Meloni echoes the American right wing in promoting what she considers traditional family values (though she herself is separated from her former partner, with whom she had a daughter out of wedlock). She regularly touts: “I’m Giorgia, I’m a woman, I’m a mother, I’m a Christian!” Schlein’s retort is: “I am a woman. I love another woman. I am not a mother, but I am not less of a woman for this.” It’s hard to say how well this riposte might play. Support for same-sex unions hit a high of 80 percent in Italy in one 2025 poll. And yet, Italy remains the only country in Western Europe where same-sex marriage is not legal.Schlein will try to build her case more around policy than emotion. “The right wing talks a lot about the support of traditional families and traditional values,” she told me, “but they are cutting funds for kindergartens, and they blocked a proposal of the opposition that aims at having, like in other European countries, five months of paid parental leave for both parents.” The digital economy and AI are also on Schlein’s mind, where she has an ally in another leader in Rome: Pope Leo. “I think this last Papal Encyclical … shows the risks of this unregulated progress of technology,” she said, referring to the pope’s recent forceful statement on technology and the global economy. She also wants to “ensure that the added value and benefits of technology are equally shared through society, and are redistributed, which is a fundamental word for the left and progressives in general.”Schlein endorses an EU-wide platform on AI and digital, as a matter of “national security,” asking “what can France, Italy, Spain, or Germany do alone when you have 500 billion investment on AI in the U.S. and 500 billion investment from China?” She proposes a European research center, across the 27 EU countries. “Otherwise, we’re out of the game.” Having served in the European Parliament, Schlein describes herself as “so passionate” about European federalism. “None of the big challenges we have ahead of us, including wars, inequalities, climate change, public health, different pandemics,” she believes, can be handled by one European country.Schlein says that unlike Meloni, she would not have capitulated to Trump’s demand that NATO allies expand military expenditure to 5 percent of their gross domestic product, because it “will be the end of the economy and welfare of this country. Meloni should have done what [Spanish Prime Minister] Pedro Sanchez did and said, ‘I am loyal to the alliance. I will respect all the capacity objectives set by NATO,’ but not give in to Trump.” Defense and military policies are precisely where Schlein must stealthily maneuver among the left coalition. There are internal contradictions among these parties, regarding pacifism, the willingness to be part of a European Defense Pact, and on strategy regarding Ukraine and Israel-Palestine.Schlein told me: “We should continue to support Ukraine as we always did with Partido Democratico.… Putin has rewritten borders with the use of military force.… Trump is too sensitive … to the arguments of Putin. You cannot negotiate a just and lasting peace without the people who were criminally invaded sitting at the table.”On the Middle East, Schlein tries to navigate a policy that defends both Israelis and Palestinians. “We were all happy about a ceasefire. But the problem we saw in the peace plan, so called, from Trump is that there were two important points missing—the end of the illegal occupation in the West Bank, and a clear perspective for the recognition of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.” She said Hamas “cannot be the future of Gaza” and that the Palestinian Authority “must go through reforms.” Meanwhile, “[Benjamin] Netanyahu and his extremist ministers,” along with Trump, must be held accountable for violating international law, she said. So, can she defeat Meloni? Two recent elections offer a split analysis. Meloni suffered a major loss attempting to change the Italian Constitution in March to reduce the judiciary’s role. Schlein told me this vote succeeded with “an intergenerational bridge.” Young people who don’t turn out in force did this time at 67 percent, along with voters over 60, to defeat Meloni. It’s precisely the type of alliance Schlein needs to win in 2027. In municipal elections held in late May, however, the right largely held off the left’s challenges, with significant wins in Venice and Reggio Calabria. But Schlein’s optimism and energy are contagious. Without doubt, she has mobilized a forlorn left. “The match is on. We are competitive,” she smiled. Importantly, she has expressed a willingness to run in a primary election with other parties in the alliance, assuming a victory will bring her greater credibility, and she believes “is the best solution for us to keep the coalition united.” Before we parted, Schlein showed me her bracelet, “Testardamente Unitari,” meaning “Stubbornly United,” which she said she wears all the time, underscoring her determination. It’s the prerequisite she needs to beat Meloni, challenge Trumpian policies, and help stave off Steve Bannon’s dream of a MAGA-fied Europe.

