In “Justice Kagan’s peculiar idea of voting rights,” WaPo columnist Jason Willick comes at the issue I was wrestling with in “Is Partisanship Merely a Proxy for Race?” from a different angle. He inadvertently illustrates why separating race and partisanship is more difficult than it may seem.

Think of a Republican living in San Francisco. She always votes, but the politicians she wants to send to Congress lose to Democrats by a wide margin every time. She is never represented by the candidate of her choice. Is she disenfranchised?

Or think of a Democrat living in Wyoming. He also goes to the polls every election cycle, but his preferred candidates for federal office are always outvoted by Republicans. Is he disenfranchised?

The answer is no. If people can vote, and their votes are counted equally, they are enfranchised even if they are outnumbered. 

That’s too simplistic, actually. If the citizen in question is voting to decide the next mayor of San Francisco or governor or US Senator from Wyoming, Willick is right. They were simply outvoted by their fellow citizens. But I would contend that those citizens are indeed disenfranchised when voting for President, owing to the wildly undemocratic nature of the Electoral College.

That principle was at the philosophical core of the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision last week in Louisiana v. Callais.

The court held, in a nutshell, that states no longer need to go out of their way to draw majority-Black or majority-Hispanic congressional districts under the Voting Rights Act. The VRA says that racial minority voters must have equal opportunity “to elect representatives of their choice.” But voters of all races have that opportunity at the ballot box, the court said, even if they live in congressional districts where their favored political party is unlikely ever to prevail.

Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent condemned the majority for “stripping minority citizens of their voting rights.” But, of course, no one’s right to cast a vote will be affected. What will change is the political composition of the districts people vote in, assuming states change their congressional boundaries in light of the new rules.

Here, I tend to agree. I’ve always found the idea that, if 70 percent of a state’s population is White and 30 percent is Black, we should expect 30 percent of the elected representatives to be Black rather odd.

Yet, I absolutely think that, if 70 percent of a state’s population is Republican and 30 percent is Democratic, we should expect roughly 30 percent of the elected representatives to be Democrats. Because party affiliation is directly on the ballot, we readily see that drawing the lines in such a way that 90 percent of the representatives are Republican is unfair. In that scenario, the state’s Democrats have clearly been disenfranchised.

We’ve all seen this many times over the years:

It’s seldom possible to draw Congressional District lines to perfectly match the partisan preferences of the citizenry, simply because there aren’t enough districts. But a neutral observer would clearly judge the fairness of the outcome by how close it came to the 60-40 split.

For Kagan, voting in a jurisdiction where your favored candidate will lose is next to meaningless. “What if the districts in which minority citizens exercise voting power” — that is, districts where a state’s minority population has been grouped together to comply with the VRA — “are sliced up, and the pieces appended to districts in which they can play no meaningful role?” she asked.

The right to vote, as Kagan formulates it, seems to include the right to have the satisfaction of voting for the winner. For those in the political minority, “voting power” is a mirage.

But that’s not Kagan’s position. She’s simply refusing to separate race and partisanship. Here’s the opening paragraph of her dissent (joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson):

Consider the story of a hypothetical congressional districtin a hypothetical State, subjected to a redistricting scheme. The example is admittedly stylized, but in its essence simulates the dispute before us, and clarifies the immense issues at stake. The district, let’s say, is a single county, in the shape of a near-perfect circle, sitting in the middle of a >rectangular State. The State is one with a long history of virulent racial discrimination, and its many effects, including in residential segregation and political division, remain significant even today. The population of the circle district is 90% Black; the rest of the State, divided into five surrounding districts, is 90% White. And voting throughout all those districts is racially polarized: Black residents vote heavily for Democratic candidates, while White residents vote heavily for Republicans. The circle district thus enables the State’s Black community to elect a representative of its choice, whom no neighboring community would put in office. But that arrangement, in this not-so-hypothetical, is not to last. The state legislature decides to eliminate the circle district, slicing it into six pie pieces and allocating one each to six new, still solidly White congressional districts. The State’s Black voters are now widely dispersed, and (unlike the State’s White voters) lack any ability to elect a representative of their choice. Election after election, Black citizens’ votes are, by every practical measure, wasted.

If we change Black and White to Democrat and Republican, respectively, there’s simply no question that she’s right. It’s only when we separate out race as a separate category—one that’s supposed to be immaterial in the drawing of districts—that it’s a debatable proposition.

That’s a jarring conception of representative democracy, which depends on the idea that representatives “speak for” their entire constituency. Hundreds of millions of Americans can’t all gather and deliberate on how to govern themselves, so they select a few hundred politicians to do so on their behalf. For that process to work, everyone has to be bound by the decisions of the political representatives — even those who didn’t vote for the politician who represents their district.

Kagan is calling that bargain into question. And the bargain, admittedly, is fragile: How can a person be represented by someone against his will? A litigant can choose the lawyer he wants to represent him in a contract negotiation. But many millions of Americans are represented in Congress by politicians of the opposing party they see as working against their interests. They have to accept the outcome of the legislative process anyway, or government by consent of the governed yields to government by force.

This strikes me as deliberately obtuse. A Democrat living in Alabama has every reason to expect to live under laws made by Republican governors with a Republican-leaning state legislature and state Supreme Court. To the extent the laws they pass are in accordance with the Alabama and federal Constitution, they’re legitimate.

But judging from their presidential voting history over the last quarter-century, Alabama is roughly a 60-40 state. There’s no way to draw its seven Congressional Districts to exactly match that, as 4-3 would skew in the Democrats’ favor and 5-2 would skew Republican. The current map is indeed 5-2, owing to a court-imposed requirement to draw a second majority-minority district. Given the ruling from which Kagan dissented, we’re likely to see the state pass a 6-1 map. That’s grossly unfair but, notably, that was the result that prevailed from 2010-2022. Before that, the state typically had two Democrats and, indeed, had three for a single term pursuant to the 2008 election.

