Jamelle Bouie

His voters and supporters were having fun. The “Send her back” chant directed at Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota was hateful but also exuberant, an expression of racist contempt and a celebration of shared values.

This dynamic wasn’t unique to the event. It’s been a part of Trump’s rallies since 2015. Both he and his crowds work from a template. He rants and spins hate-filled tirades; they revel in the transgressive atmosphere. The chants are their mutual release. Sometimes he basks in them.

To watch raucous crowds of (mostly) white Americans unite in frenzied hatred of a black woman — to watch them cast her as a cancer on the body politic and a threat to a racialized social order — is to see the worst of our past play out in modern form.

To be clear, the Trump rally was not a lynch mob. But watching the interplay between leader and crowd, my mind immediately went to the mass spectacles of the lynching era. There’s simply no way to understand the energy of the event — its hatred and its pleasures — without looking to our history of communal racial violence and the ways in which Americans have used racial others, whether native-born or new arrivals, as scapegoats for their lost power, low status or nonexistent prosperity. And in that period, one event stands out: an 1893 lynching in Paris, Texas, where Henry Smith, a mentally disabled black teenager, was burned alive.

The 17-year-old Smith, “generally considered a harmless, weak-minded fellow,” according to Ida B. Wells-Barnett in “The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States,” had been accused of the rape and murder of 3-year-old Myrtle Vance, the daughter of the local sheriff. The white community of Paris believed the murder was retaliation for an earlier arrest by the sheriff, and the accusation of rape was added, in Wells-Barnett’s words, “to inflame the public mind so that nothing less than immediate and violent death would satisfy the populace.”

On the day of the lynching, an estimated 10,000 people crowded along Paris’ main street to witness the killing. Smith was bound to a float and paraded across town in a theatrical performance meant to emphasize his guilt. The audience jeered and chanted, cursed and gave the rebel yell. “Fathers, men of social and business standing, took their children to teach them how to dispose of Negro criminals,” a witness to the event said. “Mothers were there, too, even women whose culture entitles them to be among the social and intellectual leaders of the town.” Around noon, Smith was tortured, doused with kerosene and lit ablaze, immolated for the crowd’s enjoyment.

It was part carnival, part spectacle and part ritual. Smith was accused of something greater than a mere crime. He was accused of violating a sacred moral order — of defiling the white home and white society. “In the minds of many white southerners,” historian Amy Louise Wood writes in “Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890—1940,” “black men came to personify the moral corruption that they believed to be the root cause of social disorder.” Lynching, then, “acted as more than a form of political terror that restored white dominance against the threat of black equality.” It also became a “divinely sanctioned retribution for black ‘sin’ that threatened not only white authority but white purity and virtue.”

In a 1933 essay, “Marxism and the Negro Problem,” W.E.B. Du Bois tried, as the title suggests, to adapt the theories and analysis of Karl Marx for the American experience. “While Negro labor in America suffers because of the fundamental inequities of the whole capitalistic system,” he argued, “the lowest and most fatal degree of its suffering comes not from the capitalists but from fellow white laborers.” It is white labor, he continued, that “deprives the Negro of his right to vote, denies him education, denies him affiliation with trade unions, expels him from decent houses and neighborhoods, and heaps upon him the public insults of open color discrimination.”

Later, in his 1935 book, “Black Reconstruction in America,” Du Bois would expand on this idea, rooting white racism in a collective bargain of sorts. “It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage,” he wrote, outlining the ways in which this “public and psychological” wage strengthened ordinary white Americans’ attachment to a system that ultimately exploited them too:

“They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule.”

When this wage was threatened — by black social mobility and economic success, by black political action, by interracial contact that challenged the boundaries of caste — the response was violence. Not just as punishment but, as the lynching of Henry Smith demonstrates, as a communal defense of the existing social order. This ability to engage in state-sanctioned extrajudicial violence was both a kind of wage and a means to collect it, which tied white communities together in a shared experience of rage, righteous anger and joy.

It is important to take history on its own terms. We shouldn’t conflate the past with the present, but we should also be aware of ideas and experiences that persist through time. A political rally centered on the denunciation of a prominent black person demands reference to our history of communal, celebratory racism. It’s critical for placing the event in context, and it can help us understand the dynamic between the president and his base.

If Trump has an unbreakable bond with his supporters, it’s because he gives them permission to express their sense of siege. His rhetoric frees them from the mores and norms that keep their grievance in check. His rallies — his political carnivals — provide an opportunity to affirm their feelings in a community of like-minded individuals.

“He gets us. He’s not a politician, and he’s got a backbone,” a woman who attended a recent “Women for Trump” kickoff event in Pennsylvania told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “He’s not afraid to say what he thinks. And what he says is what the rest of us are thinking.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/opinion/trump-rally.html" id="7c3fc544-b770-32c4-a4d4-e5f0bd52c62a">The New York Times</a>.

The chanting was disturbing and the anger was frightening, but what I noticed most about the president’s rally in Greenville, North Carolina, on Wednesday night was the pleasure of the crowd.

The Joy of Hatred

Despite their influence, however, anti-Trump voters are practically invisible in recent mainstream political coverage. Instead, the focus is the president’s most fervent supporters, as it has been since 2015, when Trump came down his escalator and announced his campaign for the White House. This past week is a prime example.

On Sunday, as nearly everyone knows by now, Trump launched a racist attack on four progressive congresswomen — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley — telling them to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” and casting them as un-American on the basis of their racial backgrounds.

Most Americans rejected the president’s outburst: 59%, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, said it was “un-American,” and 65% said it was “racist.” A total of 68% said it was “offensive.”

We’ve seen this dynamic before. When the president plays with bigotry — when he defends racist protesters or disparages immigrants from predominantly nonwhite countries or casts migrants as dangerous criminals — he suffers in the polls. But the story in the press wasn’t about Trump’s decision to alienate a broad majority of voters with explicit racism. It was about the devotion of his voters and his strategy for the 2020 election.

Here, for example, was CNN’s take:

“Many GOP voters and lawmakers are uncomfortable with Trump’s conduct and sentiments. But most are sufficiently satisfied with the ideological direction of his presidency that they are willing to turn a blind eye to such behavior, making it a useful political weapon as he seeks to drive a rampant base turnout in 2020.”

And here was The Associated Press:

“Trump, who won the presidency in 2016 in part by energizing disaffected voters with inflammatory racial rhetoric, made clear he has no intention of backing away from that strategy in 2020.”

Reuters, reporting on its own poll, emphasized Republican support for the president in the wake of his remarks even as the full results show Trump flailing with independents — just “3 in 10” say they approve of the president. Others took for granted that Trump’s racism was effective, all actual evidence notwithstanding.

You could justify this relentless focus on the president’s voters with an analysis of Trump’s victory over Clinton. He won because his strongest supporters were disproportionately in the most valuable swing states. If he can keep them energized, he has a path to reelection. You could even understand the attack on Omar as the first part of a plan to win Minnesota, which nearly flipped for Trump in 2016.

