Wall Street Wants to Change the Rules for Your 401(k): It Could Put Your Retirement at Risk

 

Financial firms want a bigger piece of the $10 trillion in America's 401(k) plans, and the Trump administration is planning a regulatory rollback to encourage less regulated and often riskier investments. 

Most Americans don’t look to their 401(k) plans for excitement or experimentation, instead relying on the promise that steady saving and sober planning will guarantee security in their golden years. But the Trump administration wants to transform the well-worn patterns of retirement investing. 

To do so, it is moving to weaken the main protection workers have over their retirement money. The man in charge of the regulatory rollback is an industry insider whose former clients are among the large companies likely to benefit from his plan.

Since taking office last year, President Donald Trump has loudly called for plans to include less-regulated — and often risky — investments like private equity and cryptocurrency. To achieve that goal, the administration is softening one of the strongest legal protections American workers have: the right to hold an employer accountable when retirement savings are mishandled. The change is designed to give employers cover if their workers’ 401(k)s are deflated by expensive, opaque or unproven investments.

“What they have done is lower the standard for everything,” said Ali Khawar, a former senior official at the Department of Labor, which is charged with enforcing the federal law that governs retirement savings.

Backing this push are Wall Street firms, which want a bigger piece of the $10 trillion in America’s 401(k) plans, and America’s largest employers, who want to avoid class-action lawsuits from their employees. They have a powerful ally in Trump’s pick to lead the effort at the Department of Labor: Daniel Aronowitz, who previously ran a firm that helped large companies protect themselves against worker lawsuits. Now Aronowitz is the one driving changes to the rules those same companies play by.

When the 401(k) replaced pensions as the main way Americans fund their retirement, the investment risk shifted from employers to employees. Instead of the promise of a monthly check, the 401(k) participant gets a tax-sheltered account, usually with an employer matching their contributions, but with no guarantees of how that nest egg will grow. Traces of the old system remain, however. Employers are responsible for overseeing the company’s plan. They choose all the financial service providers and have the final say on what investment options are available to employees. But it’s typically workers who pay for those services out of their 401(k) savings. And it’s workers who suffer from diminished savings if the plan has poor options.

There are plenty of pitfalls for 401(k) savers. The “recordkeepers” that administer 401(k)s may attempt to steer workers to their own in-house funds, whether they are the best options or not. They may sell advisory services of questionable value. And then there are the investment fees, which are the main cost to participants. These are charged as a percentage of each investment. Roughly, a 1% fee for a $10,000 investment would result in a $100 yearly charge. Recordkeepers — companies like Fidelity, Principal, Vanguard and Empower —  and other service providers often receive a cut of these fees. This means that they have the incentive to recommend more-expensive options. 

If employers are lax in their oversight, workers might find themselves overpaying to invest in funds that underperform. Even modest differences in fees or performance can, when compounded over time, make a huge difference in how much someone is able to save for retirement, potentially tens of thousands of dollars at the end of someone’s career. By the Labor Department’s own math, 1% in additional fees can shrink someone’s nest egg at retirement by 28%.

When overseeing retirement accounts, employers have a fiduciary duty to make prudent decisions and put their workers’ interests first. If they allow financial firms to fleece plan participants, they can be held responsible under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, a pension-era law that now governs 401(k)s.

Over the last 15 years, employees have increasingly sued large employers over unnecessarily high fees or inferior investment options. Companies like UnitedHealth, Boeing, Verizon and General Electric, without admitting wrongdoing, chose to settle suits for tens of millions. Aronowitz has called the increased litigation a “con game” that misleads judges, argued that such cases should go before a specialized court and labeled the whole enterprise a “scam.” 

Over 90 of these class-action lawsuits against large employers were filed in 2025. To Aronowitz, that’s a big number — his former firm tracked and publicized the rise of these suits as part of its business underwriting liability coverage to employers — but it’s a tiny fraction of the more than 700,000 401(k) plans nationwide. 

