Put a Human Face on the Misery That Trump Wreaks

This week, members of both houses of Congress came together, in bipartisan fashion, to accomplish the one thing they’ve been consistently excellent at in recent years: giving one another long vacations away from Washington. This time, lawmakers will adjourn knowing that by their mid-November return, they will resume their duties in a much-changed world: Either former President Donald Trump will have been reelected or former President Donald Trump will be conspiring with Republicans to overturn Vice President Kamala Harris’s election.

The extent to which this all might weigh heavily on the minds of Harris’s congressional allies is not something that I know for certain. That said, it is conspicuous enough that House Democrats spent part of their last week staging a hearing on Project 2025, the elaborate manifesto that purports to be Trump’s second-term agenda, which the former president has, in unconvincing fashion, attempted to disavow. It’s not hard to see why: Democrats successfully pushed Project 2025 into the zeitgeist and poisoned public opinion against it.

All of which might raise the question: Why fight a war you’ve already won? Well, sometimes you just gotta play the hits, I suppose. While Democrats weren’t exactly breaking new ground in their presentation (which paid substantial homage to the multimedia gloss used by the January 6 select committee), TNR’s Grace Segers took note of a new trick that Democrats pulled from their sleeve during the hearing: an effort to “put human faces to what they saw as the most objectionable of Project 2025’s proposals.”

The presentation on Tuesday included testimony from a woman who needed to travel out of her home state of Wisconsin to obtain an abortion, an autoworker from Michigan who spoke about the agenda’s anti-union provisions, and a Virginia woman who relies on Medicare to obtain insulin. It focused specifically on abortion, the economy, and Social Security and Medicare access—topics that are among the most important for American voters.

For a party that I think too often gets caught in the weeds of airy principles and highfalutin paeans to Washington norms, I think this is a welcome shift in tactics. It’s a good sign that Democrats are following an instinct to put flesh and blood on the bones of their case against Trump and to tell real-life stories about the potential mayhem of a future Trump presidency. (TNR contributor Nina Burleigh recently hosted a panel discussion devoted to these insidious plans.) It’s rhetoric that fits Harris’s prosecutorial skills, and it fills in an important blank space: If the next few weeks of this campaign are to be a prosecution of Trump, that case will need plaintiffs—the realer the better.

It’s an auspicious time for such storytelling, as it seems that stories of the real people harmed by the GOP’s designs have recently blossomed across the news cycle. Last week, ProPublica’s Kavitha Surana named two women who lost their lives due to Georgia’s abortion ban. Harris immediately made avenging their deaths part of her campaign. “This is exactly what we feared when Roe was struck down,” she told reporters.

Harris has established firm footing on the issue of reproductive rights. Like the attention given to Project 2025, hers is the more popular position, and she’d be well advised to keep finding stories to tell about the dangers of the post-Dobbs world. That said, I’ve argued that the campaign needs to expand its palette to include other patches of what should be favorable terrain, such as Trump’s plan to purge the federal workforce and restore a corrupt spoils system, and the Supreme Court’s attack on liberal governance by gutting Chevron deference in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, without which most of the policies Harris might propose in office won’t survive.

As it happens, reporters have lately endeavored to put some human faces on these complicated matters as well. Over at The Washington Post, author Michael Lewis has been turned loose to curate a series of stories on the men and women of the federal workforce, which Trump wants to transform into an instrument of his revenge and self-enrichment. As TNR’s Tim Noah notes, this is a welcome shift from a paper that’s too often given the civil service short shrift. Meanwhile, over at ProPublica, Eli Sanders draws back the curtain on the people who’ve already been harmed by the Loper Bright decision, confirming the fears of the dissenting Justice Elena Kagan, who warned that the ruling would lead to “large scale disruption.”

This might be the most critical time for Harris and her allies to make use of this considerable fodder and start weaving stories of the people who stand to lose in a second Trump term. Stories that come attached to human faces are more potent and palatable to the media than those attached to intangible arguments about norms and principles: The lives of actual people are more easily transformed into the controversy and conflict that the political press craves. (It’s for this reason that it’s maddening that the Harris campaign hasn’t made a stirring defense of the Haitian community who have so recently borne the brunt of Trump’s attacks, and who live as a febrile example of what his mass deportation plan will be like. This is something that Harris should correct with all due haste.)