But that’s a bit shallow. Trump rallied his base in the weeks before the 2018 elections using a similar strategy of racist demagogy. He held events in pivotal states like Wisconsin, fanning fear around the migrant “caravan” and blasting figures like Rep. Maxine Waters of California as representative of the entire Democratic Party. It didn’t work. Not only did Republicans lose the House, but Democrats won important statewide elections in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and came within a hair’s breadth of winning the governor’s races in Georgia and Florida.

Trump galvanized his supporters at the cost of energizing the opposition. But somehow, this has fallen out of political memory, with many observers focused on the president’s base of non-college-educated whites as the only voters who matter. And that includes some prominent Democrats. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s opposition to serious and aggressive oversight of the president — up to and including impeachment — is arguably tied to a belief in the singular importance of these voters. They must be catered to, even if it angers and disillusions the Democratic base.

But even electoral potency doesn’t work to justify the endless focus on the president’s base, since if it did, you’d have to look at other groups with a similarly major impact on political outcomes.

In a 2018 report sponsored by the Center for American Progress, the Brookings Institution, the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Public Religion Research Institute, demographers Robert Griffin, Ruy Teixeira and William Frey simulated future election outcomes based on assumptions about voting patterns among demographic groups.

Most demographic and voting changes would produce small swings from 2016. But a few transform the electoral landscape. If Trump were to win an even larger margin of non-college whites — deepening his support with a 10-point swing from his 2016 baseline — he’d have a slight advantage in the popular vote and a comfortable majority in the Electoral College.

The next most potent change is an increase in black turnout and support. African Americans are the most heavily Democratic group in the country, with a large presence in many of the most competitive states. Small increases in their participation would have an outsize effect on the electoral landscape. The projections bear that out. Given population growth since the last election, if black turnout and support return to 2012 levels, Democrats win handily, with an estimated 338 electoral votes and a 5-point margin in the national popular vote.

You could make a strong case that the future success of the Democratic Party depends on its ability to mobilize and win over black Americans, a key group in a broad coalition of voters. We have post-Obama proof that this is a continuing phenomenon from the 2017 elections — where strong black turnout drove those Democratic victories in Virginia and Alabama — as well as in the 2018 midterms, where greater support and participation from black voters put black candidates within striking distance of statewide victories in Georgia and Florida.

But the press isn’t hyper-solicitous of the views of black voters. Cable news doesn’t constantly turn to swing-state focus groups of black Democrats to gauge their opposition to the president. And Democrats in Congress aren’t worried about demobilizing a group that may determine the next election. Just the opposite — some moderates believe the party has spent too much time challenging the president’s racism and showing solidarity with their nonwhite constituents. As The New York Times reported:

“While Democrats were publicly unanimous in their support of the resolution, some moderate lawmakers from Republican-leaning districts that backed Mr. Trump in 2016 privately voiced their discomfort. They said that while the president’s comments had been racist, the party was playing into his hands by spending so much time condemning his remarks, according to centrist lawmakers and senior aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.”

Conventional wisdom on 2020 is that Democrats will lose if they can’t get their progressive wing under control. This overstates the leftward swing of the Democratic Party and understates the distance between the center of American politics and the president’s right-wing policies. It also misses another, crucial dynamic — that by trying to court and convert voters who backed Trump, Democrats may sacrifice an opportunity to deepen support among their existing voters, to powerful electoral consequences.

The press may not have much interest in the broader electorate, but Democratic leaders and strategists, at least, should understand that the anti-Trump coalition is much bigger than the Trump base. If they want to oust the president next November, they should start to take that fact seriously.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/opinion/trump-2020.html" id="2fa4c70d-a5a6-362d-ab9f-afc3ad439753">The New York Times</a>.

The anti-Trump vote is the single largest coalition in American politics. That was true in 2016, despite Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the Electoral College. It was true in 2017, after Democrats won major victories in Virginia and Alabama. And it was true in 2018, when the anti-Trump coalition gave Democrats a majority in the House of Representatives.

Trump Voters Are Not the Only Voters

Whether out of sycophantic loyalty or a deep-seated belief in executive impunity, Barr has used his position to insulate the president from legal scrutiny. He has done everything in his power to downplay the impact of the special counsel’s investigation.

He did not hesitate, for example, to frame Robert Mueller’s findings as an exoneration of the president, despite a report that said otherwise. By itself, this gave Trump the appearance of vindication, as major media outlets declared him innocent of “collusion.”

During a hearing in April, when Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland asked Barr whether Mueller, the special counsel, supported Barr’s conclusion, the attorney general said he didn’t know, despite the fact — revealed on Tuesday — that he had received a letter from Mueller on Barr’s handling of the report. Mueller directly criticized Barr’s initial letter to lawmakers and the public.

“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

Later in April, just before he released the redacted version of the report, Barr held a news conference where he spun its conclusions even further, echoing the president’s cries of “no collusion” and bizarrely praising Trump for his cooperation with investigators.

Barr has done nothing but run interference for Trump, indifferent to his established pattern of lawbreaking and criminality. And it has left his former colleagues bewildered and searching for answers. “How could Mr. Barr, a bright and accomplished lawyer, start channeling the president in using words like ‘no collusion’ and FBI ‘spying’?” James Comey, the former FBI director, asked in a New York Times Op-Ed.

Eric Holder, who served as attorney general under President Barack Obama, echoed this dismay on Twitter: “I thought he was an institutionalist, committed to both the rule of law and his role as the lawyer for the American people.” Even Mueller’s even-keeled letter can’t help betraying his expectation that Barr would behave very differently.

But the better question is why anyone expected otherwise. You don’t have to dive deep into Barr’s history to see that he is an apparatchik, less committed to the rule of law than he is to his political party and its leadership.

In 1989, Barr, then assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, determined that the FBI could legally seize criminal suspects in foreign countries without consent from their governments. In doing so, Barr changed the department’s position — in a 1980 legal opinion, the government said that such kidnappings were unlawful.

It was a controversial opinion, especially given its key implication at the time — that the United States could abduct Gen. Manuel Noriega of Panama, who had seized power that spring. In response, Congress called Barr to testify. “Kidnapping a suspect would make the U.S. into an international outlaw,” Rep. Don Edwards of California said during the hearing, as he outlined the consequences for America’s reputation if federal authorities had free rein to kidnap.

Congress also asked Barr to release his memorandum to the public, but he refused. Instead, he wrote a 13-page summary that he claimed contained its “principal” arguments and conclusions, something that should sound familiar to contemporary observers.

Except it didn’t. In 1991, Congress obtained a copy of the full memo. It contained several points not present in the summary, including the contention that the president of the United States could ignore the United Nations’ prohibition of state-sponsored kidnapping.

Barr misled Congress and the public through omission. But by then he was already on his way to confirmation as attorney general under President George H.W. Bush, where he would recommend pardons for key figures in the Iran-Contra scandal, which stymied a yearslong investigation into executive-branch lawbreaking that implicated the sitting president.

Helping Republican presidents act with impunity is William Barr’s stock-in-trade — it’s what he does. Even before joining Trump, he wrote an unsolicited memo arguing outright that a president cannot be charged with obstruction of justice if the underlying actions fall under his lawful authority and the accusations are false — the same argument he made at Wednesday’s hearing.

