Jamelle Bouie

His voters and supporters were having fun. The “Send her back” chant directed at Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota was hateful but also exuberant, an expression of racist contempt and a celebration of shared values.

This dynamic wasn’t unique to the event. It’s been a part of Trump’s rallies since 2015. Both he and his crowds work from a template. He rants and spins hate-filled tirades; they revel in the transgressive atmosphere. The chants are their mutual release. Sometimes he basks in them.

To watch raucous crowds of (mostly) white Americans unite in frenzied hatred of a black woman — to watch them cast her as a cancer on the body politic and a threat to a racialized social order — is to see the worst of our past play out in modern form.

To be clear, the Trump rally was not a lynch mob. But watching the interplay between leader and crowd, my mind immediately went to the mass spectacles of the lynching era. There’s simply no way to understand the energy of the event — its hatred and its pleasures — without looking to our history of communal racial violence and the ways in which Americans have used racial others, whether native-born or new arrivals, as scapegoats for their lost power, low status or nonexistent prosperity. And in that period, one event stands out: an 1893 lynching in Paris, Texas, where Henry Smith, a mentally disabled black teenager, was burned alive.

The 17-year-old Smith, “generally considered a harmless, weak-minded fellow,” according to Ida B. Wells-Barnett in “The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States,” had been accused of the rape and murder of 3-year-old Myrtle Vance, the daughter of the local sheriff. The white community of Paris believed the murder was retaliation for an earlier arrest by the sheriff, and the accusation of rape was added, in Wells-Barnett’s words, “to inflame the public mind so that nothing less than immediate and violent death would satisfy the populace.”

On the day of the lynching, an estimated 10,000 people crowded along Paris’ main street to witness the killing. Smith was bound to a float and paraded across town in a theatrical performance meant to emphasize his guilt. The audience jeered and chanted, cursed and gave the rebel yell. “Fathers, men of social and business standing, took their children to teach them how to dispose of Negro criminals,” a witness to the event said. “Mothers were there, too, even women whose culture entitles them to be among the social and intellectual leaders of the town.” Around noon, Smith was tortured, doused with kerosene and lit ablaze, immolated for the crowd’s enjoyment.

It was part carnival, part spectacle and part ritual. Smith was accused of something greater than a mere crime. He was accused of violating a sacred moral order — of defiling the white home and white society. “In the minds of many white southerners,” historian Amy Louise Wood writes in “Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890—1940,” “black men came to personify the moral corruption that they believed to be the root cause of social disorder.” Lynching, then, “acted as more than a form of political terror that restored white dominance against the threat of black equality.” It also became a “divinely sanctioned retribution for black ‘sin’ that threatened not only white authority but white purity and virtue.”

In a 1933 essay, “Marxism and the Negro Problem,” W.E.B. Du Bois tried, as the title suggests, to adapt the theories and analysis of Karl Marx for the American experience. “While Negro labor in America suffers because of the fundamental inequities of the whole capitalistic system,” he argued, “the lowest and most fatal degree of its suffering comes not from the capitalists but from fellow white laborers.” It is white labor, he continued, that “deprives the Negro of his right to vote, denies him education, denies him affiliation with trade unions, expels him from decent houses and neighborhoods, and heaps upon him the public insults of open color discrimination.”

Later, in his 1935 book, “Black Reconstruction in America,” Du Bois would expand on this idea, rooting white racism in a collective bargain of sorts. “It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage,” he wrote, outlining the ways in which this “public and psychological” wage strengthened ordinary white Americans’ attachment to a system that ultimately exploited them too:

“They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule.”

When this wage was threatened — by black social mobility and economic success, by black political action, by interracial contact that challenged the boundaries of caste — the response was violence. Not just as punishment but, as the lynching of Henry Smith demonstrates, as a communal defense of the existing social order. This ability to engage in state-sanctioned extrajudicial violence was both a kind of wage and a means to collect it, which tied white communities together in a shared experience of rage, righteous anger and joy.

It is important to take history on its own terms. We shouldn’t conflate the past with the present, but we should also be aware of ideas and experiences that persist through time. A political rally centered on the denunciation of a prominent black person demands reference to our history of communal, celebratory racism. It’s critical for placing the event in context, and it can help us understand the dynamic between the president and his base.

If Trump has an unbreakable bond with his supporters, it’s because he gives them permission to express their sense of siege. His rhetoric frees them from the mores and norms that keep their grievance in check. His rallies — his political carnivals — provide an opportunity to affirm their feelings in a community of like-minded individuals.

“He gets us. He’s not a politician, and he’s got a backbone,” a woman who attended a recent “Women for Trump” kickoff event in Pennsylvania told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “He’s not afraid to say what he thinks. And what he says is what the rest of us are thinking.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/opinion/trump-rally.html" id="7c3fc544-b770-32c4-a4d4-e5f0bd52c62a">The New York Times</a>.

The chanting was disturbing and the anger was frightening, but what I noticed most about the president’s rally in Greenville, North Carolina, on Wednesday night was the pleasure of the crowd.

The Joy of Hatred

Despite their influence, however, anti-Trump voters are practically invisible in recent mainstream political coverage. Instead, the focus is the president’s most fervent supporters, as it has been since 2015, when Trump came down his escalator and announced his campaign for the White House. This past week is a prime example.

On Sunday, as nearly everyone knows by now, Trump launched a racist attack on four progressive congresswomen — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley — telling them to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” and casting them as un-American on the basis of their racial backgrounds.

Most Americans rejected the president’s outburst: 59%, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, said it was “un-American,” and 65% said it was “racist.” A total of 68% said it was “offensive.”

We’ve seen this dynamic before. When the president plays with bigotry — when he defends racist protesters or disparages immigrants from predominantly nonwhite countries or casts migrants as dangerous criminals — he suffers in the polls. But the story in the press wasn’t about Trump’s decision to alienate a broad majority of voters with explicit racism. It was about the devotion of his voters and his strategy for the 2020 election.

Here, for example, was CNN’s take:

“Many GOP voters and lawmakers are uncomfortable with Trump’s conduct and sentiments. But most are sufficiently satisfied with the ideological direction of his presidency that they are willing to turn a blind eye to such behavior, making it a useful political weapon as he seeks to drive a rampant base turnout in 2020.”

And here was The Associated Press:

“Trump, who won the presidency in 2016 in part by energizing disaffected voters with inflammatory racial rhetoric, made clear he has no intention of backing away from that strategy in 2020.”

Reuters, reporting on its own poll, emphasized Republican support for the president in the wake of his remarks even as the full results show Trump flailing with independents — just “3 in 10” say they approve of the president. Others took for granted that Trump’s racism was effective, all actual evidence notwithstanding.

You could justify this relentless focus on the president’s voters with an analysis of Trump’s victory over Clinton. He won because his strongest supporters were disproportionately in the most valuable swing states. If he can keep them energized, he has a path to reelection. You could even understand the attack on Omar as the first part of a plan to win Minnesota, which nearly flipped for Trump in 2016.

