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Every Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York has that one judge he just can’t escape.

Although cases are assigned randomly through a process that combines bingo with the NBA draft lottery – sealed envelopes containing index cards, each bearing the name of one of the forty or so district court judges, drawn randomly from a hollow wooden wheel – every new prosecutor somehow finds that seemingly half his cases somehow wind up with one particular judge. For me, that judge was Alvin K. Hellerstein – the same man who now presides over the Nicolas Maduro case and, through a combination of inaction and irrationality, threatens to waylay the prosecution.

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I don’t relish writing this. Judge Hellerstein is a good man, well-intentioned and generally amiable. I did fine in his courtroom, and there’s plenty more good blood between us than bad. But he’s simply not up for the job of presiding over the single most important criminal case currently pending in our federal court system.

Judge Hellerstein took the bench in 1998, upon nomination by Bill Clinton. He’s held “senior” judicial status since 2011, which means he carries a reduced caseload. The Judge is now 92 years old. He was born in December 1933; he was eleven when World War II ended, 29 when JFK was assassinated, and 41 when the Vietnam War ended. Judge Hellerstein reportedly fell asleep on the bench at times during his most recent trial, last year. When I practiced in his courtroom in the mid-2000s and early 2010s, he was in his 70s. He was capable then, but at times displayed spotty judicial decisionmaking.

Too often, Judge Hellerstein rules by gut instinct, without regard for the law. As Politico delicately phrased it, the Judge is renowned among practitioners for his “stubborn streak” and “an often unorthodox approach to running his courtroom.” As one personal example, he made an obvious legal error in a gun case of mine that was about to go to trial. I filed a brief explaining why he was plainly wrong, but he never read it. He ruled against the prosecution anyway, and got reversed unanimously by the Court of Appeals, which noted pointedly that the Judge’s legal rationale had previously been “rejected by this [appellate] court without equivocation.”

When the Maduro indictment was wheeled out randomly to Judge Hellerstein in early January 2026, he could have reassigned it. Senior judges sometimes do this with cases that promise to be drawn-out and demanding, but the Judge kept the case for himself. That fateful decision already has had troubling consequences.

First, the Maduro case is moving along at an exasperating pace for all involved. District judges hold virtually unfettered power to set schedules, and a judge who understands the necessity for a prompt resolution can typically move from indictment to trial in a year or less. Yet nearly four months in, the Maduro case is essentially nowhere. Forget about a trial date – the Judge hasn’t yet even set a definitive schedule for pre-trial motions. At this pace, there’s no chance of a 2026 trial, and even 2027 might be a stretch. (Judge Hellerstein appears to be a magnet for high-profile case assignments; he also has a piece of the appeal of Donald Trump’s hush money conviction. Nearly six months ago, the Court of Appeals ruled that the Judge had not “adequately considered issues relevant to the [case]” and sent the matter back to him for reconsideration. He hasn’t ruled yet.)

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Judge Hellerstein now stands on the brink of a precipitous decision that could undermine the Maduro prosecution and potentially set the case back to its starting point. In March, the Judge held a hearing to determine whether Maduro’s legal fees could be paid by the country of Venezuela. Maduro’s private defense team – which likely will accrue fees in the millions of dollars – argued that Venezuela is willing to pay, and that Maduro’s constitutional right to counsel would be compromised by a decision barring such funding. The Justice Department countered that economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. government against Venezuela and Maduro prohibit such payments, and that Maduro should be not permitted to use “plundered” assets to fund his criminal defense.

At the hearing, the Judge seemed distinctly inclined in Maduro’s favor. He questioned the wisdom of the U.S. government’s sanctions: “What is the interest of the government now in blocking those funds? We are doing business in Venezuela.” And he noted that, “The defendant is here; Flores [Maduro’s wife] is here. They present no further national security threat.” Judge Hellerstein concluded the hearing without ruling, and promised to issue a decision soon. (Nearly a month later, he hasn’t ruled yet.)

If Judge Hellerstein allows Venezuela to fund Maduro’s defense, he’ll put the Justice Department in a bind. On one hand, prosecutors could accept such a ruling, incorrect though it would be. Judge Hellerstein plainly misunderstands (or oversimplifies) the purpose of sanctions. He seems to think they’re based on whether a person poses “a national security threat” when in fact sanctions can be about much more: international diplomacy, politics, economics, and trade. Moreover, under basic Constitutional principles, sanctions are within the purview of the Executive and Legislative Branches, not the Judiciary. It takes breathtaking arrogance for any district judge to purport to unilaterally overturn the will of the President and Congress on matters of foreign affairs and international relations.

Or the Justice Department could choose to appeal a ruling allowing Venezuela to fund Maduro’s defense, notwithstanding U.S. sanctions. Prosecutors would likely win – but the appeal itself would take months, and then Maduro would receive court-appointed counsel. That would effectively hit the reset button on the entire case, as new lawyers would need to start from scratch and get up to speed.

The Maduro case involves global stakes in its own right. And now the Trump administration apparently intends to use similar tactics elsewhere. Sarah Fitzpatrick of The Atlantic reports that “the U.S. attorney’s office in South Florida is preparing indictments against Cuba’s political and military leadership,” following the Maduro model of removal and prosecution of disfavored foreign heads of state.

Judge Hellerstein should have reassigned the Maduro case right away, and he still should reassign it now, though it’s clear he won’t. This bit of judicial self-indulgence, coupled with the excruciating pace and baffling nature of his decisionmaking, threatens to undermine the Maduro prosecution, and potentially others to follow. The world is watching, and it’s not looking good.

Donald Trump has appointed 34 federal judges so far in his second time in office, and clear patterns have emerged. The one most people have noticed is that his nominees are overwhelmingly white and male, with only 9 women among the list and 91% of his picks being white. He is thus following a similar pattern as his first term, when 85% of his nominees were white and 76% were male.

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People have also commented on the fact the appointees seem to be loyalists to him. Emil Bove, who is now a judge on the Third Circuit, is the most notable among that crew, having previously served a high-profile and controversial role in Trump’s Department of Justice, enforcing his immigration agenda, and advising on pardoning January 6 insurrectionists and dismissing the DOJ lawyers who brought the cases. He has also nominated Justin Smith, a lawyer who represented him in the presidential immunity case in the Supreme Court and in the litigation between Trump and E. Jean Carroll, for a seat on the Eighth Circuit. Other nominees demonstrated their loyalty by refusing to answer questions during their confirmation hearings about whether the Capitol was attacked on January 6.

Trump’s judges also have a record of supporting policies Trump likes. For example, Edmund LaCour, now a judge in the Northern District of Alabama, argued for limiting the Voting Rights Act when he represented Alabama as solicitor general. Former Missouri Solicitor General Joshua Divine, now a judge on the Eastern District of Missouri, wrote an op-ed as a student advocating for literacy tests for voters. Trump has also picked people who served in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel during his time in office, a period when the OLC has blessed everything he has wanted to do. Jennifer Lee Mascott, now also a judge on the Third Circuit, served in that office, as did Jordan Emery Pratt, now a judge in the Middle District of Florida.

There is, however, another stark pattern among Trump’s picks that has received little attention: He has overwhelmingly favored lawyers who have worked for the government and most often as prosecutors. Of his 34 picks, at least 25 of them have represented the government as lawyers. Three of them worked in the Department of Justice in high level positions, four of them defended a state as part of a state solicitor general’s office, and a whopping 18 of the 34 picks – more than half – served as prosecutors.

This continues a pattern from Trump’s first term. A Cato study of Trump’s first term found that the appointments “exacerbated the already substantial disparity on the federal bench between judges who used to represent the government in court versus judges who used to challenge the government in court.” Specifically, among Trump’s first term nominees, “ex-prosecutors outnumbered public defenders and other defense attorneys by over ten to one.” The ratio is an even more alarming 12-to-one if you compare all lawyers who represented the government (not just as a prosecutor but in other capacities) compared to those who represented individuals challenging the government.

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Thus, even people who are not loyal to Trump have professional backgrounds that suggest they see the world from the government’s perspective, and specifically from the perspective of the executive branch. These former prosecutors are unlikely to question law enforcement demands. Nor are these executive branch veterans likely to question claims for broader executive power because that is where they have spent their careers.

Consider the backgrounds of four of the five justices on the Supreme Court who signed on to the broadest view of presidential immunity ever recognized – absolute immunity for actions within presidents’ core constitutional powers and presumptive immunity for all their other official acts – something nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. Chief Justice Roberts had extensive executive branch experience before becoming a judge, working in the White House Counsel’s office and as a Special Assistant to the Attorney General. Justice Alito worked in the Office of Legal Counsel and was a federal prosecutor. Justice Gorsuch also worked in the Department of Justice, and Justice Kavanaugh worked in the White House Counsel’s Office. Only Justice Thomas lacked DOJ or White House experience. This kind of experience creates a worldview that favors executive power.

I recently documented in my book, Justice Abandoned, the ways in which the Court’s favoritism toward the government helped feed the engine of mass incarceration in America. The dominance of former prosecutors on the list is disconcerting because these are people unlikely to see the dangers of excessive law enforcement tactics or the potential for abuse.

To the extent people on Trump’s list represented individual clients, the client was him. This is not a list of people with experience representing criminal defendants against the awesome power of the state or defending the civil rights of people in the minority or at risk of oppression.

This is a judiciary built for the kind of America Trump wants to create: one with aggressive law enforcement powers that go unchecked, led by a president with king-like powers over the executive branch. These judges have life tenure, so this Trump legacy will long outlast his own time in office.

In many ways, Trump is adding to a Republican blueprint in place for decades, as Republican presidents have long favored judicial nominees who take a strong view of executive power. Both parties, moreover, have tended to favor people with prosecution experience. The Cato report noted that President Obama also favored judges with prosecution experience, with 41% of his nominees having experience as prosecutors and only 14% having worked in public defense.