“Most of the obstruction claims that are being made here, or episodes, do involve the exercise of the president’s constitutional authority,” Barr said to Sen. Pat Leahy of Vermont. And he asserted, “We now know that he was being falsely accused.”

For Barr, there are no apparent limits to presidential authority, at least as long as that president is a Republican. His theory of presidential immunity did not extend to Bill Clinton, for example, whose impeachment Barr defended.

The memo even shows the same lack of interest in the facts of the investigation that Barr demonstrated during his exchange with Sen. Kamala Harris of California, during which he admitted that neither he nor his office examined the evidence behind the Mueller report before determining the president could not be charged with obstruction of justice.

What we have seen over the past two months is a professional at work. Someone who understands his mission and acts accordingly. Unless he voluntarily resigns, Barr will be attorney general for at least the next 20 months, or until Trump dumps him, which seems unlikely given his success at protecting the president. For now, there doesn’t appear to be much his opponents can do, but there is something they can learn.

If Barr had ever been held accountable for his actions in the past — if he had ever faced scrutiny or social sanction for his work on the Iran-Contra cover-up — he might have never resurfaced to protect another Republican president accused of serious wrongdoing. The same goes for other figures in the Trump administration who were welcomed back into the halls of power despite condoning torture or abusing the public trust.

If and when progressives retake the White House and the Senate, they have to make accountability a priority. Otherwise, the Bill Barrs of the world will emerge over and over again, ready to do their yeoman best.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/opinion/barr-trump-impunity.html" id="70806193-cf79-3fc5-a5e6-c63989f9ce71">The New York Times</a>.

On Wednesday, when Attorney General William Barr testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Mueller report, he addressed lawmakers more as if he were a member of President Donald Trump’s legal team than as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. Barr framed Trump’s actions as fully justifiable, even arguing that if the president feels an investigation is unfounded, he “does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow it to run its course.”

Bill Barr's Perverse Theory of Justice

In this environment, the only way to preserve right-wing conservatism in American government is to rig the system against this new electorate. You tilt the field in favor of constituencies that still back traditional Republican conservatism in order to build a foundation for durable minority rule by those groups. In just the last week, we’ve gotten a glimpse of what this rigging looks like in practice.

Let’s start with the census dispute that’s now before the Supreme Court. The Trump administration wants to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, asking Americans to declare their status in order to participate. The government asks a similar question in the American Community Survey, a more frequently performed survey that is given to a sampling of households. But it hasn’t asked all households the citizenship question on a decennial census since 1950. Wilbur Ross, the secretary of commerce, whose department oversees the Census Bureau, wants to bring it back. He has the authority to do so. The problem is that he circumvented the official process. The case before the Supreme Court deals with whether the question can stand, given Ross’ decision to, as a federal judge put it, upend the rules that govern adding a question to the census.

The citizenship question is likely to make the census less accurate, to put it mildly. In the face of the harsh anti-immigrant policies sponsored by the Trump administration, as well as uncertainty about their own status, immigrants may not want to reveal their legal status to the government. According to an analysis from the Census Bureau itself, 5.8 percent of households with a noncitizen — or about 6.5 million people — would not respond to a census with that question on it. There’s some evidence that this outcome is the point. Kris Kobach, a Trump ally who pushed anti-immigrant policies when he was secretary of state for Kansas, was a proponent of adding the citizenship question to the census.

This matters because the census determines congressional apportionment as well as the distribution of Electoral College votes. If millions of immigrants decline to answer the census, then the areas they live in will be undercounted relative to places with fewer noncitizens, which means political power and representation will probably shift as well. A move of just a few Electoral College votes from immigrant-heavy blue states to more white and rural red states could help Republicans win the White House while yet again running behind in the popular vote. (As it stands, Republicans have lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections.) The Republican Party can maintain a hold on power without changing its priorities or making a fundamentally different appeal to the public.

That said, this is an almost subtle way to rig the architecture of democracy, comparatively speaking. More recent efforts by Republican-held state legislatures to erect large barriers to voting are more explicit. Republican lawmakers in Tennessee, for example, are pushing broad new restrictions on large-scale voter-registration drives, including civil penalties for groups that unintentionally file incomplete voter-registration forms and criminal punishment for those that don’t attend state-mandated training sessions, according to the Tennessean.

It’s not as if Tennessee has a particular problem with registering voters. What it does have are organizing groups that successfully brought a greater number of black Americans and other people of color to the polls in 2018. In that context, this bill is a form of electoral intimidation — a direct attempt to hinder those groups and their ability to make similar gains in 2020 and on into the future.

Last November, Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment to end felon disenfranchisement. Unable to stop the change, Republicans chose to put barriers to its implementation. On Wednesday, the Florida House of Representatives passed legislation that would require former felons to pay fines as part of their criminal sentence before they can vote again. It’s a poll tax. And like those under Jim Crow, it is an ostensibly neutral policy that falls hardest on black communities, which have a higher share of former felons.

Each of these moves works in concert with the others. Pre-existing malapportionment helps Republicans capture the presidency despite losing a majority of voters. This allows them to build a Supreme Court majority that rules in their favor on key questions of ballot access, voter participation and campaign finance.

Republican lawmakers in the states use the legal leeway from rulings like Shelby County v. Holderto erect new barriers to voting, while Republicans in Washington look for new ways to embed their partisan interests in the electoral system. At the same time, their wealthy allies take advantage of campaign finance loopholes to spend huge sums on behalf of Republican candidates and conservative causes. And on the chance that Democrats overcome these obstacles and win political power — after the election of Barack Obama, for example — Republicans break the norms of politics to keep them from actually governing the way they want to.

Mitch McConnell’s leadership in the Senate during the years he had a majority — and in particular, his “blockade” of Obama’s judicial nominations, including the Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland — is a paradigmatic example of the latter strategy. But Republican lawmakers in several states have gone even further, using legislative majorities to strip constitutional authority from newly elected Democratic executives. Republicans in Kansas introduced legislation this past week that would strip the recently elected Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, of her power to fill vacancies in top state offices. They cite fairness as a reason to support this proposal, although a leading Democratic critic called it “morally wrong” and an example of legislating for narrow partisan gain.

Wisconsin Republicans attempted something similar after Tony Evers, a Democrat, unseated the Republican governor, Scott Walker. They advanced bills to restrict his ability to run public benefits programs and to curb his authority to set rules on implementation of state laws. They also established a new legislative power to intervene in litigation challenging state laws and wrested the right to decide on legal action against the Affordable Care Act from the attorney general’s office, placing it with the heavily gerrymandered legislature’s budget committee. A judge eventually blocked these efforts, but Republican state leaders have appealed the ruling. And Republicans in Michigan made a similar push to rein in executive power after Democrats won all three statewide races, in an attempt to keep Democrats from overturning Republican actions once they took office.

It’s clear, then, that from the White House and its allies on the Supreme Court down to individual state lawmakers, conservative Republicans have decided that their agenda cannot survive fair competition on equal ground. They reject efforts at electoral expansion — early voting, automatic registration and mail-in balloting — and embrace strategies that put the burden on voters themselves.