But that’s a bit shallow. Trump rallied his base in the weeks before the 2018 elections using a similar strategy of racist demagogy. He held events in pivotal states like Wisconsin, fanning fear around the migrant “caravan” and blasting figures like Rep. Maxine Waters of California as representative of the entire Democratic Party. It didn’t work. Not only did Republicans lose the House, but Democrats won important statewide elections in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and came within a hair’s breadth of winning the governor’s races in Georgia and Florida.

Trump galvanized his supporters at the cost of energizing the opposition. But somehow, this has fallen out of political memory, with many observers focused on the president’s base of non-college-educated whites as the only voters who matter. And that includes some prominent Democrats. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s opposition to serious and aggressive oversight of the president — up to and including impeachment — is arguably tied to a belief in the singular importance of these voters. They must be catered to, even if it angers and disillusions the Democratic base.

But even electoral potency doesn’t work to justify the endless focus on the president’s base, since if it did, you’d have to look at other groups with a similarly major impact on political outcomes.

In a 2018 report sponsored by the Center for American Progress, the Brookings Institution, the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Public Religion Research Institute, demographers Robert Griffin, Ruy Teixeira and William Frey simulated future election outcomes based on assumptions about voting patterns among demographic groups.

Most demographic and voting changes would produce small swings from 2016. But a few transform the electoral landscape. If Trump were to win an even larger margin of non-college whites — deepening his support with a 10-point swing from his 2016 baseline — he’d have a slight advantage in the popular vote and a comfortable majority in the Electoral College.

The next most potent change is an increase in black turnout and support. African Americans are the most heavily Democratic group in the country, with a large presence in many of the most competitive states. Small increases in their participation would have an outsize effect on the electoral landscape. The projections bear that out. Given population growth since the last election, if black turnout and support return to 2012 levels, Democrats win handily, with an estimated 338 electoral votes and a 5-point margin in the national popular vote.

You could make a strong case that the future success of the Democratic Party depends on its ability to mobilize and win over black Americans, a key group in a broad coalition of voters. We have post-Obama proof that this is a continuing phenomenon from the 2017 elections — where strong black turnout drove those Democratic victories in Virginia and Alabama — as well as in the 2018 midterms, where greater support and participation from black voters put black candidates within striking distance of statewide victories in Georgia and Florida.

But the press isn’t hyper-solicitous of the views of black voters. Cable news doesn’t constantly turn to swing-state focus groups of black Democrats to gauge their opposition to the president. And Democrats in Congress aren’t worried about demobilizing a group that may determine the next election. Just the opposite — some moderates believe the party has spent too much time challenging the president’s racism and showing solidarity with their nonwhite constituents. As The New York Times reported:

“While Democrats were publicly unanimous in their support of the resolution, some moderate lawmakers from Republican-leaning districts that backed Mr. Trump in 2016 privately voiced their discomfort. They said that while the president’s comments had been racist, the party was playing into his hands by spending so much time condemning his remarks, according to centrist lawmakers and senior aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.”

Conventional wisdom on 2020 is that Democrats will lose if they can’t get their progressive wing under control. This overstates the leftward swing of the Democratic Party and understates the distance between the center of American politics and the president’s right-wing policies. It also misses another, crucial dynamic — that by trying to court and convert voters who backed Trump, Democrats may sacrifice an opportunity to deepen support among their existing voters, to powerful electoral consequences.

The press may not have much interest in the broader electorate, but Democratic leaders and strategists, at least, should understand that the anti-Trump coalition is much bigger than the Trump base. If they want to oust the president next November, they should start to take that fact seriously.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/opinion/trump-2020.html" id="2fa4c70d-a5a6-362d-ab9f-afc3ad439753">The New York Times</a>.

The anti-Trump vote is the single largest coalition in American politics. That was true in 2016, despite Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the Electoral College. It was true in 2017, after Democrats won major victories in Virginia and Alabama. And it was true in 2018, when the anti-Trump coalition gave Democrats a majority in the House of Representatives.

Trump Voters Are Not the Only Voters

Whether out of sycophantic loyalty or a deep-seated belief in executive impunity, Barr has used his position to insulate the president from legal scrutiny. He has done everything in his power to downplay the impact of the special counsel’s investigation.

He did not hesitate, for example, to frame Robert Mueller’s findings as an exoneration of the president, despite a report that said otherwise. By itself, this gave Trump the appearance of vindication, as major media outlets declared him innocent of “collusion.”

During a hearing in April, when Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland asked Barr whether Mueller, the special counsel, supported Barr’s conclusion, the attorney general said he didn’t know, despite the fact — revealed on Tuesday — that he had received a letter from Mueller on Barr’s handling of the report. Mueller directly criticized Barr’s initial letter to lawmakers and the public.

“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

Later in April, just before he released the redacted version of the report, Barr held a news conference where he spun its conclusions even further, echoing the president’s cries of “no collusion” and bizarrely praising Trump for his cooperation with investigators.

Barr has done nothing but run interference for Trump, indifferent to his established pattern of lawbreaking and criminality. And it has left his former colleagues bewildered and searching for answers. “How could Mr. Barr, a bright and accomplished lawyer, start channeling the president in using words like ‘no collusion’ and FBI ‘spying’?” James Comey, the former FBI director, asked in a New York Times Op-Ed.

Eric Holder, who served as attorney general under President Barack Obama, echoed this dismay on Twitter: “I thought he was an institutionalist, committed to both the rule of law and his role as the lawyer for the American people.” Even Mueller’s even-keeled letter can’t help betraying his expectation that Barr would behave very differently.

But the better question is why anyone expected otherwise. You don’t have to dive deep into Barr’s history to see that he is an apparatchik, less committed to the rule of law than he is to his political party and its leadership.

In 1989, Barr, then assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, determined that the FBI could legally seize criminal suspects in foreign countries without consent from their governments. In doing so, Barr changed the department’s position — in a 1980 legal opinion, the government said that such kidnappings were unlawful.

It was a controversial opinion, especially given its key implication at the time — that the United States could abduct Gen. Manuel Noriega of Panama, who had seized power that spring. In response, Congress called Barr to testify. “Kidnapping a suspect would make the U.S. into an international outlaw,” Rep. Don Edwards of California said during the hearing, as he outlined the consequences for America’s reputation if federal authorities had free rein to kidnap.

Congress also asked Barr to release his memorandum to the public, but he refused. Instead, he wrote a 13-page summary that he claimed contained its “principal” arguments and conclusions, something that should sound familiar to contemporary observers.

Except it didn’t. In 1991, Congress obtained a copy of the full memo. It contained several points not present in the summary, including the contention that the president of the United States could ignore the United Nations’ prohibition of state-sponsored kidnapping.

Barr misled Congress and the public through omission. But by then he was already on his way to confirmation as attorney general under President George H.W. Bush, where he would recommend pardons for key figures in the Iran-Contra scandal, which stymied a yearslong investigation into executive-branch lawbreaking that implicated the sitting president.

Helping Republican presidents act with impunity is William Barr’s stock-in-trade — it’s what he does. Even before joining Trump, he wrote an unsolicited memo arguing outright that a president cannot be charged with obstruction of justice if the underlying actions fall under his lawful authority and the accusations are false — the same argument he made at Wednesday’s hearing.

