Heather Cox Richardson: The Story of the 14th Amendment

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2026 //
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It’s no exaggeration to say that the 14th Amendment is the foundation of modern civil rights law and that the 14th Amendment today is under attack by reactionary forces. Historian Heather Cox Richardson provides here a history of the 14th Amendment, which many–perhaps most–Americans don’t know.

I wish she had written a few paragraphs on the subject of birthright citizenship, which is the current target of Trump and his henchman Stephen Miller. The Supreme Court recently upheld birthright citizenship but by only a slender margin. The dissenters said that the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to apply only to formerly enslaved Black Americans.

Justice Katanji Brown Jackson eviscerated that claim in a brilliant 20-page commentary. This is the full decision in Trump v. Barbara. Justice Jackson’s scathing response to Justice Clarence Thomas begins on p. 32. She argues that birthright citizenship was always intended to apply universally, not just to Black Americans who were formerly enslaved. Read it. You will be glad you did.

Heather Cox Richardson wrote:

Today marks the anniversary of a dramatic reworking of the U.S. constitutional order.

On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation that brought the principles of the Declaration of Independence to life. They required the federal government to protect the equal rights of all American men.

In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited slavery on the basis of race, but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which Black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after actor John Wilkes Booth murdered President Abraham Lincoln, white southern Democrats had done their best to push their Black neighbors back into subservience. So long as southern states had abolished enslavement, repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy and made war on the United States.

Northern Republican lawmakers refused to accept this caricature of freedom. There was no way they were going to rebuild southern society on the same blueprint as existed before the Civil War, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it. Having just fought a war to destroy the South’s ideology, they were not going to let it regrow in peacetime.

Congress rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction.

But then congressmen had to come up with their own. After months of hearings and debate, they proposed amending the Constitution to settle the outstanding questions of the war. Chief among these was how to protect the rights of Black Americans in states where they could neither vote nor testify in court or sit on a jury to protect their own interests.

Congress’s solution was the Fourteenth Amendment.

It took on the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision declaring that Black men “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens.”

The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The amendment also addressed the Dred Scott decision in another profound way. In 1857, southerners and Democrats who were adamantly opposed to federal power controlled the Supreme Court. They backed states’ rights. So the Dred Scott decision did more than read Black Americans out of our history: it dramatically circumscribed Congress’s power.

The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857 this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm.

The Fourteenth Amendment overturned that idea, recognizing the federal government’s power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures passed discriminatory laws. “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it said. And it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South.

Those same principles took on profound national significance in the post–World War II era, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment aggressively to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states.

The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.

Opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. They began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level. Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court.

Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”

At the time, Bork’s supporters expressed outrage at what they insisted was Kennedy’s smear campaign, for surely the right-wing attack on the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment would never so completely undermine modern society.

And yet in 2026, here we are.

—

Notes:

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Robert_Bork%27s_America

Categories Education Reform

Texas Tech Professors’ Group Sues to Overturn Restrictions on Academic Freedom

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2026 //
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Federal courts are overturning bans that tell college professors what they are not allowed to teach. And more campuses are taking a stand.

At the Texas Tech University system, the American Association of University Professors and its Texas affiliate are the latest to do so.

The Dallas Morning News reported:

Two faculty groups filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday to block the Texas Tech University System from implementing its policies on how professors can discuss race, gender and sexual orientation in the classroom.

The suit, which marks a major legal challenge against a Texas university system over increased restrictions on what can be taught, focuses on two memos issued by Texas Tech Chancellor Brandon Creighton in the last academic year.

One memo, sent in December, banned content that advocates for one race or sex as “inherently superior to another” and prohibited faculty from teaching that there are more than two sexes. The second memo, sent in April, ordered universities to cut all academic degrees “centered on” sexual orientation and gender identity.

The two groups, the national American Association of University Professors and its Texas chapter, argue Creighton’s policies violate their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

Who is named 

The lawsuit names Creighton, a former Republican lawmaker, as a defendant, as well as the nine members of the system’s Board of Regents. Representatives from the Texas Tech University System did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“This case presents an extraordinary system of censorship in higher education,” the suit reads, “in which professors in the Texas Tech University System are prohibited from teaching the most basic scholarship, while at the same time not fully comprehending the contours of prohibitions that place them under threat of losing their employment and livelihood.”

The groups in the lawsuit say the system’s policies “suppress” professors’ constitutionally protected speech and “obscure documented history, facts and theories.”

In one instance, a law professor was blocked from teaching information about race related to the landmark Supreme Court case Dred Scott v. Sandford, which ruled that Black people were not U.S. citizens, according to the filing. The lawsuit against Texas Tech also says that medical faculty have been instructed to remove content about treating transgender patients and racial minorities. Professors are not named in the filing.

Allegations 

The lawsuit argues that Creighton’s policies violate professors’ Fourteenth Amendment rights to due process because its language is “so vague and ambiguous” that they are “unable to discern what is, and is not, permissible.” That ambiguity, the filing says, has led to a chilling of speech.

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Censorship, Ethics, Extremism, Higher Education, Texas

The Hartmann Report: Are We Living in a Police State Yet?

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2026 //
7

Thom Hartmann reflects on the question: are we living in a police state yet?

Read his article and judge for yourself.