Americans have long struggled over the scope of voting and representation. Democracy is — and always will be — a fight. And the lines of this particular conflict are clear. Rather than try to expand our democracy or even preserve it as it stands, Republicans are fighting for a smaller, narrower one that favors their voters over all others so that their power and the interests they serve become untouchable.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/opinion/sunday/the-republican-war-on-democracy.html" id="716d6e25-4c8f-3604-a25b-f9a0186f0ce4">The New York Times</a>.

The demographic changes coming over the next few decades — the continuing rise of a more diverse electorate, with more liberal views than previous generations — won’t destroy the Republican Party or make it electorally insolvent. But it may make right-wing conservatism a rump ideology, backed primarily by a declining minority of older rural and exurban white voters. You can already see this taking shape. Among the youngest Republicans, 52 percent say the government should be “doing more” to s...

The Republican War on Democracy

If that is the recommendation, then it’s a recognition that democratic accountability in the American political system goes beyond elections. Each branch of government is empowered to check and challenge the others, and Congress has a specific obligation to hold the presidency to account between electoral cycles. Under ordinary circumstances, lawmakers use their oversight powers to keep an eye on the executive branch. Under extraordinary ones, they have impeachment, the clear remedy for a lawless president.

But Democrats, who hold the House of Representatives and have the power to initiate this particular process, are divided on how to move forward.

Following the release of the Mueller report, for example, the House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, tossed cold water on the impeachment idea. “Based on what we have seen to date, going forward on impeachment is not worthwhile at this point,” he said. “Very frankly, there is an election in 18 months, and the American people will make a judgment.” On the other side of the ledger, Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said Sunday that “if proven, some of this would be impeachable, yes. The accusations in the report are impeachable. Obstruction of justice, if proven, would be impeachable.”

Among the most vocal Democratic voices for impeachment is Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who wrote, “The severity of this misconduct demands that elected officials in both parties set aside political considerations and do their constitutional duty. That means the House should initiate impeachment proceedings against the President of the United States.”

Do Democrats charge forward on principle or do they leave the question to voters? Do they commit to hearings and investigations with an eye toward impeachment proceedings or do they downplay the issue of presidential accountability? To reject impeachment in the face of clear wrongdoing would all but prove the provision a constitutional dead letter. But embracing it has pitfalls of its own, like energizing Republican voters in defense of the president. There’s also no chance of conviction in the Senate — Republicans would almost certainly vote to acquit. Democrats could pursue impeachment, but it would be to make a symbolic point.

But symbolism matters. It shapes public perception and the contours of political conflict. Trump wouldn’t be president, for example, without his keen manipulation of race and identity.

Thanks to Robert Mueller, Democrats may have the facts of the president’s corrupt behavior, but they still need to make the case that his actions show criminal contempt for the Constitution. And that kind of high-stakes political argument is won by action, not passivity. Impeachment gives Democrats a real chance to seize the initiative.

Yes, more typical oversight may uncover the same evidence of presidential wrongdoing. Impeachment, however, makes that wrongdoing a question of fidelity to the Constitution. It captures our attention, sets the terms of debate and potentially puts Trump and his allies on the defensive — especially if an impeachment inquiry uncovers evidence of other wrongdoing. It also gives Democrats an opportunity to tell a larger story about the president’s behavior that goes beyond the Mueller report to include actions and rhetoric that show similar disregard for the duties of the office. The case for impeachment is about self-dealing and self-enrichment as well as obstruction of justice, open indifference to and contempt for the lives of American citizens struck by disaster, as well as passivity in the face of foreign attack.

Those fearful that an impeachment drive would mobilize his base should consider how Trump already keeps his supporters in a constant state of political mobilization through demagoguery and fearmongering. Instead of thinking about their opponents, Democrats should focus on their supporters, who voted in large numbers to give the party a House majority and keep the president in check. Even if Democrats won’t commit to an impeachment vote, an expressed willingness to consider an impeachment inquiry could help activate those voters and keep them energized through the next year and a half.

There’s also little reason to worry about a backlash that helps the president. Donald Trump is not Bill Clinton, who was unusually popular from 1997 onward, with a second-term job approval average of 61%. Even accounting for political polarization, Trump is unusually unpopular, weighed down by constant scandal and chaos. As late as January of this year, a majority of voters — 53%, according to a poll from Quinnipiac — said that Trump is “not fit to be president.”

And high-profile coverage of the president’s scandals has an impact. In a Reuters poll that measured immediate reactions to the Mueller report, Trump’s approval rating declined to 37%. The same survey shows a slight increase in support for impeachment (40% versus 39% in March) and a significant decrease in opposition to impeachment (42% say Trump should not be impeached versus 49% in March).

It’s possible that voters will change their minds in the face of an impeachment threat against the president. But given existing public opinion, it’s more likely that an impeachment investigation would deepen the sense that Trump is unfit for the office he holds.

The symbolic and the practical aside, there’s also the real question of our constitutional order. Either the president is above the law or he isn’t. Voters can’t determine this — elections aren’t actually the venue for adjudicating that kind of conflict. This is a job for our elected representatives in Congress. And if House Democrats believe Trump has violated the Constitution, they have an obligation to act on that belief, even if conviction in the Senate is impossible under current political circumstances. Elijah Cummings, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, made this point Sunday in an interview on “Face the Nation.” “Even if we did not win, possibly, if there were not impeachment, I think history would smile upon us for standing up for the Constitution,” he said.

The potential impossibility of conviction itself is an important message for the public to take in. Many Americans may still believe that sufficient wrongdoing would bring both parties together to remove a lawless president. If that isn’t true — if presidential accountability of this sort is impossible under divided government — then Americans deserve to know. Then, at least, we can have a national discussion about what that means for the Constitution.

Caution on impeachment makes sense. It is a monumental step that would shape politics in unforeseen and potentially negative ways. But inaction, or even just ordinary action, has risks, too. Trump will continue try to shape the post-Mueller narrative to his advantage, condemning the investigation as a “witch hunt” from its origin to its conclusion. His allies will do the same. Even if they fail to persuade the public, they can muddy the waters and turn this constitutional conflict into another case of partisan bickering.

Democrats still have to defeat Trump at the ballot box, which means building a mass coalition against his politics. At worst, impeachment could crowd out the material case against Trump, centering the election on legal questions versus the impact of his presidency on people’s lives. But there’s another possibility: that impeachment helps Democrats make a truly comprehensive case against the president, uniting his corruption, his criminality and his contempt for ordinary Americans under a single narrative. Impeachment, pursued with vigor, then becomes part of the larger argument against him and the Republican Party that has bolstered his presidency, indifferent to its corrosive effect on all parts of American life.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/opinion/impeachment-politics-congress.html" id="b0c3bf65-7dd3-3121-a11f-fe59d64e2382">The New York Times</a>.

Donald Trump may not have conspired with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election, but the Mueller report still shows a president with criminal disregard for the rule of law and constitutional government. And arguably it suggests that Congress should address this in accordance with what the report reminds us is “our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.”