President Biden answered the call to balance the judiciary by appointing judges with diverse professional backgrounds, including as defense lawyers and civil rights lawyers. Indeed, more than 40% of his 235 judicial appointments had those backgrounds.

The Democrats need to pick up this mantle to provide much needed balance to the judicial branch Trump is creating. If the Democrats take control of the Senate, they need to stand firm against Trump nominations. Most critically, the next Democratic president needs to redouble the Biden effort to bring balance to the bench. Federal judges are the guardians of our constitutional rights, and they need to have an open mind to allegations of government abuse of power. A bench filled with former government employees who advocated for broad law enforcement and executive powers is bound to come up short.

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Donald Trump’s next attorney general must meet two job requirements. One is easy and in plentiful supply; the other is impossible. Anyone who takes the job is doomed to fail.

The first job requirement – the abundant one – is unyielding fealty to Trump and his political agenda. Our recently-dispatched Attorney General, Pam Bondi, had this part aced. “The greatest president in U.S. history,” she gushed during her self-debasing House testimony in February. Days later, she draped over the DOJ headquarters building a stories-high banner bearing the President’s visage atop the Justice Department’s official seal — a schmaltzy hosanna from the toadyish AG and a desecration of DOJ’s longstanding tradition of independence.

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Beyond the kowtowing, Bondi tried her darnedest to make Trump’s prosecutorial revenge fantasies come true. She aimed the Justice Department’s prosecutorial firepower at a succession of prime targets on the President’s enemies list: Letitia James, James Comey, Senators Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin, and Jerome Powell. Bondi’s prosecutors failed at every turn, their transparently vindictive cases rejected by judges and grand juries alike. (The John Bolton indictment is different, as the investigation reportedly predated the current Trump administration, and the charges appear sound.) Other Trump payback investigations remain pending, but their outlooks are no brighter. It’s unclear whether Bondi actually cared about all the losing, but plainly her first priority was the performative display of prosecutorial loyalty: “Hey boss, I tried.”

We’ve come to take it as a given that Trump demands absolute political allegiance from all his appointees, but this is pointedly and historically aberrant for the Justice Department. No modern attorney general has been entirely above the occasional appearance or accusation of partisanship, of course: Eric Holder called himself “the president’s wingman;” Bill Barr twisted facts and law to clear Trump on the Mueller investigation; Merrick Garland waited until after Trump declared his 2024 candidacy to launch Jack Smith, a “heat-seeking missile” (as described by Democratic power lawyer Abbe Lowell) with an established record of prosecutorial overreach, against the past-and-future President.

But nobody has done any president’s bidding nearly as aggressively as Bondi did (or tried to do) for Trump. At least prior AGs typically landed in some gray area and disputed accusations that they acted on political motivations; Bondi flaunted hers, in a sweaty effort to impress the Commander-in-Chief.

Then we come to the second job requirement for Trump’s next attorney general, the impossible one: Actually winning. Trump fired Bondi not for any lack of enthusiasm for retributive prosecutions, but for her failure to win them. But the next AG won’t fare any better.

The hard reality is that no prosecutor, no matter how great, can make a case where there is none to be made. You can combine Pat Fitzgerald with Arhchibald Cox with Eliot Ness with Robert Mueller with Thomas Dewey with the real-life incarnation of Jack McCoy – and still fail if there’s no validly prosecutable crime to begin with.

How exactly will the next attorney general fulfill Trump’s fantasy for a successful prosecution of Barack Obama for “treason”? How will our hypothetical successor AG indict and convict Powell when one of Bondi’s prosecutors already acknowledged in court that DOJ has found no evidence of criminality? For what crime might the next AG indict former cyber expert Chris Krebs and former Homeland Security advisor Miles Taylor – the high crime of “Pissing Off Trump”? Who’s going to bring a successful prosecution against Joe Biden for felonious use of an autopen? Who will indict and convict James after one judge and two grand juries already have thrown out cases against her? Why would any grand juror indict (or trial juror convict) the U.S. Senators who made a 90-second internet video reminding service members that they can defy illegal orders, after a grand jury rejected charges against Kelly, Slotkin, and other Democratic officials?

Sure, a shady prosecutor might hoodwink a grand jury (with no judge or defense lawyer present) into finding just enough evidence to support a probable-cause indictment. But after the unilateral portion of the proceedings conclude, the going gets tougher. Indeed, judges and juries across the country are onto DOJ’s shenanigans and have shown that they will swiftly reject Trump’s bad faith prosecutions.

There will be no shortage of aspirants to replace Bondi who share her capacity for cringey public displays of fealty to the President, and her eagerness to take action on even his most outrageous retributive requests. Let’s run down some top candidates.

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Jeanine Pirro, the acting U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C., is always eager to fire away on Trump’s behalf. And she already has helmed the failed efforts to take down Kelly, Slotkin, and Powell. After a judge blocked her subpoenas in the Powell investigation, Pirro called a scream-therapy press conference to yelp Trump’s favorite catchphrases (“activist judge!” “we have cleaned up this city!”) and stake her claim for a higher job at DOJ. Pirro promises to be another Bondi, in angrier packaging.

Trump has called EPA Administrator (and 2020 election denier) Lee Zeldin, reportedly in the running for the AG position, his “secret weapon.” It’s unclear why the relatively milquetoast Zeldin – who has little prosecutorial record (he was a military lawyer for four years, including some time as a line-level prosecutor) – would succeed where others have failed. The attorney general job, were he to get it, would be his first as a prosecutor anywhere near this level. Count me skeptical that he’d find some magical way to convict high-profile political targets based on sketchy (at best) evidence.

And then there’s Todd Blanche, Bondi’s former Deputy and current Acting Attorney General, who is gunning for the permanent job. In a press conference this week, Blanche made the wild assertion that Trump has not only the right but “the duty” to influence targeted prosecutions of “men, women, and entities the President in the ​past has had issues with” – sweet enticement to a President hellbent on personal revenge. Blanche also meets the sycophancy requirement; he proclaimed that, if Trump chooses not to make him the permanent AG, he’ll respond simply but sweetly, “Thank you very much. I love you, sir.”

Blanche has been a prosecutor and a criminal defense lawyer for two decades. He started at the Southern District of New York in 2006. (We overlapped and were colleagues and friends there.) On one hand, Blanche has a strong prosecutorial pedigree as an outstanding violent crimes prosecutor in New York. But Blanche made his name at the SDNY by bringing valid criminal cases supported by actual evidence against real criminals – not the baseless political nonsense that defined his tenure as Deputy AG. All of Bondi’s failures – on the Epstein files and the political vendetta cases – are Blanche’s too. He’s not quite as embarrassing or self-destructive as Bondi in front of the cameras, but don’t expect anything different, or better, if Blanche gets the permanent nod as attorney general.

Plenty of Trump’s loyalists will pursue the AG job over the upcoming weeks. But ultimately, the next attorney general will find no more success than Bondi did in pursuing the President’s doomed prosecutorial vengeance mandate. It’s not that the candidates themselves are lacking, though it’s an underwhelming lot. It’s that the job itself simply can’t be done as Trump wishes it could.

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There is something especially ugly about going after children, denying them a basic education, which cuts off their path to life in a way that can’t be restored later on in their lives. But that’s what Republicans want to do.

The legal arguments aren’t complicated—the Supreme Court has plainly ruled that children, regardless of immigration status, are entitled to a K-12 education. This latest incarnation of anti-immigrant venom is defenseless. Kids don’t choose where they’re born. They don’t decide how they arrive. They don’t control their parents’ immigration status. And yet, in 2026, there is a coordinated political effort underway to deny them one of the most basic building blocks of participation in American life: a public education.

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That effort runs straight through a 1982 Supreme Court case, Plyler v. Doe.

In Plyler, the Court ruled 5–4 that states cannot deny undocumented children access to free public K–12 education. The decision is grounded in the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It recognized that education is not just another government benefit. It is foundational. Denying it would impose a lifetime of harm, not just on the child, but on society at large. It would create a permanent underclass of people who are locked out of education and therefore less able to participate in civic life, less able to support themselves, and more likely to live at the margins. Nothing about that reasoning has become less true over time. If anything, it has become more urgent.

Let’s dismiss one of the arguments against Plyler at the outset. This is not about Americans funding education for “illegal immigrants.” A recent study documented that in 2022, undocumented immigrants contributed almost $100 billion to federal, state, and local tax revenues, paying property taxes, sales taxes, and federal/state payroll taxes. The study concluded that, “Despite those payroll taxes funding Medicare, Social Security, and Unemployment Insurance, undocumented immigrants are not eligible to enroll in and receive regular benefits from these social programs.”

As for the law, it has been settled for over four decades. Schools do not ask about immigration status at enrollment. Children show up, sit in classrooms, learn to read and write and think, and become part of the civic fabric of America, ready to make their contribution to the world.

Alabama tried an end run around Plyer in 2011 when it passed HB56 and included a requirement that parents’ immigration status be revealed on a child’s school enrollment forms. In U.S. v. Alabama, the 11th Circuit confirmed that the law was designed to circumvent Plyler v. Doe, leading to a “chilling effect” on the enrollment of immigrant children, including American citizen children born to undocumented parents. The court affirmed immigrant children’s right to go to school and declined to punish their parents for exercising that constitutional right. The Supreme Court declined to rehear the case.

Now, that stability is under deliberate, strategic attack.

Since 2025, at least half a dozen states have introduced legislation designed to provoke a challenge to Plyler. Tennessee’s House has already passed a bill requiring schools to check immigration status, and there is ongoing maneuvering to make it state law as part of a school voucher measure, setting up a direct challenge to Plyler. Other states—Idaho, Ohio, Oklahoma—are moving in the same direction. The Heritage Foundation is openly advocating for states to pass laws contrary to Plyler with the explicit goal of generating a lawsuit that could reach the Supreme Court and overturn yet another longstanding, well-established precedent.

