The Real—and Deeply Corrupt—Reason Trump Is After E. Jean Carroll
https://newrepublic.com/post/211110/trump-e-jean-carroll-justice-department-corrupt
The Real—and Deeply Corrupt—Reason Trump Is After E. Jean Carroll
Actually, it’s not reason, singular. It’s reasons, plural. And there are 88.3 million of them.
Holy Damage Control, Batman: CNN originally reported late in the day Wednesday that the Justice Department was opening a probe into whether E. Jean Carroll, the New York woman who successfully sued Donald Trump and won $88.3 million in damages for sexual abuse and defamation, lied during the legal proceedings against Trump, and that Andrew Boutros, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, would be leading the investigation. Then, on Thursday, Boutros said, Hey, not me!, categorically denying that he was investigating Carroll.
This is extraordinary on so many levels. First and foremost, it’s shocking and disgusting that the Trump administration would even contemplate doing this.
It’s important to dip briefly into the facts here. Yes, in a 2022 deposition, Carroll misrepresented the fact that Democratic billionaire Reid Hoffman donated to her defense fund. Her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, has said that Carroll recalled later, sometime in 2023—it seems worth bearing in mind that she was in her late seventies at the time—that she had received some outside donations and that she told Kaplan, and Kaplan immediately told Trump’s lawyers. Those lawyers tried to pounce on this new information to cast doubt on Carroll’s credibility, but the judge barred Trump’s lawyers from using it at trial. Two juries subsequently found Trump liable for both sexual assault and defamation.
That’s the background. Here’s the important part, as detailed by Lisa Rubin in a recent MS NOW column: Trump appealed, twice, trying to get appellate courts to agree that Carroll was lying, and he lost both times. First, a three-judge appellate panel upheld Trump’s conviction and believed that Carroll just forgot: “Ms. Carroll plausibly represented that she had forgotten about the limited outside funding,” the panel wrote. Second, eight of 10 active judges on an appellate panel in June 2025 denied a request for rehearing by Trump’s lawyers. (And even just last month, a third appellate panel denied a rehearing of the defamation case.)
If you look at that June 2025 ruling I linked to above, you’ll see an interesting name listed as counsel for “defendant-appellant”: Todd Blanche.
This, of course, is the same Todd Blanche who is running the Department of Justice today. When Trump fired Pam Bondi as attorney general and stories came out that Trump had been displeased with her lack of zeal about going after his enemies, you, like me, probably wondered how anybody could possibly be more of an unethical, corrupt, cowardly lickspittle than Bondi was. She brought—or tried to bring—prosecutions against Trump antagonists Letitia James, James Comey, John Brennan, Fani Willis, and more. When career prosecutors declined to bring those cases, she fired them and brought in incompetent hacks to do Trump’s bidding. In some cases, federal judges found these hacks to have been installed illegally.
Bondi was venally corrupt, on an absolutely Wagnerian level. Just this week, in fact, a retired chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, backed by 120 judges, attorneys, and law professors, brought a blistering ethics complaint against Bondi demanding that she be investigated and disbarred. That complaint is mostly about her handling of the Epstein files because, remember, she behaved indefensibly there too.
So how could anyone be more corrupt than that? I’ll tell you exactly how, through Trump’s eyes: They could succeed where Bondi failed. That was her crime. Not obviously and serially violating departmental ethical canons. Her crime was not doing it well.
Hence, Blanche. The fact that his name was on that appellate denial—that he was one of Trump’s lawyers in the Carroll proceedings—means he has personal skin in this game, which in turn means that there’s no way on earth this should be happening on his watch. And indeed, he is said to have “recused” himself on the matter of the Carroll investigation. So it was tossed to Boutros, in Chicago.
But Boutros, as I noted above, says he’s not investigating Carroll. He maintains that he’s only investigating Hoffman’s nonprofit, American Future Republic. It’s based in Chicago, you see, so there’s the veneer of justification. But this just raises the question: What has American Future Republic done wrong? It’s allowed to donate money to a legal defense fund. It’s a 501(c)4, not a (c)3, the basic difference being that a (c)4 is allowed to be more directly political (also that donations to a (c)4 are generally not deductible as charitable contributions).
