Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 19
August 9, 2025
August 9, 2025
Last Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposted a video in which Christian nationalist pastors express their opposition to the idea of women voting. “I would like to see this nation being a Christian nation, and I would like this world to be a Christian world,” said Christian nationalist Doug Wilson. In his repost of the video, Hegseth wrote “All of Christ for All of Life.”
But the government of the United States of America is not, and never has been, based in Christianity. In his 1785 “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” framer of the Constitution James Madison explained that what was at stake in the separation of church and state was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental, unalienable human right—that of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.
The United States of America is based not on religion but on the law. The country’s founding documents are the Declaration of Independence, which established the principle that all people are created equal, and the U.S. Constitution, which has gradually expanded since it was first written, increasingly recognizing the equal rights of all Americans.
The Constitution didn’t expand on its own. Since the time colonists first began to contemplate creating their own country, individuals have worked, step by step, to create an inclusive democracy. The Declaration of Independence gave them the language to claim those rights, and using it, along with logic, art, organization, and humor, they challenged the nation to turn the principles of the Declaration of Independence into reality.
At a time when political leaders like Hegseth are using their crabbed understanding of religion to take away rights, it seems worth remembering those who expanded rights by standing firm on the Declaration of Independence. The linked videos are a window into how ten people led the way.
So tonight is a night off from the firehose of the news and a reminder of what it has meant throughout our history to stand for American values.
I’ll be back at it tomorrow.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2dS6uX1RkUzIhvfzi1zPwdgTDv9NNnJK
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Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/09/pete-hegseth-video-pastors-women-voting
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-08-02-0163#JSMN-01-08-02-0163-fn-0014-ptr
August 8, 2025
August 8, 2025 (Friday)
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed he could stop Russia’s war on Ukraine with a single phone call. Instead, Matt Murphy and Ned Davies of the BBC report that Russian attacks on Ukraine have doubled since Trump took office. Today was the deadline the president had announced for Russian president Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire in his illegal invasion of Ukraine or face further sanctions. Instead, Trump announced this afternoon that he intends to meet with Putin on August 15 in Alaska.
Putin generally cannot travel outside Russia because he has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, including the theft of Ukrainian children. And yet Trump is welcoming him to the United States of America.
This welcome gives Putin the huge gift of letting him touch down on U.S. soil after he invaded Ukraine in defiance of the policy established after World War II to prevent another such devastating war. In 1945 the United Nations charter declared that “[a]ll Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” The United States was the key guarantor of this principle until Trump took office.
The U.S. has stood against Russian invasions into Ukraine not only on this general principle, but because of security guarantees the U.S., along with the United Kingdom and Russia, gave to Ukraine in 1994. After the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, Ukraine had the third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. In exchange for Ukraine’s giving up those weapons, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia agreed to secure Ukraine’s borders. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, they agreed they would not use military force or economic coercion against Ukraine. Russia violated that agreement with its 2014 and 2022 invasions.
Now Trump will welcome Putin to the United States, to territory that once belonged to Russia, reinforcing for Russian nationalists the dream of recreating Russia’s old empire. That dream has been part of the ideology of Russia’s drive to seize Ukrainian land.
Donato Paolo Mancini, Alberto Nardelli, and Daryna Krasnolutska of Bloomberg reported this morning that U.S. and Russian officials are planning this summit to hammer out an agreement that will force Ukraine to cede to Russia its land currently occupied by Russian troops, as well as Crimea. This deal would hand Ukraine’s eastern industrial territory to Russia and bless the principle that one country can seize territory from another through force. Observers note that once this principle is established, as Putin wishes, there will be nothing stopping him from invading Ukraine again as soon as his war-weary country recovers its strength.
The plan revealed by the Bloomberg journalists is still vague, but it excludes Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky and European allies and is similar to the one Russia demanded in April 2025. That plan, in turn, rehashed almost entirely the plan Russian operatives presented to Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort, in exchange for helping Trump win the White House.