Where Willick and I disagree slightly with Kagan is how to factor race into this. Like Willick, I don’t think there’s any inherent right for the roughly 26.5% of Alabamians who are Black to have a Representative that looks like them. But I do think that the roughly 40% of Alabamians who are Democrats—including probably 90-odd percent of the Black population—to be represented in Congress.

The Supreme Court’s ruling involved how to draw legislative districts, but the most important elections for federal office these days are not subject to a gerrymandering frenzy. Senators are elected in statewide contests with fixed boundaries. So are presidents, for the most part — the electoral college is a winner-take-all contest in 48 states.

If Kagan is right that the minority party can be, in effect, disenfranchised in lopsided congressional districts, that is already true in more-consequential elections for the Senate and the presidency in deep-red and deep-blue states. Democrats in Alabama, and Republicans in Hawaii, for example, can’t expect their preferred presidential candidate to win their state’s electors in the foreseeable future.

Again, this seems deliberately obtuse. The whole point of Congressional Districts, at least as we’ve conceived them historically, is to represent local interests. “Cracking” localities to skew the outcome is undemocratic. Senators represent states, so electing them at large makes perfect sense. My objections to the Electoral College have been documented at length for the last two decades, so I won’t rehash them here.

There are several more paragraphs in the column, but it’s more of the same.

The Secretary of Belligerence, Pete Hegseth (aka the Bro of War), testified to Congress this week. While he excels at such skills as smirking, dodging questions, and getting more than a bit shouty, he did not provide much in the way of helpful explanation concerning the ongoing excursion in Iran. Indeed, he provided a great new twist to the War Powers Act: cease-fire days don’t count. I think that’s kind of like cheat days when you have a donut (but just one!) when you are on a low-carb diet.

Shh! Nobody tell him that a naval blockade is an act of war!

One thing Hegseth did do this week was emphasize concerns over Iran’s nuclear potential.

For example:

That clip kind of makes my brain hurt, given the fact that, as a lifelong reader and writer, I am aware that words are supposed to mean things. Knowing something about international relations and politics, as well as basic cost-benefit analysis, adds to the pain of it all.

For example, this administration’s usage of “obliterated” has essentially become like what we all did as kids, saying a certain word over and over and over until it loses meaning (the internet informs me that this is called “semantic satiation“-so if you learn nothing else today, maybe you learned that like I did).

Anyhoo, for those keeping score at home, to “obliterate” means to “destroy utterly.” It does not mean, as Hegseth suggests, burying something. Perhaps Pete means “entomb”? Inter? Cover with rocks and garbage?

But, of course, the Möbius strip that is the explanation about the war is that we “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capability by burying their enriched uranium and not destroying it, but we still had to go to war because they still have nuclear “ambitions” and because they are building a “conventional shield” (you know, the one that was utterly ineffective against our conventional attacks).

Indeed, in other testimony, he kept making it sound as if any cost is worth paying to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon (despite all the aforementioned obliteration). For example:

I wonder how much the Iranian’s would have charged to sell us their enriched uranium? If no price is too high, I guess we should have paid it as per Hegseth’s, shall we say, logic?

Or, I wonder, if the cost of having to adhere to an agreement negotiated by Barack Hussein Obama was worth it?

Well, apparently, that cost was too high.

Setting aside a discussion of what the exact threat to the US or its interests would be of a nuclear-armed Iran, the sad reality is that we are where we are because Donald “Art of the Deal” Trump withdrew the US from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and promised to provide us with a much better deal.

You know, the same way he promised lifelong marriage to Ivana Marie Zelníčková and Marla Maples (but I digress) and that Trump University would provide some kind of actual education (which it did by proving the adage that a fool and his money are soon parted).

The NYT has an excellent analysis of the situation: How Iran Accumulated 11 Tons of Enriched Uranium.

Since eight years ago when President Trump pulled out of a nuclear deal with Tehran, Iran has accumulated 22,000 pounds, or 11 tons, of enriched uranium. But the fate of Iran’s stockpile remains a mystery, two months after the United States began a war meant to prevent Iran from ever building an atomic bomb.

[…]

Iran lacked a single bomb’s worth of uranium in 2018, when Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the pact and reimposed a series of tough economic sanctions.

Then Iran began to enrich above the deal’s limit, first at low enrichment levels to pressure the West and then up to 20 percent in early 2021, just before Mr. Trump left office.

The Biden administration tried, unsuccessfully, to restore aspects of the abandoned deal. Throughout the negotiations, Iran enriched uranium to an unprecedented level of up to 60 percent — a hairsbreadth away from the preferred grade for atom bombs.

With Mr. Trump again in office in 2025, Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium grew at the fastest rate since the International Atomic Energy Agency started reporting.

Check out this graph. It may be difficult to spot, but if you squint, you can see where the JCPOA took effect and the consequences of the US withdrawal from said deal. Try not to strain your eyes

Heckuva job, Trumpie.

The reality remains, to conclude, that this war has emboldened the Iranians to use the Strait of Hormuz as a weapon, it has likely shifted regime leadership into a more hardline space, and it has taught them that they need a nuclear weapon as a deterrent.

So, to sum up: if the administration’s main goal is an Iran that has no nuclear ambitions, they appear to be doing everything in their power to ensure the opposite.

Maybe threatening to destroy all their bridges and power plants will help? Perhaps a threat to end their civlization will compel them to eschew any desire for the one weapon that has been shown to deter attacks of the kind they have recently experienced?

I know! Let’s send in a real estate developer and an investor with conflicts of interest to negotiate a peace deal.

That’ll solve the problem.

tl:dr, Trump essentially created the problem he is now trying to solve by spending massive amounts of money, killing people, and doing massive damage to the global economy (with collateral damage to our alliances in Europe and the Persian Gulf), all to create a situation that increases the chance that Iran will pursue a nuclear weapon. As a bonus, all of this will likely increase, not decrease, the chances of nuclear proliferation globally (not only because of regional concerns, but lots of countries that were willing to rely on the US will be less confident in that stance going forward).