I still think that Harris and her fellow Democrats shouldn’t skimp on another rhetorical priority: looking toward the future for which she’ll ostensibly be fighting if elected; this too can be decorated with human faces. And with Congress out, it’s hard to know what platform these important allies will use to mount a case in the media. But it’s nice to see Democrats develop a taste for the kind of storytelling on display at this week’s Project 2025 hearings. There’s magic in having a bit of the old human touch. This election won’t be won with white papers, websites, or wonkery. Victory in November will be claimed by whoever makes the best use of stark moral tones and the real-live stakes faced by real-live people. It will be won by whoever best manifests the joy of helping our neighbors, the satisfaction of crushing their enemies.

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

If Donald Trump has a singular policy proposal that he’s planning on implementing upon his return to Washington, it’s probably his bruising and “bloody” mass deportation of tens of millions of people from the United States. Kamala Harris understands that what Trump is proposing is frightening, darkly warning on Wednesday that the plan could herald massive raids and deportation camps. But even as she takes this message to voters, her own position on immigration is, as The New York Times characterizes it, “a balancing act.” It’s important to identify what, precisely, she’s trying to balance, though: on the one hand a desire to appeal to immigration restrictionists and on the other a moral imperative to treat migrants fairly and humanely.

It’s an odd situation for Democrats to be in, considering that draconian immigration policies are Trump’s bread and butter—to say nothing of his habitual demonization of migrants and immigrants. If something in the Democratic response seems to be sputtering, however, that’s probably indicative of a sad reality: One of Trump’s big political successes was his dismantling of the polite Beltway consensus on immigration reform and taking public opinion with him.

If Trump implements his mass deportation scheme, it would be perilous for just about everyone. As the Washington Monthly’s Robert Shapiro reported last May, the proposal would be economically calamitous—damaging to key industries and certain to “bring on a recession while reigniting inflation.” But Shapiro points to something else beyond the economy that seems like it might leave a deeper wound: “MAGA attacks on immigration also draw on common fallacies and reckless misrepresentations. For example, the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants have deep ties to their communities and the country.”

This is the heart of the matter: a plan to harm both immigrants and the communities that have taken them in. If you’d like to get a feel for what it looks like when Trump is carving up the U.S. population, one need only look to Springfield, Ohio, which has become a microcosmic example of the former president’s larger design. There we’ve seen the Trump-Vance campaign concoct and stoke lies, for the purpose of putting a town on edge and fomenting mass paranoia and the tormenting of the Haitian community, who settled within the city limits on the promise of well-paying jobs and helped revive their town. Trump’s efforts have led to the bullying of these immigrants and chaos throughout the community, with leaders futilely trying to stem the tide of the campaign’s meretricious lies while contending with bomb threats and other violence.

Haitians are the epitome of a vulnerable group, having arrived here after “fleeing a series of disasters, both natural and man-made, many of them exacerbated or caused by the government and industries of the U.S.,” as TNR contributor Jonathan Katz wrote this week. The way the Haitians of Springfield have been depicted by Trump and his MAGA allies is especially grotesque, and might be more than mere campaign trail politicking: Engendering public animus toward immigrants is a soft launch of sorts for Trump’s mass deportation project—which, as Mother Jones’ Isabela Dias reports, is going to target not only undocumented migrants but legal ones too.

The Haitians facing Trump’s slings and arrows could use a champion. So far, however, Harris hasn’t exactly been their fire-spitting defender. In their debate, Harris passed on an opportunity to take Trump to task for his racist attacks on Haitian Americans, offering only a throwaway comment (“Talk about extreme”) before pivoting; a second chance to assail his deportation plan more specifically ended with Harris roasting Trump for the criminal charges he’s racked up since leaving office. More recently, at a National Association of Black Journalists confab, Harris expressed support for the larger Springfield “community” without actually naming the segment of that community who are facing the full force of her opponent’s cruelties.

None of this is likely demonstrative of some personal animus that Harris holds toward Haitians in general—though her omission does recall an incident from the 2020 campaign in which the Haitian American community in Miami was left feeling slighted by a Harris campaign visit. It’s more in keeping with a deep skittishness that has permeated the campaign, most likely through the advisers she’s inherited from Biden. But it’s also a timidity that elite Democrats all seem to share on the issue. I was never very confident that Trump’s ouster was going to catalyze much of a reversal on Trump’s immigration policy. As reporters like TNR contributor Felipe De La Hoz have continually reported during its tenure, the Biden administration has been disappointingly predictable.

