Today marks 60 days since the start of Trump’s failed war in Iran. The U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 8) gives Congress the power “To declare War,” and the War Powers Resolution of 1973 — enacted over Nixon’s veto — mandates that troops be withdrawn within 60 days unless Congress extends the deadline or declares war.
On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed that Trump doesn’t need Congress’s approval to continue the war past the 60-day mark because the ceasefire agreement with Iran has effectively stopped the clock. (Trump echoed Hegseth’s claim today in a letter to Congress.)
That’s bullshit, of course. But the interesting question is why — when Republicans have majorities in both chambers of Congress — Trump doesn’t want such a vote. Why not just let Republicans vote in favor of continuing his war, and be done with it?
It’s possible, of course, that Trump is worried that some Republican members might vote against the war — joining with all or almost all Democrats in voting against its continuation. Even a close vote could force a debate and pressure Trump to set the conditions and timeline for a withdrawal.
But there’s an easier and more straightforward reason.
Trump’s war is so unpopular that Republican members of Congress don’t want to have to go on record as voting in favor of it. With midterm elections in six months, they know their votes in favor of Trump’s war could be held over their heads — especially if the war drags on, or if gas prices continue to rise because Iran is blocking the Strait of Hormuz, or both.
They’ve let the White House know that forcing them to vote on the war will hurt their chances of maintaining control of Congress.
So congressional Republicans are choosing the coward’s way out: agree with Hegseth and Trump that there’s no need for such a vote because the ceasefire has tolled the clock. Or claim, even more absurdly (as has Speaker of the House Mike Johnson) that there’s no “war” to begin with, and hence no reason for such a vote.
Republicans in Congress are not brave people. To the contrary, they may be the most cowardly group ever to claim to represent the American people.
David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, has reason to smile
Friends,
Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders voted last Thursday on the Ellison family’s purchase of the company. Some 1.743 billion shares were cast in favor of the sale; 16.3 million were cast against it, a ratio of roughly 99 to 1.
1. Great for a Handful of Super-Wealthy, but Bad for Workers and Bad for America
This vote came soon after more than 4,000 workers in the media industry — directors, screenwriters, producers, actors, editors, cinematographers, musicians, and composers — signed a letter predicting an industry disaster if the sale went through.
That’s because, as my friend Harold Meyerson from The American Prospect has noted, such deals typically saddle the purchased companies with gigantic debts that buyers incur to make the deal — in the case of Warner Bros. Discovery, $79 billion — and this debt, in turn, requires that buyers slash costs (especially payrolls) to pay off some of it.
More than 70 percent of all the shares in Warner Bros. Discovery are held by institutional investors — including the Vanguard Group, BlackRock, and State Street. These institutions voted for the sale because they believe it will make their shares more valuable.
The sale will also make certain individuals a lot of money. David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, stands to collect some $886 million for shepherding it, in addition to his regular pay package (which was $51 million in 2024). Oracle’s Larry Ellison and his son, David, the new owners of Warner Bros. Discovery, are already among the richest people in the world.
But what about the workers in the industry who’ll lose their jobs as a result of the sale? What about all the people whose wages will be slashed? What about Los Angeles, which may lose a sizable portion of its major industry?
And what about the concentration of so much of the news business — so much of what Americans learn about what’s happening — under these two Trump suck-ups?
If Trump’s Justice Department approves the deal (do birds fly?), CBS News and CNN — along with CBS entertainment (home to Stephen Colbert, whose contract is about to run out and who will be taken off the air because of his criticisms of Trump) and Comedy Central (home to Jon Stewart) and HBO (John Oliver) and TikTok (where 1 out of 5 Americans now get their news) — are all about to become one giant mega-media monopoly under the control of Trump allies, the Ellisons.
2. The Moral Bankruptcy of Shareholder Capitalism
At the heart of modern American capitalism is the assumption that a corporation exists for only one purpose: to make its shares more valuable.
That goal trumps (excuse me) all other goals — such as raising workers’ wages, improving workers’ job security, creating more jobs, enhancing the quality of life for the community where a company is headquartered or does business, making life better for the inhabitants of the nation and the world, even protecting democracy.
In fact, if shareholders can make more money by shafting these other “stakeholders” and destroying these other values, that’s thought to be perfectly fine. It’s simply the way “impersonal market forces” work. It’s “efficient.”
