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The US Had a Choice After 9/11. It Chose Wrong.

In this week’s Elie v. U.S., our justice correspondent reflects on September 11. Plus: the stupidity of the “Trump Dividend” and the threat of AI.

Anti-war demonstrators hold hands at Union Square in New York City 11 September 2002 during a candle light vigil.

This newsletter is going to hit your inbox on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, which means you’re no doubt being flooded with remembrances and retrospectives. 

And regrets. The country’s response to the worst terror attack in our history was to launch a global war of hysteria that consisted of rage-bombing two countries, destabilizing an entire region, and seeding a police state that has now been fully weaponized by an authoritarian regime against its own citizens. Moreover, every post-9/11 mistake we’ve made has been understood as a mistake in real time—not by all, or even most, people in this country, but by enough that nobody can credibly claim to have been unaware of the dangers. 

But the majority of Americans were always going to want to respond to violence with more, overwhelming violence. The majority of people were always going to be willing to trade a little bit of liberty (especially liberty of people perceived as Other) for a little bit of (false) security. 

On 9/11, I always think about what might have been. What if, instead of making war on countries that didn’t attack us, we had made the lives of the people living in those places better? What if we had raised their standard of living, instead of bombing their standard of living? What if President George W. Bush had committed our country to using renewable energy instead of starting a war for oil? What if New York City had built Freedom Apartment Buildings instead of the Freedom Tower? 

9/11 was a tragedy, but it was also an opportunity to show the world what we really valued and cared about. I guess… we did. 

The battle over Missouri’s attempt to radically change its congressional maps to favor the GOP in the midterms—which start in [checks notes] two months—appears to be over. The Supreme Court rejected yet another appeal from state Republicans to change the maps, and the Missouri secretary of state—facing a contempt charge from the Missouri State Supreme Court—finally agreed to follow the law. 

We’re still waiting for the Supreme Court to decide whether Donald Trump and the US Postal Service will be allowed to rig the midterms by restricting mail-in voting. But all the briefs have been filed, so we can expect the court to rule soon on how the freaking election is supposed to be administered. Wonderful system we’ve got here. 

If I still had time to worry about actual legal issues (as opposed to Trump and the GOP’s extralegal election rigging), I would be super interested in the question of whether senior citizens should be allowed to vote by mail while others are not. As Adam Liptak explains in The New York Times, the question—which is at the heart of a recent Fourth Circuit ruling—runs smack into the constitutional heart of the rarely cited 26th Amendment, which prohibits denying the right to vote on account of age to anybody 18 years or older. Arguably, allowing seniors to vote by mail but not allowing others to do the same is a violation of the 26th. However, since making it easier for seniors to vote but harder for everyone else helps the Republican Party, I have to assume the Supreme Court will ignore this aspect of the amendment.

The Trump administration has officially proposed its new rules for the 2030 census. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how these rules were being designed both to help Republicans by undercounting minority populations and to stop........

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