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Mexico City and Ottawa have tried repeatedly to reach an agreement with Washington to prolong the deal, under which $2 trillion is traded annually.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 30 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of the New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined by Adam Gurri. He’s the publisher of Liberal Currents, which is a great publication, a newer publication that writes about politics both in the U.S., and Britain, and a little bit abroad as well, but mainly focuses on the U.S. We’re going to talk today about a project Liberal Currents is doing called “The Reconstruction Papers.” So Adam, welcome. Thanks for joining me.Adam Gurri: Thank you for having me.Bacon: So tell people about Liberal Currents a little bit, just because I assume that’s a publication people are not as familiar with as The New York Times or The Washington Post. So tell them about Liberal Currents and what you’re doing, first of all.Gurri: It’s an essay publication, mostly—more commentary than news, though occasionally we’ve done a bit of news. Our focus is obviously through a liberal perspective. One of our inspirations when we started in 2017 was Jacobin magazine, which was created on the idea that socialism had been discredited in the U.S., in its reputation. They wanted to actually say, No, this is a serious intellectual tradition, and we are its number one exponents in the U.S.We had the reverse situation, which was that liberalism was so successful that people didn’t take it very seriously, in the sense that they assumed a lot. We assume that we believe in free speech, we assume that we believe in different things—in human rights and such—but not a lot of thought was actually given to why anymore. The enemies of liberalism spent a lot more time thinking about ways to attack it than the defenders thought about how to defend it, both intellectually and otherwise. So we wanted to correct that. We wanted to be one of the foremost exponents of what liberalism is, what it should be, why the world should be more liberal, and how we should go about it.Bacon: So talk about The Reconstruction Papers and what you’re doing.Gurri: So the Trump era, liberal resistance to it—the very name “resistance” implies a negative response. We’re trying to stop him from doing bad things. Even in talking about the extreme destruction of the second term, it’s often, It’s bad that he’s breaking this thing. It was so great before. We need to fix it as soon as we can, stop the destruction as much as we can.That’s all true, but we shouldn’t fix it to be the way it was before. All of these things had problems before Trump came along. Everyone agreed, for example, that tuition was out of control in colleges and no one could quite identify the cause. That the public funding of science—which was this tremendous accomplishment in the twentieth century for the U.S., and still … I think the biggest [in the world] by a wide margin before Trump—was getting creaky, bureaucratic, sclerotic in a number of ways.The Reconstruction Papers is saying, We’re not just going to go back to before Trump. First of all, that’s impossible, because it’s not how things work. If you tried to do that, you would be doing a kludge that would be worse than what we had before. But second of all, what we had before could be better. Why limit ourselves? Now that we have this window of opportunity, where the Republicans have shot their shot—they’re trying to destroy the administrative state, the New Deal state, really and truly for the first time—let’s shoot our shot. Let’s make the best version of all of these things that we can.The Reconstruction Papers isn’t as comprehensive as we would like it to be in that. There’s more that we could write. We’ll continue publishing new things, obviously, on the main site—potentially a future issue of The Reconstruction Papers as well. But it covers a lot. It covers a lot of different topics.Bacon: Do you mean to invoke Reconstruction as in the post–Civil War [movement]?Gurri: Absolutely. There’s a few things. Reconstruction, the original one, is both an inspiration and a caution. They had the right idea. They weren’t just passing amendments to change what legal rights we had, which was obviously one thing they did do. But the whole goal of it, the whole idea of Reconstruction, was the slave power was not just a legal entity. It was an institution that had social and political power, and in order to actually destroy it, you couldn’t just outlaw slavery. You had to actually break the political arrangement, break the economic organization of the South in such a way that it wouldn’t come back.The caution is that they failed. They did accomplish a lot. But a lot of their gains were reversed, and then we had almost a century of Jim Crow. Some people—including Victor Ray, in our collection—refer to the era of civil rights reforms as the “Second Reconstruction.” That would be the successful one. The Voting Rights Act—even more than the Civil Rights Acts, I would say—being the spine of that, holding the whole thing together. But that was fairly successful in actually enfranchising African Americans permanently, and other minorities that were disenfranchised elsewhere. And frankly, Southern whites, very disenfranchised as well. It was not just minorities that were disenfranchised there. It was also poor people, anyone that they didn’t really want having a chance at challenging the status quo.But now we’re seeing the unwinding of that. So if there are two, we need a third.Bacon: I don’t think I read all of them, but I read many of the Reconstruction Papers. So what Liberal Currents has done is there are dozens of people who’ve written articles—maybe four pages, maybe 15 pages—about their subject matter. There’s foreign policy, there’s trade, there’s higher education, there’s domestic policy. That’s a broad sense. But give people a sense of two or three ideas that are in the document they might want to think about.Gurri: One to think of in terms of what has just