The Los Angeles Times has steadfastly criticized Trump as a “dangerous” and “dishonest” man. It is a liberal newspaper in a liberal state. Its editorial board intended to endorse native Californian Kamala Harris, as it did when she ran for Senate.
But on October 11, the owner of the newspaper, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, ordered the editorial board not to issue any endorsement. The Trump campaign reacted with glee, casting the non-endorsement as a rejection of Harris by the editorial board.
The editor of the editorial board, Mariel Garza, resigned in protest. Veteran journalist Sewell Chan wrote the back story in The Columbia Journalism Review, where he is now editor after a long career that included The Los Angeles Times.
This is Garza’s resignation letter, addressed to Terry Tang, the editor of the paper.
Terry,
Ever since Dr. Soon-Shiong vetoed the editorial board’s plan to endorse Kamala Harris for president, I have been struggling with my feelings about the implications of our silence.
I told myself that presidential endorsements don’t really matter; that California was not ever going to vote for Trump; that no one would even notice; that we had written so many “Trump is unfit” editorials that it was as if we had endorsed her.
But the reality hit me like cold water Tuesday when the news rippled out about the decision not to endorse without so much as a comment from the LAT management, and Donald Trump turned it into an anti-Harris rip.
Of course it matters that the largest newspaper in the state—and one of the largest in the nation still—declined to endorse in a race this important. And it matters that we won’t even be straight with people about it.
It makes us look craven and hypocritical, maybe even a bit sexist and racist. How could we spend eight years railing against Trump and the danger his leadership poses to the country and then fail to endorse the perfectly decent Democrat challenger—who we previously endorsed for the US Senate? The non-endorsement undermines the integrity of the editorial board and every single endorsement we make, down to school board races. People will justifiably wonder if each endorsement was a decision made by a group of journalists after extensive research and discussion, or through decree by the owner. Seven years ago, the editorial board wrote this in its series about Donald Trump “Our Dishonest President”: “Men and women of conscience can no longer withhold judgment. Trump’s erratic nature and his impulsive, demagogic style endanger us all.”
I still believe that’s true.
In these dangerous times, staying silent isn’t just indifference, it is complicity. I’m standing up by stepping down from the editorial board. Please accept this as my formal resignation, effective immediately.
General John Kelly did not want to speak out against former President Trump. He held his tongue about what he saw in the Oval Office as Trump’s chief of staff. But when Trump threatened to use the military against his critics, General Kelly believed he had to step forward. Sarah Longwell, a Republican turned Never Trumper and publisher of The Bulwark, wrote about the criticism of General Kelly by Trump’s defenders.
WHEN GEN. JOHN KELLY WENT PUBLIC about Trump’s praise for Hitler and his fears about a dictatorial second Trump term, he joined a growing list of former Trump officials ringing the alarm.
He also sparked what has become a pathetic if not predictable pattern, in which a chorus of Trump sycophants obediently rush forward to explain away the alarming revelation and impugn the witness’s credibility.
Here’s reliable Trump lickspittle Scott Jennings telling us that Kelly probably made the whole thing up and that the real Hitlers are on college campuses. Trump apologist Ryan James Girdusky said, “I, honest to God, like most Americans, do not care about Gen. Kelly’s farewell tour.”
Brian Kilmeade on Fox and Friends said of Trump’s praise for Nazi generals: “I can absolutely see him go, ‘It’d be great to have German generals that actually do what we ask them to do,’ maybe not fully being cognizant of the third rail of German generals who were Nazis, or whatever.” (Not a parody.)
Trump confidante Mike Davis called Kelly “Gen. Christine Blasey Ford”—get it? Chris Sununu is unbothered: “We’ve heard a lot of extreme things from Donald Trump. With a guy like that, it’s kinda baked into the vote.” Sen. Bill Hagerty, on CNN, downplayed the entire revelation as a matter of personal dispute between two men. Kelly and Trump, he said, “were not a good fit.”
There is something deeply pernicious to this routine. These people want you to forget the cumulative weight of the accusations against Trump, especially when those accusations are coming from his own former employees—many of them high-ranking military officers. They’re doing so not because they don’t believe the accusations but because they know how harmful they could be.
You know how we know this? Because the claims of Kelly and others are backed up by what we’ve seen with our own eyes over the last nine years.
Are we supposed to be skeptical that Trump called soldiers “suckers” and “losers” when he said as much out loud about John McCain?
Are we supposed to be skeptical that he praised Hitler’s generals when he admires dictators, dined with white supremacist Nick Fuentes, calls people “vermin,” and talks about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of America?
Are we supposed to believe he bears no responsibility for January 6th when we all watched him summon a mob and sic it on the Capitol?
Are we supposed to believe that this is all about some personal tiff between Kelly and Trump when so many others have so many similar accounts?
When Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, told us that “the American people deserve to know that President Trump asked me to put him over my oath to the Constitution” on January 6th?
When James Mattis said Trump’s “use of the presidency to destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens has been enabled by pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice”?
When Mark Esper said Trump was “unfit for office,” and put “himself before country”?
When John Bolton warned that “this will be a retribution presidency”?
When Ty Cobb said Trump’s “conduct and mere existence have hastened the demise of democracy and of the nation”?
When Mark Milley called Trump “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country”?
When Bill Barr said Trump “shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office”?
I have another idea: Why don’t we accept the obvious truth that is staring us in the face? Trump is dangerous and unfit and all the responsible people who served in his last term have told us as much.
