Will Trump Check His Executive Privilege?

While pundits debate whether there was a blue wave in last week’s midterm elections—there was—the White House is bracing for an onslaught from the new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. Democrats are preparing to subpoena the Trump administration on at least 85 different matters. The list of targets include trivial and weighty subjects alike, the latter including Trump’s tax returns, the Russia investigation, the migrant family separation policy, the travel ban, and whether Trump is using the presidency to enrich his personal businesses.

Two opposing forces will shape these investigations: Congress’s power to oversee the executive branch, and the executive branch’s power to keep certain documents from Congress. Though executive privilege is not mentioned in the Constitution, the courts consider its use by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to be the next best thing. Presidents from both parties have, with varying degrees of success, invoked the separation of powers to keep the executive branch’s internal deliberations hidden from the federal judiciary and from Congress.

Trump’s presidency has been characterized by impulsiveness and short-sightedness. When it comes to invoking executive privilege, however, the White House has been unusually strategic. The administration has opted not to invoke it at key moments, largely related to the Russia investigation, while selectively using it to protect documents related to Trump’s businesses and the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. These episodes could be instructive in how Trump wields the privilege in the political standoffs to come.

There are two notable instances where the White House avoided invoking the privilege. Last year, after Trump fired James Comey, the Senate Intelligence Committee invited the former FBI director to testify. Some political and legal observers speculated that the White House would use executive privilege to prevent him from doing so, but Trump instead took the path of least resistance, forestalling what would have been a bruising—and potentially fruitless—legal battle.

At around the same time, Trump hired lawyers John Dowd and Ty Cobb to lead his legal defense in the Russia investigation. The two men, in hopes of speeding up the inquiry, took a highly cooperative stance with special counsel Robert Mueller, including reportedly waiving executive privilege to provide him with numerous documents. Trump’s lawyers also made no effort to stop Mueller from interviewing former White House Counsel Don McGahn or other top administration officials about Comey’s dismissal.

This strategy wasn’t without its detractors. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie dismissed Cobb and Dowd as a “C-level legal team” for waiving the privilege so readily, which he said could harm Trump’s future legal defenses. (Christie is now reportedly under consideration to succeed recently fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions.) Cobb and Dowd left the president’s legal team earlier this year, and the once-cooperative approach may have left with them: Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman reported in July that Emmet Flood, the president’s lead lawyer, is taking a more adversarial approach to the special counsel’s inquiries and invoking executive privilege more frequently.

In one notable instance—Sessions’s congressional testimony about Comey’s dismissal—the Trump administration took a murky and muddled approach. Rather than invoke executive privilege outright, Sessions avoided answering questions by telling lawmakers that it would be inappropriate to testify about his private conversations with the president, in case the White House wanted to invoke the privilege in the future. This rhetorical maneuver left lawmakers with few answers about what he witnessed during one of the Trump presidency’s most pivotal moments.

At other times, the White House has played hardball with investigators and invoked the privilege to stymie them. In an August report, the Government Services Administration’s inspector general said that Trump met twice with top GSA officials about the future of the FBI’s dilapidated headquarters in downtown D.C. The GSA ultimately decided to keep the headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue rather than move it elsewhere, which would have led to the redevelopment of the FBI’s current site—a massive parcel that surely would have attracted hotel developers. Trump may have taken a special interest in the project because the headquarters are located right across the street from his D.C. hotel.

The Kavanaugh hearings led to another decisive blow to congressional oversight. Democrats wrangled with Republicans for months about the judge’s records from his days on the Whitewater investigation in the 1990s and the George W. Bush administration in the early 2000s. The GOP ultimately made only a fraction of his documents public. In September, Trump invoked executive privilege to withhold 100,000 pages of purportedly sensitive documents from Kavanaugh’s White House tenure. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, called the announcement a “Friday night document massacre.”

