Not Necessarily Stoned, But Beautiful

Today marks the anniversary of a dramatic reworking of the U.S. constitutional order.

On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation that brought the principles of the Declaration of Independence to life. They required the federal government to protect the equal rights of all American men.

In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited slavery on the basis of race, but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which Black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after actor John Wilkes Booth murdered President Abraham Lincoln, white southern Democrats had done their best to push their Black neighbors back into subservience. So long as southern states had abolished enslavement, repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy and made war on the United States.

Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court.

Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”

At the time, Bork’s supporters expressed outrage at what they insisted was Kennedy’s smear campaign, for surely the right-wing attack on the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment would never so completely undermine modern society.

That’s wild! This is from @Naomi Klein herself (see her post below):

*Chew two gasx tablets

* Poop from mild laxative taken last night

* Leave 50-55 minutes prior to appointment

* Constantly drink water until 30 minutes before scheduled treatment

* Hold it. Keep holding it.

* Treatment (10 minutes give or take)

As Tom Nichols noted in The Atlantic, the U.S. emphatically does not have the Strait of Hormuz. “Iran, Not Trump, Is in Control of This War,” the title of Nichols’s article reads. It goes on to say that the Iranians are calling the shots in the war and “are routinely humiliating the American president.” The so-called ceasefire was likely intended to calm oil markets, Nichols says; neither side ever stopped shooting.

Like many other observers, Nichols noted that Trump was “incoherent” in Ankara. He referred to Iran as the “Islamic Republic of Japan” and referred to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin.” In an off-with-their-heads! moment, he also announced he had ordered Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to cut off all trade with Spain.

According to Humeyra Pamuk and David Latona of Reuters, Trump repeatedly complained about Spain, whose leftist prime minister Pedro Sánchez refused to let the U.S. use its bases or airspace to attack Iran even though Spain has been dramatically increasing its NATO spending. Trump then told Bessent: “I don’t want to do any more trade with them, alright? Don’t even talk to them. They’re hopeless. They’re bad people.... They make so much money with us, and we’re going to see that they make a lot less. I want no business with them.”

As economist Paul Krugman notes in his newsletter, cutting off trade with Spain is simply not going to happen. First of all, Trump does not have the authority to do any such thing. Second, the U.S. actually does a lot of business with Spain, and American businesses would not accept any such cuts. But even more, it is impossible because Spain is part of the European Union. As Krugman notes, this declaration is rather like Europe declaring it is going to cut off all trade with Florida.

Trump’s declaration is a “non-event,” Krugman notes. It is “not something that is real.”

What we should take from it, he says, is that the statement was “completely crazy.” “In any kind of normally functioning political system,” he said, “in any kind of normally functioning party environment we would have a massive bipartisan call across the aisle, across almost everybody except for a handful of members of congress who are themselves crazy, to say okay this guy is non compos mentis. We cannot leave the fate of the United States or the world in the hands of somebody who is completely irrational, who is making demands and believing himself to have powers that he does not.”

A German official was more succinct: “Europeans don’t take Trump seriously any longer.”