"Freedom of Navigation"? from an "Ill-Advised War"!

 

Anyone outside White House vortex of spin and lies knew the die was cast as soon as Iran demonstrated its ability to seize the Strait of Hormuz and hold the world’s energy markets hostage. With that, the vaunted principle of “freedom of navigation” that the United States has stood behind not only in the Middle East but around the world was shattered. And, as we are now witnessing, a crack in a fundamental pillar of U.S. power has dire consequences for the U.S.’s stature in the world and the rules-based system that has largely preserved peace and ensured prosperity for the Free World.

There is no such thing as “partial” or “conditional” freedom of navigation of the world’s oceans and waterways. The diplomatic contortions the U.S. continues deploying are something to behold. “Any fees in the Strait of Hormuz would be voluntary,” suggested a diplomat from Oman, recently enlisted by Iran to obtain its pound of flesh from the Trump negotiators. Iran, however, was not playing along: Of course the payments would be mandatory. (Who would pay otherwise?) 

The New York Times explained: “Call it voluntary if you like — Hormuz was completely open before this war, and now it isn’t,” said H.A. Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a research organization in London. “That is not Oman’s doing, they never wanted this. All this hassle is part of Washington’s bill for starting an ill-advised war.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, reliably disingenuous (unless he somehow believes the claptrap he parrots), insists that “the United States would oppose any scenario in which use of the strait was monetized, regardless of whether it was called ‘a fee or a toll or a donation.’” The U.S. can oppose it, but there is no reason to doubt that Donald Trump and his hapless negotiators will simply give way on this bedrock principle.

Donald Trump’s nonstop lies about our control of the Strait cannot alter the new power dynamic in the region, as Foreign Policy’s Keith Johnson details: 

The United States expended a large portion of its munitions, both precision-guided bombs and missiles such as Tomahawks and advanced missile interceptors such as Patriots, in a multiweek burst of “epic fury” in order to create a situation where Iran believes it will remain in control of one of the world’s key shipping corridors (and may well do so), all while ensuring for itself sanctions relief and billions of dollars in economic oxygen.

While U.S. President Donald Trump still mulls the idea of restarting the war with Iran, few take that seriously because kinetic action achieved little except higher gasoline prices, and the U.S. midterm elections are now even closer. To get a short-term peace, Trump offered all carrots and no sticks. Even future carrots: The MOU actually commits the United States to refraining from future sanctions on Iran.

Sure enough, Trump’s flimsy memorandum of understanding has become Iran’s mechanism to exert its leverage over the Strait, angle for sanctions relief, pursue access to frozen funds, and haul in international reconstruction funds — all without making binding commitments to address the ostensible reason Trump launched his reckless war, its nuclear weapons program.

Brookings Institution’s Burt Jones observed recently that “Iran [showed] that it can flex the major muscle that it has, which is to constrict shipping through Hormuz, and it can withstand the price that the West would impose on it.” Having accomplished that, nothing that will occur in post-war talks is likely to alter the new regional reality: 

Iran comes out of the war “in a stronger position than we went in.”

In reporting on Iran’s newfound negotiating partner, the New York Times reported last week: Iran and U.S.-allied Oman are moving forward with plans to collect payment for ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz, despite public American objections, according to an Iranian official and four diplomats with knowledge of the matter.

If enacted, the plans would be a significant change from the prewar status in the strategic waterway, underscoring how the American Israeli decision to attack Iran on Feb. 28 has changed the Middle East in far-reaching and unanticipated ways.

Demonstrating Iran’s newfound confidence, “Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired missiles at two commercial ships near the Strait of Hormuz early Tuesday,” the Wall Street Journal reported. It is just the latest sign that the shift in power in the region has become more profound as the war played out.

 Kari Heerman of the Brookings Institution explained: “Iran did not only assert control over the strait, it also experimented a little bit with politically conditioned access, offering discounts to its friends and higher rates to its enemies.” Heerman noted in analyzing how “freedom of navigation” has lost any meaning. “[T]hat’s a major departure from not only the status quo ante, it also presents major challenges for international maritime law.”

We hear each week that the talks are at risk of “collapsing” or that the “fragile truce” is at risk. Iran, with Oman’s aid, is systematically asserting long-term control of the Strait. Trump has zero interest in returning to full-scale hostilities; the economic sanctions that have constrained Iran are already being unwound; and the entire topic is a political loser for Trump. As oil prices gradually drift downward, Trump is less inclined to restart major military operations. The war is over, as both sides know. The memorandum talks are merely the means of tallying the cost to U.S.’s international standing.

Given all this, much of the Iran coverage has taken on an air of unreality. The Trump regime pretends to be engaged in grown-up statecraft; legacy media coverage regurgitates the Trump team’s assertions that Iran is desperate for a deal. The headlines take at face value the threat that the U.S. would resume a full-scale fight; but no one engaged in the talks believes that is remotely possible.

Rather than frame the news of the day around what the Trump regime is saying about events (Trump ready to destroy Iran again!), coverage of the talks should lay out the facts to educate the public about the new balance of power (Iran using muscle to extract economic benefits from Strait of Hormuz).