“Most of the obstruction claims that are being made here, or episodes, do involve the exercise of the president’s constitutional authority,” Barr said to Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont. And he asserted, “We now know that he was being falsely accused.”

For Barr, there are no apparent limits to presidential authority, at least as long as that president is a Republican. His theory of presidential immunity did not extend to Bill Clinton, for example, whose impeachment Barr defended.

The memo even shows the same lack of interest in the facts of the investigation that Barr demonstrated during his exchange with Sen. Kamala Harris of California, during which he admitted that neither he nor his office examined the evidence behind the Mueller report before determining the president could not be charged with obstruction of justice.

What we have seen over the past two months is a professional at work. Someone who understands his mission and acts accordingly. Unless he voluntarily resigns, Barr will be attorney general for at least the next 20 months, or until Trump dumps him, which seems unlikely given his success at protecting the president. For now, there doesn’t appear to be much his opponents can do, but there is something they can learn.

If Barr had ever been held accountable for his actions in the past — if he had ever faced scrutiny or social sanction for his work on the Iran-Contra cover-up — he might have never resurfaced to protect another Republican president accused of serious wrongdoing. The same goes for other figures in the Trump administration who were welcomed back into the halls of power despite condoning torture or abusing the public trust.

If and when progressives retake the White House and the Senate, they have to make accountability a priority. Otherwise, the Bill Barrs of the world will emerge over and over again, ready to do their yeoman best.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/opinion/barr-trump-impunity.html" id="70806193-cf79-3fc5-a5e6-c63989f9ce71">The New York Times</a>.

On Wednesday, when Attorney General William Barr testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Mueller report, he addressed lawmakers more as if he were a member of President Donald Trump’s legal team than as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. Barr framed Trump’s actions as fully justifiable, even arguing that if the president feels an investigation is unfounded, he “does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow it to run its course.”

Bill Barr's Perverse Theory of Justice

In this environment, the only way to preserve right-wing conservatism in American government is to rig the system against this new electorate. You tilt the field in favor of constituencies that still back traditional Republican conservatism in order to build a foundation for durable minority rule by those groups. In just the last week, we’ve gotten a glimpse of what this rigging looks like in practice.

Let’s start with the census dispute that’s now before the Supreme Court. The Trump administration wants to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, asking Americans to declare their status in order to participate. The government asks a similar question in the American Community Survey, a more frequently performed survey that is given to a sampling of households. But it hasn’t asked all households the citizenship question on a decennial census since 1950. Wilbur Ross, the secretary of commerce, whose department oversees the Census Bureau, wants to bring it back. He has the authority to do so. The problem is that he circumvented the official process. The case before the Supreme Court deals with whether the question can stand, given Ross’ decision to, as a federal judge put it, upend the rules that govern adding a question to the census.

The citizenship question is likely to make the census less accurate, to put it mildly. In the face of the harsh anti-immigrant policies sponsored by the Trump administration, as well as uncertainty about their own status, immigrants may not want to reveal their legal status to the government. According to an analysis from the Census Bureau itself, 5.8 percent of households with a noncitizen — or about 6.5 million people — would not respond to a census with that question on it. There’s some evidence that this outcome is the point. Kris Kobach, a Trump ally who pushed anti-immigrant policies when he was secretary of state for Kansas, was a proponent of adding the citizenship question to the census.

This matters because the census determines congressional apportionment as well as the distribution of Electoral College votes. If millions of immigrants decline to answer the census, then the areas they live in will be undercounted relative to places with fewer noncitizens, which means political power and representation will probably shift as well. A move of just a few Electoral College votes from immigrant-heavy blue states to more white and rural red states could help Republicans win the White House while yet again running behind in the popular vote. (As it stands, Republicans have lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections.) The Republican Party can maintain a hold on power without changing its priorities or making a fundamentally different appeal to the public.

That said, this is an almost subtle way to rig the architecture of democracy, comparatively speaking. More recent efforts by Republican-held state legislatures to erect large barriers to voting are more explicit. Republican lawmakers in Tennessee, for example, are pushing broad new restrictions on large-scale voter-registration drives, including civil penalties for groups that unintentionally file incomplete voter-registration forms and criminal punishment for those that don’t attend state-mandated training sessions, according to the Tennessean.

It’s not as if Tennessee has a particular problem with registering voters. What it does have are organizing groups that successfully brought a greater number of black Americans and other people of color to the polls in 2018. In that context, this bill is a form of electoral intimidation — a direct attempt to hinder those groups and their ability to make similar gains in 2020 and on into the future.

Last November, Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment to end felon disenfranchisement. Unable to stop the change, Republicans chose to put barriers to its implementation. On Wednesday, the Florida House of Representatives passed legislation that would require former felons to pay fines as part of their criminal sentence before they can vote again. It’s a poll tax. And like those under Jim Crow, it is an ostensibly neutral policy that falls hardest on black communities, which have a higher share of former felons.

Each of these moves works in concert with the others. Pre-existing malapportionment helps Republicans capture the presidency despite losing a majority of voters. This allows them to build a Supreme Court majority that rules in their favor on key questions of ballot access, voter participation and campaign finance.

Republican lawmakers in the states use the legal leeway from rulings like Shelby County v. Holderto erect new barriers to voting, while Republicans in Washington look for new ways to embed their partisan interests in the electoral system. At the same time, their wealthy allies take advantage of campaign finance loopholes to spend huge sums on behalf of Republican candidates and conservative causes. And on the chance that Democrats overcome these obstacles and win political power — after the election of Barack Obama, for example — Republicans break the norms of politics to keep them from actually governing the way they want to.

Mitch McConnell’s leadership in the Senate during the years he had a majority — and in particular, his “blockade” of Obama’s judicial nominations, including the Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland — is a paradigmatic example of the latter strategy. But Republican lawmakers in several states have gone even further, using legislative majorities to strip constitutional authority from newly elected Democratic executives. Republicans in Kansas introduced legislation this past week that would strip the recently elected Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, of her power to fill vacancies in top state offices. They cite fairness as a reason to support this proposal, although a leading Democratic critic called it “morally wrong” and an example of legislating for narrow partisan gain.

Wisconsin Republicans attempted something similar after Tony Evers, a Democrat, unseated the Republican governor, Scott Walker. They advanced bills to restrict his ability to run public benefits programs and to curb his authority to set rules on implementation of state laws. They also established a new legislative power to intervene in litigation challenging state laws and wrested the right to decide on legal action against the Affordable Care Act from the attorney general’s office, placing it with the heavily gerrymandered legislature’s budget committee. A judge eventually blocked these efforts, but Republican state leaders have appealed the ruling. And Republicans in Michigan made a similar push to rein in executive power after Democrats won all three statewide races, in an attempt to keep Democrats from overturning Republican actions once they took office.

It’s clear, then, that from the White House and its allies on the Supreme Court down to individual state lawmakers, conservative Republicans have decided that their agenda cannot survive fair competition on equal ground. They reject efforts at electoral expansion — early voting, automatic registration and mail-in balloting — and embrace strategies that put the burden on voters themselves.