KELLY HAD BEEN RELUCTANT to speak publicly about his assessment of Trump. Previously, he said that speaking out against his former boss wouldn’t even get “a half a day’s bounce.” Trump’s apologists are trying to prove him right. We shouldn’t let them.
Kelly did the right thing. But it’s not enough. These messages need to reach people where they are, especially disengaged voters—not because they aren’t politically potent (they are) but because they fundamentally matter.
When someone of Kelly’s stature and proximity to Trump says the ex-president is a fascist and praised Hitler’s generals, it should send a great chill through our body politic. If this becomes a half-a-day story, it will be an indictment on all of us.
We are now in the home stretch. Millions of voters are—right this moment—making up their minds. This is the time when elections are won or lost. Those other former officials now have an obligation to do what Kelly has: come forward and offer their candid assessments of Trump.
They should do so not just to defend Kelly but to make a larger point: that we can, should, and must be honest about the threat Trump poses.
Trump’s defenders want us to doubt what we have seen with our own eyes and heard with our own ears. They want us to treat a White House chief of staff confirming that the former president praised Hitler and called members of the military “suckers and losers” as just another bit of campaign fodder—not evidence of something fundamentally rotten at the core of their movement. If we allow that to happen, it will be a stain on our politics akin to electing Trump himself.
ADDENDUM BY DIANE: SARAH FORGOT TO INCLUDE THE PUNGENT COMMENT ON TRUMP BY HIS FIRST SECRETARY OF STATE REX TILLERSON. HE SAID: “TRUMP IS A “F—— MORON.”
Politico intends to name the big winner of each day’s political news. Tim Walz was the big winner of political news yesterday. He set his sights on the richest man in the world, who is pumping uncounted millions into the Trump campaign. In this country, rich people aren’t supposed to buy elections but no one told South Africa-born Musk that.
On Tuesday, the Minnesota governor rediscovered the looseness that once had him casting Republicans as “weird,” skewering Donald Trump, JD Vance — and, more than anyone, Trump campaign surrogate Elon Musk.
“I’m going to talk about his running mate — his running mate Elon Musk,” Walz said in Madison, Wisconsin, on the first day of early voting in the Blue Wall battleground. “Seriously, where is Senator Vance after he got asked the simplest question in the world at the debate: Did Donald Trump win the 2020 election, and after two weeks he finally said, ‘No, he didn’t.’”
Next, Walz uncorked on the wealthiest man in the world and the owner of X.
“Look, Elon’s on that stage, jumping around skipping like a dipshit.”
On a day when his running mate, Kamala Harris, had no events and an interview with MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson, Walz’s line reverberated and drowned out other news on the trail.
And won Walz the day.
In some ways, that Walz has been scarce on the trail and in interviews, of which he’s doing more now.
His performance Tuesday came at a time when Democrats are increasingly desperate to remind voters about the dangers of a second Trump term — particularly in a battleground like Wisconsin. (John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff and the onetime general, offered an assist on that front, kicking off a media tour explaining how Trump had asked “for the kind of generals that Hitler had” and talked of using the military against U.S. citizens, something Harris has been warning about on the trail).
It also comes as Harris continues amid a gender divide to struggle with male voters. She could use some of the same Midwestern bravado that originally landed Walz on her radar this summer.
Harris may have somewhat dampened Walz’s value-add to the ticket when she warned him“to be a little more careful on how you say things,” as he said in a recent interview.
Its finances had been shaky for a long time, and its enrollment had declined. Yet no one anticipated its sudden closure.
As it happens, the Network for Public Education reported only days ago on the frequency of charter school closures. Its report is called Doomed to Fail. It’s sad but true that charter schools have an unusually high record of transience. Parents can’t be sure that the charter school they chose will keep its doors open for more than a year, or three, or five.
The Washington Post reported:
On the day Eagle Academy abruptly closed, teachers at theD.C. charter school had been unpacking supplies, moving furniture and hanging bright posters covered with the names of students who were supposed to fill classrooms.
There had been rumblings of financial troubles, but the school’sleaders told families over the summer they had a plan: Another charter school had agreed to take over Eagle’s two campusesin Congress Heights and Capitol Riverfront.
But the D.C. Public Charter School Board, an independent city oversight body, blocked that plan. Eagle Academy unexpectedly was shuttered in August, less than a week before the new school year, leaving roughly 350 prekindergarten through third-grade students, plus their teachers, scrambling….
Eagle Academy had shown signs of financial shakiness as enrollment declined over several years, relying at times on credit cards to stay open and missing reporting deadlines, according to a staff report from D.C.’s charter school board.
While pandemic emergency funding gave the academy a temporary boost, Eagle made errors in budgeting, including overshooting student enrollment estimates and grant allocations, a Washington Post review shows. A promise to make significant cuts in spending and an effort to attract more students did not fully materialize.
Public records and more than a dozen interviews with Eagle families, school leaders and D.C. officials show that the city and Eagle’s own board lacked a clear picture of the school’s increasingly dire financial situation — leading to questions over whether more could have been done to stave off closure or allow for an easier transition for families. The city’s charter school board also said it would examine its oversight practices…
Eagle Academy opened its first campus in 2003. It was the dream of Cassandra S. Pinkney, who set out to build a school where Black children from underserved communities would learn to swim and kids like her son — who had special-education needs — could thrive. Pinkney founded the school with [Joe] Smith, a friend and charter-school advocate.
It was vaunted at the time as the District’s first “exclusively early childhood public charter school,” according to Eagle’s 2023 annual report. Two years after opening, the school had a special-education department with speech-language therapy, mental health services and other supports. It would later expand to enroll children through the third grade…
The enrollment problems caused financial ones. Schools are funded by the city largely based on the number of students who attend.