The U.S. has sacrificed a cardinal principle of a rules-based international order, freedom of navigation of the seas, which is a strategic defeat of immense importance.

Meanwhile, the Republican Congress, having entirely abandoned its constitutional and oversight role in America’s disastrous war, is equally responsible for this debacle. Republicans have made the case better than the most esteemed constitutional scholars: allowing the president (especially one as ignorant and reckless as this) unchecked control of foreign policy is a recipe for constitutional chaos and national security ruin.

Democrats need to keep the pressure on, insisting on comprehensive hearings and definitive committee reports to document the serial blunders in launching and conducting the war, tally the human and financial costs, and assess the diplomatic, economic, and strategic consequences of Trump’s catastrophe. Republicans have disqualified themselves from holding power. It will be up to Democrats to reassert Congress’s role as a critical constitutional player in matters of war and peace — and deal with the consequences of the loss of freedom of navigation of critical waterways such as the Strait of Hormuz.

-Jennifer Rubin, The Contrarian is community-supported. Help fund bold journalism and critical lawsuits to stop Trump’s corruption by becoming a paid subscriber. Join the fight now.

 

Reining in a Rogue Supreme Court: It is up to Congress to use its legitimate Article I powers to do so

At this American Celebration time, masses will visit the National Archives to see our founding documents, originals under bulletproof glass. Those who examine the Constitution, across several cases, will see clearly the Framers’ intent. Article I, on the Congress, is detailed in its descriptions of elections and powers, and is twice as long as Article II, on the Executive, which in turn is twice as long as Article III, on the Judiciary. Length alone does not fully describe the reality that Congress is first among equals in our three branches.

Among its powers are the key ones of any government: the power of the purse, to tax and spend, and the power to declare war. A president can veto bills passed by Congress, but Congress can override the vetoes, and the president cannot override the override. The Senate has the power to accept or reject treaties made by a president, and to accept or reject nominations for executive or judicial offices. Congress can remove a president through impeachment; a president has no power to remove members of Congress. And Congress has immunity from executive harassment.

As for the judiciary, the Constitution gives very limited original jurisdiction to the Supreme Court and gives Congress the power to decide what additional jurisdiction or roles it should have, including the power to decide the size of the Supreme Court — and to create other federal courts. And, of course, Congress can impeach and remove judges and justices.

These truths should be self-evident. But not to the Roberts Court. In a series of arrogant, ahistorical, anti-Constitutional decisions, the Supreme Court has arrogated to itself the power to defang Congress, undermine democracy, and unleash a corrupt, power-hungry, vindictive president with dictatorial powers (and few, if any, constraints), destroying the delicate checks and balances foundational to our political system.

The immunity decision was perhaps the most shocking. We went for well over 200 years evolving under presidents constrained by laws and traditions not to use official powers to corrupt or endanger people or law and order. On the occasions when they did — see Nixon, Richard — the system of checks and balances responded, both Congress and the Supreme Court. The reaction of Trump when Trump v. United States was announced — glee at being granted absolute power — revealed how reckless, misguided, and anti-constitutional it was.

That was compounded by Slaughter v. Trump. By enabling a president to fire at whim members of independent regulatory commissions who had been confirmed for fixed terms by the Senate, the Court effectively destroyed the independence and balance of these commissions, the first of which was the Interstate Commerce Commission, created in 1887. The numbers were expanded under President Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 and 1913 with the creation of the Federal Reserve and the agency the Roberts Court just eviscerated, the Federal Trade Commission.

These agencies and others, from the Federal Communications Commission to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Labor Relations Board, were crafted with a delicate balance by presidents and Congress; independent, but with commissioners nominated by presidents and confirmed by the Senate, with a partisan balance and the ability of a president to remove only for cause. 

No longer. Even more unsettling, by flatly asserting that the president had total control over the executive branch, the Court threatened the existence of a career civil service and set the stage for a return to the spoils system that had plagued the country until the Pendleton Act of 1883 created the merit-based system that has been in effect for over 150 years.

Now, the powerful commissions, which include the Federal Communications Commission, can be used by presidents to intimidate, punish, and coerce people, corporations, and other entities; and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which can now give a free pass to insider trading by Trump cronies. 

Even before this awful decision, the chair of the FCC, Brendan Carr, misused his power to threaten broadcast entities and relax rules on behalf of Trump and his allies. Ironically, in an Alice in Wonderland twist, Justice Neil Gorsuch used Carr’s thuggery to justify giving Trump more unleashed power at the expense of Congress and decency.

This decision (blowing up the ruling in Humphrey’s Executor, which had ruled for 90 years) followed a 2024 decision, Loper Bright v. Raimondo, which overturned the Chevron doctrine. In a different galaxy, championed by Justice Antonin Scalia, this required judges to give deference (in regulatory decisions) to the expertise of agencies, as long as they followed the Administrative Procedures Act, showing careful and diligent work. Instead, the decisions could be made by judges alone, with no expertise, and enabled corporations to judge-shop to get favorable rulings.