Let’s be clear about what that means: Republicans are openly arguing that children—living in this country, growing up in our communities—should be denied access to school. There is no way to soften that. It is both legally indefensible and morally reprehensible.

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The legal case for preserving Plyler is straightforward. The moral case is even clearer.

An estimated 600,000 to 850,000 undocumented children are enrolled in K-12 education in the United States. They are not abstractions. They are kids sitting in classrooms next to American citizens, learning the lessons that will permit them to contribute to whatever society they are a part of as adults. Forcibly removing their access to education doesn’t just harm them individually, it leaves entire communities worse off.

We are a country that invests in the next generation without asking whether they “deserve” it based on circumstances beyond their control. Public education is one of the purest expressions of that principle. The argument against Plyler reduces children to line items on a budget, and we would do well to remember that budgets are moral documents; they reveal who we are as a society. We’ve already shut down the argument that Americans shouldn’t fund education for people here without legal status. But even if that argument held water, which it doesn’t, it misses the point.

Education is not a zero-sum game. Every time we close the door on a child, we are potentially closing the door on innovation, on creativity, on contributions we cannot yet imagine. The next scientist, teacher, entrepreneur, or writer does not come with a label indicating their immigration status at birth. When we deny education, we are not protecting America. We are diminishing it.

The challenge to Plyler is particularly dangerous given the ideological configuration of the current Supreme Court. Plyler was a 5–4 decision. That margin matters. This Court has shown a willingness to revisit—and overturn—longstanding precedents. After Dobbs, scholars across the ideological spectrum have warned that decisions like Plyler could be vulnerable.

And the groundwork is being laid intentionally. This is not an organic legal evolution. It is a coordinated strategy: pass laws that conflict with Plyler, trigger lawsuits, and present the Court with an opportunity to reconsider the case. The goal is not to refine the law. It is to dismantle it.

We have seen this playbook before.

The attack on Plyler is not really about immigration policy. Reasonable people can disagree about border enforcement, asylum systems, and pathways to citizenship. Those are complex questions. But denying children access to school is not a complex question. It is a choice, a bad one. It is a choice to embrace cruelty as a policy tool. It is a choice to ignore both constitutional principles and lived experience. It is a choice to move further away from American ideals built on the melting pot of our society.

There is a reason Plyler has endured for 44 years. It reflects a baseline commitment that most Americans, regardless of party, have historically shared: that children should not be punished for the circumstances of their birth, and that education is too important to be used as a weapon. Walking away from that commitment would not just overturn a precedent. It would mark a profound shift in who we are willing to be. Once you decide that some children do not deserve to learn, it becomes easier—far too easy—to decide that other rights, for other people, are negotiable too.

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When will oil tanker traffic return to its normal volume in the Strait of Hormuz? Will Elon Musk buy Ryanair? Who will win Season 22 of The Bachelorette?

You can bet on these questions and thousands of others on prediction markets, such as Polymarket or Kalshi. These platforms are a cross between sports gambling and the stock market, allowing ordinary people to place bets on real-world outcomes. But, as in both of those ventures, the opportunity to cheat offers lucrative temptations. Except in the real world, throwing a game can have devastating consequences.

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With financial incentives for correctly predicting an event, prediction markets may incentivize people to take action solely for the purpose of a payout. For example, predicting the death of a world leader could lead to his assassination. Or, at the very least, prediction markets could lead decision-makers to tip off friends about an impending action so that they can place a bet and collect their winnings. According to Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat who has proposed regulating the industry, “Perfectly timed bets on prediction markets have the unmistakable stench of corruption.”

Indeed, in recent months, bets on specific events have been remarkably prescient. In January, a Polymarket user won $400,000 by betting that President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela would fall from power. In February, more than 150 accounts on Polymarket correctly predicted the American military strike on Iran, betting a collective $855,000. The accuracy of these bets has sparked concern that people entrusted with sensitive information may be leaking to their friends in order to cash in. In addition to undermining the integrity of the prediction market, these disclosures could compromise the operations themselves.

As a result, federal prosecutors in Manhattan have been exploring the potential application of insider trading laws and other statutes to prediction markets. Jay Clayton, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, recently told the audience at a securities law conference that he expected to see criminal cases in the prediction market industry.

Insider trading is usually charged under the statute that prohibits securities and commodities fraud. That statute, 18 U.S.C. 1348, makes it a crime to knowingly execute or attempt to execute a scheme to defraud in connection with the delivery of a security, like stock, or a commodity, like soybeans. Although commodities were originally thought of as tangible things like pork bellies and copper, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) requires prediction markets to comply with its rules. Consequently, an inside tip about the likelihood of an event could constitute fraud under the statute, a violation of which is punishable by up to 25 years in prison.

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Of course, the unusual nature of the prediction markets industry makes it an odd fit under the statute. As explained by Aitan Goelman, the former director of enforcement at the CFTC, “Prosecutors would have to show not only that someone was trading in possession of material nonpublic information, but they were doing it in violation of some kind of fiduciary duty or duty of trust. But all this is untested.” In addition to those legal hurdles, marketplaces that operate outside the United States may pose jurisdictional challenges for prosecutors, even though American bettors can access these offshore markets through the Internet.

Prosecutors may look to other statutes to address fraud in prediction markets. Online sports gambling, which has exploded since the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision overturning a legal ban, offers some guidance. In recent years, we have seen the rise of the “prop bet,” short for proposition. Rather than betting on the outcome of a game, prop bettors will wager on whether Matthew Stafford will pass for more than 150 yards in the first half or whether Steph Curry will score more than 12 points in the third quarter. Because a player can control the outcome, it is susceptible to cheating. Last November, Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz were charged with wire fraud for allegedly rigging prop bets on the type of pitches they would throw to certain batters during games. According to a federal indictment, bettors would use advance information from Clase and Ortiz to place sure-thing wagers and collect thousands of dollars in gambling winnings. The pitchers would receive bribes or kickbacks in exchange. The wire fraud statute requires a scheme or artifice to defraud and a wire transmission in furtherance of the scheme. The wire transmission can be as simple as a text message.

If current statutes regulating commodities prove a poor fit to address the harms caused by insider trading in prediction markets, new laws may be necessary to save prosecutors from trying to ram a square peg into a round hole. It may, however, be difficult to get the president to sign such legislation. Donald Trump Jr. is a paid adviser to Kalshi and an investor in Polymarket. And the president’s Trump Media and Technology Group is developing its own platform called Truth Predict.

Perhaps we will see a legal crackdown on prediction markets. But during the Trump administration? Don’t bet on it.

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The story of the Iran war is often told through military operations, regional strategy, gas prices, politics, and policy debates. Less visible are the human beings trying to survive its daily realities. What has life been like for Iranians in the lead up to the war and since it started?

I spoke with Cora Engelbrecht, a reporter for The New Yorker, whose work brings life inside Iran into sharp focus. Her reporting is both deeply sourced and intensely scene-driven, built on individual voices, sensory detail, and careful verification.

What follows is our conversation, edited for brevity.

Tamara: What did the lead up to this war look like?

Cora: So we’re going back to late December, which is when I started reporting on this. I hadn’t reported on Iran since 2022, which was the Woman, Life, Freedom movement after security officers killed this young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, and there was a big uprising. I had been in touch with a lot of dissidents who ended up leaving the country. The demonstrations started in late December; set off by an extreme drop in the currency and people just being really fed up with their economic situation. That moment was supercharged by a summoning from the former Shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi, who invited Iranians to come out via a social media post that went viral. It was followed by President Trump saying that if protesters were to be killed, he was going to come to their defense. That’s when I really started trying to get in touch with people who were inside.

The thing that immediately distinguished the anatomy of this crowd of protesters was that it was composed of multiple generations — entire families, grandparents, people in wheelchairs, veterans who had served in the Iran-Iraq war, who had lost limbs. It included people in conservative cities. So that was important for understanding how different a moment this was for the Iranian public. People had just totally lost their fear and were ready to receive violence at any cost.

When I saw that the internet was getting cut across the country, I immediately sensed that something horrific was going to happen nationwide. We saw bits and pieces, but it wasn’t until we could get a full picture from at least one city that everyone was able to start calling this what it was: multiple massacres across the country.

Tamara: How has that feeling of courage and possibility people felt during the protests changed since the mass killings and then the U.S.-Israel campaign?

Cora: It seems to shift almost daily. It depends on who I’m talking to and where they are based. A lot of people still have hope that this is going to end up being the defining moment that will bring down the regime. And it’s because it’s the only thing they can really cling to right now when everything is feeling chaotic and it’s hard to make sense of more violence, more death, or being caught in the crossfire between two forces.

The hope that I’m hearing from people, it can sound a bit far-fetched in this moment, given all the mass killings that we know just happened at the hand of this regime, but they think there might be a moment, an opportunity for them to come out again and really oust the regime, and that change could still come from within. It sounds extraordinary, but I do understand that it’s the light at the end of the tunnel that’s helping people hang on.

There’s a lot of anger too, certainly for the regime, but also for the bombardment, as people’s lives are being more upended every day. It’s become clear that these intervening forces aren’t necessarily there to liberate the civilians on the ground.

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Tamara: Trump has told Iranians to “take back their country.” Are they heeding that message?

