Booker's Filibuster

 Kudos to Senator Corey Booker (D-NJ), who broke the record (set by Strom Thurmond) for longest speech given on the Senate floor. He filibustered against Trump for over 25 hours (25 hours, 4 minutes). He spoke the entire time save for questions from the floor and time given over to fellow speakers. He remained standing throughout.

As Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski noted, "Whether you agree with him or not, the past 24+ hours was what most people think a filibuster actually looks like." She congratulated him. 

Social media that I looked at (Bluesky) seemed mainly supportive of Booker. Some detractors pointed out that he wasn't filibustering any one piece of legislation, that this made his performance more of a stunt than anything. Others disagreed, noting that Democrats have needed a coherent and inspiring leader since Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reversed course and (with nine other Democratic votes) helped Republicans to avoid a government shutdown. 

I still don't know what to think about that decision. I was against it, in no small part due to arguments from Isaac Saul. Saul himself, however, withdrew his opposition to the continuing budget resolution. Friends and family who work for government agencies were likewise opposed to shutting down the government, fearing that would embolden DOGE's already drastic government cuts. 

Those same friends, however, just got "the letter" today--a "better take it while it's offered" deal to retire early. Some are taking the deal. Some--those who haven't worked long enough or aren't old enough (there's a calculation that balances those factors)--can't afford to retire now. Thus they wait for a roll of the dice to see if they still have a job.

Mind you, the FAA will, I expect, still be relied upon to do all the tasks they currently do--prevent widespread death and chaos in air travel--at severe labor shortages.

Tomorrow, April 2, Trump is supposed to be announcing his "liberation day" tariffs on everyone everywhere. Even the Wall Street Journal editorial board calls the "tariffs are really tax cuts" an Orwellian exercise. One gets the sense that Trump and his Commerce Secretary Howard "I Don't Know Anyone That Isn't Pissed Off At Him" Lutnick really do believe what, well, no one with any economic training agrees with. The Politico article I linked to suggests that Trump world is poised to blame Lutnick when things go south. "Bad advice." I hope that dodge fails. Trump owns "tariffs are good." And even if he didn't, isn't he supposed to be so good at hiring the best people?

I don't know. I'm back to hoping for bad things. Really, I'm not sure what good path Trump perceives by raising taxes on all imports. Nothing I've heard on that score seems realistic or coherent. 

There's so much I'm losing track of what next to write about to my Republican Senators. I'm guessing it'll be about ICE overreach and the horror of doing away with due process for all. But it could be about how Trump's initiatives seem to do the opposite of what they aim to do. He's going to fix the economy by ruining it? He's going to create peace by going to war? He's going to improve government efficiency by gutting vital programs--including and especially those that make or save us money--randomly? He's going to fix immigration by creating no-human-rights-apply states of exception? 

No wonder Senator Booker needed 25 hours.

Credit Where It's Due

 Credit where it's due: I gotta write one of my two mega-GOP senators today. I had written them previously to ask them to stand up to Trump's badmouthing of judges who rule against him. It seems now that some Republican senators are doing just that, including the one I wrote to. He was quoted saying, well, good things?

Of course, other Republican legislators are trying to replicate that end run with extra steps, proposing a bill to strip federal judges of blocking executive acts beyond the immediate parties bringing the challenge. That seems like a bad idea, one that GOP senators would have (rightly) decried had Democrats attempted the same to curtail challenges against Biden's or Obama's executive orders. Hopefully they'll see that.

Did my letter make any kind of difference, play any kind of role in that senator's stand? Almost certainly not. But it was good to see.

Thus he gets this letter tonight:

Dear [SENATOR]--

About a week ago I wrote to urge you to stand up to the White House's badmouthing of federal judges for rulings they don't like. I was pleased to see an article from thehill.com: "Senate Republicans urge Trump, allies to stop threatening courts." You were quoted, speaking against Speaker Johnson's plans to defund federal courts. 

I applaud your stance and thank you for defending our system of checks and balances.

I am less thrilled by Senator Grassley's proposal to limit the injunctive power of federal judges. Limiting injunctions to the immediate parties bringing a challenge would seriously hinder a major check against executive overreach. Temporary stays and temporary injunctions already have a limiting factor: they're temporary. If the acts in question are legal, then they will find their way through judicial scrutiny. If they're illegal, then they should never have been issued in the first place.

By contrast, victims of ill-considered executive orders require broad and immediate protection. Waiting for a class action lawsuit to redress a sweeping illegal order by the President is like filling out mail-in request for firefighters while the house burns. 

