Liberals perked up last week when House Speaker Mike Johnson let slip that Republicans plan to slash Social Security and Medicare if they manage to hold Congress1.

These programs, "have to be adjusted and fixed,” Johnson said, adding, “we have a plan to do that next year, and it's critical."

Liberals always get excited when Republicans remind the public, in unguarded moments, that the raison d’etre of GOP politics is to funnel money up the income ladder, then use budgetary pressures as an excuse to cut and privatize entitlements.

It hits every sweet spot: The Republican view on these issues is terribly unpopular. Democratic views—ranging from protecting health and retirement safety nets to expanding them—are very popular. Anchoring discourse around distributive policy is politically advantageous relative to culture wars, and frees Democrats from the task of using power against Republicans. Much better and more pleasant to deploy political capital toward advancing forward-looking ideas than imposing direct political accountability on the GOP.

Once upon a time I believed this to be true, and even now I wish it were. In the past, politics has centered around this higher-minded stuff, and it seemed to benefit Democrats. Thus, the thinking goes, if we could yoke politics back to New Deal issues—where it was from the financial crisis through Barack Obama’s first term—Democrats could rebroaden their appeal and win elections the old fashioned way: with superior arguments about values and ideas.

All things equal, it’s better that Johnson said this than that he didn’t. That much is trivially true. But with the benefit of hindsight, I’d argue the advantage lies less in the fact that the Republican fiscal agenda is unpopular, than that it’s often hidden, and Republicans usually lie about it.

A campaign anchored around the putrid Republican culture of lying (about policy, and elections, and everything else) presents the public a character critique with windows into every one of the GOP’s constituent liabilities: that its agenda is unpopular, that its leaders are corrupt, that its appeals are bigoted. By contrast, a campaign that brushes most of that stuff aside in order to present a simple contrast of policy proposals is likelier to fail.

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I feel comfortable making this argument, because we have a substantial record to consult, and it isn’t especially impressive.

Republicans have been more or less transparent about this same agenda every election cycle for decades now, and it hasn’t provided Democrats a cheat code to victory.

The GOP war on the New Deal consensus began a long time ago, but for a brief stretch under Obama, Republicans really owned it… and it scarcely rendered them unelectable.

In 2009, at their lowest ebb in decades, Republicans needed a tidier image, so they handed policy over to congressman Paul Ryan, their top budget guy in the House. Ryan was an acolyte of Jack Kemp and Ayn Rand. He would later admit he’d dreamed of cutting Medicaid since he was “drinking out of kegs,” and it showed! He quickly produced the first in a series of lengthy policy documents tying Republicans to plans to privatize and cut Medicare; gut Medicaid, and (in some versions) Social Security as well. Democrats weren’t oblivious to this. They made it the centerpiece of their opposition.

Democrats make no apologies about relying on Social Security as a closing campaign issue — especially in midterms, when the senior vote is expected to be more reliable than the youth vote that turned out in 2008 for Barack Obama. It “fires up our base,” and Republican alternatives “turn off independents,” a DCCC spokesman said.

They made Paul Ryan’s fiscal “roadmap” famous. Republicans won the 2010 midterms in a historic landslide.

The story doesn’t end there, obviously. Obama won re-election against Mitt Romney, who put Ryan on the ticket and ran on a version of his agenda. But there was no landslide, no national rising against the idea of entitlement reform. Paradoxically, the extremism of the Romney-Ryan agenda made it difficult for Democrats to attack, because voters had a hard time believing Republicans would propose anything as outrageous as slashing taxes for the rich and paying for it by raiding Medicare.

In the end the campaign settled on something a bit more narrative-driven than a contrast of visions. They transformed Romney, the former private equity baron, into an avatar for the entire GOP, and ran against his cold indifference to working people. His desire to cut wealthy people’s taxes and working people’s benefits slotted nicely into that story—and it worked. But it’s not as though Obama won with FDR or LBJ-size margins.

In 2014, unchastened Republicans elected Paul Ryan as speaker of the House. They went on to win another landslide midterm.

Then along came Donald Trump, who ran aggressively against Obamacare, but whose main innovation was lying about his unwillingness to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Democrats warned that tens of millions of people stood to lose their health insurance. They repurposed all their old lines of attack. Trump did not do exceptionally well in 2016, but he did win. It was only after he operationalized his campaign promise and came within one vote of repealing the Affordable Care Act that the public really turned on the GOP and its terrible health care agenda.

The lessons here are two-fold: First, it is much harder to animate voters by warning them about what Republicans plan to do than it is to mobilize them to oppose bad legislation after Republicans have already won. Second, making policy a political albatross for the GOP probably requires tying it to some overarching character flaw. In 2012, it was callous indifference to working people. In 2026, and for as long as Trump is president, it should be rank dishonesty.

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If and as Democrats try to tag Republicans with Johnson’s comments, I suspect Republicans will resume lying. Trump will insist Medicare and Social Security are off limits. Republicans in frontline districts will pretend they aren’t rubber stamps for Trump. We’ll be right back to he-said/she-said.

Here’s where a campaign pitting normal politics against a culture of lying can help break the deadlock. And the best thing about it is the approach works even in races where policy isn’t particularly salient.

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Thread is open for members.

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Let’s assess how Republicans are running against Democrats, to the extent that they’re trying to influence voter decisions and win more votes.

I phrase it that way, because Donald Trump is devoting most of his efforts to election-rigging and election-theft schemes. On his orders, Republicans sprinted to gerrymander as many seats as possible mid-Census. He’s racing to install an intelligence chief who’ll be willing to manipulate or lie about intelligence, to create pretexts for seizing control of elections or worse. His loyalist federal prosecutors are sniffing around for excuses to seize or nullify ballots.

But Republicans are still campaigning.

Most proximately, in California, the Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton will hit the trail with Spencer Pratt, the failed Republican candidate spreading lies about his defeat in the Los Angeles mayoral primary. Hilton says he may even appoint Pratt to a role in his administration, in the unlikely event that he becomes governor.

More conventionally (“conventionally”) Texas Republicans are running an A.I. generated ad that depicts James Talarico wearing a dress, singing a song about how much he loves transing children. To the extent that this is an appeal to voters, it works on the lizard-brain level: They want men to feel emasculated for supporting Talarico, and maybe to fool some thin margin of Texans into believing the footage is real.

The immorality is part of the appeal in their minds: Who do you want to elect: those of us on the front foot? Or our back-footed opponents? We do and take what we want; they can’t stop us; they don’t even really try.

And they’re right about that last part. Your description may depend on how favorably disposed you are to Democratic strategic thinking, but in both cases, the Democratic response has mostly been to play it cool, avoid direct confrontation, change the topic.

I want them to break this habit.

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Let’s get back to what I mean by that specifically in a minute. First: some navel gazing.

I don’t write at much length, or in too much analytical detail, about the strategic or psychological underpinnings of right-wing malice. These are not complicated people, and they don’t need much explaining. Their arguments and appeals are not made in earnest and so earnestly refuting them is usually a sucker’s game. I’m quite confident that most readers would gloss over my commentary if I wrote ethnographies of their degenerate culture. (Though, correct me if I’m wrong—always happy to oblige!)

That kind of thing—inhabiting the right-wing mind, or addressing right-wing claims and arguments on the merits—was once of some use, when there was still constructive dialogue across the ideological divide. Or when gullible or snowed-over members of the national press might benefit from interpretive analysis of right-wing misdirection. Why do movement conservatives do what they do, or say what they say? What’s really going on?

But that hasn’t been the case for at least a decade. There’s little reasoned thinking left on the professional right, no more shame, and certainly no more interest in right and wrong. The White House situation room is no longer a place where national leaders weigh life and death against the national interest, but a place where they draw up plans to conceal the president’s involvement in a child sex scandal. The degradation is so complete, it should be obvious even to people paid to give Republicans the benefit of the doubt. If any members of the mainstream press are still under the impression that the parties are roughly mirror images of one another, they are beyond the reach of earnest argument.

The only targets of persuasion who people in my position might actually be able to persuade reside within the broad left. They include voters, who might make demands of their Democratic representatives, fellow liberal commentators, who may not always agree with me, and professional Democrats, who might occasionally find wisdom in good-faith critique. I believe we are all in pretty close agreement at this point as to what the American right has become. Our shared objective now must be to optimize methods of opposition, and contain the damage the right inflicts. That’s how I see my role.

But that’s just me!

There are millions of people in America who could benefit from clear distillations of right-wing pathology. They just aren’t politics junkies who subscribe to newsletters. But even passive actors absorb political news and ideas, and if nobody with real reach and authority tells them what we all take for granted, they will be terribly misinformed.

One of the sub-asymmetries in our asymmetrically polarized politics is that Republicans exploit media aggressively, at every juncture, to smear, savage, and blame their opponents, while Democrats tend to steer away from collective character attacks. Their partisan appeals are rooted in policy and ideology, rather than in blunt assessments of the character of their organized opposition. To use less fancy language, Republicans say Democrats are shitty people; Democrats don’t return the favor.

To take just one example from this week: Pull up another browser window and Google something like “Republicans Biden screwworm.” Scan the headlines. Click through a few links.

What Republicans allege in these stories is biophysically impossible. The life-cycle of a screwworm is many times shorter than Donald Trump’s 509 days in office. But that is how Republicans roll.

To be clear, Democrats and liberals are doing the basic work of fact checking these false claims on social media and in other venues. But it typically does not occur to them to take the next step and fold the correction into a larger critique of Orwellian right-wing lying. What kind of people tell bald-faced lies as a matter of course? Bad ones.

There are several reasons for this, but here’s the one that concerns me most: Democrats decide what to talk about and how to say it on the basis of quantitative analysis. Republicans make the same determinations intuitively, through a more natural grasp of the human condition.

They place themselves in the shoes of lower-information voters, try to see the world from their perspective, and then ask: How can I make people like this develop a low opinion of Democrats? How can I instill hatred in them? When screwworm returns to the U.S. decades after liberals eradicated them, thanks entirely to Donald Trump and Elon Musk and DOGE, we tell the truth about it. But from there we expect that reality and evidence will do much of the work for us.

It surely will do most of the work for us. The story is simple. Trump cut screwworm monitoring, screwworm came back.

But Republicans view it as a cardinal objective to get as many of those affected as possible to hear a particular kind of made up story. Not just one that shifts blame, but that attributes blame to liberal villainy. That under Biden and the left, illegals crossed the border in record numbers, carrying screwworm larvae in their oozing wounds and sores. Yes, they want people who hear ‘we got screwworm because of Trump’ to respond, ‘huh, I heard it was because of Biden.’ Confusion serves their interests. But they also want those same confused people to accept the premise. Even if Democrats didn’t cause this screwworm infestation, they are grubby radicals who love open borders and don’t care about us.