Cora: I’m not hearing a lot of positive reactions from people I’m in touch with to this liberation campaign or the way that Trump has been framing it. It seems tone-deaf. Like it’s coming from someone who’s not trying to imagine the reality that they’re faced with on the ground. I heard this most recently from families who are in especially vulnerable situations right now. They were still picking up the pieces of all the human consequences of the crackdown. They have family members who have disappeared, whether they’re in prisons or they have lost contact with them. The most enraged reactions come from families who don’t feel seen at all by a foreign leader who’s telling them to rise up and meet this opportunity. It doesn’t make them feel secure, because that kind of call to action is born out of a total lack of awareness of the Iranian regime and how it works to terrorize and repress its people.

Tamara: Describe what this experience has been like for families who are searching for prisoners—protesters essentially disappeared by the government.

Cora: A lot of dissidents outside of the country and rights groups in the diaspora are incredibly skilled at trying to locate and follow up on cases inside Iran from abroad. But even so, this has been the most dramatic communication breakdown that a lot of these family members have experienced. They’re just families who have turned into their own detectives, like Bellingcat teams. They’re doing everything they can in family group chats to geolocate and verify based on rumors that are heard on the ground while relatives on the outside race to corroborate that information. They have created these webs of communication systems that are incredibly compelling and also devastating to watch them try and maneuver around this system. It is a form of psychological torture.

I spoke to one woman who’s based abroad, and she received an anonymous phone call from someone inside the country, who called her to tell her that her brother had been killed and that she needed to make sure that her family collects his body. You have no idea at that moment if that person is real or not, if they’re being honest or not, if they’re calling just to scare you or mess with your head. And suddenly it’s on you to figure out how to follow up in a way where you’re not endangering the relatives still in the country. But that’s how Iranians outside the country are already wired, which gives you a sense of the sinister form of this repressive regime that has for five decades mastered the art and science of repression.

Tamara: You tell one success story of a woman whose brother was arrested and disappeared, and she took her search public. . .

Cora: Yes, Shailin Asadollahi is a woman I connected with a few weeks ago after her brother had disappeared. He had called his family the day before the war started to tell them that he had been given a release date. This whole family has a history of political dissidence. They went to the prison gates and were told the prisoners had been relocated. From there, their family group chat turned into an information sharing operation where relatives on the inside would hear something from families of other prisoners, and they would send those rumors to Shailin, who was on the outside of the country, and she would try and find other relatives in the diaspora to corroborate them. Then she started going public, talking to news outlets, going on CNN, speaking to the New York Times, NPR, and eventually her brother was released. It’s unclear whether it was definitely because of all of her efforts, but he was released a couple of weeks after the war started. Then, she started receiving hundreds of requests from other Iranians who didn’t know what to do. She became a kind of makeshift hotline fixer for other relatives navigating this moment.

This outcome is not the case for many ordinary Iranians inside the country who are experiencing imprisonment right now and are dealing with a government that makes good on its promise to meet whatever effort they make to publicize their story with more violence and repression. So they’re conditioned to think that coming forward only hurts them.

Tamara: One of your earlier articles took a closer look at the hospitals. Tell us more about that.

Cora: A lot of government-run hospitals became an extension of the Iranian security apparatus, patrolled by security officers who arrest injured protesters in the halls, interrupt surgeries, and wait for them to take them to prison.

The first story that I reported on involved a protester who lived through three days of mass violence in Mashhad. He went to a government-run hospital and faced off with two prison guards. His partner at the time was helping two doctors who had opened their home nearby because they anticipated the hospitals would be patrolled – so they started treating protesters there during the massacre. That led me to find more doctors across the country who were doing that work.

These networks of doctors spanned cities. They realized they had to organize convoys to help transfer protesters from more remote areas to facilities where they could get specialized treatment.

These injuries were from automatic weapons fired at close range. People were being disfigured. Many weren’t getting immediate care because they knew the risk of going to a government-run facility. They were getting awful infections, losing limbs and eyes.

A lot of this is by design, creating hospitals that are entrapments. It’s a pretty horrific tactic used against civilians to make sure they don’t get help.

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Tamara: The regime’s tactic of forced forgetting really comes through your reporting. Why has erasure been such a big part of this regime’s strategy?

Cora: One of the more surprising anecdotes I was hearing during the mass killings on January 8th and 9th was from protesters who told me how clean the streets were the next day. There was something so chilling about that. It’s one thing for a regime to be expert at killing and slaughtering, and another for them to clean up the mess so surgically the next day. But the forced forgetting extends beyond that. The whole design around the repression is to disappear the stories of struggle and loss and grief to make sure it doesn’t become communal history.

Traditionally in Shi’a communities in Iran, the important mourning marker is the fortieth day after a death, and in the context of mass killings, those mourning ceremonies can become major public displays of grief and protest. Historically, they have sometimes helped fuel further demonstrations, because they bring together people across communities who are mourning the dead. The regime responds by having targeted campaigns to silence each family: sending them messages directly, summoning them to police stations, threatening them personally. They monitor the funeral services and arrest family members leaving cemeteries.

The chaos of war has helped that effort. It’s made things more opaque and has upstaged a lot of the grief and human consequences of the mass killings.

Tamara: When you’re working with material like this, take us through your process.

Cora: It’s never a hard decision for me to start with a very gripping anecdotal lead when it comes to Iran. It is really the best tool to combat the opaqueness of this conflict. Humanizing it is the most important work, and the best way to do that is to hone in on either one place or one story. It’s also the safest way to work in Iran because if you’re on the outside like me, you can’t meet people in order to feel really secure in who you’re talking to. You have to corroborate and verify to the point where you have so much information, so much detail, so many scenes, that you believe this person actually lived through what they’re telling you over the phone. That verification process more often than not leads me to a very trusting relationship that allows me to write through an anecdotal lead the way that I do.

Tamara: How do you authenticate the various documents you collect throughout your reporting?

Cora: Ninety percent of the time a story starts with someone I trust putting me in touch with someone. The diaspora is really skilled at knowing who’s a good source, who can be trusted, who hasn’t come under pressure recently. I will start building a story usually when I have corroborating evidence. The first story that I did on the massacre in Mashhad, I was connected to someone who had a lot of friends taking videos over those three days, and they all started sending me the videos via him directly. So I had this trove of evidence that tracked almost hour by hour what they were doing, which parts of the city they were in. Once you have a foundation like that, you build out and start trying to find other people from that city who can tell you what they know. That’s the best way to break through all the opaqueness surrounding an internet blackout.

Tamara: What is the emotional toll that this work is having on you?

Cora: There’s a lot of worry involved in this work, mainly for the safety and security of the people who are talking to me. Publishing a story is usually not a liberating moment – my immediate thought is, what could the repercussions be? That feeling never goes away. I feel a sense of relief every time I hear back from a source. I’m always trying to understand if someone should be included in a story or not. There was a father who wanted to be on the record because he believes the regime has withheld his son’s body as a form of psychological torture, and he wants people to know that his son existed. We went through a lot of back and forth about whether or not I could do that for him. In the end, he decided that it would be best to be anonymous. That’s a great example of how stressful this is – figuring out how to tell these stories in a way that’s safe. But it also helps me understand rather than look on in horror. And that gives a sense of purpose in a moment that’s just incredibly disorienting.

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Last week two American juries found social media companies liable for harming children. The New Mexico verdict was framed in early coverage as a precursor to the LA verdict, the latter being regarded as the “bellwether” case. But the two cases did different legal work, and face distinct appellate threats, which matters enormously for the 2,000 cases still pending. The First Amendment may kill the Los Angeles judgment on appeal while leaving New Mexico’s verdict largely untouched.

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In the Los Angeles case, a young woman known in court documents as Kaley sued Meta and Google’s YouTube (and TikTok and Snap, but both settled before trial), arguing that Instagram and YouTube had caused her mental health issues. Kaley began using YouTube at age six and Instagram by age nine. By her early teens she had developed severe depression, anxiety, and body dysmorphia. Her lawyers were careful to argue the platforms were defective products, deliberately and negligently engineered to be addictive through features like infinite scroll, autoplay, variable reward schedules, and algorithmic recommendations designed to maximize time-on-app, irrespective of the psychological costs. They did not, importantly, argue that the platforms had shown her harmful content posted by other users. After a trial that included testimony from Mark Zuckerberg himself, followed by nine days of jury deliberations, the jury found both Meta and Google liable. They owed Kaley $3 million in compensatory damages and $3 million in punitive damages.

One day earlier, a jury in Santa Fe reached a verdict against Meta in a different social media case. New Mexico’s attorney general had sued Meta in 2023 after an undercover operation, in which his office created fake Instagram accounts registered to minors as young as 12 years old. The accounts were flooded with solicitations from predators, and the platform appeared indifferent to stopping it. The jury found that Meta had made false or misleading statements about platform safety and had exploited the vulnerability and inexperience of children, and awarded $375 million in a verdict against Meta.

Some legal scholars and commentators have argued that social media companies are just as liable as tobacco companies were. The tobacco analogy is more precise than its critics credit. The turning point in tobacco litigation wasn’t jury verdicts finding that cigarettes caused cancer. Plaintiffs had been winning those cases for years without driving systemic change because individual causation was always contestable, and appellate courts kept finding ways to reverse on appeal. But once state attorneys general started using their broad discovery powers to force disclosure of internal industry documents that showed companies had suppressed their own research on addiction and cancer risk for decades, the question was no longer whether smoking caused harm but whether the companies lied about what they knew.

New Mexico just demonstrated that the same legal tool is available for social media. The 2,000 pending cases can be organized either around proving that platforms were badly designed or that companies knew what they were doing and misrepresented it. The design defect theory may be more vulnerable on appeal to both a Section 230 challenge and First Amendment challenges, while the fraud and misrepresentation theory faces neither to the same degree.

