Let me start with an oldie but a goodie. I was watching “Casablanca” while working out just now. (TCM’s Valentine’s Day fare seems to be complicated love stories. The movie before it was “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”) While I am fully aware of the critique of the colonialist subtext when the patrons in Rick’s bar are led in singing “Le Marseillaise” by Victor Laszlo, it still gets to me every time. And each time I have watched this seen in the past year, I have felt this strong sense that although the movie is full of pro-American jingo-ism, if the movie were made today, jackbooted thugs from our own modern Gestapo would be the ones freedom-lovers would be seeking to defy and drown out. Our government is now the greatest enemy America and Americans face and frankly, it’s not even close. Recent weeks have been a pretty harsh reminder of that with serial efforts by Trump and his lackeys and enablers systematically destroying protection after protection the people of the U.S. have sought and benefited from. They removed protections against the climate crisis. They have let lapse our last remaining vital nuclear arms agreement. They have undermined our alliances (even when trying to pretend otherwise as in the case of Marco Rubio this weekend.) They have undercut vital health protections. They have attacked the rule of law. They are planning the most major assault on the right to vote in our modern history. They have debased our government with corruption and incompetence, attacked the Congress with contempt and lies. As I have argued before, they have crossed the line from being political adversaries to being the enemy within our borders. It is important we recognize this because it underscores what kind of moment this is. It is vital that they be defeated. There is no good or acceptable Plan B. (I’d add that there is a useful reminder in the reference to colonialism above. It is true that the French patriotism we cheer in the movie lies atop a foundation of French control of a nation that was entitled to but had been denied the right of self-determination since 1912. But, had the Germans won the war and taken control of all of France, Morocco would never have had the chance to become independent as it did just 11 years after the conclusion of World War II. Why is it relevant? Because in a world of manifold injustices and enemies, we have to set priorities and defeat the most dangerous and urgent ones first so we have a chance to get to the others. Translation: Nothing nor any single issue should stop those of us who care about the future of this country from defeating Trump and MAGA both in 2026 and 2028. Then we can get to the business of fixing the many other often grave problems we face.)
There are groups of Dems here in DC and outside the Beltway that have taken up efforts to prepare for remaking the government once Trump is gone. This is a worthy task. The damage Trump, MAGA and the GOP has done is so massive that it will not only take a concerted effort to fix it but we must enter office with a real concrete plan. If we spend the first years of the next Dem presidency (should we be fortunate enough to have one) debating plans we will get nowhere, the weakening of the country will continue and another far right government will be waiting in the wings. I’m participating in some of these efforts and leading a couple. As a consequence, I see some real problems emerging. First, too many of the policy and political folks involved are caught up in their own habits and legacies to provide the new thinking we critically need. Going back to the way we did things under Biden or Obama is not the answer. Hitting reset on US AID or State or DoD or HHS is not the answer. We need new ideas and structures to help us meet new challenges…and we need to recognize that budgetary and practical constraints and the march of progress in the world has made going backwards a foolish idea. Another reason that a lot of these groups revert to old formulations is that many of the folks in these groups are not there to break new ground or imagine a new America or US government. They’re there to get a job in the next administration. For most DC Dems, Project 2029 centers on their own future employment prospects. Not only is this not great because it should not be the priority and because we really need new thinking and thinkers, it is also not great because too many “savvy DC insiders” realize that the only way to get confirmed is to not be too bold or controversial. (That’s why DC think tanks produce so many bland and unreadable monographs and studies. They don’t ever want to stick their neck out for fear that doing so will lead to static when it comes time for the Senate to approve them. That’s why so little actual thinking goes on in think tanks. Many are, as I have said before, just large meat lockers in which we store former government officials and academics who hope to someday be future government officials.) The whole thing makes me think we might want to consider term limits for the policy community. Once you’ve been in a couple of administrations, then you just time out and we’d be forced to get the turnover we need. That’ll never happen. The ambition of the average DC denizen won't allow it (nor will the self-interests of those who spend so much time cultivating them). So, rather than taking it as a serious suggestion, take this whole point as an admonition that if you are in such a group, keep your eyes on the future and reward creativity and big ideas and if you are not but you start seeing the reports, ask yourself who the authors are and how their self-interests have likely shaped the conclusions they reached.