For nine months I’ve been making a stink about the Trump administration’s imminent sale of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which houses the richest store of New Deal murals in Washington, D.C., including a series of Ben Shahn frescoes, situated along both sides of a 70-foot lobby corridor, that would be very, very hard to remove (and require a great deal of expertise to preserve). Shahn judged these murals “the best work I’ve done,” and I don’t disagree; they’re stunning to see in person. Now there’s good news to share. On Thursday, the General Services Administration, which manages real estate for the federal government, signaled for the first time that it wants to cancel the sale, based on an aspect that I didn’t know about—and which has nothing to do with the Cohen being (in the words of Gray Brechin, founder of the nonprofit Living New Deal) “a kind of Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.” Earlier this month, I was able to report a tiny glimmer of good news—two House Republicans had voted for an appropriations amendment introduced by Representative Chellie Pingree, Democrat of Maine, to compel public release of a GSA feasibility study about refurbishing the Cohen. The amendment failed, but it was the first signal that we might see some bipartisan interest in saving the building. (For my earlier pieces about all this, click here, here, here, and here; see also follow-up coverage in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and USA Today.) This week’s news is much better, and from the unlikeliest forum—a public meeting of the Public Buildings Reform Board, an independent government agency that in a May 2025 report recommended the Cohen building’s sale and gave no indication that the Cohen was anything other than a cavernous and underutilized structure that nobody would ever miss. I have a strong suspicion that the PBRB didn’t know at the time about the Cohen’s artworks (which, in addition to the Shahns, include important works by Philip Guston, Seymour Fogel, and others).Now, Ben Peters of The Washington Business Journal reported Thursday, the PBRB is putting the brakes on the sale. At the end of last year, the Trump administration was so hot and bothered to unload four properties in Washington’s Southwest quadrant, including the Cohen, that the White House started soliciting bids—illegally, I might add—to demolish the buildings (since the land is what real estate developers really crave). The demolition didn’t happen, but this spring two of the four buildings were sold at, respectively, one-tenth and one-fifth of market value (in a local market for commercial real estate that was already seriously depressed). A third building outside the Southwest quadrant, the Old Post Office, also sold below market, but that’s a more complicated story of kleptocratic self-dealing by President Donald Trump.At Thursday’s hearing, according to Peters, board member Michael Capuano said, “Our analysis shows that absent an identified anchor tenant with Southwest, the market is not ready to absorb all of this additional square footage.” Translation: We just staged two embarrassing fire sales in Southwest, so maybe we’d better slow the hell down. According to Peters, board members also expressed concern that the federal government has not yet agreed with the local District government on a master plan to redevelop the Southwest neighborhood.But I haven’t even told you yet the really good news. Making an appearance at the hearing was Rich Butterworth, senior analyst and adviser with the GSA’s Office of Real Property Utilization and Disposal and a career civil servant. Butterworth said (this is Peters’s paraphrase): “Infrastructure complications with the 1.2 million-square-foot Cohen Building at 330 Independence Ave. SW are prompting officials to potentially consider pulling it from a disposal list and instead attempt to reinvest in the property for continued government use.”Having been focused on the Shahn murals throughout my reporting, my first thought on reading this was that “infrastructure” is a very odd word to describe precious art. But it turns out Butterworth wasn’t talking about any of the building’s murals or friezes. He was talking about the difficulty posed by the fact that the Cohen has a sort of conjoined twin, the Mary E. Switzer Memorial Federal Building, which houses staff for the Health and Human Services Department, and which the federal government does not intend to sell. The Switzer and the Cohen were built simultaneously, in roughly the same Egyptian-Revival-Meets-Art-Deco style, on opposite sides of C Street. They were designed by the same architect, Charles Z. Klauder, probably best known for building the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh. And it turns out Klauder, when he designed these twin buildings, decided to save Uncle Sam a little money by having them share certain underground guts—heating and electrical equipment, I’m told, and some other utility-related gewgaws. Apparently the two buildings are conjoined sufficiently that separating the Cohen from the Switzer in order