He wrote:

Tuesday morning in Houston, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo did what he’d done nearly every morning for 35 years. He woke at 5 a.m., kissed his wife goodbye, loaded his van, and drove off to pick up his construction crew in Magnolia Park, the neighborhood that’s anchored Houston’s Mexican American community for a century. 

He’d raised three sons in that city; they became a teacher and two engineers. He had no criminal record, and he was partway through the legal process of getting a work permit, biometrics and fingerprints already done.

By 7 a.m. he was lying face down on Canal Street with a bullet in his abdomen, crying out for help in Spanish while a federal agent knelt over him talking on the phone. He died at Ben Taub Hospital, the same hospital where two of his sons were born. The Harris County medical examiner has ruled the manner of his death a “homicide.”

ICE says he rammed their vehicle and “weaponized” his van to run down an officer, who fired in self-defense. His family says he almost certainly thought the unmarked cars tailing him were thieves after his work tools, because the men following him wore no insignia identifying them as law enforcement. 

The League of United Latin American Citizens says photographs of the vehicles show little visible damage, which is a strange thing for a van that supposedly rammed a law enforcement vehicle hard enough to justify lethal force. David Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute reviewed newly surfaced footage and concluded it appears to show ICE initiating contact with Salgado Araujo’s vehicle, not the other way around; Norm Ornstein looked at the same evidence and called it “cold-blooded murder.” 

The federal government has released no body camera footage, no dash camera video, and no photos of the damage it claims exists. The three eyewitnesses who were in the van, including Salgado Araujo’s own brother, are in ICE custody and can’t speak out. The Harris County District Attorney is trying to investigate, but her office says access to key evidence “remains under federal control.”

The president of Mexico announced this week that her government will pursue legal action against the United States over the killing. The historical inversion packed into that sentence is complete: Mexico is now appealing to international bodies to protect its citizens from American police violence.

Which brings us to the question people keep asking me on my radio show and on social media: “Are we in a police state yet?” And the question underneath it, the one that really matters: “How would we know?”

I lived in Germany for years, working with Salem International, some of that time in the little village of Höchheim hard up against the East German border, where the guard towers and the death strip were part of the landscape you saw on your way to buy bread. 

I crossed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin in 1986 and felt what a mature police state does to ordinary people: the lowered voices indoors, the glance over the shoulder before anybody said anything real. (If you’ve never experienced that world, watch the brilliant film The Lives of Others; it captures the East German surveillance state better than anything else on film.)

My spiritual mentor and employer in Germany, Gottfried Müller, had been an intelligence officer in Hitler’s army who renounced Nazism, was captured by the British in Iran, and spent most of the war in prison; he devoted the rest of his life to peace work. 

And my dear old friend Armin Lehmann, who was the teenage Hitler Youth courier in the Führerbunker who delivered the news to Hitler that the war was lost (I still have a picture of him with Hitler, that’s on the cover of his book), spent his last decades in America as a peace activist. 

Both men told me essentially the same story about how it began. It started getting scary, they noted, when the regime began to explicitly come after verbotener Gedanke, “forbidden thought.” For example, the radio stations, they said, used to encourage ordinary Germans to call in — to the shows and to the police — and “out” their neighbors who weren’t sufficiently loyal to the regime. Informing became one of the highest expressions of patriotism.

The Germans even have a word for the process by which their entire society was brought into line during 1933 and 1934: as Timothy Snyder notes, it’s Gleichschaltung, a coordination, a synchronization. 

Germany didn’t become a police state in a day, and there was never an announcement.

There was just a series of Fridays, each one slightly worse than the last, until one day the question, “Are we in a police state?” had become dangerous to ask out loud.

So instead of waiting for an announcement that’s never coming, let’s do what Herr Müller would have done and run through the inventory necessary to create a fascist police state:

— A police state is a nation where the police answer to the leader rather than to the law, and where nobody outside the leader’s circle is permitted to hold them accountable. It’s a nation where they can arrest, beat, torture, imprison, and even kill with both anonymity and impunity.

In January, ICE officer Jonathan Ross reportedly shot Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, through the window of her car in Minneapolis, and Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, on a public street days later. Within hours, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was calling both dead Americans “domestic terrorists,” a slander she refused six times under oath to retract. 

Murder is a state crime, and in America state investigators have always worked police shootings alongside the feds. Not this time. The FBI agreed to a joint investigation with Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension the morning Good was killed, then reversed itself the same day after Trump declared Minnesota officials “crooked.” 

Federal agents physically blocked state investigators holding a valid judicial warrant from the scene of the Pretti shooting. Federal prosecutors who wanted to pursue the Good case as a civil rights matter were pressured until they resigned. Today, Good’s car sits shrink-wrapped and unexamined in an FBI warehouse in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, and the state has been forced to sue the federal government just to learn the names of the agents who killed two of its citizens. 

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty called the categorical withholding of all evidence “unprecedented in American history.” Now the same machinery has closed around the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. It won’t be the last time.

— A police state imprisons its dissidents, and it makes the sentences spectacular so everyone else gets the message.

On June 23, federal judges in Fort Worth sentenced eight members of a local book club who held a July 4, 2025 protest outside the Prairieland ICE detention center to a combined 450 years in prison, a figure the Justice Department bragged about in its own press release. Benjamin Song, who fired at an officer after the officer drew his weapon on the crowd, got 100 years. 