The expansion of presidential power — and the overweening judicial power that engendered it—has come at the expense of the First Branch. But other decisions made by John Roberts and his cohorts have also undercut Congress while empowering corporations and billionaires. 

Monsanto v. Durnell, involving the pesticide Roundup gave chemical and agriculture companies protection against lawsuits claiming their products caused cancer or other ailments; an earlier decision, AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion, denied the possibility of a consumer class action from abuses by companies in the fine print of contracts, forcing individuals to use arbitration instead of the courts.

Then there is campaign finance. John Roberts said in his confirmation hearing that he wanted to avoid 5-4 decisions and aimed to get to 8-1 or 9-0 by relying on stare decisis. It did not take long for that to be proven a lie. The landmark Citizens United was a narrow case, brought on an as-applied basis, to enable the group to air its anti-Hillary Clinton film as a documentary free from campaign finance law regulating campaign messages. 

Instead of deciding it on that basis, Roberts and his allies pulled it back to broaden it — without any request from the plaintiffs and without briefs or hearings — and redo it in a way that would subvert over a century of established campaign law.

Roberts then produced a majority that not only upended the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Law that only recently had been affirmed (before Justice Sandra Day O’Connor retired), but also changed many decades of law that had blocked corporations from giving money directly to candidates, thereby opening up more avenues for big money to dominate elections, putting no limits on what corporations, unions, and wealthy individuals could use for political ads “independent” of candidates. The result was an explosion of “Super PACs” and the sharply expanded involvement of billionaires using dark money to influence elections and policy.

That was followed by McCutcheon v. FEC, in which the Court removed limits on overall spending, allowing ultra-wealthy donors to write multi-million-dollar checks to joint fundraising committees, crowning the wealthiest donors the kingmakers in our politics and elections. And now a new one, NRSC v. FEC, blew up a 50-year precedent limiting coordinating spending between parties and candidates.

The result? Another gift to billionaires, allowing them to bypass direct candidate contribution limits by transferring hundreds of thousands of dollars to party committees, which can channel funds directly to candidates. Are there any checks on this, or any meaningful regulations of big, dark money domination? Thanks to the Slaughter decision, the feckless Federal Election Commission, which is the regulatory authority, is even more feckless—and can be weaponized by Trump to harass and crimp Democrats while giving a free hand to Republicans.

Of all these moves to undermine Congress and democracy, none are more serious than the repeated Roberts Court attacks on voting rights. 

It started with the egregious Shelby County v. Holder, where Roberts used a remarkable display of faulty logic to take away a key component of the Voting Rights Act, Section V, which required pre-clearance by the Justice Department for voting jurisdictions to change voting laws if they had shown a clear pattern of racially-based discrimination. Roberts’ rationale was that while there had been discrimination, it was no longer present, so Section V was no longer needed. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg likened the logic to closing one’s umbrella during a driving rainstorm because you were dry under the umbrella.

The day after Shelby County came down, Southern states and counties leapt in to implement more discriminatory laws, which had no impact on Roberts. The Voting Rights Act had first been passed in 1965 after decades of Southern segregationists in the Senate using filibusters to block civil rights legislation. It was reauthorized numerous times, most recently in 2006, reauthorizing preclearance for 25 years after extensive debate, hearings, and fact-finding. The 2006 reauthorization passed the Senate unanimously and in the House by 390-33. Roberts gave that congressional mandate the middle finger. And waited to go even further.

Five years ago, in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, Alito and five others upheld two Arizona voting restrictions that banned the collection of absentee ballots by third parties and discarded ballots cast in the wrong precinct. It took a devastating swipe at Section II, with Alito rewriting the law to fit his viewpoint, proposing that just because a law creates a “disparate impact” on minority voters, it did not justify striking it. This made it harder to challenge racially discriminatory state-level voting restrictions in federal court.

The recent Louisiana v. Callais ruling effectively killed Section II, making it clear that if there were any other pretext for voting restrictions, such as partisan gerrymandering (which the Roberts Court gave a green light to in Rucho v. Common Cause), it did not matter if the result was racially discriminatory.

Louisiana had begun early voting under a map created after a Section II challenge that enabled two majority-minority districts. But though the Roberts Court had invented a “Purcell principle” (that no ruling should take effect close to an election — which it applied when Democrats won challenges to discriminatory maps), that “principle” was discarded to disallow votes already cast and use their prejudicial map for 2026. The most outrageous blow came two months later, in June. 

Even though multiple lower courts had offered voluminous evidence that Alabama had created a map explicitly designed for racial discrimination, meeting the steep standard of Callais, the Roberts Court cast aside its own standard to allow the map to be used in 2026.

After such a slew of decisions to end the Court’s term, the one that captured the most public and press attention was birthright citizenship, where — on the surface — 6 justices upheld the right. But underlying that decision was another troubling reality. Even though the Constitution and history made the right clear, four justices denied the plain language of our founding document, contorting it to fit their worldview.