GuideStar records show that the group did donate $7 million to Kaplan’s former law firm in 2020. That is by far its largest single donation. But even so, so what? The material question here isn’t whether Hoffman partly or even wholly paid for Carroll’s defense. The question is whether she lied about it. Three different panels of judges believe she did not.
What’s really going on with this investigation, one sniffs, is this. Trump is running out of appeals here. As Lisa Rubin wrote in the column I cited above: “In other words, Trump is facing down the increasingly real possibility of paying Carroll more than $88 million, before interest, with only the Supreme Court to potentially rescue him.” So he and his current lawyers are trying to resuscitate the issue that a judge prevented them from using at the original 2023 trial.
That’s not necessarily a crazy, last-ditch legal strategy for a person faced with writing that kind of check. The problem, though, is that the person is the sitting president of the United States, and “his current lawyers” are the U.S. Department of Justice, which he has corrupted. And by the way, if you want to know more about this Boutros fellow, just read Michelle Goldberg’s column today about his ghastly attempt to prosecute six people, including onetime Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, on felony conspiracy charges. The case fell apart last week after prosecutors admitted to misconduct before the grand jury. As Goldberg put it, “If Trump didn’t manufacture scandals on such an industrial scale, the case that collapsed last week in Chicago would have been a huge story.”
So many things would have been huge stories under any other presidency. Trump’s purchase of Dell stock and the awarding of a large Pentagon contract to the company. White House intervention to get a $620 million contract funneled to a company affiliated with Don Jr. The ongoing ICE scandals, with Democratic pols being prevented from being able to inspect horrid conditions at ICE’s detention camps. The new homeland security secretary vowing to cancel international flights to certain liberal cities. The plainly illegal effort to put Trump’s face on a new $250 bill. Any one of those, in normal times, would be a major scandal. And those were just this week.
I pondered writing about each of those. I chose the Carroll matter because it’s not only obviously corrupt but another cannon blast at the rule of law and the independence and integrity of the Justice Department. And because it’s something new: Are investigations into liberal nonprofits to become a regular thing now? So far, Trump has used the DOJ completely unethically, but he’s used it just to go after a handful of personal enemies. If he and Blanche open up the gates to start harassing liberal groups on a much wider basis, then we’re truly in tinpot dictator territory. It can, and will, get worse.
There’s One Thing All Democrats Must Agree On, or They’re Dead in 2028
The DNC’s 2024 autopsy is a waste of your time. The answer to the party’s woes lies deep in a New York Times poll released the same day.
I started reading the Democratic autopsy of their 2024 loss that was belatedly released Thursday, but I stopped on page eight, when I got to this sentence: “In 1989, after losing three straight presidential campaigns, our party refocused the conversation around policy and purpose to reclaim the vital center of American discourse.” The second I saw that indefensible sentence, I clicked away.
Why? I’ve written this a few times, but I’ll write it again: There is no comparison whatsoever to be made between the Democrats’ situation after the 1988 election and their situation now, post-2024. In 1989, the Democrats had been absolutely pasted in three elections in a row. In 1980, Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan by nearly 10 points and 440 electoral votes; in 1984, Walter Mondale lost to Reagan by 18 points and 512 electoral votes; in 1988, Michael Dukakis lost to George H.W. Bush by 8 points and 315 electoral votes.
Meanwhile, the last three presidential elections have been decided by razor-thin margins. Hillary Clinton lost narrowly, though she won the popular vote by a fairly substantial margin (2.8 million); Joe Biden won; and Kamala Harris lost by a combined 230,000 votes in three states. There is no parallel to 1989.
So why would someone write this? I can think of only two reasons. The first is a combination of historical ignorance and allowing emotion to push aside facts. Democrats were so crushed by 2024 that it kinda felt like 1988. But feeling that without looking at the actual numbers is either dumb or lazy.
The second reason someone might write that sentence is ideological. That is, they are firmly committed to the view that the Democratic Party needs to “move to the center” or even “to the right,” and so they invoke the anemic ghost of 1988 to help them make their case. And if they did happen to stop and look at the numbers from the 1980s and wrote the sentence anyway, well, that would make the writing of it a deeply cynical exercise as well, because the writer would know there’s no truth to the analogy.
That “someone,” by the way, was Democratic consultant Paul Rivera. The Democratic National Committee hired him on a pro bono, part-time basis to conduct the autopsy even though he hadn’t worked on a presidential campaign in more than two decades. Apparently, he never finished the job, as the document released on Thursday was shockingly incomplete. “For full transparency, I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged,” DNC chair Ken Martin said. “It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word.”