Maricela Rueda, a doula and mother who was acquitted by the jury of every violent count against her, got 70 years in prison. Five others who were likewise acquitted of the attempted murder and firearms charges got 50 years apiece, because prosecutors persuaded the jury that wearing black and using the Signal messaging app constituted “material support for terrorism.” 

And Daniel Sanchez Estrada, a Denton teacher and poet who wasn’t even at the protest, got 30 years for moving a box of anti-fascist political zines at his wife’s request, literature the prosecutors admitted was protected by the First Amendment. 

For comparison, Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years for orchestrating the seditious conspiracy of January 6th, and Trump pardoned him anyway. In this America, leading an armed attempt to overthrow the government earns you a pardon, while a book club that protests ICE earns its members what amounts to life without parole.

— A police state criminalizes thought itself, as well as any expression of or action on that thought, no matter how “otherwise legal” it may be.

Last September, Trump signed NSPM-7, a national security directive that names “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as “indicators of domestic terrorism” and calls anti-fascism the “organizing rallying cry” of domestic terrorists. Consider how many of the roughly 75 million Americans who voted against Trump it could plausibly cover. 

In December, then-AG Pam Bondi ordered every federal law enforcement agency to mine five years of data for anything “Antifa-related” by average Americans and hand it to the FBI, and directed the Bureau to publicize its domestic terrorism call-in tip line and establish a cash reward system for informants. 

The FBI has since retooled its roughly 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces and their 4,000-plus personnel toward the American “left” and stood up a new Joint Mission Center that’s investigating the funding of anti-Trump protest movements and payment of bounties while actual crime fighting goes begging. 

When Herr Müller and Armin told me about German radio hosts urging listeners to inform on their neighbors, I thought I was hearing history, but it turns out I was hearing a forecast, and the American version pays cash.

— A police state knocks on your door in reaction to your opinions, should you dare to express them out loud or in print.

In January, a Rochester software professional named David Streever sent a three-paragraph email to then-ICE Director Todd Lyons after watching the videos of ICE killings in Minneapolis. 

“You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher,” he wrote. “You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.” 

The email contains no threat of any kind, just a prophecy about a man’s conscience, the kind of furious letter Americans have been writing to powerful officials since before there was a Constitution to protect the practice. 

Five months later, two federal agents rang his doorbell while he was in Finland with his seven-year-old daughter and handed his wife a document headed “WARNING NOTICE” and “YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW.” When he flew home, an agent showed up at his New York City hotel, a hotel whose location his wife had never disclosed, meaning Homeland Security found him anyway. 

He’s now suing with the help of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which could, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and multiple DC law firms, cause the Trump regime to put FIRE in their crosshairs next. 

That same week, federal agents confronted Paigelynne Gonyea while she was working the polls during New York’s primaries, over an Instagram post about the already-publicly-identified officer who killed Renee Good. Federal agents questioned this poll worker, at her polling place, during an election, about her opinion of a federal agent who killed an American citizen on live video for the world to see.

— A police state builds a security force loyal to the leader and his oligarch cronies rather than the nation.

Pentagon documents reviewed by The Washington Post describe a new National Guard “quick reaction force” of roughly 23,500 troops across all fifty states, trained for domestic riot control, with the first units ordered ready by last January 1 and the rest by April, timed neatly to the midterms. 

Trump has claimed “unfettered authority” to deploy troops into American cities, boasting “I could send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, I can send anybody I wanted,” while governors are cut out of the chain of command and Pete Hegseth has barred military personnel from even talking to Congress without approval. 

Vladimir Putin built exactly this in 2016; he called it Rosgvardiya, and its job was never national defense but regime preservation. Hitler built his version too, and it started small, as a “protection detail,” which in German is Schutsstaffel. History remembers it as the SS.

— A police state needs a compliant press, and you don’t have to nationalize the networks when you can simply arrange for a friendly morbidly rich oligarch to buy them.

Last month the Justice Department approved Paramount’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, placing CNN, CBS News, HBO, and two major studios under David Ellison, Larry Ellison’s nepo-baby and a Trump ally who, the Wall Street Journal reported, privately assured administration officials he’d make “sweeping changes” at CNN if he got that network, too. 

— A police state rewrites the past, because people who remember accurate history make poor subjects. As George Orwell wrote of fascism: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

In March of last year Trump signed an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” and the sanitizing began: the National Park Service was ordered to strip signs and exhibits about slavery from national parks, including “The Scourged Back,” the famous photograph of the whip-scarred back of a man named Peter who escaped enslavement in Louisiana, and materials about John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry. 

In Philadelphia, the administration went to court to replace the interpretive panels at the President’s House telling the story of the nine human beings George Washington enslaved there. 

Trump himself complained that the Smithsonian was “OUT OF CONTROL” because its museums discussed “how bad Slavery was,” and this past weekend, on the Fourth of July no less, the White House released a report declaring that the National Museum of American History “cannot be trusted” to tell America’s story, faulting its director for, among other sins, wanting to move the museum away from an “America First mentality.” 

That’s the same slogan under which 20,000 American Nazi sympathizers rallied at Madison Square Garden in 1939 beneath swastikas and a three-story portrait of George Washington, a chapter of our history this crowd would clearly prefer you never learn. 