The Lure of Impeachment

But this phrasing assumes discontinuity between past and present, as if there weren’t antecedents to Donald Trump in the recent Republican past. The actual relationship between Trump and the Republican Party is more psychological. Trump is the Republican id personified, driven to express the impulses and desires of conservative politics in their basest form.

That dynamic has been on clear display for the past few days, as the president of the United States leads a campaign of racist demagoguery against Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a Somali-American Democrat and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress.

The pretext for this attack was Omar’s remarks last month at a fundraiser for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Omar talked about several issues but her major theme was prejudice against Muslim Americans.

“Here’s the truth,” she said. “For far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen. Frankly, I’m tired of it. And every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it. CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”

CAIR was actually founded in 1994, but Omar’s point is clear: A small group of Muslims committed the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, but many Americans blamed Islam itself. Muslims quickly became targets of fear, disdain and demagogic political rhetoric. A 2004 report from the American Civil Liberties Union showed widespread attacks on the civil rights of Muslims in the United States, including harassment and racial profiling by federal law enforcement.

The way Omar’s address made its way to Trump is emblematic of how inflammatory ideas and rhetoric are transmitted from individual lawmakers and conservative media to the national stage. Omar spoke in public — Fox News even streamed it for its audience. But it wasn’t a controversy until it reached the ears of Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas, a Republican who took the snippet on 9/11 and framed it as something disrespectful. “First Member of Congress to ever describe terrorists who killed thousands of Americans on 9/11 as ‘some people who did something,’” Crenshaw said on Twitter. “Unbelievable.”

With that, the wider world of conservative media pounced. “You have to wonder if she’s an American first,” declared Brian Kilmeade, one of the hosts of “Fox &amp; Friends” on Fox News. The Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post took it a step further with a Thursday front page showing a photo from 9/11 — the moment the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center — with the headline, “Here’s Your Something.”

On Friday, Trump stepped into the fray with a video. Footage from the Sept. 11 attacks is edited together with Omar saying “Some people did something” to create the impression of dismissive contempt for the dead. Trump captioned the video “WE WILL NEVER FORGET!” He later retweeted an account that called Omar a “sick monster.”

The president continued his attacks on Monday, attempting to disparage House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the process. “Before Nancy, who has lost all control of Congress and is getting nothing done, decides to defend her leader, Rep. Omar, she should look at the anti-Semitic, anti-Israel and ungrateful U.S. HATE statements Omar has made,” he said on Twitter. “She is out of control, except for her control of Nancy!”

Crenshaw may have sparked these attacks, but the president’s intervention has escalated the situation to something potentially dangerous, which is why — after a slow start — Democrats have begun to condemn the president’s actions, defending Omar by name.

“Ilhan Omar is a leader with strength and courage. She won’t back down to Trump’s racism and hate, and neither will we,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. “The disgusting and dangerous attacks against her must end.”

Likewise, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts accused Trump of “inciting violence against a sitting congresswoman — and an entire group of Americans based on their religion.” That, of course, is the idea. Trump believes he benefits from the passions and anger stirred by racist demagoguery.

It is easy to tie these attacks to Trump’s history of anti-Muslim rhetoric. But anti-Muslim prejudice was common in Republican politics before he stepped on the political stage with his “birther” charges against President Barack Obama.

It was an important force among Republican voters — in one 2004 poll, for example, about 40 percent of self-identified Republicans said that Muslim Americans should be required to register with the government and 41 percent said that Muslim-American civic groups should be infiltrated by the government. Well before Obama was a household name and Trump a political figure, a 2006 Gallup poll found wide anti-Muslim prejudice “with Republicans ascribing more negative political and religious qualities to Muslims, and being more opposed to having Muslims as neighbors than are Democrats and independents.”

It was an important force in conservative media. Conservative radio and television hosts frequently conflated all Muslims with the actions of extremists. In one 2006 segment on his radio show, Glenn Beck warned that if “good Muslims” aren’t “the first ones in the recruitment office lining up to shoot the bad Muslims in the head,” then “human beings” might be forced into “putting up razor wire and putting you on one side of it.”

And it found traffic with Republican politicians. After Keith Ellison became the first Muslim elected to Congress in 2006, Rep. Virgil Goode of Virginia wrote a letter to voters in his district stating his fear that “in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped.” Anti-Muslim prejudice surfaced throughout the 2008 presidential campaign.

Trump has simply brought this rhetoric to the bully pulpit of the presidency. He has taken everything coursing through the last 20 years of Republican politics and made it explicit. It now has an official seal of approval. And if Omar is a target, it has little to do with what she said and everything to do with who she is: A black Muslim woman — and an immigrant — whose very person disrupts the exclusionary ideal of a white Christian America.

The difference between the pre-Trump era and the present, in other words, isn’t the substance of belief but its expression — and the force of the venom, contempt and hatred behind it.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/opinion/trump-omar-9-11.html" id="6d2ddc59-58a1-344c-a84c-cb2c7d25b7ce">The New York Times</a>.

It’s still common to hear analysts speak of the “Trumpification” of the Republican Party — the extent to which it has adopted the attitude and ethos of the sitting president.

Why Trump Won't Stop Talking About Ilhan Omar

“Once someone pays their debt to society, they’re out there expected to pay taxes, expected to abide by the law, they’re expected to support themselves and their families,” she said. “I think that means they’ve got a right to vote.”

Most Americans agree with her. Nearly two-thirds of respondents in a March 2018 poll by HuffPost and YouGov said former felons should have the right to vote. Voters and lawmakers across the country have begun to roll back the laws and procedures that, according to the Sentencing Project, kept an estimated 6.1 million citizens from the ballot box in the 2016 presidential election.

Last year, for example, a supermajority of voters in Florida endorsed a state constitutional amendment to end the draconian policy of permanent disenfranchisement (barring a pardon from the governor). As of 2018, 15 states and the District of Columbia restore voting rights to felons upon release from prison. Likewise, Alabama repealed a clause that denied rights for the vague offense of “moral turpitude,” which reportedly had disenfranchised thousands of former convicts.

But the growing tide against felon disenfranchisement raises a related question: Why disenfranchise felons at all? Why not let prisoners vote — and give the franchise to the roughly 1.5 million people sitting in federal and state prisons? Why must supposedly universal adult suffrage exclude people convicted of crimes?

There is precedent for this idea. California allows voting for those in county jails (with limited exceptions). Colorado does too. New York recently allowed those on parole or probation to vote. And two states, Maine and Vermont, already let prisoners vote. In fact, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., affirmed his support for voting rights in prison the same week Warren backed automatic enfranchisement for former felons.

“In my state, what we do is separate. You’re paying a price, you committed a crime, you’re in jail. That’s bad,” Sanders said, responding to a question at a town hall. “But you’re still living in American society and you have a right to vote. I believe in that, yes, I do.”

Warren was also asked to weigh on this question, but deferred it, saying only that it’s “something we can have more conversation about.”

We ought to have that conversation now. Americans may see it as common sense that you lose your right to vote when you’re imprisoned, but in many democracies prisoners retain the right to vote. When that right is revoked, it’s only for particular crimes (in Germany, it’s for “targeting” the “democratic order”), and often there is a good deal of judicial discretion. Mandatory disenfranchisement is unusual, and permanent disenfranchisement is even rarer.