ERISA says nothing about which types of investments are prudent; it sets a standard of care, not a list of approved options. It’s up to employers to use their judgment, and employers have generally been wary of allowing cryptocurrency, private equity or hedge funds onto their plans because they are more complex than the usual stocks and bonds, often untested and much more expensive. Nevertheless, Trump issued an executive order last year blaming the limited uptake on “regulatory overreach” and “lawsuits filed by opportunistic trial lawyers” and calling for new rules. 

Aronowitz, as head of the Employee Benefits Security Administration, the Department of Labor office that enforces ERISA, is responsible for following through. His most significant move is a rule to make it far harder for workers to sue. The proposal, which will likely be finalized later this year, outlines a set of factors for employers to consider before approving investments. Just following this process would entitle employers’ decisions to “significant deference” from the courts — a “safe harbor,” or legal shield, meant to guard those decisions from challenge. A company could load a plan with a high-fee private equity fund and be protected from suit as long as it showed it had followed the rule and considered the fees.

To opponents of the change, like Khawar, who was second-in-command of EBSA under President Joe Biden, this is a mere “check-the-box approach,” akin to a teacher awarding a math student an automatic A — even if the answer is wrong — because the student showed their work.

Aronowitz has bristled at this sort of criticism. “Absolutely not,” he said in April at an industry event. “Read the proposed rule. We require a rigorous, objective, thorough and analytical fiduciary process that must be documented.” 

At the same time, Aronowitz is also pulling back on policing plans’ investment choices. In April, EBSA released a bulletin updating its enforcement priorities. In addition to announcing that agency staff must now get Aronowitz’s sign-off before any major enforcement action, it set a new guideline for investigators. “EBSA must avoid cases that unfairly second-guess process-based fiduciary judgments,” the bulletin said, meaning investigators should not challenge an employer’s investment choices if the employer can show it followed the proper steps, regardless of the outcome for workers. 

Tim Hauser, a 34-year-veteran of EBSA who was the highest-ranking career staffer there before retiring last year, said such ideas undermine the heart of ERISA. Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, EBSA was “dedicated to protecting plan participants,” he said, but that has changed under Aronowitz. The ability of courts and regulators to hold employers accountable for using bad judgment when choosing 401(k) investments is “fundamental to this whole system,” Hauser said. “They are proposing to deprioritize it at the same time that they are encouraging plans to invest in more complicated, opaque investments. It’s infuriating.”

The shift at EBSA has also been evident in court. Over the last year, the Labor Department has filed amicus briefs — friend-of-the-court filings that lay out legal arguments for judges — in several class-action lawsuits on the side of the defendant company. In the past, the Labor Department’s briefs had generally sided with the employees. These amicus briefs can be influential. Recently, the agency interceded on Home Depot’s behalf in a case pending before the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs then dropped it.

A Labor Department spokesperson said in a statement to ProPublica that EBSA would prioritize “the highest-risk matters” in order to protect participants. 

In pushing for looser rules and easing enforcement, the Trump administration and Wall Street are aiming for much more than giving workers the option of investing in so-called alternative assets. They predict it will become common, part of a new normal.

In recent years, the typical 401(k) plan has settled into a pattern, one that’s proven popular with investors but less lucrative for the recordkeepers and asset managers that serve plans. Decades ago, actively managed mutual funds, where professionals pick investments and charge for doing so, were dominant. They carried higher fees, often above 1% of the amount in the fund each year. But over time, passive funds, which often track an index of stocks or bonds like the S&P 500, attracted investors with their promise to deliver the same or better results for fees often below 0.1%. 

Investment and administrative fees in 401(k) plans have, on average, steadily decreased. One main reason is the rise of passive funds, but another, experts say, is the threat of litigation. With cheap options broadly available, large companies might have a hard time explaining to a judge why they forced their employees to choose funds that cost 10 times more.

This decline has pinched profit margins in the 401(k) world, said Kai Richter, an attorney with Cohen Milstein who has long specialized in ERISA class-action cases. “So the financial industry is looking for other ways to make money.” 

Nonpublic investments like private equity are, as a rule, actively managed. That means higher fees. If 401(k) plans began to commonly include these investments, the long-term trend of lower fees would halt and perhaps reverse. 