I don’t think they’ll “win the argument” in the sense that most people in the affected region will believe that Democrats brought screwworm back to the U.S. But I do think the caricature will make a lasting impression—even on those who accept the factual truth about screwworm.

When elections are decided on the margin, that is a huge deal.

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There are three ramifications when Republicans propound these slanders.

One, my primary concern, is what turning the other cheek does to Democrats themselves. How it dampens intra-party morale and signals weakness to the broader electorate.

Another is civic. Is there any deterrence? If not, where does the ratchet end? Sometimes Republican lies fizzle. Sometimes they culminate in a violent insurrection.

But what I’m writing about here is the first order question. How do the lies shape sentiment in the middle. Republicans are terribly unpopular because they govern and behave in ways that are unappealing. Their indifference to truth is palpable. But the cost of lies isn’t merely to discredit liars. Republicans produce a ton of information, much of it derogatory, and it travels and lands in various places, then spreads like mold.

I don’t assume it’s a winning play, on net, for Republicans to lie about the Los Angeles mayoral election, or to use A.I. to depict James Talarico in a dress. All else equal, their political hand would probably be stronger if they behaved more normally and more ethically.

As I wrote here Republicans lose or eke out elections in large part because they’re stuck in a plurality trap that incentivizes them to behave in crazy ways to impress a large fanatical base. This inhibits their ability to appeal more broadly and grow into what might otherwise be a formidable popular majority.

But so long as they remain in this state of fevered far-right hatred, the question becomes: What’s the optimal way for Democrats to respond?

They could:

1. Lower themselves to the GOP’s level.

2. Fight fire with water.

3. Ignore the smears, and race to higher terrain.

You can usually bet on them to choose option three. And on a case-by-case basis, it’s easy to see why. Shouldn’t Talarico want to pivot away from trans rights, and ground his campaign in things like health care or screwworm or Ken Paxton’s corruption? Don’t California Democrats want to move on to their general elections?

My view, even in a case by case sense, is: Not necessarily. Brushing off character attacks conveys weakness, imposing no consequence for civic degeneracy frees Republicans to pull us all into the gutter. Joseph McCarthy did incredible damage to American civic space until someone finally shamed him in public.

But in a collective sense, non-response is a total disaster. It leaves us, in sum, with an information environment overrun with unrebutted lies, many of which will stick in the craws of voters who might otherwise open their hearts to Democrats.

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Obviously Democrats should not tell baseless lies about Republicans rigging or attempting to steal elections. They can tell the truth about it. About the insurrection and gerrymandering and all the rest. But we will not get out of this if Democrats start pretending to believe that, e.g., Ted Cruz stole the 2018 Senate election from Beto O’Rourke. That’s what Republicans do.

But there’s much in between sinking to the GOP’s level and pretending Republicans don’t exist.

They could stop preening and start making AI-generated ads depicting Ken Paxton’s actual sins and crimes. Or they could try to make Republican deception a liability in itself. I don’t mean correcting the record. I don’t mean citing fact-checkers. I mean telling stories about how today’s GOP professional class is defined by putrid, morally corrosive dishonesty.

In Talarico’s specific case, I hope he gives an approach like this some thought. I know it’s Texas. I know this is an incredibly rare and important opportunity, and he is in a dead heat. His advisers will surely tell him that getting into a partisan fight risks squandering it all. Most Texans are Republican after all. But they are Republican voters; not Republican operatives: Talarico is tied, or maybe slightly ahead, because a critical number of Republican voters can already see that something’s wrong with their party’s professional class.

Responding to the personal affront directly would address the innuendo by show and tell. It would help slow the mold-like spread of Republican lies. And, if more Democrats followed suit, the dividends would be invaluable. They’d begin the important work of rehabilitating the Democratic brand, and helping more voters in the middle see Republicans for what they are. Regular people will see them standing up for themselves, and Republican lies will no longer linger unrebutted, where they can do insidious damage.

Adrienne: Why can’t we get rid of the two party (dems and repubs) system and just vote for the best person for the job? Candidates would have to list their qualifications and what changes they recommend. If they don’t follow through, then vote them out. Or we can shorten term limits and no one could serve twice in a row!

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I imagine this question is born of frustration more than anything, but the answer resides in the realm of political science. Game theory, really.

In short, we can’t rid ourselves of the two-party duopoly without first making major structural reforms to our political system. At the presidential level it would likely entail amending the Constitution.

The U.S. hasn’t been divided between Democrats and Republicans since the founding. Parties have formed and reformed and collapsed; famously today’s Democrats are the heirs of the Civil War-era’s Republicans and vice versa. Despite all this churn, we keep evolving back toward two-party rule.

This is because each of our districts is represented by a single member of Congress, who must win a plurality of the vote to be elected. The way we elect the president is a bit different, but it reduces to something very similar: We vote for one person to be president, and the winner is whoever gets 270 electoral votes first.

So imagine we abolished the parties tomorrow, and threw open a general election for the House. In your district 20 people run, no party affiliation, just résumés and policy platforms. A local loud mouth named Johnny Lawrence with an expensive education, trust fund, and family connections wins with 20 percent of the vote. He crows about meritocracy—under the two-party system, he never would’ve stood a chance. When we threw it open to competition, the best man won.

At the same time… 80 percent of the people in your district preferred someone else. Progressives and liberals divided their votes up among nine other candidates. Religious conservatives among six. Fascists among four. Most people are pretty unhappy.

To make matters worse, Johnny turns out to be corrupt as hell, sweeping the leg out from under the independent production teams trying to compete with his stepfather. But he’s the incumbent now, and a shoo-in against another crowded field. So, on the advice of a wise Okinawan mentor figure, a local transplant named Daniel Laruso gathers all the progressive candidates together and says, “look, we all want to serve in Congress, but we’re spoiling each other’s chances by dividing the left-of-center vote. What if, instead, we scheduled a convention, conducted a straw poll, and agreed that the winner would run as the sole progressive, representing the Miyagi-do Party. If anyone else enters the race claiming to be the true progressive, we’ll all agree to call him an imposter. This is the way we’ll get Rep. Lawrence out of office, and replace him with someone who shares at least some of our values.”

The plan works! Daniel wins the straw poll. He runs against a divided field comprising Johnny (the incumbent) and sundry right-wingers, and is off to Congress. But he’s always getting himself into trouble, and somewhat culturally out of step with his constituents. So, next cycle, Johnny assembles the Christians and the fascists at a convention of their own. They run the same play, and the Cobra Kai party is born.

Welp! We’re back to two parties. Basically the same as the old ones. And, as before, everyone’s learned the hard way that third-party candidates are spoilers.

The silly hypothetical is mine, but the incentives are well understood by theorists. In academia it’s known as Duverger’s Law.

The term-limits question is a bit different. Term limits would also produce a lot of frustration, I fear. It’s true they would increase variance. But they’d also starve the legislature of expertise and productive partnerships. And they’d incentivize other kinds of corruption. If everyone knew members of Congress could only serve one or two terms, elections would attract candidates who intended to use office not to advance the interests of all constituents but, the interests of particularly wealthy or powerful constituents, in anticipation of lucrative payouts on the other side of the term limit.

Creating a real multi-party system at the congressional level would require a big change, like enacting multi-member districts with ranked-choice voting. Or a political revolution establishing parliamentary democracy. The former would make a ton of sense. But there’s a reason members of Congress are more interested in nonpartisan districting than in creating multimember districts. A better, more radical reform would cost many more of them their jobs!

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Tyler Steward: Brian, your recent column about how the courts, SCOTUS in particular, cannot be relied upon as bulwarks against election theft this time around prompted me to wonder this: say the Republicans steal the midterms, and one or both chambers are thus illegitimately held. How should Dems at all levels of government respond? Establish a shadow congress? Blue state impoundment of federal tax revenues? Commandeering of federal property where possible and expulsion of federal agents? What else? The situation would be so unprecedented it’s difficult for me to imagine what an appropriate response would be, TBH, but pretending that it’s all regular order, and hoping for better luck in 2028, seems untenable.

I don’t believe there’s any one right answer. In the column you’re referencing, there’s a footnote observing that as a matter of black-letter Constitutional law, the Senate seats its own members—so in that specific scenario, I think it’d be incumbent upon Democrats to tell the Supreme Court: Thanks for your input, we’re seating James Talarico anyhow.

More generally, I think that before we get to various coup d’etat scenarios, Democratic leaders should deliver public remarks about where Republicans seem to be headed, to say in essence, ‘we’re on to you, and we’re not going to play patsy. If you attempt to overturn the decisive Senate election in bad faith, we will seat the winner anyhow.

Beyond that, at this juncture, I take an any port in the storm view of post-coup resistance, with emphasis on the term resistance. Meekly accepting the right’s will to power, as in Bush v. Gore (or as in Virginia just a few weeks ago) would be unacceptable. A betrayal. And Democratic officials shouldn’t deceive themselves: If, as the last bulwark against dictatorship, they surrender without exhausting all their options, they’ll be contributing to the emergence of violent unrest. Some people will (quite understandably) conclude that they no longer have a vehicle for petitioning the government or building political power.

Assuming that Dems would continue to fight in earnest (a big assumption, I admit) there are ways to resist that may not have the direct effect of undoing the theft, but that would render the country ungovernable.

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More-or-less regular people will sometimes attach themselves morally to powerful bad actors.

Some people become in thrall to politicians or cultural icons and then begin lying to others or deluding themselves about the ways those actors abuse power. They stop assessing leaders on the merits, or based on how they stack up to their predecessors, and instead build new identities around their support for particular hero figures. They forget that amassing power is opportunistic; that politicians work for us; that transparency and accountability are checks on corruption and abuse. They become unable to criticize their tribe and its members over discrete points of disagreement, because they experience that kind of independent thinking as a form of betrayal.

This essentially describes MAGA.

Other people accept jobs they don’t need to advance the interests of powerful individuals with bad values or poor character, and they stick around long after they’ve been pushed beyond their once-imagined redlines. There is honor even on the political side of public service (campaigns, p.r., etc.) just as there’s honor in representing criminal defendants. There’s less honor in choosing powerful but morally deficient clients for the pay day, while pretending they’re no different from anyone else in the market for professional services. And there’s no honor in being swept into immoral or criminal enterprises.

This essentially describes cretins like Kellyanne Conway, lawyers for the tobacco industry, Andrew Cuomo’s inner circle. People like that. Perhaps one day we’ll say it describes the crew that plucked Graham Platner from obscurity and hid facts about his character, knowing he might become the linchpin for control of the U.S. Senate.

But we’re not there yet. I’m not sure we’re even particularly close.

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Reasonable minds may differ as to where we should draw these lines, or how proximate one must be to bad deeds before their service transforms into complicity. Some moral judgments are close calls. Others are more cut and dry. But the realms of power, particularly political power, are sprawling. The world would probably be a worse place if the people who stood up PEPFAR under George W. Bush had instead resigned to protest the Iraq War.