Mandatory disenfranchisement is constitutional — the 14th Amendment allows the government to restrict the right to vote because of “participation in rebellion, or other crime” — but there are few good reasons for the practice. The best argument, outside of the case from custom and tradition, is that committing a serious crime voids your right to have a say in the political process. You lose your liberty — your place in civil society — and the freedoms that come with it.

But doing it that way — subjecting prisoners to a kind of social death — is in conflict with the idea of “inalienable” rights that cannot be curtailed.

As it stands, incarcerated people retain a variety of rights, some of which touch on the political rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Prisoners have freedom of worship. They can protest mistreatment and poor conditions. They can exercise some free speech rights, like writing for newspapers, magazines and other publications. To that point, there is a rich literature of work by incarcerated people tackling complex social and political issues. Voting would be a natural extension of these activities.

An obvious objection is that criminal transgressions render prisoners unfit for participation in democratic society. But there’s nothing about committing a crime, even a serious one, that renders someone incapable of making a considered political choice. Losing your liberty doesn’t mean you’ve lost your capacity to reason. Prisoners are neither more nor less rational than anyone else who is allowed to vote.

If anything, the political system needs the perspectives of prisoners, with their intimate experience of this otherwise opaque part of the state. Their votes might force lawmakers to take a closer look at what happens in these institutions before they spiral into unaccountable violence and abuse.

There are practical benefits as well. Racial disparities in criminal enforcement and sentencing means disenfranchisement falls heaviest on black communities. This is not just a direct blow to prisoners’ electoral power; it also ripples outward, depressing political participation among their friends, families and acquaintances. On the other end, suffrage in prison may help incarcerated people maintain valuable links to their communities, which might smooth the transition process once they’re released.

“Citizenship is not a right that expires upon misbehavior,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for the majority in Trop v. Dulles, a 1958 case dealing with the rights of a military deserter. And, he continued, “citizenship is not lost every time a duty of citizenship is shirked.” Yes, prisoners have committed crimes, and yes, some of those are egregious. But depriving any citizen of the right to vote should be the grave exception, not a routine part of national life. Universal suffrage means universal suffrage.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/opinion/voting-prisoners-felon-disenfranchisement.html" id="142cff2e-9c11-302c-ae74-638f0be2cd5c">The New York Times</a>.

At a forum in Iowa last weekend, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts gave what has become a standard answer for Democrats on the question of felon disenfranchisement.

There Is No Good Reason Prisoners Can't Vote

She also carried out the president’s “zero tolerance” policy, resulting in the separation of thousands of families at our border with Mexico. Many parents are still searching for their children.

But there were limits to Nielsen’s embrace of Trump’s immigration policies. She pushed back on his demands to break the law to stop migrants from entering the country, according to The New York Times, and repeatedly reminded the president of “the limitations imposed on her department by federal laws, court settlements and international obligations.”

In almost any other administration, this would be unremarkable. It simply means Nielsen took her job and its legal obligations seriously — what we would expect from any civil servant. But Trump is unusual among modern presidents for his routine elevation of people who lack that basic sense of public ethics. If regular pressure to break the law was part of Nielsen’s decision to leave the administration, then her departure illustrates how any belief in the public good, no matter how slight, is incompatible with working for this president, even if you share his views.

This was evident from previous resignations and firings. Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of state, seemed to share the president’s skepticism of the department, carrying out an agenda meant to shrink its influence. But when Trump wanted to break the law — which, Tillerson said in an interview after leaving the administration, was “often” — Tillerson would push back, unwilling to completely subordinate himself to the president’s will. “I would have to say to him, ‘Mr. President, I understand what you want to do, but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law.’ ”

The president’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, faced similar pressures after he recused himself from any investigations related to the prospect of Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election. Sessions took that step after The Washington Post revealed his meetings with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, during the campaign — the kind of contact he had denied during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Trump was furious, which grew into rage after the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, appointed Robert Mueller special counsel. Trump reportedly berated Sessions in the Oval Office — which the attorney general called his “most humiliating experience in decades of public life” — and complained that the recusal was “unfair.”

Trump wanted Sessions to derail the Russia investigation and protect him from scrutiny, essentially making himself above the law. And he spent much of 2018 pressuring the attorney general to do just that, either attacking him in public or cajoling him in private. Sessions, who shared Trump’s politics but not his complete contempt for the rule of law, wouldn’t budge.

“As long as I am the attorney general, I will continue to discharge my duties with integrity and honor, and this department will continue to do its work in a fair and impartial manner according to the law and Constitution,” he said in a February 2018 statement. This stalemate resolved itself after the midterm elections, when a frustrated and weakened Trump finally fired Sessions, replacing him temporarily with Matthew Whitaker, a loyalist who served as Sessions’ chief of staff, and permanently with William Barr, who served as attorney general under George H.W. Bush, shielding him from the fallout of the Iran-Contra scandal.

The overall pattern is clear. Trump wants to act with impunity, breaking the law if he needs or even just wants to. His appointees, who share his goals but not his methods, resist. He scolds and attacks them until they resign, replacing them with loyalists who may actually bend to his will.

Tillerson was replaced by Mike Pompeo, then serving as director of the CIA. Unlike Tillerson, who attempted to contain Trump’s worst instincts, Pompeo has been willing to say or do nearly anything to stay in Trump’s favor. It’s why he would echo the president’s widely criticized flattery of Kim Jong Un and the North Korean government.

Trump says that Kevin McAleenan, until now the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, will take over for Nielsen as acting secretary of Homeland Security. Like Nielsen, McAleenan backs the president’s harsh border policies. He defended Border Patrol agents after they used tear gas on hundreds of migrants, including women and children, who tried to enter the United States near Tijuana, Mexico. Some attorneys say it’s unclear if Trump can elevate McAleenan, since the laws regarding succession point to undersecretary for management Claire Grady as next-in-line as acting director.

For a more permanent replacement, Trump is reportedly considering Ken Cuccinelli, the former Virginia attorney general turned conservative television personality, and Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state notorious for his aggressively anti-immigrant policies.

With either choice, Trump would affirm the pattern of his administration so far, jettisoning people who act as if they were accountable to the public and replacing them with people who above all are loyal to Trump, willing to go in the “tougher” — and possibly illegal — direction he demands.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/opinion/kirstjen-nielsen-trump-border.html" id="e0834729-d537-3149-a4eb-47f40d789a8c">The New York Times</a>.

There’s no reason to mourn Kirstjen Nielsen’s departure from the Department of Homeland Security. She was an immigration hard-liner working aggressively to carry out President Donald Trump’s restrictionist agenda. She spearheaded efforts to crack down on migrants and asylum-seekers. She requested military assistance at the border. She limited the number of people who can legally present for asylum at ports of entry. And she vastly increased the number of immigrants in detention.

Who Is Left to Say No to Trump?

Grant’s inauguration felt like the beginning of a new era of reform and revitalization. For nearly four years, Americans had suffered through the tumultuous presidency of Andrew Johnson, who drove the nation to political crisis with his virulent racism, erratic behavior and leniency toward the defeated secessionists.