Writing in Slate, UC-Berkeley public policy professor Jake Grumback purports to explain “How Normie Pundits Paved the Way for the Supreme Court Voting Rights Disaster.” He makes some compelling points but is ultimately too reductionist. Indeed, the introductory paragraph gets there straight away:

For two decades, a certain kind of American political thinker has insisted they know the real problem. Authoritarianism, oligarchy, and racism were symptoms rather than causes. The true pathology was partisan polarization. The sorting of Americans into hostile camps. The collapse of bipartisan comity.

Nobody of any note has argued that polarization was the only problem, merely that it was making it impossible to govern.

We built serious institutions around this diagnosis. Duke opened its Polarization Lab. Princeton launched its Bridging Divides Initiative. No Labels raised tens of millions of dollars. Braver Angels held town halls. The Carnegie Foundation offered prestigious fellowships, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences convened a blue-ribbon commission. Ezra Klein’s bestselling book didn’t seek to answer why democracy is dying, but Why We’re Polarized. Today there are more conferences and fellowships devoted to “bridging divides” than there are functioning bridges between the parties.

Again: these are part and parcel of the same thing. Our system is explicitly designed to require compromise every step of the way. If there are no functioning bridges between the parties—and the parties are completely sorted—then our system breaks down.

So, for example, Klein’s book (written in 2019 and published just as the COVID pandemic was starting in January 2020) describes the situation thusly:

“The American political system—which includes everyone from voters to journalists to the president—is full of rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face,” writes political analyst Ezra Klein. “We are a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole.”

“A thoughtful, clear and persuasive analysis” (The New York Times Book Review), Why We’re Polarized reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture.

America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. Over the past fifty years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. These merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together.

Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the 20th century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and one another. And he traces the feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions that are driving our system toward crisis.

This rather clearly does not ignore racism as a causal factor. It’s just one factor among many.

Back to Grumback:

The Supreme Court just revealed where that project was leading. In Louisiana v. Callais, the court’s conservative majority held that when a legislative district is polarized along party lines, it cannot simultaneously be found to be polarized along racial lines under the Voting Rights Act. The consequence is devastating: In a country where over 90 percent of Black voters vote Democratic and over 60 percent of White voters vote Republican, any racially discriminatory map can now be laundered as merely a partisan one. The VRA’s protection against racial vote dilution has been nullified—using a conceptual weapon that liberals and moderates spent years building and lending prestige to.

But, put another way, 10 percent of Black voters are Republican, and 40 percent of White voters are Democrats. So, clearly, race isn’t the only sorting mechanism.

The ruling also rests on a methodological error that would earn a failing grade in a graduate statistics course. The court treats race and party as competing explanations, as if controlling for one neutralizes the other. But for millions of American voters, race explains party affiliation. The vast majority of Black Americans did not randomly sort into the Democratic Party. Already trending blue since the New Deal, they were pushed fully into the Democratic Party by Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act and Republicans’ Southern Strategy over the decades since. To “control for partisanship” when assessing racial gerrymandering is to erase the very mechanism through which racism travels. Consider the analogy of a court ruling that a company didn’t discriminate by gender in pay because, once you control for being a manager or executive—positions from which women were systematically excluded—the gap disappears. Or that if you exclude people with high blood pressure, then a high sodium diet appears to have no effect on your risk of stroke.

This is Grumback’s strongest point and, indeed, the one that makes the essay worth thinking about. Six decades beyond Jim Crow, anti-Black racism is no longer the central driving mechanism in American politics—even in the Deep South. Diluting the Black vote is not the main aim of Republican-led gerrymandering. But it’s certainly a guaranteed outcome if not a necessary mechanism to achieving the desired outcome of maximizing Republican advantage.

Race and partisanship are therefore inextricably linked. But they’re not one and the same.

The polarization nostalgists also badly misread the history they claim to be mourning. American politics has almost always been polarized by party. The exceptional era was that of the New Deal coalition of the mid-20^th century, when the staunchest segregationists and the most anti-racist politicians in the country coexisted within the same Democratic Party only by keeping civil rights off the agenda. To conclude that partisan divisions negate racial divisions would be to assume that even the Civil War had nothing to do with race.

Well no. Indeed, the primary reason Abraham Lincoln and the upstart Republican Party won the 1860 election was that the Democrats split into two factions over the issue of race and the remants of the old Whig Party formed the Constitutional Union party, creating a four-way race. Slavery and the fate of the Union was the central issue in the contest. But, of course, that means we didn’t have the partisan sorting that Klein and others have pointed to.

Polarization-obsessed liberals did not directly cause the Callais ruling. But they laid an intellectual foundation. When we spend years insisting that partisan division is the master pathology of American life, we delegitimized arguments about racism as divisive. We created a cultural climate in which conflating race and party seems like a sophisticated, noninflammatory intervention rather than an evasion. And we’ve handed five Supreme Court justices a respectable intellectual framework for a ruling that would otherwise look nakedly like what it is.

I’m considerably older than Grumback and can not remember a presidential election when race was not at least a tacit issue. And Democrats have explicitly made race—and racism—a central issue in their campaigns against Republicans and, especially, against Trump. Further, there have been multiple best-selling volumes attributing Republican electoral success to racist rhetoric and proclaiming that Democrats would emerge as a permanent majority party as older Whites die off and get replaced by Black and Hispanic voters. (In fairness, some Republicans were making that argument at least as early as 2012.)

Polarization is a description of political temperature. It tells you nothing about what is being fought over or who is being harmed. A democracy polarized between those who want to preserve multiracial voting rights and those who want to destroy them is not suffering from the same illness as one polarized between competing visions of the capital gains tax.

So, I fully agree with the second sentence here. I just disagree that “multiracial voting rights” is the primary driver of our polarization. Indeed, Grumback’s prize-winning book, Laboratories against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics, seemingly agrees:

Jacob Grumbach argues that as Congress has become more gridlocked, national partisan and activist groups have shifted their sights to the state level, nationalizing state politics in the process and transforming state governments into the engines of American policymaking. He shows how this has had the ironic consequence of making policy more varied across the states as red and blue party coalitions implement increasingly distinct agendas in areas like health care, reproductive rights, and climate change. The consequences don’t stop there, however. Drawing on a wealth of new data on state policy, public opinion, money in politics, and democratic performance, Grumbach traces how national groups are using state governmental authority to suppress the vote, gerrymander districts, and erode the very foundations of democracy itself.

