Corey Robin's Blog, page 10

And Justice For All

1. Like other top law firms, the law firm at which Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s husband, is a partner, has cut a deal with Trump. 2. Among various concessions, the firm has agreed to gut its DEI programs and to take on, pro bono, clients fighting alleged antisemitism. 3. Emhoff was brought into the firm, as a partner, in January. His specific portfolio was to advise corporations about “matters with significant reputational concerns.” 4. Emhoff’s firm announced its deal with Trump just hours after Emhoff told Georgetown Law students that “the rule of law is under attack. Democracy is under attack. And so, all of us lawyers need to do what we can to push back on that.” “Us lawyers […]

But the parliamentarian!

Step 1 Democrats say they plan to ask the parliamentarian to rule that Republicans must use a current law baseline for projecting the cost of extending the 2017 tax cuts. Step 2 Republicans are set to make the audacious play of bypassing the Senate parliamentarian and moving forward with a budget resolution based on a scoring baseline set by Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) that would allow them to argue extending President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts won’t add to the deficit. There are three types of people in this world. Type 1 sees this sequence of events and thinks, darn those Republican rascals, why can’t they get some principles! Type 2 sees this sequence of events and thinks, darn […]

Chickens don’t come home to roost

One of the claims that you often hear on the left is that fundamental violations of human rights in the United States are a case of chickens come home to roost. That is, vicious policies that the government enacts abroad or on non-citizens on native soil eventually migrate to how the state treats its own citizens. Yet, listening to the Press Secretary of the White House deal with the administration’s vicious treatment of immigrants, it’s clear that in the right’s imagination, the causality often works in the opposite direction. Here’s the NYT: Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, took aim at the media’s reporting on deportation cases Tuesday, accusing journalists of caring more about the due process rights of […]

Where is Our Tank Man?

Everyone’s waiting for that one person to stand up to Trump. Not just that one person. There are a lot of such people. You can read about them in every newspaper. But that one person with real power who’s willing to risk something costly in defiance. That one university president who’ll say, fuck you and your money. That one Democrat who’ll say, fuck you and your threat to my reelection or that of my party. Everyone’s looking for our Tank Man, staring down a column of tanks, all by himself, in Tiananmen Square. Why don’t we see that person? Where is our Tank Man? (And, no, I don’t think Cory Booker doing a marathon-length filibuster counts.) The reason we see […]

A Tale of Two Letters

Tonight, I read two academic letters of public protest against What Is Going On—one from 2,000 of the nation’s top scientists and one from more than 80 Harvard Law School professors. The first letter is about the threat to scientific research, the second about the threat to the rule of law. Despite being in a discipline adjacent to the teaching and study of law, I felt that it was the letter of the scientists that truly spoke to me about what is politically at stake in this moment. And that was because it was the scientists who spoke the clearest, most direct, most forceful, and least artful, language of political alarm. At the simplest level, the scientists know how to […]

Punishment and Purification at Columbia

My friend Alex Gourevitch alerted me to Columbia’s statement on combatting discrimination, harassment, and antisemitism, which I had somehow missed. Alex points out how it’s essentially DEI from the right—new sensitivity trainings, for what the university calls antisemitism; new diversity hiring initiatives, for pro-Israel scholars; new administrators, to oversee the hiring—with a lot more coercion. On that question of coercion, have a read of the statement and simply count how often words like “sanction” (as in punish) and “suspension” and “expulsion” appear. It’s hard not to read this as new constitutional order for universities, in which the onerous apparatus of crime and punishment that this country has veered to over the decades is simply dropped onto the university campus. Is […]

On the decision of Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley to leave the United States

Earlier this week, Yale professors Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley announced that they were leaving the United States to take up academic positions in Canada. Ordinarily, this would not be considered news. Academics move all the time. Sometimes from the United States to other countries. But since both Snyder and Stanley have been, since 2017, the two leading proponents of the thesis that the United States is sliding precipitously toward fascism or authoritarianism, if we’re not already there, their announcement has attracted a considerable amount of attention. Snyder’s reason, and the timing of his decision, has been somewhat murky. But Stanley has been forthright: He’s moving his family out of the country because the political climate has grown intolerable, and […]

It’s the Only Face I Have

One of the big mistakes we make when we think about fear is to oppose fear to hope. Hope against fear, that’s the credo. And it’s badly mistaken. Nadezdha Mandelstam was one of the great writers on Stalinism. Her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, was murdered in 1938. She survived the purges and went on to write a miracle of a memoir titled, aptly, Hope Against Hope. This is what she had to say on the topic of hope and fear: Until a short time before, I had been full of concern for all my friends and relatives, for my work, for everything I set store by. Now this concern was gone—and fear, too…Having entered a realm of non-being, I […]

Pasionaria of the American State

MSNBC had on Susan Rice, Obama’s National Security Advisor, who claimed there that Signalgate, as it’s now being called, is “likely the biggest national security debacle that any professional can remember.” My first thought was, really? The biggest national security debacle that anyone can remember? Forget Vietnam, which might have well have happened under the Holy Roman Empire. What about, oh, I don’t know, the Iraq War? My second thought was, yeah, probably from the perspective of the “professional” class in DC, who can’t remember what happened two days ago, let alone what happened two decades ago, this probably is the biggest debacle that any of them can remember. My third thought was, wow, even when she’s obviously trying to […]

Pasionara of the American State

MSNBC had on Susan Rice, Obama’s National Security Advisor, who claimed there that Signalgate, as it’s now being called, is “likely the biggest national security debacle that any professional can remember.” My first thought was, really? The biggest national security debacle that anyone can remember? Forget Vietnam, which might have well have happened under the Holy Roman Empire. What about, oh, I don’t know, the Iraq War? My second thought was, yeah, probably from the perspective of the “professional” class in DC, who can’t remember what happened two days ago, let alone what happened two decades ago, this probably is the biggest debacle that any of them can remember. My third thought was, wow, even when she’s obviously trying to […]