Eagle was spending close to $50,000 per student — higher than the citywide average of about $28,000 — according to data from the 2022-2023 school year, the most recent available. Most of Eagle’s student body came from lower-income homes, and the school had a higher-than-average share of children with disabilities, according to data published by the city, which are factors that bring in more funding.
The combination of declining enrollment and financial stress doomed the school.
I have learned so much about what’s happening in Oklahoma from John Thompson, retired teacher and historian. Recently I asked John if he could explain the question that is the title of this post. John responded with the following post. Thank you, John!
When Kevin Stitt was elected governor in 2018, Oklahomans knew he was an extreme conservative and a true believer in the “Free Market,” as THE solution to our problems. Stitt had been the CEO of Gateway Mortgage, which had a questionable reputation. And he knew little or nothing about how government operated; The Tulsa World reported that Stitt apparently hadn’t even voted for governor before he was elected. Even so, the World explained, “Stitt wants the Legislature and the voters of Oklahoma to give him authority no previous governor has ever had — the power to hire and fire all state agency heads and boards.”
The first bill Gov. Stitt signed into law allowed individuals to carry firearms without a permit or training and then he “expanded the number of public spaces where guns could be carried.”
On the other hand, in 2019, I was active in the Justice for Julius campaign, which was fighting for the life of my former student who had been sentenced to death for murder, despite the lack of evidence against him, and the evidence that Julius Jones had been framed. We were told that Stitt’s religious beliefs were sincere. Stitt saved Julius from execution, but denied and banned any future efforts for parole or clemency.
Stitt also began his administration by listening to bipartisan efforts to curtail Oklahoma’s mass incarceration; our state had one of the world’s largest incarceration rates. But, a rightwing dark money group invested $160,000 on ads that said Stitt was soft on crime. Afterwards, the Oklahomanexplained, Stitt rejected Pardon and Parole Board recommendations, and replaced several board members. Moreover, “Oklahoma has executed 14 men during Stitt’s administration, second most among U.S. states. All but one were people of color or poor, or a combination thereof.”
Also, as Oklahoma Watch explains, Stitt’s belief that healthcare was a personal responsibility “became his tagline throughout the (COVID) pandemic.” As the Washington Post reported, in the first few days of the pandemic, Stitt was maskless when “he attracted national attention for tweeting a photo with his family at a ‘packed’ Oklahoma City restaurant,” and saying “he would continue to dine out ‘without living in fear, and encourages Oklahomans to do the same.’”
Stitt soon caught COVID, and he also attended, without a mask, “Trump’s rally in Tulsa — the president’s first since the pandemic set in … Local health officials warned the indoor event at a 19,000-person arena could cause a dangerous spread of the virus in a county that was already seeing a spike.” That week, Oklahoma’s weekly COVID deaths increased by more than 40%. Republican Herman Cain caught COVID after attending the rally maskless and died afterwards.
The Washington Post also reported how Stitt resisted the federal vaccination mandate for the Oklahoma National Guard, and fired the Guard’s adjutant general for supporting vaccinations.
The Frontier also reported that Stitt ordered $2 million of hydroxychloroquine, which President Trump touted. And as NPR reported, in 2020, Stitt refused to publish Oklahoma infection and death rates.
So, it’s hard to estimate how many thousands of deaths were attributable to Stitt, but in 2022, Oklahoma’s death rate was 5th highest in the U.S. In 2023, it was 2nd highest in the nation.
And Stitt continued to undermine governmental and legal institutions. After he ramped up attacks on established legal compacts with Oklahoma’s tribes, and invested $600,000 in state money in compacts which the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled were illegal, the conservative Republican Attorney General, Gentner Drummond, said he was compelled to take “extraordinary action to put an end to the governor’s betrayal of his duty … [and] ‘cause the laws of the state to be faithfully executed.’”
As the New York Times reported, Stitt also advocated for and signed a bill that “bans nearly all abortions starting at fertilization. The new law … is the most restrictive abortion ban in the country.”
And Stitt took the lead in campaigning against Critical Race Theory which was falsely said to be undermining public education. The Oklahoman reported:
Stitt signed House Bill 1775 that would prohibit public schoolteachers from teaching that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another,” and that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive.”
Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill prohibiting nonbinary gender markers on birth certificates for people who don’t identify as male or female — the first law of its kind in the United States, according to legal experts.
… Republican backers describe the new rules as reflecting their religious beliefs, arguing that gender is binary and immutable. “I believe that people are created by God to be male or female,” Stitt said when he issued the executive order. “There is no such thing as nonbinary sex.”
I am taking decisive executive action to ensure the true definition of the word woman, meaning a biological woman, is what guides the state as we reaffirm our commitment to ensuring the safety, dignity, and sanctity of women across Oklahoma. As long as I’m governor, we will continue to protect women and ensure women-only spaces are reserved solely for biological women.
By the way, my House Representative, Mauree Turner, was the nation’s first Black, Muslim, nonbinary state legislator; As the Washington Post explained, Rep. Turner suffered through terrible abuse by Republican politicos. Their behavior was illustrative of a new norm where MAGAs seemed to compete over the ability to be cruel, and push out their colleagues who showed respect for their opponents.
Eventually, the extremism of Stitt et. al sowed division among Republicans. OpenSecrets.org was unable to locate the source of the money used by Stitt to fund primary candidates who opposed Republican incumbents who weren’t reactionary and confrontational enough, but it did “match up” expenditure from 46 Forward Inc. that funded 46 Action and Stitt’s “endorsements in the Republican state Senate primaries.”