I know that’s pretty “inside the Beltway” but what’s the point of having me live around here if not to provide such points of view. That said, let me offer two more related points. First, most of these discussions get way way down in the weeds. What we need are big ideas and big picture thinking. The rest will take care of themselves. (To take one example: Don’t rebuild, US AID. But by all means reallocate the funds to do the vital work it was doing. Best path: allocate it to bureaus at the State Department to better connect the spending to the foreign policy goals of the US. Let them spend the money and where possible do so by allocating it to creative problems solvers closer to the issues being addressed.) What is more for those coming up with ideas in 2026 and then in 2027 and 2028…try to give special focus to those that can actually help Democrats win. (See point 1 above.) That means, in each discussion ask, “Does this matter to voters?” If it doesn’t, it may be important but it is secondary to winning. We need to triage our work.
In addition, a friend suggested one Project 2029 that is essential and frankly, I’m not aware it exists. That is one that focuses on the issue of accountability. We need a plan to identify abuses and corruption and then determine how to remove, prosecute and penalize members of the Trump Team and their co-conspirators and collaborators and enablers. Again, see point 1 above. The next transition in Washington will not be a normal one. There will be massive efforts to destroy records, pardon officials who did criminal things, steal, and sabotage. It has already started. We need folks planning now how to ensure that a clear message is sent that we cannot and must not ever go back to the serial destruction of our institutions and the staggering contempt for the rule of law in America that we are seeing now. Accountability must not be an afterthought and old school thinking must not leave us open to precisely what happened between 2020 and 2024.
Oh, did I hurt some of your feelings by suggesting that President Biden and some on his team failed us by not realizing that perhaps their primary job was to keep Trump from returning to office—because he was/is the greatest threat we face? Sorry not sorry. Democrats who do not recognize the nature of this moment or what our priorities should be must be called out and asked/forced to step aside. If you think this in contradiction to the point above about winning at all costs, that’s wrong. We do not harm the party by calling out those we see as being too soft or misguide or not as capable as others and challenging them, primary-ing them. We want candidates who can win, of course. But, we also need candidates who will do what is necessary should they win. (No more Fettermans or Manchins, please.) We can handle it as a party and as a country. Furthermore, the country is not in the same place it was. (That’s how you go from Eric Adams to Zohran Mamdani in New York…or produces massive swings to Dems in district after district countrywide.) Voters realize that we face an existential threat and we have a government that does not give a fuck about them unless they are billionaires who bend the knee to Trump. They also realize that we face new problems—from AI to the rise of China to the degree of income inequality that has turned into unprecedented political inequality. So they too are ready for and more open than ever to new approaches and the honest debates that can help address those things.)
As my friend Mike Tomasky puts it in an excellent piece in The New Republic and as AOC made it clear in her effective and well-received speech at the Munich Security Conference, attending to the needs of working-class Americans—to all Americans who are not privileged who are coddled by our system—is essential. Read Mike’s piece. It’s worth your time. And he makes a key point. Right now most Americans do not believe our system is working for them. They believe it is rigged. Because it is rigged. While the current and recent administrations bend over backwards to help those who already have much, most Americans today are stalked by, tormented in one way or another by economic insecurity. It’s appalling. Like the obscene inequality in this country and directly tied to it, is a failure of our system. Ask around. Who do you know that does not fear that a serious health crisis could wipe them out, that they may never be able to own a home, that owning or renting a home is making it impossible for them to afford other daily needs. Tens of millions of Americans can’t afford energy costs. Aged and aging Americans fear that they will live in poverty as they get older. That’s the reality. Not just for the poor. For middle-class and even upper-middle-class Americans, too. Politics today is about unrigging our system. It is about ensuring that as a democracy should, the needs of the many are addressed and not shunted aside by the disproportionate power of big corporations and big donors. This is a country riven by social crisis and the failure of our political system. These issues and not just halfway measures and slogans are what voters want to see addressed. It is a time for clarity, courage and boldness.