Required reading for this precarious moment in our politics, Laboratories against Democracy reveals how the pursuit of national partisan agendas at the state level has intensified the challenges facing American democracy, and asks whether today’s state governments are mitigating the political crises of our time—or accelerating them.

The book is based on his multiple prize-winning Berkeley PhD dissertation, and I’ll happily defer to his expertise on what’s happening at the state level, especially since it comports with my more casual observations. While I was somewhat slow to come around to the implications, I’ve been writing about “using state governmental authority to suppress the vote, gerrymander districts, and erode the very foundations of democracy itself” for at least fifteen years now.

But those things are happening precisely because the parties have become more polarized and sorted. And, as Grumbach notes, the divisions are about much more than race: “red and blue party coalitions implement increasingly distinct agendas in areas like health care, reproductive rights, and climate change.” That’s to say nothing of abortion, LGBTQ issues, the role of women in society, vaccines, masks, what should be taught in our public schools, and so many other issues. And, indeed, the culture wars at least temporarily moved a considerable number of Black and Hispanic men into the Trump camp.

The court absorbed decades of elite discourse that trained us to distrust racial explanations and reach for partisan ones instead, then took that discourse to its logical conclusion. If everything is partisan, nothing can be racial, and the law that Congress designed to specifically fight against racial discrimination can no longer operate within its legislative intent.

I fully agree with Grumbach that it’s impossible to fully disentangle race and partisanship in America. But it’s noteworthy that we’re seeing polarization and the rise of extreme populism and nativism across the West, including in places without our history of Black slavery and Jim Crow. So, while it’s right to reject “nothing can be racial,” it’s absurd to argue “everything is racial.’

“Sinking”

(Or “How the News Makes Me Feel These Days”)

March 14, 2026

Providence Canyon State Park (Lumpkin, GA)

WSJ (“Trump Poised to Defy Congress on War Authorization“):

The Trump administration is on course to blow past an initial deadline for congressional approval for the Iran war on the grounds that the ongoing cease-fire stopped the clock on a 60-day deadline—an assertion met with outrage from Democrats and skepticism from Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Under a 1973 law called the War Powers Resolution, the president is required to notify Congress within 48 hours of military action and withdraw U.S. troops 60 days later, unless lawmakers declare war or authorize the use of force. The expectation on Capitol Hill was that the 60-day deadline expires on Friday.

In testimony Thursday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the current cease-fire with Iran, which began April 8, stopped the countdown.

While Trump halted airstrikes against Iran, the U.S. military continues to enforce a military blockade that prohibits ships from reaching or leaving Iranian ports. A blockade is considered an act of war under international law.

“We are in a cease-fire right now, which our understanding means the 60-day clock pauses or stops in a cease-fire,” Hegseth said. “That’s—it’s our understanding.”

This doesn’t constitute “defying Congress” because Congress hasn’t acted. Indeed, a Senate measure to halt the conflict failed for the sixth time yesterday, by a 47-50 vote. The only new vote in support of the measure came from Maine Republican Susan Collins, who’s in an uphill re-election fight.

Beyond that, the “the war is over even though it’s still underway” argument is not unprecedented. President Obama invoked it after the Libya deadline passed—even though US forces were actively involved in kinetic action—on the basis that we had no “boots on the ground.” Not only do we not have boots on the ground in Iran, but we’re not actively engaged in hostile action.

To be sure, this war rather clearly violates the Constitution, under which only Congress can authorize sending American forces to war, and the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which declares,

The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.

Alas, both of these have been violated repeatedly. Further, as I noted almost exactly 15 years ago, when the Obama administration was doing the exact same thing in Libya that the Trump administration is doing in Iran now, that resolution “isn’t a criminal statute. The remedy remains what it was before the War Powers Act was passed: Impeachment.”

As a theoretical matter, Congress could also cut off funds to a war that has thus far cost somewhere between $25 and $50 billion. But that’s even less likely than impeachment. It would be seen as a failure to “support the troops.”

I’ve written on this issue many, many times over the years. The first instance appears to be roughly six weeks into OTB’s existence, a March 2003 post titled “Suing to Stop War.”

A group of House Democrats and a handful of citizens are suing in the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals to stop the war. They are arguing that the president shouldn’t be able to order troops to war without a congressional declaration of war. In the past, courts have been reluctant to intervene in such “political questions.”

While I find the argument interesting, it has no chance of winning. Presidents have been sending the military into harm’s way at least since Jefferson ordered strikes against the Barbary Pirates in Tripoli. It has been done so many times as to have simply become the way we do things, much like the federal judiciary acquired the unenumerated power of judicial review. Indeed, the Congress formalized this fact with the 1973 War Powers Act, passed over Nixon’s veto, which allows presidents to use force on their own, but requires that they notify Congress as soon as possible and get approval after 60/90 days. Furthermore, it is arguable that the October 2002 joint resolution of Congress authorizing the president to use force in Iraq amounts to a declaration of war.

Philosophically, I don’t think presidents should have the right to act without congressional approval in matters such as this case. In situations where there is an imminent crisis, the president as Commander-in-Chief obviously needs to be able to act quickly and decisively. But when we spend months playing footsie with the UN, in a Quixotic quest for legitimacy, presidents have time to gain the approval of Congress. I didn’t like it when Clinton sent troops into Kosovo and Bosnia without authorization, and don’t like it now with Bush. But, again, that’s how the war power has evolved and I can’t see the courts overriding that now.

It turned out that Bush got an Authorization to Use Military Force for the Iraq War, rendering the issue moot. But he could have sent forces into harm’s way on his own authority had he so chosen.

