Callais, combined with today’s court ruling in Virginia, has jolted Democrats and sent commentators into bemoaning an accelerating “race to the bottom” and, to paraphrase Jeff Zeleny on CNN this afternoon, the end to norms that have organized American politics and redistricting for generations.

I’d like to offer a significantly different view of the situation. What we have seen over recent months is that Democrats have largely abandoned the mode of the last decade plus in which with one hand they fought the partisan battles of the day and with the other assume the mantle of defending the political norms Republicans have already destroyed. In other words, it was the responsibility of Democrats both to be contestants and referees. Republicans violated norms; Democrats tried to uphold them. That of course meant no partisan battle was ever on equal terms and Republicans almost always won them.

Yesterday, Lauren Egan — who authors The Bulwark’s newsletter about Democrats — sent out a newsletter edition entitled “Get Ready for the Dem Court-Expansion Litmus Test.” (Egan tends to be fairly dismissive of Democrats’ intentions, with a kind of mainstream media vibe.) Today Chief Justice John Roberts is complaining that the public is misinformed thinking that the Supreme Court is made up of corrupt political actors. As I’ve written repeatedly, there are deep inertia pools of opposition to Supreme Court reform. It’s a much heavier, though just as critical, lift than contesting the gerrymandering wars or abolishing the filibuster. But these and other hints show that a movement and a coherent push are beginning to take shape.

I’m hoping to bring you some news on the DOJ-in-Exile front in the not-too-distant future. It was probably simply too early in the spring and summer of 2025. It’s not too early now. But the DOJ-in-Exile idea was and is part of a more general ambition and agenda — to create a baseline record, a predicate and an expectation of future accountability for the Trump administration’s criminal conduct. Some of that effort is a kind of opposition therapy, resisting the authoritarian aim of convincing the public that the law, the ecosystem of criminal accountability has disappeared. It heartens people. It provides a framework of expectation: the law hasn’t disappeared. We’re in an interregnum. It will return, as will accountability. The battle over expectations about the future is a central battle in any authoritarian takeover.

But it’s not solely a matter of heartening, strengthening the morale of the opposition. It is also very directly and literally laying the groundwork for criminal accountability for a renegade executive and all the corrupt actors and criminals who now populate the executive branch.

Living as we must, in history, it is always important to distinguish between the mostly contingent events of the moment and the deeper trends that will affect the future. Call it, perhaps, the difference between the libretto and the score. I was thinking about this while I was trying to make sense of the latest jousting over the Strait of Hormuz. Trump remains in the same space, having gotten himself into the crisis with no plan for how to get out of it. He’s now making limited efforts to contest control of the Strait. Iran says it remains completely in control of it. But, in a way, that’s a trap for Trump, because if passage through the Strait requires using military force, it’s precisely the use of military force, the danger and uncertainty it creates, which makes it impossible to use the Strait as a secure and safe means of transit. Force may be the medium-term answer to Trump’s problem. But in the short term it makes things worse. And Trump’s not a delaying-gratification, thinking-long-term kind of guy.

But the deeper impact of this crisis, one entirely of Trump’s own making, has been to convince many countries, especially but not only in East Asia, that oil and gas are too vulnerable to price shocks and supply instability. Meanwhile, renewables like solar and wind have now crossed the threshold where they are not only simply cheaper than fossils fuels but, as a tech product, will continue to get cheaper over time. Wind and solar energy can be produced entirely within your sovereign borders. So the Strait crisis is looking like it may be a turning point in the climate/renewables energy transition.

I’ve been talking over the last few weeks about critical reforms that are necessary to make any kind of civic democratic revival in the U.S. even possible. The ending the filibuster and reforming the Supreme Court are high on that list. I want to talk about related topic today that we can only see if we take few steps back from the immediacy of day to day events over the last year and a half. These are tied to the over-mighty nature of the American presidency — or rather, the over-mighty potential of the American presidency, which a mix of Donald Trump’s degenerate personality and the theories of the conservative legal movement have brought to the fore.

The difference I want to note is between administration and ownership. We talk a lot these days about how Donald Trump seems to think he owns the United States – he puts his brand, his likeness, his signature on everything. He talks about his generals, his military, etc. But there’s a more concrete and specific way this is true and it goes to the heart of what needs to be fixed about the American presidency and the whole constitutional system.

Here’s a brief follow up on yesterday’s post about the corrupt Supreme Court. Yesterday I noticed law professor Steve Vladeck arguing on Bluesky that civic democrats are making a mistake by seeking to “fix” the Court by, as he puts it, “permanently weakening it as an institution.” The gist of his argument is that you constrain the Court by “forcing it to look over its shoulder” as it decides case. In a post on the topic, he writes, “as compared to a time when Congress controlled things like when the Court sits; where it sits; which cases it hears; the Court’s budget; and what the justices must do when not hearing cases (i.e., ride their circuits), today’s Court can do just about whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and all without realistically having to look over its shoulder.”

I told him that I actually agree with the concept of having the court “look over its shoulder” — that you have a series of teeth in place to react to overreach. I’m not sure about the best method of applying that pressure. But I agree with the general principle. Or, rather, I did agree with it — but I think we’ve missed the window for that kind of intervention from Congress. (You can see our brief exchange here.)

It’s a good day to return to the question of the Supreme Court’s corruption and the necessity of reforming it in order to make democratic self-government possible again in the United States. The federal constitution is an expansive document. Within the system begun with Marbury v. Madison – which is subject to many reasonable critiques – it is possible to have more liberal or conservative jurisprudences, loosely tethered to the progress of presidencies and senates. The Roberts court is a different beast. It is the product of a decades-long effort to corrupt the federal judiciary. That degree of corruption first came into full view in the second decade of this century when the Court openly began to do three closely interrelated but conceptually distinct things.