A Supreme Court that flagrantly contorts decisions to geld Congress, flexes its self-aggrandizing Article III powers, and advances an extreme “unitary executive theory” that has no basis in the Constitution, or the view of the Framers needs to be reined in. It is up to Congress to use its legitimate Article I powers to do so.

Of course, there are reforms on the table, starting with expanding the court to 13 members to represent the 13 circuits (there were nine when the court size was adjusted to that number). Term limits are less controversial but also a powerful antidote — especially if they start immediately, moving all those who have served for whatever single term is set — 18 years if the court has nine members; 26 if it is expanded. But there is another, more far-reaching change to consider.

That is returning the Supreme Court to the original jurisdiction the Framers established. They did not see the Supreme Court as all-powerful, arrogating to itself key legislative powers and making Congress an inferior branch. That original jurisdiction was established to enable the Supreme Court to settle controversies between states, between citizens of different states, and between states and foreign entities or persons. 

Here is the key clause: In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

In other words, Congress can take away the Supreme Court’s appellate authority in whatever areas it wants, except the narrow ones defining original jurisdiction. This includes regulating commerce, defining or adjudicating congressional and executive powers, voting rights and elections, individual rights, and more. 

Congress can create a new appellate court to handle those areas, perhaps one consisting of the chief judges of all the circuits. And Congress needs to mandate a stiff, meaningful code of ethics for the Supreme Court, including creating an Independent office consisting of former judges and legal ethics experts who would recommend sanctions for violations, with the judicial conference required to explain in detail if the recommendations are rejected.

We have a rogue Supreme Court, and it is time to consider more sweeping actions to restore the balance among the branches.

---

Norman Ornstein is a renowned political scientist, frequent Contrarian contributor, co-host of the podcast “Words Matter,” and the author of books, including “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.”

The Contrarian is community-supported. Help fund bold journalism and critical lawsuits to stop Trump’s corruption by becoming a paid subscriber. Join the fight now.

Postscript to July 4, 2026

We live in a country today where an authoritarian is destroying our democracy and the Rule of Law; where venture capitalists and hedge fund billionaires continue to destroy our democracy; where 401(k) s are still fraudulent games of theft and greed played within the wealthy financial sector; where numerous senators and representatives are pawns of a demented fool and the American Legislative Exchange Council; where “the privatization of health services has corresponded closely with skyrocketing costs, leaving millions of Americans without access to care or deeply in debt for seeking treatment for their illnesses.” 

We live in a country where Republicans are behind the scenes on the federal and local levels to eradicate Social Security and Medicare as overly costly entitlements given to working class people; where today’s Republicans aim to reduce the range of thought through doublespeak, denial and deceit; where language is stripped of reason and raped by propaganda. 

We live in a country where power is not a means for Trump; it is an end for him—power for its own sake; where plutocracy caters to self-interested desires and profit to the detriment of millions of Americans, while promising “freedom and prosperity;” where Free market principles advocate that the rich and poor should be taxed at the same flat rate, despite creating a vast inequity; where education, health care, retirement pensions, national parks (and most any function intrinsic to essential governing) become privatized to reap in more profits; where publicly-owned companies, services and their assets are auctioned off to private investors; where there is the allocation of vast amounts of wealth and resources from public to private ownership, and where there is also a transfer of private debts to the public sector. 

We live in a country where systemic racism and bigotry are rampant; where xenophobia is pervasive; and where hypocrisy, prevarication, incompetence, immorality, inequality, poverty, and injustice prevail. We have witnessed this trumped-up transformation and its exacerbation these past years. Trump is an authoritarian inhibited by no laws or moral consideration, and there are others who are just as avaricious, incompetent and dangerous as he is: Stephen Miller, Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Pam Bondi, Scott Bessert, Howard Lutnick, Linda McMahon... The destruction of America's fragile democracy will be the result of our failure to respond to those among us who choose to repudiate empirical truth and falsify reality for power and greed. 

What our current weak democratic leadership needs to address, besides the antiquated filibuster and Freedom to Vote Act, is the lack of unity in the Democratic Party; the Republican propagation of lies; the ongoing Republican subversion of the next elections; the Republican attempt to rigged the voting system in their favor; the Republican focus on voting in partisan supervisors for elections; Republican gerrymandering; Republican legislator purges; Republican attacks on Medicare and Social Security; Republican obstruction of serious gun control legislation; Republican (or theocratic!) takeover of the U.S. Supreme Court; rising American religious fundamentalism; the pandemic's long-range effects on healthcare; the unvaccinated and their effects on hospitals and the economy; the global demand for thermal energy; the climate crisis; the education and teacher crisis; cyber security; immigration reform; corporate corruption; pharmaceutical greed; wage stagnation, inflation and reflation; Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran... 

What the Democratic Party also needs to consider (when it finally takes over the House) is the income inequality and unfair taxation of the wealthy elite; the availability of healthcare for those who cannot afford it; an expansion of Medicare to include dental, vision and hearing benefits; more reduction of prescription drug prices; the continuing expansion of the Child Tax Credit; and the incarceration of a revengeful, demented, narcissistic, sociopathic criminal and insurrectionist, to name just a few. 