The White House, like any, will bend on some congressional requests and hold firm on others. Inquiries into besieged Cabinet members may be allowed to proceed, so long as they don’t touch the president himself. Scrutiny of controversial policies like the travel ban and the family separation policy may be hindered or curtailed, but not entirely thwarted. The closer the investigations get to Trump personally, though, the more he may resist them. It’s conceivable that probes into his conversations with top officials about the Russia investigation, and matters involving his children and businesses, will be fought all the way to the Supreme Court. But in doing so, Trump would be giving a roadmap into what deserves more scrutiny, not less.

In political terms, Trump will open any constitutional clash with a significant disadvantage. Many of his predecessors justified invoking executive privilege by citing the need to preserve the White House’s integrity as a coequal branch of government. Trump, by comparison, has shown little interest in the presidency as an institution, except insofar as it can be used to his benefit and to his political enemies’ frustration. So whenever he invokes executive privilege over the next two years, Democrats rightly will see it as a purely self-serving maneuver. They will smell the blood in the water.

Early on Sunday morning, dozens of buses set off from every region of Poland, carrying tens of thousands of patriotic Poles to the capital for the centenary celebration of the country’s independence from imperial powers.

At 4 a.m., a crowd waiting in Legnica, near the German border, was met by Piotr Borodacz, a local far-right activist who had organized two buses for the 100 people who’d asked to join him on the trip. They made their way west through Silesia—a region transferred to Poland from Germany after WWII—picking up passengers along the way.

The mood was combative. Days before, Warsaw’s mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz had announced a ban on the annual Independence Day march, which since its inception as a fringe gathering for nationalists in 2009 has grown into a magnet for far-right groups from across the globe. The annual event is organized and promoted by radical nationalist groups, and the presence of white power slogans at last year’s march prompted alarmist headlines about the rise of fascism in Poland and left the government scrambling to avoid such scenes on the centenary.

“Poland and Warsaw have suffered enough from aggressive nationalism,” Gronkiewicz-Waltz, who represents the opposition Civic Platform party, wrote on Twitter. “This is not how the centenary of independence should look.” Yet the following day, the ban was overturned by a Warsaw court for infringing upon the right of assembly, and the way was cleared for nationalists to monopolize commemoration of Poland’s biggest celebration in recent memory.

The ruling Law and Justice party in Poland has spent years rallying nationalist passions for political gain. Since its election in 2015, it has elicited the support of groups disillusioned with Poland’s post-1989 trajectory, emboldening some of their most radical members.

Yet the far-right populism they stoked seems to be slipping beyond their control. “There was enough time to address this problem, to prepare these celebrations in a way that upholds the dignity of the state and its democratic identity,” said Rafal Pankowski of Never Again, an organization which monitors nationalism in Poland. “But the government lacked the courage.” Faced with the prospect of thousands of nationalists marching through Warsaw without official oversight, the governing party found no alternative but to join them.

Borodacz’s group arrived in Warsaw around noon after an eight-hour drive, sleep-deprived but energized by the scenes unfolding outside the bus windows. Some 200,000 people had descended on the city center, according to official figures released during the march, carrying Polish flags and armbands with the logo of the Home Army, a wartime resistance movement. Some were decked out in historical military uniforms. Every few seconds, the deafening bang of a flare could be heard.

Borodacz and his friends wove their way into the crowd, and moments later stood shoulder to shoulder with thousands of fellow Poles and activists—from members of far-right groups like Italy’s Forza Nuova to Polish families on day trips with their kids—to hear President Andrzej Duda declare the event open.

“I want us to march together beneath our banners, in an atmosphere of joy,” Duda said, his voice echoing through speakers that towered above the crowds. “Let this be a march for everyone, one which everyone wants to join and at which everyone feels good.”

But the Poland that marked its centenary on Sunday is a bitterly divided nation. Conflicting with official police statistics, at least one independent watch group claims hate crimes have skyrocketed in the past few years. Feuds over the country’s past and present, waged over the airwaves of state-owned TV, on social media, and on the streets of Poland’s cities, spilled over into mutual recrimination as the big day drew near. In the morning, steps from where Duda delivered his address, Gabriela Lazarek and fellow members of the opposition group Citizens of Poland unfurled a banner with an image of emaciated children at a Nazi concentration camp. “This is how nationalism ends,” it read.