As Axios reports, the progressives who want a clean break with Trump’s immigration designs are hoping that Harris’s recent hawkish stance is a temporary measure, born out of (an assumed) necessity of the campaign trail. It’s hard to fathom from where they derive this hope. Democrats haven’t exactly blazed a path away from Trumpism. Harris herself is still taunting the GOP for following Trump’s orders to kill the Biden-favored immigration bill that, had it been enacted, would have left these hopeful progressives bereft.

And as Washington bends in the direction of more draconian immigration policies, the public seems to have become more cemented on Trump’s side of the issue. According to a September 18 Ipsos poll, more respondents “believe former President Donald Trump would do a better job handling immigration than Vice President Kamala Harris, and Americans broadly do not understand what Harris’ role is, related to immigration.” And while “most support giving a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children,” there is also majority support for some form of “mass deportation.”

It’s amazing how things change in such a short amount of time. During the Obama administration, Democrats and Republicans took comprehensive immigration reform seriously and tried to find common ground to create a more sensible, secure, and decent way of admitting people into this country. When Mitt Romney pledged to lead a wave of voluntary self-deportation, his proclamation was considered harsh and embarrassing—the fumbling attempts of a dyed-in-the-wool technocrat courting the fringe. Now Trump wants to banish tens of millions of immigrants, including an untold number of legal citizens, and it’s raising surprisingly few hackles.

There is obvious comfort to be taken in the fact that Harris doesn’t share these extreme views and—I think!—doesn’t share Trump’s love of disappearing a huge portion of the populace. But Trump has drastically shifted the Overton window, and Democrats have done almost nothing to arrest it. The aspirations of comprehensive immigration reformers seem all but dead, and the future of humane immigration policies is bleak indeed. We might as well say it, if only because admitting we have a problem is the necessary first step in solving it: Trump won.

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

It’s pretty rare for the Columbia Journalism Review and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban to be dishing on the same topic. But media critics touched a nerve this week with accusations that the political press suffers from a “coherence bias,” particularly as it relates to Donald Trump: the tendency of reporters and editors to take his verbal diarrhea and transform it, through the magic of elision and omission, into statesmanship. TNR contributor Parker Molloy has an even better word for this practice: “sanewashing.”

That this discussion arose in the days leading up to the presidential debate was to the benefit of those tuning in. It likely primed the pump for some of the real-time fact-checking of those moments when Trump seemed to be completely gacked up on whoop chicken, such as his contention that Democrats support “post-birth abortions” and that immigrants in Ohio are stealing and eating pets. But if there’s an agreement to be had on sanewashing, then let it serve as a springboard for a larger and more important conversation: whether the political media’s grasp of policy is truly commensurate with its constant demand for it.

Recent attempts in the mainstream media to understand and explain wonky matters have been embarrassing failures—a dereliction that shares strands of DNA with its tendency to tidy up Trump’s constant barrage of nonsense. A prime example can be found in one of the stories that provoked the sanewashing conversation: the Associated Press’s recap of Trump’s appearance at the Economic Club of New York last week, in which he offered up several paragraphs of word salad in lieu of a discussion of child poverty. The straight story of what happened was a naggingly simple one: Trump dodged a question about child poverty in order to pivot to what he wanted to talk about—tariffs—and shoehorn in his preferred talking points. He did this less artfully than many politicians, but it would have been sufficient to simply say he did not bother to answer the question he was asked.

But the AP didn’t opt for the straight story, and instead constructed a world rivaling George R.R. Martin. In the AP’s version of cloud-cuckoo-land, Trump explicated an innovative idea, in which the proceeds from our trade wars would facilitate bountiful childcare benefits … somehow. It’s bad enough that the AP did all this heavy lifting just to make it appear that Trump used complete English-language sentences in a speech. But considerably more effort was expended here to convert several minutes of sundowner gobbledygook into an allegedly earnest policy proposal. To get there, these reporters had to ignore a vast amount of information and experience, including knowledge of the policies that Republicans have actually supported and the informed opinions of actual experts.