-Glen Brown 

 

"Our president is trying to take America down with him"

 

One might think, given Trump’s propensity to plaster his name on everything, that he’s obsessed with legacy. He is, insofar as it’s the way to advance the game of writing one’s name upon the world (in, as always, the most stupidly literal way possible). But his long-term plan is closer to the opposite of planning for posterity. He cannot creatively envision a future in which he is no longer the main character, except to hate and fear it. He is going un-gently into that good night — and once he’s gone, as far as he’s concerned, everybody’s party might as well be over.    

Our president is trying to take America down with him.

There’s been a few years’ worth of chatter around the phenomenon of MAGA’s “death drive,” or “suicide rightism.” What’s with the alt-right love for seppuku-committing ultranationalist author Yukio Mishima? Why did DHS post a video of the penguin who walks off to its seeming doom in Werner Herzog’s Arctic documentary with the caption “Americans have always known why”? Why does Pete Hegseth say “lethality” like it’s not the means but the end? I dismissed some of this (minus Hegseth) as would-be edgy manifestations of masculinity in crisis…until realizing that the commander-in-chief is on the same page, which explains a lot.

What does a death-driven administration look like, aesthetically? It looks like blood sport on the White House lawn. It looks like one failed attempt after another to wrest control of nature, from a paved-over rose garden, to a scum-choked reflecting pool, to a coterie of human bodies shellacked to parodic levels of denial of decay. It looks like the inability to attract crowds for, much less successfully host, anything resembling a celebration of life. The president’s charisma may play on the airing of grievances–to–riot incitement bandwidth, but collective joy is beyond him.

What do such an administration’s policies look like? They look like turning off the lights of knowledge and memory one by one, much like an unspecified 79-year-old sliding into senescence. They look like the antithesis of life: brutality in the streets, inhumane detention conditions, murder. They look like climate change denial and the rapacious stripping of environmental regulations. They look like antagonizing the UN and eliminating USAID, starting tariff wars with allies, and a literal war in the Middle East that scuttles a nuclear détente.

Many watchers have been baffled by Trump’s diplomacy because it is so flagrantly shortsighted; the Occam’s razor explanation is that he does not care about the long term. As though riding one of his once-buddy Musk’s privatized rockets, Trump is getting as far into the stratosphere of kleptocratic wealth as he can by burning through every bit of goodwill/democratic norm/actual hydrocarbon that it took 250 years to produce (or, in hydrocarbon’s case, far longer). Which is fine if you simply do not care about the place or the people you’re leaving behind.

I’m sorry to mark our 250^th anniversary by recapping the horrible present. But it’s necessary to put into context just how much this administration has no business celebrating a milestone of national life and evolution, a date that should serve as the springboard for hard-fought, generative discussions about where we’ve been and where we’re going. That’s what anniversaries are for, if used well.

They’re just another date, but in bearing the shape of a pivotal moment, they invite us to remember that we can choose any moment, this one included, to turn in the direction of progress.

The administration has never wanted to look candidly back, and it is becoming increasingly clear that they have no interest in or capacity for looking ahead. The far right is adrift in a curdling fantasy of an America with a past that never existed and a future that even they, it seems, don’t care to stick around for. Luckily, they do not represent the America that has survived this long.

Here’s what life looks like. It looks like Kansans welcoming Algerians and Minnesotans standing up to ICE. It looks like a Knicks-inspired ode to pluralism and 8 million people marching against kings. It looks like the Seneca Falls Convention, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the March on Washington. It looks like Good Trouble and Stonewall and rock n’ roll. E.B. White defined democracy as, among other things, “the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles” and “the feeling of vitality everywhere.” That defiant pulse is with us still.

I’ve found myself thinking lately of a poem by Lucille Clifton, “won’t you celebrate with me.” After limning what it is to be a Black woman in this country, the speaker ends with a fierce invocation to celebrate the fact that, every day of her life: “something has tried to kill me / and has failed.”

That’s enough to celebrate this July Fourth. And we have much more. The forces of dull, narrow imagination and greed have failed to take this opportunity for joy and reflection from us (however much they muddle the Reflecting Pool), just as they have failed to take our future. They are the ones passing through and away.