Herr Müller and Armin lived through the original version of this, too: within months of taking power the Nazis had burned the books, purged the universities and museums of “un-German” scholarship, and rewritten the textbooks so that German children would grow up inside a glorious past that never existed. Control what people remember and you control what they’ll accept.

— And finally, a police state controls the vote.

In January, FBI agents raided Fulton County’s election warehouse and seized more than 650 boxes of 2020 ballots and voter rolls on an affidavit that omitted the state findings debunking its own claims, with then-DNI Tulsi Gabbard on scene and Trump personally on the phone with the agents. 

On Tuesday, the same day Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed, the Justice Department sent letters to the election chiefs of all fifty states threatening each of them individually with criminal prosecution if noncitizens are found on their rolls, giving them five days to respond, this after the department lost eleven straight court cases trying to seize those very rolls. 

Yesterday, Trump removed from office all of the members of the Federal Election Assistance Commission, an independent, bipartisan agency created by Congress that has the power to call out and punish election fraud, illegal campaign tactics and spending, and vote-rigging when it’s committed by candidates, parties, or state or local officials. It’s now effectively shut down. 

And when senators asked, under oath, whether ICE agents would be kept away from polling places this November, both Kristi Noem and her successor and former plumber Markwayne Mullin refused to rule it out, while the White House press secretary said she “can’t guarantee” it and Steve Bannon openly muses that ICE at the airports was a “test run” for ICE at the polls.

So, are we in a police state yet?

Armin and Herr Müller taught me that we’re asking the wrong question — or at least at the wrong moment — because nobody ever wakes up one morning and notices, “Gee, I guess I’m inside a police state…”

Instead, a police state gets assembled around you, one component at a time, while officials assure you that each component is perfectly normal and even necessary to “maintain order” or, more insidiously, to “preserve freedom.” 

Milton Mayer, in his 1955 book They Thought They Were Free, described how good, decent Germans came to accept fascism. He was a Chicago reporter who, following World War II, went to Germany to interview ten “average Germans” to try to learn how such a terrible thing could have happened and, hopefully, thus prevent it from ever happening here. 

The stories he heard are so familiar to me, as I heard the same things over and over when living in Germany in the 1980s while talking with people who’d kept their heads down through the 1930s and early 1940s just to survive day-to-day. 

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people,” a German college professor told Mayer, “little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security….”

As Mayer’s professor friend noted, and Mayer recorded in his book:

“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. …

“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. … [O]ne no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”

In this conversation, Mayer’s friend suggests that he wasn’t making an excuse for not resisting the rise of the fascists but was simply pointing out what happens when you keep your head down and just assume that ultimately the good guys will win:

“You see,” Mayer’s friend continued, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. …

“But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.”

In a police state, everything seems the same, Mayer’s friend told him. You still go to work, cash your paycheck, have friends over, go to the movies, enjoy a meal out. The regime even backs down from time to time, making things seem ever more normal. Little victories, you tell yourself.

Except, as the German professor told Mayer, they’re not. One day, he said, you inevitably realize that:

“The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.

“But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”

So, here we are. The unaccountable killings, the show trials, the informant bounties, the door knocks over emails, the leader’s praetorian guard, the captured press, the rewritten history, and now the reach for the ballots themselves: every component is now built, tested, and humming.

But what we still have, and what the DDR and the Third Reich did not, is one more election in which the machine’s operators can be stripped of their power by the people they’re trying to frighten. 

That’s precisely why they’re working so hard on the machinery of that election, and precisely why the single most subversive act available to a free American this year is to vote, and to help everyone you know do the same.

So call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your senators and representative to defend state authority over elections, demand independent investigations of the killings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and put a statutory ban on federal agents at the polls. 

Check your registration right now at vote.org, because voter roll purges are already happening in Red states. 

Sign up to be a poll worker in your county; they want poll workers intimidated, and the answer to that is more of us, not fewer. 

Program the Election Protection hotline into your phone, 866-OUR-VOTE, and share it. 

Support the people fighting this in court, from FIRE to the Blue state attorneys general. 

And if this piece helped you see the machinery used to construct a police state more clearly, please share it and support independent media like my Hartmann Report, because a free press that can’t be bought by billionaires is one component of democracy they haven’t figured out how to seize. 

At least not yet.

Categories Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, Trump

Politico: A Tribute to Lindsey Graham

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2026 //
12

Since I posted two scathing commentaries on the life of Lindsey Graham, I thought it only fair to finish with an admiring tribute to the late Senator. It was written by Jonathan Martin, Politico’s senior writer, and posted in Politico.

The setting on the article or website does not permit me to copy anything. I hope you can open it.

Martin praises Graham as a deft politician who held enormous power and wielded it skillfully. He was a war-hawk and a national security expert. He whispered into Trump’s ear, to keep the U.S. in NATO, to calm NATO about Trump’s demand for Greenland, to maintain relations with Ukraine, to support Israel. He had just returned from Ukraine shortly before he suffered cardiac arrest. He was evidently very charming and able to build bipartisan coalitions.

He was not my favorite Republican but Martin says that he had many friends on both sides of the aisle.