During Stitt’s second term, his ideology-driven policies continued to get weirder. For instance, the Oklahoma Voice reports, “Gov. Kevin Stitt has approved a controversial set of rules from the Oklahoma State Department of Education, as expected after the Legislature declined to take action on the regulations.” This gives Walters’ rules that expand test-driven accountability. The regulations also add “new ‘foundational values’ for the state Education Department that make multiple references to ‘the Creator.’”
Other rules include potential punishment for schools that continue to employ educators under investigation for wrongdoing (as defined by the ideology-driven board), and permission to fire teachers who engage in acts that “promote sexuality” within view of a minor.
For the second year in a row, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt has rejected a federal program that would have provided additional funding for families to feed their children next summer.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Summer EBT program … would earmark about $40 per child per month on a card that families could then use at local grocery stores.
Oklahoma ranks fifth in the nation for child food insecurity.
A new food program would have kicked in this summer, had Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt not turned down $48 million from a $2.5 billion initiative that the Biden administration calls “a giant step forward” in ending childhood hunger in the country. Though Oklahoma is one of the most food-insecure states, with surveys finding that more than 200,000 children are hungry at some point during a year, Stitt suggested the administration was “trying to push certain agenda items on kids.”
And as the Oklahoman reports, a new consent decree seeks to provide mental health services for “scores of presumed-innocent Oklahomans who experience severe mental illness [and] are languishing in county jails awaiting competency restoration treatment for prolonged periods that far exceed constitutional limits.” But “Gov. Kevin Stitt, House Speaker Charles McCall and a top state mental health official are pushing back on a proposal.”
Stitt sounds like he is resisting the funding that would be required, but I wonder if he’s also opposing the agreement because it is supported by his opponent, A.G. Gentner Drummond, who doesn’t want this injustice, which has “plagued” the criminal justice system to continue to “drag on for months or years.”
By the way, A.G. Drummond was not at that meeting; he was arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court against the execution of Richard Glossip arguing that prosecutorial misconduct prevented him from receiving a fair trial.
And that brings us back to Stitt’s original intention to hire and fire all state agency heads and boards. During his second term, Stitt, rightwingers’, and their dark money donors have doubled down on a campaign to politicize the Oklahoma Supreme Court. I doubt Stitt knew much about the Court’s history, but it used to be the most corrupt Supreme Court in America. But a bipartisan team created the Judicial Nomination Commission which was often seen as the institution that started the process of making Oklahoma a real democracy.
A rightwing dark money group is funding an effort to remove three justices who voted for abortion and voting rights, tribal contracts, and against the creation of a Catholic charter school. So, whether he knows what he is doing or not, Stitt is helping to lead an effort to dismantle the Nominating Commission, take control over the nomination process, and likely turn back the clock to the corruption of the 1950’s and before.
And that leads to the question as to whether Stitt is primarily motivated by a simplistic “Survival of the Fittest” ideology, and merely follows the lead of Big Money? Or are his policies simply born out of his ignorance and their propaganda? Or has he fully embraced the most disgusting components of Trumpism, and thus devoted himself to brutality? Fundamentally, is he now seeking a reputation for embracing the cruelty that the MAGAs admire?
As we have seen over the past two years, Trump has used his legal team to delay, delay, delay, with the hope of eventually getting a sympathetic judge who will dismiss the case against him. That is what happened in Florida, where Trump-appointed District Court Judge Aileen Cannon threw out the entire case about Trump’s theft of documents. The reason: She believes that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional. She is the first federal judge to reach this conclusion. Many other judges and legal scholars have reached the opposite conclusion and found the appointment of special counsels to be constitutional. Her decision has been appealed by prosecutors.
Yesterday, Obama-appointed District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan dismissed most of Trump’s requests to “discover” more government documents that might show that his actions on January 6, 2021, were necessary.
In a significant legal setback for Donald Trump, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan issued a detailed ruling on his latest discovery requests in the 2020 election subversion case, dismissing most of his demands as speculative and unsupported by law. Trump had sought to compel the federal government to search for and produce a broad array of documents related to election interference, cybersecurity threats, and law enforcement actions connected to the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.
In this article, we will succinctly analyze Judge Chutkan’s latest ruling and its implications on Trump’s election interference case. To read our full analysis below, please join as a paid subscriber to support our work.
Let’s get into it:
The ruling, issued today (October 16, 2024), addressed two key motions filed by Trump’s defense team: a Motion to Compel Discovery and a Motion for an Order Regarding the Scope of the Prosecution Team. In these motions, Trump’s lawyers asked the court to force the federal government to search nine government agencies for information across 14 categories, including classified intelligence assessments and communications about foreign election interference. Trump’s defense argued that this information would support his claim that his actions were based on legitimate concerns about election security.
Judge Chutkan, however, found that Trump’s requests were largely unsupported by the law. She pointed out that under both Brady v. Maryland and Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 16, defendants bear the burden of demonstrating that the requested materials are material to their defense. “Speculation” that the government might possess favorable evidence is not enough to justify an expansive search, Chutkan noted, and Trump had failed to show that the requested documents were likely to yield new, non-cumulative evidence.
For example, Trump sought all drafts and communications related to the 2020 Election Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), claiming that these documents would help demonstrate his “good faith” concerns about foreign interference. But Chutkan rejected this request, noting that Trump did not claim to have been aware of these drafts at the time of his indicted actions. Without showing that this information could have influenced his state of mind, Trump could not meet the standard of materiality required for discovery.