-The Contrarian 

Why July 4th Matters More This Year

Happy birthday, America. Your president is a civilly adjudicated sexual abuser, a convicted felon, and a man whose name appears more than a thousand times in the Epstein files. I refuse to sugarcoat any of this on your 250th birthday. You deserve the truth laid out the way a trial lawyer presents evidence to a jury. So here comes the evidence. The Courts Already Ruled In May 2023, a unanimous federal jury in Manhattan found Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room and then defaming her. The jury awarded her $5 million. Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan went further in a written opinion, stating the evidence established Trump raped Carroll as most Americans understand the word rape. A second jury later ordered him to pay $83.3 million more for continuing to smear her. Five days ago, on June 29, 2026, the United States Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal. Not one justice dissented. The facts, law and verdict stand. Forever. A Felon in the Oval Office Now the criminal record. On May 30, 2024, a Manhattan jury convicted Trump on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to hide hush money payments to a porn star before the 2016 election. Twelve ordinary citizens heard the evidence and voted guilty 34 times. He became the first American president ever convicted of a felony, sentenced in January 2025, and he carried a criminal record into his second term. No president in 250 years of American history has done what he forced this country to witness. He Lit the Match, Then Freed the Arsonists He summoned the mob. On January 6, 2021, Trump told the crowd he assembled to fight like hell, and his supporters stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of an election he lost. More than 140 police officers suffered injuries. Several died. The House impeached him for incitement of insurrection. Special counsel Jack Smith indicted him on four felony counts for the scheme to overturn the election, and Smith’s report concluded the evidence would have convicted him at trial. On day one of his second term, Trump erased the accountability. He granted clemency to nearly 1,600 rioters, including hundreds of convicted felons, and freed militia leaders convicted of seditious conspiracy. By this June, at least 97 of the people he released had been arrested for new crimes. The Epstein Files Trump fought the release of the Epstein files with everything he had. Congress overruled him, passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and the Justice Department finally released millions of pages in 2026. His name shows up more than a thousand times. Flight logs place him aboard Epstein’s private jet at least eight times after he told the country he was never on the plane. His DOJ is still refusing to release the last several million records. You get to decide what his resistance to transparency tells you. Why July 4th Matters More This Year Two hundred fifty years ago, ordinary people risked everything to declare no king rules here. The law binds the farmer and the president alike. Trump attacks reporters, judges, calls sworn jury verdicts hoaxes, and treats the Constitution as an obstacle. Every time he does, he spits on the promise your ancestors bled to secure. Take Your Stand This July 4th, I celebrate America. I celebrate her Constitution, her courts, and her juries of everyday citizens who stared down a president’s legal army and spoke the truth under oath. I refuse to celebrate him. Epstein’s “best friend” and a man adjudicated as a sexual abuser and convicted as a felon belongs in a courtroom answering for his conduct, never on a stage wrapping himself in your flag. Fly your flag high today. It and this country belong to you. Then wake up on July 5th and act like the citizen of a free country. Speak up, show up, and stay loud. Two hundred fifty years of America were built by people who refused to stay quiet. Be one of them. -Mitch Jackson, Esq.

"A Declaration of Independence"

 

“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” Walt Whitman wrote, but the nation was conceived in prose. Other countries have national holidays that commemorate feats of revolutionary or military glory. This one celebrates a document. The Declaration of Independence was a charter and a manifesto, yes, but in essence it was a memo, a hastily drafted, feverishly edited, hand-copied piece of committee work. A masterpiece, too.

It’s poetry, philosophy and polemic, all in a little more than 1,300 words and all represented in its second and most famous sentence.

The Declaration of Independence

1776 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable 

Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.  No matter how many times you’ve read it before, it’s worth reading again. Each idea flows from the previous one, and a comprehensive argument takes shape.

We are equal.

We have rights. Those rights describe the very essence of our humanity.

That’s a lot. Pages and pages have been written on this passage, seeking out its ideological subtext, its historical context and its intellectual pretexts in classical and early modern thought. But the plain English of the first 35 words — from “We” to “happiness” — is still remarkable in its sweep and radical in its implications.

It moves from a theory of knowledge to a vision of the good.

We — putting aside for a moment just who this “we” might be — don’t appeal to precedent, tradition or any other external authority, but to the evidence of our own eyes. Human equality is not aspirational: It’s obvious.

Furthermore, this equality isn’t just a formal, mathematical axiom. It has a specific moral and metaphysical content. A human creature is defined by the possession of rights, by a divinely granted entitlement to live, to act and to prosper. This is remarkable writing — and also a slippery and variable text.

English grammar was a more fluid enterprise in 1776; punctuation and capitalization were irregular. In the first printed version, for example, there was no period after “happiness.” The sentence kept going, swelling to paragraph length and encompassing all of human nature in a chiming succession of clauses.

Even the simplest gloss — the near-heretical attempt to put the language of the Declaration “in other words” — hints at the complexities rippling through the crystalline clarity of the prose. Every word is a fighting word, begging to be contested. What exactly did they mean by “equal”? By “Creator”? By “Liberty”? By “We”? Over the years, writers of various scholarly, literary and political temperaments have proposed answers.

One assumption that has guided generations of interpreters is that Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and their collaborators meant a lot more than they said. Their simple words reflect deep learning and complicated agendas. Some historians have highlighted the influence of John Locke and other philosophers of the Enlightenment; others have emphasized the economic and political concerns of merchants, artisans and farmers in a prosperous outpost of the British Empire.

Those specific contexts and hidden meanings are important. But if the Declaration remains relevant and vital for ordinary readers after 250 years, it may be for the opposite reason: Its writers said so much more than they meant. The genius of the document lies not in the original, local intentions that might be excavated from it, but in the meanings that later generations have projected onto it.