I note that Republicans have never taken a stance that judicial injunctions go too far when Democrats occupy the White House and issue executive orders. Nor should you. Executive orders that overstep should be challenged and when necessary paused. Thus we have judicial stays and injunctions.

That there have been many injunctions against the President indicates executive overreach, not judicial activism. Over the last two months, the White House has proudly adopted a "move fast and break things" attitude. The President has "flooded the zone" with sweeping executive orders and novel interpretations of old laws to justify a range of actions. It's no surprise that causing a flood triggers floodgates to close.

The broad powers the President claims call for extra caution. Already we've seen how imprudent acts such as the Venezuelan deportations to El Salvador turn out badly. News reports tell of mistakenly identified several innocent people as violent gang members. It's a nauseating abuse of power and flagrant disregard of due process. The worrisome practice of "disappearing" legal residents who break no laws at all likewise cries out for close scrutiny.

Great power requires great oversight and accountability. The White House has so far been reticent to accept oversight on its own. (Witness the shameful whataboutism and excuse-making around the Signal debacle.) Congress and the courts must step in to compensate for the White House's rashness.

I ask that you and the rest of Congress continue to hold the executive branch accountable to the law and to the Constitutional protections for all.  

Thank you,

Mouffe in the Time of Trump

 A friend of mine at church briefly let me know he'd been thinking of my work with Braver Angels and the entire endeavor of talking to the other side. 

He was having a hard time with it lately. When a senator of ours was walking his dog through my friend's neighborhood, my friend rolled down his window and "said some unkind words."

I'm not a fan of unkind words per se. But I do see where my friend is coming from. Support for Trump--really, absolutely loving what he's doing--seems so foreign to me. 

This, my training tells me, represents a failure of my imagination. I remember my Chantal Mouffe. The classical trap is thinking your political opponents must be either irrational or immoral. They're deluded, poor things, misled by the right-wing mediasphere into believing the stories of immigrants flooding over the border to steal their jobs and infect their communities with fentanyl. Or they're just self-centered, ethically broken people who covertly or openly want a white supremacist (and patriarchal, anti-queer, anti-disabled, etc.) society. 

The hardest truth to swallow is that people just as intellectually and ethically sophisticated as you are hold very different values and believe very different things. They think the same things about your side: how could anyone believe what they do? Are they stupid or just evil?

 Our differences can't just be talked out. We can't just meet in the middle. Our struggle will determine the fate of democracy, the political and practical realities for everyone.

Mouffe argues that the challenge is to see such opponents not as antagonists--enemies we must crush utterly--but agonists--players in the same liberal democratic game. We play to win, not to draw. But winning does not mean annihilating our opponents. Nor does it mean breaking the system that allows them to play in the first place. That means anyone's victory is always partial, always temporary. The struggle continues. 

At least, that's ideally how it is supposed to go. 

I'm not sure Mouffe entertains enough the possibility that one set of players might operate via bad faith. I'm not sure she entertains the possibility that a majority of the populace may vote to do away with the fair-play rules altogether. Stanley Fish once wrote that democracy has a self-destruct button permanently installed inside of it. Any demos at any time could conceivably press it, abdicating rights and popular sovereignty in favor of monarchy or feudalism or something else.

It's hard not to see people who defend this administration's chaos and incompetence and pettiness and unlawfulness as mashing that button as hard and as often as they can. Does this make them evil? Deluded? Something else? 

I don't know. But Mouffian agonism seems unlikely to muster an effective response. The alternatives, though, promise even less appealing paths. 

All this to say: I don't know what Braver Angels has to offer right now. I've not yet been able to bring myself to watch some of the "debates" about Trump's first 100 days. I may need to summon some courage, if only to respond well to my friends--and my enemies. 

A Small Voting Victory

 It's hopeful that all four amendments on the state ballot today failed. Though some of them dangled enticing treats (e.g., a pay raise for teachers), such lures hid several sharp hooks that would have snared citizens. Our GOP Governor wanted more power. The people denied him this power, contrary to his apparent expectations.

I'm especially heartened Amendment 3 failed. It would have, essentially, made it easier to prosecute juveniles for a wider array of crimes. That 65% of voters said no to this gives me hope that the culture of justice-as-revenge-on-those-I-hate may be losing steam. 

So much of the Trump administration's actions seem predicated on revenge against those Trump perceives as having slighted him: people, law firms, companies, universities, and whole countries and international organizations. Trump acts like a petty bully; this we knew already. 