Judge Chutkan also denied Trump’s request for communications and drafts of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) statement, which had described the 2020 election as “the most secure in American history.” Trump argued that earlier versions of the statement might show narrower language that would support his defense, but the court found this request speculative and irrelevant to Trump’s intent at the time.
Trump did win a limited victory in his request for certain “discrete, identified” documents, which Judge Chutkan ruled the government must produce. However, these documents represented only a small portion of Trump’s overall requests. The ruling emphasizes that Trump’s legal strategy cannot rely on vague or speculative claims of what might be found in government records.
Chutkan’s ruling further solidifies the challenges Trump faces as he prepares his defense in the federal criminal case. Trump’s argument that his state of mind was shaped by legitimate concerns about election integrity appears increasingly difficult to substantiate, as the court continues to limit the scope of discovery to concrete and relevant evidence.
Judge Chutkan’s Conclusion and Order
This ruling follows a pattern in which courts have resisted attempts by Trump’s legal team to broaden the scope of discovery in various legal challenges. Chutkan’s decision reiterates the principle that discovery is not an unlimited right and must be grounded in specific, demonstrable need.
With the court setting an October 30 deadline for any further motions to compel discovery, the Trump defense team will need to reconsider their approach as the case moves toward trial. Judge Chutkan’s decision is another indication that Trump’s claims, both inside and outside the courtroom, face serious judicial scrutiny.
One reaction to my last post, “Kamala Harris Will Win the Popular Vote,” has been some variation of a smug suggestion that I take a civics class because the next president will be decided by the Electoral College. Another has been a bit less condescending, something like, “Sure, but what matters is the Electoral College.”
I have a respectful suggestion for anyone who had those kinds of reactions (other than “read the post”). I ask you to consider what it means that we collectively shrug off such an anti-democratic structure as “just the way it is.”
Because when we do that, we align ourselves with those who in their times scoffed at the abolitionists, the Radical Republicans, the suffragists, the modern civil rights movement, and those who called for the direct election of senators and “one person, one vote” in legislative districts. All of these people had the courage in their own time to call out the ways in which American elections were legal but not legitimate, either by universal standards of democracy or even by the Declaration of Independence’s central claim – that governments depend on the consent of the governed, legitimately ascertained.
Legal but not Legitimate
All democracies have to be prepared to deal with the question of what to do when something may be legal, but is plainly not legitimate, as when anti-democratic actors compete in democratic elections. Emerging out of the rubble of World War II, the leaders of the European democracies were freshly aware of the catastrophic damage done by fascist and totalitarian communist regimes that came to power through putatively democratic processes, and fashioned constitutions and laws to safeguard against anti-democratic hijacking.
We have confronted the same challenge twice. In the aftermath of the War of Rebellion (aka the Civil War), Congress enacted several measures designed to safeguard democratic freedoms for all, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment (the Insurrection Clause), and the Enforcement Acts (1870 – 1871). And nearly a century later, in response to Jim Crow and racist terrorism that effectively prevented African Americans from voting, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act (1965).¹
Unlike in Europe, however, America’s anti-democratic faction maintained enough social and political power to thwart or undermine both of these efforts. The MAGA faction, now firmly in control of the Republican Party, as well as the state governments in which half of America lives, as well as the Supreme Court, following in the footsteps of its Jim Crow and Confederate predecessors, deploys “states’ rights” to exempt its antidemocratic actions from scrutiny, and further whitewashes these actions’ fundamental illegitimacy through its control of the Supreme Court.
When we treat all of this as “just the way it is,” we revert to the kind of learned helplessness that Martin Luther King, Jr. warned against in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail:
“We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”
Today, we have lost the clarity we had 57 years ago when the VRA passed. Because we’ve given up on expecting our most important national institutions to do what is right, and because we’ve given up on expecting active democratic citizenship from ourselves and each other, our “democracy” has shriveled to the point that the outcome of partisan bloodsport now passes for the consent of the governed.
In America, this century of accelerating democratic crisis has been supercharged by the exploitation of the anti-democratic features of our Constitution and traditions. Consider that:
In two of the last six presidential elections (one third!) the results of the Electoral College overturned the popular vote, and in one instance (2000), that result depended not only on the Electoral College but on five partisan Supreme Court justices swooping in to prevent all the ballots in Florida from being counted.
Five of the six Republicans on the Supreme Court were confirmed by senators representing less than half of the US population.
Republicans have held the Senate majority for five of the last twelve Congresses despite representing a majority of the US population only once in that span.
Minority Rule
The typical response to objections about the anti-majoritarian features of the Constitution, or our present system more generally, hearken back to the original reasoning for checks and balances. Those features were meant to prevent the rule of the mob, or frequent lurches that disrupt the need of citizens to have a set of consistent laws that they can rely on. That’s captured in the (likely apocryphal) quote attributed to George Washington that “We pour legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it.”
With that in mind, let’s begin by looking at an idea that most readily agree to, which is the need for the system to protect the rights of those in minority groups. I think we would all agree, for example, that preventing any group of people from voting, or any other right generally enjoyed, is indefensible. Unfortunately, that foundational precept has been rhetorically hijacked to contend that the system must protect minorityinterests.
Thus, especially over the last twenty years, our system has proved less the sturdy bulwark on behalf of the rights of minority groups and more the driving force on behalf of the very much minority interests of plutocrats and theocrats than at any time since the end of Reconstruction.
Let’s look at just how much this is the case, as reflected in our foundational institutions.
The Senate
Let’s begin with the “saucer,” which, if it was meant to be chilling in 1789, has become positively cryogenic since.