to sell it would cost the federal government a lot of money that nobody gave a moment’s thought to until five minutes ago. Well, maybe the GSA thought about it, quietly. But Senator Joni Ernst, who wrote an amendment into a water resources bill last year requiring the Cohen’s sale, almost certainly did not. (She didn’t know about the art, even though the Cohen is situated a mere two blocks from the Capitol.) To sell the Cohen, Butterworth informed the committee, wouldn’t save the government money; it would cost the government money, because, he said, it would be “extremely expensive to replicate or sever those utilities.” Butterworth continued:While a lot of people would like to see this building disposed of—and given its underutilization rate, we understand why—our thought is, unless we can solve that problem, that might be a building that’s better reinvested in and get back to a utilization rate that would make sense and justify the level of investment.The way to save the Cohen, it turns out, is to save a bunch of dirty pipes and cables and ducts that you can’t even see because they run underneath C Street. With this revelation, Butterworth just made it a whole lot easier for Congress to stop the sale. Let’s raise a glass to the remarkable foresight of Charles Klauder.“We remain concerned,” Mary Okin, assistant director of the Living New Deal, told me, “since the building is still on the accelerated disposal list, but we welcome any public announcement suggesting the building is not going to go up for sale.”I do too, and I think probably we’re going to get one.

The Supreme Court paved the way for the Trump administration to deport more than 350,000 Haitian and Syrian nationals in the United States who were previously protected by Temporary Protected Status designations. In doing so, the court effectively blessed Trump’s bigotry toward Haitians and dealt potentially catastrophic damage to federal civil rights laws.The court’s ruling in Mullin v. Doe dealt with two separate issues. One was whether Congress had barred the plaintiffs from seeking judicial review of the secretary of homeland security’s decision to revoke the TPS designation for both Haiti and Syria. The other was whether the Haiti TPS revocation was illegal because it was made with a racially discriminatory purpose.Both countries at issue experienced tremendous upheaval in the 2010s. Haiti experienced a devastating earthquake in 2010 that killed as many as 160,000 people and destroyed large swaths of the country and especially the capital, Port-au-Prince. The ensuing social and economic crisis fueled political unrest and ubiquitous gang violence. Gunmen stormed the presidential compound and killed Haitian President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, and the country has yet to elect a constitutional successor.Syria also saw massive civilian displacements during its 13-year civil war, which began in 2011 as a protest movement against the regime of President Bashar Al Assad. More than 650,000 people died in the ensuing conflict. Assad fled the country in 2024 as rebel forces captured Damascus. While the new government has built ties with major powers to end economic sanctions and rebuild the country, much of Syria’s economy and infrastructure remains in ruins.Federal law allows the secretary of homeland security to grant Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, to foreign nationals inside the United States when they are unable to return to their home countries due to extraordinary circumstances, like natural disasters or civil wars. While the law does not create a pathway to permanent residency or citizenship, it does generally protect TPS recipients from deportation without some other cause.The Obama administration invoked TPS for Haitian and Syrian nationals in 2010 and 2012, respectively. Under federal law, the secretary of homeland security must conduct a review every 18 months to determine if the country in question “no longer continues to meet the conditions for designation.” The law requires the secretary to “consult with appropriate agencies of the government” before reaching that determination.Since TPS status can hinge entirely on an executive branch official’s determination, those protected from removal by it became a logical target for Trump officials after they retook power last year. The second Trump administration has dedicated itself to ethnically cleansing the U.S., both by shutting down legal pathways for immigration and by removing as many nonwhite people from the country as possible through deportation.To that end, the Trump administration has constructed a vast network of deportation warehouses to pressure people to leave by holding them in unsanitary and unsafe conditions. It has dismantled the nation’s refugee-resettlement program with the sole exception of white Afrikaners from South Africa. It has even claimed the power to abolish birthright citizenship by executive order; the Supreme Court will rule upon the legality of that step later this month.In keeping with that goal, Trump also issued an executive order last year that