First, The Meaning of Words is For Little People.

The Court has, with increasing boldness, manufactured new doctrines and text out of the constitution which simply do not exist in the document. Often they are implicitly or even explicitly ruled out by the plain text itself. The greatest example is the 2024 presidential immunity decision, a ruling contradicted by all the history of the document as well as its clear language. The framers knew how to create immunity. They did it for the work of Congress. They declined to do it for Presidents. The entirety of the decision is manufactured out of whole clothe. Whether the majority falsified this immunity because they thought it should exist or specifically for the benefit of Donald Trump hardly matters. It is corrupt, illegitimate and a wholesale attack on the constitution itself. The Court have also increasingly resorted to plainly absurd textual analysis to change the meaning of constitutional language the meaning of which has never been in doubt. The current birthright citizenship case, whatever the majority decides, is another example.

Second, The Choose Your Own Adventure Constitution.

Closely related to point one, the Court no longer has any consistent or even comprehensible jurisprudence. It simply has political goals it seeks to achieve – presidential immunity, an increasingly absolute right to firearms, a 14th amendment focused primarily on race not actually existing. Arguments are chosen by convenience simply as backfill to arrive at the desired end. The corruption often emerges most clearly in those brief moments when the logical conclusions of the Court’s own arguments are too much for even it to bear. Again, we have a recent example. Presidents can fire anyone in the executive branch based on nothing more than the presidential will, even when Congress has specifically given them protections against such dismissals. Except the Federal Reserve, even thought it is by every measure an independent federal agency constitutionally indistinguishable from the rest. Why is it different? Because Federalist Society ideologues actually don’t like inflationary monetary policy. So in this one case, it’s different … even when it’s not.

Third, Political Power if For Republicans Only.

While the corrupt majority has consistently advanced and enforced an ideological vision of how the country should be run it has another simpler brief: not allowing Democrats to govern when they are in power. When Republicans are in power the powers of presidency are almost limitless; when it’s Democrats the office is feeble and hemmed in by a cobweb of invented doctrines. We had the ironic benefit of two Trump presidencies sandwiching a Biden presidency to make this principle of action crystal clear. Quite simply, the corrupt majority ensures that only Republicans actually get the fruits of political victories.

In our thinned out political discourse people often use the term “corruption” to refer only to venal corruption – bribes, conflicts of interest mostly involving money, kept Justices like Clarence Thomas. That is neither the only nor the most significant form of corruption. In most cases venal corruption is significantly self-correcting. It gets exposed and prosecuted. The more general meaning of corruption is when a form of rot takes over an office or institution because of systemic and ingrained abuses of power. That is the case with the Supreme Court and it’s especially dangerous with the Supreme Court because a mix of history and restraint have left very few checks on its abuses. The Supreme Court is given specific powers to achieve specific ends. Over the last 15 years it has assumed vast new powers and used them consistently for anti-constitutional ends. Far from interpreting or defending the constitution it is at war with it. An orderly, proper and essential process of reform is entirely possible by simple statute law on simple majority votes.

This morning I was reading this Puck article about the public relations woes of the AI industry. In short, having the CEOs and industry leaders tell everyone for years that their product will lose jobs for half the population and quite possibly lead to the extinction of humanity led to some serious reputational challenges for AI. (The article is paywalled. But that and what follows includes the gist.) Author Ian Krietzberg correctly notes that this isn’t just blather or bad messaging. It’s an investment strategy. Silicon Valley venture investing is essentially a well-oiled FOMO machine. Getting people to invest means pumping up the disruptive, game-changing nature of the product. Disruptive dislocation is the basis of all Silicon Valley venture investing since it’s the basis of the stratospheric growth of a small percentage of bets which makes the whole economy make sense.

But that’s not the entirety of it. Or rather the mentality of the key players in the space is so bound up and shaped by the dynamics of the investment logic. In so many words, it breeds a feral mentality and personality type. It’s no accident that you have architects of that world having famous mottos like “move fast and break things.” It’s a culture based on hyperbole and valorizing transgressive attitudes and actions.

It’s difficult to imagine anything more perverse, authoritarian, diseased or corrupt than the immediate push to back President Trump’s “ballroom” as a response to security failures revealed in the shooting incident at the White House Correspondents Dinner. It involves so many overlapping bad ideas, bad motives and even bad people that it requires a some organization and staging to cover them all.

Let’s dive in.

First, despite the chorus of claims, this was not in any sense a security failure. It was a success. A man rushed a security perimeter inside the Washington Hilton — far from the actual festivities and protectees — and he was stopped. Initial reports suggested the gunman was stopped just before or even while entering the ballroom. Neither is true. He was on a different floor. The point of Secret Service security is not to prevent every violent incident but any that endanger the President or other protectees.

One of my great meta-journalistic interests is to observe the moments when more or less obvious political realities enter D.C. conventional wisdom. They’re not strongly overlapping Venn diagrams. They often diverge pretty dramatically. I noticed one of those moments Saturday when Axios published this piece entitled “Term-limited Trump mortgages GOP’s future.” The headline mostly speaks for itself. President Trump won’t face voters again. So he’s increasingly indifferent to his political standing or perhaps more specifically unwilling to shift from or limit unpopular policies. It’s true that there are big consequences for Trump in the midterm elections. But even in the biggest blowout election Democrats aren’t going to gain supermajorities that would allow them to pass veto-proof legislation or remove Trump from office. Given the scale of High Court corruption, investigations will amount to trench warfare.