Subsequent posts worth highlighting:

• “War Powers in the Age of Terror,” October 31, 2005
• “Congress and Warmaking,” January 25, 2007
• “War Declarations,” October 7, 2007
• “War Powers Consultation Act,” July 8, 2008
• “War Powers Act and Illegal Wars,” May 12, 2011
• “Congress vs. Obama on Libya,” June 13, 2011
• “America Carrying Load in Libya While Pretending Otherwise,” July 2, 2011
• “Congress is Powerless to Stop Presidential Strike on North Korea,” February 9, 2018
• “Trump Says War Powers Act Doesn’t Apply to Cartel Strikes,” November 2, 2025
• “War Powers Catch-22,” March 5, 2026

And that doesn’t include a boatload of posts on the matter by the late Doug Mataconis and a handful by my co-blogger Steven Taylor. They can be found organized under the War Powers tag.

WaPo (“Supreme Court limits key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act“):

The Supreme Court on Wednesday sharply weakened a key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act, a ruling that limits the consideration of race in drawing voting maps and could usher in Republican gains in the House.

The decision is expected to touch off a scramble by Republicans to redraw majority-minority districts, especially in the South. New districts could shift the balance of power in Congress by imperiling the reelection prospects of some Black Democrats, possibly as soon as November’s midterms in some instances. Minority representatives in state legislatures and local offices could also be redistricted out.

The court’s conservative majority found Louisiana unlawfully discriminated by race when it created a second majority-Black congressional district to comply with the VRA. But the court did not strike down the provision, known as Section 2, as unconstitutional as many voting rights advocates had feared. Still, the court’s liberal justices and voting rights experts said it was effectively gutted.

The ruling carries significant symbolic weight, scaling back the last major pillar of a 60-year-old law long considered one of the marquee achievements of the civil rights era. The Voting Rights Act bans discriminatory voting practices such as literacy tests and poll taxes, and has helped greatly increase minority representation in state and federal offices.

In an ideologically divided 6-3 ruling, the conservative justices created a higher bar for the law’s powerful provision that allows states to use race to draw maps that help minority communities elect candidates of their choice. Section 2 is aimed at combating discriminatory gerrymandering that weakens the power of Black, Latino, Native American and Asian voters.

SCOTUSblog’s Amy Howe (“In major Voting Rights Act case, Supreme Court strikes down redistricting map challenged as racially discriminatory“):

The Supreme Court on Wednesday, in the case of Louisiana v. Callais, struck down a Louisiana congressional map that a group of voters who describe themselves as “non-African American” had challenged as the product of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. By a vote of 6-3, the justices left in place a ruling by a federal court that barred the state from using the map, which had created a second majority-Black district, in future elections. Although Wednesday’s ruling did not strike down a key provision of the federal Voting Rights Act, as Louisiana and the challengers had asked the court to do, Justice Elena Kagan suggested in her dissent (which was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson) that the majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito had rendered the provision “all but a dead letter.”

The decision was the latest, and presumably final, chapter in a long-running dispute arising from Louisiana’s efforts to adopt a new congressional map in the wake of the 2020 census. The first map that the state adopted, in 2022, had one majority-Black district out of the six allotted to the state. A group of Black voters – who comprise roughly one-third of the state’s population – went to federal court, where they alleged that the map violated Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits discrimination in voting.

A federal judge agreed that the 2022 map likely violated Section 2, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld that ruling. It instructed Louisiana to draw a new map by January 2024 or risk having the court adopt one for it.

The map that Louisiana drew in 2024 created a second majority-Black district, leading to the election in November of that year of Cleo Fields, a former member of Congress who had represented another majority-Black district during the 1990s.

The map also prompted the lawsuit leading to Wednesday’s opinion. It was filed by a group of “non-African American” voters who contended that the 2024 map violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause by sorting voters based on race. A three-judge federal district court agreed with them and barred the state from using the 2024 map in future elections, but a divided Supreme Court temporarily paused that ruling in May 2024.

[…]

In a 36-page opinion, Alito explained that “the Constitution almost never permits the Federal Government or a State to discriminate on the basis of race.” The question before the court, he said, is “whether compliance with the Voting Rights Act should be added to our very short list of compelling interests that can justify racial discrimination.”

As a general rule, Alito wrote, Section 2 of the VRA guarantees voters, including minority voters, an opportunity to cast a vote for their preferred candidate, but that candidate’s chances of success may be affected by the choices that the state is allowed to make when drawing a redistricting map – such as the desire to protect incumbents or increase the number of seats held by a particular political party. And under the Constitution, Alito continued, a violation of Section 2 only occurs when “the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred” – for example, when there are several possible maps that contain majority-minority districts, but the state “cannot provide a legitimate reason for rejecting all those maps.”

Slate‘s Richard L. Hasen proclaims, “The Supreme Court’s Conservatives Just Issued the Worst Ruling in a Century.”

Wednesday’s 6–3 party-line decision in Louisiana v. Callais will go down in history as one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the last century. All six Republican-appointed justices on the court signed onto Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion gutting what remained of the Voting Rights Act protections for minority voters, while pretending they were merely making technical tweaks to the act.

This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils, by ending the protections of Section 2 of the act, which had provided a pathway to assure that voters of color would have some rudimentary fair representation. It’s the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy, and a brazen willingness to reject Congress’ judgment that fair representation for minority voters sometimes requires race-conscious legislation. It gives the green light to further partisan gerrymandering. It protects Alito’s core constituency: aggrieved white Republican voters. It’s a disaster for American democracy.

The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer contends “Voters Can Be Disenfranchised Now.”

The decision purports to uphold Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting, but effectively nullifies it, ruling that a Louisiana redistricting map that created two majority-Black districts out of six, in a state whose population is one-third Black, was an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” The majority opinion uses procedural language to obscure what its rewriting of the VRA will allow lawmakers to do: engage in racial discrimination in drawing political districts as long as they say they are doing so for a partisan purpose rather than a racist one—as if the results would not be identical.

