“…and will to the best of my ability…”
Yeah, well…
“…preserve, protect, and defend…”
That time I made a public comment about him in 2018, trying to defend the Court as above politics—what did he tweet? “Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges.’” Won’t make that mistake again.
“…the Constitution of the United States…”
But the tough words I used in my 2024 year-end report about public officials “regrettably” attempting to intimidate judges—surely he got the message, right?
“So help me God.”
All that time in the Harvard Law library. Then clerking for Rehnquist, working my way up the Court ranks. The hours listening to Alito whine about his wife’s stupid flags. Now I’m about to turn 70—and it’s this guy and the next four years that are going to define my legacy. Amazing.
“Congratulations, Mr. President.”
Whew, he didn’t give me the death grip handshake. Do I really need to stop by the after-party in Clarence’s RV?
Kathryn Joyce, investigative reporter who wrote, mostly recently, on the “Catholic right’s celebrity-conversion industrial complex”
Several years ago, when I first began reporting on Republican attacks on education, one advocate I spoke to compared what Governor Ron DeSantis was doing to K–12 public schools in Florida to what had happened in Chile under Pinochet, as the effects of dismantling a public good continued long after the dictatorship had ended. “It’s like Humpty Dumpty,” she told me. “Once you get the system to fall, you can’t put it back together again.”
I’ve been thinking about that line a lot lately. Certainly in terms of how right-wing attacks on education at all levels are going to continue and escalate, with what DeSantis did to Florida’s New College serving as an indirect model for other states and now the federal government. But also so many other systems, public and private, that we take for granted but are actually incredibly fragile.
I’m also thinking a lot about how the Christian right, in all its varieties, is going to continue to be a dynamic source of badness, but also about how religious bodies themselves are fragile institutions. And as nationalistic, and white nationalistic, versions of religion become an increasingly formal part of the Trump administration, and sympathetic state governments, there will continue to be fights for the souls of those institutions that are worth our attention.
James Robenalt, author, lawyer, and presidential historian
On March 4, 1801, Thomas Jefferson delivered his first inaugural address in the new capital city of Washington, DC. He spoke at a time when political parties were being birthed, threatening to tear apart the nation, still in its infancy. John Adams, a Federalist and the country’s second president, was defeated by Jefferson, his Democratic-Republican vice president.
The campaign was beyond ugly. Jefferson’s Federalist opponents charged in newspapers that he was an atheist and warned that “there is scarcely a possibility that we shall escape a civil war. Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced.” The passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts by the Federalist-controlled legislature gave President Adams the power to imprison and deport noncitizens and criminalized the making of false and malicious statements about the federal government—resulting in Democratic-Republican publishers being prosecuted and jailed. As worrisome, the election of 1800 ended in a tie between Jefferson and Aaron Burr, his supposed vice presidential pick. (The Constitution had to be amended to fix this anomaly.) The election was thrown to the House of Representatives—controlled by Federalists—to pick the winner. Violence and “stolen election” charges flew. Jefferson was selected just weeks before his inauguration.