happened in the Supreme Court would be Anna Law’s contribution on immigration law. I think probably even more ambitious programs are possible, but our immigration status quo is so bad right now—even before the Trump second term, it was so bad—that there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit. Her approach essentially was to say, Let’s take the low-hanging fruit. The low-hanging fruit is essentially what she calls normalizing immigration law.Right now, Congress has failed to pass any kind of bill for 20 years. There’s a lot of things that bipartisan-ly they have more or less agreed on for most of that time that would make the situation better off, including for people like us who believe that immigration is good. And we should just do it. It should be reauthorized on a regular basis through Congress, so that it will normalize the process of actually revisiting how many people are here on TPS, the different levels and numbers of each—Bacon: Just to be clear, and make sure people understand—every year Congress should intentionally think through and pass legislation about how many people are entering the country.… There should be a whole number, right?Gurri: I forget the exact cadence. I don’t think it’s every single year. But for example, the Voting Rights Act itself was reauthorized multiple times.Bacon: Yes.Gurri: And each time they reauthorized it, one of the things they would say is, We’ll reauthorize it again in this number of years. After the Reagan one, it was quite a long time. Before that, they did it a couple of times relatively close together. This is one of those inside-baseball, Congress things that a lot of people don’t know about. Having legislation be reauthorized like that gives Congress a more central role.A theme across the Reconstruction Papers is many of the problems of our system are downstream of the dysfunction of Congress. The more you can do to force Congress to actually step up and fill the role it’s supposed to, the more that out-of-control presidencies and out-of-control courts will be reined in, almost just by happenstance. Making Congress regularly reauthorize some basic things about immigration law, according to Anna Law, will help a lot of things.So that’s one tied to the TPS, because TPS itself is a kludge. It’s like, Oh, presidents can discretionarily give it to some people. Maybe we don’t make it quite so discretionary for them to revoke it, though it is discretionary for them whether or not they’re going to renew it—it’s just a mess in terms of how it works.Bacon: What are the Supreme Court reforms in the document? I’ve forgotten now.Gurri: We actually don’t talk about it that much. One reason being that I actually am pretty optimistic that all the ideas are out there, for the most part. This has been discussed to death, and it’s really just a matter of having the will to do it. Nick Grossman, in his first essay—which is about the short-term things we need to do to get out of the immediate crisis, rather than the long-term vision stuff—says outright that we should just expand the Court.In my essay, which is on federalism, I mention that almost everything we’re talking about that’s in any way ambitious is going to require a Supreme Court to go along with it, which means we should just make one that will. Whether it is through one-time expansion or—Senator Wyden a few years ago had a court reform plan already that would work fine. It essentially would create a fixed number of appointments per presidential term. In theory, you need to pass an amendment to set term limits. What they wanted to do in practice was to just create a new seniority status, where you’re on the Supreme Court but you’re not actually seeing any cases after a certain number of years. So even doing that, and immediately putting the older Republican nominees on the retirement path, and making sure that the number of nominees per term is such that the first Democratic president is going to create a Democratic majority immediately—stuff like that will be good enough.Bacon: The federalism essay is about giving states more power. That was very striking to me, so talk about federalism.Gurri: Yeah. It’s three things. So the one that is relevant to what’s happened the past year and a half, mostly, is the guaranteeing-the-republican-form-of-government component. I strongly believe that a lot of the problems in our system—it’s not very timely to talk about right now, with the federal government going out of control—but most of the problems are local.When we talk about police reform, for example, the worst police in our country are just random localities that aren’t very populous. They don’t have a big tax base. They engage in very predatory behavior. They’re not very professionalized. But whenever we want to do police reform, you can’t do it very systematically, because you do it county by county or locality by locality.So I’ve always believed that one path forward is: Make state governments more democratic, A. B, make state governments stronger than local governments. And C, do better fiscal federalism, the way that Canada does, for example, where we’re not putting a lot of strings attached to the block grants the federal government gives to states. We’re just trying to make sure that state budgets per person are more or less equalized, regardless of whether you have a lot of poor people in your state or a lot of rich people in your state, to summarize it—Bacon: I’m a little worried, because as I read what Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott [o each day—I’m a little worried about this idea. So talk about that a little bit.Gurri: So the Constitution, in theory, guarantees the republican form of government for each state. We’ve never actually done anything with this. Even the Voting Rights Act has nothing to do with it. It just invokes the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments—mainly the Fifteenth, which is about not denying people the right to vote on the basis of race.But we should actually use that, and we should use that to authorize legislation that is very prescriptive about what is allowed as the form of government at the state level.