Grey area extends horizon to horizon; people get lost in it and don’t always recognize when they’ve crossed over into the black and white.

Platner, and the relatively small group of people who’ve made Platner possible, are well within the grey area. They might well be vindicated. They might well be disgraced. It may be that the stakes of Platner’s campaign turn out to be minuscule. But it’s reasonable to expect them and him to feel conflicted, like they’ve placed their credibility and the lives of strangers on the line.

Voting in an election, as a distinct act, is not like this at all. It’s not meant to be like this, at any rate. Voting, particularly in a two-party democracy, is about harm reduction. Even when candidates are inspiring and well-intentioned, voting is still about harm reduction, because politics is highly impure. Superpower politics are especially impure. Voting is utilitarian. It is not like flashing a gang sign. In a contest between a bad candidate and a worse one, voting for the bad candidate is like expressing the moral intuition that someone should amputate a gangrenous leg rather than allow the patient to die. To take a more familiar example, a ballot does not ask you whether to pull the lever that sends the trolley onto the new track; it asks you which of two people you want in the conductor’s seat when the dilemma arises.

You can’t know exactly what the future holds—maybe pulling the lever causes the trolley to derail—but for that reason you are not attached to subsequent failures morally, so long as all you did is vote on the basis of sound judgment.

People who voted for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris because they sincerely believed that, for all his sins, he’d be the better instrument for world peace may have been idiots—but they at least got the concept right. People in swing states who abstained from voting because they couldn’t bear the moral dissonance of associating themselves (via secret ballot) with candidates who failed their litmus tests are different. They may have felt righteous about their decisions—they may still feel righteous. But they contributed to immense harm. To return to the earlier simile, they expressed the view that the patient’s life or limb is immaterial because the best available doctor has committed malpractice and billing fraud, and thus shouldn’t be practicing medicine at all.

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This is a lot of throat clearing for me to say that if I lived in Maine, I’d vote for Platner in November without reservation. What we’ve learned about him so far isn’t even really in the ballpark of the kind of thing I’d have to know he did, or see him do, before I’d decide re-electing Susan Collins would cause less harm than replacing her with him.

I wasn’t moved to write this by the results of Tuesday’s Maine Senate primary. Platner won the nomination handily, though the fact that Janet Mills—the retiring, elderly governor who suspended her Senate campaign weeks ago—drew about one in five primary voters suggests some Maine Democrats wanted a place to register their disapproval.

My larger concerns are the slippage we’ve seen in head-to-head polls between Platner and Collins, and the elected Democrats like Jake Auchinchloss and Madeleine Dean who say Platner’s “disqualified” himself.

Having a different preference in a primary, or casting a protest vote in a primary, is totally reasonable. But I think these other people have lost their minds.

Platner’s relatively young. If he wins the election in November, he could serve as a senator for a very long time. If he trounces Collins, he will vault into consideration for the presidency. It is true, we should be circumspect about sending anyone along a path to so much power. But he will have to win more elections to advance his career in either of those ways. The vote in November is—at most—about the six years between 2027 and 2033. Do we think that over this time span, Platner is likely to cause more harm than Collins would?

The answer is incredibly obvious. And it pertains very little to either candidate’s personal character. It is only “yes” if you believe that the Democratic Party is the more malicious of the two parties. Many people in America do believe that! They’re dominated by supporters of Donald Trump.

But at this juncture I’m not even prepared to concede that what we know about Platner confirms that he’s a person of lower personal character than Collins. It’s obviously difficult to compare the moral worth of someone with Platner’s background to someone who’s been making life-and-death decisions—mostly bad ones—affecting everyone on Earth for decades. But even in the realm of personal conduct, why is anyone certain she’s more trustworthy than he is? Or places a higher value than he does on the wellbeing of others? What was her romantic life like when she was a young adult in the 1970s? What did she say about black people or gay people when she thought the public wasn’t listening? All lost to history, and all thoroughly beside the point. The only thing I know about her in this regard is that she called the police to report a protester who chalked a polite, pro-choice message on the sidewalk outside her home.

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She also just voted to pre-fund the Department of Homeland Security for years, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. Years ago, she voted for the wars Platner helped fight. She more recently disclaimed responsibility for the harms her votes inflicted on U.S. service members, noting that our military is all volunteer. Platner, like all the others, chose to enlist.

Voting in the Senate is not like voting in an election. Her cavalier and calculating views on husbanding and spending political capital betray a terribly low cunning. Some Republicans (because of who they are, or who they represent) cheer for war and ICE raids and for throwing people off their health care. Collins’ approach reveals she wants these things to happen, but knows they’re wrong, and thus seeks artificial distance from them.

On the trail, she will not want to talk about prefunding ICE. She’ll want to talk about her vote against the OBBBA—to say she is not responsible for costing tens of thousands of Mainers their health insurance. But she is! It is her party—which she joined just as willingly as Platner joined the military—that works day and night to uninsure as many Americans as possible. And it is her party that will attempt to block future efforts to restore that coverage. Re-electing her sets back the cause of reinsuring millions, including in Maine, because we can’t know how much of a buffer Democrats will need ahead of 2028, in order to control the Senate in 2029. Senators are powerful, and the 51st senator is exceptionally powerful.1

There are things I can imagine Platner doing, or that we might learn about him, to change my view. But they’re really out there. Frustrated as I am about the course of John Fetterman’s term, I’m still glad he, rather than Mehmet Oz, represents Pennsylvania. Because that was the choice. If somehow Fetterman wins another Democratic primary, I would make this very same argument about the importance of re-electing him2. Even if his opponent were the Susan Collins of Pennsylvania.

This isn’t just Flight 93-style self-justification, but in reverse. There is a family resemblance, I admit, like the resemblance between Mufasa and Scar. But the people who delivered us Trump have no moral lines, whereas if Platner took a Trumpian turn—if he recanted his apologies, or advocated for political mob violence, or covered up child sex abuse—I would change my view.

But unless and until, let’s keep our heads on straight. A bad senator can be voted out of office. A terrible senator can be driven from office and replaced by their governor. Whether he deserves your vote anyhow turns entirely on the person and party he’s running against. I will take a bad senator from a broadly liberal party over a “moderate” senator from a fascist party 100 percent of the time I’m confronted with the choice. If people like Auchinchloss and Dean can’t bring themselves to say the same, they’re the ones who deserve to lose their next primaries.

I want to revise and extend an argument I made in Monday’s newsletter.

In the context of the lies Republicans have told (and continue to tell) about ballot counting in Los Angeles, I suggested California Democrats should defer seemingly necessary steps to streamline vote counting.

There are good arguments for tightening the process in California, consistent with the interest of ballot access, so that vote counting can be completed within hours, rather than days or weeks:

Voters and candidates alike have an interest in determining outcomes quickly, so that the losers can move on and the winners can begin the transition to office right away, certain of the results.

And then there’s the perception issue. California’s system—which allows same day registration, and mail voting through election day—is not especially vulnerable to fraud. That is a lie. But the fact that California elections are secure is unintuitive—how can the government not have a handle on all the ballots so long after election day? Adjusting the windows for early and mail voting at the margins would be good civic hygiene. It would make the process more efficient, address public doubts, and deny enemies of democracy one of the brickbats they use to smash faith in elections.

At the same time, California Democrats simply cannot be seen caving to blackmail. Voters already view Democrats as weak and easily bullied; perhaps more importantly, if California Democrats were to sheepishly change these rules in response to lies, Republicans would, in cascading bad faith, treat the concession as an acknowledgment that the old system was rigged.

That’s why I argued the cloud of election lies would have to be lifted first.

Inspired by some recent reading, though, I now think California Democrats actually can make these reforms, in a manner that streamlines the process while simultaneously making clear that Republican election lies have no place in democratic life. But they’d have to do both things at once.

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They would need to bundle these objectives together in legislation that simultaneously modifies California’s voting procedures (so that all ballots can be tallied within hours of polls closing) and imposes real, enforceable penalties on people who lie about election results.

Indeed, every blue state should advance legislation to penalize election lying, with the goal of taking the idea federal in 2029. This would both represent a proportionate response to Donald Trump’s corrosive lying and help Democrats rehabilitate their national image, which has never been more tattered.

Here’s how I imagine it working.

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Donald Trump stormed off the set of Meet the Press Sunday because Kristen Welker had the temerity to note he has “no evidence” that Democrats steal elections.

Trump was mostly fixated on the 2020 election, because that’s the one he lost. But this time he did something that could help us beat back his election lies more thoroughly: He alleged fraud in an election that’s underway right now—while he is president, and, crucially, after he has toppled the firewall separating the White House and Justice Department.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: You play right into their hands with this stuff. You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they’re rigged. Do you know that I won an election in a landslide and I got 94% bad press.

KRISTEN WELKER: But Mr. President –

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: You know why I got that?

KRISTEN WELKER: – you’ve never presented –

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: Because you have no credibility.

KRISTEN WELKER: -evidence. But you’ve never presented evidence it was rigged. Let’s keep talking about, I want to talk about Todd Blanche.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: You have more evidence, there’s more evidence than ever presented.

KRISTEN WELKER: Let’s talk about–

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: Your elections in this country –

KRISTEN WELKER: – you went to court.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: We’re like a third world country.

KRISTEN WELKER: But sir –

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: Your elections are crooked and you’re crooked, and Meet the Press is crooked.

KRISTEN WELKER: But Mr. President–

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: And so is ABC and CBS and CNN.

KRISTEN WELKER: But Mr. President–

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: You’re a one-sided crooked network. Sorry. Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time.

This is no less repugnant than any of his earlier election lies. But it could be of more use. The lie rests incongruously alongside federal inaction. If there were evidence of fraud, this Justice Department would collect it aggressively and bandy it about for the whole world to see. It would raid counting facilities and seize ballots and air allegations at press conferences.

The fact that nothing of the sort has happened is a tell. It confirms widespread awareness, even in Trump’s orbit, that his lies are just what they appear to be. And it should mark a change in how the political establishment grapples with Trump’s addiction to promoting election conspiracy theories. Alas, in all likelihood, the opportunity will slip away and we’ll continue as we have for the past decade, treating these poisonous lies as a fact of life we must tolerate.

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Welker’s choice of the word “evidence” here is worth dwelling on—though we should note that she didn’t coin this phrasing; she’s just the one who drew the Trump interview this week. The word “evidence” is the crutch basically everyone in the mainstream news business uses when dealing with Trump, in order to flag his false claims without calling him a liar or asserting the truth with certainty.

She’s of course correct that Trump has presented no evidence of election theft, because he just made it up. It’s not just that he has no evidence—it’s that the election was not stolen.

One could in theory defend this phrasing on proving-a-negative grounds. Maybe—just maybe—someone pulled off the perfect heist and covered their tracks meticulously. Wouldn’t it be irresponsible of a reporter to claim certainty about things unseen? Even low-probability events?