Before the 1980s, American capitalism ran on a very different principle: that large corporations had responsibilities to all their stakeholders. “The job of management,” proclaimed Frank Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, in a 1951 address, “is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly affected interest groups … stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.”
The sentiment may seem quaint or inauthentic today, but in the three decades after World War II, it laid the basis for rapid economic growth and, with strong unions, an equally rapid expansion of the American middle class.
It reflected the sincere views of corporate executives. Many had endured the Great Depression and the war and felt some responsibility for America’s future well-being. These views helped legitimize the role of the large corporation in the public’s mind.
Today, shareholder capitalism has replaced stakeholder capitalism — and most Americans are excluded from its benefits.
Over 92 percent of the value of all the shares of stock owned by Americans is owned by the richest 10 percent. More than half is owned by the richest 1 percent. And even they have turned over their votes to giant institutions like Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street, which have no concern for the well-being of anyone or anything other than the short-term value of the shares they buy or sell.
We are witnessing the logical ending point of shareholder capitalism.
As the share values of America’s biggest corporations continue to soar — even as (and in many cases, because) they eliminate tens of thousands of jobs — the goal of “maximizing shareholder returns” is revealing itself to be morally bankrupt and economically rotten.
And as Artificial Intelligence takes over a growing amount of the work Americans do, the gap between share values (including the wealth of top investors and executives) and the incomes of most Americans will widen into a chasm.
3. Toward a New Stakeholder Capitalism
But here’s the good news: We don’t have to stick with shareholder capitalism. We don’t have to be victims of “impersonal market forces” over which we supposedly have no control.
We can have control. The market is a human creation. It is based on laws that humans devise. We can make laws that alter market forces to serve the interests of the vast majority instead of mainly the oligarchs at the top.
Over the last four decades, corporate laws have been shaped by wealthy individuals to channel a large portion of the nation’s total income and wealth to themselves.
If America’s super-wealthy continue to have unbridled influence over laws and gain control over the assets at the core of Artificial Intelligence, they will end up with almost all the wealth, all the income, and all the political power. Under such conditions, our economy and society simply cannot endure.
Laws can and should be changed to produce a new version of stakeholder capitalism that shares the wealth more widely.
How? For example, corporations could be required to provide long-term employees with the same number of shares as are held by investors. Profitable corporations could be required to provide their workers a portion (a quarter?) of their profits.
Corporations whose highest-paid executives earn more than 100 times their lowest-paid employees should have to pay a surtax. Corporations over a certain size (worth, say, $1 trillion or more) or having more than a certain share of their markets (say, 25 percent) should be broken up. Unfriendly (hostile) takeovers should be banned (as they were, in effect, before 1980).
The “stepped-up basis” rule that allows the wealthy to pass assets to their heirs without ever paying capital gains taxes on them should be eliminated. Vast accumulations of private wealth (say, in excess of a billion dollars) should, after a certain number of years, automatically be turned over to a fund providing subsistence incomes — a universal basic income.
State corporate laws shouldn’t empower corporations to make any campaign donations (effectively reversing Citizens United).
Sound radical? Maybe it is. But shareholder capitalism doesn’t work — as illustrated by the Warner Bros. Discovery fiasco. Unless radical changes are made, that fiasco is just a taste of what’s to come. If Artificial Intelligence isn’t to destroy capitalism and obliterate democracy, we’re going to have to come up with something that does work, and soon.
I was driving my car yesterday, heading home after doing some errands, when someone ran a red light and just about hit me. I swerved to avoid him, then stopped my car, got out, and stood in the middle of the road screaming at the vanishing as*hole and giving him the finger.
Are drivers becoming more belligerent, or am I becoming grouchier?
Not just drivers. A few days ago, I was waiting in line at a bakery when someone broke in line ahead of me without even a “Please excuse me.” I tapped him on the shoulder and told him in no uncertain terms to get back in line.
Is our civic life becoming more brutish, or am I becoming angrier about it?
I’ve been seeing more people dump their trash on the street, and telling them to stop. I’m watching parents scream at their kids with a ferocity I’ve rarely witnessed before, and occasionally I suggest they treat their kids better. My neighbor has started using a loud power tool in the evening, and I’ve asked him to keep it down.