Although perhaps intuitively compelling, the design defect theory rests on shakier legal ground. Social media companies have for three decades been shielded by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects platforms from liability for content their users post. In the LA case, Kaley’s lawyers targeted not what appeared on the platforms, but how they were built. The trial judge agreed that design was a separate question from content and instructed the jury accordingly. The distinction between product design and content is what made the verdict possible. But it’s also what Meta and Google will attack on appeal, because there is a legitimate argument that when someone is harmed by becoming addicted to Instagram, what they are returning to is content other people posted, and an algorithm that surfaces that content is arguably organizing rather than creating it.

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The First Amendment threat is potentially even more serious. In 2024, the Supreme Court decided Moody v. NetChoice, a case involving state laws in Florida and Texas that tried to restrict how platforms moderate content. The Court held that platforms’ algorithmic curation of third-party content is protected editorial discretion under the First Amendment, the same principle that prevents the government from telling a newspaper what to print. The Court remanded the cases for further proceedings consistent with that framework. If Meta’s recommendation algorithm is protected editorial expression, a court order requiring Meta to redesign it may be compelled speech, which the First Amendment forbids, regardless of the government’s interest in protecting children. An appellate court sympathetic to that principle and willing to extend Moody’s logic to tort liability, and there are several, could conclude that holding a platform liable for design choices that are themselves constitutionally protected expression is a First Amendment violation dressed in tort law.

Notice, though, what that argument does and doesn’t do for the New Mexico case. The fraud and misrepresentation theory doesn’t require any court to order Meta to change its algorithm. Instead, it punishes Meta for the gap between what its executives said in public and what they knew in private. Fraud doctrine has never been understood as implicating the First Amendment’s protection of editorial discretion, because knowing deception is not protected speech. A company can claim First Amendment protection for its editorial choices but can’t claim First Amendment protection for lying about them.

Internal Meta documents read aloud in the courtroom showed the company had estimated that 30 percent of American 10-to-12-year-olds were already on Instagram in 2015 and set an explicit goal to increase the time 10-year-olds spent there. A 2018 document was more explicit: “If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens.” When the company’s own experts concluded that appearance-enhancing filters contributed to body-image problems in young girls, Zuckerberg declined to remove them, calling that response “paternalistic.” On the stand, he told the jury that keeping users safe has always been a priority and that a platform where people feel unsafe is “not sustainable.” What the jury was being asked to weigh was the distance between what was in those documents and what Meta actually told parents.

A theory of damages based on insult to mental self-determination runs through both verdicts, even if the law hasn’t named it yet. Cognitive liberty, the right to think, form preferences, and make decisions free from external manipulation, has never had a cleaner test case than this. Product liability is an imperfect fit, and the negligence doctrine applied in both cases wasn’t built for these harms. And as Moody shows, the First Amendment may complicate the effort to remedy insults to cognitive liberty through product design mandates. But the fraud theory offers a path to protecting cognitive liberty that doesn’t require the law to develop new doctrine. It simply requires companies to tell the truth about what they know. It is as old as the common law. And the documents showing what they knew already exist.

Sometimes if both sides are angry at you, you’re doing something right. Other times, everyone simply agrees that you’re awful — as Pam Bondi has shown us throughout her historically disastrous tenure as attorney general.

Bondi’s ouster as AG marks a rare moment of bipartisan consensus. President Donald Trump plainly doesn’t see Bondi’s tenure as any kind of success as he ushers her out the door after just over a year on the job — the shortest of any confirmed AG since the Watergate era. Democrats (and others) cheered Trump’s decision to dispatch Bondi, though for widely varying reasons.

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Partisans on both sides concur that Bondi’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein matter has been a debacle. The AG can blame herself for bringing the Epstein case back to wide public attention, as she strode into office promising to reveal shocking information about the notorious child sex trafficker and his network. In February 2025, when asked on Fox News about the Epstein “client list,” Bondi infamously boasted, “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.” (She later claimed she meant some unspecified set of the Epstein documents and not necessarily a specific smoking-gun document.)

Then followed a whiplash-inducing series of fits and starts. Bondi announced in July 2025 that the Epstein files revealed no uncharged crimes and that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.” But in September 2025, she declared that she had opened new criminal probes into various Epstein-adjacent Democrats and that “the Department will pursue this with urgency and integrity.” Nobody has been indicted to date, and there’s no indication anyone is being meaningfully investigated.

In November 2025, Congress passed and Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act — and it got worse still. Bondi’s Justice Department produced the first batch of documents over 40 days late and withheld millions of responsive documents for months beyond that. DoJ improperly redacted the names of various men who apparently had engaged in wrongdoing while unforgivably disclosing victims’ identifying information. And when Bondi was called before Congress to testify about her failures, she responded with a public temper tantrum lowlighted by a barrage of canned personal insults and unhinged tirades about the status of the stock market. A new series of memes emerged — “If Pam Bondi Was a Waitress” and the like — and the Trump administration winced at her performance and its public reception.

But don’t let Bondi’s mishandling of the Epstein files overshadow her even more corrosive legacy: the destruction of the Justice Department’s independence.

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It’s cliché, and maybe you’re tired of hearing it, but it’s true and it’s worth repeating: The Justice Department must keep prosecution entirely clear of politics. I was trained — indoctrinated, even — on this first principle during my time as a DoJ prosecutor, and I’m grateful for it. Only the Justice Department holds the power to strip an individual’s liberty, to lock a person behind bars — and that power is toxic when mixed with any base desire for political vengeance.

Bondi gleefully embraced the president’s revenge-fueled prosecutorial agenda — though he reportedly canned her in part because she wasn’t aggressive (or effective) enough in executing his payback agenda. But Bondi certainly tried. In September 2025, when Trump publicly called on “Pam” to prosecute his political enemies — including New York attorney general Letitia James, former FBI director James Comey, and U.S. senator Adam Schiff — Bondi snapped to attention. Her prosecutors obtained palpably deficient indictments against Comey and James, which were quickly thrown out by a federal judge for constitutional infirmities around the appointment of unqualified local U.S. Attorneys. Undaunted, the Justice Department tried and failed to reindict and then to re-reindict James. Bondi also has launched and overseen facially retributive criminal investigations of dubious merit against Schiff, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, Fed governor Lisa Cook, former special counsel Jack Smith, and others.

At the same time, Bondi flatly refused to investigate anyone or anything that might ruffle feathers inside the administration. The AG declined to even open an investigation into the misuse of the Signal messaging app by top administration officials; she preposterously concluded (despite having done zero investigation) that specific information about impending military attack plans was somehow “not classified and inadvertently released.” And Bondi refused to gather the facts and conduct a full probe into the fatal shootings of U.S. citizens by ICE in Minneapolis. Why take a look when a probe might yield politically inconvenient results?

Pam Bondi is gone now, and she has herself to blame. The stain on the Justice Department will remain.

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Last weekend, The Washington Post reported that FBI Director Kash Patel had assigned agents in the San Francisco field office to review the counterintelligence files of a case involving Representative Eric Swalwell and a suspected Chinese spy, Christine Fang, from 2011 to 2015. Swalwell is running for governor in California, and the move represents a new phase in the weaponization of federal law enforcement seeking to smear, if not investigate and prosecute, the administration’s opponents (Swalwell was on the so-called “enemies list” of people in Patel’s 2023 book, Government Gangsters). In this regard, the Trump administration is taking yet another page from the authoritarian playbook – but like many of its other moves, it has the potential to backfire, including on our own national security.

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Most foreign intelligence officers operate under diplomatic cover: They send spies here as, say, the Cultural Attache to their embassy, or to the U.N. The benefit of being under diplomatic cover is that if these officers get caught, there’s not much the U.S. can do to them: The harshest measure is for the government to declare these diplomats persona non grata (PNG), and to send them back home. (Of course, our CIA officers who work under diplomatic cover get the same benefit.) The downside is that it’s easier for the country’s counterintelligence service (in the U.S., that’s the FBI) to track them, since there is a limited universe of individuals to monitor and spies typically work under “slot succession,” meaning that once a post is designated to an intelligence officer, it stays that way, i.e., you always know that the “Cultural Attache” is actually that country’s James Bond.

That’s why foreign intelligence often uses NOCs, individuals with “no official cover” – they might pose as journalists or business people, giving them more opportunities to interface with targets and making them less likely to be detected by counterintelligence. Russia runs these kinds of operations – you might recall Maria Butina, a “student” and “journalist” who was the darling of the gun-rights lobby and hobnobbed with people like Donald Trump, Jr. and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal before she was arrested in 2018 for espionage. These “political influence operations” offer spies the opportunity to forge relationships with people who may end up in positions where they will have the power to shape policies favorable to the foreign government. The access in private settings also allows spies to assess whether the people they are meeting have vulnerabilities that might make them susceptible to be recruited as spies themselves.

That appears to be what Fang was up to. U.S. officials believe Fang was working with China’s intelligence service, the Ministry of State Security (MSS), in a political influence operation to develop relationships with up-and-coming politicians. U.S. intelligence officials say that Fang used “campaign fundraising, extensive networking, personal charisma, and romantic or sexual relationships with at least two Midwestern mayors” to infiltrate political circles. It was in this milieu that Fang met Swalwell: She participated in fundraising for his 2014 reelection campaign and also referred an intern hired by his office. A U.S. official later noted that Fang was one of “lots of agents” operating on behalf of the MSS at the time – by 2019, the threat posed by China’s political influence campaign was urgent enough that the FBI actually created a special unit to counter the country’s efforts to influence state and local politics.

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All of this is to say that a Chinese spy making contact with Swalwell – especially given his position at the national level – is really not surprising. What’s more important is what happened next. By 2015, the FBI became alarmed enough with Fang’s activities that it contacted Swalwell, as well as numerous other state and national officials, to let them know he was being targeted. This is known as a “defensive briefing,” and is noteworthy: It reveals that the focus was on Fang, and in “neutralizing” (to use the intelligence lingo) her activities by exposing her to the people she was targeting. If the FBI believed that Swalwell was somehow in cahoots with Fang or otherwise engaging in unlawful activity, they would have placed him under direct investigation and monitored him as part of an espionage investigation, not shown their cards so early. (Swalwell was never charged with any crimes.) A good example of this approach is the case of Senator Bob Menendez, who last year was sentenced to eleven years in prison for, among other charges, acting as a foreign agent for Egypt.