As the next graph shows, Republicans have held Senate majorities in five of the last twelve Congresses, despite representing a majority of the population only once, in the 109th Congress (2005-2006).²
Let’s consider two “best case” scenarios for 2025, based on a 50-50 Senate in 2025, in which either Harris or Trump is president.³ The difference between the red and blue bars visually represents the democracy gap in the US Senate. Note that if Harris is president, the 50 senators needed to pass a continuing resolution or confirm judges will represent nearly as much of the population as Senate rules envisioned would constitute the supermajority necessary to break a filibuster – while if Trump is president, he will be able to do the same with senators who represent a minority of the population – just barely enough to block cloture, if they represented the same proportion of senators.
The Supreme Court
Since the founding, 116 jurists have been confirmed to the Supreme Court. Only five were confirmed by senators representing less than half of the US population – Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. The following graph shows how far off from representing democratic legitimacy the present Roberts Court is from even the SCOTUS that delivered Bush vs Gore. And, of course, depending on how you measure it, either three or five of them were nominated by presidents who did not win a majority of the popular vote themselves.⁴
Barack Obama and Kamala Harris have both talked with patriotic pride about how theirs is a “story that could only be written in America.”
But, thanks to the Electoral College, so too is Donald Trump’s a story that could only be written in America. Absent the Electoral College, he could not have become president, nor could he persist for so long as such an asphyxiating, toxic cloud over all of our politics. Indeed, Trump stands the original justification for the Electoral College on its head. The founders felt an Electoral College representing the most responsible Americans might be needed someday as a check against popular passions which might someday elect an antidemocratic demagogue. In reality, it has done the opposite – installing an antidemocratic demagogue the people rejected.
But it’s even worse than that. Reimagine November 3rd, 2020, without an Electoral College. By the next day, Biden would have been seen as the winner, ahead by millions of votes. None of what followed would have happened, as there would have been no serious ways for Trump to have questioned the outcome in any other than the most outlandish terms. No bullying calls to Brad Raffenperger to find 11,780 votes; no Stop the Steal rally, no riot on the Capitol grounds, because that ministerial procedure would not even be a thing.
In other words, the Electoral College process was the precondition for January 6th because of how long it delays the peaceful transfer of power, and because of how many democratically frivolous opportunities it offers bad faith losers to corrode public confidence in the election and even organize violent resistance.
Indeed, whatever the outcome on November 5th, 2024 the fact that Harris will all but inevitably win the popular vote by a comfortable margin – and yet it will still be as “close” as it was in 2016 and 2020 in key states – all but guarantees a rerun of 2020’s post election confusion and crisis.
We spend an exhausting amount of time and effort asking what it says about the American people that Donald Trump became president and could be again, searching for answers almost exclusively in the individual psychology, morality, or life circumstances of the individual people who vote for him, when we should be asking what it says about the American systemthat continues to produce these outcomes. Especially when for the last twenty years or more the American people routinely insist that the system is not serving them and that they have no confidence in it in general, and the Electoral College in particular.
Notably, dissatisfaction with the Electoral College was bipartisan until 2016, when Republican voters realized its “benefits.” Now, a bitmore than 70 percent of Democrats and Independents want to “amend the Constitution to base the presidential winner on the popular vote.”
But, as long as systematic reform is so easily swatted away merely by embarrassing those who would wish otherwise as being too naive or insufficiently “realistic,” we’ll bounce around the room like a Roomba, with serial diversions like “Democrats need a better message.”
This is as true now as it was in the 1960’s when James Baldwin wrote:
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Which is why I would rather count myself with those who, in their times, had to acknowledge that enslavement, the disenfranchisement of women, the indirect election of senators, egregious gerrymandering, and Jim Crow were legal – but never conceded that they were legitimate.
Footnotes:
1. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act required covered jurisdictions to preclear changes to their voting laws, even if those changes were to be made by elected representatives. Section 5 was essential because we understood that without preclearance, the racist faction legally in control of the machinery of the state in those jurisdictions would continue to use their illegitimate authority to deny Black people their citizenship rights. We understood the need to take aggressive, facially anti-democratic actions to prevent “democratically” elected state governments from enacting new laws or rules to continue to disenfranchise African Americans. In other words, we rejected that faction’s claim to the benefit of the doubt that it was acting in democratic good faith. Moreover, it did not occur to anyone at the time to consider the enactment of the Voting Rights Act as intended to give one party or the other an advantage in future elections.
2
Percent of the population is computed as the share of each Republican senator’s state of the United States population. For example, the population of Texas is 9.2 percent of the US population. Since both Texas senators are Republicans that would count as 9.2 percent in this calculation. If only one senator was Republican, that would count as 4.6 percent of the population. Using this method, if states were of equal population, the number of senators would equal the percent of the US population.
3
By “best case” I mean that Democrats hold their current seats except West Virginia. In order to compute the percentages of the population represented by senators, the procedure is to begin with the smallest states until the number of indicated votes are reached.
4
Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett were nominated by Trump, who lost the popular vote. Roberts and Alito were nominated by George W Bush who reached the White House after losing the popular vote in 2000, but who won the popular vote in 2004, the term in which he nominated Roberts and Alito.
The charter lobby has created a mythology that charter schools are more successful than public schools. As the study shows, the mythology is not true. What parent would choose a school that is likely to close in a few years?
Parents want to know if they can depend on a school being there not only when their children start but also when they finish. Based on a marketplace model with fewer regulations, the charter school sector is far more unstable than local public schools.
While the fate of each school cannot be predicted, we can show trends.
