Jun 09 - Today’s reading
Constitutional Amendments
Lawyers, Guns & Money by Dan Nexon / Jun 8, 2025 at 4:17 AM
I’ve argued that the defects of the U.S. Constitution — as interpreted by the Roberts Court and exploited by the Trump administration — leave us no choice but to pursue a long-term goal of amending it. I’ve also hypothesized that the very process of advocating for a set of amendments could be politically useful from a messaging perspective. Consider how the politics of the Republican “balanced budget amendment” during Clinton’s first term — an amendment which, in fact, almost made it to the states for ratification.
The idea — and I should be clear that this entire post falls under the category of “spitballing” or “brainstorming” or at maybe even “pub conversation” — requires relatively simple amendments that a) are good ideas and b) structure debate in a way that is advantageous to pro-democracy reformers. So let me put it this way: if we had already decided on the strategy, what would those amendments look like?
My inclination favors short, modular amendments. I’d call the larger proposal, or al least the platform that included them, something like “The New Declaration of Independence” and then sort them into broad categories along the lines of “No More Kings” or “No Taxation without Representation” or “Independence from Corruption.” Here are some examples:
No One is Above the Law
Presidents and former Presidents enjoy no immunity from criminal prosecution, including for actions within their conclusive or preclusive constitutional authority.
However, the President of the United States is presumptively protected from federal criminal prosecution during, and only during, his time in office. This protection does not extend to former Presidents, nor to any person who has been elected President more than twice or who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than ten years.
Congress has the authority to suspend a President’s protection from federal criminal prosecution by resolution, provided the resolution is passed by three-fifths majorities of both houses. The procedure for suspending this protection shall otherwise follow those established for impeachment and conviction, and may be pursued in conjunction with that process.
No President may pardon himself. No President may pardon a former President if he served as Vice President at any time during the former President’s term of office.
The President is not a King
The executive powers vested in a President of the United States of America are enumerated in Article II, and shall not be construed to otherwise include powers or prerogatives enjoyed by the Kings of England or other monarchs.
Protecting the Integrity of the Pardon Power
The Power of the President to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States is hereby amended and qualified:
Congress shall, within three months of the adoption of this amendment, establish and provide for a Federal Board of Reprieves and Pardons.
The size of the Board shall be established by statute, but shall include at least five voting officers. Its voting officers must be either former or sitting member of the federal judiciary. Current members of the Supreme Court of the United States are ineligible for appointment to the Board.
No more than one-third of the Board’s members may have been nominated to the federal judiciary by any single President of the United States, regardless of whether that President served consecutive or non-consecutive terms.
Except in cases involving capital punishment, the President may grant Reprieves or Pardons only to individuals who have been vetted and recommended by a plurality of the aforementioned Board within the prior six months — but only if the plurality vote included members who were nominated to the federal judiciary by at least two different Presidents.
Neither the President nor the Vice President may attempt to influence the recommendations of the Board Evidence of such influence will constitute grounds for legal challenges to a Reprieve or Pardon, as well as provide a basis for impeachment proceedings.
If the President declines to issue a pardon to such an individual, the Board may reconsider and resubmit their recommendation after six months has elapsed.
Presidents may, in cases involving capital punishment, grant a temporary Reprieve pending full consideration of the case by the Board within the next six months. If the Board declines to recommend a permanent Reprieve, the President is empowered to Commute the sentence to one of life imprisonment. The use of these powers does not constitute “influence” as described in Section 5.
This last one is more complicated than is ideal. And obviously we’d want an amendment to enshrine the constitutionality of independent agencies, irrespective of whether or not the “President is not a King” amendment (or its equivalent) already does so.
Ideas? As I said, consider this an opportunity to think about constitutional reforms, especially ones that essentially reaffirm longstanding precedents or attempt to reign in abuse of power.
Apologies for typos, but I really can’t spend any more time on this.
The post Constitutional Amendments appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.
NEXT ARTICLE:
A shattered world: Revisiting “1984”
Lawyers, Guns & Money by Paul Campos / Jun 7, 2025 at 10:36 PM
Share
I’ve been re-reading 1984 from beginning to end, which is something I don’t think I’ve done since 1984 itself, when I was graduate TA for a class about the book. I’ve looked up certain passages many times in the interim, but I’ve been struck by how I had forgotten much of the book’s actual plot.
One thing I had also sort of forgotten is what an incredibly grim book it is. Taken as prophecy — which in some ways it was clearly intended to be, although Orwell also emphasized that it was a satire of the present rather than a literal prediction of the future — the book’s message could be reduced to this famous passage:
He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: ‘How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’
Winston thought. ‘By making him suffer,’ he said.
‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.’
Part of what gives the book its extraordinary bleakness is that Orwell was a sick and eventually dying man, as he wrote it in fits and starts between 1944 and 1948, doing much of the writing on a primitive and isolated island off Scotland. (Orwell died of tuberculosis just seven months after the book was published in the summer of 1949).