HINDSIGHT - WRITE SOMETHING WORTH READING ABOUT OR DO SOMETHING WORTH WRITING ABOUT
Saturday, February 14, 2026
A Dose of Hard Truths
Welcome to the Voyage of the Damned
Welcome to the Voyage
of the Damned
Feb. 14, 2026, 7:58 a.m. ET
Credit...Photo
Illustration by Philotheus Nisch for The New York Times
By Maureen Dowd
Opinion
Columnist, reporting from Washington
When President Trump
vitiated scientific facts on Thursday, helping fossil fuel fat cats by
eliminating the government’s ability to regulate treacherous gases, a reporter
asked what he says to people worried about the very real hazards of a hotter
planet.
“I tell them don’t worry
about it,” he shot back.
The administration has
even coined a word to denigrate those who push back on Trump’s rash policies:
“panican,” as in one who panics.
In a world steeped in
violence and menace, we are constantly being told by the people in charge not
to worry.
Don’t worry about a sweltering Earth.
Don’t worry about all those powerful creeps getting away with abusing young
women exploited by Jeffrey Epstein; instead, just behold the beauty of the
rising Dow, as the abrasive, evasive Pam Bondi suggested at a congressional
hearing Wednesday.
Don’t worry about the
Trump family’s unethical get-rich-quick schemes. Don’t worry about an economy increasingly
catering to the well connected. Don’t worry about the president threatening to
unilaterally set the rules for state elections — Congress be damned.
The pueri aeterni of
Silicon Valley have greased the palm of our King Joffrey in the White House.
And now we are told not to worry about safeguards for A.I., the most
spine-tingling technology ever created.
I interviewed Elon
Musk in 2017, when he still cared about A.I. safety as much as he once cared about
going to the wildest party on Epstein’s island and now cares about constantly sharing deranged
posts about race on X. He told me that the fate of humanity depends on not
allowing the algorithms to be concealed and concentrated in the hands of tech
and government elites.
“It’s great when the
emperor is Marcus Aurelius,” Musk said then. “It’s not so great when the
emperor is Caligula.”
Let’s just say that our
man in the White House is no Marcus Aurelius.
When I reported in Silicon Valley back
then, the debate was whether A.I. would jump to the dark side once it got
smarter than us.
But since then, even the
tech gods who once had good intentions have gone to the dark side, seduced by
the billions to be made on A.I., including on erotica. These geniuses who were
supposed to escort us into a better, safer future turned out to be the biggest
sellouts of all time.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s
chief executive, has welcomed erotica, or “adult mode,” as it’s called, saying
he wants to “treat adult users like adults.”
Once Musk put up an
A.I.-generated picture of himself in a bikini to demonstrate his A.I. model’s
new feature, people used it to manipulate pictures of women online, stripping off
their clothes.
The tech bros are
thrilled with their ability to buy influence in Trump world. (Yes, Jeff Bezos,
I’m talking about “Melania.”)
As Wired reported, the
president of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, was one of Trump’s biggest individual
donors in 2025, to the tune of $25 million. Another $25 million is on the way
to a PAC that fights politicians who favor regulating A.I. OpenAI’s original
mission was to protect humanity, but where’s the money in that?
The tech universe
shuddered this week at alarms from several Paul Reveres.
An urgent post on X titled “Something Big Is Happening,” by
Matt Shumer, the C.E.O. of two small tech companies, went viral. He warned that
A.I. is leaping ahead faster than we think.
“The future is being
shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a
handful of companies … Open AI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind,” he wrote, adding:
“I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job … I tell the A.I.
what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find
the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself.” Now,
he wrote, OpenAI’s newest model is showing judgment, and it knows how to make
the right call on its own.
On Monday, an Anthropic
A.I. safety researcher, Mrinank Sharma, quit his job, posting an apocalyptic warning on X that the “world is in
peril” from A.I., bioweapons and cascading crises.