Categories Ethics, Politics

Federal Judge Rules Against Trump’s Deal with Justice Department as “Self-Dealing”

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2026 //
1

Judge Kathleen M. Williams blasted Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service and the settlement, which created a $1.776 billion “slush fund” for Trump’s aggrieved allies and granted Trump, his family, and his businesses immunity from IRS audits.

Judge Williams also referred Todd Blanche to the Florida Bar Association and the New York Bar Association for possible disciplinary actions. Blanche, the acting Attorney General, was nominated by Trump to be Attorney General; Senate confirmation hearings begin this week.

The New York Times reported:

A federal judge on Monday ruled that President Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service was an improper exercise in self-dealing and barred him from claiming that the extraordinary tax protections he received were part of a legitimate settlement agreement.

In the order, the judge, Kathleen M. Williams, also referred the lawyer who brought Mr. Trump’s case against the I.R.S. to the Florida bar for potential disciplinary proceedings. Judge Williams added that she would forward her decision to the New York bar, which is already investigating the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche.

The decision by Judge Williams did not explicitly kill the deal that Mr. Trump had worked out with his own government to receive what amounted to amnesty from investigations into tax returns that he, his family and their businesses have already filed. But Judge Williams’s scathing ruling exposed the negotiations between Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers and senior officials at the Justice Department he controls for what she says they were: backroom dealings that did not arise from a legitimate legal process.

“The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the president and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law,” the judge wrote.

The 56-page decision, issued in Federal District Court in Miami, came two months after the Justice Department released a pair of documents purporting to be formal agreements that settled Mr. Trump’s remarkable suit against the I.R.S. The documents laid out a pair of separate but shocking moves — one granting the president, his family and his businesses wide-ranging immunity from tax inquiries and the other creating a $1.8 billion fund aimed at compensating allies of Mr. Trump who say they were the victims of so-called government weaponization.

After outcry from Republicans on Capitol Hill, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said the Justice Department would not move forward with the fund. But he said that Mr. Trump’s extraordinary protections from I.R.S. scrutiny would remain in place.

Categories Corruption, Democracy, Discipline, Ethics, Justice, Trump

Steve Schmidt on the Passing of Lindsey Graham

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2026 //
3

Steve Schmidt is a political strategist who worked for the campaigns of Republicans such as George W. Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and John McCain.

Disgusted by Trump, he was one of the founders of the Lincoln project, an organization of anti-Trump Republicans. He left the Republican Party in 2018. In December 2020, he switched his party registration to Democratic. He writes one of the most popular blogs on Substack.

He wrote about Lindsey Graham on his Substack blog The Warning:

Lindsey Graham was a lonely and unprincipled man who betrayed his country for power and his decency for attention.

Let it be known for all time that he knew exactly what Donald Trump was from the very beginning, and chose him over his country:

“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.”

“I believe Donald Trump would be an absolute, utter disaster for the Republican Party, destroy conservatism as we know it.”

“We would get wiped out and it would take generations to overcome a Trump candidacy.”

“Donald Trump is not going to be the nominee of the Republican party. If he is, that’s the end of the Republican Party.”

“Trump is an interloper and a demagogue of the greatest proportion.”

When Donald Trump attacked America, and tried to burn down the republic built by Washington, saved by Lincoln and redeemed by King, he was aided by Lindsey Graham who supported the lies, dismissed the insanity and sought personal gain from it all.

Lindsey Graham was a pathetic man, a true cynic and a faithless servant of the Constitution.

He was a simple man to understand and a tragic one. He lacked a moral core and any sense of right and wrong. The great empty spaces of his life were filled with an insatiable need for “relevance.” He found it as a cast member in the most malignant reality show ever made.

Let there be no confusion about what Lindsey Graham was. There was no complexity to the man, nor much in the way to plumb and analyze about his journey to the bottom of the Trump sewer.

Lindsey Graham lived his life as a pilot fish, a parasitic sucker fish hovering about larger predators. He was a sidekick and the hollowest of hollow men. Here is what I once shared with Rolling Stone:

“People try to analyze Lindsey through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things that he used to believe and what he’s doing now. The way to understand him is to look at what’s consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers about a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That’s Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trump’s the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power — but he’s found it unattainable on his own merits.”

Let there never be any confusion over the choice Lindsey Graham made.

He chose Trump over his friend.

He chose Trump over his country.

He chose Trump over his duty.

He chose Trump over his oath.

Now he’s dead, and Trump is his rotten legacy — and in that, he won’t be alone.

In the end he made an adjudicated rapist laugh and played a lot of golf with him.

He was a warmonger and the architect of a lost war against Iran.

Lindsey Graham helped Trump divide America and break our alliances, ideals and traditions.

He was no patriot.

Lindsey Graham made his choice.

The high court of history will pass a brutal judgement about a man who knew better, but chose worse.

I won’t mourn Lindsey Graham’s death, but rather the country he helped break.

He was a most contemptible man.

Categories Character

Andy Borowitz on the Passing of Lindsey Graham

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2026 //
3

Andy Borowitz is one of the nation’s most notable humorists. For years, he wrote for The New Yorker. Now, he writes on Substack, where this commentary was posted.

I remember when Senator Graham was Senator John McCain’s best friend. John McCain was a true war hero. He was shot down over Hanoi, and he spent five years as a prisoner of war. He was offered the chance to get an early release, but he said he wouldn’t leave until the other POWs were freed. Graham adored him until he was dead, then attached himself to Trump. Trump mocked McCain, and said McCain was not a hero because he got captured. This from a man who dodged the draft because of “bone spurs.” And Graham forgot his friend.

