I’ve told you a few times of my difficulty launching the DOJ-in-exile project. Such is life. But there’s another set of actions, much easier to do, not requiring any organization or concerted action, which is just as important. We hear a lot of Trump administration actions decried, denounced and so forth, as they should be. What I would like to hear more clearly is that with this or that criminal or unconstitutional action, the next time Democrats control the government the actions will be reversed and those who acted criminally will be prosecuted. This also applies to bad policy. So, for instance, with the absurd expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Democrats should be saying clearly that once they are back in power, that whole expansion is going to be reversed. People signing up for all those new jobs should know that now. Democrats couldn’t reverse those things as long as Trump’s in power and has a veto pen. But they might be able to deny more funding as soon as 2027.

An onslaught of bad news for the rule of law over the past few hours:

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The term “constitutional crisis” gets used a lot these days. By a very fair definition we’ve been in one since January. A more apt and consequential meaning, however, is a crisis in which the legitimacy and continuation of the state rests in the balance or whether it fragments and degenerates into civil war, military rule or state disintegration. Today President Trump proposed something that, to my view, for the first time provides a path to such a crisis.

We’ve got more from Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL), the avatar of post-law Washington DC, where they let you do it if you’re a Republican.

Remember all the way back in February DC police were called to Mills’ apartment over an alleged assault of a woman who was not his wife. (Mills’ wife lives back in his home district. She’s a kind of Schrodinger’s Wife, but we’ll get back to that.) Subsequent news confirmed that the woman was Mills’ DC girlfriend, and when we last checked in on this story a couple weeks ago she still appeared to be his girlfriend, notwithstanding the alleged assault. (She soon recanted her accusation after the incident.) DC law being under the management of Jan. 6 attorney Ed Martin at the time meant Mills skated on that incident, though there was some question of whether the DC police might also have botched the initial arrest and investigation in ways that might have made prosecution difficult even if Republicans were still required to follow the law in DC.

Then three weeks ago we learned that Mills was in the process of being evicted from his $21,000-a-month DC apartment, which he appeared to stop paying rent on right after the alleged assault.

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I wanted to flag for you what I think is an important shift in the assumptions and behaviors of key institutionalist or middle-of-the-road Democrats. Here I don’t mean ideology so much as behavior, the critical spectrum between fight and norms.

Four days ago, Chuck Schumer or, most likely, someone on his social media team, posted a screen shot of an AP headline that read “Senate heads home with no deal to speed confirmations as irate Trump tells Schumer to ‘go to hell.'”

The White House has been making noises about President Trump being concerned or unhappy about starvation in Gaza. After his comments over the weekend, Axios reported today that the U.S. is mulling a “take over” of aid provision in Gaza because Israel isn’t up to the task. But there are no specifics and no timeline. VP JD Vance also made some generic comments that Israel should increase the pace of aid. But the issue really has nothing to do with increasing the pace of aid or getting more money from donor countries in the region. The issue is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a U.S.-based non-profit created back in the February to take over food aid from the United Nations and the various NGOs that work with the UN. It wasn’t in addition. The UN and the existing NGOs were booted out and the GHF took over. It’s executive chairman is Johnnie Moore, a U.S. evangelical leader and businessman who started his career as the campus minister and senior VP at Liberty University.

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I want to address the questions now about redistricting: specifically, what should Democrats in reliably blue states do, if anything, to counter what’s happening in Texas? The answer is simple. We are in the current situation to a decisive degree because the forces of civic democracy have not been willing to use political power with anything like the ruthlessness or aggressiveness of the authoritarian right. The answer is simple. States like California and New York should gerrymander their states to neutralize the Texas power grab. Since more Democratic states have non-partisan commissions, by definition the blue states have more to gain. What about the point of principle? If I were in the positions of the Governors of California or New York I would say if Texas desists or undoes its redistricting and stets it back to the previous maps, their states will do the same. This satisfies any point of principle. We need a national redistricting law to create a common framework. Having only one side fighting is stupid. The reality is that the United States is a nation-state. Democracy will stand or fall at that level.

This will become much more relevant when Donald Trump is no longer in power. But the old system has been shattered. Ignore the norms and follow the law. A new system will have to be built to replace the old one, which can’t be resuscitated.