As a rhetorical move, this is a copout—indeed, it should be a source of embarrassment to the news industry. On one hand, there is “no evidence” of Democratic election theft. On the other hand, there is no “proof” that the election wasn’t stolen—because proving a negative is impossible. But that shouldn’t be the end of the inquiry: There is, after all, substantial evidence that Trump knows his claims aren’t true.

January 6 investigators discovered that many of Trump’s most trusted aides told him that his claims of election theft were false. They also discovered that he would privately acknowledge his defeat to them. “Can you believe I lost to this effing guy?" he said.

“I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out,” he instructed his White House chief of staff. At one point he told his family, "It doesn't matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”

If evidence is the standard for making a controversial assertion on television, then the right response to Trump claiming any election is stolen is: A thorough investigation established that you know you lost and are being dishonest about it.

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But let’s be exceedingly generous and allow that Trump’s mental illness may have weakened his grasp on reality. Perhaps he once knew he lost the election, but over time his brain convinced him that he actually won, to protect him from ego injury. Maybe in that sense he isn’t lying the way he lies about other things, because his comments lack deceptive intention.

This is why it’s useful, in a perverse way, to see him tell the same lie about the Los Angeles mayor’s race, in which the Republican candidate, Spencer Pratt, failed to qualify for the general election ballot.

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Donald Trump’s corruption, the way he stuffs his pockets as the country rots, gives rise to a weighty political paradox.

It is, on the one hand, a gift to his opposition, particularly as Democrats reawaken to the reality that voters hate corruption. Nearly every American is worse off for it. And most of us are incensed.

But it is also a source of volatility, fuel for further attempts to overturn elections. Suddenly Trump has everything to lose by losing, and nothing to lose by attempting another coup. He’s too pig to fail, you might say.

And so while his corruption will make it easier for Democrats to sweep the midterm elections, it will also make him more determined to steal back their victories. That’s why the past month’s news read the way it did: A slush fund to buy a second insurrection. An election-denying prosecutor in North Carolina named Dan Bishop who’s up to god knows what. A promotion for the acting attorney general who’s promised Trump total loyalty. A new interim spy chief, chosen for his willingness to mine confidential government documents seeking dirt on Trump’s enemies. All while Trump increases the pace of looting, and abandons any pretense of trying to win the old-fashioned way.

The really alarming thing, though, is how Republicans at key hinge points seem willing or eager to go along with him. His allies in state legislatures helped national Republicans steal perhaps five to 10 House seats through mid-Census gerrymandering. They were given a leg up by Republicans on the Virginia Supreme Court, which summarily voided a voter-approved pro-Democrat gerrymander, and by Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court, who allowed southern Republican legislatures to redraw congressional maps in the middle of primary elections, creating new Republican seats just in time for the midterms.

Democrats have noticed. How could they not? Their countercoup strategy is to make do with what they have on their side: people, and the law as written. Run up the score enough to make overturning the election logistically difficult. Beat back bad-faith challenges to Democratic victories and other rule-breaking efforts to steal seats.

Part one of that is clearly achievable.

But part two depends on…maybe more of a prayer than an assumption. It’s true that when Trump tried to steal the 2020 election, the courts held. They rebuffed Trump’s efforts across the country. And as of today, at least, the composition of the courts isn’t much different than it was six years ago. Presumably the judiciary will do the right thing again, yes?

In other words, maybe the Republicans on the Virginia and U.S. Supreme Courts weren’t interfering in the midterms on Trump’s behalf. Maybe they were just applying the law as they understand it. Ask them and they’d say: It isn’t the judiciary’s job to tell state legislatures how to conduct their affairs; and it isn’t the Supreme Court’s job to step in and create fairness when state legislatures won’t.

It’s just a total coincidence these doctrines exist the way they do, and happen to advantage Republicans going both ways.

We can’t know what’s in anyone’s heart (though we do know what some of them say when they think no one’s listening). But I believe it’s folly to assume Republican judges will once again refuse to play ball with Trump—and, ironically, it’s for the same basic reason that Trump can’t abide defeat: They, too, have everything to lose by losing, and nothing to lose by helping Trump complete his coup. In the winter of 2020, their interests diverged, or at least seemed divergent. Today, they are completely aligned.

This analysis doesn’t just apply to Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who are all but unrepentant insurrectionists, and venally corrupt as well. They may fear personal accountability, and they certainly don’t want Democrats making policy. But they mostly just view themselves as soldiers in God’s war against the Constitution. They’re ready to have it out.

It’s the others who have every reason to abandon the prudence they mustered in 2020.

A lot has changed since then. When they declined Trump’s last legal challenge to his defeat, they likely imagined that the last great threat to the Roberts Court revolution was gone. Trump would give way to Joe Biden and fade into irrelevance; Democrats would let bygones be bygones; and the right-wing scaffolding the justices had built would remain intact for a less off-putting GOP standard bearer to exploit.

But then Trump mounted a comeback. He reclaimed control of the party, and gave the Republican justices a choice: you’re with me or you’re with the Democrats. They didn’t hesitate to pick a side. They went out of their way to protect Trump from political and criminal accountability for the January 6 insurrection. Then when Trump returned to power, they used their shadow docket to advance his interests by fiat, without explaining themselves to the public. And that was before their ruling in Callais, which transformed the Voting Rights Act from a statute that prohibited gerrymanders intended to disenfranchise black voters into a doctrine meant to encourage anti-black gerrymanders and forbid pro-minority gerrymanders.

They’ve been behaving badly, and they know it. They know they’ve radicalized many Democrats who never imagined they’d come around to the importance of expanding the Supreme court. And they know that court expansion isn’t just insurance against future fuckery. It’s a means of redressing the Court’s worst, most capricious decisions going back more than 20 years.

All that hard work, for nothing. But it’s worse than that: Six years ago, they could tell themselves that history is written by the winners and they’d won. Trump may have lost, but not by a wide enough margin to put the balance of the Court at risk. It’d take at least a decade and incredible luck for Democrats to flip a 6-3 Republican majority. Their ill-gotten gains were safe. And history would accommodate itself to the idea that Roberts court jurisprudence was legitimate—American as apple pie—rather than a consequence of random happenstance and theft.

But they can see the anti-Trump rebellion brewing, and they know it doesn’t just threaten their power. It threatens to consign them to the legal anticanon along with some of the country’s greatest historical villains.

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In other words, it’s not just win some, lose some. Whatever the justices truly believe about the Constitution or the law they’ve created, they know that the historical discrediting of past courts has tainted legacies and foreclosed certain judicial methods in perpetuity—particularly reactionary ones, designed to subjugate minorities and rig American democracy for the ruling class.

Every law student in America learns about the anticanon—the worst rulings in the Supreme Court’s history: Dred Scott, which upheld slavery. Plessy, which upheld segregation. Lochner, which invented a right of contract as a pretext to void all kinds of government regulation, from workplace safety to the minimum wage. And the more recently overturned Korematsu, which upheld Japanese internment.

We have not backslid as far as slavery or Jim Crow or internment. But between the inversion of the Voting Rights Act and Trump’s unchecked prison camps, we’re making steady progress. The Roberts era has more broadly resembled the Lochner era in its intent—Roberts did not invent one doctrine to proscribe liberal governance, he’s invented doctrines as needed to proscribe liberal governance.

And that was all before Roberts’s decision in Trump v. United States, which transformed the presidency into a zone of lawlessness for would-be dictators. Republican ones, anyhow.

This is my rendering of the history, and I suspect it will strike many readers as a bit tendentious. But if the worst of the Roberts Court rulings are overturned in the aftermath of a mass rising against the Trump regime, mine will become the common understanding. Because it is the correct one.

First, though, Democrats have to win those elections, and claim their seats. If all goes well, they can put a down payment on upending the Roberts era starting next year. All they have to do is win back the Senate and place an embargo on Trump’s judicial nominees. Six months ago, that seemed like a stretch. Today, much less so—and everyone in the Republican Party knows it.

Now ask yourself: what wouldn’t Roberts and the other justices do to stop this?

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It’s November 2026. Democrats have just swept the midterms.

From an electoral vantage point they’ve done all that could’ve been asked of them. Yes, they mostly just surfed a huge anti-Trump wave; but ultimately their task was to not screw anything up too badly—and they didn’t. The Trump administration, along with its loyalists in the states and on the bench, had been signaling interest in overturning the election if at all possible, but Democrats won seats beyond the margin of shenanigans. Stealing back a House majority would be more or less mathematically impossible.

Better still, on a wave this big, Democrats have managed to flip the Senate, too. Barely. They defended seats in Michigan and Georgia, while flipping North Carolina, Iowa, Alaska, and (by the narrowest of margins) Texas. But partisanship denies them a pickup in Ohio, while scandal denies them a pickup in Maine. A disappointment, but cosmically balanced—after all, if it weren’t for scandal politics, they wouldn’t have won back Texas. The biggest prize on the map. A cause for celebration.

Until… surprising no one, Trump alleges fraud. So does the loser, Ken Paxton, who also happens to be the state’s sitting attorney general. They race to federal court, claiming Paxton is the rightful victor. A Republican judge disqualifies enough ballots to flip the result. Democrats appeal. The appeal reaches the Supreme Court quickly. Control of the Senate, and thus the legitimacy of the entire U.S. government, hangs in the balance.

How do you expect the court to rule. And what are you—voter, congressman, senator1—prepared to do about it?

Ron Sluiter: “I don’t think Democrats should pursue partisan domination.” Why not?

We have a two party political system where one party is a weak, ineffectual, failure and the other party has become a fascist cult. Why shouldn’t Democrats cast off their history of weakness and failure - why shouldn’t they defend the rule of law and hope for democracy, instead of paying both lip service?

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TO BE CLEAR (and honestly I think I have been) Democrats should obviously try to win every election, every cycle, as far as the eye can see. I believe that as a normative matter, but it’s also a bit tautological. Republicans “should” try to win every election as well because that’s what parties exist to do.

This is why I spend a lot of time arguing that Democrats should reconsider what constitutes the best way to “win every election”—not because I’m certain I know, but because they seem certain they do, while the record suggests they do not. If they did, they would not have lost two of three elections to the worst, most dishonest, most corrupt, most deranged person ever to seek the presidency. The approach Democrats believe (incorrectly) to represent the optimal path to victory selects for timidity, empty-suitism, and personal ambition, so I infer they should experiment with strategies that select for more admirable qualities: strength, conviction, selflessness.

What I don’t advocate for them to do is to win power, then tilt the playing field of elections so that Republicans can’t be competitive. That’s what I meant by “partisan domination.” That’s what Republicans do. They’re the ones trying to create a one-party autocracy. Liberals shouldn’t do this—again, both normatively and tautologically—tautologically, because this would be illiberal; normatively because they would descend into their own form of repressive rule, and civil unrest would persist or accelerate.