The reality is that what will happen in Trump’s second term looks more like this: These tariffs get applied. American consumers pay more money for goods. The money goes into federal coffers. And the GOP passes (and Trump signs) budget packages that include massive tax cuts for billionaires and corporations, alongside massive cuts to funding for social services.

Could that money have paid for childcare? Sure! It could have gone to baking the world’s largest funnel cake! But in our actual reality, the GOP is adamantly, philosophically opposed to providing government assistance to the people who need relief the most, thus rendering meaningless whatever benefits Trump thinks all of his alleged “big numbers” might provide. This kind of forthright, accurate analysis was available had anyone at the AP understood tariffs at the same level of intellectual heft as the Twitter menswear guy.

This is only the latest example of the vast delta in the political press between acquiring policy information and understanding that information. The signature policy goal of the next Trump administration, to hear reporters tell it, is the facilitation of a massive deportation plan that would evict tens of millions of people from the country. One question that could be asked here (because it’s the first question put to any Democratic policy proposal) would be, “How will you pay for it?” Literally where does the funding to spin up this effort come from? How do you plan to get the United States out of the deep recession that would occur as a result of this population extraction? (If Trump’s answer is, “I’m doing tariffs,” maybe remind him that those proceeds were already earmarked to fix child poverty.)

So it was very weird when—with all these unasked urgent questions—a recent New York Times story portrayed his nigh-on unworkable plan as a linchpin in a proposal to ameliorate the affordable housing crisis: “Harris and Trump both have plans to address America’s affordable housing crisis,” the story originally read. “Hers include tax cuts and a benefit for first-time buyers, and his include deportations and lower interest rates.” (The story was later stealth-edited to massage these sentences out of existence.)

The original contention of the piece was to portray economists as equally skeptical of both candidates’ housing proposals. But here, the entire idea that a mass deportation plan would play a role comes bull-rushing into the discussion without warning and without any explanation of how it would work. Would low-income Americans be literally moved into the domiciles of freshly evicted immigrants? No one knows, and no one can say! (And to be honest, “economists” would probably be even more keen to find out how Trump’s plan to issue massive tax cuts for the wealthy—and the ballooning deficits that would follow—would somehow lead to lower interest rates. The Times just takes it on faith that Trump will somehow magically summon them from the economic wreckage of his grand design.)

That so much falls by the wayside in covering Trump’s policy proposals might be somewhat acceptable if this lackadaisical approach was consistently applied across the board, but this hasn’t been the case. I am sympathetic to journalists, from campaign reporters to The New Republic’s Alex Shephard, who think Kamala Harris ought to put more meat on the bone in terms of policy, but we should be at least as demanding that Trump answer the “How?” and “WTF?” questions that his ideas engender.

What’s very clearly emerged from recent weeks of campaign trail coverage is a rather glaring disparity. On one hand, we have an eminently defensible drive to get Harris to pony up more details of what she wants to do as president, and real scrutiny being paid to how much her policy preferences have shifted in the past five years. On the other hand, we have reporters dutifully filling in Trump’s blanks, excusing his psychopathic edges, and inventing weird cause-and-effect chains that purport to explain how his ideas work. I’m glad that the press is taking Trump both literally and seriously, but no one can look seriously at the literal details of his “proposals” and conclude they make any sense. To pretend otherwise is to write fiction, not journalism.

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

Just when Donald Trump thought he had put his latest weird controversy behind him, the son of the late Senator John McCain dragged it back into the news. This week, Jimmy McCain, who followed his father into military service, announced that he was all in for Kamala Harris, going so far as to register as a Democrat for the upcoming election. The catalyzing event for McCain was a scandal that made huge news last week: the Trump campaign’s bizarre attempt at a publicity stunt at Arlington National Cemetery on August 26, which ended in an altercation between members of his campaign staff and an official at the cemetery, who attempted to enforce a rule barring cameras in one section of the grounds.

The fracas spurred a weeklong festival of potshots, recriminations, and—as with all things Trump—the specter of political violence, as the official who ran afoul of Trump’s campaign thugs was left fearful of retaliation. It was all too much for McCain fils, who referred to the Trump team’s actions as a “violation.” As true as that may be, the whole hullabaloo is also quintessential Trump—and perhaps the best example of how he will rule in a second term: as a bully, bent on pushing around, publicly maligning, and punishing those who earn their living in public service.