Doomed to Fail: An analysis of charter school closures from 1998-2022 uses data from the Common Core of Data, the primary database on non-private elementary and secondary education in the United States, to determine charter school closure rates and the number of students affected when closures occur. The report analyzes charter school closures from 2022 to 2024 to determine the reasons why schools close and how much notice families receive.
Charter schools come with no guarantees. And, as this report shows, in far too many cases, these schools were doomed to fail from the very start.
Here are some of the key findings of the report:
-By year five, 26% of charter schools have closed
-By year ten, nearly four in ten charters fail, rising to 55% by year twenty.
-More than one million students have now been stranded by charter closures
-Eight states have closure rates that exceed 45%.
-The inability to attract and retain students is the primary reason for failures.
-The second most frequent reason is fraud and gross mismanagement.
-Forty percent of closures are abrupt, giving insufficient warning.
-School operators, not authorizers, initiate the majority of closures (blowing a hole in the “accountability” myth..
The report includes some pretty startling examples of charter shutdowns during the last two years, exposing corruption, mismanagment, and operators who did not bother to tell parents the school would be closing until just before it happened. There is also a section written by Gary Rubenstein on the failure of the Tennessee Achievement District. The report can be found here and the Executive Summary here.
Jennifer McCormick was the last elected state superintendent of schools. She switched parties because of the Republicans’ hostility to public schools.
She is running for Governor of Indiana against Senator Mike Braun, who is a far-right Republican. Braun and his running mate, an evangelical extremist, want to get rid of public schools.
The 74 reports:
U.S. Sen. Mike Braun, a conservative Republican, is still ahead in the state’s gubernatorial race but his lead among Indiana voters over Democrat Jennifer McCormick has shrunk in recent weeks.
Polling released this week by the Democratic Governors Association shows Braun just three points in front of McCormick, 44% to 41%. That’s a dropoff from the Sept. 17 results of an Emerson College Polling/The Hill voter survey that had Braun with roughly 45% of the vote and McCormick with 34. Libertarian candidate Donald Rainwater also picked up more support but less dramatically so, going from 5.8% to 8%.
Indiana has not elected a Democratic governor since 2000 and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a comfortable 14 percentage point lead, 57% to 43%, over Democrat Kamala Harris, according to an ActiVote poll released Tuesday.
If elected to succeed Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb, Braun and his running mate, pastor, podcaster and far-right Christian nationalistMicah Beckwith, have pledged universal school choice for every Indiana family while focusing on parental rights and school safety.
McCormick, a career educator, was the last person elected to the superintendent of public instruction’s office before it became an appointed position in 2021. She seeks to expand affordable child care, fight what she believes is excessive state-mandated testing and call for an equitable school funding formula.
She also wants to place limits on the state’s private school voucher initiative: The program grew to encompass more than 70,000 children in 2023-24, a 31% increase from the year before. The state allocated $439 million in tuition grants to private parochial or non-religious schools last year — up from nearly $312 million the year before.
McCormick said the program, which might have been intended for lower-income children, is often utilized by white suburban families and is too expensive.
“We can’t afford it,” she told The 74, “and it is sucking the resources out of our traditional schools.”
Braun, 70, wants to expand school choice by removing the $220,000 annual family income cap from the voucher program, known as the Choice Scholarship Program, and doubling the $10 millionallocated to the state’s Education Scholarship Account Program. The program, which has also seen tremendous growth in participation, gives special education students and their siblings funds for tuition and support services.
Braun did not make himself available for an interview and attempts to reach various supporters were not successful.
“School choice programs put parents in the driver’s seat, allowing them to choose schools that prioritize their children’s needs,” he states in his education plan. “Providing universal school choice will ensure every Hoosier family has the same freedom to choose their best-fit education.”
A former school board member, Braun also wants to create an Indiana Office of School Safety to streamline the efforts of several departments, including the state police — and implement age-appropriate cyber training for students regarding online safety. He said, too, that the state should limit cellphone use on campus.
Braun wants to increase Indiana’s public teacher base salary — and financially reward educators whose students perform well.
Keith Gambill, president of the Indiana State Teachers Association, said his group endorsed McCormick, 54, because of her commitment to funding traditional public schools.
He noted she did not have the group’s endorsement when she initially ran for the state superintendent’s office as a Republican. But, Gambill said, after filling the role and understanding the state’s educational needs, she switched parties and her values more closely aligned with the union’s.
“She really stood up to members of — at that time — her own party in working toward what was best for our schools,” he said, speaking of her time in office. “And, of course, as soon as they were challenged, they didn’t like that. She realized that if she was going to make a difference in public education, she would have to move in a different direction.”
McCormick aims to secure a minimum base salary of $60,000 for pre-K-12 educators, and adjust veteran teacher salaries to reflect their non-educator peers. She wants to increase academic freedom, safeguard university tenure and protect the ability of teachers unions to collectively bargain for wages and benefits.
Her running mate, Terry Goodin, a former state representative, was a teacher, assistant principal and public school superintendent at Crothersville Community Schools.
Braun, in his education plan, said he wants schools to notify parents about their child’s request to change their name or use different pronouns on campus. He has denounced gender-affirming surgery for minors and opposes transgender students playing on girls’ sports teams. Braun has the backing of Americans for Prosperity and CPAC — and maintains high ratings from the NRA.
Braun was endorsed by Trump in 2023 and won his party’s nomination for governor in May after beating out a crowded field of GOP contenders. He acknowledged last month, according to Axios, that Harris’s presence at the top of the presidential ticket has complicated down-ballot races, including his own.
“I think that’s had an impact,” he said, “but I’m going to plow through that because this is a lot about kitchen table issues once you’re starting to run for governor.”