instructed executive branch officials to take a more “limited” approach to TPS designations. Then-Secretary Kristi Noem announced soon thereafter that she would be terminating the TPS designations for Haiti and Syria. A group of TPS recipients responded by suing her and the department to challenge her decision on multiple grounds. (Markwayne Mullin, who replaced Noem as secretary earlier this spring, is now the lead defendant.)Congress, using its jurisdiction-stripping powers, had included a provision in the statute to forbid courts from exercising “judicial review of any determination of the [secretary] with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state.” As a result, the TPS recipients had no ability to challenge the designation itself—for example, to argue that it was not yet safe to return to their home country.Instead, the TPS recipients argued that they weren’t challenging Noem’s determination itself. They argued that she had illegally reached that determination by improperly following the law’s consultation requirement with other federal agencies. Alito, writing for the majority on Thursday, argued that the judicial-review bar applied to the entire deliberative process. “If the final agency action is unreviewable, then so too are subsidiary determinations,” he concluded. “This important principle ensures that challengers cannot avoid a judicial-review bar by creative pleading or clever lawyering.”In the Haiti case, a federal district court in D.C. also found that the TPS designation was illegal on equal protection clause grounds because race was a motivating factor. It applied the Supreme Court’s test from the 1977 case Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corporation, which requires courts to evaluate whether race was a “motivating factor” by, among other things, looking into “evidence of intent” that can include “contemporary statements” by key officials.It is not surprising that the district court ruled against the administration because Trump is vehemently and publicly racist toward Haitians. Accordingly, the court concluded that Trump had acted, “at least in part, with racial animus” because the president “repeatedly invoked racist tropes of national purity.” Findings like this are typically subject to clear-error review by appeals courts. In other words, they aren’t supposed to be overturned as long as they are “plausible,” Kagan noted in her dissent.With Trump, that should be an easy threshold. “The evidence [the plaintiffs] have offered includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print,” Kagan noted. “Indeed, one measure of the President’s way of speaking about Haitians is to compare it with the majority’s, which is unfailingly respectful.”She cited Alito’s assertion that “poverty and deprivation are no reflection on character, and there is no justification for denigrating the character of Haitians who suffer from and bear no responsibility for their country’s ills.” At the same time, Kagan also quoted from Trump’s public comments about Haitians at length:Haitians are “eating the dogs.… They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live [in Springfield, Ohio].” And: Haitians are also eating “other things too that they’re not supposed to be.” And: Haitians in the United States “probably have AIDS.” And: Haiti is a “shithole country,” which is “filthy, dirty, [and] disgusting.” And: Haitian immigration is “like a death wish for our country.” And: Haitians, along with some others, are “poisoning the blood” of our country. And: “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries” like “Haiti [and] Somalia”? “Why cannot we have some people from Norway [and] Sweden?” The majority briefly replies that those remarks are not “overtly racial,” but it is hard to know what that means. Haitians are Black. (Norwegians and Swedes not so much.)Alito, along with his five colleagues, divided up Trump’s statements into four categories. Some “express strong objections to the immigration that this country has experienced in recent decades” and to “many of the immigrants who have come here, particularly those who have come […] illegally,” which Trump “associate[s] with crime and other social ills.” Alito could have hardly sanitized them more than if he had used Clorox.Other statements, Alito claimed, “express great displeasure with TPS” in general or “broadly denigrate the countries for which TPS designations have been granted—including Haiti—portraying them as hellish places to live.” Finally, Alito noted, some of Trump’s comments “malign Haitians who have come to the United States.” If only there were a shorter word to describe that.After completing this act of transmutation, Alito then insisted that “none of the cited statements by either the president or the secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications.” This is a deeply disturbing assessment on two levels. First, it is historically and linguistically illiterate. “The references—of filth, disease, and primitiveness—are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes,” Kagan continued, quoting from precedent. “It is