Broad adoption of alternative assets is indeed the administration’s goal. One of the most consequential parts of a 401(k) plan is the default option, since most workers simply leave their money there. Usually, the default is a target date fund, which, based on the investor’s target date of retirement, gradually shifts its composition as that date approaches from mostly publicly traded stocks to mostly bonds, becoming more conservative and less risky as the person gets closer to needing the money. Target date funds haven’t changed much over the past two decades as they’ve soared in popularity. They offer all-in-one simplicity and, since they are often passive, low cost. Adding complex investments like private equity or hedge funds as a standard part of the mix would be a sea change. 

The proposed rule professes to be “neutral” as to what effect the new, lax standard will have on investments, but it confidently predicts that companies will include more alternative assets over time in 401(k)s. That, after all, is the point of the rule, to broaden access to “the potential growth and diversification opportunities associated with alternative asset investments,” as Trump’s executive order put it. After the rule is finalized, plans covering about 5 million participants will add new or modified target date funds that include alternative investments, according to the proposal, and the number will continue to grow every year. 

Over the past year, there’s been a wave of product announcements in the 401(k) industry as financial companies, taking their cues from the administration, have prepared to offer new options to plans. Major firms that manage private investments, such as BlackRock, Apollo and Goldman Sachs, have announced funds for 401(k)s that include private assets. 

Ahead of the proposed rule’s adoption, Empower, the second-largest recordkeeper, has been expanding alternative options through managed accounts where participants opt to have advisers shape their 401(k) portfolios. About 1,000 companies have agreed to offer these investments to their workers, Empower’s CEO said recently. 

But the ultimate effects of the administration’s efforts won’t be limited to alternative assets, and the outcome is far from certain. The proposed rule seems sure to meet legal challenges, and employers, even with Aronowitz’s assurances, might remain reluctant to overhaul their plans. Short of lawsuits, employers may fear blowback from their workers, who surveys show are content with traditional investment options. 

Paul Kiel, business reporter with a focus this year on 401(k) plans.

 

The Plot to Ruin America

Nothing encapsulates the decline of the American project quite like the optics of its 250th anniversary. While four hundred masked neo-fascists marched through the capitol in navy-blue button-downs and khakis chanting “Reclaim America!”—entirely unchallenged either by police or antifascists—the official Independence Day parade was canceled because of extreme heat. It’s a disturbing vignette for our era. The country is turning far to the right and becoming too hot to even celebrate its own founding myths, reaching temperatures that climate scientists said would have been “virtually impossible” before human-caused climate change.

So, who’s to blame for this current mess? Predictably, the political class has no interest in examining the structural decay. In two back-to-back speeches this weekend, President Trump workshopped a new scapegoat: communism. The tone summoned the anger of his 2017 inauguration speech, “American Carnage,” when he blamed open borders and foreign nations for gutting the American Dream, carefully avoiding the corporations that plundered the working class and spoiled the land.

But his second term is less focused on hardening borders and more focused on what he calls the “enemy within,” which has included immigrants and anyone potentially critical of U.S. foreign policy, especially the fanatical, bipartisan worship of genocidal Zionism. Trump has met that “enemy” with violent and deadly force, using the Department of Homeland Security as the main instrument of terror in places like Minnesota.

That definition of the enemy has expanded to include antifascism, which he has designated a “domestic terrorist organization,” paving the way for the targeting of any organization or individual supporting actions considered “antifascism,” such as immigrant defense or even the broad set of movements and beliefs under the rubric of “anti-capitalism.” In other words, we’re reaching a moment when it’s illegal to be antifascist.

This rhetorical escalation is no accident; it is a calculated electoral strategy. More and more, as an electoral left movement makes key wins in the lead-up to the November mid-terms, Trump will most likely ratchet up his anti-communist rhetoric, painting even the most rabid, establishment anticommunist Democrats as party to a nefarious communist plot. That has already included targeting more organized formations of the socialist and anti-imperialist left.

