Justice for All

The government is shut down. Democrats have shown some backbone, and neither they, nor their opponents, are used to this. The latter’s potential outrage must be as terrifying as the novelty. Republicans aren’t in the habit of being stopped, so why start now, just a few miles shy of completing the trench to the 19th century and a few weeks away from criminalizing opposition? 

Abusers are at their most dangerous after being defied, and never more intensely than when their victims are about to escape their control. Even if the Democrats can’t bring themselves to believe it, the Republicans know that their president — the person to whom they have ceded almost all public identity — is deep underwater in the polls. Whatever moment you’re reading this probably represents the highest public approval that Donald Trump will enjoy for the rest of his term — and the best remaining one for Trump to try to take it all.

This means it is also the likeliest moment for Democrats to fumble the ball — which is to say, the likeliest moment for Democrats to arrest any momentum by worrying that they already have fumbled the ball, inevitably will or are in the process of doing so, until it becomes a self-fulfilling anxiety. It has never been more urgent to cut through the cacophony of traditional Democratic strategies, like ceding agency to thought-terminating clichés about conservative hegemony, opening bargaining with timorous half measures or setting goals allergic to frank description. Between now and November 2028, Democratic candidates looking for a guiding idea to harness people’s time and votes, here is your minimum opening bid: revenge. 

If that word seems too divisive, replace it with “justice.” Consider it an unceasing enforcement of criminal statute. This concept shouldn’t be hard to fit in Democratic mouths that are used to twisting themselves around whatever tropes conservatives campaigned on in the last cycle. It is, after all, just Republicans’ eternal tough-on-crime pledge with a twist: Now it also counts when they do it, and anything this overdue is worth overdoing. The Democratic imagination has been so haunted for so long by thoughts of whatever Republicans might do in response to Democrats’ abandoning norms that they’ve done little about Republicans actually violating norm after norm, year after year. Like any good predator, Republicans have noticed that their serial violations — thefts of rights, of security and of the commons — have met no consequences. They must be taught to discipline themselves via the only mechanism they respond to, when the force they project onto their opponents to excuse their behavior actually appears.

Start with the unitary executive. The best way to invalidate this core tool of Trump’s tyranny is to wield it with confidence against Republican malfeasance. Given that almost literally everything a president does is now legal — more so on national security matters, where Donald Trump is serially televising a nautical murder spree — any incoming Democratic administration should detain any Trump administration official, friend or adviser who played any role in the events of Jan. 6, 2021, had anything to do with this administration’s kidnapping and trafficking of human beings, or participated in the United States military’s invasion of the United States on charges of domestic terrorism. Given that Bush and Obama-era jurisprudence accorded virtually zero rights to suspected terrorists, no one will even have to stoop to Pam Bondi’s level, which should be well guarded, brightly lit and subterranean.

Yes, the Supreme Court might object. It tends to do that after Democrats get sworn in, and with Federalist Society advancements in precognitive legal retrospection, there’s a good chance they will spend the next few dozen months discovering originalist cases for enjoining Democrats from being elected in the first place. The trick is to keep them busy. 

For one thing, John Roberts is a co-conspirator to all the above, and for another, both Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas should have the evidence of their being the top two most corrupt justices in the court’s history forensically examined by an Securities and Exchange Commission, IRS and FBI white-collar crime division swelled by impounding and redirecting the budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which should be demobilized by executive order. Good lawyering might spring a few, but they and whatever court conservatives haven’t also been indicted will be reassigned to the “TBD/Who The F Cares” Circuit, there to review cases only brought by Elon Musk and adjudicated by Matthew Kacsmaryk or James Ho, with every ruling deemed nonprecedential.

Meanwhile, the tactics and permission the court accorded the Department of Government Efficiency should be applied immediately to America’s analog to denazification. (Only this time without the postwar anticommunist rush job that stuffed the security state full of better-heeled goose steppers who were doing white supremacy the right way.) Anyone in the executive branch or military who abetted Trump’s assault on the Constitution must go. 