Russia had invaded Ukraine in 2014 and was looking for a way to grab the land it wanted without continuing to fight. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election explained that Manafort and his partner, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, in summer 2016 “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having [Russian-backed Viktor] Yanukovych, the Ukrainian President ousted in 2014, elected to head that republic.”
The Mueller Report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.” The region that Putin wanted was the country’s industrial heartland. He was offering a “peace” plan that would carve off much of Ukraine and make it subservient to him. This was the dead opposite of U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine, and there was no chance that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the presidency against Trump, would stand for it. But if Trump were elected, the equation changed.
According to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, Kilimnik wrote: “‘[a]ll that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from D[onald] T[rump] saying ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine’ and a decision to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process.’ Following that, Kilimnik suggested that Manafort ‘could start the process and within 10 days visit Russia ([Yanukovych] guarantees your reception at the very top level, cutting through all the bullsh*t and getting down to business), Ukraine, and key EU capitals.’ The email also suggested that once then–Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko understood this ‘message’ from the United States, the process ‘will go very fast and DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration.’”
According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018.
After Russia invaded Ukraine again in 2022, Jim Rutenberg published a terrific and thorough review of this history in the New York Times Magazine. Once his troops were in Ukraine, Putin claimed he had annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, two of which were specifically named in the Mariupol Plan, and instituted martial law in them, claiming that the people there had voted to join Russia.
On June 14, 2024, as he was wrongfully imprisoning American journalist Evan Gershkovich, Putin made a “peace proposal” to Ukraine that sounded much like the Mariupol Plan. He offered a ceasefire if Ukraine would give up Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, including far more territory than Putin’s troops occupy, and abandon plans to join NATO.
On June 27, 2024, in a debate during which he insisted that he and he alone could get Gershkovich released, and then talked about Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Trump seemed to indicate he knew about the Mariupol Plan: “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.”
That plan reappeared in April and, once again, is back on the table.
At the same time, officials from this, the second Trump administration, are working to rewrite the history of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election that led to Trump’s first administration. Although it is well established that Russian operatives worked to elect Trump in 2016, Trump has consistently tried to undermine that history by insisting that the many findings of Russian help for his campaign in 2016 were a hoax.
Lately, MAGA loyalists have worked to claim that the real story of the 2016 campaign was not Russian support for the Trump campaign, but rather a Democratic conspiracy to push the story of the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia. On Wednesday, Warren P. Strobel of the Washington Post reported that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard last month overrode the advice of the Intelligence Community when she declassified and released a highly classified report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The document made reference to sensitive sources and methods, but Trump supported Gabbard’s release of the report.
White House officials appear to be revisiting the story of Russian interference in the 2016 election to try to distract voters from the story of Trump’s relationship to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Their pivot to this position has tied the two stories together in a way that had not previously been suggested. The surprising association has led Democratic political strategist Simon Rosenberg of Hopium Chronicles to speculate that Putin might possess “some form of the Epstein files” that Trump would prefer to keep from seeing the light of day.
Certainly, Putin is behaving like someone who is holding a strong hand of cards. Today Jennifer Jacobs, Margaret Brennan, and Olivia Gazis of CBS News reported that Putin “needle[d]” Trump this week by giving his special envoy Steve Witkoff the Order of Lenin, a Soviet-era award that commended outstanding service to the state, to pass on to the mother of 21-year-old American Michael Gloss, who was killed in 2024 fighting in Ukraine on behalf of Russia.
The journalists report that Gloss struggled with his mental health and did not appear to have been recruited by Russia. His family did not know he had enlisted in the Russian army or that he was in Ukraine.
Apparently, after he was killed, Russian officials learned that his mother, Juliane Gallina, serves at the CIA. By giving Witkoff an award named for the first head of the Soviet state to pass on to a CIA employee, Putin appeared to suggest that the Soviet Union had won the Cold War after all.