Grant, by contrast, backed the rights and privileges of freed black Americans. He supported the 15th Amendment to the Constitution (ratified in 1870) extending voting rights to black men and deployed federal troops against vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan (itself started by a former battlefield foe, Nathan Bedford Forrest).

But the laudable commitment from Grant and the Republican Congress to the political rights of the former slaves was fatally undermined by their indifference to the vast social and economic inequality of the postwar South. Unable to see past an ideology of “free labor” and “free soil,” they also couldn’t grasp how slavery and racial stigma gave black Americans a fundamentally different relationship to economic life. The result was actions that ultimately sowed seeds for new relationships of race hierarchy in the South and the nation at large.

Johnson, a Tennessee Unionist and ardent proponent of white supremacy, had hoped to restore a version of the antebellum status quo, with white planters taking the reins of black labor with as little federal intervention as possible. He quickly brought secessionist states back into the Union and gave ex-Confederates a free hand in directing the South, which they used to impose slavery-like conditions on the formerly enslaved. He vetoed civil rights bills and condoned racist violence against black Americans seeking equal political rights.

His disregard for the sacrifices of the war put him in fierce conflict with the Radical Republicans in Congress. Eventually, the House impeached him, and while he wasn’t removed from office — the Senate fell one vote short — Republicans had neutered him as a political force. Democrats declined to nominate him for re-election, and an openly contemptuous Grant refused to ride with him to the inauguration. He left Washington in disgrace.

Grant’s election both defused the ideological crisis of the Johnson era and weakened the radical movement within the Republican Party, which derived much of its influence from its conflict with the former president. Grant’s principal allies, Columbia historian Eric Foner writes in “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution,” were the “Stalwarts,” leaders whose power “rested on control of federal patronage.”

They had grown tired of — and impatient with — the “ideological mode of politics that had shaped the party at its birth,” Foner argues. For these political professionals, “the organization itself, not the issues that had once created it, commanded their highest loyalty.”

That the Stalwarts were less ideological did not make them anti-ideological. Many had cut their teeth in the anti-slavery crusade of the 1850s and were still committed to Reconstruction on the basis of “free labor” and “free soil,” where whites and blacks would work for wages as rational individuals responding to market incentives. “The free labor social order,” Foner writes, “ostensibly guaranteed the ambitious worker the opportunity for economic mobility, the ability to move from wage labor to independence through the acquisition of productive property.”

In “The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age” (the latest volume in Oxford’s history of the United States), Stanford historian Richard White notes how most Republicans “sincerely embraced free labor and continued to believe in its transformative capacity and egalitarian assumptions.” They believed that Southern whites in particular would embrace the prosperity of free labor, “even at the price of supporting Reconstruction policies that extended economic opportunities to black men.”

But Southern society still rested on ideas of hierarchy and caste that still shaped behavior for former masters, former slaves and poor whites. “To the plantation planters such a wage contract was economic heresy and social revolution,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in “Black Reconstruction in America.” Many poor whites, likewise, “faced with the dilemma of recognizing the Negroes as equals,” saw them as a “threat” to their “very existence.”

To upend this relationship, Republicans would have to transform the property relations of the South. Without land redistribution and a measure of material equality, political rights for blacks (and whites) would falter under the weight of planter power and racial caste. As Thaddeus Stevens, the radical Republican congressman from Pennsylvania and an ardent support of black civil rights, argued in the first months after the war, “How can republican institutions, free schools, free churches, free social intercourse, exist in a mingled community of nabobs and serfs?” He continued, “If the South is ever to be made a safe republic let her lands be cultivated by the toil of the owners or the free labor of intelligent citizens.”

Deeply entwined as they were with Northern capital and committed to the protection of private property, neither Grant nor the Republican Party was willing to take those steps. Instead, they allowed Northern and Southern employers to extract profit by any means necessary, imposing peonage and sharecropping on landless former slaves. The government would distribute land, but to railroads and Western settlers, not blacks.

Grant entered office committed to the fortunes of the formerly enslaved. But by the end of his administration, he had acquiesced to white racism and financial power, largely withdrawing from the South and leaving its black citizens at the mercy of a reinvigorated class of owners and planters. Reconstruction as an active federal presence was already coming to an end when Republicans cut the 1877 deal that made Rutherford B. Hayes president and withdrew federal troops from the South. With time, the Southern owner and planter class would construct a new system of race hierarchy, affirmed by the mass of poor whites, that would reproduce racial stigma and mire the South in poverty and disadvantage.

Despite scandal and corruption, Ulysses Grant left office with his popularity and stature intact. But Reconstruction would topple in the face of reactionary violence. Without a sustained federal presence, blacks could not secure their political gains. Without land reform — or any effort to extricate the roots of the plantation system from the South — the oppressive logic of slavery would endure. And without a three-pronged assault on racial domination, social exclusion and economic inequality, race hierarchy would survive, as it does now, diminishing the promise of American democracy.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/opinion/ulysses-grant-president.html" id="01df299f-d33f-3565-ab42-2e7decaa5a50">The New York Times</a>.

On March 4, 1869, Ulysses S. Grant gave his first inaugural address — a short, plain-spoken statement of intent. Abraham Lincoln’s prized general, and a national hero in his own right, he promised to bring his singular determination to the presidency. “The responsibilities of the position I feel, but accept them without fear,” Grant said. “The office has come to me unsought; I commence its duties untrammeled. I bring to it a conscious desire and determination to fill it to the best of my abil...

Grant's First Tomb

Attacking those lawmakers, Paul LePage, former governor of Maine — who still calls into conservative radio shows from his retirement home in Florida — dismissed the proposal as an attack on the political rights of white people. “Actually what would happen if they do what they say they’re going to do is white people will not have anything to say,” he said. “It’s only going to be the minorities that would elect. It would be California, Texas, Florida.”

That is racist nonsense. But it’s useful to think about, in a way, because beneath LePage’s objection is an unintentionally keen observation about the electoral status quo. If direct election of the president would give equal weight to all votes, then the Electoral College works to give outsize weight to a narrow group of voters in a handful of states. That bias is why Donald Trump is president: A healthy plurality chose his opponent, but his supporters carried key swing states.

It could happen again. A 2018 report on America’s future political demography found four realistic scenarios in which Democrats win the national popular vote but lose the Electoral College because of the geography of the electorate. The 2020 election could be the third time in six elections that the White House went to the loser of the popular vote.

That is why Electoral College reform deserves a prominent place in the national conversation, especially as the Democratic Party champions a host of pro-democracy reforms, such as public financing of elections and an end to gerrymandering.

As it stands, the most visible Democrat speaking against it is the former Attorney General Eric Holder, who on Tuesday called for its abolition. “Time to make Electoral College a vestige of the past,” he said on Twitter. “It’s undemocratic, forces candidates to ignore majority of the voters and campaign in a small number of states. The presidency is our one national office and should be decided — directly — by the voters.”