The really depressing part was how many US voters seemed happy to endorse that bullying. Decimating federal government agencies, firing qualified people for random reasons, and choking off research funding? Just what those stupid bureaucrats deserve! Disappearing people from other countries--even those here legally and legitimately--without due process? Screw 'em! Threatening universities and colleges? Love those know-it-all elites' tears!

I think we're starting to see some pushback even from Republican voters. This is especially so among those who find themselves directly affected by DOGE cuts and anti-DEI purges. John Stoehr, editor of The Editorial Board, however, argue that such stories do not indicate conversions to left/Democratic causes--just disillusionment with Trump. The woman CNN interviewed for the story, a Trump voter who lost her job due to DOGE, regrets her vote now. But, Stoehr skeets, "She expected the government to cut out people who do not belong, that is, cut out “waste, fraud and abuse,” and now that she has discovered that she is among the 'undeserving,' she is experiencing cognitive dissonance." She voted for Trump three times, Stoehr observes. Her problem isn't that Trump wanted to go after/take revenge on people; it's that she personally got caught up in those targeted people. For Stoehr, Democrats must focus efforts not on converting or appealing to voters like her--that's not a winning move for them. Rather, the aim should be to discourage her from supporting Trump. "Stay home if he's on the ballot" makes for a better and moer reachable goal.

Stoehr's rationale here presumes that Trump voters will never share the ethical stance Democrats might wish them to have--Perhaps it's wrong to treat people unfairly even if we don't know or like them. I don't know about that. 

Maybe people voted down Amendment 3 just because they hate Amendments, or hate Landry, or just hate change. But maybe, just maybe, there was something in them that militated against the idea juvenile offenders deserve harsher and longer sentences. 

I'd like to think so.

Solo

 We put one of our cats down today. Solo--named not after Star Wars but because originally we thought we'd be getting him and his brother. When his bro was given away before him, we got a solo kitty instead of a duo. He'd been having gastrointestinal trouble for the last year or so--throwing up a ton, lots of poop problems. Gradually he went down from his former 14 pounds to 10, then 9, then this week 7. Despite tons of vet visits and medication regimens--is it IBS or lymphoma?--over the last week or so he just stopped eating. 

Even at the end, Solo so enjoyed his "water treat": we trickle water from a cup into a bowl for him. He's always gone gaga for that, pawing (and clawing) at the cup, taking a turn around the mini waterfall, examining the back of the cup, sticking his little nose underneath the stream, sneezing violently after water would go up his snoot, and even sticking his head into the cup to drink directly from the cup as water trickled out of it. Just the words "water treat" would summon Solo like magic.

That remained up even this morning. When I got up, Solo came in, thin and bony and bleary-eyed, and sat next to his bowl and cup. I gave him water treat. He stuck his nose in the stream. But he couldn't bring himself to drink. He hadn't eaten anything for days, not even the nibbles or licks at kibble or canned food. 

We had stopped the nightly ordeal of stuffing meds down his throat a few days prior. 

After I got home from school, we took him to the vet down the street, the same vet that had taken care of Solo when he was a kitten with what they feared was kitty pneumonia. 

As we pet him, the vet gave the first of two shots--this one to relax him into near unconsciousness and painlessness. His eyes stayed open, and I tried to close them so they wouldn't cause any discomfort (though he was by that point beyond discomfort). They then brought in the heart-stopping injection. They had to struggle a bit to fit it into his thinned vein. But they did, and he was gone.

Solo is only the second cat that I've raised from a tiny kitten, and the only one so far I've seen all the way through from kitten to passing. (Our other cat, Hidey, we got from a shelter when she was just emerging from smallest kittenhood.) Our next cat is likely to be my partner's attempt to domesticate the stray he's been courting for over a year now. I'm not convinced NC ("Neighborhood Cat") wants to be indoor, nor am I convinced Hidey would want her. But he'll try anyway, and we'll see.

I cried earlier this week, holding Solo, anticipating this day. I shed tears all day and sobbed on the way home. I'm going to bump up against a kitty-shaped absence in my life for some time to come. All the little places he'd be: hopping up to take one of my hands as I work on the computer, waiting outside of the shower to investigate the drips and puddles (a scientist of water was Solo), chewing on anything crinkly and often carrying it to his water bowl like an offering to some sea god, and mostly snuggling up to me. At his healthiest, he was so big, and he insisted on taking up my torso. 