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Notes:
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/08/06/gabbard-russia-report-cia-trump/
Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections, ICA 2017-01D, January 6, 2017, at https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/magazine/russiagate-paul-manafort-ukraine-war.html
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sites-default-files-documents-report-volume5.pdf (pp. vi, 99)
https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/dl (pp. 139–140)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yl6eegv63o
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/putin-award-order-of-lenin-american-ukraine/
Bluesky:
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August 7, 2025
August 7, 2025
At 7:22 this morning, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “I have instructed our Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures and, importantly, using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024. People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Trump has no power to change the timing of the U.S. Census, which is mandated by the Constitution to take place every ten years.
He also has no power to declare that undocumented immigrants won’t be counted: the Constitution specifies that representatives “shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State.” MAGA turns sometimes to the Fourteenth Amendment’s exclusion of “Indians not taxed” from the count for representation as proof that lawmakers recognized that some people should be excluded from the census. But, in fact, “not taxed” identified a group of people who did not come under the purview of the United States government.
Just a year after the Civil War, lawmakers looked at the crisis caused by southern enslavers who had wielded outsized political power because the Constitution had allowed them to count enslaved Americans for purposes of representation and worried that a similar system would develop in the new states in the West. When they wrote the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866 (it was ratified in 1868), they explicitly excluded “Indians not taxed” out of concern that congressmen from the new western states would exercise more power than they should by counting the large numbers of Indigenous Americans who did not participate in the modern economy or have a say in the government. By excluding “Indians not taxed” explicitly, lawmakers demonstrated that they fully intended to include everyone else.
The U.S. government has always included “all persons” when taking the census.
Taking an accurate census suddenly is also not remotely possible. Setting one up takes most of the decade between them and costs close to $15 billion. Census officials are already working on the 2030 census.
Trump’s announcement is revealing, though, in two ways.
First, it shows how aware he and administration officials are that their program is deeply unpopular and that they expect to lose control of the House of Representatives in 2026 unless they rig the system. As Lisa Needham wrote today in Public Notice, “‘We stood aside so Trump could shutter vital agencies, take away your healthcare, and spend every last dime scooping up immigrants to help get Stephen Miller his 3,000 arrests a day’ is not exactly a rallying cry that will turn out voters.”
Republicans in Texas are trying to redistrict the state; Republicans in Indiana, Florida, and Ohio are considering the same tactic. Today, Adam Wren and Andrew Howard of Politico reported that Vice President J.D. Vance brought an entourage of White House officials with him to Indiana to pressure lawmakers there to redistrict the state, indicating just how important administration officials think redistricting is to keep control of the House. Now Trump has simply blurted out that he plans to change the game altogether and rig it to win.
But there is an even darker image behind destroying our democratic system. If undocumented immigrants aren’t counted, their districts will be shortchanged on representation and whatever federal monies are still available for states, for sure. But if undocumented immigrants aren’t counted, will they be easier to dehumanize? Already the government is taking people from the streets and denying their right to due process. Observers are describing human rights abuses in detention facilities where most of those incarcerated have no criminal record. If undocumented people are not officially recognized as existing, they could simply disappear.
Yesterday Adam Taylor, Hannah Natanson, and John Hudson of the Washington Post reported that, according to leaked drafts of the annual report on human rights from the State Department, the Trump administration plans to back away from criticizing El Salvador, Israel, and Russia for their extensive human rights abuses. In 2024, the State Department reported government-sanctioned killings, torture, and “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions” in El Salvador; the new report says there are “no credible reports of significant human rights abuses” in the country. Last year’s report for Israel was more than 100 pages; this year it is 25.
The State Department has also declared support for the end to presidential term limits in El Salvador. This change enables Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele, who allowed Trump to render Venezuelan immigrants to his infamous CECOT prison, to hold office indefinitely, establishing himself as a dictator. A spokesperson for the State Department said: “El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly was democratically elected to advance the interests and policies of their constituents. Their decision to make constitutional changes is their own. It is up to them to decide how their country should be governed.”
It is a truism that democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.
But Americans are not simply accepting the administration’s reworking of American society. People congregating in the Indiana Statehouse today to protest redistricting met the news that Vance was in the building with resounding boos.