No wonder I couldn’t read it any further. Lazy and inapt historical analogies, and indeed carrying on a detailed argument about why Harris lost, is irrelevant to what’s needed most in this moment: a discussion of how the Democrats can win in 2028. But before doing that, let me quickly offer three broad reasons why Harris lost:
1. Joe Biden didn’t exit the race in time.
2. Harris didn’t do an adequate job of reminding voters of Trump’s incompetence on a range of fronts in his first term (this is a point the autopsy apparently does make, in fairness).
3. Harris didn’t make a compelling or aggressive enough economic case.
Always in presidential campaigns, there are dozens of factors, but I would hope about 97 percent of us can agree that if Biden had exited in the spring and the Harris campaign had done a better job of 2 and 3, she’d likely have won those 230,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and more. OK? And that’s all the autopsy that’s really needed. (There are separate questions of the ground game and spending and things like that, but those topics are for insiders only.)
The same day the autopsy was released, The New York Times published a poll looking at Democrats’ beliefs and attitudes right now. The poll does say that in some ways, Democrats and “potential Democratic supporters” want the party to move to the center; 52 percent said the party should nominate a centrist in 2028, and 25 percent said it should nominate a more progressive candidate. Respondents thought Democrats should moderate their positions on immigration (specifically the border) and crime. And I think it’s clear to most people, for example, that the 2028 Democratic standard bearer does have to take a pretty stern line on border security. It’s the one promise Donald Trump made that he’s actually delivered on, and the only issue on which he’s above water in polls (this does not include, mind you, wanton deportations by ICE thugs—just the actual border).
So there were things, surprise surprise, that Democrats disagree on. But there was one thing they seemed to agree on: “Still, the economic populism pushed by a growing number of Democratic midterm candidates has found a receptive audience. More than 80 percent of the party’s backers thought the political and economic system should be torn down entirely or needed major changes, and nearly 90 percent called the economic system unfair.”
That’s the secret sauce, right there. That’s the answer. There was one question in the poll that to me was more important than all the others. It was wordy, so bear with me: “Now I’m going to describe two hypothetical Democrats. Tell me which of the two you would be more likely to support in the next Democratic primary for president. A candidate who promises to lower prices by going after corporate monopolies and price gouging. [Or] a candidate who promises to lower prices by making it easier to build housing and expand energy production.”
I’m not quite sure why housing and energy were considered the opposite of monopoly power and price gouging, but hey, I didn’t write it. Anyway: Going after monopolies and price gougers won 67 to 30 percent. It won massive majorities from every category in the cross-tabs. Young people, 75 percent; old people, 68 percent. Men, 65 percent; women, 69 percent. Whites, 70 percent; nonwhites, 65 percent.
Oh. And among which subcategory was the result most lopsided? White noncollege, by 76 to 22 percent. In other words, those magic white working-class voters the Democrats have hemorrhaged, and the media can never stop talking and writing about. The result among nonwhite noncollege respondents was not as extreme as that, but was still a whopping 64 to 34 percent.
The lesson here is obvious. Democrats have to make it crystal clear, unmissably clear, that they are on the side of working people struggling to get by and getting nickel-and-dimed by shifty corporations every day of their lives. That means taking certain policy positions, but it means much more.
“Positions” are close to worthless in campaigns today. What’s needed today is to create emotionally gripping narratives and make them go viral. On this issue, that means calling out the bad actors by name. It means naming villains. It means educating the American public about why they’re paying higher prices for prescription drugs and other forms of medical care, and who’s responsible. Watch this five-minute clip of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just ever so deftly ripping the eyeballs out of David Joyner, the CEO of CVS Health, earlier this year. Much more of that, please, Democrats.
In the superficial lexicon the political media uses, I suppose this means “moving to the left” on economics. Fine. So be it. But I’d argue it isn’t even “to the left.” It’s moving to where the people are. The people are furious about getting ripped off by corporate actors whom a rigged system will never hold to account. If virtually every demographic in that poll prefers a nominee who goes after monopolists and price gougers by 30-plus points, well, polling doesn’t ever get any clearer than that.