… Almost every state now is bicameral, with two chambers like the federal government, and then a separately elected governor. The minimum-level change should be one of those chambers has to be done by proportional representation, meaning that whatever party gets 30 percent of the votes gets 30 percent of the seats, et cetera.So that’s one thing. The other thing is, if you are going to have separately elected executives like the governor, like the attorney general in many states, they have to be either a runoff or ranked-choice vote, so that you don’t get a situation where someone has a lot less than a majority of the vote and wins. In both cases, you are pushing against minority rule.In the case of proportional representation specifically, you’re breaking up what a lot of people call our two-party system. I would call it a two-at-most-party system. Most state governments are just one party. Primaries are treated like, OK, we have primaries. You can just vote in those instead. But those rarely have the same level of turnout as a general election. Plus, they make elections a lot more expensive—you have to have two elections that you’re running in.Proportional representation creates actual multiparty-ism in every single state, actual party competition in every single state. In a state like Texas or Florida, what that probably means is the Republican Party mainly cracks up, and the different wings of it are competing with each other directly, but they’re not spoilers necessarily. Then they have to coalition with each other in the legislature to actually work. But it opens up the space.Everyone right now is spitting mad on the liberal side of the spectrum, and many on the independent side as well, about a lot of what the administration has done. But the approval rating of the Democratic Party itself is still in the gutter, even though the Republican Party is doing so badly. And it’s because the Democratic Party brand is terrible, frankly. It’s a combination of, Republicans hate them, but then Democrats feel like they’re just not doing anything, they’re not accomplishing anything, so they also don’t approve.Having actual multiparty competition would open up the possibility of new liberal parties to run that don’t have the baggage of the Democratic Party, but can still coalition with them when they win. So at the federal level, you say to state governments, You have to do this, or your elections don’t count under our authority implementing the Constitution. Then gerrymandering is no longer a problem, and we’ve seen how big a problem that can quickly become. Proportional representation makes that impossible. You can’t gerrymander governors, so you just make sure that there’s no spoilers where someone’s winning with 40 percent or less of the vote, or something insane like that. Or what we actually have now, which is just one party wins every single time. You have actual multiparty competition. You don’t have minority rule in any case.Those are the strings in order to get the support of the federal government to consolidate power at the state government level. State governments, if they were actually democratically responsive, would be a far better way to govern than local governments, for the most part.Bacon: Alright, that was helpful, because that was a far-reaching idea that would be much different.… I want to get people to understand that what you all are calling for in many areas of policy is just much different than where we are now.Gurri: Yes.Bacon: It is reconstruction. It is not reform. It’s not tinkering. I wanted to get that. So now I want to talk less about the ideas and more about where we are.A lot of people I agree with—Jamelle Bouie’s writing in this direction, you guys are doing good stuff in this direction—who are thought leaders are describing a big, We need to have a big, Reconstruction-style agenda for 2029. But the Democratic Party, both wings of it, is not there. I’m going to start with the Zohran, DSA, Bernie Sanders wing—they might reject me framing it so directly here—but their agenda seems to be, If we do a lot of economic policies that help the working class, we will win elections, and that will be the way to restore democracy. I’m dubious of that, and I assume you are too. So talk about why we can’t just do working-class affordability and that’ll solve every problem.Gurri: Yeah. I want to do those things, obviously. They’re good policy. But for Biden, he did a lot of really good things, and what we just saw is he didn’t get any credit for them. The CHIPS Act and the IRA were both incredible policies—great stuff that we should have been doing—and a ton of money was poured into red states, mostly because it was easier to build there. No other political reason than that. Those states all went supermajorities for Trump anyway. It didn’t matter. They voted for the guy that came in and immediately killed all that stuff.That theory of change clearly does not work. We actually have to do something more fundamental. So yes, the original Reconstruction Republicans in the nineteenth century believed that they needed to change the actual plantation economic system, but they very much believed you had to change the institutions and the incentives and all that stuff as well. It’s just clear that rural areas right now have a way disproportionate influence on our politics. If you actually were to force a lot of states, and the House, for example, to really be proportional—if you were to get us out of the two-party frequent-switching situation in the House—the situation will change considerably.I don’t necessarily think the DSA would be against it, though. Most of their talking points are—Bacon: It’s not that they’re against it. They just don’t talk about it very much.Gurri: I agree, they’re not. I do think that from a self-interest point of view, their success—I was talking to this political scientist, Jack Santucci, who’s written a lot about proportional representation in his work, and he was saying that the situation with the DSA rising right now, in