Donald Trump is certainly going to lose the popular vote, like he did in 2020 and 2016.
Donald Trump is probably going to lose the Electoral vote, like he did in 2020.
But if the latter is close—and thanks to the antidemocratic architecture of the archaic Electoral College system, it may be—the House of Representatives might wind up deciding who will take the White House on January 20. Trump would probably win in the House (which, despite its intended purpose and its name, is not accurately representative of the American people).
And if it ever got that far, Trump would certainly win in the Supreme Court. There, Leonard Leo’s far-right drones are chomping at the bit to return FPOTUS to the Oval Office. Amy Coney Barrett would join with the four hateful men in robes in holding with the Donald. And proudly, eagerly joining them in such a nightmare scenario would be Chief Justice John Roberts, the reactionary in moderate’s clothing, whose raison d’être is to make the United States as antidemocratic (or, if you will, as fascist) as possible—all the while convincing the media that he’s merely an umpire calling balls and strikes.
Roberts may well be an umpire. But umpire-ness does not automatically guarantee objectivity and neutrality. Like, I’ve seen the baseball scenes in The Naked Gun. Who better to rig the game than the umpire, who can call a slider under the chin a strike and a fastball right down Broadway a ball?
That’s exactly what Roberts has done. In his court, balls are strikes, white is black, up is down, Radiohead is Coldplay. Words have no meaning. On his watch, SCOTUS decided that “well regulated” means “not regulated at all, even a little,” and that, in the case of Trump being removed from the ballot in Colorado for leading an insurrection, “Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability” means that it’s not actually necessary for Congress to do such a thing. Roe, legal precedent for half a century, is overturned, but the Comstock Act is okay.
There is not, and will never be, an internal logic to these decisions. Leonard Leo and the rightwing machine decide what outcomes they want, they game the lower court system to get the Supreme Court to take on the requisite cases, and then Roberts & Co. pull shit out of their collective ass to produce a ruling that pleases their rightwing whoremasters. And who pays the price? Pregnant women who cannot access necessary healthcare. Children who get gunned down by the score in schools all across the country. Minorities who have seen their federal civil rights protections evaporate. Consumers of tainted cold cuts. And, just to pull something out of today’s news, homeowners in the path of Hurricane Helene, victims of the climate change the GOP and its stooges on the Supreme Court will deny until Florida is underwater.
At the heart of all of this is voting rights. A country is only as democratic as its system for electing its leaders. By that measure, the United States is not all that democratic. State legislatures devise lopsided redistricting maps; that ensures a significant number of extremists in the House. The Senate, meanwhile, is inherently fucked by its construction, which vouchsafes New York the same number of senators as North Dakota. Thus has a minority of reactionary weirdos managed to hijack our federal government. And no one has done more to make this a reality than John Glover Roberts Jr.
“This is who he is,” David Daley, author of the excellent and exigent new book Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections and my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast, tells me. “And John Roberts has so successfully maintained his reputation as an institutionalist, as an umpire, as a caller of balls and strikes, that he’s gotten away for 25 now with being what I call the most effective Republican politician of the last fifty years—who has delivered the right victory upon victory that they never could have won at the ballot box.”
In 2013, Roberts gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, torpedoing Section 5, which required historically racist states like Alabama and Mississippi to “preclear” any proposed changes to laws, policies, or maps related to elections. In the disgraceful Shelby County decision, the Chief Justice assured us that the South “has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.” Section 5, he wrote, is “based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day.”
Incredibly, a white Republican who grew up in a whites-only town in Indiana was somehow ignorant of what was happening to racial minorities in the South. As Daley writes in Antidemocratic:
Spend some time with the Justice Department files from this era and two things become immediately clear: First, across small-towns in the South, the VRA helped to promote parity in voter registration numbers, but preclearance prevented the adoption of many new-school methods of voter suppression designed to keep the past alive in little locales where no media played watchdog and officials could not be trusted. And second, the five Supreme Court justices who declared that preclearance should have been a vestige of the past spent little time examining these stories.
They likely knew nothing of the majority-Latino town Seguin, Texas, about a half hour east of San Antonio, where the white population accounted for a third of the population but two-thirds of the City Council. That imbalance persists because officials simply refused to redistrict for more than two decades, after both the 1980 and the 1990census. Latino leaders filed a lawsuit using Section 5 and won—only to see the city respond by rushing the filing deadlines forward for candidates so that no Latino candidates could qualify. To stave off that latest scheme, the Latino majority had to rely on preclearance—and another successful lawsuit.
Seguin, Texas is hardly the only example. Daley recounts many of them in his book. They are nauseatingly, infuriatingly unfair. To this day, and contrary to Roberts’s assurances in Shelby County, voter suppression in the South remains a big deal. And that’s just how the Chief Justice likes it.
“[P]eople on the left still say, ‘Oh, John Roberts is going to save us on this really important thing,’” Daley tells me. “And John Roberts is not going to save you. John Roberts is not an umpire. John Roberts is not your friend. John Roberts was raised in a town for whites only, that was still advertising itself as a place for Gentile Caucasians, even after the United States outlawed housing discrimination.”
Sam Alito is the most pompous of the current Leonard Leo justices. Clarence Thomas is the most corrupt. Brett Kavanaugh is the most nakedly partisan. But John Roberts is the most dangerous, the most insidious, the most fascistic, and, worst of all, the most appealing in the eyes of the press—despite the severe and possibly fatal damage he’s done to our democracy.
“This is who John Roberts is,” Daley says. “Curtailing voting rights has been John Roberts’s life’s work—and he’s really really good at it.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 