A Fact-based Lindsey Graham Obituary

Like many Americans, I mourn the sudden passing of Lindsey Graham. I had hoped he would live long enough to be tried for treason.

Let me define my terms. A true traitor collaborates with the enemy despite knowing better. For that reason, someone like Sen. Tommy Tuberville could never be considered a traitor, because he knows nothing.

And then there’s Lindsey.

For the better part of a decade, the senior senator from South Carolina was enmeshed in an on-again, off-again—but mainly on-again—bromance with Donald J. Trump.

It began when both men were running for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. At the time, Graham had some pretty harsh words for his GOP rival.

“There’s only one way to make America great again,” he said. “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”

Snap! But Lindsey was just warming up. He’d go on to call Trump “crazy,” “a jackass,” and “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot” who “shouldn’t be commander-in-chief.”

“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed,” he said, “and we will deserve it.” Why was he so sure that Trump would lose? “Donald Trump is the most unelectable Republican I’ve seen in my lifetime,” he said.

As for Trump’s mental health, Lindsey offered this succinct diagnosis: “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy.”

Just one year later, when the crazy xenophobic jackass was chain-slurping Diet Cokes in the Oval Office, Graham decided to revise that assessment somewhat.

“What concerns me about the American press is this endless, endless attempt to label the guy as some kind of kook not fit to be president,” he told CNN.

This sort of flip-flop worked so much better before the invention of Google. But Lindsey seemed to hope that by piling praise on the man he once wished would go to hell, we’d forget about all that mean stuff he’d said before. By 2018, Graham was bizarrely claiming that Trump “deserves the Nobel Peace Prize and then some.”

In his quest to suck up to Trump as strenuously as possible, Graham hurled himself into self-abasement as if it were an extreme sport. When Trump relentlessly insulted the memory of John McCain—purportedly Graham’s best friend when they were Senate colleagues—Lindsey responded with astonishing nonchalance.

“I don’t like what he says about John McCain,” Graham told Bloomberg. “But when we play golf, it’s fun.”

Yes, Lindsey apparently lost his moral compass somewhere in the sand trap of the Trump National Golf Club. That’s why it was so striking when he seemed to express genuine outrage on the floor of the Senate after Trump incited the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.

“Trump and I… we’ve had a hell of a journey,” he said. “I hate it to end this way. Oh my god, I hate it… but today, all I can say is ‘Count me out. Enough is enough.’”

Alas, Lindsey’s appearance on the right side of history turned out to be a head-fake, as his hell of a journey with the insurrectionist-in-chief was far from over. Like his fellow quisling, Mitch McConnell, Graham voted to acquit Trump in his second impeachment trial. And once it became clear that launching a coup against the US government wasn’t a deal-breaker for 99 percent of the GOP, Lindsey was hitting the links with the wannabe junta leader once more.

“I’m trying to keep a relationship with him after the riot,” he told Axios two months after January 6. “I still consider him a friend. What happened was a dark day in American history. And we’re going to move forward.”

Lindsey just couldn’t quit him.

All of the events I’ve recounted thus far are sufficient to qualify Graham as a traitor. His defenders, though, might raise a mitigating factor: his hawkish stance against the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin.

In this regard, Graham was always on the same page as his Senate pal McCain. Responding to George W. Bush’s gullible assessment of the murderous Russian (”I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.”), McCain quipped, “I looked in Mr. Putin’s eyes and I saw three letters—a K, a G and B.”

But Graham might have topped McCain in his detestation of Putin. Calling him a “war criminal” and “not a legitimate leader,” in 2022 he proposed assassination as the swiftest way to end the war in Ukraine: “I just want him to go…I wish somebody had taken Hitler out in the ‘30s.”

When the International Criminal Court, in a somewhat less draconian measure, issued an arrest warrant for Putin in 2023, Lindsey hailed the decision: “To forgive and forget Putin’s war crimes—that are occurring on an industrial scale—would irrevocably damage the Rule of Law-based world order established at the end World War II.”

That “Rule of Law-based world order” was shredded in the Oval Office last year when Trump and JD Vance disgracefully ganged up on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for having the audacity to suggest that Putin might not be a trustworthy fellow. Aware of Graham’s longstanding hatred of the man he called a war criminal, I eagerly awaited his rousing statement of support for Zelenskyy.

Instead, Lindsey told reporters, “What I saw in the Oval Office was disrespectful, and I don’t know if we could ever do business with Zelensky again… I have never been more proud of the president. I was very proud of JD Vance standing up for our country.”

That kind of statement made many people wish Lindsey would go to hell. Done.

Categories Accountability, Character, Democracy, Elections, Ethics

Miles Taylor Said: Don’t Celebrate Anyone’s Death

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2026 //
2

Miles Taylor worked in the first term of Trump. He worked in the Department of Homeland Security and rose to become its Chief of Staff.

In 2018, he wrote an essay in The New York Times titled “I am Part of the Resistance inside the Trump Administration” and signed it “Aninymous.”

He now has a Substack blog called Defiance.

This was his response to Lindsey Graham’s death.

“When his enemies die, Trump stomps on their graves — and we rightly call him a ghoul for it.