the past primaries that they had where they were successful, is very akin to the situations where European countries that got proportional representation actually finally did it. And it’s because they wanted to institutionalize the factions of their parties, rather than have this within-a-party competition thing.A future DSA-type party in a multiparty system could still coalition with the Democratic Party, but it might be better for both of them to stop competing for the same voters internally and consolidate themselves a bit, and then just coalition with whatever they get in the general election.Bacon: You answered one part of my question, which is, for one faction, affordability will solve everything—we’re dubious of that. Both the center-left and the left in Washington, the official party—they both believe that to win an election, you have to talk about economic issues. People don’t care about democracy, they don’t care about institutions: Hillary and Harris lost because they said “democracy” too much, and all people care about is prices.So do we want President Buttigieg to read your agenda and do it in office, but maybe not talk about it? Do you think talking about it—is it bad politics, good policy? Do you think that’s the conventional wisdom in Washington, that institutions, democracy reform is good policy, bad politics?Gurri: I try to be pretty humble about talking about what works in a campaign, because I’ve never run or won one.Bacon: Only person in the world that feels that way. Good for you.Gurri: I really don’t like armchair doing it. What I can say, from the sense of perceptions—again, having no authority whatsoever on the subject—is, for example, Steve Randy Waldman’s trade proposal. Everyone has said, How the heck are you going to explain this to voters? It’s very technocratic. But I think it’s easy. His trade proposal is essentially an old idea at the top level, which is free but balanced trade. That’s relatively easy to sell now of all times, because Trump is all about tariffs. He’s done the worst possible version of them, but that’s a good way to discredit bluntly doing tariffs. But no one wants to go back to the neoliberal trade regime, because it resulted in deindustrialization and trade imbalances, which were very related to each other.Campaigning on a top level—we want free but balanced trade, the tariffs don’t work—to the people who care about this stuff, which is not no voters, you could say, Look, Trump did all these tariffs and our trade imbalance got worse, and China’s trade surplus got better, so clearly that’s not working. Here’s an alternative where we get the best of both, essentially. That actually is true in this case, for his policy.Not all the things we go into are like that, though. Moira Berstein’s essay is about climate risk mitigation for housing, specifically. That’s a super-detailed technocratic thing.Bacon: In other words, this is not a campaign guide.Gurri: It’s really not. I would like for Democrats, especially ones running for office for the next two years, to see this, have it in mind, and think about how they can position themselves so that if they implement these things, they haven’t been misleading. I want them to talk about the spirit of the thing, the high-level public-facing elevator pitch for it. I don’t want them to just say, Oh, we won’t do that, and then do it. I want honesty. The level of sheer dishonesty in the Trump era has been mind-boggling. Not encouraging that by any means. But it’s definitely not a campaign guide. It’s a governing philosophy, I would say, more than a policy document.Bacon: That leads me to the next question. There are two views of the Republican Project 2025 … and it’s worth putting both of those [out there]. One view is that it unified the party’s elite class around a set of goals. They worked out what they’re going to do, and they did it. That’s a thing the Democrats might want to emulate. On the other hand, if Harris won the election—and Harris almost did—it would’ve helped that the Republicans put out a bunch of radical-ish stuff in a document that she gets to run against. So how do we view this enterprise itself? Is it important that the Democrats put out some detailed agendas, or they look at yours, look at what CAP does? Is it important that these documents are broad and ambitious, or is it important that they don’t include anything that the other side will use during the campaign?Gurri: I think you can’t avoid the latter anyway. As we saw with the Harris campaign, she was very minimal. She didn’t necessarily push a bunch of big, bold plans. She was very, USA is great, we stand for more than this. Frankly, she ran the campaign that everyone’s been asking Democrats to run.Bacon: Yes.Gurri: Some of the people who want to defend that style will say it’s because she had history. She didn’t just appear out of nowhere that year. But every candidate is going to have history. They’ll find something, or they’ll make something up.Bacon: In other words, she ran the populist, poll-tested, economic, move-to-the-right-on-social-issues campaign the David Shor crowd all want, and she lost.Gurri: Yeah. I don’t even think she moved to the right. But she was very patriotic, and she was not very divisive. She wasn’t very woke.… So I don’t think you can shrink from that kind of thing.Part of the game with The Reconstruction Papers, and things like it, is even if it’s not a campaign document, we are sending it to people that are not just policy and media insiders. We are actually trying to make the case for a vision of liberalism that we think is good, and that we should persuade people to want to have. I don’t necessarily think an election campaign is the place to do that, except at maybe a very high level. But we’ve got a couple of years—let’s proliferate this. Let’s try and get this as popular as it can be, or things like it.A lot of politics is not just the campaign, but consolidating what your side is on. Project 2025 was probably more focused specifically on elites, but there was some broader conservative-world discourse about it as well.Bacon: You said earlier that adding justices to the Supreme Court has almost been socialized enough in the party. Do you want Buttigieg [or] Gavin Newsom or Whitmer or Slotkin to talk about that kind of reform, even? Adding justices to the Supreme Court? Do you think that we’re already there? Do they have to talk about that? Where do the ambitious-but-controversial ideas go during the campaign?Gurri: You can’t run to do the specific reform, probably. Again, this is just speculation. But you probably don’t run on I’m going to expand the Court so much as you run on the corruption of the Court. That’s what gives you the door to [say], Here’s what we’re going to do.If you’re going to do the Wyden plan, for example.