The good news is that they don’t need to seek “partisan domination” in order to embody strength. One way Democrats could embody strength (and thus make themselves more competitive) is to stand up for themselves, and for the concept of fair play. First, insist on unrigging the game. Then, upon winning elections, change the rules and govern wisely. But the procedural and democratic reforms I promote wouldn’t leave Republicans at a structural disadvantage. They wouldn’t suddenly have to get 52 or 55 percent of the vote to win on their preferred platform. They wouldn’t have to water down their platform for the purposes of overcoming undemocratic handicaps. They’d just have to win more arguments on the merits, and become capable of steady governance. One person, one vote. All Americans with equal representation. Winning parties can and indeed must govern. Etc. Etc.

Winning on an even playing field might (almost certainly would) require Republicans to become less extreme and less dishonest and less corrupt. But no party is entitled to a strident or self-serving agenda. No party gets to say “it’s not fair that our agenda is unpopular, so we need a leg up.” We’re in this mess in large part because Republicans faced a choice between tribal conquest and democracy and they chose the former. We have to insist that’s not a choice a party in a free and open society is allowed to make. Not Republicans. Not Democrats either.

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Jo B: Everyone is talking about how unbelievably corrupt the ‘weaponization fund’ is, and it is, but very few are including the unbelievably corrupt IRS agreement to never ever audit anyone in the Trump family or their businesses up through now when talking about this whole shakedown.

My guess is Trump couldn’t actually care less about that fund and would do his usual bitch and whine if it got nuked, but would quickly move on so long as the inability to audit remains.

So my question is why isn’t that part of the so called settlement a much bigger story and can it be undone if Dems takeover as easily as it was done?

In the days since you posted this, Todd Blanche made clear that shelving the fund changes nothing about the tax immunity provision, which places the whole Trump family above the law1.

That has turned it into a bigger story. Arguably not big enough. But Democrats have noticed and I’m confident that when the Senate returns and Republicans resume work on their ICE reconciliation bill (assuming that’s what they’ll do) Democrats will force them to vote on an amendment rescinding this arrangement.

I don’t know what Republicans will do. That immunity provision is perhaps less toxic than the slush fund, but it’s at least as toxic as the ballroom funding, and Republicans are scared to vote for that. So we might not have to wait until next year. Or: Trump will have to choose between stealing ~$100 million and Stephen Miller’s dreamt of police state.

Practically speaking, though, I’m not sure how much work the settlement does. This becomes clear when you focus less on its text, and more on its likely effect: What potential wrongdoing will this settlement allow the Trump crime family to get away with that they would not otherwise have gotten away with? Let’s walk through various scenarios together.

The settlement is retroactive. As written, it allows the Trumps to keep perhaps $100 million in unpaid taxes plus penalties. More importantly, it allows them to conceal evidence of recent criminal activity.

The Trump family’s goals are to keep the evidence concealed—get away with the crimes—and, ideally, keep the $100 million. The question is, does the settlement advance these goals?

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Donald Trump’s presidency is failing along every visible dimension.

We can’t see everything going on behind the scenes, and behind the scenes he is orchestrating plans to cheat in and steal the midterm elections. Perhaps those plans are going well—he certainly has allies on the bench who will help him in a pinch. But the things he’s attempting in public are not working as he imagined, and it’s made him catastrophically unpopular. It’s eroded his control over the Republican Senate (and to a lesser extent the House of Representatives) as erstwhile allies turn on him. It’s made even some of his most vile apologists in right-wing media question their allegiances.

In just the past week or so:

• Trump claimed for the—sixth? eighth? tenth?—time that a deal to end his failed war in Iran and reopen the Strait of Hormuz was afoot, only for the Iranian government to reject his proposal, cut off communication with U.S. negotiators, and resume bombarding allied Gulf states.

• He had to shelve (and most likely abandon) his $1.8 billion insurrection slush fund; in part because Republicans in Congress have signaled they won’t be able to withstand pressure to kill the fund legislatively, and in part because a federal judge cited the “settlement” as evidence that Trump and his administration perpetrated a fraud on her court.

• Trump’s plan to hijack America’s 250th birthday collapsed, when musical artists dropped out, suggesting the Trump operation misled them into thinking they’d be participating in a nonpartisan federal commemoration of the founding, rather than a MAGA hate festival.

He also lost his attempt to commandeer the Kennedy Center and saw his persecution of the Broadview Six ICE protesters collapse due to prosecutorial misconduct.

On the one hand: HAHAHA schadenfreude popcorn ya hate to see it.

On the other hand: There’s still five months until the midterms, and 29 months until the presidential election, and when Trump is or feels rejected by anything he tries harder and harder to force himself on that thing. Failing that he tries to destroy it.

This is the context in which you should understand his decision to appoint a man named Bill Pulte to be the nation’s acting spy chief. Pulte is pure filth—a rich real-estate fortune heir who ingratiated himself with Trump well enough to become head of the Federal Housing Finance Administration. Running FHFA is meant to be a boring, somewhat technical administrative job. But Pulte saw it as an opportunity: to rummage through private mortgage application documents associated with Trump’s enemies, so he could cite errors and ambiguities as pretexts for investigations, indictments, or firings. He’s the man behind the failed attempts to prosecute Adam Schiff, and New York Attorney General Tish James, and the on-hold attempt to fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve board.

Pulte has no experience in national security or intelligence gathering. His only qualification to be the nation’s spy chief is that he’s pure filth—someone who feels no compunction about abusing state power for whatever serves Trump’s purposes. Trump already enlisted Pulte’s predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, in election subversion shenanigans in Fulton County, GA. This move is a sign that Trump recognizes his presidency is in shambles, and is thus redoubling his effort to steal the midterms.

But the GOP freak out over the slush fund, and the artist freak out over the Independence Day bait-and-switch, are important indicators. They suggest Trump’s own allies aren’t confident he can pull off big heists anymore. They’re trying to disassociate themselves from his most corrupt schemes. This is why Democrats should seek Pulte’s impeachment and removal.

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It may not be necessary. Trump is so toxic that pushback from congressional Republicans might compel him to rescind the appointment.

But Democrats shouldn’t count on it.

They also shouldn’t wait around for Republicans to do the right thing, and they certainly shouldn’t do nothing, assuming it’ll all work out at the ballot box.

Democrats on Capitol Hill, and in aligned DC law firms, are doing a lot of admirable work preparing for Republican election shenanigans. But nearly all of this preparatory work assumes these matters will be settled after the fact in court, or through certification proceedings that are meant to be ministerial.

They are doing very little (at least that I’m aware of) to stop the shenanigans before they’re attempted. I’m thinking in particular here of the decision by Virginia Democrats to fold in the face of evidence that, if called upon, the Virginia Supreme Court’s Republican members will help Trump operationalize a coup d’etat.

I don’t think Democrats should wait until matters are justiciable before running them through court systems that Republicans control. In Virginia, that would mean removing the judges who overturned a voter referendum1 meant to restore midterm fairness.

In Pulte’s case it means not waiting to see what laws he breaks in service of helping Trump rig elections, then filing suit to stop him. It means calling the question now. Pulte should not be the country’s intelligence chief in any capacity, for any amount of time. He is only eligible to serve in that role because he currently serves as a Senate-confirmed official in the Trump administration—an office he has already abused in impeachable ways. Fortunately, there’s a remedy for that.

House Democrats should thus introduce a resolution to impeach Pulte, and force Republicans to vote on it. Under House rules, Republicans could not stop them.

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I suspect they will not.

After the administration announced the insurrection trust fund, Democrats ignored public advice to force a vote on impeaching acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

That problem at least seems to have taken care of itself, and maybe this one will, too. But it’s not as though Democrats have a crystal ball. They didn’t know the slush fund scheme would unravel. And they don’t know that the Pulte appointment will be rescinded. Blanche has put the slush fund on ice, but he’s still on the job, at Trump’s disposal for the next crime. Wouldn’t it be better to address root problems, rather than play Whac-a-mole?

Some have suggested an alternative path:

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When soft-bodied Republicans like Stephen Miller smirk and say James Talarico is “transgender” and “transitioning into a female” they have two main objectives.

One is directed left, to anger Talarico’s supporters and eventually shake their faith. Some of them will want Talarico to come to the defense of transgender Texans. Others will want to see if he can stand up for himself. Miller et al have made a bet that he will do neither—certainly not both—and it’ll demoralize the opposition. This is important, and we’ll address it at length below.

But the other objective is directed rightward, and it marks a disturbing but important escalation in the GOP’s vile anti-trans politics.

I mean “disturbing” in MAGA-adjusted terms, because MAGA politics are broadly degenerate. There’s an obvious family resemblance here to earlier Republican anti-trans politics, which is why nobody seems particularly shocked. The GOP always goes low, we just can never be sure when if ever they’ll hit bottom.

Prior to now, though, their modus operandi has been to use bills and laws and rules as tools of abuse against trans people, in service of the same, tired culture-war pitch: trans people are weird and gross and Democrats care about them more than regular Americans. The idea, as with most of their culture war feints, is to fan the prejudices of their voters and then either divide Democrats, or unite them and portray them all as extremists and perverts.

The result has been a mass right-wing panic that endangers trans people, but not only trans people. Pass anti-trans bathroom laws or laws banning trans sports participation, and you encourage a form of vigilantism. The most proximate targets are out trans people. But the law doesn’t leave everyone else untouched. Is the tall, strong softball team star trans? Oh my god what do we do?!?! How can we be sure?! Can we force her home state to release birth records? Conduct an invasive genital inspection?

And here we reach the touchpoint with Republican lies about Talarico.

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Between the DNC’s autopsy fiasco and Project 2029 recriminations, there’s been a ton of navel gazing lately (more even than usual) about how Democrats should poise themselves for a comeback. How they should resist the Trump regime today, or next year in the congressional majority, and how they should govern if they return to power two and a half years from now.

So I hope you’ll forgive me. I want to add one more suggestion from the cheap seats: As they plan and strategize for midterm elections in 2026, and for legislating and oversight in 2027 and 2028, and for winning the presidency—with all the white papers and talking points and investigative work that stuff will entail—Democrats should also dedicate real effort to understanding (and helping political professionals understand) the vibecession.

Not for the purposes of generating op-eds or congressional hearings or yet more white papers. But for their own survival, and the greater good of preserving liberal government for future generations.

Maybe by the time their work is done, it won’t be needed. Maybe the vibecession will end as mysteriously as it began, or some eminent political scientist or economist will produce definitive work on what leadened economic sentiment. Maybe by the time Democrats are governing again, the public will respond well to improving economic conditions, and poorly to deteriorating conditions, in the way theory and observation predicted they would right up until 2021.

But it’d be reckless to bet on the problem solving itself, and even more reckless to try to build the country back from fascism on a wing and a prayer that voters won’t immediately sour on Democrats all over again.