Also noteworthy is that following the defensive briefing, Swalwell immediately ceased contact with Fang and assisted the FBI by providing any information he had about her. As a counterpoint, consider the case of Carter Page, who was targeted by Russian intelligence in 2013: He, too, was alerted by the FBI. But, he continued to maintain contact, even after he knew they were spies. In 2016, the Trump campaign was also given a defensive briefing about Russia. No one alerted the FBI to Russia’s outreach after, and those who were asked about it, lied. In Swalwell’s case, the FBI’s decision to neutralize Fang worked – soon after it began providing defensive briefings to her targets, she abruptly left the country, likely because she learned that the FBI was investigating her (remember, unlike spies under diplomatic cover, she was subject to arrest and jail).

All of this highlights why releasing the files on Fang and her contact with Swalwell would not serve any national security purpose, and would likely only undermine it by helping China. A national security case file on an intelligence target will include lots of information that would be valuable to foreign adversaries – like how the FBI was able to identify one of its NOC agents, the types of investigative techniques it was using (like confidential sources or electronic surveillance), and what it has learned about China’s tactics and objectives. Even if the purpose is “only” to embarrass Swalwell – indeed, perhaps especially if the goal is to embarrass Swalwell – the FBI is likely to under-redact information that might reveal sources and methods and potentially even compromise other ongoing investigations. (As we know from the Epstein files, redaction is not the FBI’s strong suit under Patel.)

It also begs the question of what, exactly, our national security priorities are. I’m not sure if Patel has noticed or cares, but we are at war with a hostile foreign power – Iranian spies are an active threat in the United States as we speak. (In fact, the Iranian intelligence service recently hacked and released Patel’s personal email.) Even when the FBI is fully employed, only about 25-30% of its overall agent force are working counterintelligence targets (against multiple countries). With the mass firings and resignations since Trump took office, the Bureau is not even at full capacity. On top of that, among those whom Patel has fired is the counterintelligence team focused on Iranian threats. Assigning agents who could be backfilling this role to chase personal and political vendettas is not a recipe for keeping America safe.

On the legal front, Patel’s move violates the Justice Department’s own internal policy against taking actions within 90 days of an election (California’s gubernatorial primary election takes place on June 2) and possibly also violates the Privacy Act of 1974 and the First Amendment. Swalwell has issued a cease-and-desist letter to Patel on these grounds. If he’s unsuccessful (as I suspect he will be), the counterintelligence file on Fang’s contacts with him will come to light – but the only party the FBI will end up harming is the United States.

If a person is subject to the jurisdiction of both the United States and Mexico, is he subject to the jurisdiction of the United States?

The answer – logically, linguistically, and legally – is yes. And that will spell near-certain doom for Donald Trump’s effort to decimate our century-and-a-half year-old Constitutional principle known as Birthright Citizenship, which goes before the U.S. Supreme Court for oral argument on Wednesday.

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Birthright Citizenship comes from the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868 after the Civil War: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” Ever since then, it has been broadly understood to mean that a child born here is a U.S. citizen, regardless of the parents’ status and with only the slimmest of exceptions. The doctrine originally served the practical purpose of ensuring citizenship for the children of recently-freed Black slaves – and the distinctly American ethic that the status of the parent need not restrict the child.

But on his first day back in office in January 2025, Trump issued an executive order bearing the Orwellian title “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship” that would vastly reduce the scope of Birthright Citizenship (but not “end” it altogether, contrary to certain imprecise reporting). Under Trump’s construction, a child born in the United States would automatically become a citizen only if at least one parent was present in the United States legally or permanently. A child born here to parents without legal status would not become a citizen. Nor would a child born in the United States to parents with temporary legal status – including, for example, lawful work visas, student visas, specialty occupation visas, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status, or humanitarian temporary protected status.

Trump’s executive order turns entirely on the meaning of the Constitutional phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The administration has argued to the courts that, if a non-citizen living in the United States is also a citizen of, say, Mexico (to use our opening hypothetical), then that person is subject to the jurisdiction of both countries – and hence not “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” (and the child therefore is not entitled to Fourteenth Amendment protection).

The illogic is plain, of course. If I’m holding two things at once – let’s say a baseball in one hand and a football in the other – then I am indeed holding a baseball; holding the football in the other hand doesn’t somehow cancel out the baseball. And if the Constitution meant what Trump’s lawyers claim it means, it would have an extra word: “subject only (or solely, or exclusively) to the jurisdiction” of the United States.

Indeed, a Mexican-born parent living illegally (or with temporary status) in the United States is unquestionably “subject to the jurisdiction of” this country. He certainly could be arrested and imprisoned in the United States, for example – “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” to use the Constitutional language. So, too, could that person be taxed by the United States government, or regulated, or questioned, or ticketed, or any of the other things the government does to people who live here. Imagine a scenario where a federal law enforcement agent tried to arrest a Mexican-born person inside the United States and that person responded, “Sorry, sir. I am physically here in the United States but I’m also a Mexican citizen, so therefore I’m not subject to your jurisdiction, according to the President.” Wouldn’t fly, would it?

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Trump’s lawyers have argued that the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t say that everyone born here is a citizen here, period; the person must also be “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” and that phrase therefore must exclude somebody to have any meaning. The answer, which has been accepted by every court to consider the issue so far, is that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” does indeed serve to exclude certain extremely narrow categories of people who are altogether outside the reach of the U.S. government: the children of foreign diplomats or invading hostile armies, for example. Read that way, every word of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Birthright Citizenship clause has a purpose, and makes perfect sense.

Thus far, Trump’s tortured Constitutional construction has been uniformly rejected in the federal courts. District judges in New Hampshire, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Washington have rebuffed the President’s attempt to rewrite the Constitution and U.S. history, and the Courts of Appeals for the First, Fourth, and Ninth Circuits have declined to block those lower court rulings. In the Washington case, Reagan-appointed District Court Judge John Coughenour called Trump’s executive order “blatantly unconstitutional.” The veteran jurist noted, “I have been on the bench for over four decades. I can’t remember another case where the question presented was as clear.” After more than a year of litigation across the country, the Trump administration is batting exactly .000.

When the Supreme Court hears oral argument on Birthright Citizenship on Wednesday, expect the Justices and the advocates to converse on all manner of deep legalese. But in the end it comes down to the simple proposition that if a person has two things at once, he also has one of them; if a person is subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and Mexico, he is indeed subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, and therefore covered by the Fourteenth Amendment.

The law and logic are clear enough here that I’d expect the conservative Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett ultimately to join their three liberal colleagues and rule against Trump, and in favor of our long-accepted notion of Birthright Citizenship. It’s tough to predict Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito whenever Trumpian politics are involved, but even they might be persuaded given the clarity of the legal issue at hand. The only real drama remaining is whether the Supreme Court will reject Trump’s position seven-to-two, or unanimously.

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This is the most transparent Justice Department in the history of the United States, and maybe all of human existence. Just ask them.

When pressed in November 2025 about DOJ’s handling of the Epstein Files, Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed to “follow the law with maximum transparency.” In a December 2025 letter, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche kvelled, “Never in American history has a President or the Department of Justice been this transparent with the American people about such a sensitive law enforcement matter.” Bondi gushed last month about serving under Trump, “the most transparent president in the nation’s history!” DOJ’s current leadership loves little more than to congratulate themselves on their world-historic, crystal-clear, nothing-to-hide transparency.

Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. Let’s ignore the fact that the Justice Department complied with the Epstein Files Transparency Act over a month late, with millions of pages improperly withheld, with victim identities inexcusably revealed, and with the names of various apparent wrongdoers improperly redacted. Let’s take as true (for the sake of argument) Bondi’s claim that she wants nothing more than for the American public to see behind the curtain.

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What, then, would we expect of this Most Transparent DOJ Ever, when the AG receives a subpoena issued with bipartisan support from a Republican-led congressional committee? Maybe something like, “The Attorney General, who prizes transparency above all, looks forward to the opportunity to testify to Congress and the American people.”

Instead, within moments of the subpoena’s issuance, DOJ’s actual response: “Completely unnecessary.”

In that initial statement, the Justice Department offered a glimpse at its strategic gameplan: “The Attorney General has always made herself available to speak directly with members of Congress. She continues to have calls and meetings with members of Congress on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which is why the Department offered to brief the committee tomorrow.”

Let’s pause here to draw a vital distinction. On the one hand, there’s Bondi’s formal testimony required by a House Oversight Committee subpoena, scheduled for April 14. That testimony would be given under oath. It would be visible to the American public, recorded verbatim by video and stenographer. And it would proceed according to a set of established rules allowing Committee members to question the AG directly. Bondi doesn’t exactly shine in these settings, of course. Recall her disastrous testimony last month – the hackish personal insults, the bizarre non-sequiturs about the Dow being over 50,000 (it’s not anymore), the overall tone of shouty defensiveness – which made her the subject of a series of derisive memes.

On the other hand, there’s the informal “briefing” that Bondi offered (together with her human heat shield, Blanche) last week, the day after the subpoena’s issuance. Predictably, it became a pointless free-for-all. Bondi was not under oath, there were no specific procedural rules, and there was no video recording or transcription – leaving it to partisan lawmakers to offer their after-the-fact, often contradictory (and self-serving) recollections of what happened behind closed doors. Democrats objected, all heck broke loose, and everyone stormed out unsatisfied.