Anthropic’s C.E.O.,
Dario Amodei, has been the most responsible tech executive in acknowledging the
awesome, hair-curling power of A.I., saying it will “test who we are as a
species” and reveal whether humanity has the maturity to handle this “almost
unimaginable power.” (The Wall Street Journal reported Friday
that the company’s A.I. tool, Claude, had helped the American military capture
Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro.)
Sharma is not sure if humanity has the
maturity to handle A.I. “I’ve repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our
values govern our actions,” he wrote.
He said he will
disappear to England and pursue a poetry degree, signing off with a William
Stafford poem containing a line that augured A.I. dominance: “Nothing you do
can stop time’s unfolding.”
Zoë Hitzig, a researcher
at OpenAI, also quit on Monday. In a guest essay for The New York Times, she said she
had lost faith that OpenAI still wanted to back her work on the two outcomes
she fears most: “a technology that manipulates the people who use it at no cost
and one that exclusively benefits the few who can afford to use it.”
Another OpenAI
executive, Ryan Beiermeister, lost her job in the safety division after
complaining about ChatGPT’s rollout of A.I. erotica, The Journal disclosed.
Beiermeister, The
Journal said, did not think the company had enough guardrails in place to stop
child-exploitation content and wall off adult content from teens.
OpenAI claimed Beiermeister’s
departure was due to sexual discrimination against a male colleague. She
adamantly denied that to The Journal.
Despite the smarmy
reassurances of the tech lords, some A.I. insiders are alarmed by what they’re
seeing.
The people in charge tell us not to
worry. But we should worry. It’s getting scary out there. There’s nothing
artificial about that.
A Fight Democrats Must Win
A Fight Democrats Must Win
Funding for the Department of Homeland Security expired at midnight. A partial government shutdown is now in effect because Democrats refused to vote for a funding bill that included no tangible guardrails on ICE and Border Patrol.
Democrats deserve real credit for taking on this fight so soon after the last shutdown. When the political environment favors us, we tend to slip into a kind of Prevent Defense—take no risks and play not to lose.
This time, Senate Democrats took a big swing because it was morally right—and they did it on the very issue that has historically made them the most nervous.
A year ago, shutting down the Department of Homeland Security over ICE funding would have looked like political suicide. Immigration was Trump’s strongest issue and the one he always leaned on during elections.
But a lot has changed in a year—especially since the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. Immigration is no longer Trump’s strength. It is a vulnerability.
According to Nate Silver’s averages, Trump’s approval rating on immigration is now 12 points underwater.
ICE’s approval rating has dropped roughly 30 points over the past year and now sits about 20 points underwater. Americans increasingly believe ICE is out of control and needs reform. A new NBC poll found:
Nearly three-quarters of respondents say they want U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be reformed or abolished. Large majorities say immigration officers have gone too far. Sixty-three percent say the federal government has gone too far in disregarding local and state governments, compared with 37 percent who say states and localities have gone too far in disregarding federal authority.
In this fight, Democrats are not defending a fringe position. They are fighting for common-sense reforms that are broadly popular. Strong majorities support:
banning the use of masks;
improving training and enforcement standards;
requiring judicial warrants for arrests and searches; and
stronger oversight of ICE and Border Patrol.
One lesson from the last shutdown is that once Trump and congressional Republicans dig in, they are unlikely to cave—even under intense political pressure. Obamacare tax credits were supported by roughly 80 percent of Americans, including a majority of MAGA voters, and Republicans still refused to budge.
That means Democrats will have to see this fight through. They cannot blink. If that means DHS remains partially shut down through the election, so be it. ICE and CBP already have the funding they need. Democrats are willing to fund the rest of DHS. They are not asking for anything radical; keeping the entire department shuttered is Donald Trump’s choice.
The only way Democrats lose this fight is if they cave when the pressure mounts.
That cannot happen. It would be a historically foolish own goal on the eve of what could be a wave election for Democrats.