There’s this endless and often boring debate about whether to energize the base or reach out to moderates. As the above poll numbers show, a populist economics that targets bad actors can energize both. It’s only elite moderates who are against this, because they accept money from those sources for their campaigns or their organizations. They don’t actually represent anybody, or they represent a share of the electorate that is shrinking at a lightning pace. They, too, need to get with the program. This is where the people are.
So autopsy, schmautopsy. Stop arguing about 2024, Democrats. Talk about the future. And talk about the bad guys who are making working people’s lives harder. That’s where today’s “vital center” is—they’re sick and tired of getting screwed—and that way lies victory.
How Do We Know the China Summit Was a Failure? Because Trump Did It.
Everything he does on the world stage is disastrous, and the U.S. is reviled globally. How much longer will some idiots believe this “Art of the Deal” garbage?
Donald Trump says China agreed to buy 200 jets from Boeing. He crowed about it on Fox News Thursday night. But funny thing: A spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was asked specifically about the jet deal after Trump spoke, and he said nothing about any such agreement. Wanna take bets on whether it actually happened?
Three points here. First of all, we should stop quickly to note that it’s sad that it’s come to pass that we just automatically believe a foreign government—and China’s no less—over the president of the United States (sad about him, that is, not us). Second, let’s remember that Boeing is an American company in a deep and sustained crisis that was brought on by basic greed: As David Goldstein explained in Democracy journal in 2024, after its acquisition of McDonnell-Douglas in 1997, the historically proud engineering culture at Boeing was destroyed as the company became more anti-union and outsourced more of its production.
And third, assuming that Trump is lying or at least exaggerating, well, we’ve just learned again for the jillionth time that Mr. Art of the Deal is a total fraud. Let’s review.
- Remember how, in his first term, Trump was going to bring North Korea to its knees? Remember how he consistently heaped praise on Kim Jong Un and his “beautiful vision for his country”? Well, it’s not a “beautiful country” to the people who live there, and meanwhile, its nuclear progress has been steady over the last decade—during most of which, of course, Mr. Art of the Deal has been the president of the United States. Experts think the nation has assembled about 50 warheads.
- Remember also that he was going to solve the Russia-Ukraine war on his first day back in office? In late March, a UN expert testified that the violence was “worse than ever.” We—that is, most decent people—are heartened by Ukraine’s resilience and wowed by its innovative drone technology. But that “we” doesn’t include the president of the United States, who obviously is cheering for his pal Putin—over whom he has zero leverage.
- The 2025 tariff war on China totally backfired. China responded to Trump’s tariffs by limiting exports of rare-earth metals, and Trump backed down. Today, U.S. soybean exports to China are down (they peaked during Sleepy Joe’s “disastrous” presidency), as are auto exports. The first Chinese EVs are landing in Canada even as we speak. These are ultra-luxury cars that sell for $10,000 or even $20,000 less than their American equivalents.
- Speaking of Canada, why isn’t it the 51st state yet? And speaking of Northern annexation, why isn’t Greenland part of the United States yet?
- How’s that world-class Gaza resort coming along?
- U.S. relations with Europe are at an all-time low. And it isn’t because of anything Europe did. Last December, the Trump administration released a security strategy paper calling Europe a bigger threat to the United States than Russia or China because of its progressive social and immigration policies, which threatened the continent with “civilizational erasure.”
- And finally, of course, there is Iran. The economic impact of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz will be felt for months ahead. The latest wrinkle? In India, where they apparently lap up Diet Coke, there’s a shortage of the beloved elixir because there’s an aluminum shortage (Diet Coke is sold only in cans there). The Middle East accounts for 98 percent of the global aluminum supply. Stock up on that Reynolds Wrap. Joking aside: There are and will be dozens of such shortages, some far more serious than Diet Coke. A UN official told AFP in Paris this week that up to 45 million people in the developing world could face hunger or even starvation because of the global fertilizer shortage.
All the above adds up to this rather grim reality, contained in a survey conducted by the Alliance of Democracies Foundations and unveiled last week. The United States ranked 128th in how it is viewed by survey respondents across 85 countries. We netted out at -16. That’s behind Russia, Syria, and Myanmar, to name a few notables. But hey, we’re ahead of Iran! By a point.