hard to imagine the statements being made today of any White community.” A Martian who arrived on Earth yesterday might be forgiven for not hearing echoes of Nazi Germany when the president says that a minority group is “poisoning the blood” of our country. Six Supreme Court justices have no excuse.Alito and the court’s other conservative justices are more than capable of discerning discriminatory intent from public officials’ remarks in other contexts. In 2012, he and his conservative colleagues joined an opinion by then-Justice Anthony Kennedy that inferred anti-religious bigotry from a member of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission for using the word “despicable” to describe a Christian baker’s refusal to sell wedding cakes to a same-sex couple. Trump’s language toward Haitians was considerably stronger than that. Indeed, the court’s conservatives routinely ascribe discriminatory intent in other religious freedom cases where legitimate policy rationales are given.Second, and perhaps more ominously, Alito’s opinion completely butchers the Arlington Heights test, which is commonly used in civil rights cases. Under that test, the plaintiffs should prevail so long as they can prove race was a “motivating factor,” even if it wasn’t the sole or primary factor. Alito flipped the rule around by claiming that Trump’s remarks “expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications.” In short, any pretextual explanation for Trump’s comments could overcome the interpretation that they were racist.Arlington Heights did not anticipate that a president would be as openly racist as Trump. It anticipated a more subtle search, which is why the court in 1977 urged judges to take into account the “historical background” of a policy, as well as a “specific sequence of events leading up to a challenged decision” and “departures from the normal procedural sequence.” The court’s decision came in a case involving zoning policy, just over a decade after the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s passage. It envisioned applying to subtle forms of racial discrimination after the demise of overt ones. Alito, once again, got it backward. The search for context as described by Arlington Heights was meant to identify racist rationales that might be otherwise cloaked by officials. To Alito, however, that search is actually meant to find pretexts to exonerate Trump. “Because application of that standard calls for consideration of the context in which a challenged statement was made, the immigration context is an important factor,” he wrote.Kagan and her fellow dissenting justices thought this to be ridiculous. “No very ‘sensitive inquiry,’ of the kind Arlington Heights compels, is needed to see them for what [Trump’s statements] are; judges, as we often say, are ‘not required to exhibit a naiveté from which ordinary citizens are free,’” she explained.This is hardly new territory for Alito: He performed the same pretzel-twisting to make it impossible to bring racial gerrymandering claims in Louisiana v. Callais earlier this term. At the same time, rewriting Arlington Heights in this fashion is arguably worse because, unlike Callais, it applies in a much wider range of legal contexts. If the court’s reworked test applies outside of the immigration context, it could excuse a much greater range of bigotry by public officials, veiled or otherwise, than the current status quo.Alito further excuses Trump’s remarks by claiming the plaintiffs themselves had given Trump a race-neutral reason by citing “the present administration’s general stance on immigration.” (As I’ve noted before, Alito has a hobby of sorts of making disfavored litigants act against their own interest.) He noted, puckishly, that the Trump administration had ended TPS for a wide range of countries from Asia, Africa, and South America and took this as evidence of a lack of racist intent.“Most would regard this as a racially diverse group of countries, but [the plaintiffs] see them all as ‘non-white’ nations,” Alito claimed. “They claim that TPS has not been terminated for any predominantly white nation, and they therefore infer that the reason for the termination of the TPS designation for Haiti was having a predominantly nonwhite population.”But, Alito noted, the reason that the administration hasn’t done so is that no European country, except for war-torn former parts of Yugoslavia, had ever fallen under TPS and lost it. (Ukraine currently has one, he noted, but it won’t be up for review until later this year.) “The great majority of countries granted TPS have ranked among the poorest nations of the world, and no European nation falls into that category,” Alito coyly observed.In the end, it comes as no real surprise that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority takes no issue with Trump’s description of Haiti as a “shithole country,” nor that it finds no racist motivation in describing Haitians as eating people’s pets or poisoning the blood of the American Volk. They don’t see Trump’s remarks or actions as racist because they apparently agree with him.

