The Democrats Just Laid Down Their Arms. Again.

Abigail Spanberger’s response to the court decision that overthrew the will of voters on redistricting is a worrying sign of surrender.

Last week, I wrote about how the far right’s capture of governing institutions like the Supreme Court has put Democrats in the jackpot, forcing them to make some hard choices. Indeed, the decision laid before Democrats is one of the most famous choices ever laid out in the English language: whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take up arms against a sea of troubles—and by opposing, end them. In a troubling sign for Democrats, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger has chosen the former.

At issue is the Virginia state Supreme Court’s decision to throw out the amended congressional district maps that voters just approved—in a referendum that cost the Democrats some $70 million, as they painstakingly played by all the rules to get it over the line. In the immediate aftermath of the ruling, Spanberger offered a limp proclamation, saying that she was “disappointed” by it but that her “focus as Governor will be on ensuring that all voters have the information necessary to make their voices heard this November.”

But it turns out that Spanberger was missing some vital information of her own: a lawful solution that could save the day and uphold the will of Virginia voters. As Quinn Yeargain at The Downballot reported, the state constitution includes a provision that allows lawmakers to change the mandatory retirement age of state Supreme Court justices. The idea Yeargain poses would be to lower the official retirement age to 54 by placing a modification in the annual budget bill that’s due by June 30, pass the legislation, and replace the hack justices—all of whom are older than 54—with seven new ones picked by Spanberger.

“Democrats might prefer other solutions,” Yeargain concluded, “but if they want to see the will of the voters respected in time for the November elections, there are virtually no other options—and none with as good a chance of success as this one.”

Spanberger isn’t going for it. In fairness, as Greg Sargent reported this week, Virginia Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell have cited some logistical impediments to the plan, namely a May 12 deadline to finalize the maps in time for early voting.

Yet, wherever the GOP holds the whip hand in the redistricting wars, they are sallying forth without either seeking the assent of voters or showing much concern for procedural deadlines—in some cases, like Louisiana, Republicans are changing the maps right in the middle of ongoing elections. Which makes Surovell’s diffident attitude especially risible: “Wiping out the entire Supreme Court is an incredibly extreme step to take over a decision you don’t like.” This is a hard thing to hear when Republicans are engineering—at warp speed—the wholesale extermination of Black political power in the South.

It’s unsustainable for our democracy to have one party that’s terrified of hypothetical blowback they might receive for violating a norm and one party vandalizing the Constitution with freedom and glee, knowing their political opponents will never force them to incur a similar cost. Democrats spend so much effort on mitigating the hypothetical radical step the right might take in the future that they’re failing to respond to the radical things they’re doing at this moment—to say nothing of the things they’re already speeding to do next. One of those things, by the way, is using the Callais decision to potentially eliminate majority-minority districts in blue states like California—or to potentially create a postelection coup in Congress.

Regardless of whether retiring the current Virginia Supreme Court would result in the electoral maps that voters approved, there are a number of good reasons why state Democrats should do it anyway. Do it because replacing the Supreme Court with one more aligned with Virginia voters will be a gift that keeps on giving. Do it because it will raise the salience of the GOP’s rush to undo civil rights gains. Do it because if the shoe were on the GOP’s foot, they would not hesitate to forcibly retire a Democratic-majority court. Do it because, as Brian Beutler writes, you cannot simply not “respond to an element of a Republican coup d’etat.”

But the biggest reason is that Democrats need to develop an appetite for the kind of hardball politics that the GOP plays. The enormity of the tasks in front of them—reversing a slew of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, rebuilding the federal government, putting Trump and his inner circle in jail—requires leaders who understand the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.