This is no mere supposition on my part. It’s no secret that Trump and his GOP allies plan to radically reconceive the federal workforce into an engine of personal gain and retribution. Indeed, it was a latter-day plan of Trump’s first term that never ended up coming to fruition: In October of 2020, he issued an executive order that would have recategorized a wide swath of the civil service under something called “Schedule F,” giving Trump broad leeway to apply political loyalty tests to executive branch employees and fire those who could not pass them.

Trump was unable to fully implement this design, and President Joe Biden was swift to rescind the order upon taking office. But Trump and his allies—notably the far-right weirdos of the Peter Thiel Extended Universe, which includes vice presidential hopeful J.D. Vance—dream of purging the federal government of anyone who isn’t a true MAGA believer and bringing back a souped-up spoils system that would transform the government into an engine of retribution.

Trump learned during his first term that the federal workforce was often a de facto blockade against his corrupt designs, simply because throughout its ranks are people who follow the rules. And while purging this workforce of its dedicated lifers and replacing them with cronies and trolls won’t make the civil service smarter or more efficient, it will reduce resistance to unlawful orders and create opportunities for corruption. Currently, federal employees are protected if they refuse unlawful orders. Trump wants to change that, so that the massive federal workforce might be transformed into the fist of an authoritarian president.

In particular, attorneys are a big focus of Trump’s plans, because these are the referees who tell government managers and political leaders which potential actions are either illegal or unauthorized. If these civil servants are dispensed with and replaced with flunkies, not only will there be no one left to slow a corrupt administration’s plots and schemes; the American people will lose vital advocates, sworn to uphold the Constitution. These will be replaced by revenge-minded vipers, with loyalty only to Trump, his financial interests, and his lust for revenge.

The potential for mayhem if Trump gets his way with the federal workforce is boundless. As I previously wrote:

Democrats might find their Social Security or veterans’ benefits delayed or denied. They might no longer be able to obtain passports. Emergency disaster aid might flow only to those deemed loyal to the administration. Corporations that refuse to pay tribute might be punished. Transform the civil service from an open hand to a closed fist, and things get very frightening very quickly.

With this in mind, it’s not hard to see how last week’s incident at Arlington National Cemetery might have gone down under a Trump presidency. With Biden in office, rules and norms were respected, and officials at the U.S Army had a free hand to support the woman who tried to stop Trump’s team from filming in a restricted area, saying publicly that “her professionalism was unfairly attacked.” If Trump returns to office, those same officials would be risking their livelihoods for trying to uphold the law against a Trump ally—or be promoted for letting them break the law.

Trump’s plans for the federal bureaucracy have received some mainstream attention, but they’ve not jumped into the public psyche yet, despite—or perhaps because of—the pure comic-book villainy of the scheme. But there’s a lesson for Democrats here: Harris and her allies were successful in popularizing Trump’s association with Project 2025—and his faltering attempts to distance himself from it—through a literal and figurative “billboard-size” campaign. These efforts paid off handsomely.

Can Democrats repeat this success? Trump’s plans to weaponize the government are cut from the same antisocial cloth. Its proponents fit squarely within the “weird” frame that Democrats used throughout the summer. “Schedule F” has a similarly ominous name. And most importantly, these are plans that Trump and his fellow Republicans openly discuss, and which they’ve already tried to implement once. The explosive incident at Arlington Cemetery is a fitting way to illustrate the larger malevolence of Trump’s designs and get people to recognize the same thing that Jimmy McCain saw this week—that it was disqualifying.

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

With the party vibes at the Democratic National Convention fading, and attention turning to the ragged ten-week sprint to November, the punditocracy seems ready to declare an end to Kamala Harris’s honeymoon. Where, everyone wants to know, are her policy positions? The notion that she has none has been overstated, but this is indeed the moment where a campaign, after all the convention’s frippery, is expected to put some meat on the bone. And given that Harris has lately retreated from bold positions she once took on a range of issues, she will be “expected to … explain the differences between her 2019 primary campaign agenda and her more limited ambitions as the Democratic nominee in 2024,” as Brian Beutler notes in his Off Message newsletter.

I’m curious about this as well—and since I labor at a journal of ideas, I’d certainly prefer the next phase of the conversation to veer in the direction of policy. But if you want to know the biggest difference between 2019 and now, I would urge you to consider the dark shadow that hangs over everything: the Supreme Court’s conservative majority’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo.