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If you mention the vibecession on social media you should gird yourself for angry and defensive backlash.

Leftists hate the idea of the vibecession because radical change is unlikely unless masses are genuinely deprived and desperate.

Moderates are somewhat hostile to the concept as well, because their theory of politics depends on a predictable relationship between median macroeconomic conditions and voter behavior. It’s technocracy all the way down.

Democratic strategists loathe vibecession discourse, because positing that the public is factually wrong about what ails the country makes the job of pandering to voters (sorry, MeEtInG VoTeRs WhEre ThEy ArE) much harder, no matter which party is in charge.

Republicans are coming around to the idea of a vibecession, because the vibecession came for Donald Trump. Badly as Trump has governed, and notwithstanding all the economic damage he’s personally inflicted, it’s hard to explain why survey takers seem to believe we’re living through the worst economic conditions in modern history. But until about a year ago, Republicans mocked the idea that America was experiencing a vibecession, because shit-talking the Biden economy per se was useful to them.

Reactive as this topic seems to be, though, it’s critical that we get to the bottom of it in a dispassionate way. Whether your views hew toward the left or center, a mysterious inability to please voters by improving their economic conditions is a live torpedo aimed at everything standing between decency and fascism. The organizing suppositions of the Democratic Party establishment, the ambition of ascendant progressives, and, indeed, the very foundation of liberal governance.

Whether or not Democratic candidates and strategists are currently prepared to accept that public-opinion formation has changed in some fundamental way—and whether or not it’s wise for Democrats to muse publicly that there’s something off about economic sentiment—they should be engaged in research designed to understand what severed the tether between macroeconomic conditions and public sentiment, and how to refasten it.

They can do this quietly if they’d like, while publicly politicking against the Trump economy and profiting politically from lingering bad vibes. But if they can’t recreate the old conditions, under which good policy yielded political victories, and thus created an incentive to govern well, elections will turn on feuds and libels and culture war nonsense forever and ever. Democrats will get swept back out of power before they have time to build a new, more responsive government, and liberal society will disintegrate.

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It is, of course, also important for economic analysts to examine and draw lessons from Joe Biden’s economic record, just as Biden’s team drew lessons from the shortcomings of Barack Obama’s economic record.

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When Donald Trump took office, dusted off Project 2025—the governing playbook he’d disclaimed throughout the election—and handed implementation to Elon Musk, et al., it became clear to me Democrats would need an analog. Before the next election, someone or some entity would have to assemble a plan, with buy-in across the left, that would serve two main purposes: rebuild from the Trump wreckage, and establish an equal right to implement a lightning-strike agenda.

This was by no means some stroke of brilliance. Many people with an interest in liberal politics had some version of the same idea. The ones most closely networked with funders and politicians went on to establish actual organizations or working groups, which they pitched to donors more or less on these grounds.

These liberals, all veteran Democratic operatives, have begun offering glimpses of their work, and I’m of two minds. First, generously: As the saying goes, there’s no bad ideas in a brainstorm. Ideas are good. Ideas that start out bad can become good. Ideas that seem unresponsive to the needs of today can become urgent—or they might just be worthy apart from any particular salience, easily slotted into some future appropriation bill without fanfare.

Second, more importantly: We are not—at this rate—getting a Project 2029 that serves anything like the purposes Project 2025 was meant to serve. We’re getting competing factional agendas, from a familiar universe of people, all of whom want jobs in or influence over the next administration. And so they’re devising policy ideas meant for popular consumption, rather than governing stratagems for fixing the American state.

This is an error of conception. It doesn’t discredit any particular idea let alone the whole suite. It just means that if liberals or progressives thought party operatives were hard at work on a blueprint for the first several months of the next Democratic administration—a series of steps that any Dem president could execute to put the country back on an even keel—they’re going to be terribly disappointed. Unless something changes.

The post-Trump era will not be a blank canvas for policy makers. To be clear, it will demand a great deal of legislating, bureaucratic deftness, technical knowhow, and creativity. Assembling a new government will need to be undertaken with an eye toward avoiding obvious pitfalls, which will of course place policy expertise at a premium.

But the governing machinery all these operatives expect to be awaiting them will be broken. The challenge will be to get a new apparatus up and running quickly, which will in turn require blowing through obstacles—the procedural ones that have been there all along, and the landmines that will be strewn about by saboteurs.

A hodgepodge of detailed policy objectives is not responsive to that challenge. Not even if the policies tick all the right interest-group and message-testing boxes.

Here, via The Bulwark, is a snapshot of what the group that calls itself Project 2029 has cooking:

Utility Monopolies: America’s electric grid still runs on a century-old monopoly model that leaves 150 million households with no choice in who provides their power and tens of billions of dollars in potential savings locked behind outdated laws. Our proposal outlines how the next President should break these monopolies open, letting competition drive down bills, speed up delivery, and unleash a new wave of cleaner, cheaper energy for families and businesses.

Child Care: Families today are caught in the “Child Care Catch-22.” With child care costs taking up nearly 10 to 20 percent of the average family’s already stretched take-home pay, families can’t afford to pay for child care while they work. And because parents with young kids are managing other costs like saving for a home or paying student debt, many can’t afford to stay home and not work. Our proposal outlines how the next President can ensure that every family has the time, financial support, and high-quality care options they want, giving parents back the power of choice on how to support their young children.

Kids Over Clicks: Parents today are raising kids in a digital environment engineered to hook them and the consequences, from a worsening youth mental health crisis to a new wave of harm from AI chatbots, are no longer in dispute. Just as America sets minimum ages for drinking and gambling, it’s time to set real guardrails around the products targeting kids online. Our proposal would protect children from the most harmful features of social media and AI, give parents stronger tools, and dismantle the surveillance advertising model that drives much of the harm.

The Annoyance Economy: Americans are losing enormous amounts of time, money, and patience to the small, daily hassles corporations deliberately design into modern life: spam calls, useless chatbots, surprise fees, impossible cancellations, endless paperwork. The hassle isn’t a bug; it’s the business model, and it costs households well over a hundred billion dollars a year. Our proposal would take on the “Annoyance Economy” directly, restoring basic fairness and common sense to the everyday transactions that shape how Americans experience the economy.

Project 2029’s peers and rivals at the Searchlight Institute and Center for American Progress have elsewhere proposed health-care reform ideas along the same lines—e.g. “blocking the formation of hospital monopolies, limiting the role of private equity in health care, and stopping insurance companies from denying coverage arbitrarily.”

All fine ideas as far as they go. But you’ll forgive me for doubting that on January 20, 2029 the most pressing problem in America will be the ownership structure of hospitals. The foundations of civic democracy will be shattered. There will be huge but basic problems in America, almost all of them downstream from Trump’s depraved presidency. Earmarking his successor’s most valuable political capital for technical reforms to the health-care delivery or energy-transmission systems would amount to evasion of the crisis staring us all in the face. And everyone fighting the Trump administration today would know they’d been let down.

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Think back to Project 2025. Not the shambolic, DOGE-y, Musk-inflected implementation, but the concept. What was it? It wasn’t really like the old budgets Paul Ryan used to make Republicans vote for, or that Ryan and Mitt Romney ran on in 2012—tendentious but dry descriptions of longstanding conservative policy goals. And it wasn’t a wishlist of social-policy bills.

It was a comprehensive plan to steamroll obstacles to partisan domination, and change on-the-ground realities in ways that couldn’t be easily reversed. They knew it would be fraught and messy. Indeed, it wasn’t a campaign document at all. If it were, Trump wouldn’t have pretended to disclaim it on the hustings. It was an instruction manual for a vast network of right-wing operatives, all of whom were psyched to settle family business.

Project 2025 was born of lies and power madness, rather than necessity, but if you put yourself in the shoes of a Republican who believed the lies, organizing a blitz-like assault on blue America and the federal bureaucracy made perfect sense—much as rioting at the Capitol would have made perfect sense had Joe Biden actually mounted a coup d’etat.

Republicans marinated in their own propaganda for so long, they developed deep-seated hatred for half the country and became hell bent on punishing their perceived enemies. If perfidious liberals have brought America to the brink of destruction, aren’t we obligated to sabotage Democratic states, institutions of higher learning, government bureaucracies, and so on? Isn’t that just doing what needs to be done?

Democrats need a genuine analog to Project 2025, and they need it out of necessity, not as a pretext to grab power. We don’t live in the shoes of Republicans, we live in the world Trump is remaking, where crises unfold everyday in reality, not in a Fox News simulacrum.

I don’t think Democrats should pursue partisan domination. And I don’t think they should lie to voters about what they intend to do. But I do think they should be clear in their hearts and minds about what the conservative movement is—what it’s shown itself to be under Trump—and then respond in the manner of doing what needs to be done. No refracting urgent remedies through data analytics in search of politically palatable half-measures. Just addressing what’s staring everyone in the face, and doing so squarely.

That is to say, Democrats’ actual Project 2029 should be largely for internal consumption, not to populate door flyers. A mission statement that channels the party’s anger into a program of rapid de-Trumpification.

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Regular readers know what I think that means in practice. All the procedural reforms I return to week in and week out.

But there’s a synthesis between what I’ve been calling for and what these groups are proposing—between what you might call Project 2029 For Fighters and Project 2029 For Wonks. It’s to package policy proposals as remedies to Trump’s abuses. To galvanize Democrats and rehash Republican sins in ways that make rapid action seem obligatory. (Because it is.)

Here, through the looking glass of Project 2025, is how the synthesis operates when the underlying grievances are purely tribal:

[T]he Department of Education… is a creation of the Jimmy Carter Administration. The department is a convenient one-stop shop for the woke education cartel, which—as the COVID era showed—is not particularly concerned with children’s education. Schools should be responsive to parents, rather than to leftist advocates intent on indoctrination—and the more the federal government is involved in education, the less responsive to parents the public schools will be. This department is an example of federal intrusion into a traditionally state and local realm. For the sake of American children, Congress should shutter it and return control of education to the states.

Short of this, the Secretary of Education should insist that the department serve parents and American ideals, not advocates whose message is that children can choose their own sex, that America is “systemically racist,” that math itself is racist, and that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ideal of a colorblind society should be rejected in favor of reinstating a color-conscious society. The next head of this department will have a lot to do—hopefully culminating in the department’s closure and the salutary restoration of educational control to states, localities, and parents

Well-worn GOP policy ideas cloaked in lib owning.

Democrats can adopt a version of this, while omitting all the fantasy nonsense. They’ll have tons of good health-care ideas on the shelf, from transformative policies like Medicare for all to Searchlight’s more incremental antimonopoly plan, and much in between. All of these options should be available. Democrats should be prepared to swing big or small depending on circumstances. Democratic candidates should have room to maneuver, and a menu of options, rather than a rigid commitment to one vision, so that the next president can scale up ambition in the event of a historic landslide, or scale down in the event of a narrow, Trump-sized victory.