Trump can fool himself, if he wants to, that Xi Jinping was talking about the Biden years when he referred to America’s decline and the suddenly famous “Thucydides Trap.” But everyone knows the truth. He was talking about the United States in general, under both parties—a country that is by now pretty much owned lock, stock, and barrel by a handful of greedy Robber Barons whom the GOP worships and the Democrats haven’t had the stones to stop.
And he was talking about the United States under Trump specifically. Xi may be a ruthlessly immoral tyrant. But one thing he isn’t is dumb. He sees very clearly what the United States is doing to itself, having reelected a low-I.Q. kleptocrat, adjudicated sex offender, and psychologically damaged sociopath who spends the wee hours firing off batshit tweets and obsessing about a ballroom the way the Sun King did over Versailles. That man, not Joe Biden, is why China now tops the United States in global approval ratings.
The United States always led China in those kinds of polls because at the end of the day we could say well, at least we’re a democracy. The way things are going, we’re not even going to be able to say that soon. But hey, he’s a great dealmaker, right?
This Is the Issue That Must Unite Democrats—and It Isn’t Donald Trump
It’s a problem that’s far more enduring than Trump. And any Democrat who isn’t serious about reining it in deserves zero 2028 consideration.
The self-pity of some people knows no bounds. Steven Roth, the CEO of Vornado Realty Trust, said this week that the phrase “tax the rich” is hate speech on a par with other well-known slurs. “I must say that I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich’—quote, tax the rich—when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs and even the phrase, ‘from the river to the sea,’” Mr. Roth said on an earnings call Tuesday, as reported by The New York Times.
Roth was peeved because Mayor Zohran Mamdani filmed a video celebrating Governor Kathy Hochul’s embrace of a tax on pricey second homes in New York in front of a building (developed by Vornado) containing a penthouse owned by hedge-fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin. Griffin bought it in 2019 for (sit down) $238 million, which made it at the time by far the most expensive single residence ever bought in New York.
I could maybe see an argument against Mamdani specifically singling out one person in that video. Griffin himself was quick to point out that Hizzoner “seems to have forgotten that the C.E.O. of another American company was assassinated just blocks from where I live in New York,” referring to Brian Thompson of United Healthcare. There are a lot of wackos out there. Although if God forbid someone shot Griffin tomorrow, it would not be Mamdani’s “fault,” any more than right-wing anti-government rhetoric was responsible for Justin Mohn shooting and then decapitating his federal-worker father in 2024. Only killers pull triggers. You’d think the people who preach at us constantly about personal responsibility would agree with that.
But let’s get back to Roth. What a crybaby. What he refuses to understand, or at least to admit, is: Nobody hates him personally. (a) Nobody cares enough about him to hate him personally, and (b) odds are he’s a relatively nice man and a good father and all that. This has nothing to do with hatred of individuals.
What millions of Americans hate is the extreme concentration of wealth and political power in the United States. Back in March, a New York Times analysis of donations in the 2024 election campaign found that just 300 billionaires and their families made a staggering 19 percent of all contributions to federal campaigns. That was more than $3 billion all told, either directly or through political action committees. The money helped elect Donald Trump, of course, but also new senators like Montana’s Tim Sheehy, who raked in $47 million from billionaires in his win over Democrat Jon Tester.
This is sick. This is not democracy. These people have no sense of limits, no sense that democracy requires that restrictions be placed on their power. Or maybe they do recognize that fact and have contempt for it, in which case it makes them opponents of democracy.
“I have the right to spend whatever I choose to promote what I believe,” David Koch once wrote, criticizing the landmark 1974 law that sought to impose caps on campaign expenditures. Fuck you. No you don’t. I mean, you do, right now, under the current laws of the United States, where the Supreme Court has held that money is speech and as such needs to be as “free” as speech is. You may think I’m referring to the infamous Citizens United decision of 2010, but actually the court initially made this holding in 1976’s Buckley v. Valeo, which came long before campaigns were so awash in lucre. That year, the average Senate race cost $595,000. Adjusted for inflation, that would be around $3.8 million now. In 2020, Senate races averaged around $30 million.
Koch is wrong. Money isn’t speech. Money is money. The difference is easily provable with the observation that all of us can speak equally but we cannot spend equally. If Koch and I are standing in the town square advocating for opposing candidates for mayor, I can speak on behalf of my candidate as endlessly as he can. That’s speech. But his ability to hand his preferred candidate $100 bills is rather more infinite than mine. That isn’t speech. It’s money. It corrupts the process. Someday, this will be obvious to a different Supreme Court.