Americans have long struggled over the scope of voting and representation. Democracy is — and always will be — a fight. And the lines of this particular conflict are clear. Rather than try to expand our democracy or even preserve it as it stands, Republicans are fighting for a smaller, narrower one that favors their voters over all others so that their power and the interests they serve become untouchable.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/opinion/sunday/the-republican-war-on-democracy.html" id="716d6e25-4c8f-3604-a25b-f9a0186f0ce4">The New York Times</a>.

The demographic changes coming over the next few decades — the continuing rise of a more diverse electorate, with more liberal views than previous generations — won’t destroy the Republican Party or make it electorally insolvent. But it may make right-wing conservatism a rump ideology, backed primarily by a declining minority of older rural and exurban white voters. You can already see this taking shape. Among the youngest Republicans, 52 percent say the government should be “doing more” to s...

The Republican War on Democracy

If that is the recommendation, then it’s a recognition that democratic accountability in the American political system goes beyond elections. Each branch of government is empowered to check and challenge the others, and Congress has a specific obligation to hold the presidency to account between electoral cycles. Under ordinary circumstances, lawmakers use their oversight powers to keep an eye on the executive branch. Under extraordinary ones, they have impeachment, the clear remedy for a lawless president.

But Democrats, who hold the House of Representatives and have the power to initiate this particular process, are divided on how to move forward.

Following the release of the Mueller report, for example, the House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, tossed cold water on the impeachment idea. “Based on what we have seen to date, going forward on impeachment is not worthwhile at this point,” he said. “Very frankly, there is an election in 18 months, and the American people will make a judgment.” On the other side of the ledger, Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said Sunday that “if proven, some of this would be impeachable, yes. The accusations in the report are impeachable. Obstruction of justice, if proven, would be impeachable.”

Among the most vocal Democratic voices for impeachment is Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who wrote, “The severity of this misconduct demands that elected officials in both parties set aside political considerations and do their constitutional duty. That means the House should initiate impeachment proceedings against the President of the United States.”

Do Democrats charge forward on principle or do they leave the question to voters? Do they commit to hearings and investigations with an eye toward impeachment proceedings or do they downplay the issue of presidential accountability? To reject impeachment in the face of clear wrongdoing would all but prove the provision a constitutional dead letter. But embracing it has pitfalls of its own, like energizing Republican voters in defense of the president. There’s also no chance of conviction in the Senate — Republicans would almost certainly vote to acquit. Democrats could pursue impeachment, but it would be to make a symbolic point.

But symbolism matters. It shapes public perception and the contours of political conflict. Trump wouldn’t be president, for example, without his keen manipulation of race and identity.

Thanks to Robert Mueller, Democrats may have the facts of the president’s corrupt behavior, but they still need to make the case that his actions show criminal contempt for the Constitution. And that kind of high-stakes political argument is won by action, not passivity. Impeachment gives Democrats a real chance to seize the initiative.

Yes, more typical oversight may uncover the same evidence of presidential wrongdoing. Impeachment, however, makes that wrongdoing a question of fidelity to the Constitution. It captures our attention, sets the terms of debate and potentially puts Trump and his allies on the defensive — especially if an impeachment inquiry uncovers evidence of other wrongdoing. It also gives Democrats an opportunity to tell a larger story about the president’s behavior that goes beyond the Mueller report to include actions and rhetoric that show similar disregard for the duties of the office. The case for impeachment is about self-dealing and self-enrichment as well as obstruction of justice, open indifference to and contempt for the lives of American citizens struck by disaster, as well as passivity in the face of foreign attack.

Those fearful that an impeachment drive would mobilize his base should consider how Trump already keeps his supporters in a constant state of political mobilization through demagoguery and fearmongering. Instead of thinking about their opponents, Democrats should focus on their supporters, who voted in large numbers to give the party a House majority and keep the president in check. Even if Democrats won’t commit to an impeachment vote, an expressed willingness to consider an impeachment inquiry could help activate those voters and keep them energized through the next year and a half.

There’s also little reason to worry about a backlash that helps the president. Donald Trump is not Bill Clinton, who was unusually popular from 1997 onward, with a second-term job approval average of 61%. Even accounting for political polarization, Trump is unusually unpopular, weighed down by constant scandal and chaos. As late as January of this year, a majority of voters — 53%, according to a poll from Quinnipiac — said that Trump is “not fit to be president.”

And high-profile coverage of the president’s scandals has an impact. In a Reuters poll that measured immediate reactions to the Mueller report, Trump’s approval rating declined to 37%. The same survey shows a slight increase in support for impeachment (40% versus 39% in March) and a significant decrease in opposition to impeachment (42% say Trump should not be impeached versus 49% in March).

It’s possible that voters will change their minds in the face of an impeachment threat against the president. But given existing public opinion, it’s more likely that an impeachment investigation would deepen the sense that Trump is unfit for the office he holds.

The symbolic and the practical aside, there’s also the real question of our constitutional order. Either the president is above the law or he isn’t. Voters can’t determine this — elections aren’t actually the venue for adjudicating that kind of conflict. This is a job for our elected representatives in Congress. And if House Democrats believe Trump has violated the Constitution, they have an obligation to act on that belief, even if conviction in the Senate is impossible under current political circumstances. Elijah Cummings, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, made this point Sunday in an interview on “Face the Nation.” “Even if we did not win, possibly, if there were not impeachment, I think history would smile upon us for standing up for the Constitution,” he said.

The potential impossibility of conviction itself is an important message for the public to take in. Many Americans may still believe that sufficient wrongdoing would bring both parties together to remove a lawless president. If that isn’t true — if presidential accountability of this sort is impossible under divided government — then Americans deserve to know. Then, at least, we can have a national discussion about what that means for the Constitution.

Caution on impeachment makes sense. It is a monumental step that would shape politics in unforeseen and potentially negative ways. But inaction, or even just ordinary action, has risks, too. Trump will continue try to shape the post-Mueller narrative to his advantage, condemning the investigation as a “witch hunt” from its origin to its conclusion. His allies will do the same. Even if they fail to persuade the public, they can muddy the waters and turn this constitutional conflict into another case of partisan bickering.

Democrats still have to defeat Trump at the ballot box, which means building a mass coalition against his politics. At worst, impeachment could crowd out the material case against Trump, centering the election on legal questions versus the impact of his presidency on people’s lives. But there’s another possibility: that impeachment helps Democrats make a truly comprehensive case against the president, uniting his corruption, his criminality and his contempt for ordinary Americans under a single narrative. Impeachment, pursued with vigor, then becomes part of the larger argument against him and the Republican Party that has bolstered his presidency, indifferent to its corrosive effect on all parts of American life.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/opinion/impeachment-politics-congress.html" id="b0c3bf65-7dd3-3121-a11f-fe59d64e2382">The New York Times</a>.

Donald Trump may not have conspired with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election, but the Mueller report still shows a president with criminal disregard for the rule of law and constitutional government. And arguably it suggests that Congress should address this in accordance with what the report reminds us is “our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.”

The Lure of Impeachment

But this phrasing assumes discontinuity between past and present, as if there weren’t antecedents to Donald Trump in the recent Republican past. The actual relationship between Trump and the Republican Party is more psychological. Trump is the Republican id personified, driven to express the impulses and desires of conservative politics in their basest form.