Cats are infamously aloof. You can't count on a cat to show affection to you. But Solo outdid any dog in loving on us. He adored us. We adored him, even in his destructive kitten phase. (We would often joke about having visits from some mysterious cult's monks, who in their gentle way would inform us that our cute little kitten was in fact Destruction incarnate. "Behind his innocent face, he dreams of the world broken and burning." "But he's such a cute boy!" we'd respond. "Yes," they would sigh, shaking their heads, "That's how he gets you.")

We withdrew somewhat as his health declined. I suspect some touches of kitty dementia. But he was still happy to sit with us, kneading a blanket and sucking on it, never having grown out of his nursing phase. He loved our hands resting on him or his head and paws resting on our hands. 

He was an exceptional cat. I told him often how much I loved him, what a good guy, a good Solo, he was. I thanked him often for being with us, and I thanked God for bringing us together. 

May God take his soul to a paradise of water treats, crinkly plastic, and beloved hands and warm torsos to snuggle with. 

Homo Sacer in US Deportations

 I was going to post about how much I like toys, which toys I enjoyed as a kid, etc. 

But I can't get over a story (one of many) about the Venezuelan men deported--against a federal judge's orders--to a brutal prison in El Salvador.

Here's a skeet about it.

 

“One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, ‘I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.’ I believed him. *** He “began to whimper,” as his head was roughly shaved, “folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell.” He “asked for his mother & cried as he was slapped again.”

[image or embed]

— Jenny Cohn (@jennycohn.bsky.social) March 22, 2025 at 3:51 PM

Do I know if the man is lying? No. Do I know whether he is, as alleged by Trump's ICE, a member of a violent gang? No.

Does it matter? Not as far as my horror at this act goes. 

Way back in the bad old days of the Iraq invasion, philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote about homo sacer (sacred man, set-aside man). This refers to the classification of biological human life excluded (set apart) from consideration as a fully political person. It was possible, Agamben wrote, to kill homo sacer without it being a crime. Homo sacer isn't so much murdered as exterminated. Agamben's larger argument suggested that something like this figure forms the necessary counterpoint to human rights discourse. When there exist "humans" with "rights," there also exists homo sacer--the human being with no rights. 

Human rights are, in theory, universal. In practice, however, they require systems that recognize and honor such rights. These systems in turn inevitably distinguish between the humans who "count" as having rights and those who, for some reason, do not. Different eras offer different social-political technologies that define such groups: enslaved people, women, the poor, immigrants, unhoused people, children and adolescents, disabled people, queer people, incarcerated people, elderly people, Black or Indigenous or POC folk. The 2000s provided ample opportunities to see Agamben's theory play out: "enemy combatants," some of whom still languish in Guantanamo in a legal limbo. These "terrorists" were denied even Geneva Conventions consideration. It became legal to commit acts (torture, indefinite detention, lack of habeus corpus) that would be war crimes if committed against others.

Many of these technologies persist for these groups. Right now, "citizenship" seems to be asserting itself once more as a major dividing line between humans with rights and "others" whom it is legal to mistreat. This isn't new. "The right to have rights" has long been one of the major defining features of citizenship. The notion disrupts ostensibly universal human rights discourse--don't rights inhere in humanity itself? 

As I tell my students, however, the core question of politics is "Who counts?" Which humans count as human? Which humans actually get considered as such by the State (and arguably by culture, the economy, etc.)? As long as that question exists, the possibility of not counting--or of counting not as much--persists. Indeed, how are the ones who count able to know what "counting" means except via constant reference to those who don't count as much? There's an old lefty adage that we have prisons to convince those not in prison that they're free. I know I have rights, in one sense, only to the extent that I can imagine and point to those who do not. That imagining and pointing can all too easily create or rationalize classes of homo sacer.

The men kidnapped and deported to a torture space under an authoritarian dictator--they are homo sacer. They have been deemed as "not counting"--apparently not endowed by their creator with unalienable rights. We don't know--can't know--whether they are actually guilty, let alone debate whether their guilt justifies shipping them off into what amounts to a concentration camp. We are expected simply to take the word of an administration whose first two months have been defined by incompetence, cruelty, and power-grabbing.

It is the job of every person who invokes the stirring rhetoric of human rights, of liberty and equality and democracy, to speak out against the curtailment of these rights. We must not claim the right to have rights--and then slam the door behind us, locking everyone else out into the space of bare existence as homo sacer.

God help those imprisoned there--and everywhere. Help those living in fear of being kidnapped by the State and sent into hell. Save them, Lord who sets prisoners free. 