Of course, there are not enough votes in Congress or the states to pass and ratify an amendment abolishing the Electoral College. Beyond partisan politics — Republicans currently benefit from its distortions — there’s sentimental attachment to the institution, tied to popular mythology about the Constitution. In this view, the Electoral College is one of the great compromises of the Constitutional Convention, part of the wisdom and genius of the Founding Fathers who sought a middle path between pure democracy on the one hand and anti-majoritarianism on the other.

The truth is less noble. The Electoral College was actually a workaround meant to satisfy a divided Constitutional Convention at the cost of actual functionality. The framers considered three ways to elect a president.

Roger Sherman of Connecticut proposed election by Congress, to make the executive “absolutely dependent on that body, as it was the will of that which was to be executed.”

Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania proposed popular election. “If the people should elect,” Morris said, “they will never fail to prefer some man of distinguished character, or services; some man, if he might so speak, of continental reputation.”

Objections came from George Mason of Virginia, who thought “the extent of the Country renders it impossible that the people can have the requisite capacity to judge of the respective pretensions of the Candidates” — and other Southern delegates who feared domination by the largest states. “The most populous States by combining in favor of the same individual will be able to carry their points,” said Charles Pinckney of South Carolina.

Southern opposition came with obvious subtext. By population, South Carolina was the seventh largest of 13 states. Maryland was the sixth. North Carolina was the third. And Virginia was a colossus — the largest state in the incipient union. But large minorities of their residents were enslaved. In Virginia, it was roughly 40 percent, giving the state a smaller voting population than its more populous neighbors to the north.

Hugh Williamson of North Carolina made this point explicit in his objection: Because there won’t always be “distinguished characters” with national recognition who could win a majority of votes, “the people will be sure to vote for some man in their own State, and the largest State will be sure to succeed.” But this will not be Virginia, “since her slaves will have no suffrage.”

James Madison, another Virginian, actually favored popular election of the president but saw the writing on the wall. “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern states,” he said a few days later as discussion continued, “and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes.”

Debate over executive election began in mid-July. It resumed in late August, and the framers settled on a solution in early September, less than two weeks before the convention would adjourn. Their compromise centered on an idea introduced at the start of the discussion: Instead of direct election or election by legislature, states would choose electors who would then elect the president and vice president from a group of candidates.

To preserve an element of popular election, each state would receive electors equal to its congressional delegation, which would also account for states with large enslaved populations, since the convention had already reached agreement on how to count slaves for legislative apportionment. If no candidate received a majority, the election would go to Congress.

Historian Jack Rakove notes how few of the framers “expected the electors to do anything more than nominate candidates.” They would winnow the field, and then elected representatives would actually choose the president.

The system worked as intended in two elections: 1789, when George Washington won his first time, and 1792, when he won again. Its flaws were apparent by 1796, when John Adams became president with runner-up Thomas Jefferson as his vice president, despite being opponents who had running mates aligned with their political factions. The following year, in response to this fiasco, a South Carolina congressman introduced an amendment requiring each elector to cast separate votes for president and vice president.

It would take deadlock to force action. In 1800, Jefferson ran again against Adams with Aaron Burr as his running mate. Their party, the Democratic-Republicans, won a majority of voters (a scant 67,282 ballots out of a free white male population of roughly 1 million and a total adult population of more than 2 million) and electors. But those electors cast an equal number of votes for Jefferson and Burr, forcing the election into the House of Representatives, where a lame-duck Federalist majority saw its chance to stymie Jefferson.

Burr was poised to become president despite not actually standing for the office. It took months of heated political conflict — with Alexander Hamilton, a Federalist, lobbying the House to choose Jefferson — to resolve the standoff. After dozens of ballots, Jefferson was elected president. To keep another such crisis from blowing up the political system, Congress passed the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1804, which distinguished clearly between votes for president and vice president and streamlined other elements of the process.

The history of the Electoral College from this point is of Americans working around the institution, grafting majoritarian norms and procedures onto the political process and hoping, every four years, for a sensible outcome. And on an almost regular schedule, it has done just the opposite. The presidency went to the popular-vote loser in 1824 (John Quincy Adams; his opponent, Andrew Jackson, also won the most electoral votes), 1876 and 1888. In the 20th century, Americans had close calls in the elections of 1948, 1960, 1968 and 1976, with near splits in the popular and electoral vote. Despite winning the popular vote in six of the past seven presidential elections, Democrats have held the presidency for only four of those terms, under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

This obvious dysfunction is why the Electoral College has been a source of persistent dissatisfaction, with generations of lawmakers introducing new proposals for modifying or abolishing the system outright. Indeed, after the 1968 election, a commission of the American Bar Association recommended “direct popular election of the president,” calling the “Electoral College method of electing a president of the United States archaic, undemocratic, complex, ambiguous, indirect, and dangerous.”

None of this has changed. The Electoral College routinely threatens or produces perverse outcomes, where the will of the voters is thwarted by an ill-considered 18th-century electoral device. It has no place in a democracy that strives for a standard of “one person, one vote.” And most Americans still don’t like it. In a 2018 survey from the Public Religion Research Institute, 65 percent said presidents should be elected by popular vote.

The simplest solution for circumventing the Electoral College is the National Popular Vote interstate compact I mentioned earlier, which would take effect once the member states made up a majority of electoral votes.

Americans worried about disadvantaging small states and rural areas in presidential elections should consider how our current system gives presidential candidates few reasons to campaign in states where the outcome is a foregone conclusion. For example, more people live in rural counties in California, New York and Illinois that are solidly red than live in Wyoming, Montana, Alaska and the Dakotas, which haven’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in decades. In a national contest for votes, Republicans have every reason to mobilize and build turnout in these areas. But in a fight for states, these rural minorities are irrelevant. The same is true of blue cities in red states, where Democratic votes are essentially wasted.

Candidates would campaign everywhere they might win votes, the way politicians already do in statewide races. Political parties would seek out supporters regardless of region. A Republican might seek votes in New England (more than 1 million Massachusetts voters backed Donald Trump in 2016) while a Democrat might do the same in the Deep South (twice as many people voted for Hillary Clinton in Louisiana as in New Mexico). This, in turn, might give nonvoters a reason to care about the process since in a truly national election, votes count.

If nothing else, our quadrennial game of political hot potato can finally come to an end. We can close off this glaring flaw in our political system and stop worrying about another president who lost the popular vote by millions and the anger, rancor and mistrust that comes with that.

But the inertia behind the Electoral College is strong, which is why it needs vocal opponents making their case as loudly and often as possible. That includes Democratic politicians, including the group running for president. A primary campaign is the perfect forum for raising the issue, giving it high-profile support and wide attention. That, in turn, might move Americans from passive dissatisfaction with the status quo to action against it. Eventually — and really it can’t come too soon — Americans could at least vote as if they live in a modern democracy.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/opinion/the-electoral-college.html" id="4ae3bd47-2b7b-316f-a97e-0242129e6169">The New York Times</a>.

It’s still well under the radar, but the movement to circumvent the Electoral College gained ground this week. On Sunday, Jared Polis, governor of Colorado, said he would sign a bill to join the National Popular Vote interstate compact, whose members have pledged to give their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. The Maine Legislature, likewise, is mulling membership and will hold hearings to discuss the issue.

Jamelle Bouie

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