That dynamic has been on clear display for the past few days, as the president of the United States leads a campaign of racist demagoguery against Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a Somali-American Democrat and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress.

The pretext for this attack was Omar’s remarks last month at a fundraiser for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Omar talked about several issues but her major theme was prejudice against Muslim Americans.

“Here’s the truth,” she said. “For far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen. Frankly, I’m tired of it. And every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it. CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”

CAIR was actually founded in 1994, but Omar’s point is clear: A small group of Muslims committed the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, but many Americans blamed Islam itself. Muslims quickly became targets of fear, disdain and demagogic political rhetoric. A 2004 report from the American Civil Liberties Union showed widespread attacks on the civil rights of Muslims in the United States, including harassment and racial profiling by federal law enforcement.

The way Omar’s address made its way to Trump is emblematic of how inflammatory ideas and rhetoric are transmitted from individual lawmakers and conservative media to the national stage. Omar spoke in public — Fox News even streamed it for its audience. But it wasn’t a controversy until it reached the ears of Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas, a Republican who took the snippet on 9/11 and framed it as something disrespectful. “First Member of Congress to ever describe terrorists who killed thousands of Americans on 9/11 as ‘some people who did something,’” Crenshaw said on Twitter. “Unbelievable.”

With that, the wider world of conservative media pounced. “You have to wonder if she’s an American first,” declared Brian Kilmeade, one of the hosts of “Fox &amp; Friends” on Fox News. The Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post took it a step further with a Thursday front page showing a photo from 9/11 — the moment the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center — with the headline, “Here’s Your Something.”

On Friday, Trump stepped into the fray with a video. Footage from the Sept. 11 attacks is edited together with Omar saying “Some people did something” to create the impression of dismissive contempt for the dead. Trump captioned the video “WE WILL NEVER FORGET!” He later retweeted an account that called Omar a “sick monster.”

The president continued his attacks on Monday, attempting to disparage House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the process. “Before Nancy, who has lost all control of Congress and is getting nothing done, decides to defend her leader, Rep. Omar, she should look at the anti-Semitic, anti-Israel and ungrateful U.S. HATE statements Omar has made,” he said on Twitter. “She is out of control, except for her control of Nancy!”

Crenshaw may have sparked these attacks, but the president’s intervention has escalated the situation to something potentially dangerous, which is why — after a slow start — Democrats have begun to condemn the president’s actions, defending Omar by name.

“Ilhan Omar is a leader with strength and courage. She won’t back down to Trump’s racism and hate, and neither will we,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. “The disgusting and dangerous attacks against her must end.”

Likewise, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts accused Trump of “inciting violence against a sitting congresswoman — and an entire group of Americans based on their religion.” That, of course, is the idea. Trump believes he benefits from the passions and anger stirred by racist demagoguery.

It is easy to tie these attacks to Trump’s history of anti-Muslim rhetoric. But anti-Muslim prejudice was common in Republican politics before he stepped on the political stage with his “birther” charges against President Barack Obama.

It was an important force among Republican voters — in one 2004 poll, for example, about 40 percent of self-identified Republicans said that Muslim Americans should be required to register with the government and 41 percent said that Muslim-American civic groups should be infiltrated by the government. Well before Obama was a household name and Trump a political figure, a 2006 Gallup poll found wide anti-Muslim prejudice “with Republicans ascribing more negative political and religious qualities to Muslims, and being more opposed to having Muslims as neighbors than are Democrats and independents.”

It was an important force in conservative media. Conservative radio and television hosts frequently conflated all Muslims with the actions of extremists. In one 2006 segment on his radio show, Glenn Beck warned that if “good Muslims” aren’t “the first ones in the recruitment office lining up to shoot the bad Muslims in the head,” then “human beings” might be forced into “putting up razor wire and putting you on one side of it.”

And it found traffic with Republican politicians. After Keith Ellison became the first Muslim elected to Congress in 2006, Rep. Virgil Goode of Virginia wrote a letter to voters in his district stating his fear that “in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped.” Anti-Muslim prejudice surfaced throughout the 2008 presidential campaign.

Trump has simply brought this rhetoric to the bully pulpit of the presidency. He has taken everything coursing through the last 20 years of Republican politics and made it explicit. It now has an official seal of approval. And if Omar is a target, it has little to do with what she said and everything to do with who she is: A black Muslim woman — and an immigrant — whose very person disrupts the exclusionary ideal of a white Christian America.

The difference between the pre-Trump era and the present, in other words, isn’t the substance of belief but its expression — and the force of the venom, contempt and hatred behind it.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/opinion/trump-omar-9-11.html" id="6d2ddc59-58a1-344c-a84c-cb2c7d25b7ce">The New York Times</a>.

It’s still common to hear analysts speak of the “Trumpification” of the Republican Party — the extent to which it has adopted the attitude and ethos of the sitting president.

Why Trump Won't Stop Talking About Ilhan Omar

“Once someone pays their debt to society, they’re out there expected to pay taxes, expected to abide by the law, they’re expected to support themselves and their families,” she said. “I think that means they’ve got a right to vote.”

Most Americans agree with her. Nearly two-thirds of respondents in a March 2018 poll by HuffPost and YouGov said former felons should have the right to vote. Voters and lawmakers across the country have begun to roll back the laws and procedures that, according to the Sentencing Project, kept an estimated 6.1 million citizens from the ballot box in the 2016 presidential election.

Last year, for example, a supermajority of voters in Florida endorsed a state constitutional amendment to end the draconian policy of permanent disenfranchisement (barring a pardon from the governor). As of 2018, 15 states and the District of Columbia restore voting rights to felons upon release from prison. Likewise, Alabama repealed a clause that denied rights for the vague offense of “moral turpitude,” which reportedly had disenfranchised thousands of former convicts.

But the growing tide against felon disenfranchisement raises a related question: Why disenfranchise felons at all? Why not let prisoners vote — and give the franchise to the roughly 1.5 million people sitting in federal and state prisons? Why must supposedly universal adult suffrage exclude people convicted of crimes?

There is precedent for this idea. California allows voting for those in county jails (with limited exceptions). Colorado does too. New York recently allowed those on parole or probation to vote. And two states, Maine and Vermont, already let prisoners vote. In fact, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., affirmed his support for voting rights in prison the same week Warren backed automatic enfranchisement for former felons.

“In my state, what we do is separate. You’re paying a price, you committed a crime, you’re in jail. That’s bad,” Sanders said, responding to a question at a town hall. “But you’re still living in American society and you have a right to vote. I believe in that, yes, I do.”

Warren was also asked to weigh on this question, but deferred it, saying only that it’s “something we can have more conversation about.”

We ought to have that conversation now. Americans may see it as common sense that you lose your right to vote when you’re imprisoned, but in many democracies prisoners retain the right to vote. When that right is revoked, it’s only for particular crimes (in Germany, it’s for “targeting” the “democratic order”), and often there is a good deal of judicial discretion. Mandatory disenfranchisement is unusual, and permanent disenfranchisement is even rarer.