… A one-time expansion, we’re redressing a specific wrong. But the Wyden reform, or something like it—which is a good idea, and we should do regardless of whether we do the one-time expansion—is saying, Look, the way we’ve been doing this isn’t working. The stakes of every single judicial nominee have gone through the roof, especially Supreme Court ones. Often it’s not about election results, it’s about who happens to die with what timing and who happens to be in office at that time. The connection to actual elections is zero, pretty much, except that you have to win as often as possible to get your chance whenever it happens to appear.Let’s tie it to elections. They won’t be these existential, once-in-a-generation affairs. But they’ll still have independence. They’ll still have whatever tenure we end up giving them. It’ll be like the Fed. The Fed gets appointed on a regular basis, not lifetime. No one thinks the Fed is not independent. We can keep the Supreme Court independent without having it be an appointed kingship for life.So running on a Wyden-plan-type thing I don’t think is a bad idea. If you’re going to do the one-time expansion, you probably don’t want to run on that; you just want to run on, The Supreme Court is out of control and lawless and corrupt, and we need to do something about it.Bacon: Project 2025 was done by the Heritage Foundation, a well-known conservative think tank. A lot of the things that are happening now in the Democratic Party are happening from either candidates themselves, politicians, the Center for American Progress, the Roosevelt Institute. These are all think tanks that are very tight with the party. You all are not a party or affiliated think tank in a certain way. You’re not in office. How are you going to socialize your ideas in the way that … you’re not in the party. You don’t really want to be. How do you get your ideas moved within the party without this being-inside-of-it sense?Gurri: We are moving into it more, I would say. So as you were implying, we need to change the party if we want them to do the right things in 2029, if they have a trifecta. Part of changing the party is not just changing the elected officials in it. It’s also changing the overall intellectual environment, the policymaking environment, around it.We had a fundraiser at the end of last year in order to grow much larger. Part of it was to promise to produce the Reconstruction Papers as well. I’m having conversations with people like yourself to try and spread awareness of it, with people who are watched by policymakers. We’re reaching out to some policymakers directly, inasmuch as some of our writers are connected to that world. Long story short, just like we’re trying to transform the Democratic Party through primaries, we’re also trying to transform the media and think-tank environment around the Democratic Party. We want to be a big part of that. That’s what we’re trying to do.Bacon: That leads me to my last question: Talk about [how] you, Liberal Currents, see last week. The New York primaries—I perceive you all as being not necessarily where DSA is, but not necessarily where Hakeem Jeffries is either. I perceive that to be a place where, actually, a lot of Democratic voters are too. My sense is the average Democrat that I talk to is not a hardcore socialist who is for Medicare for All at all times—I’m for that, but I’m just saying—nor are they, Israel is great, we must defend Israel at all times. My sense is most of them are, “Trump is bad. We should win elections, fight him, and make sure there’s not another Trump again.” I’m not sure they would call that liberalism. They would just call that logical. But is that where you all are, in a certain sense?Gurri: Oh, yeah, definitely. Chance Phillips wrote something about last Tuesday for us, and he called it the Democratic Tea Party, which everyone hates. We got 100 replies that were like, Don’t call it that. The Tea Party was terrible, and they were astroturf. Fair enough. But that’s what everyone calls it.His point was the DSA was the single biggest winner because they were well-organized—they’d benefited from about a decade of socialism becoming less of a terrible, scary word on the left. But they weren’t the only ones. Outside of New York City, there were a lot of not left, but, like you were saying, candidates—Bacon: Outliers.Gurri: —that were not Hakeem Jeffries, who were not strongly pro-Israel, and who are running on, I’m pissed off about Trump, and I’ll do something about him, because I know you’re pissed off about him. Chance lists a few of those who are not DSA. Even Lander—Lander used to be DSA. He’s my district, by the way. And I voted for him.The way I interpret it is—you see polls that say Trump’s approval rating is the lowest it’s ever been. But more interesting than that is, even before it dipped that low on the disapproval side, it’s almost 100 percent “strongly disapprove,” where they show “disapprove” or “strongly disapprove.” People are very mad.I was talking to an elected official who goes to a lot of union events. For years, those union events always had tons of people with MAGA hats. But last year—this was June or July last year, not even that late—she went to one, and none of them were. They were all pissed off. So there’s a lot of anger to channel into. It’s not let’s do socialism in America anger. It’s, We have to stop this. This