The Justice Department plainly hoped that, by sliding in for a quick informal chat with the Committee, they could obviate the need for Bondi’s formal testimony on April 14. Republican Representative Lauren Boebert, who had voted for the Bondi subpoena, announced after the chaotic debriefing that she was reconsidering her support for the subpoena because it “is absolutely shameful to have her come in there willingly to answer anything that we want to ask, and to be treated that way. It just shows what’s to come.” Republican Representative Tim Burchett, who also had supported the Bondi subpoena, said after the briefing, “She was there, they had an opportunity, and they blew it.”

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Committee Democrats weren’t having it. Ranking Member Robert Garcia called out the ruse: “[W]e’re not going to participate in fake hearings and briefings like the one that they tried to set up yesterday to get out of sworn, under oath testimony.”

Bondi hedged on whether she’d comply with the subpoena. On her way out of the briefing, when asked by a reporter if she would still testify on April 14, the AG proclaimed that she “made it crystal clear I will follow the law” – which means absolutely nothing. Bondi might mean, “Of course I will testify in compliance with a lawful congressional subpoena.” Or (more likely) she could mean, “I think the subpoena is unlawful, so I will defy it.”

If Bondi in fact refuses to testify on April 14, the next move will belong to the Committee, which holds the power to recommend a formal contempt resolution. The Oversight Committee includes 25 Republicans and 21 Democrats, so the votes of all Democrats plus three Republicans would constitute a majority. Five Republicans voted for the Bondi subpoena, though Boebert and Burchett have since wavered publicly. If the Committee votes for contempt, the matter goes to the full House – 217 Republicans, 214 Democrats, and one Independent (plus three vacancies). Again, Democrats can hold a majority if they all vote in favor of contempt, and peel away three other votes.

And here’s where it all comes full circle. If the House votes for contempt, then the matter gets sent for potential prosecution to… the United States Department of Justice. Which is currently helmed by… Attorney General Pam Bondi. I’ll go out on a limb here and predict that the odds of Bondi approving an indictment captioned “United States v. Pamela Jo Bondi” are… slim.

We’ve seen recently that attorneys general, as a rule, aren’t exactly eager to indict themselves. We somehow managed to go 230-plus years as a nation without holding any attorney general in contempt. But lately it’s become a ritual. In 2012, the Republican-controlled House (with some Democratic support) held Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for refusing to provide documents relating to the “Fast and Furious” firearms sting operation. In 2019, the Democratic-controlled House held AG Bill Barr in contempt when he declined to provide documents relating to the administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the census. And in 2024, the Republican-controlled House held AG Merrick Garland in contempt for his refusal to release audio of an interview between Special Counsel Robert Hur and then-President Joe Biden. In all three cases, the AGs shocked precisely nobody by declining to charge themselves with criminal contempt.

Still, beyond the privileged world of attorneys general, contempt of Congress charges can have teeth. Trump advisors Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro were held in contempt for defying subpoenas from the January 6th Committee. Both were indicted in 2022, tried, convicted, and imprisoned for four months each. More recently, the House Oversight Committee (with bipartisan support) approved a contempt resolution against Bill and Hillary Clinton after they defied subpoenas relating to the Epstein investigation; after the vote, the Clintons decided to testify rather than risk prosecution.

While Bondi surely has no fear of an indictment, it’s tough to square a formal finding of contempt – especially one that would require bipartisan support – with her constant self-congratulatory claims of unprecedented transparency. But that bit of overt hypocrisy might be a small price to pay for Bondi to avoid another round of humiliating testimony like she gave last month on Capitol Hill. Circle April 14 on your calendar, but only in pencil.

Donald Trump cannot declare a national emergency and cancel the November 2026 or the November 2028 elections. Period. There is no basis in the Constitution or any federal law for the president to do so. No president, even in war time, has tried. The courts would surely declare any such efforts unconstitutional. But this does not mean that Trump cannot try to do other things to alter the outcome of the elections.

The idea of Trump trying to cancel an election comes from none other than Trump himself. In an interview with Reuters in January, Trump said that Republicans have been so successful that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later said the president was “joking” and “being facetious” about canceling the election. But on other occasions, too, Trump has mentioned the possibility of not having an election. And there certainly is the strong sense that Trump acts as if he can do anything.

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The Constitution requires federal elections every two years as that is when the terms of all members of the House of Representatives and one-third of the Senators expire. The Constitution also mandates a presidential election every four years. The date for federal elections is set by federal statute.

The Constitution has no clause that allows for this to be suspended in an emergency, even a war. Federal elections were held during the War of 1812, the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Although in theory Congress could change the date of the election, that is unlikely and not something President Trump has the unilateral power to do.

Nor can Trump exercise control over how elections are conducted. An enormous protection of our electoral system is its decentralization. State governments are responsible for conducting elections, though for federal elections they must meet the requirements of federal statutes and, of course, the Constitution.

In March 2025, President Trump issued an Executive Order, “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.” The Executive Order would have required proof of citizenship in order for a person to register to vote. It also would have prevented counting absentee or mail-in ballots received after election day. In League of United Latin American Citizens v. Trump, a federal court in Washington, D.C. declared this unconstitutional because the President has no authority to impose such requirements. The court declared: “Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the States—not the President—with the authority to regulate federal elections. [N]o statutory delegation of authority to the Executive Branch permits the President to short-circuit Congress’s deliberative process by executive order.”

Congress is now considering a statute to impose some of these requirements in the proposed Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. The SAVE Act would require that individuals provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote and a photo identification at the time of voting. It would require voters submitting absentee mail ballots to provide a photocopy of their I.D. And it would mandate that states share voter registration data with the federal government, which most states have refused to do. It would also create personal criminal liability for election officials that violate the law.

The bill passed the House of Representatives in February 2026 and is being stalled in the Senate by a Democratic filibuster. President Trump has urged Republican Senators to change the Senate’s rules to allow this to pass with 50 votes (and if needed, the Vice President breaking a tie), rather than the 60 votes needed to end a filibuster. In fact, President Trump has said that he will not sign any other legislation passed by Congress, other than to restore funding for the Department of Homeland Security, until the Senate passes the SAVE Act. So far, Senate Republican leadership has indicated they don’t have the votes to change the Senate rules concerning the filibuster.

The SAVE Act, like President Trump’s Executive Order, is addressing a problem that does not exist. And it would have devastating consequences with regard to the right to vote. There is no evidence that non-citizens are registering to vote and casting ballots. A federal law, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, already explicitly prohibits non-citizens from voting in federal elections. It is a felony for a person to falsely attest under penalty of perjury to being a citizen and eligible to vote.

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Many studies have been done and all have come to the same conclusion: Instances of non-citizens voting are extremely rare. A study in 2017, by the Brennan Center, looked at 42 jurisdictions where 23.5 million votes were cast, and found only 30 instances in which there were investigations of non-citizens voting, or 0.0001 percent of the ballots cast. The Heritage Foundation, which has advocated passage of the SAVE Act, found that since the 1980s, out of over a billion ballots cast, there are only 68 documented instances of non-citizens voting.

Some states have also carefully reviewed their elections to investigate whether non-citizens are voting and found that it just isn’t happening. Utah, for example, did a review of its entire voter list from April 2025 through January 2026. After an exhaustive review of two million registered voters, it found only one instance of a noncitizen registering to vote and zero instances of a non-citizen voting. In Georgia, a 2024 audit of its 8.2 million registered voters found only 20 noncitizens who had registered.

While the SAVE Act would do nothing to protect the integrity of elections, it would have the effect of keeping many citizens from being able to register to vote. The law would require that in order to register to vote a person would have to prove citizenship by presenting an original birth certificate or a passport or a naturalization certificate. Many people do not have any of these. The Brennan Center estimates that more than 21 million Americans lack ready access to those documents.

Indeed, many people have been kept from registering to vote in states that have adopted a proof of citizenship requirement. For example, when Kansas adopted a requirement for proof of citizenship in order to register to vote, 31,000 citizens – or 12 percent of all applicants – were kept from registration. Quite importantly, this figure does not reflect how many people chose not even to bother to register to vote if they had to go to the extra step of obtaining an original birth certificate or applying for a passport.

Hopefully, Democratic Senators will succeed in continuing to block this from becoming law. But expect President Trump to keep trying to meddle in the coming election. A draft of a 17 page Executive Order that would create federal control over every aspect of elections has been leaked. It is a stunning document that would, among other things, prohibit most Americans from casting a mail ballot. It would also require all 211 million Americans already registered to vote to re-register in person at an election office for the 2026 midterm elections by proving their citizenship using only their birth certificate, passport, or naturalization certificate. If adopted, this Executive Order, like its predecessor, is sure to be struck down by the courts as unconstitutional.

Some believe President Trump will station ICE agents around polling places to discourage citizens from going to vote for fear of being hassled or even apprehended. Earlier this month, New Mexico adopted a law prohibiting armed federal agents near polling sites. California’s legislature is considering a similar prohibition. It is unclear whether a state can regulate the federal government in this way. But the fear is real that President Trump might try and use federal agents to discourage people from voting in Democratic areas.

There will be elections in November 2026 and November 2028. But even Russia has elections. The question will be how much President Trump can do to control them. Hopefully, courts will enforce the many legal protections that exist to stop him from undermining our democracy.

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Even as the Supreme Court has granted Donald Trump expanded presidential powers, it has tried to warn him: Don’t mess with the Fed.

But the President has forged ahead with his effort to strong-arm the government’s independent rate-setting agency, the Federal Reserve Board, into cutting interest rates. As he doggedly pursues that fleeting economic sugar high, Trump has endured a series of legal losses that promises to continue until he gets the point and gives up the senseless browbeating. And while he flails, he’ll undermine his own ability to install his preferred ratemakers at the agency.

