Bluesky

The editorial board of Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post dedicated an entire editorial over the weekend to criticizing Supreme Court reform and expansion. The piece is titled “The Court Packing Comeback,” which might make you think it will offer a balanced look at the surging popularity of court-expansion proposals, but the URL tells you what the editorial board is really after. It reads: “kamala-harriss-mindless-flirtation-with-court-packing.” The article isn’t really about Harris, beyond the fact that she recently said that there are “no bad ideas” when it comes to court reform. The fact that the editorial board used that offhand comment to go full sexism—Why is Harris’s statement “mindless”? How is she “flirting”?—tells me they’re scared that court reform is gaining in popularity.

Beyond this base and gross sexism, the editorial board marshals, dare I say, mindless tripe to defend the current court set-up. Here’s the basic premise: “No matter how much someone disagrees with recent decisions by the high court, threatening to subordinate judicial independence to the whims of a political party befits a banana republic. Turning the court into a partisan plaything would destroy one of America’s strongest bulwarks against tyranny.”

Let’s do a close read:

• “No matter how much someone disagrees” is a phrase intended to minimize the horror of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions. I will stipulate that for your average cis-hetero white Washington Post editorial writer, the court’s decisions are, at worst, disagreeable. But for many of us, these decisions are matters of life and death. They certainly are for the trans people the Supreme Court is trying to erase. And for the women who live in states where their lives cease to matter the second they get pregnant. And while political representation is not necessarily a life-or-death issue, the demolition of the Voting Rights Act and the right of Black people to participate equally in the process of democratic self-government cannot be dismissed as a mere matter of disagreement.
• “Threatening to subordinate judicial independence to the whims of a political party befits a banana republic.” First of all, the current court is subject to the whims of a political party, the Republican Party. The Post’s editorial writers just happen to like it that way. And second, most functional democracies have high courts that are far less powerful than ours. Having nine unelected judges-for-life determine which laws we’re allowed to have is antidemocratic. Actual republics, banana or otherwise, do not cede the functions of democracy to unaccountable people with lifetime appointments.
• “Turning the court into a partisan plaything” is what Senator Mitch McConnell did. Court reform is a way to undo that, thanks for asking.
• “[O]ne of America’s strongest bulwarks against tyranny.” Is it, though? Is the Supreme Court a “bulwark” against tyranny? From where I sit, I see a litany of examples of American tyranny that were supported by the court. Slavery, segregation, internment of Japanese Americans—all of these atrocities came with the Supreme Court’s stamp of approval. Police violence, gun violence, and ecological destruction all flourish in this country because of what the Supreme Court has allowed. More often than not, the Supreme Court is a bulwark against progress.

After this inauspicious set-up, the editorial goes on to make all the usual arguments against court reform: It decries “tribalism,” agonizes about the possibility of tit-for-tat expansion, and recasts Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempt at court-packing as a “failure,” even though the mere threat of it helped FDR get his New Deal policies through a hostile Supreme Court.

It all boils down to this: The Washington Post editorial board thinks the current Supreme Court is working just fine and doesn’t want anybody to change it. And they’re not wholly wrong about the first part: The current Supreme Court is working just fine—for The Washington Post and the moneyed interests it now represents.

So let me put it like this: If Jeff Bezos doesn’t want the Supreme Court to be reformed, that should be a sufficient reason for the rest of us to be in favor of it.

The Bad and the Ugly

• The Department of Justice has filed an indictment against Raúl Castro, former president of Cuba, over the downing of civilian airplanes over international waters while he was defense secretary. The indictment is the usual “lawfare” the Trump administration carries out against non-whites the world over, but I want Democrats to notice something: Castro is being indicted for an event that took place when he was the defense minister. If Trump can do that to Castro, our defense secretary, other countries can certainly indict Pete Hegseth for his war crimes. Hegseth shouldn’t be able to step foot outside this country without winding up in The Hague for the rest of his life.
• Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche continued his Better Call Saul impression this week when he apparently lied, under oath, about meeting with victims of Jeffrey Epstein. (He claimed he did, when he absolutely did not.) Blanche is another Trumper who should be prosecuted for his crimes when this is all over. I hope Jack Smith is keeping a list.
• Twenty-five states and the District of Columbia sued the Department of Education for new restrictions it placed on loans for students attending professional schools. It appears Linda McMahon doesn’t think we need nurses. As clear as I can tell, McMahon hasn’t committed any crimes, so instead of prosecuting her I vote to set her adrift—put her on an ice floe while her students assure her that climate change isn’t real and she should be fine—when she is out of power.
• Jeff Bezos thinks that the bottom 50 percent of wage earners shouldn’t pay any taxes. I think Jeff Bezos should pay his workers a living wage. We are not the same.
• Waymo, the driverless taxi company, suspended service in Atlanta because its cars don’t know how to deal with flooding. A similar thing recently happened in San Antonio, and the company has also issued a general recall because its taxis keep driving into water. The idea of AI being flummoxed by the very climate change AI is helping stoke feels like a plot point in a Michael Crichton novel.