“Don’t be like Trump.”

I admire his forbearance.

But I am nonetheless posting commentaries by two people who cannot forgive Senator Graham’s sycophantic embrace of Trump.

Categories Trump

Marc Elias: GOP Wants to Destroy Citizens’ Belief in Fair Elections

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2026 //
7

The GOP knows that it’s in trouble with the voters. Trump’s decision to join Israel in a war against Iran is a disaster. It has caused inflation at a time when voters were already worried about affordability. Trump’s poll numbers are somewhere in the 30s.

His biggest issue, meant to distract voters, is to charge that our elections are fraudulent. He told world leaders that our elections are “rigged,” which is surprising considering that he and his party won the last (rigged?) election.

Marc Elias has led the legal battle to stop Trump’s multiple efforts to take control of voter data and to control state elections. The Constitution clearly says that states control their elections. He and his team of lawyers have fought the federal government in case after case and won.

Trump’s goal is to destroy Americans’ belief in the fairness of elections. The goal is to transfer the public’s trust to authoritarianism.

Marc’s “Democracy Docket” is a must-read.

He writes:

I doubt Donald Trump thinks Chuck Gray is allowing noncitizens to vote. Indeed, when the Wyoming Secretary of State first ran for the office in 2022, Trump endorsed him. In 2024, Wyoming overwhelmingly voted for Trump for president.

Nevertheless, on Tuesday, Trump’s Department of Justice sent Gray and the chief election officials in the other 49 states a letter warning that they could face criminal prosecution over possible noncitizen voting.

Utah’s top election official, Deidre Henderson, posted on social media that the letter was “truly bizarre behavior.” The Republican Lt. Governor noted that the DOJ “is supposed to be protecting civil rights.”

I can say confidently that neither Gray nor Henderson has anything to worry about. Like their colleagues in the other 48 states, they have done nothing to warrant the insulting correspondence they received.

Though I have profound differences with many Republican chief election officials, I have no doubt they, like their Democratic counterparts, aim to keep noncitizens off their voter rolls and have done nothing remotely criminal.

But keeping noncitizens from voting wasn’t the point of the DOJ’s letter. Nor is it the point of DOJ’s announcement that it is sending “observers” to watch primary elections in fifteen jurisdictions across six states — Arizona, Michigan, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Virginia.

No, the point of both efforts, like so much in the Trump era, is performative. In lieu of evidence of actual fraud, the administration wants to use these clumsy steps to create the illusion that fraud exists.

This is a tactic Republicans regularly employ when it comes to their attacks on voting. For example, the DOJ has filed thirty lawsuits to gain access to state voter rolls. It has lost all 11 that have been decided. Yet its public posturing around the cases is intended to convey the message that something untoward resides in the data it seeks.

The RNC has followed a similar path, touting new anti-voting lawsuits that are either later dismissed or amount to nothing. Yet the propaganda value of the filing is achieved nonetheless.

There is a second, more dangerous reason why Trump and his allies act this way. They want to desensitize the public to their creeping authoritarianism.

When the DOJ deployed a handful of observers in advance of the 2025 elections, it caused waves. Now it is expanding that program with less fanfare. If, as I expect, it massively increases this behavior in the fall, officials want it to seem like old news.

Sadly, we have seen this work for Trump.

The right wing has made promoting lies about elections its top priority. It shows up in every presidential speech, is embraced by every GOP campaign, and is promoted — at least in part — by every right-wing advocacy effort.

Anyone nominated to the federal bench by this administration is required to adhere to certain norms supporting election denialism. They cannot say Biden won the 2020 election; they must parrot at least some form of voter fraud allegations.

Democrats dismiss these statements but mostly want to discuss other topics — the economy, jobs and healthcare. This makes good campaign sense but leaves a mismatch in the volume of messages Americans hear on the vital topic of democracy.

The legacy media has proven itself unable or unwilling to stay focused on threats to democracy. It feels institutionally compelled to treat the entire issue as a two-sided political contest rather than as an existential threat to the rule of law and the country.

That leaves those of us in the pro-democracy movement. Independent media has made great strides but continues to suffer from a lack of reach and resources necessary to inform the broader public of the nature and extent of the risks.

Voting rights organizations and lawyers do the hard work in the trenches but face Republican officials, a hostile administration and well-funded opponents.

With four months until the election, the challenges I lay out above will only grow. I haven’t even mentioned the role of disinformation, foreign interference, or how the Supreme Court might undercut efforts to protect voting.

But the truth is that we have faced these threats before — in 2020, when Trump tried to overturn the election and then inspired a violent insurrection at the Capitol, and in 2022, when his followers tried to prevent certification of elections.

We can defeat Trump’s authoritarianism. We can protect our elections and our democracy. But it will require all of us working together with a common mission.

That starts with refusing to allow ourselves to become numb to what Trump is doing, and insisting that we remain vigilant for signs that it is getting worse. In short, it requires us not to turn away, but to focus on the threats.

In the weeks and months ahead, there will be opportunities to discuss specific tactics and steps to take. But for now, all I ask is that you stay engaged. It’s okay to be tired and worried. It is not okay, however, to give up hope. That is what Trump wants — and is counting on.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Republicans, Trump

Trump Fires Every Member of the Federal Election Commission

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2026 //
3

Rebecca Slaughter was a member of the Federal Trade Commission, appointed by Trump to a Democratic seat in 2018, then reappointed for a second term by Biden in 2023. In 2025, Trump fired her and another member of the commission. She challenged her dismissal in court, because she had been removed without cause. On June 29, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the President could fire members of independent commissions without cause.