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Last year, the Supreme Court granted the president unprecedented, unilateral power to fire (for any reason, or none at all) the heads of obscure Executive Branch agencies like the Merit Systems Protection Board and the National Labor Relations Board. But the Justices cautioned against presidential encroachment on the Fed. The fired agency heads argued that, if the Court allowed the president to remove them, then the Fed could be next. “We disagree,” the six-Justice conservative majority wrote. “The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”

The Court usually refuses to offer gratuitous guidance about how it might rule in future cases. But here, the conservative Justices left little doubt that, while they would allow the President to run roughshod over most regulatory agencies, they would draw a protective line around the Fed.

Trump didn’t notice or didn’t care (or, perhaps, both). First, he went after Fed Governor Lisa Cook. Bill Pulte, an unapologetic sycophant who runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency, sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department alleging that Cook had committed mortgage fraud. Pulte’s record isn’t great; he had previously prodded DOJ to bring mortgage fraud charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James – a case that has now been rejected by a federal judge and, somehow, two grand juries.

Undaunted, and without waiting to see whether the Justice Department would actually seek to indict Cook, Trump fired her by Truth Social post in August 2025. Trump made no effort to disguise his motivation. Just hours after he purported to dispatch Cook, he boasted of the Fed, “We’ll have a majority very shortly. So that’ll be great … We have to get the [interest] rates down a little bit.”

But Cook challenged her termination. The case made its way to the Supreme Court, which heard arguments in January 2026 and seemed distinctly disinclined towards the President. Chief Justice John Roberts noted that some allegations against Cook were “contradicted by other documents in the record,” and fellow conservatives Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett voiced concern over the lack of process afforded to Cook; apparently firing by social media post doesn’t do the trick. We await a decision but it’s clear Cook isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s attention wandered to Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Trump appointed Powell as Fed Chair in 2017, but they’ve distinctly grown apart. Recall the Curb Your Enthusiasm-esque public exchange last year when the two men, both wearing goofy hardhats in front of a bank of television cameras, bickered over the details of cost overruns. (As Trump cited phony figures, Powell shook his head vigorously and replied, “I’m not aware of that.”)

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Last week, federal district court Judge James Boasberg took the dramatic step of blocking two subpoenas that Trump’s U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C. – the former Fox News blunderbuss Jeanine Pirro – had served on the Fed. Pirro’s office is investigating whether Powell gave false congressional testimony about the same cost overruns that Powell and Trump sparred about in the awkward hardhat exchange. Not coincidentally, Trump also has posted on social media over 100 times berating Powell for declining to cut interest rates; the president has mused aloud that “I want to get him out” and “I may have to force something.” Pirro stood ready to oblige.

After Judge Boasberg rejected her subpoenas, Pirro – evoking Cecily Strong’s wine-spitting Saturday Night Live impression – called a press conference and podium-pounded her way through a bizarre half-hour of unhinged nonsense.

Pirro called Boasberg an “activist judge” – never mind that he was first nominated to the bench by George W. Bush (and later was elevated by Barack Obama), and in 2017 sided with Trump and rejected an effort to force disclosure of his tax returns. Pirro claimed that the ruling marked “the first time” a judge had quashed a grand jury subpoena and was “untethered to the law.” Judges rarely block grand jury subpoenas, but this was hardly a first. In fact, Judge Boasberg cited a dozen semi-recent examples from across the country – and Trump himself has asked courts to exercise their power to quash subpoenas in prior investigations pointed at him. Pirro wailed that Judge Boasberg had “neutered” her investigation of Powell. But it’s not that the Judge cut off the case’s balls (to pick up Pirro’s analogy); he simply noted that it had none to begin with.

Trump usually has a knack for choosing politically useful foils, but his beef with the Fed and Powell is backfiring. Congressional Republicans have cautioned him to back off. Senator Lisa Murkowski criticized the Powell investigation and added, “if the Federal Reserve loses its independence, the stability of our markets and the broader economy will suffer.” Senator Thom Tillis concurred: “It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question.” Representative French Hill, Chair of the House Financial Services Committee, called the Powell investigation “an unnecessary distraction… [that] could undermine this and future Administrations’ ability to make sound monetary policy decisions.” Senator John Kennedy said bluntly of the Powell criminal inquiry, “We don’t need it.” Remember: these are Republicans. (Democrats are uniformly apoplectic.)

Trump’s efforts to bully Powell aren’t playing any better with the American public. A paltry 32% of all respondents to a January 2026 Economist / YouGov poll approved of DOJ’s investigation of Powell – including only 57% of all Republicans.

The thing is, Trump likely could have gotten his way with the Fed if he had just waited a bit. He could have let DOJ’s investigation of Cook play out; had prosecutors obtained an indictment, he likely would have had ample cause to fire her. Instead, he jumped the gun with the investigation still pending, and now has run into a blockade in the courts.

And Powell’s tenure as Chair ends in two months, in May 2026. But the criminal investigation of Powell could delay the confirmation of Trump’s chosen successor, Kevin Warsh. After Pirro vowed to appeal Judge Boasberg’s ruling, Tillis vented about the “weak and frivolous” criminal probe of Powell, and vowed to block Warsh’s confirmation until the conclusion of Pirro’s “embarrassment” of an inquiry and appeal.

A federal appeal could easily take six months or more to play out. If Pirro insists on forging ahead, and Tillis holds his ground, then this whole spat will prevent Trump from installing his chosen Fed chair for months beyond the natural end of Powell’s term. Indeed, Powell confirmed this week that he intends to remain in place as Fed Chair until the conclusion of DOJ’s investigation and Senate confirmation of his successor, even if the process extends beyond May.

We’ve grown used to Trump defying Democrats and his other natural political opponents, often purely for the sake of the defiance itself. But his effort to overrun the Fed has rankled his own political allies, and has gone exceptionally poorly in the courts. The President has chosen the wrong battle.

The Tennessee legislature almost did something extraordinary this month—and not in a good way. A bill that would have treated abortion as criminal homicide, potentially exposing women to the death penalty, failed not because it was unthinkable, but because no one would move it forward. No motion. No vote. Just a quiet acknowledgment that even in a state with one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, there are still lines that, for now, cannot be crossed.

That matters. But it should not reassure us.

The fact that such a bill was introduced at all tells us something important about where we are. And the fact that it failed quietly, procedurally, without a broader reckoning, tells us something about how easy it would be for a future version—slightly different, slightly more palatable—to advance.

Women’s civil rights, and the reproductive freedom that makes those rights real, cannot be treated as a side issue in our democracy. They are not peripheral. They are foundational.

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A democratic system rests on a simple premise: that people have the ability to shape their own lives and participate fully in public life. That promise collapses if half the population has no control over whether and when to have children. The ability to make decisions about reproduction affects everything—education, employment, financial stability, health, and the capacity to engage in civic life. It determines whether a person can plan a future or must simply accept one imposed on them.

For that reason, reproductive freedom is not just a policy question. It is a civil rights issue. It is about equality in its most practical form. When that freedom expands, women gain leverage personally, professionally, and politically. When it contracts, so too does their ability to participate as full and equal citizens. The current debate over reproductive rights is, at its core, a struggle over power and autonomy.

History makes that clear. Periods of expanding rights are almost always followed by backlash. When long-standing social roles shift, institutions have to adjust. And the people who benefited from the old arrangements rarely give them up quietly. What we are living through now is not an aberration—it is a pattern.

That is why so many people have had the same disorienting thought in recent years: I cannot believe we are here again.

But we are here because what once felt settled was never permanent. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization made that unmistakably clear. For decades, reproductive rights were treated as stable law. In reality, they were contingent, dependent on a set of political and legal conditions that could change. And when those conditions shifted, the rights went with them.

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But the risk lies not just in sweeping decisions, but in the quieter, more incremental ways rights are narrowed over time. Sometimes that happens through new legislation. Sometimes, through regulatory changes. And sometimes through the revival of laws that most people assume are long dead.

Take the Comstock Act of 1873. It was originally passed to prohibit the mailing of “obscene” materials, a category that was interpreted broadly enough to include information about contraception and abortion. Over time, courts narrowed its reach, and it faded into the background. Most people stopped thinking about it altogether. But it was never repealed. And in recent years, legal arguments have emerged in litigation suggesting it could be used to restrict1 the mailing of abortion medication nationwide. Not as a relic, but as an active legal tool.

Rights can erode through neglect, through reinterpretation, through the quiet reactivation of laws that never fully went away. That is why the Tennessee bill matters, even in failure. It is part of a broader pattern—testing boundaries, shifting norms, seeing what will stick. And it underscores a deeper point: rights are not self-sustaining.

Living in Birmingham, Alabama makes that impossible to ignore. The city is a constant reminder that civil rights were not inevitable. They were built—deliberately, persistently—by people who understood that progress required more than moral clarity. The Civil Rights Movement is often remembered through its most visible moments: marches, speeches, landmark legislation. But those moments rested on years of quieter work, organizing voter registration drives, raising money for legal challenges, building networks that could translate outrage into action. But progress often provokes resistance.

The success of the movement did not come from avoiding that backlash, but from anticipating it and continuing the work anyway. That is the framework we need now to protect women and their families. Protecting reproductive autonomy requires engagement with the democratic process itself. Most of this work will not feel dramatic. It will look like voting, and organizing, and paying attention to local races that rarely make headlines. It will involve supporting institutions doing the slow, often unglamorous work of holding systems accountable. That may not feel satisfying in the moment. But history shows it is how change actually happens. The people who fought for civil rights in earlier generations did not know which legal case would succeed, or which election would shift the balance. But they acted anyway because disengagement would only preserve the status quo.

The future of democracy will not be determined in a single moment. It will be shaped by a series of decisions, some visible, others not, and perhaps most importantly, by whether people stay engaged when it is so easy to look away.

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