Marchers clad in Polish colors cast distasteful sideward glances at the banner as they passed, and some accused the opposition activists of betraying Poland and pandering to the European elites many of the marchers see as undermining Polish sovereignty. It was an ugly scene, but one that Lazarek—who organizes regular opposition rallies in her home town of Cieszyn—has become used to.

“For me, this is a day of national mourning,” she said, reflecting on the divisions that have riven her country. “I feel terrible, and I never thought I’d feel this way today.”

Beside the spot where she stood was an improvised memorial to Piotr Szczęsny, a man who committed suicide by immolation to protest the politics of Law and Justice in 2017. The party stands accused by critics at home and abroad of curtailing Poland’s media, purging its courts, and reversing the country’s progress as a democratic state in the 30 years since it emerged from Soviet domination. Lazarek said she had come to stand watch beside the memorial and defend it from attacks by the far-right.

With no national symbols and no Polish flags, she and her supporters stood out in a city center bathed in red and white. Lazarek felt the symbols associated with her country had been distorted and co-opted by radical groups she wanted nothing to do with. “As long as the words ‘death to the enemies of the motherland’ are displayed below that flag,” she said, citing a nationalist slogan prominent among the marchers, “I am not going to wear it.”

With moderate male supporters of Law and Justice comprising the bulk of the marchers—some with wives and kids in tow—the event remained tamer than Polish officials had feared. The far-right All-Polish Youth burned an EU flag, and video surfaced online of racist and homophobic chants. But those and other incidents, in both severity and number, paled in comparison to scenes witnessed in 2017.

Yet long after sunset, when the vast crowd congregated before a stage outside the National Stadium to hear speeches by the leaders of the far-right movements which hosted the march, the mood shifted.

“Independence means Poland’s sovereignty from foreign capitals—from Moscow, from Berlin, from Washington,” National Movement leader Robert Winnicki told the crowd. “The dictatorship of the 21st century is the dictatorship of globalists.” The crowd erupted into nationalist chants.

“Independence is freedom from those who want to destroy our healthy Polish Christian traditions,” he continued. “And today in the name of independence we must declare decisive war against that whole rainbow gang which wants to corrupt our youngest generation.” The leader of the National-Radical Camp, another group affiliated with the National Movement, thanked Forza Nuova and other far-right activists from across Europe from coming to Poland for the march.

Around 9 p.m., when the speeches were over, Borodacz and his friends packed a pizza restaurant not far from the stadium. This had been the largest Independence Day march they’d ever attended, and half of the people who had joined Borodacz had come for the first time. Many said they’d attend again.

Borodacz took a seat at the largest table, and ordered a beer. He seemed energized by the speeches he’d heard. He has long believed it was time for Poland to stand up to the European “elites” and defend its national identity from liberal advocates of gay marriage, immigration, and other measures he believes pose a threat to the health of his nation.

“We live in a Europe that’s moving towards a single state, a single army and a single constitution. How do you convince people to come on board with that?” he said. “You destroy patriotism and discredit it in those countries, you distance people from the values of their ancestors, from God and Christianity, you promote multiculturalism and leftist ‘values’, you liquidate the traditional nuclear family and you push people into a life devoted purely to consumerism.”

He took another slice of his pepperoni pizza and a sip of his beer. “But this is about something bigger. I believe the big conflict being waged in Europe and the attacks from European elites concern competing visions of the world,” he added. “I believe they are fighting patriotism.”

Has the Republican Party’s grand experiment in union-busting finally come to an end? Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin, rose to national prominence in 2011 when he passed a landmark bill dealing a blow to unions in the state and across the country. With Act 10, Walker stripped public workers of their right to collectively bargain, gutting their salaries, health care, and pensions. He then survived a vigorous recall effort, which featured 100,000 protesters storming the capitol rotunda in downtown Madison.

Walker was the face of an anti-union movement championed by Republicans and backed by libertarian financiers like the Koch brothers. But seven years later, in the midst of an ostensibly booming state economy, Walker narrowly lost his reelection bid on November 6—and he was not the only anti-union gubernatorial candidate to go down this election season.