In states with large Black populations that remain under Republican control—half of the Black American population resides in the South—lawmakers will now be able to draw districts that dilute Black residents’ voting power. In his opinion for the right-wing majority, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “in considering the constitutionality of a districting scheme, courts must treat partisan advantage like any other race-neutral aim: a constitutionally permissible criterion that States may rely on as desired.”

[…]

[W]hat the Roberts Court is making possible, is a country where white people can maintain their political dominance at the expense of Americans who are not white. The anticaste provisions of the Reconstruction amendments, intended by their authors to reverse the “horrid blasphemy” that America was a white man’s country, are being inverted to defend that dominance. This is not the color-blindness of Martin Luther King Jr., but what the scholar Ian Haney López has called “reactionary colorblindness,” the purpose of which is to maintain racial hierarchy through superficially neutral means. It takes the view that the Constitution’s “color-blindness” renders any attempt to remedy anti-Black racism unconstitutional, because by definition that would involve making racial distinctions. Similarly, the ruling in this case does not explicitly overturn the VRA’s ban on racial discrimination in voting so much as rewrite it to allow such discrimination.

I shared my thoughts on this seemingly inevitable ruling in my October post, “End of the Voting Rights Act?“

Given that we’ve been essentially a 50-50 nation the last decade-plus, stacking the deck to make it nearly impossible for Democrats to win is obviously wildly undemocratic. But Section 2 has been living on borrowed time for decades, with conservative and even moderate Justices being skeptical of race-conscious remedies going back at least as far as the Bakke decision in 1978. Case after case since then, at least as recently as 2023’s Students v Harvard, have held that the Equal Protection Clause prohibits race-based discrimination, even if intended to remedy the ongoing effects of past discrimination.

The creation of “majority minority” districts, first done during the 1990 redistricting cycle, always struck me as problematic. I so happened to move to Alabama’s newly created 7th Congressional District to start graduate school in 1992. It was created by connecting the Blackest parts of Tuscaloosa with the Blackest parts of Birmingham, which was just bizarre. But it had the desired impact of essentially guaranteeing Alabama would have a Black Congressman for the first time since the Reconstruction era. It also had the probably unintended consequence of “bleaching” the other six districts, virtually guaranteeing they would be represented not only by White Congressmen but by White Republicans.

Regardless, assuming the ruling goes as predicted and Section 2 is either ruled unconstitutional or significantly neutered, it will remove the last remaining barrier to hyper-gerrymandering.

Unlike the commenters quoted above, I actually see the specific ruling here as incredibly modest. The damage was done years ago when the Supreme Court ruled, probably correctly from a textualist standpoint, that the Constitution does not prohibit partisan gerrymandering. This simply officially removes a barrier that no longer existed in practice. So long as the gerrymandering is done to advantage Republicans rather than to disadvantage Black and Hispanic voters, it’s constitutionally fine.

On this morning’s episode of The Daily, “A Landmark Ruling on Civil Rights,” guests Adam Liptak and Nick Corasaniti predicted that this would supercharge the already ongoing race to gerrymander Congressional districts. But that process is already feeding itself, with states like California and Virginia abandoning nonpartisan districting commissions to gain partisan advantage (granted, in response to efforts by Republican-dominated states to do the same). But, given the overwhelming advantage Democrats have with Black voters, they’ll have a harder time using this ruling to their advantage.

I don’t have the energy to even try and unpack all of this this at the moment, but all of this is worth documenting (in escalating order of dumb, for the most part).

Via NPR: Kid Rock flies in Army helicopter weeks after flights near his house drew scrutiny.

Kid Rock and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth both flew in Army Apache attack helicopters at a base in Virginia on Monday, weeks after military pilots drew scrutiny for hovering near the entertainer’s Tennessee home.

On social media Monday night, Hegseth posted photos of himself and Kid Rock at the base. “Kid Rock is a patriot and huge supporter of our troops,” Hegseth wrote.

What is this administration’s obsession with Kid Rock?

While, yes, this is not the first time an administration has hosted a celebrity guest, but this feels especially transgressive after the pilots who buzzed Kid Rock’s hosue first got in trouble (as they should have) and then Hegseth blocked any punishment.

Army aviators in March flew the same type of helicopters near the home of the musician, who is an outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump. The helicopters also flew over a “No Kings” protest against the Trump administration in Nashville, prompting questions about flight safety and whether either maneuver was authorized.

The Army initially said it would investigate the March flights, which involved crews from the 101st Airborne Division at nearby Fort Campbell, and suspended the pilots involved. However, Hegseth quickly intervened and shut down the inquiry.

Army officials said at the time that the helicopters were on a training mission when they stopped by Kid Rock’s house and that their presence had nothing to do with the protest.

Feels a lot like an endorsement of political commentry by members of the armed services by the SecDef and/or giving a special treat to a celebrity supporter of the president.

Then we have this from Truth Social on Wednesday morning:

I know that on one level, many Americans are ignoring his weird provocations in social media (if not ignoring the war itself), but it seems worth nothing that is not normal and is profoundly unserious.

But, I guess once you’ve threatend the death of a civilization only to TACO out and starting treating bridge and powerplant day the way you treated infrastructure week in your first term, a lot of people will tune you out.

For the record: I am glad he TACO’ed out on his maximalist threats, but he does keep blustering only to end up claiming pretend victories and the wash-rinse-repeating.

Then was the lawsuit filed over the ballroom. Check out the AP headline: Justice Department legal argument for the White House ballroom reads like a Trump social media post.

The 16-page filing, which was signed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and submitted by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, is a sign of the extraordinary degree to which the president has demolished the wall of independence that the Justice Department has historically had separating itself from the White House.

“The National Trust for Historic Preservation’ is a beautiful name, but even their name is FAKE because when they add the words ‘in the United States’ to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, it makes it sound like a Governmental Agency, which it is not,” the filing’s first sentence reads.

I guess Blanche really wants to be AG.

Speaking of the ball room, I am old enough to remember when it was going to be totally paid for by private funds (source):

Back to Blanche and his job aspirations, Ken White has a must-read piece on the laterst Comey indictment: The Comey Threat Indictment Is A Grave Embarrassment To The United States Department of Justice And The Rule of Law.