Although the conservative majority claims to be “originalists,” they overruled a long-standing precedent (“Humphrey’s Executor”) which protected the independence of independent commissions, requiring the president to have cause for firing or removing a member of an independent commission.

Trump hailed the decision as “the Greatest Increase in Presidential Power in the last 100 years.”

Trump just removed three of the four remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission. He didn’t have to give a reason. Everyone (except members of the Federal Reserve) serves at his pleasure. By law, the four-member commission is supposed to be bipartisan, with two members from each party.

What makes this removal ominous is that Trump has made no secret of his desire to manipulate the election machinery to benefit his party. He wants to change the rules of eligibility, change the documentation, change mail-in voting, anything that might make it more difficult to vote.

L.C. Francis of the L.C. Francis Open Society for History & Civics warns about the dangers of removing an electoral safeguard on the cusp of an important election. Will any new commissioners be Trump partisans? Will they swear their loyalty to him? Will they agree that the 2020 election, which he lost decisively, was rigged?

L.C. Francis writes:

Trump could not force an independent commission to carry out his voting agenda. Less than four months before the midterms, he removed the entire leadership team.

“Power is of an encroaching nature, and ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it.”
—James Madison, Federalist No. 48

Dear Friends,

Imagine learning, over your first cup of coffee, that less than four months before a national election, every seat on the federal commission created to protect the machinery of that election is vacant. No commissioners remain to lead it, to question political pressure, or to stand between the White House and the rules beneath the ballot.

Donald Trump recently eliminated the last three members of the United States Election Assistance Commission, leaving all four positions vacant. Two commissioners were dismissed via email, while the third resigned after being informed of her imminent removal. Subsequently, the White House issued a statement that clarified the intent behind these actions: stating that election officials need to be “totally aligned” with the president’s agenda.

The issue at hand is that an election commission, originally meant to stay independent from presidential influence, has been undermined by a president who thinks its leadership should be aligned with him.

To fully understand what has been at stake, we need to return to Florida in 2000. Election workers held punch-card ballots up to the light while lawyers argued over hanging chads, incomplete punches, and the intentions of individual voters. The presidency turned on 537 votes, handing George W. Bush the Oval Office, and the country discovered that the right to vote depended on an aging and uneven election system that few Americans had ever considered.

After the chaos of the 2000 election, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act and established the Election Assistance Commission on the hard lesson that no president, party, or faction should control the machinery beneath the ballot. Its four members were evenly split between the parties, recommended by congressional leaders, confirmed by the Senate, and required to produce three votes before the commission could act.

The design was intentional because the agency manages voting-system standards, testing labs, election grants, and the national registration form, all of which influence an election well before any ballots are counted.

While researching this article, I was struck by James Madison’s warning that power tends to overreach. Congress learned this lesson and distributed authority over elections among the states, Congress, the courts, and an independent bipartisan commission. It’s important to remember that while the president may nominate members, he cannot legally turn the commission into an arm of his campaign or personal agenda.

Trump has already tried to cross that boundary.

In March 2025, he directed the commission to require documentary proof of citizenship on the federal registration form and sought to implement new rules for mail ballots and election funding. However, a federal court halted key parts of the initiative because the Constitution assigns the regulation of federal elections to Congress and the states, not the president.

He was unable to compel the commission to follow his order and has now dismissed everyone who had been managing it.

Trump is not currently in the Oval Office altering vote counts. Instead, he aims to influence the rules governing elections before votes are even cast, including who can register, what identification is required, which voting systems are permitted, and the extent of federal pressure on the states.

We still have lawful means to prevent the consolidation of power.

The commission needs three confirmed members to function legally. Any replacements must get Senate approval, and bipartisan membership is still required. Moreover, state attorneys general and secretaries of state can challenge illegal federal requests before Election Day.

In fact, election officials are authorized to publicly disclose all White House instructions, preserve all communications, and reject policies exceeding presidential authority. Courts can also issue injunctions against disputed rules before those rules reach voting ballots, registration offices, or voting machines.

The public must therefore monitor the replacement process with the same attention normally reserved for election night. The nominees’ names, records, testimony, and views on presidential power will determine whether the commission remains independent or becomes obedient in all but name.

Congress created this commission because the country learned in 2000 that an election can be lost in the machinery before a single result is announced. Trump has now cleared out his leadership as the nation prepares to decide whether to restrain his power. No serious citizen should mistake the timing as coincidence.

The chairs at the Election Assistance Commission may be empty, but the law has not surrendered them. Courts can still block unlawful executive action, as the Kennedy Center injunction proved. States can resist presidential interference, public records can expose what is being attempted, and every nominee can be scrutinized before obedience is allowed to pass for qualification.

The danger is not that our constitutional defenses have vanished…It’s that Americans may wait to use them until the damage is already done.

I’ve always believed that no president controls the machinery of an American election. It is ultimately owned by the states, the law, our Constitution, and, most importantly, We the People.

Vivat Constitution!

Categories Trump
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