But the ideas on that menu belong in the index, or in bullet points. Up front, the party needs a story to tell about why aggressive action is necessary:

MAGA Republicans believe people who can not afford health care out of pocket should not get any. They lied to voters about this, then threw millions of them off their plans. We will ensure that this lost coverage is restored, that everyone in the country can afford to see a doctor, and will enact reforms that make it harder for MAGA Republicans to swindle people out of their health care ever again. Those might include…

Something along those lines.

Likewise, Democrats can either get mired in the weeds of fiscal policy, and fight with each other over what to do about deficits, inflation, and interest rates. Or they can tell a true story about why these challenges materialized so abruptly after Joe Biden pulled deficits down, and set themselves up to act on maximally favorable terms.

Between their tax cuts, their support for Donald Trump’s tariffs, wars, and corruption, and myriad governing disasters that Democrats will now have to clean up, MAGA Republicans have left the country in a dire fiscal condition. We will restore sustainability to our federal finances, but we will do so in a way that insures the people responsible for these failures bear the overwhelming brunt of the sacrifice.

Framed this way—in a way that is true—the need to mow over obstacles is all but explicit. The policy ideas lay a predicate for procedural hardball. Framed as a la carte solutions to random problems, though, the Project 2029 preview is uncanny. Its name is borrowed from the shock-and-awe campaign we just lived through, but its content is blasé. As if the plan is to win the election and then not do what clearly needs to be done.

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Matt Colbert: Dem Senators continue to vote for Trump’s judicial nominees. Why?

Are they lazy? Do they think they’re buying some kind of goodwill for the next time there is a Democratic president? Do they just... support his nominees? I would love to hear a reason, even a bad one.

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The reasons, plural, are the same you’ll hear whenever members of the Senate minority vote for the other party’s presidential nominees. Some mix of:

• Like it or not, this nominee is qualified.

• This nominee is a constituent of mine, and has support from his or her community (plus maybe some of my donors).

• I have received concrete promises from this nominee relating to my agenda or important home-state concerns.

• [on truth serum] This nominee was going to be confirmed anyhow and providing him or her a meaningless surplus vote is an incredibly cheap way to bolster my bipartisan bona fides, which I’m assured are very important to voters.

In the abstract these aren’t terribly objectionable rationales. They’re not inspiring by any means. But being a legislator, particularly a member of a legislative minority, is all about choosing from among uninspiring options.

And you can see why going along to get along in certain instances seems worth it: Politics is still transactional, even if Donald Trump’s untrustworthiness means all transactions must have enforcement mechanisms. Establishing credibility with a subset of swing voters and voters in the other party clearly has some value. Susan Collins dominated Maine politics by being the kind of moderate who’s always there for Democrats when they don’t need her. She takes every free, low-stakes vote with the Democrats that she can.

But we do not live in the abstract. We live in Trump’s America. And in Trump’s America, every single executive and judicial branch nominee has passed a loyalty test in which they agree to lie or spread doubt about the 2020 election.

And so every vote for a Trump nominee is a vote for the idea that the 2020 Big Lie is not disqualifying. Something we can live and work with. As my recent commentary about the Jared Polis/Tina Peters fiasco makes clear, I think that’s crazy; that tolerating soft election denial is a big error with a decades-long tail. It’s why I published this piece more than a month before Trump’s second inauguration.

Absent the loyalty test, I would not really care about this much at all. There’s an argument in progressive circles that Dems should resist massively wherever they can because Trump is a fascist and there’s symbolic value in denying him votes no matter what—even if we’re talking about bills that will become law anyhow, or nominees who will be confirmed with Republican votes alone.

That’s not really how I think about effective resistance. Effective resistance, in my mind, is compatible with some level of pragmatism.

We saw this in Republican resistance to Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and we see it in the fact that Republicans still occasionally defy Trump. It’s just not the case that Republicans always go full tilt, anymore than Dems always curl into the fetal position at the first sign of hostilities. Republicans voted for a pretty large number of Joe Biden’s bills, and even at the height of Obama-era GOP obstruction, his nominees would usually get some GOP support. We see this week in South Carolina, as we saw in Indiana last year, that Republicans still occasionally show faint glimmers of integrity or independence. They love owning the libs, but they have other priorities, too—some of which require cooperating with the opposition.

But Obama’s nominees were not civic degenerates to a person. Obama’s nominees did not all make deals with the devil. Obama and Biden could each be trusted to honor bipartisan agreements.

Life in Trump’s America is nothing like that, and so it does not make sense for Democrats to adhere to outmoded standards of faithful opposition. No votes for the annual budget if the administration’s policy is to break budget laws. No votes for the president’s nominees if they so much as wink at election deniers.

Now obviously a non-decisive Democratic vote for some random judge or sub-cabinet official is less consequential than clemency for Tina Peters. But whether we’re talking about nominees or monuments to Trump or leniency for insurrectionists, I think it’s very important for Democrats to treat the truth about the 2020 election as non-negotiable, just as much as Trump insists on lying about it. They should have zero tolerance for the Big Lie, unless they want to consign all of us to accommodating modern day Redeemers for the next century or so. Unless they want generations of American children to read from history textbooks that treat the truth about 2020 as contested and unknowable.

Democratic senators should not offer their votes to election deniers in exchange for political chits, anymore than Democratic governors should bend to Trump’s extortion in exchange for his magnanimous leniency. If they feel the need to establish a record of bipartisanship, they should look elsewhere.

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Ben Y: I’m really struggling with your increasing advocacy for procedural radicalism. Part of it is that I think my views have evolved away from taking hard line positions on court packing , and democracy reforms equivalent to the H.R. 1 of the early 2020s. But I really just want to understand your theory of the case. In trying to play this out in my head, Democrats win a trifecta. They abolish the fiilbuster and pack the courts, and pass a ton of progressive legislation, and make it much easier to vote etc. If the history of the past several administrations has taught us anything, it’s that the backlash to perceived overreach is always strong. The only counterexample seems to be Roosevelt in 1934, when he delivered for people in such tangible ways that the normal midterm backlash didn’t happen. But that was nearly a century ago! Even in-parties that have had decent/good midterms (Dems in 1998, GOP in 2002, Dems in 2022) saw it collapse within a few years. Odds are that the perceived radicalism will do far more to motivate the right-wing base. It will be a tea party on steroids. They will vow to strike back harder, and if material conditions don’t radically improve (which probably can’t happen in four years), then they will get their own trifecta. They will pack the courts themselves with ideologues that make Sam Alito look like a squishy moderate statesman. They enact their version of the SAVE America Act, to vastly restrict voting, and no court will stop them. Then it REALLY might be impossible for Democrats to win another election. At best, we will have this increasing tit for tat where we lurch from one extreme to another. And in that case, I can’t see Democrats winning in the long run because a) they have the more favorable political geography given that we can’t abolish the Senate and b) they have the guns.

Totally fair question. Here’s my extremely long answer. (Get comfortable, it’s really long…)

At some level we can’t get around the fact that different people have different temperaments, different risk tolerances, and different tolerances for unfairness. For my part, I admit to being more stubborn than most. But I don’t think it’s poisoned my judgement here.

Is it possible that life under the status quo, in all the ways it disadvantages our half of the country, is more sustainable than my preferred future, where Democrats insist on fair play, and start changing the rules unilaterally?

Yes it is.

But that’s just another way of saying that if Republicans want fascism more than the rest of the country wants democracy, sooner or later they’ll accumulate enough power to impose fascism in fullness. We’d then exist in a new, worse paradigm, where freedom lovers live lives of oppression until something happens to collapse the regime, at which point we’d have to rebuild from the studs.

I can’t promise a future like that isn’t possible, or that my vision of democratic reform wouldn’t accelerate us toward it. But I don’t assume we’re doomed to fail! By the same token, procedural moderates can’t promise that we’ll avoid dictatorial fascism simply by looking forward, tolerating intolerable double standards, governing through one-sided road blocks, and hoping Republicans eventually discover enlightenment. Barack Obama and Joe Biden made peace with the status quo and Republicans lurched toward fascism anyhow.

What I can say is that taking a bygones approach would amount to terrible appeasement, and (it seems) would not be acceptable to many (if not most) Democratic voters. They are tired of leaving problems unaddressed simply because trying to fix them might not work out in the long run.

It’s almost always better, in my experience, to study problems, envision new arrangements that would alleviate or eliminate them, then make those changes. To do what’s right, in other words. Yes, this will often generate turbulence. But you’ve mastered the problems! You’ve put a lot of thought into the remedies! You can justify your actions even to your angriest critics.

So here’s my theory of the case: What I want, what problems my program would remedy, and how I imagine reform leaving us better off than we are.

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Democrats remain favored to win back control of the House in November, but after state-level GOP officials stole several seats on Donald Trump’s orders, it’s shaping up to be a more closely run election.

Party officials are thus wrestling with the questions of how to win power and what to do with it. This has led them inexorably to familiar arguments: over the proper balance between investigation and legislation, and then over the value of the impeachment power. The party’s grassroots wants oversight and accountability, but the party’s leaders and strategists, as always, believe promising conflict with Trump will backfire.

That’s why Hakeem Jeffries visited Fox News recently to reassure its viewers: Democrats view impeachment as a distraction. “I’ve made clear from the very beginning that our top priority is going to be to drive down the high cost of living,” Jeffries said.

At very least, Jeffries wants the public to believe there will be no impeachment, and little in the way of oversight, because Democrats will be so busy lowering costs. They believe an appeal along these lines will help them win the largest possible number of seats.

And yet the balance contemplated in the Constitution is something like the inverse of this. Politicians and parties have a lot of leeway, but the framers did obligate them to a few tasks, and protecting the country from a tyrant is one of them. Democrats should commit, in their hearts if not in their words, to aggressive oversight that will likely shake loose proof of impeachable offenses. They should do this because the public has a right to know, and because it is literally the most explicit part of their job—the one task they swear an oath to complete.

We may not like this. We may feel their duties should stem from their campaign promises rather than their oaths of office. But the congressional oath does not actually obligate members of Congress to pass bills to lower prices; it obligates them to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic [and] bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” That’s it. The Constitution says a president shall be impeached and removed for high crimes and misdemeanors, and members bearing true faith and allegiance to the Constitution must thus endeavor to impeach and remove Trump.

If all this strikes you as exceedingly literalistic, I hear you. I understand that members of Congress must win elections before they can govern, which means they also must contemplate the electoral consequences of various public appeals. If campaigning aggressively on impeaching and removing a faithless president makes it less likely that he will be impeached and removed, it is a breach of duty at some level to appeal to voters in that manner. Likewise, we can’t wish away complicit Republicans. If they intend to render the removal power a dead letter (against Republican presidents, at an rate) then Democrats have to proceed under the assumption that Trump will not be removed at any point. This reduces the value of a Senate trial, and maybe even the formal House vote to impeach.