On April 28, 2026, the United States Department of Justice indicted former FBI Director James Comey over a mildly sassy arrangement of seashells. The charge is preposterous and no competent or honest prosecutor would bring it. It represents a betrayal of the professional and ethical obligations of every U.S. Department of Justice attorney involved, and reflects the complete collapse of the Department’s credibility and independence in favor of a cultish and cretinous devotion to Donald Trump.

[…]

As a lawyer commenting on the Trump administration’s legal arguments, I face a challenge: how do I convey to non-lawyers, or even lawyers in different fields, the shameless fatuity of some of the Trump Justice Department’s arguments? Words fail. This case is overtly, obviously, on its face, ridiculous and premised on a foolish and unconstitutional theory. I know it as confidently that those of you who work with numbers know that 2 + 2 = 5 is not a plausible argument. I know it as confidently that those of you in the arts know that “John Wayne Gacy is the most respected American painter” is wrong.

Yet we live under a Department of Justice that will commit this travesty and argue it’s valid. Even now, members of Congress — nominally sworn to defend the Constitution — are defending it. And soon enough, some puerile throne-sniffer of the legal academy — some Wurman, some Barnett, some Turley — will emerge to argue that it’s plausible, so thoroughly has Trumpism corrupted us.

Not only is all of the absurd, it is dangerous and demostrates the subversion of the DoJ. As White notes in his piece, it is going to take a while to reclaim what has been lost, if it even can be reclaimed.

Bonus clip:

The Atlantic‘s Jonathan Chait wants you to know that “Calling Trump a Tyrant Is Not a Call to Violence.”

To describe Donald Trump as a corrupt aspiring authoritarian is not to conclude that he should be murdered.

This ought to be a simple point to understand. Yet it is lost on a large swath of the American right, who insist that calling Trump what he is causes at least some of his opponents—among them, the accused shooter Cole Tomas Allen—to believe that violence is justified against the president.

Offhand, this is an obvious non sequitur. Labeling someone or something as something odious is not inherently a call to destroy or otherwise do harm. But it may well nonetheless persuade someone that violence against that person or thing is justified.

But Chait is not being abstract.

In an interview with CBS following the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, Trump blamed the most recent attempt on his life on “the hate speech of the Democrats,” which he called “very dangerous.”

Leaving aside the degree to which we should presume Trump cares about analytical rigor, capitalizing on violent acts to delegitimize one’s political opponents is a time-honored tradition. The first instance that comes to mind was President Clinton’s blaming the Oklahoma City bombing on right-wing talk radio.

We hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other. They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable.

I’m sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves in America today. Well, people like that who want to share our freedoms must know that their bitter words can have consequences, and that freedom has endured in this country for more than two centuries because it was coupled with an enormous sense of responsibility.

That was more than three decades ago. While Clinton’s framing was more nuanced, the messaging is identical. And we’ve seen this sort of talk just about every time an act of political violence occurs.

My view on this has been consistent: absent direct incitement, the only ones responsible for these acts are the perpetrators. At the same time, extreme language suggesting that a politician, organization, movement, group, or whathaveyou is an existential threat will naturally lead some to believe violence is an acceptable response.

The New York Post asked on Sunday, “Where did Allen get such ideas about Trump and the need to remove him, via murder?” It answered the question like so: “Almost certainly from the left, including from Democrats in positions of power. Barely a day goes by without some Dem calling Trump an autocrat, a king, a dictator, Hitler.”

Also on Sunday, CNN’s Dana Bash asked Representative Jamie Raskin to engage with the premise. “You and many of your fellow Democrats have used some heated rhetoric against the president,” she said. “Do you think twice about that when something like this happens?” And yesterday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt charged, “Those who constantly falsely label and slander the president as a fascist, as a threat to democracy, and compare him to Hitler to score political points are fueling this kind of violence.”

So, again: I see this mostly as an attempt to poison the well and put the political opposition on the back foot. Free speech—including especially the right to call the chief executive a tyrant—is literally a foundational principle of this country. But that doesn’t mean nuts or extremists won’t take the next logical step. Indeed, Sic semper tyrannis is emblazoned on my state’s flag.

This claim suffers three serious defects. First, it assumes that violence is the only logical response to an attempt to undermine democracy. In reality, Trump’s assault on democratic norms can be—and in fact, is being—successfully resisted through democratic means. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán had carried out a more advanced version of the same power-consolidation strategy that Trump is attempting now, and voters defeated him through peaceful organizing.

Not only is our political system considerably more convoluted than Hungary’s, it’s notable that peaceful organizing has twice failed to stop his election. The first time, despite his getting fewer votes than his opponent.

The second problem with a moratorium on calling your opponents authoritarian is that Trump himself routinely violates it. The president has spent a decade calling his rivals communists and traitors, among other hyperbolic insults. He has specifically claimed that Democrats rig elections as a matter of course. Taking violent steps to stop undemocratic political leaders follows much more closely from Trump’s rhetoric than from anything Democrats have said about him.

This would seem to buttress the opposite argument to the one Chait is advancing. The violent rhetoric of Trump and the broader MAGA-aligned movement has indeed precipated violence.

And third, the conservative principle would seem to rule out any criticism of authoritarian tendencies, however real they may be. If calling a politician an aspiring authoritarian is tantamount to inciting their murder, then doing so is irresponsible even if the charge is true. Republicans could nominate the reanimated corpse of Benito Mussolini for president, and Democrats couldn’t question his commitment to democracy without being accused of ginning up violence.

I suppose it depends on whether you think killing Hitler or Mussolini justified. But, yes, I agree that the communicative value of applying extreme (even if valid) labels to one’s opponents is worth the risk someone will take it to its (illogical) conclusion, especially in extreme cases. It’s also true that we have normalized that kind of rhetoric for a very long time, including in cases where the basis is considerably less valid—even absurd.

