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Yesterday, Donald Trump’s Supreme Court told him he could keep building his stupid taxpayer-funded ballroom.
I wasn’t surprised. You shouldn’t be either. But the ballroom isn’t really the story. It’s just the latest blip. At this point, the operating assumption should be that this Court will let this man do essentially anything he wants, and the only real question is how they’ll dress it up on the way to saying yes. That is not a court. That is a permission slip. It is a partisan institution staffed with political operatives who are not interested in acting as jurists, not interested in the rule of law, and not interested in the American people. They are interested in outcomes. They have been for a long time.
That building has been corrupted — by Trump, by the absentee Mitch McConnell, and by a few decades’ worth of Republicans who figured out that if you can’t win the argument, you buy the referee. There is no integrity left in it. And I want to be careful here, because I know how that sounds. I’m not saying it to be edgy. I’m saying it because my entire adult political life has been shaped by that Court making decisions that a rational person cannot square with anything resembling law.
I am still mad about Bush v. Gore. Genuinely, in my chest, still mad. I believe Al Gore would have been president if they had simply let people finish counting the votes. That’s it. That’s the whole ask. Count the votes. The Supreme Court of the United States stopped the counting of votes in an American election, and most people went to brunch. Then 9/11 happened and we all forgot.
Then watch what McConnell did. He held a Supreme Court seat hostage for a year to keep Barack Obama from filling it. Then, when the Access Hollywood tape dropped and Donald Trump’s political career was lying on the floor of the Republican Party bleeding out, that stolen seat is what resuscitated him. It gave every squeamish Republican a reason to hold their nose and get in line. McConnell didn’t just steal a seat from Obama. He saved Trump. And then the rules kept changing, and the arguments kept getting more transparently full of shit, and the political press kept nodding along like they were covering a tennis match instead of a heist. McConnell understood something Democrats have spent far too long refusing to understand: power unused is power surrendered. He had it. He used it. And we have been living with the consequences ever since.
And here we are. A Court that has decided the president is essentially immune for his crimes. A Court where four justices were unwilling to fully say that a president cannot rewrite the Constitution with the stroke of an executive order. A Court that gives this man whatever he asks for. And an administration that keeps coming back, keeps pushing, keeps testing every remaining guardrail — birthright citizenship, mail-in ballots, executive power, whatever comes next. And you can bet your last dollar that the second we elect a Democratic president, these same people will rediscover their deep and abiding concern about the limits of executive power — right on time, right when we need that power to actually do something for somebody.
So let me say the thing plainly. Democrats are never going to deliver the kind of lasting change this country needs until we are willing to confront what has happened to this Court — and what it represents. Not “message better.” Not “win the news cycle.” Reset the Court. Undo what Trump and McConnell did to what is supposed to be the most important check in this entire system. And stop pretending that preserving broken institutions is the same thing as defending them.
That means hard decisions — exactly the kind of decisions that technocratic, credentialed, deeply cautious Democrats have spent my whole career avoiding. We may need to add seats. We absolutely need serious ethics reform, because there are multiple justices who are very obviously taking bribes, who have relationships they will not disclose, who refuse to recuse when their friends and benefactors have business in front of them. I have come around to term limits. And I want radical financial transparency — not just for the Court, but for every politician in this country. Health records too. We are being lied to, and we have been lied to by multiple generations of politicians, and yes, the members of the Supreme Court are politicians whether they’ll admit it or not.
This requires wholesale reform. And it requires a Democratic Party willing to actually do it.
This is the argument at the heart of Endless Urgency: power is not the problem. What matters is who uses it, how they use it, and who benefits. If you want to help build a politics that moves with urgency for working people instead of billionaires and demagogues, become a paid subscriber. $8/month keeps this work going and helps us reach more people.
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And that reform can’t stop at the Court. The immunity ruling may make criminal prosecution extraordinarily difficult, but civil liability still matters. Following money made through bribery, extortion, insider trading, or market manipulation matters. Other countries have done this after corrupt regimes — Peru after Fujimori, the Philippines after Marcos, Nigeria after Abacha — recovering billions through permanent investigative institutions and international cooperation.
We must be prepared to do the same. Because if the Trump family walks away from this era vastly wealthier than it entered it, that money becomes power — and power becomes protection. We’re handing the next generation the money and influence to make sure they’re even harder to hold accountable than the last.
I have been a loyal Democrat my entire life. I intend to be one for as long as I have air in my lungs, as long as this party is fighting for working people and for our individual freedoms. But I’ll tell you where my line is. When we take back the House, and we take back the Senate, and we take back the White House — if this party doesn’t take the steps necessary to make sure that what we’ve lived through in the last year and a half can never happen again, if we go right back to protecting norms that Republicans already destroyed, I will be standing right alongside most of you trying to burn the whole damn thing down.
Because Republicans did this. Let’s be clear about that. But part of the reason we’re here is that Democrats wouldn’t do the hard thing when it was available to us. We could have banned insider trading. We could have fixed the Court. We could have fixed campaign finance. We didn’t. And the why matters: it’s an adherence to norms that don’t actually exist anymore, a Washington culture that protects its own, and a bone-deep unwillingness to stand up to entrenched power and concentrated wealth. It’s a fear of using power because somebody might accuse us of using power. Meanwhile, Republicans use it. Relentlessly.
That has to stop, and I think it’s starting to. In my conversations with clients, with candidates thinking about running, with organizers and staffers — more people understand this now than at any point in my career. What Trump has done over the last eighteen months has radicalized people inside our own party into realizing that our relationship to power is broken. We have spent too much time treating power like something dirty instead of what it actually is: a tool. The question isn’t whether you use it. The question is what you use it for.
We should emulate his urgency. But only his urgency. Nothing else. He wakes up every day and moves with total speed to lie and cheat and steal from the American people. He doesn’t wonder whether he’s moving too fast. He doesn’t worry whether some fucking panel on cable news will call him too aggressive. He identifies the power available to him and uses every inch of it. That’s why I named this thing Endless Urgency — it’s my personal motto, but it’s also what I watched him do, and what I want us to do in reverse. Move that fast so people don’t go bankrupt when they get sick. Move that fast so forty hours of work buys a decent life. Move that fast so people can live with dignity and self-determination. Move that fast to repair the institutions they’ve broken. Move that fast to give people a government they can actually believe in again.
We have done it before. We’re the party of the New Deal. We’re the party of the Great Society. We’re the party that carried the Civil Rights Act across the finish line. Goddamn it, remember who we are.
So when you feel that rage watching this Court do the inevitable — hand this man more power — don’t let it curdle. The Republican Party lost its way by becoming a party of grievance, punishing enemies because it feels good. We don’t do that. We take the rage and we turn it into action, and we wield power for the vast majority of Americans who already agree with us on the issues but have stopped believing we can deliver. Their rage became cruelty. We don’t do that. Ours has to become construction. We take the rage and we turn it into action, and we wield power for the vast majority of Americans who already ag ree with us on the issues but have stopped believing we can deliver. And then we fucking deliver.
We can be that party again. I believe it.
Let’s get to work.
With urgency,
—Mike
An ethics code with teeth. Enforced by the congress (cut off the court’s money 💰)
I’m voting for the candidate who will put term limits on these bums