You’d think these people would be satisfied with the way things are, so heavily stacked in their favor. But they aren’t. They want more. They always want more. This year, billionaires who want to keep AI free of any restrictions or regulations are pouring eye-popping sums into the midterms: Leading the Future, a pro-AI super PAC founded by venture capitalist Marc Andreesson and OpenAI president Greg Brockman, has amassed a war chest of $140 million. Their goal is to defeat candidates like Alex Bores in New York, who vows to lead a charge to regulate AI if he gets to Congress, and to promote candidates who’ll lie back and let them do what they want.
Why are they so hot on AI? Well, it’s pretty simple, isn’t? More AI means fewer human employees, with their oh-so-burdensome salaries and benefits and occasional illnesses. Claude Anthropic can’t agitate for a union. More AI means they get richer. The millions who lose work? Well, that’s progress. If they lose work, it’s what they deserved for not keeping up with the times. (Fancifully, some AI evangelists claim to support universal basic income as a solution to the mass immiseration their products will cause. But we know exactly which side they’ll be on if Congress ever takes up such a measure.)
These people have to be stopped. They need to be taxed at higher rates, of course. And their political power has to be curbed. In fact, that has to be a defining issue in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary race.
Every Democratic candidate needs to be asked: What will you do to rein in the political power of the billionaires? They may not be able to do as much as we’d like, given the Supreme Court, but how they talk about it—whether they’re angry or sanguine, whether they convey alarm or spew out a bunch of stupid happy talk about being able to work with everyone—will tell us a lot about their character and their worldview.
It’s kind of a “price of entry” issue. That is, the price of being taken seriously as a candidate, whatever their other positions, is that they recognize this state of affairs for the five-alarm fire it is. If something isn’t done about this, by 2030, those 300 billionaires will account for 40 percent of all federal campaign spending. Or 50. And what remains of this democracy will be dead.
By the way, the other “price of entry” issue? It’s that the candidates will use every ounce of political capital they have to kill the Senate filibuster if they win control of Washington in 2028. Not reform it. Kill it. The filibuster in any form means continued paralysis, dysfunction, and a certain drubbing in the 2030 midterms that will return control of one or both houses of Congress to the GOP. No filibuster means passing 10 or 15 or 20 bills that make people’s lives better and stop monopolies from being able to rip people off the way they can now. It has the potential to revolutionize politics. Any Democrat who doesn’t see this at this point can’t possibly be taken seriously.
Kvetch away, Steven Roth. But maybe in the meantime, pause and give a little thought to what is required for a healthy democracy to function. Reflect, perhaps, on the fact that this country experienced its greatest growth, its golden era, when a third of the workforce was unionized, when the top marginal tax rate was 90 percent, and when corporations generally understood that they had a commitment not only to shareholders but to community stakeholders.
Finally, as you reflect with justifiable pride on your own success, devote at least a few moments to the elements of public infrastructure—the roads, the rails, the computer networks that were all initially developed by the government—that helped make you so rich. If you and your class don’t want to be hated, stop doing things people hate.
John Roberts Is Either Dumb or Racially Obtuse. And He’s Not Dumb.
After the Supreme Court struck down school integration, guess what happened in the schools? The same thing that’s about to happen with congressional districts.
If Chief Justice John Roberts has uttered two quotable sentences in his career that will likely appear high up in his New York Times obituary, they are these. The first comes from his 2005 confirmation hearing: “My job is to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.” The line was meant to convey to senators and America that he would be a neutral arbiter of constitutional interpretation, sans ideological agenda. It was later picked up by the entire conservative legal movement and repeated by numerous other right-wing judicial nominees at their confirmation hearings.
It was a lie. He was there, as we have subsequently learned many times, to bat. And not to spray dinky little singles—to swing for the fences. You may recall Jeffrey Toobin’s stunning 2012 article in The New Yorker detailing how painstakingly the chief justice orchestrated the 2010 Citizens United decision to make sure that it went as far as possible in removing limits on the financing of campaigns. The John Roberts of that article was no umpire. He was Mark McGwire juiced up on steroids, trying to smash the ball out onto Clark Avenue.