HEATHER
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At midnight tonight, most of the agencies and services in the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) will run out of funding, as popular fury over the
violence and lawlessness of federal agents from Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Border Patrol made Senate Democrats refuse to
agree to fund DHS without reforms. And yet, because the Republicans lavished
money on ICE and Border Patrol in their July 2025 budget reconciliation
bill—the one they call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—those agencies will
continue to operate. The 260,000 federal employees affected by the partial
shutdown will come from other agencies in DHS, including the Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA), the Transportation Security Agency (TSA), and the
Coast Guard.
A measure to fund DHS passed the House by a majority vote, but in the Senate,
the filibuster allows the Democrats, who are in the minority, to make demands
before the measure can pass. On February 4, Senate minority leader Chuck
Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) sent Senate
majority leader John Thune (R-SD) and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) a
letter outlining demands Democrats want incorporated into a measure to
appropriate more funds for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Those demands are pretty straightforward. The Democrats want federal agents to
enter private homes only with a judicial warrant (as was policy until the
administration produced a secret memo saying that DHS officials themselves
could sign off on raids, a decision that runs afoul of legal interpretations of
the Fourth Amendment). They want agents to stop wearing masks and to have their
names, agencies, and unique ID numbers visible on their uniforms, as law
enforcement officers do. They want an end to racial profiling—that is, agents
detaining individuals on the basis of their skin color, place of employment, or
language—and to raids of so-called sensitive sites: medical facilities,
schools, childcare facilities, churches, polling places, and courts.
They want agents to be required to have a reasonable policy for use of force
and to be removed during an investigation if they violate it. They want federal
agents to coordinate with local and state governments and for those governments
to have jurisdiction over federal agents who break the law. They want DHS
detention facilities to have the same standards as any detention facility and
for detainees to have access to their lawyers. They want states to be able to
sue if those conditions are not met, and they want Congress members to have
unscheduled access to the centers to oversee them.
They want body cameras to be used for accountability but prohibited for
gathering and storing information about protesters. And they want federal
agents to have standardized uniforms like those of regular law enforcement, not
paramilitaries.
As Schumer and Jeffries wrote, these are commonsense measures that protect
Americans’ constitutional rights and ensure responsible law enforcement, and
should apply to all federal activity even without Democrats demanding them.
Democrats said White House offers were insufficient to address their concerns,
although the White House did not make its position public. Before they left
Washington yesterday for a ten-day break, senators refused to fund DHS in its
current state.
Before the vote, administration officials appeared to try to soften the image
of the federal agents who have terrorized Americans, arrested citizens and
legal immigrants as well as undocumented immigrants, and shot people. Trump’s
immigration advisor Tom Homan, who took over in Minneapolis after Border Patrol
agents acting under the leadership of then-commander Greg Bovino shot and
killed a second American citizen in that city, told reporters yesterday that
that administration will end its surge of federal agents into Minneapolis,
saying it had achieved “successful results” including 4,000 people arrested.
Agents will remain in the city, he said, but the surge of thousands of agents
will end. Torey Van Oot of Axios adds that more than a dozen federal
prosecutors resigned after the Department of Justice declined to investigate
the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and support for Trump’s handling of
deportations cratered as Americans saw children tear-gassed and citizens shot.
Acting director of ICE Todd Lyons told the House Homeland Security Committee on
Tuesday that the agency is training agents adequately before they go into the
field and that once there, they are properly enforcing U.S. immigration laws.
“And,” he added, “we are only getting started.”
But Lyons’s claim that federal agents are adequately trained was belied on
Wednesday when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) abruptly closed the
airspace over El Paso, Texas, for what it initially said would be ten days.
Such a closure would shut down all flights below 18,000 feet, including medical
helicopters, and is rare enough that the comparison media used was to the
closure of airspace after 9/11. Confusion reigned, since no one had notified
even the mayor of El Paso, a city of 700,000 people. Shortly afterward, the FAA
reopened the airspace.