Mandatory disenfranchisement is constitutional — the 14th Amendment allows the government to restrict the right to vote because of “participation in rebellion, or other crime” — but there are few good reasons for the practice. The best argument, outside of the case from custom and tradition, is that committing a serious crime voids your right to have a say in the political process. You lose your liberty — your place in civil society — and the freedoms that come with it.

But doing it that way — subjecting prisoners to a kind of social death — is in conflict with the idea of “inalienable” rights that cannot be curtailed.

As it stands, incarcerated people retain a variety of rights, some of which touch on the political rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Prisoners have freedom of worship. They can protest mistreatment and poor conditions. They can exercise some free speech rights, like writing for newspapers, magazines and other publications. To that point, there is a rich literature of work by incarcerated people tackling complex social and political issues. Voting would be a natural extension of these activities.

An obvious objection is that criminal transgressions render prisoners unfit for participation in democratic society. But there’s nothing about committing a crime, even a serious one, that renders someone incapable of making a considered political choice. Losing your liberty doesn’t mean you’ve lost your capacity to reason. Prisoners are neither more nor less rational than anyone else who is allowed to vote.

If anything, the political system needs the perspectives of prisoners, with their intimate experience of this otherwise opaque part of the state. Their votes might force lawmakers to take a closer look at what happens in these institutions before they spiral into unaccountable violence and abuse.

There are practical benefits as well. Racial disparities in criminal enforcement and sentencing means disenfranchisement falls heaviest on black communities. This is not just a direct blow to prisoners’ electoral power; it also ripples outward, depressing political participation among their friends, families and acquaintances. On the other end, suffrage in prison may help incarcerated people maintain valuable links to their communities, which might smooth the transition process once they’re released.

“Citizenship is not a right that expires upon misbehavior,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for the majority in Trop v. Dulles, a 1958 case dealing with the rights of a military deserter. And, he continued, “citizenship is not lost every time a duty of citizenship is shirked.” Yes, prisoners have committed crimes, and yes, some of those are egregious. But depriving any citizen of the right to vote should be the grave exception, not a routine part of national life. Universal suffrage means universal suffrage.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/opinion/voting-prisoners-felon-disenfranchisement.html" id="142cff2e-9c11-302c-ae74-638f0be2cd5c">The New York Times</a>.

At a forum in Iowa last weekend, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts gave what has become a standard answer for Democrats on the question of felon disenfranchisement.

There Is No Good Reason Prisoners Can't Vote

She also carried out the president’s “zero tolerance” policy, resulting in the separation of thousands of families at our border with Mexico. Many parents are still searching for their children.

But there were limits to Nielsen’s embrace of Trump’s immigration policies. She pushed back on his demands to break the law to stop migrants from entering the country, according to The New York Times, and repeatedly reminded the president of “the limitations imposed on her department by federal laws, court settlements and international obligations.”

In almost any other administration, this would be unremarkable. It simply means Nielsen took her job and its legal obligations seriously — what we would expect from any civil servant. But Trump is unusual among modern presidents for his routine elevation of people who lack that basic sense of public ethics. If regular pressure to break the law was part of Nielsen’s decision to leave the administration, then her departure illustrates how any belief in the public good, no matter how slight, is incompatible with working for this president, even if you share his views.

This was evident from previous resignations and firings. Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of state, seemed to share the president’s skepticism of the department, carrying out an agenda meant to shrink its influence. But when Trump wanted to break the law — which, Tillerson said in an interview after leaving the administration, was “often” — Tillerson would push back, unwilling to completely subordinate himself to the president’s will. “I would have to say to him, ‘Mr. President, I understand what you want to do, but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law.’ ”

The president’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, faced similar pressures after he recused himself from any investigations related to the prospect of Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election. Sessions took that step after The Washington Post revealed his meetings with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, during the campaign — the kind of contact he had denied during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Trump was furious, which grew into rage after the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, appointed Robert Mueller special counsel. Trump reportedly berated Sessions in the Oval Office — which the attorney general called his “most humiliating experience in decades of public life” — and complained that the recusal was “unfair.”

Trump wanted Sessions to derail the Russia investigation and protect him from scrutiny, essentially making himself above the law. And he spent much of 2018 pressuring the attorney general to do just that, either attacking him in public or cajoling him in private. Sessions, who shared Trump’s politics but not his complete contempt for the rule of law, wouldn’t budge.

“As long as I am the attorney general, I will continue to discharge my duties with integrity and honor, and this department will continue to do its work in a fair and impartial manner according to the law and Constitution,” he said in a February 2018 statement. This stalemate resolved itself after the midterm elections, when a frustrated and weakened Trump finally fired Sessions, replacing him temporarily with Matthew Whitaker, a loyalist who served as Sessions’ chief of staff, and permanently with William Barr, who served as attorney general under George H.W. Bush, shielding him from the fallout of the Iran-Contra scandal.

The overall pattern is clear. Trump wants to act with impunity, breaking the law if he needs or even just wants to. His appointees, who share his goals but not his methods, resist. He scolds and attacks them until they resign, replacing them with loyalists who may actually bend to his will.

Tillerson was replaced by Mike Pompeo, then serving as director of the CIA. Unlike Tillerson, who attempted to contain Trump’s worst instincts, Pompeo has been willing to say or do nearly anything to stay in Trump’s favor. It’s why he would echo the president’s widely criticized flattery of Kim Jong Un and the North Korean government.

Trump says that Kevin McAleenan, until now the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, will take over for Nielsen as acting secretary of Homeland Security. Like Nielsen, McAleenan backs the president’s harsh border policies. He defended Border Patrol agents after they used tear gas on hundreds of migrants, including women and children, who tried to enter the United States near Tijuana, Mexico. Some attorneys say it’s unclear if Trump can elevate McAleenan, since the laws regarding succession point to undersecretary for management Claire Grady as next-in-line as acting director.

For a more permanent replacement, Trump is reportedly considering Ken Cuccinelli, the former Virginia attorney general turned conservative television personality, and Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state notorious for his aggressively anti-immigrant policies.

With either choice, Trump would affirm the pattern of his administration so far, jettisoning people who act as if they were accountable to the public and replacing them with people who above all are loyal to Trump, willing to go in the “tougher” — and possibly illegal — direction he demands.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/opinion/kirstjen-nielsen-trump-border.html" id="e0834729-d537-3149-a4eb-47f40d789a8c">The New York Times</a>.

There’s no reason to mourn Kirstjen Nielsen’s departure from the Department of Homeland Security. She was an immigration hard-liner working aggressively to carry out President Donald Trump’s restrictionist agenda. She spearheaded efforts to crack down on migrants and asylum-seekers. She requested military assistance at the border. She limited the number of people who can legally present for asylum at ports of entry. And she vastly increased the number of immigrants in detention.

Who Is Left to Say No to Trump?

Her suggestion brought a sharp response from Republicans.

“The desire to abolish the Electoral College is driven by the idea Democrats want rural America to go away politically,” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said on Twitter. His colleague Marco Rubio posted a similar note, calling the Electoral College a “work of genius” that “requires candidates for president to earn votes from various parts of country. And it makes sure interests of less populated areas aren’t ignored at the expense of densely populated areas.”