Ideally, critics of Trump’s threat to democracy would recognize that authoritarianism is on a dimmer switch, not an on-off switch, and that his opponents have ample space to oppose him through democratic channels. They would likewise acknowledge that even most dictators fall far short of the horrors of Hitlerism. That distinction is widely, if not universally, understood, which is why the rallies are called “No Kings,” not “No Führers.”

Indeed. Although I must admit amusement that I’m reading this on the day King Charles III spoke to Congress, extoling the virtues of limited government.

The ruling as out of bounds any discussion of Trump’s contempt for democracy is not merely some unfortunate by-product of the right’s rhetorical gambit, but its central purpose. Trump has been glorifying and stoking violence since he entered politics. He has urged his rally-goers to “kick the crap out of” counterprotesters; has fantasized about unleashing the brute strength of his supporters (“I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad”); and, of course, mass-pardoned the insurrectionists who did precisely that on January 6, 2021.

Of course, this means that calling Trump a tyrant or worse is more likely to be taken seriously. Which is both useful in terms of its intended goal of mobilizing political support and more likely to generate unintended acts of violence.

There’s more to the piece, but that’s the gist. Chait and I fundamentally agree: calling out Trump’s illiberal acts, and labeling it appropriately, is fundamental to how our system is supposed to work. Attempts to poison the well by linking it to violence is illiberal. But, yes, raising the stakes can have unintended yet foreseeable consequences. We should own that trade-off rather than pretending it doesn’t exist.

Politico reports: State Department to release limited edition ‘America250’ passports with Trump’s face.

“As the United States celebrates America’s 250th anniversary in July, the State Department is preparing to release a limited number of specially designed U.S. passports to commemorate this historic occasion,” State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott said in a statement. He added that the passports will have “the same security features that make the U.S. Passport the most secure documents in the world.”

The new passports are expected to be released in July as part of the Trump administration’s America250 initiative that includes a UFC fight at the White House and a Grand Prix street race in Washington, D.C.

The Department of State reported this on Twitter earlier today:

This is not normal.

Let me repeat: this is not normal.

Sitting presidents in normal democracies do not plaster their name and likeness on official documents and buildings. They are not supposed to be symbols of the country.

Nor are they supposed to be avatars of a major national celebration.

Trump is branding the United States with his name and likeness. This is personalistic dictator stuff.

Thank goodness I already got my passport renewed about a month ago. Can you imagine being stuck with Trump’s face in your passport for a decade?

I am not even going to get into the Grand Prix and the UFC fight, but let’s just say neither screams “America’s 250th birthday.”

Sunday, reflecting on yet another assassination attempt on President Trump,* Steven Taylor noted that “We are Steeped in Violence.” He noted that mass shootings are on the rise, the Justice Department is talking of bringing back the firing squad, the Defense Department is hyping “lethality,” and radical rhetoric is everywhere.

The WSJ adds another data point in its report,”The Year of the Molotov Cocktail: American Antigovernment Violence Hits a 30-Year High.” After some scene setting, they note:

[D]omestic attacks and plots against the U.S. government are at their highest levels since at least 1994, according to data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. For the first time in 20 years, they are coming from extremists on the left in greater numbers than the right, the center’s data shows. Of the 20 attacks and plots recorded in 2025, the center categorized 10 as originating from the extreme left and eight as coming from the extreme right.

Half the incidents from the extreme left last year appear to have been aimed at immigration officers or facilities in response to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Another was an attempted attack on the Dickinson County Republican Committee Headquarters in Michigan.

Violence from the extreme-right has also climbed. A Democratic state lawmaker and her husband were killed in Minnesota last June. One police officer was killed in August after a man who had been critical of the Covid-19 vaccine fired 500 rounds outside the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

All told, three people were killed last year in attacks characterized as extreme right, while one died after an attack classed as extreme left. Classifying extremism attacks is a murky business. The CSIS data sorts attacks by political leanings where possible based on court documents and contemporaneous reporting. Perpetrators often don’t fit into neat categories. Some attacks on U.S. political figures, like the one on Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, whose residence was set on fire last April, were allegedly motivated by events abroad.

D.C. police say the alleged attacker on Saturday night was carrying a shotgun, handgun and multiple knives. That fits a pattern: Firearms have increasingly been used to carry out plots and attacks, the data show.

However, last year’s weapon of choice was the Molotov cocktail. That crude, incendiary device (symbolic of revolutionary politics) featured in at least seven attacks or plots, including the one on Shapiro’s residence and two efforts to attack immigration agents.

Last January, a Massachusetts woman told Capitol Police that she planned to throw Molotov cocktails at the feet of then-Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent. In another incident, a man set fire to a California post office, intending to “make a point to the United States government.”

They include this chart:

I’m dubious of assigning ideological motives to crackpots, but CSIS is a reputable, nonpartisan source. Regardless, the main point isn’t the ideological distribution of the violence but rather its frequency.

Like Steven, I both condemn the violence and understand it. We have increasingly cast our politics as existential. Every presidential election in my lifetime has been “the most important presidential election in our lifetimes.” And, as the parties have polarized and sorted, the stakes have certainly increased: every election is a referendum on the future of race relations, gay rights, trans rights, abortion rights, gun rights, etc.

At the same time, the safety valve that deligitimates violence in a democracy—elections—have become increasingly meaningless. Gerrymandered House seats mean few of the 435 districts are truly in play; the winner of the dominant party’s primary is all but assured of election. This is true for the Senate and Electoral College in all but a handful of states. So, for all practical purposes, most Americans have no real say come Election Day.

And that’s to say nothing of the counter-democratic, if not outright undemocratic, features that have been bolted onto the system. Voter suppression efforts by state legislatures to further skew outcomes. The routine use of the filibuster has made it almost impossible to pass legislation. A Supreme Court with an extreme partisan skew that tends to strike down policies enacted by Democrats at a much higher rate than those enacted by Republicans.

Violence is a tool of the powerless. And more and more people feel powerless.

*Granted that he was between terms the previous two attempts, they were still attempts to radically influence the shape of American politics through violence.