Every time Republicans condemn this program as a political harrowing of conservatives from government, Democrats should say with one voice: You don’t get immunity from the consequences of collaboration because you put collaboration in the party platform. Malfeasance isn’t effaced because it displays the label of ideology, as evidenced by the zero times a judge has ever dismissed a case after a defendant listened to the charges and told the court, “You know, I don’t see it that way.” Legitimacy is not in the eye of the offender, no matter what the conservative attitude toward rape tells you. This is not a debate between “you should face consequences for your abuse of power” and “you would rather not,” and nobody has to acknowledge that both sides kind of have their points.

To the right, all these suggestions sound like revolution. But the rule of law only sounds revolutionary to a kleptocracy. The important thing is that no element of the Trump criminal regime really broke new ground in breaking the law. A prosecutor who can’t lock them all up by playing by the rules is one that can’t fog a mirror. Our old friend Anton Chigurh’s adage — “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” — must be the only guide as to how much purported normalcy can be restored. Until then: For our friends, the law; for our enemies — also the law. Ideally all 30,000 pounds of the Martindale-Hubbell legal directory, dropped from a great height.

This is not a complete to-do list. Nor is it one everyone will agree on. But it is a basic program that will reveal a critical point Democrats have learned to forget: Justice and revenge are great coalition builders. They are purposeful and cathartic, twinning high-minded principle with low visceral satisfaction. They are ideas, bigger and stronger than those who wield them, and they are what transforms someone like Gavin Newsom from a haircut that razes homeless encampments into an avatar of something that can feel like hope. They are the reason why the Squad represents 50% of the House Democratic Caucus that anyone can recognize as human. After getting demolished by Mitch McConnell in 2020, Amy McGrath might not have had the wit to take her spare millions in donor money and hire a clutch of bounty hunters to track down a reason to vote for her, but an uncompromising commitment to restored, restorative and punitive justice should be enough. Imagine the joy of an abundance agenda whose debate is, “How abundant does justice need to be? Equal or relentless?” 

Imagine a centrist vs. leftist intraparty debate pitted between “We need to expand the Supreme Court to counterbalance the effects of the life-termed conservative lunatics” and “We need to expand the entire federal court system to meet the demands of an overburdened judiciary, and since the Democrats never developed their own Federalist Society, our flooding the zone with a Rolodex of the most radical justices we can find will amount to installing a raft of candidates that would have been labeled unobjectionable just a generation ago.” There are so many reasons to vote for a party that can’t decide on “We should ship racist meme jerkoff and apex welfare queen Elon Musk to the Hague for using the rescission of federal contracts to kill eight figures’ worth of Africans over the next decade” or “We should do that, but how many of the companies of his that America underwrote should be nationalized?”

Many Democrats will reflexively and perhaps unconsciously dismiss such a political-legal program with the rhetoric of reaction. It will be easy, for instance, to crush a notion as simple as “we should run our nation according to the rules we approved and wrote down” under the limitless imaginary weight of unintended consequences. They will conjure an as-yet unrealized phantom terror that is inexplicably direr than the ongoing destruction of the American republic at the hands of fascism influencers who could fuck up a two-car funeral. They will fear that Republicans might call Democrats terrorists, which they already do, or communists, which they already do, or threaten to jail them, which they already do, or emphasize the need for someone — not saying who, but someone — to kill them, which they already do. Republicans have already turned their gaze from a “war-torn” Portland filled with inflatable dancing frogs and senior-citizen ukulele bands to an Oct. 18 No Kings protest they are billing as a “hate America rally” conducted by the “terrorist wing” of the Democratic Party. A war this imaginary not only has to fabricate the atrocities, it has to fabricate the enemy army. 

The right doesn’t know that this writer and publication carry about as much water with Democratic leadership as a colander in a tornado. If they get wind of this column, they’ll just claim this is the official policy of the Democratic Party anyway. Why wait to take the blame when you can step forward and take the credit?