Last night, Trey Parker and Matt Stone skewered Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and ICE on South Park, and comedian Stephen Colbert went scorched earth on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., saying, among other things, that his cuts to vaccine research are “bad news for fans of living.”
The White House continues to try to put a lid on questions about the relationship between convicted sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein and Trump but is having little luck. After vehemently denying they had plans for a meeting last night to discuss responses to the Epstein issue, White House officials met last night after all, MSNBC reported. Those officials included Attorney General Pam Bondi and Federal Bureau of Investigation director Kash Patel.
Just after 12:00 a.m. Eastern Time today, Trump’s tariffs of at least 10% on products from other countries went into effect. As Josh Boak of the Associated Press reported, while Trump and administration officials continue to insist that Trump’s economic policies will create “unprecedented” growth, “there are signs of self-inflicted wounds to the U.S. as companies and consumers brace for the impact of the new taxes.”
Economic growth is slowing, job growth is stagnant, and prices are headed upward. Chao Deng and John Keilman of the Wall Street Journal reported today that rather than increasing as Trump claimed it would under his tariff regime, manufacturing activity in the U.S. has shrunk for most of Trump’s second term.
The one thing that appears to be going according to Trump’s wishes is his remaking of the White House. Trump’s new patio where the Rose Garden lawn used to be is finished. It now has café tables with yellow striped umbrellas. Brian Glenn of right-wing media outlet Real America’s Voice noted: “Very ‘Mar-A-Lago’ ish. Nice!”
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Notes:
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, August 7, 2025, 7:22 AM.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-14/
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-105819
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/07/trump-new-census-00497025
Public NoticeThe GOP's gerrymandering frenzy is a sign of weaknessRead morea day ago · 329 likes · 26 comments · Lisa Needhamhttps://www.cnn.com/2025/08/06/world/el-salvador-eliminating-presidential-term-limits-intl-latam
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/07/entertainment/south-park-kristi-noem-trump-administration
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/07/vance-indiana-00497634
Facebook:
X:
https://x.com/brianglenntv/status/1953405326734025056
Bluesky:
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August 6, 2025
August 6, 2025
Members of the House of Representatives are back in their districts for August, and on Monday, Republican Mike Flood of Nebraska held a town hall in Lincoln. A woman asked what she called a fiscal question. She said: “With 450 million FEMA dollars being reallocated to open Alligator Alcatraz, and 600 million taxpayer FEMA dollars being used to now open more concentration camps, and ICE burning through $8.4 million a day to illegally detain people—How much does it cost for fascism? How much do the taxpayers have to pay for a fascist country?” The crowd cheered wildly. Nicholas Wu, Cassandra Dumay, and Mia McCarthy of Politico reported today that by the end of Flood’s town hall, “chants of ‘Vote him out!’ threatened to drown out his closing comments.”
The Politico reporters also said that Republicans maintain they aren’t worried about their angry constituents and dismiss the town hall pushback as astroturfed and not reflective of real voter sentiment.
Maybe. But with the political tide running strong against the administration, that position sounds like posturing.
Trump’s firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the same day that numbers from that bureau showed a dramatic slowdown in the economy seems to have awakened businesspeople who were willing to back Trump to the reality that he’s pulling down the economy. Today Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook expressed concern about the jobs numbers, suggesting that the big revisions in them “are somewhat typical of turning points” in the economy.
At the same time, the administration’s immigration policies are deeply unpopular and unlikely to improve as Americans learn more about them. Today a report by Hatzel Vela of NBC South Florida went national as a former corrections officer for a private contractor who worked at the detention center in the Florida Everglades, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by supporters, said the detainees “have no sunlight. There’s no clock in there. They don’t even know what time of the day it is. They have no access to showers. They shower every other day or every four days…. The bathrooms are backed up because you got so many people using them.”
Florida is running the Everglades detention facility in expectation of reimbursement by the federal government. Immigration advocate Aaron Reichlin-Melnick pointed out that, unlike the federal government, the state of Florida “can be sued for civil rights violations and punished with monetary damages.”