Viewed in this light, Trump’s speech last Friday at the so-called Shrine of Democracy was probably his most ironic. Under the shadow of Mount Rushmore, Trump went on a dark tirade naming the enemy as the “communist menace,” a movement made up of “illegal immigrants,” “criminals,” “radicals,” “thieves,” and “lunatics” who “come in and loot [and] pillage our nation.” This isn’t just typical rhetorical theater from one of the world’s greatest confidence men. It is the foundational myth making required to justify a very real domestic police state.

There is no small irony in those accusations. The very ground beneath the president’s feet is stolen land, and the monument itself is a permanent testament to the exact kind of looting and pillaging he attributes to Marxist agitators.

If you possess even a baseline level of cognitive function and haven’t succumbed to total historical brain rot, Trump’s ultimatum should make you laugh and perhaps cry. He stood beneath the shadow of thieves and men who had looted and pillaged Indigenous land. The shrine had been built at the final destination for what was once known by the Lakotas as the “Thieves Road,” the trail Custer had illegally carved into the Black Hills in 1874 in search of gold.

But don’t take my word for it. The Supreme Court declared the ground beneath Trump’s very feet stolen land—that is, pillaged and looted. In fact, it called the settlers and miners who had entered the lands known as He Sapa trespassers, ruling in 1980 that the starvation-driven coercion used to strip the Sioux of the Black Hills was a profound constitutional violation.

The irony is that the only thief present at Mount Rushmore that day was the very country holding the party. Trump’s warnings about a ‘communist menace’ threatening American heritage are just a projection trick—it’s an inversion of reality, where the oppressors have become the oppressed, and the invaders act in self-defense against the very people they have robbed and slaughtered. This projection and inversion is central to the very American identity Trump claims is under attack.

“You can be loyal to Karl Marx, or you can be loyal to America,” he said. “You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.” The ultimatums are spurious but appear to create a loyalty test, forcing a choice between standing with genocidaires and slavers, and their apologists, or with those who tried to overthrow those violent systems of oppression. (I think I know what side we’d all like to be on.)

Those supposedly loyal to the nineteenth-century German political economist spread “lies about our heritage” and “tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors.” But one has to wonder about the legacy of Marx as a European when he said of the historical reality of class revolution, “as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendency for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes.”

Or when he described just how the ascendancy of that bourgeoisie was achieved in the first volume of Das Kapital, where he dryly noted that the dawn of capitalist production was “[t]he discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population” of the Americas. Understanding that modern capitalism required genocide and plunder is, apparently, quite scary. Trump has met rhetoric with action, and we should take note.

In his second term, Trump has waged an all-out assault on his political opponents, primarily those on the left. Specifically, that includes what he laid out in his National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” and signed on September 25, 2025.

The directive fully recalibrates post-9/11 counterterrorism objectives to target domestic political speech, organizing, and funding. I wouldn’t say it is the darkest chapter in U.S. history, but we should take serious stock of how easily the post-9/11 security apparatus—originally built to hunt down and kill “terrorists”—has been seamlessly turned inward to criminalize domestic dissent, freeze the bank accounts of progressive non-profits, and treat local antifascist activists like insurgent cells. It has effectively implemented widespread counterinsurgency in the absence of an actual insurgency.

After all, fascism isn’t new to the United States, and it hasn’t historically had to don the mantle of fascism to operate. Whether it was the genocidal blood quantum laws of federal Indian policy or Jim Crow racial segregation, European fascists took much of their inspiration from the colonial and white supremacist legal regimes of their American counterparts when they drafted documents such as the Nuremberg Laws.

And climate crisis aside, it is worth making a controversial point: our present state of affairs is far from the most repressive or authoritarian era the United States has ever seen. I’m not saying it can’t get worse—it could. But it also could turn out another way, if people are willing to fight for an alternative.

That’s not to minimize the real and terrible danger of the current moment and the necessity to confront it and build alternatives. Rather, it serves as a baseline for reality. As a student of history and a historical subject myself, it is humbling to read the stories of our ancestors—how they survived genocide through everything from everyday acts of defiance to organized resistance movements that undoubtedly staved off complete annihilation.

CounterPunch, this piece first appeared on Red Scare. Nick Estes is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is a journalist, historian and co-host of the Red Nation Podcast. He is the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019).

 

"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.

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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.”

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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.