I’m aware of more shoving and pushing — in a department store, at a local restaurant, at an airport — which pisses me off. I hear more people using racial, ethnic, and sexist insults, which I just won’t tolerate. Yesterday’s errands included a stop at the neighborhood Safeway, where someone called the cashier a “bitch.” I told him he shouldn’t say that.
Are such small acts of bullying on the rise, or am I becoming less tolerant of them?
Okay, maybe I am turning into a grouchy old man. But there’s another old man in the White House who has lowered the moral tone of the nation. His selfish, bigoted belligerence has signaled to America that it’s okay to disregard social norms in pursuit of whatever you want.
He’s signaled it’s okay to disregard norms, not just in social interactions but in the system as a whole.
CEOs of hugely profitable firms are now laying off large numbers of workers — not because they have to, but because they figure they can make even more money that way. Until recently, highly profitable corporations didn’t do mass layoffs; it was considered bad form.
A Wall Street Journalstory calls the past few months “the era of the mega-layoff,” citing Amazon’s recent reduction of its workforce by 30,000 and Oracle’s laying off many thousands of its employees. As the Journal reports,
“Instead of laying off people in more incremental—and less disruptive—waves, employers are seizing on the potential financial upsides of severing swaths of their workforces at once. That is a departure from not long ago, when mass layoffs registered as a sign of trouble or mismanagement and that a company needed to take drastic measures to right its performance. Now, such a company is more likely to get a big stock bump and praise from investors for acting boldly.”
Wall Street, meanwhile, is investing in crypto and private credit, in apparent disregard for the dangers they pose to the financial system. It’s as if the Street is saying: Who cares, if there’s money to be made?
We’re in a wave of selfish assertiveness even worse than the “greed is good” days of Gordon Gekko.
Trump is not singularly responsible for every such breach of public morality, of course. But a president inevitably influences the character of a nation. We’re continuously bombarded by how he acts, what he says and does, the ways he treats others, his style, his attitude.
Trump’s are disgusting.
This coarsening of American life should be counted among the myriad ways Trump has worsened America.
I for one am going to resist this degradation of our civic life, even if it earns me a reputation of being an old grouch.
Joyce Vance was U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. I’m grateful to her for sharing her views on today’s shameful and dishonest Supreme Court decision kneecapping Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, in which Samuel Alito pretends he’s not nullifying Section 2 while doing exactly that. It’s a bad day for American democracy.
Today, with all six Republican appointees in favor and all three Democratic appointees opposed, the Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act.
In striking down a Louisiana voting map as a racial gerrymander, the court opened the door for other states to redraw their maps in ways that dilute the votes of minority voters.
But Justice Alito — writing for himself and the five other Republican appointees on the court — did this by sleight of hand. Rather than directly strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race, Alito weakened Section 2 so much he renders it almost toothless.
Until today’s decision, an assessment of whether a state violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act would begin with a simple question: Is a minority group sufficiently large and compact to form a single member district where they would have a fair chance of electing their candidate of choice?
Now, according to the test announced by Alito, plaintiffs get that chance only if a random computer model would give them that opportunity.
This is totally contrary to the history of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which Congress amended in 1982 specifically to respond to an earlier Supreme Court decision (City of Mobile v. Bolden) in which the court said plaintiffs had to prove discriminatory intent. Congress responded by saying that if a redistricting plan results in vote dilution — that is, has that effect — plaintiffs have proven their case.
Today Alito says that the court must reject that 1982 law to avoid a clash with the 14th and 15th Amendments. Rubbish. The ratifiers of those amendments engaged in race-conscious legislation to protect former slaves. Everyone understood that those amendments permitted race consciousness in order to reverse America’s horrible history of slavery — which still has repercussions today.
Rather than be faithful to Congress’s effects test, Alito revives the intentional discrimination test:
In short, §2 imposes liability only when the evidence supports a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.
This effectively guts Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. It will end what has been the most successful way Black and other minority voters have gotten fair representation in Congress, in state legislatures, and in local bodies. It will make all our legislative bodies whiter. It will significantly diminish protection for minority voters.
A Supreme Court so fundamentally hostile to the rights of minority voters places the court at odds with democracy itself.
From now on, favoring a party is viewed as a venerable tradition in districting. And when a state favors a party in a way that significantly dilutes the votes of minorities, it’s not a Section 2 violation unless minority voters would have been hurt without a redistricting plan that favors one party.