But here I want to focus on another factor, which is that it’s difficult to appreciate today what an utterly catastrophic period the years 1914-1945 — essentially all of Orwell’s life after his early childhood, as he was born in 1903 — was for the world view that had dominated much of intellectual life, at least in the western world, for many decades prior to that. Orwell captures this shift in an essay about H.G. Wells’s failure to grasp the meaning of Nazism:
If one looks through nearly any book that [Wells] has written in the last forty years one finds the same idea constantly recurring: the supposed antithesis between the man of science who is working towards a planned World State and the reactionary who is trying to restore a disorderly past. In novels, Utopias, essays, films, pamphlets, the antithesis crops up, always more or less the same. On the one side science, order, progress, internationalism, aeroplanes, steel, concrete, hygiene: on the other side war, nationalism, religion, monarchy, peasants, Greek professors, poets, horses. History as he sees it is a series of victories won by the scientific man over the romantic man. Now, he is probably right in assuming that a ‘reasonable,’ planned form of society, with scientists rather than witch-doctors in control, will prevail sooner or later, but that is a different matter from assuming that it is just round the corner. There survives somewhere or other an interesting controversy which took place between Wells and Churchill at the time of the Russian Revolution. Wells accuses Churchill of not really believing his own propaganda about the Bolsheviks being monsters dripping with blood, etc., but of merely fearing that they were going to introduce an era of common sense and scientific control, in which flag-wavers like Churchill himself would have no place. Churchill’s estimate of the Bolsheviks, however, was nearer the mark than Wells’s. The early Bolsheviks may have been angels or demons, according as one chooses to regard them, but at any rate they were not sensible men. They were not introducing a Wellsian Utopia but a Rule of the Saints, which like the English Rule of the Saints, was a military despotism enlivened by witchcraft trials. The same misconception reappears in an inverted form in Wells’s attitude to the Nazis. Hitler is all the war-lords and witch-doctors in history rolled into one. Therefore, argues Wells, he is an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost immediately. But unfortunately the equation of science with common sense does not really hold good. The aeroplane, which was looked forward to as a civilising influence but in practice has hardly been used except for dropping bombs, is the symbol of that fact. Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age. Science is fighting on the side of superstition. But obviously it is impossible for Wells to accept this. It would contradict the world-view on which his own works are based. The war-lords and the witch-doctors must fail, the common-sense World State, as seen by a nineteenth-century Liberal whose heart does not leap at the sound of bugles, must triumph. Treachery and defeatism apart, Hitler cannot be a danger. That he should finally win would be an impossible reversal of history, like a Jacobite restoration.
Orwell conceived the plan for 1984 while the Nazis were still very much not defeated, and he wrote it in the shadow of the triumph of a Stalinist dictatorship which was every bit as totalitarian — and indeed quite a bit more “rational” in modern bureaucratic terms — as the Nazis themselves.
The other huge development that shaped the writing of the novel was the invention and deployment of the atom bomb, which of course did not exist when he began writing the book. The novel imagines some sort of devastating nuclear exchange in the 1950s, after which three mega-states divide the world up to avoid the complete annihilation of any form of civilization. Orwell’s thoughts on the atom bomb itself are also interesting:
Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected. The newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the average man, of protons and neutrons doing their stuff, and there has been much reiteration of the useless statement that the bomb “ought to be put under international control.” But curiously little has been said, at any rate in print, about the question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely: “How difficult are these things to manufacture?” . . .
From various symptoms one can infer that the Russians do not yet possess the secret of making the atomic bomb; on the other hand, the consensus of opinion seems to be that they will possess it within a few years. So we have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them. It has been rather hastily assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps an actual end to the machine civilisation. But suppose – and really this the likeliest development – that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.
This was, I would say, a very plausible hypothesis in the immediate aftermath of World War II. (The other big influence on Orwell’s thought here was James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, which he discusses in another interesting essay).
In short, 1984 was written by a man whose entire life had been dominated by the spectacle of two incredibly destructive and insane wars, that killed collectively more than 100 million people, the industrialized mass murder of the Holocaust, the global crisis of capitalism in the 1930s, the rise of a new form of comprehensive despotism in the totalitarian regimes of Germany and the USSR, and the invention of a weapon via the most advanced form of scientific technology that clearly had the potential to destroy civilization.
This was a period that pretty much destroyed the sunny optimism of previous couple of generations, which assumed that science and technology, under the control of rational secular Enlightenment thinking, were guaranteeing that the arc of history was inevitably towards progress, understood in rational bureaucratic terms, and away from the superstitious despotism and desperate poverty of the past. (This of course was never a universally held view, but it was the dominant view of the educated classes in Europe and America from at least the late 18th century until August 1914).
1984 was written amid the smoldering wreckage of the events that had annihilated that optimism, which helps explain why it is such a remarkably grim dystopia.
. . . Should probably be a separate post, but I meant to mention how Trumpism must continue to seem like an inexplicable atavism to so many sensible liberals and moderates, in something like the way that Nazism appeared to be to Wells. History simply CANNOT reverse itself so grossly.
The post A shattered world: Revisiting “1984” appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.