Administration officials immediately said the problem was drones flown into the
area by drug cartels, though such drone flights are common. Then the media
reported that the Defense Department had been testing out a new antidrone
defense system without signoff from the FAA on danger to civilian planes. Then
it turned out that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had permitted U.S. Customs
and Border Protection, the parent agency of Border Patrol, to use an antidrone
laser near Fort Bliss, where detainees are housed at Camp East Montana. Someone
then used the laser without informing the FAA. And then it turned out that the
“drones” agents used the laser to shoot down were actually party balloons.
That the Defense Department is loaning a military weapon to CBP is itself
concerning, but that a weapon powerful enough to cause the closure of El Paso’s
airspace was in the hands of someone who mistook balloons for cartel drones is
also a problem. So, too, of course, is that the administration’s initial
impulse was to lie about what happened.
In his testimony, Lyons maintained that ICE is indeed prioritizing the removal
of undocumented immigrants with records of violent crime, enabling Republicans
to claim that Democrats who want to rein ICE in are deliberately endangering
public safety. Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News reported this week that
documents from DHS itself show that fewer than 14% of the nearly 400,000
immigrants arrested in Trump’s first year had either convictions or charges for
violent crimes, with fewer than 2% either charged with or convicted of homicide
or sexual assault.
Leah Feiger of Wired reported today that ICE has been quietly and aggressively
expanding across the United States in the past months. It has bought or leased
new facilities in nearly every state, many of them outside of the country’s
largest cities, although they are concentrated in Texas. Feiger reports that
DHS asked the General Services Administration (GSA), which manages government
properties, to ignore competitive bidding rules and hide lease listings out of
“national security concerns.”
Douglas MacMillan and Jonathan O’Connell of the Washington Post reported today
that ICE officials are planning to spend $38.3 billion to buy warehouses across
the country. ICE will retrofit sixteen of them to become processing centers
that can hold 1,000 to 1,500 detainees at a time before funneling them into
eight megacenters that can hold up to 10,000 detainees each.
The administration has dramatically changed ICE policy to assert the right to
imprison noncitizens until they are deported, even if they are applicants for
asylum. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) made an unannounced oversight visit
to the ICE field facility in Baltimore, Maryland, yesterday. He saw “60 men
packed into a room shoulder-to-shoulder, 24-hours-a-day, with a single toilet
in the room and no shower facilities. They sleep like sardines with aluminum
foil blankets.” Mike Hixenbaugh at NBC News today narrated the life of a
Russian family in the U.S. seeking asylum. For four months, they have been
incarcerated at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas, where there
is little medical care and the food is often spoiled with mold or worms.
In a statement, a spokesperson for DHS accused the media of “peddling hoaxes”
about poor conditions in detention centers.
But DHS has lied about so many things that no one should take their words
seriously. In January, when an ICE agent shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in
Minneapolis, DHS claimed that he had driven away from a “targeted traffic
stop,” crashed into a parked car, and run. When an ICE agent caught up with him
and Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna, DHS said, the men had attacked the agent with a
snow shovel and a broom handle. DHS said an agent had then fired on the men “to
defend his life.” The men escaped but were later captured and charged with
assault.
Yesterday, the Justice Department dropped the charges, saying “newly discovered
evidence” suggested the allegations were false. Aljorna’s lawyer explained: “It
is my understanding that the video surveillance evidence that captured the
incident was materially inconsistent with the federal agent's claims of what
happened.”
Last night, in a deep expose of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her
advisor Corey Lewandowski, Wall Street Journal reporters Michelle Hackman, Josh
Dawsey, and Tarini Parti described a department in chaos. Noem and
Lewandowski—who the authors say are having an affair and essentially run the
department together—are using DHS for their own aggrandizement with an eye to
elevating Noem to the presidency. The reporters detailed the focus on image,
the decimation of ICE by firing or demoting 80% of the career field leadership
that was in place when they arrived, the apparent steering of contracts to
allies, and Noem and Lewandowski's excessive demands, including “a luxury 737
MAX jet, with a private cabin in back, for their travel around the country.”