An expanded transcript of the interview on which this article is based is available here.So, Marc Elias, what are you most worried about Donald Trump getting up to between now and Election Day?“What we’ve seen from Donald Trump in the past is that he starts with lies, then he increases the rhetoric behind the lies, then you see the legal process,” Elias told me and my wife, Carol Butler, in an interview this spring. “And then when he fails in the legal process, we have violence. And I think that we are on that progression. He has lied about voting, he has now upped the rhetoric for all of the SAVE Act, which began as a proof-of-citizenship law. It’s now become a voter suppression, voter purge, ban on mail-in voting, trans-targeting law, right? So when he loses in court in the cases I referenced, and he’s not able to pass this law through Congress, as we’ve discussed, I think he’s going to escalate further.”Elias, of course, is the indefatigable Democratic election lawyer and founder of the website Democracy Docket, which tracks voting litigation in the United States. Elias is the right person to be tracking voting litigation, for the simple reason that he’s directly involved in most of it. He explained: “The Department of Justice is suing to get access, essentially, to the unredacted voter rolls in all 50 states. And they’re suing 30 of those states, and we have intervened to oppose them in all of those states.” He’s won so far in Oregon, California, and Michigan. He and his team await verdicts in the other states. And he noted, on the downside, that as many as 17 states, including Texas and Florida, quickly complied with Justice’s request. (On June 22, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration could not pool data with states to verify voters’ citizenship, noting that states like Texas were already “actively” using it to check voter registrations and had flagged eligible voters for removal.) “It’s just gonna be a knife fight from here to the end,” Elias said.A knife fight, he predicted, that will almost surely find its way to the Supreme Court in some form. One likely form: In March, the court heard arguments in Watson v. Republican National Committee, in which it will rule on the constitutionality of a post–Election Day grace period for mail-in ballots. Mississippi is one of 15 states that provides for such a period. The RNC cites an 1845 law defining Election Day as one specific day. A decision is expected this term, by late June.“The argument broke down into two predictable camps,” Elias said. “You had the three most conservative justices that seem likely to rule for the RNC. You had three liberals who are not going to. And then the question is, What are [Brett] Kavanaugh, [Amy Coney] Barrett and the chief justice going to do? And I think they are hard to read.” The decision could affect thousands of votes, and in close elections, that could matter.This brings us back to Trump and his plans and the possibility of violence. If Trump tries to send ICE agents to the polls, Elias said his group would fight it. He also thinks ICE’s techniques might be more subtle: “Let’s assume that they’re not at the polling place, but rather, they are occupying all the parking lots, and they are closing off the streets.… You’re now being told you’re going to have to park a mile away and walk to the polls, right? So don’t underestimate the amount of voter suppression they can impose, simply through their chaos and contrived inconvenience.”And finally, Carol asked, while you and other insiders are working to stop Trump from stealing the election, what can regular citizens do?“I always say this to every audience I speak to,” he said. “There are things that lawyers can do which are unique to lawyers. There are things that elected officials can do that are unique to elected officials. There are things that philanthropy can do that are unique to philanthropy, but everyone, no matter who they are, no matter what their job, no matter how much they have or don’t have, they do have a town square that they can stand out in and speak out.“Now, some people have really big town squares. You know, they own major media publications. Other people have smaller town squares. It may be just their social media feed, it may be their dinner table, it may be their bridge club or the bowling league they belong to, but everybody’s got some place where they can speak out and be heard. And what everyone needs to do is to use that town square to call out what Donald Trump is up to and what is happening to our democracy. And No Kings Day is a great opportunity for people to do that, but it is only one day out of a year. And so my ask for everyone is for them to use every opportunity they have to speak out on the issues of democracy and free and fair elections.”Because if we don’t have free and fair elections, he concluded, nothing else good can happen—none of the other crises that confront us, from climate to reproductive rights to you name it, can be addressed.“Because I think if we have free and fair elections,” Elias said, “Democrats are going to take control of the House and the Senate, and they’ll do quite well downballot, but if Donald Trump is able to, in the darkness of the night, rig the elections through unfair districts or suppress the vote through executive orders that go unchallenged, or make it impossible for people who have hourly jobs to be able to vote because there are long lines or because the streets are closed off, then he will have won. All of us can become ambassadors for access to voting by posting on social media, calling their friends, or texting their text chain with their college roommates. And so that’s the thing that I ask everyone to do.”

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