What does this mean for the 2026 elections? In many states, primaries are over, or nearly so. But the decision could affect places still redistricting for 2026, including, most importantly, Florida. It could also affect state and local elections, from school boards and city councils to state legislatures.
Its major effect will be in 2028.
Justice Kagan’s dissent is correct. She notes that the court is now bringing back the requirement that minority voters prove discriminatory intent — while denying it is doing so.
Alito knew precisely what he was doing today — making it seem as if he’s not gutting the Voting Rights Act through legal and technical gibberish, while turning it on its head.
Alito’s mission has long been to favor the white Republicans he seems to think he represents, rather than all Americans. His five Republican-appointed colleagues on the court appear to believe the same thing.
So many of you participated in last week’s Office Hours discussion about who should be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2028 that I think it will be useful to have your views about the “second tier” of candidates (second tier only in terms of national name recognition at this point).
Last week, I listed the top four potential Democratic candidates by current name recognition: Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Out of the 7,174 of you who voted on these four, only 6 percent chose Kamala Harris; 12 percent were for Gavin Newsom; 26 percent of you chose Pete Buttigieg; and 6 percent were for AOC.
The rest of you — 49 percent — wanted someone else.
So today we’re going to focus on the top “someone else” options in current polls: Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, and Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. (That still leaves a “third tier” comprising California Congressman Ro Khanna, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and former congressman and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel — all of whom we’ll get to soon.)
Here’s a summary of the current second tier’s pros and cons.
As much as he’d love to be, Trump is not king of America. Which makes Charles III’s visit here a bit odd. It’s billed as a state visit, but Charles isn’t a head of state; his function is purely symbolic.
Most Americans disapprove of Trump, but there’s something special about the relationship between the Brits and their Royal Family. For it is in fact their Royal Family — not just an archaic symbol of what remains of the British Empire but a living, breathing, soap opera of a family that in the minds of many Brits represents modern-day Britain.
To those who say it’s bizarre for one of the world’s major democracies of the 21st century to cling to the fiction of royalty — and it is indeed a fiction, because Charles III has no tangible political power — I say this: It’s a relatively harmless fiction and one that arguably meets the needs of people to gossip about, project upon, and vicariously live the lives of a storybook family that tries to be of service to their nation.
Here in America — at least before Trump — some of us romanticized our presidents and their families. Remember Camelot?
But because our presidents also run the executive branch of our government, the two roles — the projected glamor and the political reality — have often gotten confused, leaving us disappointed on both grounds.
After Camelot came Lyndon Johnson, who pulled up dogs by their ears. And then, eventually, Donald (“Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything”) Trump. You can’t get any further from a romanticized Camelot.
Britain’s government may seem drab and boring but is at least free to do its drab and boring best.
Here, we demand that our presidents and their spouses throw formal balls (Trump is trying to build the biggest ballroom anywhere) and state dinners, decorate the White House like a castle, appear in person at every major national anniversary or memorial or funeral, and always symbolize the nation.
I’m certainly not suggesting America should have a royal family. Count me in the “No Kings” camp.
It’s just that Britain’s infatuation with its own royalty may have some social utility there that we Yanks don’t fully understand. Keeping the trappings of royalty separate from the daily slog of governing makes some sense.
His aides don’t trust his judgment, so they’ve excluded him from the war room. So, who’s in charge of his war with Iran?
He’s losing his marbles, friends. For the good of the nation and the world, it’s time we faced the reality that the head of the most powerful nation in the world can’t do the job. Congress should impeach and convict him as soon as possible — and get him out of the Oval Office.
You can be Secretary of Defense (War) and cause the mightiest military in the world to be brought to its knees, and still keep your job in the Trump regime.
You can be in charge of public health and cause measles to reemerge as a major hazard to Americans, and still keep your job.
You can be illegally enriching yourself and your family as Commerce Secretary, and still keep your job.
But you’ll be fired for actively and unnecessarily getting bad press.
A few days ago, a senior White House official toldPolitico that FBI director Kash Patel’s bad press was “not a good look for a Cabinet secretary” and had frustrated Trump. “It’s only a matter of time,” they said, before Patel is canned.
Like Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Patel has been his own worst press agent.
He filed a $250 million defamation claim against The Atlantic magazine over its April 17 report claiming that his FBI colleagues were alarmed by his excessive drinking and unexplained absences. The report included claims that his security detail struggled to rouse him due to intoxication several times in the past year and that he drank heavily at a private club in Washington. Bureau employees expressed concerns that his behavior posed a threat to public safety.
