I’ve been beating the drums for years about reforming the Supreme Court to bring its corruption and anti-democracy to heal. In general I’ve avoided getting very detailed about what reform would look like for two reasons. First, there are technical details I lack knowledge about and which others are more able to address. Second, my focus is on building support for the premise, the necessity of reform. Getting too bound up or identified with really specific reforms can get in the way of that.

However, I get asked this a lot. So I wanted to explain the outline of the reform path that makes the most sense to me. I put this forward as a concept, with the understanding that some points might need fine tuning either for technical or constitutional reasons.

I doubt I’ll get much argument from TPM readers when I say that the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v United States, the immunity decision, is among the Court’s most corrupt decisions. But even many of those who recognize the fraudulent and anti-constitutional character of this decision still often agree that it would be a bad thing if ex-presidents were routinely or even frequently brought up on charges for their actions as president. Or, more specifically, they think it would be a bad thing if such charges became part of a partisan game of tit-for-tat in which presidents who had not abused their office were brought up on frivolous charges as a matter of partisan payback.

In this post I’d like to ask you to question that assumption. Of course, I don’t want the justice system abused. I don’t want anyone brought up on bogus or frivolous charges. But this is a risk we should be willing to take, and, more specifically, it should be one we ask anyone who wants the job of president to accept.

As you’ve seen, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of birthright citizenship by a 6 — or perhaps 5 1/2 — vote margin. See Kate Riga’s report on the majority decision and Josh Kovensky’s piece on the dissenters’ goal of doing away with birthright citizenship. I repeat my point from yesterday which is that the occasional non-corrupt decision doesn’t make the Court any less corrupt or in need of reform. In this case, in a sane world, the dissents from Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas would on their own be sufficient basis for impeachment and removal from office. One might as well believe or pretend to believe that the federal senate is unconstitutional despite its being unambiguously written into the structure of the document itself. The level of abuse of power that is the basis of these dissents can only be seen as criminal in nature and grows from the culture of corruption and impunity that now reigns on the Court.

This likely goes without saying. But I’ll say it anyway and add a few points. The occasional non-terribly ruling by the corrupt Supreme Court doesn’t reduce the necessity of reform one iota. I’m not as wound up as I might have been by the anti-constitutional and frankly absurd independent agency ruling only because it was telegraphed so long in advance. (ICYMI, the Court ruled that the president has the authority to fire civil servants, unless they work for the Federal Reserve. More from Kate Riga on that here). I call the ruling absurd only because of what I guess we need to call the as-yet-tact “sound money” doctrine which makes the Fed somehow different from every other independent agency because of the more general “because” doctrine.

What I want to note here is what is semi-taken for granted even by many who despise the Court’s corruption. And that is the way it is more or less assumed now that any law, prohibition, or imperative assumed or embraced by Democrats goes up for review by the Court as though it were some kind of Guardian Council or perhaps more aptly an upper legislative house like the House of Lords. Of course judicial review is not new. That goes back 225 years. Key pieces of New Deal legislation were overruled by the pre-Carolene Products Court. And you have the entire Lochner era in which the Court held that most of what we would now call garden-variety regulation was unconstitutional.

I’ve been observing the unfolding conversation about big DSA wins in New York City on Tuesday and specifically the clout Mayor Zohran Mamdani has gained because he went three for three in congressional endorsements. It’s a complex picture and I’m generally more sanguine about what’s happening than others. As I wrote, I think Chevalier doesn’t have any business in Congress. Lander and Valdez are simply the left wing of the Democratic party and on that front even Lander and Valdez are very different candidates. I may do a separate post on Chevalier’s extremism on Israel-Palestine and, yes, Jews, as well as other issues. Important topic but not the topic of this post.

I’ve made the point a few times that our political language and mental geography assumes that there are two political spectra in the Democratic party, one that is right/centrist to left and another that is accommodation to fight. It’s often assumed that these pretty neatly line up — progs and left-wingers are up for a fight but the more center-left or liberal folks are more cautious, institutionalist or even accommodationist. And yet there’s no real connection between these two things.