Inspired Takes

• For The Nation, Kali Holloway dives into the new trend among always-online white supremacists: livestreaming their harassment of Black people with racial slurs and insults while threatening to shoot them. Holloway rightly points out that, while some people will see this as a new evil brought about by social media, Black people know this is an old evil brought about by white supremacy.
• Speaking of undesirable men, there’s a really interesting article from Planet Money about how there’s a shortage of economically stable men in today’s “marriage market.” It details how college-educated women are marrying men who lack a college education but are nonetheless doing well for themselves, leaving almost nothing left over for women without a college education who are increasingly choosing to parent on their own. 
• Not gonna lie, the “marriage market” article sent me down a rabbit hole and, well, I ended up at Playboy—just for the articles, I swear! The piece that caught my attention was fascinating because it explored the case of undesirable rich men. It concluded that billionaires are so interpersonally odious as to be “unfuckable,” with the result that only rich women who are used to and complicit in their odious behavior want to have sex with them. These two articles led me to conclude that “nice guys” do not actually “finish last” (my editor points out that this is because guys, in general, rarely finish last) and the obsession with the “male loneliness epidemic” is just about granting victimhood status to assholes.

Worst Argument of the Week

On Thursday, the Democratic National Committee released its “autopsy” of the 2024 election—but don’t get too excited: The DNC has its head so far up its ass that we now need an autopsy for the autopsy. DNC Chair Ken Martin initially said he wasn’t going to release the report, then changed course as people, including Kamala Harris herself, demanded its release. Then, it released a report that was full of errors—like, it literally gets people’s names and positions wrong and cites figures that are provably incorrect.In addition to the report, Martin put out a statement. This paragraph stings:

I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards. I don’t endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it. I could not in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on it. But transparency is paramount. So, today I am releasing the report as I received it—in its entirety, unedited and unabridged—with annotations for claims that couldn’t be verified.

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It’s the most “I’m not a member of an organized political party—I’m a Democrat” moment we’ve encountered in a while.

I could end this week’s “worst argument” section here. Martin’s “I put out a shambolic report riddled with errors that I am not proud of” is a terrible look. So, for that matter, is “Ken Martin should be the head of the DNC.” Martin is so obviously bad at his job that he should be playing for the Mets.

Still, I’m not going to end this section on Martin, because there is one thing that’s even worse about the DNC report—and that is what is not in it: any mention of Gaza. Somehow, the Democratic Party did a 192-page review of what went wrong in 2024, and its response to the genocide in Gaza didn’t rate a single mention.

I don’t know how you do that. I mean, I guess I do know because I know how cowardice and complicity translate into better jobs and power within the Democratic Party. But even for an establishment from which I expect so little, the decision to ignore Gaza really shocks the conscience.

This report gives me no hope for the future. How can the party learn lessons when it won’t even acknowledge facts?

I’m not normally one of the guys who thinks that the Democratic Party needs to be burned to the ground so that we might build something better from its ashes. But in moments like these, it’s hard for me to argue that anything could be worse than the current Democrats.

…Except, of course, for the current Republicans.

What I WroteDid you hear about the $1.8 billion white-grievance slush fund Trump created? I wrote about it. And I also urged Democrats to use it as a model for future reparations to those who have been victimized by the Trump regime.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

I finally got around to watching the Ken Burns documentary The American Revolution, which came out in November. I had been avoiding it because, while I love Burns’s work, I wasn’t in the mood for a hagiography of this country’s founders. I’ve watched every one of his films, multiple times, and I know how he deals with atrocities. I don’t think it’s fair to say he sanitizes or whitewashes them, but he tends to put them off to the side. In his series The Vietnam War, for instance, My Lai gets about as much screen time as Jane Fonda. In his World War II documentary, The War, the Holocaust doesn’t happen until American troops are pushing into Germany.

I understand this style of filmmaking: He’s trying to tell a story from 30,000 feet, and focusing too granularly on the atrocities would overpower the rest of the narrative. You shouldn’t watch his Civil War documentary for a historical account of American chattel slavery; that’s not the point of that show. And, in fairness, you don’t need to understand slavery to understand how Robert E. Lee screwed up at Gettysburg.

Still, despite my initial reluctance, I finally watched the American Revolution series because, as we hurtle toward the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I wanted to refamiliarize myself with what most people have been taught. The American Revolution was, to my mind, one of the most hypocritical wars ever fought. It saw slaveholding whites demanding their natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness while running an economy based on human bondage—and poor, landless whites fighting so that they might one day steal land from Native Americans. The level of intellectual dishonesty at the heart of the project is something I’ve been aware of since I was old enough to memorize the dates of the battles.

The film does surface all of these hypocrisies. It rightly characterizes George Washington as an inveterate slaveholder and Indian killer—and also the only person holding the revolutionary army (and thus the entire fledgling country) together. But, as I feared, it also largely lets the founders off the hook. Their disgusting treatment of enslaved Africans and Indigenous Americans is a side plot in the larger story about fighting the British.

Those Brits, however, get an interesting treatment in this film. I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about the United States’s founding, but I don’t think I’ve been exposed to a more evenhanded treatment of the British perspective during the Revolutionary War. Burns was able to show me how the British thought about the uprising, and how the 13 colonies were, to their mind, small potatoes, compared to their incredibly lucrative slave-powered colonies in the Caribbean.

It’s hard to imagine that Black people and Native Americans would have been better off if the British had won the war, but there’s no way they would have been worse off. The founding generation had an insatiable appetite for land—and for the enslaved people to work those lands. Once they were freed from England’s shackles, they unleashed a terror of genocide and suffering across the entire continent.

All of which is to say, I left the documentary as I leave any contact with the history of the United States’s founding: firm in my belief that calcifying American constitutional law in the “original intent” of these slack-jawed, slaveholding, racist, sexist, genocidal, backwoods mouthbreathers is stupid. I reject orignalism in its entirety.

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