is outrageous. They don’t even think of it as liberalism or socialism or something. It’s just a politics of, We reject this, and we want something better. Candidates that come in and are like, We will make it our number one thing to reject it are coming in.Bacon: You said something about the media environment that intrigued me a little bit. I worked at FiveThirtyEight, and that was a smaller publication, but at that point there was Twitter, and that was very easy. Everybody was on Twitter. You could really socialize your ideas. You were talking very openly, which is rare of people, about, We want to change the idea structure. We want to change the intellectual environment in the party. I’d be curious how you do that. I learned about you all through Bluesky, and that’s how I’ve come to see you all, but that is not necessarily reaching the average Democrat the way Twitter was. A lot of elite commentators will refuse Bluesky as too left or too Dem—whatever it is, they won’t join it. Is that a big barrier? What is your strategy to reach people who are not [on there]?How do you shift the environment? I don’t perceive you all to be on MSNBC a ton either, and none of you have a New York Times column, as far as I know. How do you influence the party if you’re only on Bluesky and things like that?Gurri: Bluesky was very helpful, because a lot of the left flank of the party world is in there. It also is one of the few feed-based, not video-based, sites—Bacon: That’s a good point.Gurri: —that will actually let you link to things—Bacon: Yes.Gurri: —and doesn’t tank that. We’ve done well in terms of just pure views, because you can link to things there still.Bacon: Twitter suppresses anything that has a link on it now. So does Facebook. It’s very hard, very bad for written content.Gurri: I’ve heard that even LinkedIn does—not that LinkedIn would be the place.Bacon: I’ve heard that too, actually, yes.Gurri: We’re growing our email list a ton, we do newsletters. We are seeking to grow in video a lot. We’re investing a lot in that effort—on YouTube in particular, but everywhere, really. The Reconstruction Papers itself is in print. It’s not yet shipped out, but getting it out into the print world and mailing it to people, bringing it to conference events and things like that, is another channel. And then conversations like I’m having with you. I live in New York City. We fundraised a lot last year, partly so that I could take this all on and do a lot more media promotion of us. Getting on MS NOW, getting on things like that, that’s the goal. We’re still getting there, but that’s certainly something we want to do.Bacon: If I was going to take up two news things that I’m reading more than I did last year—Hasan Piker’s done a really great job post-2024 in making himself prominent, and you guys have too. He’s more on Twitter, you guys are more on Bluesky. He’s more in video, you guys are more on text. You don’t have the same policy views exactly, but the critique of the Democratic Party is similar from both outlets.Gurri: Yeah, makes sense.Bacon: Anything else? Tell people where they can find you and where they can find Liberal Currents’s work.Gurri: Yep. There’s liberalcurrents.com, where you can subscribe to us. You can see all our social media there. I am on Bluesky. Also, Adam Gurri—a very easy-to-Google name. I am literally the only Adam Gurri, so it’s very easy to find me.Bacon: Adam, thanks for joining me. And the Reconstruction Papers are on Liberal Currents’s website, obviously.Gurri: I encourage people to check those out. There’s a big link at the top to get to them.Bacon: Thank you for joining me. Good to see you. Take care.

“This is Citizens United 2.0,” Representative Greg Casar said Tuesday about the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing political party campaign committees to coordinate directly with campaigns without a cap on spending. Republicans praised the decision, while Democrats issued dire warnings about the fate of democracy.But behind the partisan divide, there’s an interesting disagreement about what, exactly, the ruling will do: Some analysts say this decision could weaken the power PACs have over elections, making political parties the dominant spending force. Unfortunately for Democrats, though, the decision will probably heighten a fundraising advantage Republicans already have this year. Then-Senator JD Vance, then-Representative Steve Chabot, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, or NRSC, and the National Republican Congressional Committee, or NRCC, first brought National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission to federal court in 2022. They argued that the court should overrule its 2001 decision restricting the amount of money political parties can spend in coordination with candidates—particularly via committees like the Democratic National Committee, Republican National Committee, or House and Senate campaign committees. The petitioners argued that these limits violated the First Amendment.Due to Tuesday’s ruling in favor of Vance and his associates, political parties can now both coordinate with candidates and raise unlimited funds—giving them an advantage over PACs, which can raise unlimited funds but cannot coordinate directly with candidates.Super PACs have become a dominant force in campaign spending since 2010, when the Supreme Court struck down caps on independent spending by corporations in Citizens United. That decision gave corporations immense power to influence elections, but with the important caveat that super PACs aren’t able to coordinate with campaigns. (Campaigns have found creative ways to get around this, namely by putting “red boxes” on their websites that instruct PACs how to spend their money without directly communicating with them.) Super PACs will remain important forces in elections. But after Tuesday’s decision, political parties may once again have an advantage over super PACs.Democrats are concerned about both the short- and long-term impacts of the decision. In the short term, they say, this could deal a blow to vulnerable House and Senate candidates, since the RNC has a major fundraising advantage over the DNC. At the end of May, the RNC reported its highest-ever cash-on-hand total, $125 million. In comparison, the DNC had just $14.4 million on hand and was $18 million in debt.On the Senate side, candidates in competitive races like Mary Peltola in Alaska and Sherrod Brown in Ohio may face better-funded opponents this fall. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “frontline” candidates, incumbents running in swing districts, could face a similar challenge from their Republican opponents. The ruling could throw a wrench into the Democratic Party’s confidence that they will be able to retake the House, and perhaps the Senate, this fall.In a statement, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, or DSCC, Chair Kirsten Gillibrand, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC, Chair Suzan DelBene, and DNC Chair Ken Martin downplayed the threat to Democratic candidates. “In November, voters will reject Republicans’ toxic agenda and efforts to rig the system and weaken our democracy by electing a Democratic House and Senate majority,” they wrote.In the long term, Democrats say the ruling will make elections more corrupt and flooded with dark money. Casar called the decision an example of the “hyperpartisan donor-purchased Supreme Court” reversing one of the landmark campaign finance wins of the post-Watergate era. “It’s essentially legalizing corruption in our political system,” he said.Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, had a similar view. “Republicans would get laughed out of Congress if they tried to repeal the few remaining guardrails against dark money and special interest influence,” he wrote in a statement. “So instead, Republicans run to their captured Supreme Court to do the democracy-damaging work for them.”

The primaries on Tuesday in Colorado weren’t a sweeping victory for the Democratic left like last week’s in New York, where three very progressive candidates won, knocking out two incumbent members of Congress along the way. But the defeats of Representative Diana DeGette and Senator Michael Bennet in his gubernatorial bid and the strong challenge to incumbent Senator John Hickenlooper are the latest signs of a shift happening across the country: It’s no longer enough for Democratic politicians to just vote the right way on key issues. The party base is looking for fighters and disrupters—and will cast aside solid politicians who they don’t think will aggressively battle Donald Trump, MAGA, and right-wing billionaires. Unlike New York, where there were three House candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and effectively running as a slate, Colorado’s primaries were more ideologically complicated. Melat Kiros, a democratic socialist who was backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, Senator Bernie Sanders, and other progressive leaders and groups both in Colorado and across the country, fairly easily defeated DeGette, who has represented the Denver area since 1997. Kiros will likely defeat the longtime incumbent by double digits, a result no one would have anticipated a few months ago. State Senator Julie Gonzales, who was not endorsed by the DSA but had the support of many progressive groups in the state, lost to Hickenlooper but received more than 45 percent of the vote, an unusually high number when facing an incumbent senator. Attorney General Phil Weiser won comfortably in the gubernatorial primary over Bennet, who had been considered the heavy front-runner until recently. Weiser isn’t much more liberal than Bennet but positioned himself as more anti-Trump. He hammered Bennet for his votes to confirm several of Trump’s executive branch nominees last year and won the backing of the state’s Indivisible chapter. It’s normal to have multiple candidates seeking an open governorship (incumbent Jared Polis is term-limited), so Weiser and Bennet facing off wasn’t unusual or surprising. But House Democratic incumbents rarely face strong primary challenges, and Democratic senators almost never do. And it’s not as if Hickenlooper or DeGette are Joe Manchin–style centrists. They strongly backed Joe Biden’s agenda and have opposed most of Trump’s. DeGette is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. While neither of them has been a leading critic of Israel, they haven’t been vocally pro-Israel like Representative Dan Goldman, who was defeated last week in New York. So why did DeGette and Hickenlooper get primary challengers, and why were those challenges so popular with voters? How did a man (Bennet) who has voted against nearly all of Trump’s proposals in Washington lose a contest over who would be the most anti-Trump? For the same reasons Mamdani won the Democratic primary in New York last year, Graham Platner won in Maine earlier this year, Abdul El-Sayed has surged in Michigan Senate polls, and other progressive candidates are gaining ground and winning around the country. Democratic voters are mad at party leaders for not defeating Trump in 2024 and then last year having to be coaxed by the base into aggressively opposing him. They are also curious if newer politicians will do a better job than those from the party establishment in fighting MAGA. Those two factors provide an opening for challenges to incumbents and front-runners, even those with fairly liberal voting records.