That ruling, which overturned a doctrine called “Chevron deference,” puts the future of any policy that Harris favors in grave doubt. If you want the Harris campaign to get more detailed on policy, I’m sorry to say that any conversation starts and ends with how they plan to confront a Supreme Court that has torched the separation of powers in the mad game of Calvinball they kicked off during the Trump era.

The gutting of Chevron deference is not something that the smooth-brained masses of the political media adequately understood when it came down. Chevron deference is essentially the doctrine that allows government agencies to respond nimbly to their congressional mandates; hitherto, the judiciary stayed out of the way, allowing executive branch personnel to use their expertise to interpret ambiguous regulations. Imagine, for example, the technological advancements that have occurred since landmark environmental legislation was passed decades ago. The EPA, given free rein to adapt to this changing landscape, can move more fleetly to remediate pollution thanks to Chevron. The Roberts court, instead, imagines a world where they have to return to Congress each time there is an emergency, to get specific guidance.

The best way of describing what the conservative majority did is to say it gave six unelected right-wing politicians who all enjoy a lifetime appointment a line-item veto over anything a Democratic Congress—and by extension Harris—wants to do, unless they can muster the votes to confront each problem they want to solve with an inhuman amount of hyper-specificity. As Vox’s Ian Millhiser has explained, if the executive branch “can’t regulate without getting permission from a Republican judiciary … then conservatives no longer need to worry about Democratic presidents doing much of anything that doesn’t meet the GOP’s approval.”

Judicial malefactors have already cited Loper Bright to challenge President Joe Biden’s policies and pilfer money from the pockets of ordinary people. The way this ruling potentially hamstrings the ability of the federal government to protect ordinary people from a myriad of harms means this is a Supreme Court decision that will come with a running tally of costs to taxpayers—and, most likely, a body count.

The Supreme Court really is the most critical policy issue in this election. The Trump-installed majority is central to what the right plans for a second Trump term. Beyond the fact that the Roberts court’s ruling in Trump v. United States imbues the chief executive with monarchic levels of unaccountability—a dangerous privilege for, frankly, any president to possess—Project 2025, which is best understood as a massive rollback of individual rights, is something that Republicans simply could never contemplate without their super-legislature in black robes.

Here, vaporizing Chevron has an asymmetric impact on the ambitions of the two parties. The GOP, having retreated from any part of the policy realm besides Project 2025’s infernal schemes, the furnishing of tax cuts to plutocrats, and deregulating everything under the sun (also a form of wealth transfer to plutocrats), need not worry about Chevron being in effect anymore.

But what makes Chevron crucial to this campaign is that the sledding for Democrats remains rough even if they prevail in November. Indeed, even if they blow the GOP out of the water electorally, the end of Chevron deference is a fail-safe against Democratic policy, constantly running in the background as long as five of the six conservatives on the Roberts court agree. In this way, Harris and her fellow Democrats are locked out of liberal governance. Since liberal governance will form the cornerstone of anything Harris and Democrats want to do during her time in office, a confrontation with a Supreme Court that’s holding the policymaking apparatus hostage is not a fight they can duck.

All Democrats need to join in this fight, and constantly raise the salience of the Supreme Court and its attendant corruption. It would be a good idea for any policy discussion to note that the Roberts court is the primary antagonist to making things better, easier, safer, and fairer for ordinary Americans; they are despoilers of the land and pilferers of our wealth. Harris should continually remind voters that turning things around will require a Democratic president to be on hand to appoint any replacements that may be needed, and prevent the oldest conservative justices from escaping into retirement, which would allow Trump to replace them with young members of the right’s lunatic lower-court farm system.

Is it time to revisit court-packing? I think the institutionalist case against it completely collapsed by the end of the court’s last term, but I doubt Harris has the stomach to revive the idea over the next several weeks. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court will remain the rock in the road that Democrats must find a way around if they want to improve our lives. Anything you might want an ascendant Democratic administration to do faces the judicial veto of right-wingers who can’t be voted out of office. It’s true that Harris is probably not going to deliver, or even champion, the most ambitious policies that progressives favor. But whether you’re a progressive fan of Medicare for All, or a centrist dedicated to means-tested, watered-down bullshit, you’re all in the same boat, so grab an oar.