Unlike its younger sibling, the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration isn’t an instruction manual. Interpreting it isn’t the job of tenured specialists. It belongs to the secular realms of politics and literature, which means that it lives to be adapted, quoted (and misquoted), wrenched out of its original bearings and repurposed.

The contradictions and limitations of the historical text are self-evident. The founders proclaimed liberty in a slave-owning society. They could hardly have anticipated the raucous, pluralistic, self-polarizing democracy the United States would become. (For what it’s worth they didn’t, in 1776, imagine what we know as the United States at all, but rather 13 autonomous, loosely affiliated political entities.) They wrote, as everyone does, in the heat of a chaotic present and in the face of an unknowable future.

That future, a succession of chaotic presents, including the one we now occupy, has looked back at those men gathered in Philadelphia as signers of an as yet uncashed check.

Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg cited the words of the Declaration as a promise to be, however belatedly, fulfilled. And nearly 100 years later, at the March on Washington, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned that the check had bounced.

For Lincoln and King, the Declaration functions as both a sacred text and an unfulfilled promise. The conditions that it holds to be self-evident in that second sentence did not, at the time it was written, exist in any known reality. Whether they subsequently did or ever could is the subject of debates that have more or less defined our politics ever since, but the ringing confidence of the statement has not diminished.

The source of that confidence, the conviction that gives the prose its bracing clarity, lies in the founders’ understanding of what they were against. Liberty and equality were ideals yet to be realized, but tyranny was a fact. The main body of the Declaration is devoted to describing its manifestations in exacting detail — taxing the colonists without their consent, suspending their legislatures, keeping standing armies among them — in order to justify the radical and unprecedented disruption of the status quo put forth at the beginning.

The invocation of self-evident truths and inherent rights is a warrant for the destruction of existing order, a rhetorical erasure not only of the divine right of kings but also, more generally, of the prerogatives of power.

This is a revolutionary document. Many years after it was written, when the world, emerging from the Napoleonic Wars, seemed to be entering an era of reaction and retrenchment, Jefferson wrote to Adams that “the flames kindled on the 4th of July 1776 have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism. On the contrary they will consume those engines, and all who work them.”

-A.O. Scott, NYTimes

 

The con of neoliberalism has gutted our democracy and paved the way for fascism

 

Neoliberalism, better understood by its less sanitized term cutthroat capitalism, is the poison that destroyed our democracy. It gave the billionaire class and corporations the ideological cover to impoverish the working class, impose crippling austerity, hollow out democratic institutions, buy off our two ruling political parties and deform our courts into appendages of corporations and the rich.

Neoliberalism drove tens of millions of disenfranchised, desperate people into the arms of Christian fascists, who preyed on their despair and sold them the fantasy of magic Jesus. It drove them into the arms of conspiracy theorists and right-wing charlatans. It drove them down the self-destructive rabbit holes of alcoholism and opioid addiction, compulsive gambling, domestic and sexual violence. These were the inevitable consequences of personal stagnation, disempowerment and feelings of worthlessness, frustration and profound despair.

Neoliberalism ignores the cries of its victims. It dismisses their suffering and rage as irrational, ignorant and racist. It neuters liberal reforms, rendering them cosmetic and useless. Liberal apologists for neoliberalism, no longer concerned with economic justice, retreat into boutique activism. They mouth empty slogans about diversity and political correctness while pretending the relentless class war, unleashed globally since the 1970s, does not exist. The victims of neoliberal deindustrialization, 30 million of whom lost their jobs in the U.S. in mass layoffs, understand that the precarity of their existence does not concern their neoliberal masters.

Right-wing pundits and politicians, such as Donald Trump, who issue crude, vulgar and expletive-laden insults against the traditional neoliberal establishment are celebrated by the disenfranchised for exposing the political charade. These demagogues promise moral and economic renewal for the betrayed, albeit grounded in magical thinking.

Neoliberals peddle their own form of magical thinking. Neoliberalism is as absurd and infantile as the Christian Rapture and Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. Trump lies like he breathes, but so did previous presidents including Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Trump embraces fantasies, but so did they. Trump, like his Democratic predecessors, enriches himself and his family, although with far more ostentation and greed. He, like them, facilitates the ongoing pillage by the billionaire class. Trump is the fascist iteration of the neoliberal con.

Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite — the twelve richest billionaires own more wealth than the poorest half of the world — is designed to create massive income inequality and monopoly power. It is the antithesis of democratic equality. It is designed to fuel political extremism and foster social and cultural divisions. It is designed to hollow out democratic institutions. Economic rationality is not the point. David Harvey calls neoliberalism “accumulation by dispossession.”

As a ruling ideology, neoliberalism is a brilliant success. Starting in the 1970s, its Keynesian mainstream critics were marginalized or pushed out of academia, state institutions and financial organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The same is true of the media. Compliant courtiers and intellectual poseurs such as Milton Friedman or New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman were given prominent platforms and lavish corporate funding. They slavishly disseminated the official mantra of fringe, discredited economic theories popularized by Friedrich Hayek and the third-rate writer Ayn Rand.