The subsequent 16 years have shown us the consequences of that decision, which will go down in U.S. history as one of the most corrosive and reactionary holdings of all time—if not right up there with Plessy and Lochner, then awfully close. It has handed our democracy on a silver platter to men who have nothing but contempt for it (Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, etc.).
The other quote is one that I suspect many people will remember, although they may forget the context: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Ring a bell? He said it early in his tenure, when the Roberts court handed down one of its first major decisions, concerning public school integration efforts in Seattle and Louisville.
The court had already restricted forced integration efforts in a 1991 ruling. Then, in 2007, in two joined cases emanating from the above-named cities, the court went further: It ruled that even voluntary desegregation efforts were out the window. Roberts uttered his famous line while reading his 5–4 majority opinion from the bench.
I remember well the predictions in the decision’s wake. Liberals warned that the public schools would likely resegregate. Conservatives said, Oh pshaw, you delicate little flowers; we’re such a different country from 1954, the year of Brown v. Board of Education. Things will be just fine.
Well, guess what happened? In the 19 years since that ruling, the public schools have resegregated. Not to a mild degree. Not to a “concerning” degree. They have resegregated to a shocking degree.
In 2024, Axios published an article based on two recent academic studies and its own review of official data from 1988 to 2022. In the former year, about 7.4 percent of the nation’s schools were “intensely segregated,” meaning at least 90 percent white. By the latter year, that figure had vaulted to 19.8 percent. In addition, Axios’s Russell Contreras wrote at the time, “several states saw about a 20-percentage point or more increase in intensely segregated schools, from 1988 to 2021.”
Mind you, this happened while the racial demography of the United States went from 67 percent white to 58 percent white. In other words, you might have thought that in an increasingly diverse country, the schools would also become increasingly diverse. Instead, the opposite happened.
Now, fast-forward to this week’s Louisiana v. Callais decision on gerrymandering. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the 6–3 majority, assures us that there’s nothing to worry about in the evisceration of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. We’re a different country. We don’t need it anymore. “Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South,” Alito wrote.
The country has changed for the better in a number of ways, no doubt about that. But has it changed enough that laws to protect minority representation aren’t needed? We’re about to find out.
Consider the following statistics. Mississippi today has a Black population of 38 percent. One of its four congressional districts is majority-minority, for a representation rate of 25 percent. Black Mississippians are ergo underrepresented in Congress. In South Carolina, Blacks make up 25 percent of the population, and one of seven congressional districts was cut for Black representation. That’s 14 percent. So Blacks are underrepresented in that state, as well. And in Tennessee, Blacks are 17 percent of the population but hold zero seats in Congress (0 percent, obviously).
In some other states of the old Confederacy, Black representation is more on par. In Alabama, Blacks are 27 percent of the population and hold two of the state’s seven congressional seats (28 percent). In Louisiana, those population-representation figures are 33 percent and 33 percent (two out of six seats). In North Carolina, they are 21 percent and 21 percent (three out of 14 seats).
Hooray for those three states, I guess. But the question is this: What will those numbers be come 2029, or 2031? It’s hardly going out on a limb to guess that Alabama, Louisiana, and North Carolina will reduce or even possibly eliminate their majority-minority seats. They probably can’t quite get away with that right now in North Carolina, where there’s a Democratic governor. But Alabama and Louisiana, where the GOP controls the governor’s mansion and dominates both legislatures? Louisiana is already licking its chops: After this week’s SCOTUS ruling, its governor announced he was suspending the House primaries on May 16 so the legislature can redraw districts more favorable to the Republicans. It’s hard to believe they’d really have the gall to cut them down to zero. Then again, a lot of things have been happening lately in this country that once seemed hard to believe.
Speaking of which, I find it kind of hard to believe that Roberts, Alito, and other conservative justices this week did not think back to the aftermath of their fateful 2007 decision on school integration. Can they possibly be unaware that schools aggressively resegregated in the wake of that ruling? That seems impossible. And if I’m right, that leaves only one explanation for this week’s decision. They understand the potential consequences quite fully. They just don’t care. Mark McGwire has hit another one, and the bleak outcome, similar to the one liberals predicted in 2007, awaits us.
This article previously misstated the percentage of North Carolina congresspeople who are Black, the number its congressional seats, and which party controls the state Senate.
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