And so I have some sympathy for the idea that, under present circumstances, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

What I do not have sympathy for is the idea that Democrats should be fearful of asserting that Trump ought to be removed from office. That the Constitution indeed compels his removal, but his Republican allies and enablers in Congress are protecting him from this rightful fate.

And so whatever Democrats choose to do with their power next year—whether they choose to impeach Trump, or merely gesture toward the idea that he should be removed, or abdicate their obligations altogether—they should do so in full view of the following two facts:

1. Impeachment makes oversight easier—on paper and likely in reality. Congress is at its highest ebb of compulsory power when it is contemplating the impeachment and removal of officers of the United States.

2. There is no evidence that Trump benefited in any way from either of his first two impeachments. And because Trump is even less popular now than he was during those impeachments, there’s no reason to fear that he’ll benefit from a third, fourth, fifth, or sixth.

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Let’s start with that second fact, because it’s what’s driving Democratic misgivings about impeachment. The idea that impeachment produces a rally-around-Trump effect.

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He’s one of a small number of Colorado Democrats who’s staked out the view that the state’s term-limited governor, Jared Polis, should face an impeachment inquiry for granting clemency to the insurrectionist Tina Peters.

This is what I believe as well, so I reached out to him for a conversation about the merits of that question.

We broadened that discussion out to explore the powers of the Colorado attorney generals office, and how they can be pulled creatively to make regular people freer from both federal government repression and heedless private interests.

And we ended on the more abstract topic of competing liberal worldviews: neoliberal vs. post-neoliberal. How incompatible are they? Is the Democratic Party doomed to division, or are Democrats’ divisions exacerbated by a system of government that makes change extremely difficult and rare?

It was a lively discussion, and I hope you’ll give it a listen or a watch. I’m confident you’ll enjoy it.

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Bringing the broad left around to the importance of abolishing the filibuster has been a decades-long project.

Happily, we’ve reached the cusp of success. The bad news is we’re already too late—unless we expand our horizons.

The time to act, the last moment when filibuster abolition might have constituted a sufficient procedural reform, was 2021. In 2021, two Democrats out of 50 stood in the way of filibuster reforms that would’ve allowed the Senate to pass important democracy protections. These Democrats, both of whom retired in short order, may have served as heat shields for a handful of weaker-willed skeptics. But it was clear that reformers had won the argument within the party. Abolition was only a matter of time.

Today, it seems quite likely that the time will come in January 2029. Donald Trump is incompetent and destructive; fixing the country will require immense effort. Democrats will be in no mood to allow Republicans to sabotage the recovery.

But now filibuster reform won’t be enough to stop them. It might actually, on its own, increase Republican power, without any predictable, concomitant benefit for Democrats. That’s not to say filibuster abolition has become a bad idea. But it is no longer commensurate with establishing something resembling a fair two-party democracy.

If Democrats aren’t willing to go further than filibuster reform, it’s no longer clear that they should bother with any reform at all.

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This essay is thus an appeal to filibuster abolitionists—whether they work in politics, or on the sidelines with me—to stop treating filibuster abolition as a goal unto itself. It must specifically be paired with court expansion (along ideally with a broader suite of reforms) or else Republicans in Congress will simply cede more obstructive power to partisan judges. The Senate will function better, but it will become a conduit for bills to nowhere, at least when Democrats are in power.

The good news is most democracy reformers outside of politics are already with me on this. The bad news is most Democratic elected officials, the ones with the power to update our democratic infrastructure, are not.

Almost two decades ago, Republicans transformed the filibuster into the principal obstacle to democratic governance in America. Eliminate it and we’d unlock a door to a brighter future—or so we imagined.

Unfortunately, it took us too long to gain adequate buy-in among elected Democrats—which in and of itself is fairly insane. The filibuster remains a major impediment to Democratic priorities, and Democratic priorities alone. Most Democrats at long last support abolishing the filibuster, but it took the hobbling of the Obama agenda, the theft of the Supreme Court, and relegation to second-class status in a two-party democracy to bring them around. Absent those developments, the left would still be paralyzed by risk aversion.

When liberal gadflies first started agitating for filibuster reform a bit over 20 years ago, we faced unsurprising skepticism. The precipitating incident was a fight over Republican judicial nominees. George W. Bush had nominated a few extremists to appellate judgeships, Democrats were using Senate filibuster rules to block them, and Republicans were threatening to invoke the so-called “nuclear option” to get them confirmed.

The Senate’s standing rules are very hard to change, but its day-to-day functioning turns on precedent, which can be set by simple majority. So for instance, the standing rules hold that “three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn” can end debate on any “measure, motion” or other matter pending before the Senate. But if 50+1 senators decide that debate on subcategories of Senate business (like legislation, or nominations) can be brought to a close by simple majority, they can create that exception pretty much whenever they want.

Voila, no more filibuster. That’s the nuclear option.

Back in 2005, liberals overwhelmingly supported Democrats in their effort to block these judicial nominees, and derided the GOP’s nuclear option threat as a power grab. A small minority of us, thinking more than one step ahead, recognized the error. Sure, these would be terrible judges, but Republican judges are terrible in general, and if Democrats wanted a fair shot at governing post-Bush, they shouldn’t line up behind the idea that 40 Republicans senators should be allowed to passively block them. Plus, it’s a democracy: majorities should rule, then voters should decide whether they like the outcomes. So let the Republicans go nuclear!

That standoff eventually ended without a change to the filibuster rules. And most progressives felt they’d dodged a bullet. If Republicans eventually did away with the filibuster, they fretted, Democrats wouldn’t be able to block Republican bills to crush union organizing. Or restrict abortion nationally. Or suppress Democratic voters. Or deregulate industry. Or…

This became consensus wisdom that locked most Senate Democrats into support for the filibuster for the next 15 years. Opposition to filibuster reform boiled down in essence to “careful what you wish for”—but that, ironically, was when the monkey’s paw curled. Mitch McConnell realized he could use the filibuster as a tool of total obstruction when Republicans were in the minority. Then, in the majority, he and his members could use the budget process, where filibuster rules don’t apply, to pass their tax cuts. And they could rely on partisan judges to do the rest of their governing for them from the bench. Democrats saw all kinds of priorities scuttled by a legislative supermajority “requirement.” Meanwhile, Republicans imposed the parts of their agenda they value most. They cut rich people’s taxes while the courts helped them crush unions, restrict abortion nationally, suppress Democratic votes, and deregulate industry. Ah well!

This horrible status quo—a double-standard no party could tolerate—should have united the party in defense of its own interests. It has, instead, accentuated Democratic infighting in perverse but inevitable ways.

The broad left today is divided into camps with competing ideas about how to transform policy into political power and vice versa. This is common enough—every party in a democracy like ours will comprise rival factions. But on close inspection, they’re not really arguing on any merits, not for the most part. They’re mostly arguing that their ideas are strategically required to overcome obstacles to liberal governance.

Our post-neoliberals say we need to break up private-sector behemoths and flatten political power, so regular people can better shape their own destinies. In other words, a rigged democracy can’t be responsive to voters.

Our abundists, in their purest form, argue we should unshackle government from self-imposed obstacles to growth and infrastructure. In other words, a rigged democracy can’t be responsive to voters.

Our deliverists believe Democrats are hobbled by the mismatch between lofty promises and shitty governing results. In other words, a rigged democracy can’t be responsive to voters.

They’re all frustrated, because all their goals are bottled up by minority obstruction.

Again, every party in a democracy like ours will comprise rival factions—but the bad blood in today’s Democratic Party is symptomatic of system failure more than of ideological incompatibility.

When Democrats do come to power, they are lucky to pass more than a couple significant pieces of legislation. The liberal advocacy community has descended into bloodsport, because the stakes are impossibly high, and the window for action impossibly narrow. They’re clashing less over the content of ideas than over who’s in the driver’s seat in those rare instances when Democratic legislating is possible. They’re jockeying to control a finite, artificially constrained resource, and, thus, have come to hate each other.

Abolishing the filibuster is a first and necessary step to ratcheting down these tensions. But in this 15 years of dithering, Republicans have radicalized ever further against democracy. They have new ways to stymie their opponents, ensuring the double-standard persists even if the filibuster disappears. Today, if Democrats don’t broaden their ambitions, it’s easy to see how filibuster abolition actually would boomerang on them, the way progressives once feared.

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What a relief it would be to wake up tomorrow and find we’d slept through to January 20, 2029, and the swearing in of a Democratic president with House and Senate majorities.

What a bigger relief if Democrats commemorated inauguration by abolishing the filibuster and passing a raft of bills to put the pieces of the country together again. Everyone gets their health care back. A statehood bill. A housing bill. A clean energy bill. A bill to de-Trumpify the executive branch, including by abolishing ICE. All supplemented by a regulatory regime to protect Americans from an invasive A.I. industry and intrusive government contractors whose executives are loyal Republicans. All of that…but no court expansion. The votes aren’t there. Plus Democrats have convinced themselves that the entire GOP apparatus has been chastened, judges and all.

Still, they move fast. And it feels like a strong start. Until! Most or all of it gets enjoined by the GOP’s favorite lower-court judges, making implementation impossible. Months trickle by. Democratic power falls to a low ebb, at which point the Supreme Court throws out the party’s agenda altogether.

It’s not that the courts weren’t a problem under Obama and Biden. But they have become more partisan, and the Supreme Court in particular has become fully corrupted—an unmasked agent of Republican power.

All of that capital and time, spent down in a flurry of filibuster reform and legislating, only to be told SORRY, you should’ve packed the court first! Think of what the Virginia Supreme Court just did to Democrats earlier this month—overturning a referendum of sovereign voters—but on a national scale, across the entire issue space.

It was once reasonable to conceive of filibuster reform as a piecemeal step. Further reforms might be necessary down the line, but it would go a long way on its own to restoring fairness in the political system.

No longer. Today, without simultaneous reforms to the court, filibuster abolition would represent a pyrrhic victory. It would actually create the perverse consequences progressives warned us about 20 years ago. Both parties would be free to legislate to their hearts’ content, but only Republican priorities would survive judicial review. By sheer coincidence, the Republican agenda would prove constitutionally immaculate, while most elements of the Democratic agenda would turn out to violate some recently discovered principle of jurisprudence. Them’s the breaks!

So we should all be court reformers now. We should also be statehood advocates, because without new states, even a filibuster-free Senate, with courts in check, would leave Republicans at an intolerable representational advantage.

But the judiciary is the big one. We don’t just need the last few Democrats to come around on the filibuster. We need them to decide whether or not they really want to establish fair play—and then to either act in fullness or not at all. If they’re too scared to implement the reforms required to give both parties equally free hands to govern, they should just admit defeat and do nothing.

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