So far, so good. You’ve heard me make this general point many times. But it is really on the center-left, or liberals, to make clear that this isn’t the case. And to a great degree they are not — not convincingly — though there’s been progress on this front over the last eighteen months. And in a political climate in which people are both really angry and really scared and think major change is necessary, the old rhetoric, the old posture just isn’t going to cut it. It doesn’t speak to anyone. It seems jarringly out of touch with the moment.

You’ve now probably seen news that Trump plans to use the U.S. Postal Service as a key part of his war on the 2026 midterm. Specifically, according to testimony Wednesday from Postmaster General David Steiner, if a state doesn’t hand over its absentee and/or voter list to the federal government, the post office simply won’t deliver that state’s ballots. This morning a court blocked aspects of the policy.

Lets start by saying this is blatantly anti-constitutional, though of course it’s possible that the corrupt Supreme Court will allow it.

But this front in Trump’s war against the 2026 election is illustrative of a number of critical factors in the challenge before us.

One of the big stories coming out last night’s primaries are the wins for House candidates endorsed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. He endorsed three House primary candidates and each won. Those included Brad Lander, who we might call a left-leaning member of the pre-AOC/DSA New York Democratic Party who allied late with Mamdani during the mayoral primary in which he was also a candidate; Claire Valdez, who won an open primary against Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso; and Darializa Avila Chevalier who defeated Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a five term Dominican-American rep and longtime NYC pol. So two wins against incumbents (Lander over Rep. Dan Goldman and Chevalier over Espaillat) and another against a quasi-incumbent, since Reynoso is the sitting borough president and had the endorsement of Rep. Nydia Velázquez, whose retirement opened up the seat.

There was voting in New York state today and I had to choose a candidate in a race I’ve observed, but not really as a voter. Who should I pick? I understood the question a little better when I explained my thinking after the fact to my son.

I wanted to share a few thoughts with you about this email from a TPM Reader from Maine which I posted last week. It crystallized a few thoughts I had about the Maine Senate primary and politics more generally. In general, I’ve always been pretty against purity tests in politics, though the label “purity tests” somewhat prejudges the question. TPM Reader JU tells us that she didn’t rank Graham Platner first (Maine has ranked choice). But that she wasn’t disappointed that he prevailed. She also believes that most of the morality tale interpretations of what happened in the primary miss what’s driving Maine voters. It’s not that they don’t care about Platner’s baggage, or that they’ve adopted some Trumpian cynicism. They just have a different understanding of character tests in politicians mount to. (You can read the post here.)

Basically I agree with JU. But I want to abstract this out, to at least a degree, from Platner’s specific issues because I know people have strong feelings about that race and the specific accusations that were made against him. Possibly the argument I’m making is valid but I’m misapplying it to Platner. But I’m trying to articulate a more general point rather than relitigate the Platner primary.

We seem to be in one of those very MAGA interludes in which members of Donald Trump’s base are not so much rebelling as in a process of mourning. They are struggling to find a path to discovering that up turns out to be down, or that the things that they have always professed to care about do not matter because Trump has announced they do not matter. Lindsey Graham seems to be maybe 3/4s through the process. Ted Cruz is working on it. But some of his supporters, especially a number of those who aren’t in elective politics are having a harder time, at least for now. The dynamic, the level of shock is very straightforward. Most of MAGAworld has gone along with the premise that the war in Iran, or Trump’s management of it, has actually been going great all along. Trump is underestimated, the Lamestream media, etcetera. Wait to see the final deal. Trump won’t let Iran get away with anything.

A lot of these folks are now coming into contact with the reality of the situation, from zero to 60 in two or three seconds. It’s pretty jarring. The deal as structured, from what I can tell at least, contains more or less exactly the details that Iranian state media has been reporting for weeks and which the White House claimed was IRGC propaganda. Maybe the U.S. isn’t contributing to the $300 billion Iran rebuilding fund. But it’s overseeing and guaranteeing its creation. So it’s a fairly minor distinction. There are also some odd signals from within the White House that they might pull the plug on the whole thing. For instance, JD Vance agreed with Megyn Kelly that the deal could be scrapped if Trump’s supporters had an “utter meltdown.” Trump has hinted that he might scrap the deal too but has mainly focused on attacking those who are pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, perhaps not even an agreement.