 

Taking Stock of Some Shifts

There was a period--back when I first started this blog--when I felt like I had a deep sense of what "the other side" was thinking. Doing research on conservative evangelicalism through the aughts and the early 2010s, I was able to listen carefully. I practiced Krister Stendahl's three rules for religious understanding:

1. Read/listen to the practitioners, not their critics
2. Don't compare your best with their worst
3. Find room for holy envy--aspects of their side that you wish your side had

I immersed myself in conservative evangelical books, podcasts, sermons, websites, blogs, interviews. I bled "conservative evangelicalism" from every orifice.

I published my book, enjoyed the mostly positive feedback--and then watched as, over the next few years the "other side" that I examined morphed into something I didn't recognize. I suppose the influence of early-to-mid-2010s-era trolling, the birth and growth of the "alt right," played a part. A kind of nihilistic irony, a sharpening of the South Park poke-fun-at-every-sincere-belief mentality, wormed its way into the American right's structure of feeling. Cheap, one-sided victories--owning the libs, getting the lulz--came to supplant and eventually replace gains for long-term visions about a shared future.

It's easy to rose-color-tint the early twenty-first-century right. Plenty of cynicism drove the Bush II era's militant patriotism. Yet one gathered that George W. Bush himself actually believed the faith he professed, and that faith--unappealing as I personally found it--gave him some kind of coherent core of sincere values. And yes, I think there were plenty of bad-faith pretenders and grifters willing to mouth churchy platitudes in order to win audience. 

But the first-wave trolls of early Facebook, Twitter, 4chan, Reddit, etc., didn't even pretend to coherent ethical or religious conviction. Instead you had webs of anonymized bullying and chaos for chaos's sake--all for anonymized fame and anonymized approval. These networks granted users a sense of power (I can make people outraged=I have power) and community (likes, lulz). Naturally, such an ethos attracted and intensified parts of online culture who felt themselves in need of power and community (young white men, mainly). This group in turn found a useful (and easily provoked) antagonist in the burgeoning online social justice movement. 

The sometimes brittle sincerity of the online left proved an appealing target for the "just joking" trolls eager to push buttons. The reaction from the left (and everyone else) to such puerile bullying soon crystallized around framing lonely white cishet men as infantile bullies. That framing in turn spurred some trolls to affirm and strengthen their male cishet non-SJW whiteness as a core identity. Thus Gamergate and other flashpoints advanced the polarization of trollish masculinity versus social justice warriors (feminists, Black and brown people, queer folk, etc.). 

Enter Trump as candidate. He and his campaign leaned happily into the trollish joy of provocation for provocation's sake. Trump's own ethos seems grounded in a petty bullying mentality: you're winning if--and to the extent that--you insult the other side. Their being outraged just proves how weak they are. It's shocking and funny at once to his audience. He gets the lulz. No wonder he so often praised his "army of trolls."

Trump II's governance advances this ethos, only without the laughs. Shock and awe--He can't be serious, can he?--defines his style so far. Yes, he really does mean it. Yes, he really will do that thing. The fact you're offended proves he's winning.

All this (and I'm super-simplifying) seems clear enough. The missing player here in my overview so far is the right-wing media ecosphere, a masterful hegemonic accomplishment. Its messages are consistent: Everything Trump does is good; everyone critical of Trump is deranged; only he alone can save us from The Threat. And, quelle suprise, The Threat turns out to be the same antagonists of Gamergate-era trolls: women, Black folk and POC, queer people. It's anyone who would dare to say that their puerile bullying is, well, puerile and bullying. 

And the government. This, I sense, comes more from TEA Party (and then Pizzagate and then Q-Anon) streams than from disgruntled gamergaters. From this source comes the deep-seated distrust and resentment of institutions, especially schools and government agencies. The right-wing mediasphere has over the past few decades supecharged such distrust into a reflexive hatred of complexity of any sort. Elon Musk and his DOGE seem the perfect blend of anti-SJW troll (with a bad boy hacker genius spice) and anti-big-government savior. Their cuts don't need to be smart or well considered, just grandiose and outrageous to Trump's enemies. That those people are getting upset about DOGE must, in this mentality, mean that it's doing something right.

The big question I have, though, is where conservative Christianity fits in. The evangelical intellectuals whose thoughts and stances I got to know so well--what's happened to them? I'm hardly the first to marvel at evangelicals' fawning over an amoral narcissist like Trump. I recognize that this support has happened. I'm still wondering how and why, which tells me I need to do some listening.