Also today, the GEO Group, a private prison and services provider, reported a better than expected second quarter today, thanks in part to two ICE contracts that, together, it expects will produce $145 million annually. The company announced a $300 million stock buyback, a process that increases the value of the stock held by remaining shareholders.
The Department of Homeland Security continues to echo the language of Nazis, posting today, “Serve your country! Defend your culture.” It does not appear that people are rushing to sign up. The administration has worked hard to recruit new agents, offering a signing bonus of up to $50,000 and help repaying student loans. Today, it eased requirements for new recruits, removing age limits and posting “no undergraduate degree required!” David Dayen of The American Prospect noted today that probationary employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have been ordered to report to ICE within seven days or lose their jobs.
As concerns grow about the economy and immigration policy, which were Trump’s strongest suits, Trump’s open attempt to steal the 2026 election by a rare mid-decade redistricting in Texas to carve out five more Republican seats in Congress has given Democrats a platform to call attention to MAGA’s attempt to stay in power regardless of the will of the voters. And they have seized the opportunity, calling the Republicans out in interviews and on social media.
At least fifty Democrats have left the state to deny the Republicans a quorum—the minimum number of people necessary to hold a vote—that would let them jam through a new voting map. Yesterday Texas governor Greg Abbott asked the Texas Supreme Court to let him expel the leader of the House Democrats, Representative Gene Wu, from the legislature, saying Wu had abandoned his office. According to Eleanor Klibanoff of the Texas Tribune, legal experts disagree. She quotes Charles Rhodes, an expert on constitutional law at the University of Missouri law school. “I am aware of absolutely no authority that says breaking quorum is the same as the intent to abandon a seat,” he said. “That would require the courts extending the premise to the breaking point. It’s inconsistent with the very text of the Texas Constitution.”
Yesterday Republican senator John Cornyn of Texas asked the FBI to find and arrest the Democratic legislators—a wild overreach of federal power—and Trump told reporters the FBI might have to get involved.
David Petesch of Shaw Local, a paper in Illinois, reported that a bomb threat early this morning at the hotel where the Texas lawmakers are staying in Illinois forced them to evacuate. After the threat was cleared, the Democrats said: “We are safe, we are secure, and we are undeterred. “We are grateful for [Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker], local, and state law enforcement for their quick action to ensure our safety.” On social media, one lawmaker blamed Texas Republicans for the threat. “This is what happens when Republican state leaders publicly call for us to be ‘hunted down,’” Representative John Bucy III said. He added: “Texas Democrats won’t be intimidated.”
Nicole Lafond of Talking Points Memo reported today that the administration is now turning to a plan to redistrict Indiana, sending Vice President J.D. Vance to meet with Republican lawmakers there. But, as Lafond notes, Republicans already hold seven of the state’s nine congressional seats. Indiana state representative Matt Pierce, a Democrat, told the Indy Star that the attention to redistricting Indiana shows that the White House is worried about 2026.
Those concerns are unlikely to be relieved by the news today that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is cancelling at least $500 million worth of awards and contracts to develop mRNA vaccines. These vaccines include those that addressed covid and were being explored for protection against HIV transmission and cancer.
And then there are the Epstein files, Trump’s appearance in them, and the administration’s attempts to change the subject.
Yesterday Democrats on the House Oversight Committee used a legislative maneuver to force its chair, James Comer (R-KY), to issue subpoenas for the Department of Justice records on the Epstein investigation, along with subpoenas for former government officials connected to the case. Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) posted that the DOJ now has two weeks to release the files to the committee. She wrote: “It’s time to find out who’s been protected, who thought they were above the law, and who’s been hiding behind power.”
On Tuesday, Trump defended the fact that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, his former lawyer, had met with a lawyer representing Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted sex trafficker who obtained victims for Jeffrey Epstein, as well as with Maxwell herself. “[W]hatever he asks would be totally appropriate,” Trump told reporters. “And I think he probably wants to make sure that, you know, people that should not be involved or aren’t involved are not hurt by something that would be very, very unfortunate, very unfair to a lot of people.”