“A big difference in this race is, what’s your approach to the Trump administration? Are you committed to fighting back, standing for our rights? Or, as Sen. Bennet has said, do you want to support some of these Trump administration Cabinet picks because you think maybe it’ll get you a better relationship?” Weiser told Deseret News in a preelection interview. I know there’s a lot of talk about how Democratic voters increasingly like socialism and hate the Israeli government. The left-wing candidates have something of a playbook: Call for Medicare for All and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement; declare what Israel has done in Gaza a genocide; bash the outsize role of billionaires and corporations in American politics. But these primaries are not simply ideological referendums. Many insurgent candidates don’t identify themselves as socialists or even progressives. The Denver DSA chapter is nowhere near as organized and powerful as the one in New York City. The Gaza war isn’t a huge issue in some races that upstarts are winning, such as the Maine primary. I suspect that Kiros (and New York’s Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier) won many voters who aren’t die-hard democratic socialists but rather are traditional Democrats who want to see if a fresh face in Washington might be more effective than the kind of people they’ve been sending to Congress for a long time. And politicians like Hickenlooper, DeGette, and New York’s Adriano Espaillat are vulnerable both because they have been in office for a long time and because they haven’t been fighting the right in high-profile ways like Sanders or Senator Elizabeth Warren.If you were trying to cast for traditional liberals who vote the right way on most issues but are entirely forgettable and rarely lead on progressive causes, it would be hard to choose a better trio than DeGette, Bennet, and Hickenlooper. In writing this article, I struggled to recall anything particularly good or bad that any of them had done on Capitol Hill. Do you remember that Bennet ran for president in 2020? I had forgotten. My guess is that many liberals in very blue Denver feel they can have a representative like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, not just a progressive but a prominent, fiery one. In the run-up to the primary, DeGette emphasized her support for Medicare for All and abolishing ICE. But she hasn’t been a high-profile advocate of those ideas—or really anything else. “A scandal-free and reliably Democratic-voting incumbent losing in her primary basically for being too ‘establishment’ and not being strident enough against Republicans would strike me as an important moment, suggesting that what happened in New York last week is a national phenomenon,” University of Denver political scientist Seth Masket wrote in his Substack newsletter on the eve of the election. The boring normalness of Bennet, DeGette, and Hickenlooper (and the lack of Mamdani-like progressive presence) is why these primaries were so important. They are more representative of how the Democratic Party is changing than New York’s races last week. The Democratic base is angry. Democratic politicians can channel that anger against Trump—or it will be channeled against them.

The move signifies a deepening political turmoil as the nation grapples with a debt crisis.

The Department of Justice is attempting to sabotage a reparations initiative that compensates victims of historic housing discrimination in Evanston, Illinois. For decades, Black residents of Evanston were subjected to redlining and other forms of housing discrimination, which prevented them from obtaining bank loans to purchase property. “Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century, housing has been the primary way that families have built wealth, and we are in a country where there is 10 times as much wealth in the white community as there is in the Black community. … [T]hat gap is a result, primarily, of this type of dispossession on the grounds of housing,” explains Howard University law professor Justin Hansford. Evanston’s reparations program, funded through donations and a local tax on recreational marijuana sales, grants Black residents and their descendants up to $25,000 for property down payments, mortgages, home repairs and other related fees. It is the first of its kind in any U.S. city and seen as a model for similar initiatives across the country and the world. “The effort to bring a lawsuit to stop this particular program is meant to send a message to programs in cities and states around the country that this is something that is dangerous or illegal,” says Hansford, who is helping Evanston city officials defend their reparations program from the DOJ’s claims that its race-based criteria are unconstitutional. “We want to make sure that everyone knows that it is constitutional to pursue reparations in the United States.”

President Donald Trump has received another setback in his ongoing quest to control U.S. elections. In a 5-4 split, the Supreme Court ruled that mail-in ballots do not need to be received by Election Day to be counted, as long as they were postmarked by then. Although a “rare victory for voting rights,” the conservative justices’ assertion that voting by mail is prone to fraud — a disproven theory that Trump blames his loss in the 2020 election for — is “very disturbing,” says Ari Berman, the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones. “My fear is that this is going to embolden Republicans to double down on their efforts to try to get rid of mail voting, including the SAVE America Act, Trump’s sweeping voter suppression bill, which he seems desperate to go to any lengths to try to pass,” says Berman, who also comments on the court’s decision to strike down a federal law limiting campaign spending.

The Supreme Court has ruled that states can prohibit transgender student athletes from competing in women’s and girls’ sports teams, with the court’s conservative justices finding that such bans — currently introduced in Idaho and West Virginia — do not violate the Constitution, and all nine justices agreeing that they do not violate Title IX, the federal anti-sex discrimination statute. These bans are part of an “effort that we’re seeing escalate to push trans people out of public life,” says Chase Strangio, co-director of the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project. They have the ultimate effect of “increasing the legitimacy of the Trump administration’s authority over every aspect of our bodily autonomy and everyday life.”

The congressman returned on Tuesday, after missing 100 votes, winning an uncontested primary for his district seat, and throughout it all... receiving his full salary.