DHS is currently leasing the $70 million plane but is in the process of buying
it.
DHS and the violence of federal agents have exacerbated rather than silenced
opposition to the Trump administration, causing a crisis for it as the American
people increasingly turn against it. Trump is adamant that Republicans must win
the 2026 elections and so is calling for new election laws, claiming that
Democrats can win elections only through the illegal votes of undocumented
immigrants.
This ties DHS and American elections together. Today Noem told reporters in
Arizona that Congress must pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or
SAVE) America, measure to secure U.S. elections, lying that noncitizens are
voting for Democrats and thus enabling them to win elections. This is an old
saw Republicans have used since 1994, the year after the Democrats passed the
Motor Voter Act, and it has been repeatedly debunked. Indeed, when reporters
asked for an example of noncitizen voting, she said she couldn’t point to a
case but assumed it happened. The bill not only would require voters to show
either a passport or a birth certificate with the name matching theirs in order
to register, but would also require states to purge their voting rolls every
month. The measure passed the House Wednesday but must overcome a filibuster to
pass the Senate.
Jen Fifield of ProPublica and Zach Despart of ProPublica and the Texas Tribune
reported today that DHS has been using an electronic tool called Systematic
Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE), previously used to check
eligibility for public benefits, to find noncitizen voters in a database made
up of confidential data from different government agencies. That information
includes confidential data from the Social Security Administration, accessed by
the Department of Government Efficiency. Republican secretaries of state in
twenty-seven states have agreed to use SAVE to check their voter rolls.
But Fifield and Despart report that the system makes "persistent
mistakes,” frequently assessing naturalized citizens as noncitizens. The system
automatically refers those individuals to DHS for possible criminal
investigation, and in certain states, individuals have had to prove their
citizenship to be reinstated as voters. “This is not ready for prime time,”
county clerk Brianna Lennon of Boone County, Missouri, told the reporters. “And
I’m not going to risk the security and the constitutional rights of my voters
for bad data.”
And so Trump clearly thinks he must take matters into his own hands. Although
the Constitution is quite clear that it is Congress, and Congress alone, that
can make laws, today his social media account announced he intends to change
the nation’s voting laws all by himself. The account posted: “The Democrats
refuse to vote for Voter I.D., or Citizenship. The reason is very simple—They
want to continue to cheat in Elections. This was not what our Founders desired.
I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on
this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near
future. There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by
Congress or not! Also, the People of our Country are insisting on Citizenship,
and No Mail-In Ballots, with exceptions for Military, Disability, Illness, or
Travel. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”
Today, ICE protesters carried a giant U.S. Constitution through the streets of
Minneapolis, demanding that federal agents honor the rights the Framers
established with that foundational document.
Excising the Cancer in Our Institutions
Excising the Cancer in Our Institutions
We need to start thinking about how we are going to separate the sheep from the wolves in sheep's clothing.
One thing that was clear from Attorney General Pam Bondi’s testimony temper tantrum in front of the House Judiciary Committee this week is that the Justice Department as we knew it is gone. Over. Kaput. Buh-bye. I had predicted as much with the FBI last August, but I thought the lawyers might last a bit longer. Nope. The Justice Department’s workforce is now so drained that it’s advertising for lawyers on X — and the main criteria appears to be that you support Trump:
Just as context, working for the Justice Department used to be one of the most competitive, prestigious jobs you could get as a lawyer. Only a select few joined the entry-level honors program right out of law school. Most people — even top law students coming out of top law schools — spent several years working for law firms before vying for highly coveted spots at U.S. Attorney’s offices across the country or at Main Justice.
Now you send a DM on X to some guy named Chad.
The FBI and the Justice Department are the two agencies I pay the closest attention to, but this same “hollowing out” — through a combination of mass firings and/or resignations — has happened across our government. For the agencies that weren’t eliminated entirely, like USAID, the ranks are slowly being replaced by Trump loyalists, who must make it clear to whoever is hiring them that their loyalty is to the President, not the Constitution. That “loyalty test” is becoming obvious when we see journalists being arrested, search warrants executed against state election facilities, and the attorney general acting like a mean girl on crack in the halls of Congress. To use John Dean’s famous phrase, there’s a cancer in the presidency — and it’s now spread to every corner of our federal government.