Once the country was forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace, once government regulations were abolished, once taxes on the rich were slashed, once money was permitted to flow across borders, once unions were crushed and once trade deals were signed that sent jobs to sweatshops in Mexico and China, the world, these poseurs assured us, would be happier, freer and wealthier. It was a scam. But it worked. And it fueled the rival con game of the demagogues and fascists who were vomited up out of the moral and political morass.

The media bears much of the blame. In the name of objectivity, better understood as neutrality, it absented itself from the class war. It did not investigate the mounting abuses of the rich, corporations or its bought-and-paid-for political class. It did not expose the absurdity of neoliberalism. It rendered the victims invisible. By shutting themselves out of the debate, the media, a vital pillar of any democracy, neutered itself. It too became despised.

Individual freedom, which neoliberalism holds up as the highest good, and social justice are not compatible. Social justice, Harvey writes in “A Brief History of Neoliberalism,” requires social solidarity and “a willingness to submerge individual wants, needs, and desires in the cause of some more general struggle for, say, social equality and environmental justice.” Neoliberal rhetoric is able to “split off libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and eventually narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of social justice through the conquest of state power.”

Neoliberalism, as Ece Temelkuran writes in “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps From Democracy to Fascism,” exiles morality from public life. It isolates it in the private space of the individual. It corrals it into “the holding pen of religion” while religion is “clipped and cropped into market-friendly ‘spiritualities.’” Justice and mercy are no longer shared concepts. Personal and public morality are severed. How, she asks, “can we convince people not to commit evil in those realms of public life from which law enforcement is absent?”

“Humans,” she writes, “are incapable of functioning and living together without a good story to bind them and keep a certain set of values intact. That’s why the lack of a story in neoliberalism, the lack of meaning and cause, can be unbearable for the human mind. Since humans are forced to live in a state of mild antipathy — an acceptable amount of antipathy that is crucial to the neoliberal system — they are forever in dire need of a cause, a central triangulation point that they can use to orient themselves in relation to what’s good and what’s bad. The ethical vacuum of neoliberalism, its dismissal of the fact that human nature needs meaning and desperately seeks reasons to live, creates fertile ground for the invention of causes, and sometimes the most groundless or shallowest ones.”

Karl Polanyi in “The Great Transformation” distinguishes between bad freedoms and good freedoms. Bad freedoms are sacrosanct under neoliberalism. They permit the powerful to exploit workers and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse. Pharmaceutical and health care corporations, for example, jeopardize the lives of those who cannot afford their exorbitant prices. The fossil fuel industry is driving us towards extinction.

Good freedoms — freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to choose one’s job — are snuffed out by bad freedoms. The freedom of the many is transformed into the freedom of the few. The result is fascism.

Fascism uses the blunt instruments of fear, intimidation and violence to curb the mounting disquiet. It divides the country into warring factions — the patriots vs. the enemies of the state. It obliterates shared values. It champions the cruelty of hypermasculinity. Those who dissent are branded domestic terrorists. Civil liberties are abolished in the name of national security.

The 30- to 100-year sentences meted out to eight anti-ICE protesters in Texas, who were portrayed in court as an “antifa terror cell,” are being normalized. A ninth defendant, David Rolando Sanchez Estrada, was not present at the protest, but was sentenced to 30 years after being convicted of concealing documents when he moved a box of political zines and other materials. A second group of defendants in the broader Prairieland case were sentenced on July 1. Six who accepted plea agreements received prison terms ranging from nearly two years to 15 years, while Ines Soto, who rejected a plea agreement and went to trial, received 50 years.

The equation of civil disobedience with terrorism is routine in countries such as Turkey, Russia and India. It is being cemented into place in Europe. A British judge, in a ruling that mirrors what took place in Texas, recently sentenced four members of Palestine Action as terrorists, sending them to prison for five to nine years, even though they were neither charged nor convicted of terrorism offenses.

It does not matter if Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin or Nigel Farage disappears. The tens in of millions of people “fired up by their message will still be there, and will still be ready to act upon the orders of a similar figure,” Temelkuran writes. “And unfortunately, as we experienced in Turkey in a very destructive way, even if you are determined to stay away from the world of politics, the minions will find you, even in your own personal space, armed with their own set of values and ready to hunt down anybody who doesn’t resemble themselves.”

Our country, as we once knew it, no longer exists. It was methodically destroyed by neoliberal con artists. The institutions and legal protections that once shielded us from tyranny no longer function. Those who champion an open society are orphans, smeared as traitors, excoriated as the “radical left.” I mourn what we have lost. I mourn what we are about to lose. This social isolation will soon be physical isolation. We will be criminalized or driven into exile.

Trump and his fascistic cabal, epitomized by billionaires such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, are constructing a mafia state. A nation of gangsters and marks. A nation where they alone have unlimited freedom to pillage and exploit. A nation where the government is privatized. A nation where we are enslaved to corporate technology. A nation where we have no place.

We must name our enemies this Fourth of July. They are the fascists who have seized power. And they are those who, selling us the con of neoliberalism, put them there.

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 Bread and Bullets - by Mr. Fish