I doubt it’s Patel’s excessive drinking and absences that are making Trump upset; it’s that they’re being reported, and that Patel has made them even bigger stories by suing The Atlantic over them.
Last week, Patel added to the drinking story when he erupted at NBC’s Ryan Reilly, who asked Patel at a press conference whether, as The Atlantic alsoreported, he feared he had been fired when he was unable to log into his government computer.
“The problem with you and your baseless reporting is that is an absolute lie,” Patel shot back. “It was never said. It never happened. And I will serve in this administration as long as the president and the attorney general want me to do so.” Patel added, “You are off topic,” and “the answer to your question is you are lying.”
Worse yet, from Trump’s viewpoint, is that some of Patel’s drinking has been in the public eye. One video showed him drinking a beer, banging his fist on a table, and celebrating with the U.S. men’s hockey team at this year’s Winter Olympics in Italy.
Nothing gets Trump angrier than when one of his underlings is caught doing something stupid on videotape. After the video of Patel spread on social media, Trump called Patel to convey his discontent, Politico reported.
Soon after Patel sued TheAtlantic, TheNew York Timesreported that the FBI had been investigating Elizabeth Williamson. Williamson was the Times journalist who revealed that Patel had used a SWAT team to protect his country singer girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, when she was invited to sing the national anthem at the annual convention of the National Rifle Association. And that Patel had “ripped into” the SWAT team’s commander when the team left after it became apparent there was no threat to her.
It’s not that Patel misused government funds on his girlfriend. Or that Patel exploded at the FBI SWAT team’s commander. Or even that Patel ordered an investigation of the journalist who reported this. No, it’s that all of this became a national story — twice. Such self-generated negative press infuriates Trump.
Patel with girlfriend Alexis Wilkins
The same day that the Times reported on the FBI’s investigation of Elizabeth Williamson, NBC reported that a federal judge in Texas had tossed out a defamation case brought by Patel against former FBI assistant director-turned-MSNBC contributor Frank Figliuzzi. Patel had brought the case over Figliuzzi’s remark on “Morning Joe” that Patel had been “been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building.”
More self-generated negative press: not that Patel has been doing the nightclub circuit and disregarding his job, but that he invited a story about it by suing Figliuzzi.
Similarly, it’s not that Patel has repeatedly wrongly accused people of federal crimes (announcing someone had been arrested for the murder of right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk when the real murderer hadn’t yet turned himself in, and that a person of interest had been detained in the Brown University shooting, only for that individual to be released hours later).
It’s that Patel’s wrong accusations were widely reported, making Patel — and, indirectly, Trump — look dumber than dirt.
Patel simply doesn’t know how to keep a low profile. Like so many others in the Trump regime, he made his name by promoting himself. As a frequent guest on right-wing programs before Trump appointed him FBI director, he pushed conspiracy theories about the “deep state,” the 2020 presidential election, and the January 6 Capitol attack.
But the occupant of the Oval Office doesn’t want his underlings engaging in self-promotion and vindictive lawsuits. If anyone’s going to be self-promotional and vindictive, Trump wants it to be himself.
Patel has been trying to win back Trump’s favor by escalating FBI investigations into Trump enemies. But so far, the investigations haven’t yielded adequate evidence to indict, another mark against him in Trump’s book.
A week ago Sunday, Patel promised that the Justice Department would soon make arrests related to the 2020 election, stating on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that “We’ve got all the information we need, we’re working with our prosecutors at the Department of Justice under [acting] Attorney General Todd Blanche, and we are going to be making arrests, and it’s coming, and I promise you, it’s coming soon.”
Patel’s plea was obviously directed at Trump.
I doubt it will work. Patel will soon be locked out of his computer for good.
Frankly, I couldn’t think of anything even slightly humorous to draw for today’s Sunday caption contest. As Karla Von Huben put it in her comment about my post this morning about the White House Correspondents Dinner: “I suspect that most people are going to think this is fake, just like the ‘attack’ in Butler that resulted in no scar on his ear. I also think it’s going to backfire bigly. I’m just so sick of this lunatic I could scream. Or cry. Or throw things.”
Me, too.
So let’s resume the Sunday caption contest next week.
In the meantime, be well. Be safe. Hug your loved ones.
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