For all the grim news about the redistricting wars, the grimmer failures of Trumpism keep the prospects of winning elections in reach. We should remember that the GOP’s race to create new districts is a product of their failures and unpopularity. And who knows? For all their cracking and packing, Republicans may pay a price for making their own red districts more vulnerable should Trump’s daily misdeeds and the worsening economy touch off a wave election. But those voters—who include suburban moms at No Kings rallies calling for Nuremberg 2.0 and neighborhoods full of ordinary people who’ve put their lives on the line protecting each other from Trump’s ICE goons—will expect their elected officials to take up arms (figuratively!) against this sea of troubles the GOP has unleashed, and bring it to a swift end.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Every Democratic Candidate Must Have an Answer for This Question

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority is trying to drive the party to extinction. What do they plan to do about it?

Recall, if you can stomach it, the late summer months of the 2024 presidential campaign. The political press was churning out (accurate) stories about how Vice President Kamala Harris was distancing herself from some of the bolder policy proposals she’d previously backed, and many of the left were in a froth over it. But I paid it little mind. Timidly pivoting to the center was nothing new for Democratic presidential candidates, and what was the point of big policy proposals anyway? For that matter, what was the point of small policy proposals? As I noted at the time, Harris and her fellow Democrats had a bigger problem: They weren’t going to get to enact anything without the approval of Chief Justice John Roberts and at least four of his colleagues.

Disappointingly, Harris largely ducked what was—and is—the fight of the Democrats’ lives: the court’s wholesale elimination of the party’s ability to govern. The conservative bloc, through what I would charitably describe as chicanery, has locked down American life for the foreseeable future. They essentially possess veto power over any legislation or executive order not to their liking, and they are now moving in the direction of stripping Democratic voters of their electoral power. This is an existential crisis that affects every Democrat running for federal office, and as we barrel toward the midterm elections and then into a presidential campaign, it’s incumbent on Democrats to explain how they will confront this challenge. Or to put it another way: How will they change the Supreme Court? Because it cannot persist in its current form.

Naturally, if you ask Roberts, he will tell you this is all overblown. This week, he whinged about the public’s low opinion of the court, saying, “I think they view us as truly political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do.” As The New Republic’s Matt Ford noted, it’s hard to see what a hypothetical high court filled with avowedly naked partisans would have done differently than these allegedly non-political actors, whose every move is laser-focused on delegitimizing and eliminating the GOP’s political competition.

The Roberts court has dismantled the Democratic Party in a number of ways. One was its 2024 ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which did away with a judicial doctrine known as Chevron deference that allows the executive branch to respond nimbly and autonomously to laws passed by Congress. Its elimination essentially allows the high court to undercut the actions taken by the administrative state to carry out laws. This is specifically bad for a party that actually uses the federal government to facilitate policy, rather than using the federal government to destroy the federal government.

But the Supreme Court has put its finger on the scale for Republicans in even less ambiguous ways in recent years. The conservative majority’s embrace of what’s known as the “major questions doctrine” has added a new layer of imperviousness to its reign of Calvinball terror. That doctrine, which is a very recent invention of the conservative legal movement, allows the justices to overturn a federal regulation if they believe Congress didn’t “speak clearly” enough when authorizing it. If you’re wondering what that means, well, it means whatever a majority of justices think it means: Over time, the major questions doctrine has allowed the justices a wide range in applying subjective and malleable criteria to rule against regulations.

The Supreme Court, by the way, has never applied the major questions doctrine to a Republican president’s actions—though Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch did contend in a concurring opinion that it should have been applied to Trump in the recent case that struck down the president’s tariff regime. In every other instance, the major questions doctrine has provided a facially neutral jurisprudential scheme to derail Democratic presidents. Democrats have also, in recent years, been sabotaged whenever the court issues a shadow docket ruling, whereas lately those unsigned rulings keep siding with Trump. As Ford recently noted, leaked Supreme Court memos have shone a new light on how the conservative justices’ shadow docket dabblings have gone from being “a simple administrative mechanism [to] a major roadblock for progressive governance.”

As if kneecapping the Democratic Party’s ability to govern isn’t enough, the court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais has effectively eliminated the safeguards in the Voting Rights Act that ensured the rights of Black Americans to participate in electoral politics. Ford wrote that the ruling all but ensures that “Black representation in Congress will … plummet, further tilting the House map in favor of the GOP.” True enough, within days, Republican-controlled legislatures began the process of dismantling majority-minority districts.