NEXT ARTICLE:
We're Finally On Our Own: Trump Vs. America
The Rude Pundit by Unknown / Jun 9, 2025 at 8:03 AM
Share
There is something you need to understand about Donald Trump and a whole bunch of old motherfuckers from his generation: We look at the Kent State Massacre and think that it was a goddamn nightmare moment in 20th-century American history. Trump and his debased ilk look at it and think, "Too bad the National Guard didn't kill more of those fucking commie hippies." In fact, they look at the protests against the Vietnam War and think that cops should have busted more heads and the military should have opened fire to teach those America-hating kids a thing or two about who has power. The same goes for protests for civil rights, women's rights, and LGBT rights. They wanted more protesters killed as a way of ending the marches and what they saw as violent mobs (who, yes, occasionally did riot, especially when faced with police repression) because, see, they wanted to prove they love this country by purging anyone who didn't love it the same way.
So you should know that, to most of us out here in Sanity Town, the protesters who blocked ICE officers in Paramount, California (after they had raided the local Home Depot and Dale's Donuts in Los Angeles County and picked up migrants who were not committing any crime other than the misdemeanor of being in a place without the right papers) might be heroic. But to Donald Trump, it's a chance for a re-do of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a perfect opportunity to show What We Should Have Done when a right-wing nutzoid was in the White House and didn't feel hindered by laws or morality. Trump has had a hard-on for murder for his whole pathetic, worthless life, valorizing mobsters and fellating dictators, pining for the chance to enact the dream of crazed conservatives since Kent State.
Over on Truth Toilet, Trump has proclaimed, "A once great American City, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals. Now violent, insurrectionist mobs are swarming and attacking our Federal Agents to try and stop our deportation operations — But these lawless riots only strengthen our resolve." There are no riots, only a few tense moments. The protests have been led by Americans. The deportations have rounded up legal immigrants. But that hasn't stopped Trump from calling on his slavering administration of dead-eyed drunks, pedophile enablers, puppy killers, and Stephen Miller to launch a potential military attack inside the country and "to take all such action necessary to liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion, and put an end to these Migrant riots. Order will be restored, the Illegals will be expelled, and Los Angeles will be set free." This is in addition to ordering 2000 National Guard soldiers to Los Angeles (and declaring victory before they ever hit the ground). By the way, you know how you know it wasn't "Migrant riots"? Because if it was migrants, ICE and federal agents would have used lethal ammo and not flash bangs or tear gas.
In a memorandum to the dead-eyed drunk, the pedophile enabler, and the puppy killer, the rapist president said, without a hint of irony, "To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States." You got that? If you slightly inconvenience the mass arrest of peaceful people, it's a rebellion. If you, say, rampage through the Capitol, vandalize the building, attack law enforcement, and prevent the constitutionally-mandated certification of the electoral votes in a presidential election while threatening to hang the vice-president, that's just patriotism, motherfucker, and fuck you if you say otherwise.
Trump and his evil criminal crew are making statements that have no basis in reality to a media ecosystem that will report it as fact to an audience that will only ever see the lies. Where we see Immigration and Customs Enforcement brutally rounding up migrants working their decidedly non-gang-related jobs at construction sites and restaurant kitchens, where we get outraged when a legal migrant checks in at a courthouse as she awaits her asylum hearing and ICE arrests her, where we want to explode with anger at the psychological and physical torture of children seeing their parents arrested or being rounded up and zip-tied themselves, the MAGAnistas are making their brain-dead followers believe that, somehow, 21 million criminals got into the country and joined MS-13 or that Venezuelan gang they can't pronounce and they now are taking over cities that the brain-dead have never heard of before Fox "news" yelled it at them. Or, you know, a "Migrant Invasion."
I honestly don't know how we get out of this without the violence that Trump so obviously craves. Everything has been building to this chance, whether it was calling for the Central Park (now the Exonerated) Five to be executed, or encouraging protesters at his Nazi rallies be beaten, or watching to see if Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi were murdered on January 6th, he wants to kill some people so fucking badly so he can join the ranks of those he worships, so he can make up for all those times the Marxist liberal crazies got away with it. Remember that he had to be talked out of unleashing the military on Black Lives Matter protests. He won't be convinced this time.
The hope, of course, is that the people of Los Angeles, with our encouragement and support, will stand firm in the first real test of Trump vs. America. And one place to look for resistance is the unions, which are being decimated by ICE raids on worksites. Because ICE arrested and injured David Huerta, the genuinely beloved president of the Service Employees International Union in California, the thugs have pissed off the roughly 2 million workers in the SEIU. That's going to activate more protests, and it already has, with events called in Boston, Portland, and elsewhere. It's pissed off the local Teamsters in L.A., which called for "An end to the militarization of immigration enforcement that terrorizes communities and disrupts lives." This is on top of the intense union support for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, which continues to this day.
Things are getting more intense in California, with protests growing across L.A., with Gov. Gavin Newsom finding his spine and calling for the National Guard to be withdrawn. By the time you read this, shit might have gotten even worse.
You're going to see the protesters blamed, but there is only one person who caused all this, all of it, all this shit that's fucking up our lives, and it's Donald Trump. He could end this by stopping his deranged mission to bleach the United States white. But I think the chaos is his Viagra and he's not gonna stop until he fucks us all.