President Donald Trump weighed in as well: “With the Popular Vote, you go to just the large States — the Cities would end up running the Country. Smaller States &amp; the entire Midwest would end up losing all power — &amp; we can’t let that happen. I used to like the idea of the Popular Vote, but now realize the Electoral College is far better for the U.S.A.”

It’s not hard to guess why Republicans are riled by Warren’s embrace of a national popular vote. Without the Electoral College, neither Trump nor his Republican predecessor George W. Bush would have won the White House on their first go-round. At the same time, these self-interested or party-specific arguments are part of a larger conversation.

In February, I wrote about the Electoral College, its origins and its problems. Whatever its potential merits, it is a plainly undemocratic institution. It undermines the principle of “one person, one vote,” affirmed in 1964 by the Supreme Court in Reynolds v. Sims — a key part of the civil and voting rights revolution of that decade. It produces recurring political crises. And it threatens to delegitimize the entire political system by creating larger and larger splits between who wins the public and who wins the states.

Many readers disagreed, making arguments similar to those used by the president and his allies. But those claims — that the Electoral College ensures rural representation, that its counter-majoritarian outcomes reflect the intentions of the framers and that it keeps large states from dominating small ones — don’t follow from the facts and are rooted more in folk civics than in how the system plays out in reality.

Take rural representation. If you conceive of rural America as a set of states, the Electoral College does give voters in Iowa or Montana or Wyoming a sizable say in the selection of the president. If you conceive of it as a population of voters, on the other hand, the picture is different. Roughly 60 million Americans live in rural counties, and they aren’t all concentrated in “rural” states. Millions live in large and midsize states like California, New York, Illinois, Alabama and South Carolina.

With a national popular vote for president, you could imagine a Republican campaign that links rural voters in California — where 5 million people live in rural counties — to those in New York, where roughly 1.4 million people live in rural counties. In other words, rural interests would be represented from coast to coast, as opposed to a system that only weights those who live in swing states.

Totaling the 2016 numbers, Sam Wang, a molecular biologist at Princeton who also runs a widely read election website, found that out of almost 400 campaign stops made after the conventions, neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump made appearances in Arkansas, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia or Vermont. It doesn’t matter that Trump won millions of votes in New Jersey or that Hillary Clinton won millions in Texas. If your state is reliably red or blue, you are ignored.

By contrast, under a national popular vote, the margin of your loss within a state matters as much as the size of your win. Democrats would have reason to maximize their share of the vote in the Deep South, and Republicans would see the same incentive in the Northeast (and the West for that matter).

Still, you might argue, the Electoral College keeps large states from dominating small ones. If there were no such system, campaigns could win by focusing all their attention on the largest states. As a matter of math, that is unlikely. In 2016, New York, California, Texas and Florida cast about 35 million ballots, roughly a quarter of the total 137 million. Even if you somehow won every single one of those ballots, you’d still have to campaign elsewhere for tens of millions more votes, assuming a 50 percent threshold. Take the total of 2016 presidential votes in the 10 largest states, and you’d get only 71 million ballots, or about 52 percent of the vote.

In the incredible event that a candidate won every ballot cast in those states, then yes, under a national popular vote, he or she could ignore the rest of the country and become president. But that isn’t politically possible. Even an attempt to “run up the score” and retreat to the largest cities isn’t viable — there just aren’t enough votes.

Compare that with what we have under the Electoral College, where hypothetically a bare majority in the 11 largest states is all it takes to win 270 electors and become president — an actual instance of big-state domination.

Beyond the numbers, it is a conceptual error to focus on states in a race for votes. Who wins Virginia has implications for down-ballot races for Congress, but it’s just a curiosity in the fight for the White House. What would count are voters and communities, and candidates would have multiple avenues for building majority coalitions across state lines.

This gets to a larger point. As James Madison observed during the Constitutional Convention, the political interests of the states aren’t actually tied to size. Instead, whether states share interests will depend on shared conditions and connections. Massachusetts and Tennessee have populations of similar size but little in common otherwise; Massachusetts and Connecticut, on the other hand, are linked by history and geography.

In modern politics, intrastate political differences are as important as interstate ones. Voters in Milwaukee may have more in common with voters in Richmond, Virginia, than they do with those in Superior in the northwest of the state. A national campaign would probably follow suit, with candidates looking for connections between regions, cities and metropolitan areas versus a singular focus on a few states.

It is true the founders feared “mob rule” and “pure democracy.” But electing a president isn’t the same as either. When Madison referred to “pure democracy” in Federalist No. 10, he meant direct governance by the people. “A society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.” He contrasted this with representative democracy, or “republican” government. And while Madison agreed to an Electoral College, he also saw the merit of choosing a chief executive by popular election.

“The people at large,” he argued during the Constitutional Convention, “would be as likely as any that could be devised to produce an Executive Magistrate of distinguished Character. The people generally could only know &amp; vote for some Citizen whose merits had rendered him an object of general attention &amp; esteem.” His main reservation was slavery and how it made “the right of suffrage” more “diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States.”

Beyond issues of representation, there are other practical problems with the status quo. When margins between candidates are large, the Electoral College aligns with the national popular vote. But narrow margins throw it into chaos. The 1968 presidential election nearly went to the House of Representatives; in 1976, if you move roughly 6,000 ballots from Jimmy Carter in Ohio and roughly 18,000 in Wisconsin, then Gerald Ford becomes president despite losing by nearly 1.7 million votes.

Indeed, the recurring prospect of a president elected with a minority of the vote inspired a major push to end the Electoral College beginning in the 1960s. In 1966, Sen. Birch Bayh of Indiana — who died last week at 91 — introduced a constitutional amendment to elect the president by national popular vote. In 1968, Bayh spoke before a committee of Congress in support of his amendment. His words still resonate. In 1968, addressing a committee of Democrats in Indiana, Bayh urged fellow Democrats to support his proposal.

“We are living in a dangerous world where the stability of the United States of America is one of the most important things facing us,” he said. “When we have an Electoral College system which threatens to elect a man who has fewer votes than his opponent, we tend to erode the confidence in the people of this country and their president and in their form of government.”

James Michener, an author who served as a presidential elector in 1968, was even blunter. The Electoral College, he wrote, was a “time bomb lodged near the heart of the nation.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/opinion/electoral-college-warren-trump.html" id="63386e91-868f-365a-a79c-a269f6bba8a1">The New York Times</a>.

At a CNN town hall in Jackson, Mississippi, on Monday night, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts called for shutting down the Electoral College. “I believe we need a constitutional amendment that protects the right to vote for every American citizen and to make sure that vote gets counted,” she said.

Getting Rid of the Electoral College Isn't Just About Trump

Attached to this memorial is a museum, which walks attendees through the events of the day — the rescue efforts and the aftermath — with an unbroken focus on the men, women and children who lost their lives. I hadn’t planned to visit, but I was in Oklahoma City and thought it was an appropriate stop, given the latest outbreak of white power terror, an attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, that took the lives of 50 Muslim worshipers and maimed dozens of others. I thought visiting the memorial might help me reflect on the recurring nature of white supremacist violence, at home and abroad.