To Ford’s mind, Democrats find themselves facing some pretty stark choices to confront a Supreme Court that has gone to such lengths to annihilate their party: “Since the Supreme Court as currently constructed cannot be trusted to protect the egalitarian republic that, as Kagan noted, Union soldiers and civil rights activists fought and died to build, sufficient justices must be appointed to it to remedy the problem.”

To pack the court, or not pack the court? This is a question that Democrats have been at pains to avoid. And to be fair, they may have other options besides the nuclear one. They could engage in jurisdiction stripping to limit the court’s ability to interfere with liberal governance. They could reform the court in other ways beyond simply nominating four new justices to turn the tide: Pete Buttigieg has floated the idea of a 15-member court split among conservatives, liberals, and ostensible neutrals. Other lawmakers have proposed we simply abolish lifetime appointments.

I could spend several more paragraphs sketching out solutions to end the misrule of an illiberal court, but the time has come for Democrats to step forward and announce what they plan to do about it. The party is no longer on a collision course with the Roberts court—the collision has happened; the wreckage is in the road. To do anything, now or in the future, Democrats will have to undo the grievous harms that imperil their party’s ability to function. In these upcoming election cycles, if Democratic candidates don’t have serious ideas of how to solve this problem, then they are not serious Democratic candidates.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Here’s a Better Idea Than Trying to Assassinate the President

Cole Allen squandered his life on a hopeless mission to change the course of history. Let’s learn from his mistakes.

Cole Allen, the 31-year-old California man who, by his own admission, armed himself and attempted to breach the security at this past weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, was officially charged this week with attempting to assassinate the president. The case—at least what’s been publicly disclosed—is still quite murky; questions remain about whether Allen even fired his gun in the bowels of the Washington Hilton Hotel. Still, the takeaway, to me at least, is clear: You should not try to assassinate the president.

I know, this is probably not something that you need to be told. Murder is, after all, inherently immoral and a criminal act to boot. Murdering the president of the United States also comes with a high degree of difficulty given his 24/7 protection by a posse of well-trained armed guards. In just about every conceivable scenario, you will likely fail and you will definitely not be able to go back to living your previous life. Still, there are some additional things to consider that are specific to the Trump era itself: whether killing the president won’t make matters much worse, and whether there is a better way to channel your discontent.

Allen is an unusual would-be assassin. There’s nothing about him that reminds me of any number of mass shooters of recent vintage. There’s no air of glory-seeking; no meme-sludge in his rhetoric. In his manifesto, he spends quite a bit of time apologizing to various people in his life for betraying their trust and takes no evident pleasure in the task he’s put himself to doing. (He also seems prematurely disdainful of the security measures that ultimately foiled his plot.) What’s most unique, and perhaps most troubling, is that his decision to try to take the president’s life is, as TNR contributor Elizabeth Spiers noted on Bluesky, rooted in a sense of moral injury.

The Huffington Post’s David Wood, who has written extensively about how soldiers often suffer from moral injury after their tours of duty have concluded, describes the condition as the “sense that [one’s] fundamental understanding of right and wrong has been violated, and the grief, numbness or guilt that often ensues.” In his manifesto, Allen wrote, “I am a citizen of the United States of America. What my representatives do reflects on me. And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” For all intents and purposes, he is saying that he is implicated in Trump’s evident corruption and misrule. “Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior,” he wrote, “it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.”

This is perhaps the most worrying part of this story—that there might be others out there who feel this way, and who might be compelled to take the same action. These are the natural consequences of our current age of elite impunity, in which a corrupt president transforms the government into an instrument of self-dealing and revenge, and justice is perceived as slow in arriving, if it arrives at all. Allen spends a considerable amount of time in his manifesto building the moral scaffolding necessary to accommodate his decision to travel to Washington, D.C., to dole out a quick dose of accountability. Based on his writing, I think he works harder than most would-be mass shooters to illuminate a humane logic for his actions. I still think he draws all the wrong conclusions.

One thing that Allen gets........

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