There is obviously going to have to be a reconstruction of sorts to rebuild the institutions that have been hobbled, decimated, and corrupted (and a deconstruction, in the case of the White House ballroom). But this will present a dilemma regarding how to deal with the people who will be currently serving as civil servants when Trump leaves power. How do you separate those who were there when he took office and stuck it out, believing they could do some good (or perhaps cancel out the bad) until things returned to “normal,” and the loyalists hired by Chad and others like him? Are there gradations in between that should matter?
One possibility to address this problem is to just do exactly what the Trump administration did: mass firings. Purge everyone, and then hire again from scratch. This has a nice “clean slate” feel to it, but it doesn’t exactly help build stability. For one thing, it looks like a tit-for-tat, and in doing so creates a norm that every administration that comes in can just purge everyone in the federal civicl service and start over. (It’s hard to create a bright line rule that differentiates “righteous” purges from ones that aren’t.) Another possibility is to not necessarily fire everyone, but make them reapply, so that they get reassessed — perhaps with a full background check or whatever other kind of vetting was normally done that got jettisoned by the Trump administration. But that is slow and cumbersome, and it also potentially allows people who were complicit in really bad things to slip through the cracks and stay.
I’ve been thinking a lot about another approach I have come across in my book research that was taken in the Allied occupation zone after World War II, during the process of denazification. The Allies faced a very difficult problem, which was how to identify various levels of culpability and provide commensurate consequences — but to do so in a way that preserved democratic values of transparency, due process, and fairness.
Their answer was to create Allied Control Council Directive 38, a sorting system based on questionnaires (Fragebogen) that assessed an individual’s involvement with the Nazi regime. These questionnaires inquired about personal history; secondary and higher education; professional and trade training; record of full time employment, experience and military service; membership and role in all types of organizations before and after the Hitler regime, especially the Nazi Party and its organizations; writings and speeches since 1923; income and assets since 1 January 1931; and travel and residence abroad.
Based on the answers to these questions, Germans were divided into five categories:
“Major Offenders” (Hauptschuldige): these included senior Nazi leaders, SS leadership, high-level party officials, and those directly responsible for major crimes;
“Offenders” (Belastete): individuals defined as “activists,” “militarists,” and “profiteers” who exercised authority, engaged in brutal acts, and materially benefited from or enforced Nazi policies;
“Lesser Offenders” (Minderbelastete): opportunistic individuals who joined the party for career, pressure, or social status. They either participated or cooperated with the regime but lacked decision-making power, or were akin to Offenders but “without having manifested despicable or brutal conduct”;
“Followers” (Mitläufer): passive participants, often party members in name only and people who went along without enthusiasm or initiative. (Mitläufer literally translates as “one who runs along with others”); and finally
“Exonerated Persons” (Entlastete): those who resisted, were coerced, or actively opposed the regime and suffered disadvantages as a result.
The law also established a special German tribunals (Spruchkammern) in the U.S. occupation zone to adjudicate the individuals once their level of culpability was determined from the questionnaire. One thing I found interesting was that the burden was on the individual to prove their innocence, rather than for the tribunal to prove their guilt, which reflected the presumption that everyone was complicit unless they could demonstrate otherwise.
The Frageboden/Spruchkammern system became increasingly ineffective as a sorting mechanism, partly because of the sheer volume of people that had to be processed (approximately 13.7 million Germans over the age of 18 were processed in the U.S. zone alone), and partly because the judges who were adjudicating the system were themselves complicit to some degree in the regime as well.
But cleaning up the federal government — and the civil service more specifically — could be a much more manageable task in this regard, one that might be more amenable to this type of “sorting.” One thing is for sure: There is no way to go back to “business as usual” when this is all over. Some deep surgery will be needed before we can return our governing institutions to a remotely healthy state.