Meanwhile, outlets reported today that top administration officials, including Vance, Blanche, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI Director Kash Patel, were scheduled to meet at the vice president’s residence Wednesday to coordinate the administration’s Epstein strategy. Notably, they appear to be meeting without President Trump.
The family of Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s victims, issued a statement saying: “We understand that Vice President J.D. Vance will hold a strategy session this evening at his residence with administration officials. Missing from this group is, of course, any survivor of the vicious crimes of convicted perjurer and sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. Their voices must be heard, above all. We also call upon the House subcommittee to invite survivors to testify.”
After news of the meeting leaked, a source told Nandita Bose of Reuters that the meeting had been canceled.
Today, reporters noticed that the online United States Constitution, maintained by the Library of Congress, was missing parts of Article I, the part of the Constitution that lays out the rights and duties of Congress. Parts of Section 8 and all of Sections 9 and 10 were gone.
Those include Congress’s control over the District of Columbia, Congress’s power to make the laws, the promise that habeas corpus would not be suspended, the stipulation that no money can be used by the government unless Congress has appropriated it, the requirement that no president can accept gifts from foreign countries, and the specification that only Congress can levy tariffs.
Officials said the deletions were “due to a coding error,” and by the end of today the missing sections were restored.
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Notes:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/06/gop-town-halls-anger-backlash-00494925
https://www.reuters.com/business/feds-cook-says-tepid-july-jobs-data-merits-concern-2025-08-06/
https://seekingalpha.com/news/4480348-geo-group-shares-decline-as-full-year-outlook-disappoints
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/06/trump-ice-immigration-00496051
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/05/texas-democrats-ken-paxton-court-vacate-seats-quorum-break/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/05/politics/trump-blanche-epstein-maxwell-vance-bondi-patel-meeting
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/us/politics/california-texas-redistricting-maps.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/08/06/texas-lawmakers-potential-bomb-threat-illinois/
https://prospect.org/labor/2025-08-06-fema-employees-reassigned-to-ice/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/05/politics/trump-blanche-epstein-maxwell-vance-bondi-patel-meeting
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/06/jeffrey-epstein-jd-vance-trump-meeting
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript#1-8
Bluesky:
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August 5, 2025
August 5, 2025 (Tuesday)
Sixty years ago tomorrow, on August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. The need for the law was explained in its full title: “An Act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution, and for other purposes.”
In the wake of the Civil War, Americans tried to create a new nation in which the law treated Black men and white men as equals. In 1865 they ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing enslavement except as punishment for crimes. In 1868 they adjusted the Constitution again, guaranteeing that anyone born or naturalized in the United States—except certain Indigenous Americans—was a citizen, opening up suffrage to Black men. In 1870, after Georgia legislators expelled their newly seated Black colleagues, Americans defended the right of Black men to vote by adding that right to the Constitution.
All three of those amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—gave Congress the power to enforce them. In 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to do just that. Reactionary white southerners had been using state laws, and the unwillingness of state judges and juries to protect Black Americans from white gangs and cheating employers, to keep Black people subservient. White men organized as the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize Black men and to keep them and their white allies from voting to change that system. In 1870 the federal government stepped in to protect Black rights and prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan.
With federal power now behind the Constitutional protection of equality, threatening jail for those who violated the law, white opponents of Black voting changed their argument against it.
In 1871 they began to say that they had no problem with Black men voting on racial grounds; their objection to Black voting was that Black men, just out of enslavement, were poor and uneducated. They were voting for lawmakers who promised them public services like roads and schools, and which could only be paid for with tax levies.
The idea that Black voters were socialists—they actually used that term in 1871—meant that white northerners who had fought to replace the hierarchical society of the Old South with a society based on equality began to change their tune. They looked the other way as white men kept Black men from voting, first with terrorism and then with grandfather clauses that cut out Black men without mentioning race by permitting a man to vote if his grandfather had, literacy tests in which white registrars got to decide who passed, poll taxes, and so on. States also cut up districts unevenly to favor the Democrats, who ran an all-white, segregationist party. By 1880 the South was solidly Democratic, and it would remain so until 1964.