The museum portion of the memorial is a harrowing experience for visitors who give it their full attention. You can listen to recordings of routine government proceedings that suddenly erupt with the sound of the blast. You can examine debris and watch interviews with survivors. Again and again, you see the faces of those victims. The young children stand out.

The museum doesn’t avoid either Timothy McVeigh or his chief accomplice, Terry Nichols, who orchestrated the bombing. Visitors are given an almost play-by-play description of McVeigh’s arrest. You can examine his getaway car and watch interviews with the law enforcement officers who captured him. There is a map of the United States showing every location he visited as he prepared his attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. An entire section of the exhibit is devoted to his trial and execution.

But in all of this detail, there is little discussion of McVeigh’s ideology. We learn, briefly, how he was angered by the sieges at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, but those aren’t placed in a larger context of white power activity. We learn that McVeigh read and drew from “The Turner Diaries” — a lurid fantasy of apocalyptic “race war” by neo-Nazi author William Pierce — but we’re left in the dark about his ties to larger networks of white power activists. At one point, McVeigh is described as an antigovernment extremist, but even this obscures the depth of his white supremacist, nativist and anti-Semitic ideology and commitment to revolutionary violence against the state.

It makes sense that a memorial would not want to focus too closely on the perpetrators. But there’s no way to understand McVeigh or his accomplices without looking deeper. As historian Kathleen Belew notes in “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,” “McVeigh, trained as a combatant by the state, belonged to the white power movement. He acted without orders from movement leaders, but in concert with movement objectives and supported by resistance cell organizing.”

That understanding of McVeigh and Nichols as part of a movement with well-defined goals and a theory of action — which itself fits into a history of ideologically driven hate networks — is important if the mission of the Oklahoma City memorial is education as much as remembrance. And in visiting the site and museum, I was troubled by shallow treatment of that context. Are visitors making the connections between past and present? Do they see the relationship between the violence in Oklahoma City and the shooting of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 or the murder of 11 Jewish worshipers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018? Do they see McVeigh as a singular threat or as an important antecedent to our present-day white power killers?

In the manifesto he released, the accused Christchurch shooter made frequent references to “white genocide,” the idea that nonwhite immigration and mixed-race relationships constitute a genocidal threat to “white” people. He recites the “14 words” — a white supremacist mantra — and elsewhere posted images of a gun with the number 14 written on it. As Jane Coaston noted in Vox, the term “white genocide” was coined by David Lane, a white supremacist responsible for the murder of a Jewish radio host in 1984. He, like McVeigh, was also inspired by William Pierce. Again, the museum devotes some space to this movement and those ideas — copies of Pierce’s books “Hunter” and “The Turner Diaries” are on display — but they are overshadowed by exhibits that focus on the experience of the bombing and its aftermath.

If visitors aren’t making those connections, they wouldn’t be alone.

President Donald Trump doesn’t see them, and in the wake of the New Zealand attack, he called white power violence a minor problem. “I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems. It’s certainly a terrible thing.” Of course, it’s in the president’s interest to downplay this activity, given his past equivocation on white supremacist violence and use of white nationalist language.

Likewise, there’s been little soul-searching among Trump’s Republican allies about their tolerance (or worse) of language that legitimizes anti-Muslim prejudice or places white nationalist ideas into wider circulation. Instead, they are busy denying the weight of their words. “If you find yourself using the tragedy in New Zealand to take backhanded swipes at conservatives in America — many of my colleagues already have — then you really have no shame and you are part of the problem,” said Dan Crenshaw, a Republican congressman from Texas, on Twitter.

But you can’t separate the current wave of white power activity from the president’s dark warnings of foreign “invaders” or the pervasive anti-Muslim rhetoric from conservative media personalities or the outright use of white supremacist tropes from a sitting congressperson. Words have weight, and this weight makes targets more vulnerable to all forms of dehumanization, including those that end in violence.

But this problem goes far deeper than the particular rhetoric of a particular political party. If the United States and other western democracies have a recurring problem with white power and white supremacist violence, it’s because they grow out of habits and assumptions that are still embedded in our societies. The extremists who dream of a white ethno-state aren’t too far removed to the more ordinary people who see no problem with (and even defend) continued segregation of schools and neighborhoods. The people who target mosques at home are channeling our disregard for Muslim lives abroad. Settler societies built on the removal and extermination of native peoples will produce ideologies that treat those actions as good, even laudatory.

Which is just to say that as we struggle against the forces behind these decades of violence, from Oklahoma City to Christchurch, we must remember that we aren’t fighting with strangers. Instead, we are confronting the very worst of our legacy — wrestling with our own shadows.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/opinion/mcveigh-new-zealand-white-supremacy.html" id="83d78180-824e-369f-a2d4-e1f8108f6776">The New York Times</a>.

The Oklahoma City National Memorial consists of two stark structures connected by a reflecting pool, intended as monuments to the strength and resiliency of the city. It’s also a contemplative space, where visitors can reflect on and honor the 168 people who died in the April 1995 bombing, carried out by a white power terrorist with ties to a network of like-minded extremists.

The March of White Supremacy, From Oklahoma City to Christchurch

Grant’s inauguration felt like the beginning of a new era of reform and revitalization. For nearly four years, Americans had suffered through the tumultuous presidency of Andrew Johnson, who drove the nation to political crisis with his virulent racism, erratic behavior and leniency toward the defeated secessionists.

Grant, by contrast, backed the rights and privileges of freed black Americans. He supported the 15th Amendment to the Constitution (ratified in 1870) extending voting rights to black men and deployed federal troops against vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan (itself started by a former battlefield foe, Nathan Bedford Forrest).

But the laudable commitment from Grant and the Republican Congress to the political rights of the former slaves was fatally undermined by their indifference to the vast social and economic inequality of the postwar South. Unable to see past an ideology of “free labor” and “free soil,” they also couldn’t grasp how slavery and racial stigma gave black Americans a fundamentally different relationship to economic life. The result was actions that ultimately sowed seeds for new relationships of race hierarchy in the South and the nation at large.

Johnson, a Tennessee Unionist and ardent proponent of white supremacy, had hoped to restore a version of the antebellum status quo, with white planters taking the reins of black labor with as little federal intervention as possible. He quickly brought secessionist states back into the Union and gave ex-Confederates a free hand in directing the South, which they used to impose slavery-like conditions on the formerly enslaved. He vetoed civil rights bills and condoned racist violence against black Americans seeking equal political rights.

His disregard for the sacrifices of the war put him in fierce conflict with the Radical Republicans in Congress. Eventually, the House impeached him, and while he wasn’t removed from office — the Senate fell one vote short — Republicans had neutered him as a political force. Democrats declined to nominate him for re-election, and an openly contemptuous Grant refused to ride with him to the inauguration. He left Washington in disgrace.

On March 4, 1869, Ulysses S. Grant gave his first inaugural address — a short, plain-spoken statement of intent. Abraham Lincoln’s prized general, and a national hero in his own right, he promised to bring his singular determination to the presidency. “The responsibilities of the position I feel, but accept them without fear,” Grant said. “The office has come to me unsought; I commence its duties untrammeled. I bring to it a conscious desire and determination to fill it to the best of my abil...

Jamelle Bouie

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