Southern states always held elections: it was just foreordained that Democrats would win them.
Black Americans never accepted this state of affairs, but their opposition did not gain powerful national traction until after World War II.
During that war, Americans from all walks of life had turned out to defeat fascism, a government system based on the idea that some people are better than others. Americans defended democracy and, for all that Black Americans fought in segregated units, and that race riots broke out in cities across the country during the war years, and that the government interned Japanese Americans, lawmakers began to recognize that the nation could not effectively define itself as a democracy if Black and Brown people lived in substandard housing, received substandard educations, could not advance from menial jobs, and could not vote to change any of those circumstances.
Meanwhile, Black Americans and people of color who had fought for the nation overseas brought home their determination to be treated equally, especially as the financial collapse of European nations loosened their grip on their former African and Asian colonies and launched new nations.
Those interested in advancing Black rights turned, once again, to the federal government to overrule discriminatory state laws. Spurred by lawyers Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley, judges used the due process clause and the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to argue that the protections in the Bill of Rights applied to the states, that is, the states could not deprive any American of equality. In 1954 the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Republican former governor of California, used this doctrine when it handed down the Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregated schools unconstitutional.
White reactionaries responded with violence, but Black Americans continued to stand up for their rights. In 1957 and 1960, under pressure from Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, Congress passed civil rights acts designed to empower the federal government to enforce the laws protecting Black voting.
In 1961 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) began intensive efforts to register voters and to organize communities to support political change. Because only 6.7% of Black Mississippians were registered, Mississippi became a focal point, and in the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, organized under Bob Moses, volunteers set out to register voters. On June 21, Ku Klux Klan members, at least one of whom was a law enforcement officer, murdered organizers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner near Philadelphia, Mississippi, and, when discovered, laughed at the idea they would be punished for the murders.
That year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which strengthened voting rights. When Black Americans still couldn’t register to vote, on March 7, 1965, in Selma, Alabama, marchers set out for Montgomery to demonstrate that they were being kept from registering. Law enforcement officers on horseback met them with clubs on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The officers beat the marchers, fracturing the skull of young John Lewis (who would go on to serve 17 terms in Congress).
On March 15, President Johnson called for Congress to pass legislation defending Americans’ right to vote. It did. And on this day in 1965, the Voting Rights Act became law. It became such a fundamental part of our legal system that Congress repeatedly reauthorized it, by large margins, as recently as 2006.
But in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts struck down the provision of the law requiring that states with histories of voter discrimination get approval from the Department of Justice before they changed their voting laws. Immediately, the legislatures of those states, now dominated by Republicans, began to pass measures to suppress the vote. In the wake of the 2020 election, Republican-dominated states increased the rate of voter suppression, and on July 1, 2021, the Supreme Court permitted such suppression with the Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee decision.
Currently, the Supreme Court is considering whether a Louisiana district map that took race into consideration to draw a district that would protect Black representation is unconstitutional. About a third of Louisiana’s residents are Black, but in 2022 its legislature carved the state up in such a way that only one of its six voting districts was majority Black. A federal court determined that the map violated the Voting Rights Act, so the legislature redrew the map to give the state two majority-Black districts.
A group of “non-African American voters” immediately challenged the law, saying the new maps violated the Fourteenth Amendment because the mapmakers prioritized race when drawing them. A divided federal court agreed with their argument. Now the Supreme Court will weigh in.
Meanwhile, on July 29, Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) led a number of his Democratic colleagues in reintroducing a measure to restore and expand the Voting Rights Act. The bill is called the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act after the man whose skull police officers fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
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You can find Liza’s daily cartoon and commentary at her publication “Seeing Things”, here:
Seeing ThingsNew and unpublished drawings and thoughts for people who want to see more of life, from a New Yorker cartoonist. Drawings, cartoons, words, live drawing, process, more...By Liza Donnelly—
Notes:
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/constance-baker-motley.htm
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2025/24-109
https://www.naacpldf.org/case-issue/louisiana-v-callais-faq/
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