The defeat of Walker in Wisconsin, as well as Bill Schuette in Michigan, Bruce Rauner in Illinois, and Kris Kobach in Kansas, is evidence that union-bashing politicians are finding it difficult to appeal to workers in a humming economy, which would otherwise seem to validate their claims that low wages and right-to-work laws have unleashed the prosperity-making powers of the market. In fact, national support for unions is at 62 percent, a 15-year high, with particular muscle in the Midwest, and among women and millennials. “There’s a sense in which Scott Walker and his ilk have overplayed their hand,” said Lane Windham, the associate director of the labor center at Georgetown University. “People understand that unions counterbalance corporate power, and corporations are too powerful.”

This was not the sense observers had two years ago when Donald Trump outperformed past Republican presidential candidates with union households and carried a string of states that formed the backbone of the old industrial Midwest. But his message—hostile to both trade and immigrants—went against the grain of Koch-style economic orthodoxy. While certain working class voters did gravitate toward Trump, the midterm election results in Wisconsin and elsewhere suggest that they have not been convinced by his party’s economic agenda and may even have soured on Trump himself. According to a Reuters-Ipsos poll released earlier this year, Trump’s support among union voters has fallen 15 points.

Many voters living under Republican leadership are reacting to stagnant wages and the rise of underemployment. (Despite working fewer hours than they would prefer, underemployed workers get counted as “employed” in official statistics.) In 2011, when Amy Mizialko, president of the Milwaukee teacher’s union, first checked her pay stub online after Act 10 passed, she broke into tears. “Those cuts were devastating,” said Mizialko, who took a $10,000 cut in wages and benefits in the first year alone. Since the passage of Act 10, membership in Wisconsin’s largest teacher’s union plummeted from 98,000 to 32,000. Once the progressive heart of the labor movement in the United States, Wisconsin saw its union membership drop 46 percent between 2011 and 2017.

While Walker’s campaign underscored Wisconsin’s 3 percent unemployment rate (below the national average), workers in the state were fighting to find enough work and wages remained low. At $7.25 an hour, Wisconsin’s minimum wage has not budged since Walker took office seven years ago. And because of Act 10, many teachers and government workers—disproportionately women and African Americans—have had to find additional sources of income. “In Wisconsin, people are working three or four jobs,” said Mizialko. “They are driving Uber. They’re delivering groceries. They’re picking up jobs at the state fair. They’re just stitching together little stints of work to make ends meet for their families.”

They also bristled at Walker’s cozy relationship with big business. In July 2017, he pledged $4.5 billion in state tax credits for the Taiwanese manufacturing giant FoxConn to build a state-of-the-art plant outside of Kenosha that promised to bring 13,000 jobs to the area. But as David Dayen wrote last week in The New Republic, the FoxConn deal has been a disaster and was an important factor in Walker’s fall. The subsidy is the largest to a foreign corporation in U.S. history, and it comes at an enormous cost to taxpayers. Most of the subsidy will be delivered to FoxConn in direct cash payments—at an estimated 18,000 in tax dollars per Wisconsin household.

Walker was among a handful of Republican governors—including Rauner, Rick Snyder in Michigan, Eric Greitens in Missouri, and Mitch Daniels in Indiana—who transformed the Midwest with their ideas about small government, austerity, and free market solutions. The Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity initiative (AFP) poured millions of dollars into the region to pass legislation that would hobble unions and freeze minimum wages. Meanwhile, gerrymandering and new voter restrictions that favor conservatives prevented voters from overturning those laws at the polls—with the exception of the upset victory of a proposition that repealed right-to-work in Missouri in August.

Over the past decade, this right-wing alliance has reshaped the Midwest by decimating private and public sector unions. Right-to-work laws, which drastically undercut union power in the private sector, have passed in Michigan, Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky, and Wisconsin since 2012. Public sector unions underwent similar attacks in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan. Such laws make union dues optional, thereby draining unions of the funds they need to fight for workers. Workers in right-to-work states earn $1,558 less on average per year than similar workers in non-right-to-work states. When right-to-work passed under Rick Snyder in Michigan in 2012, Americans for Prosperity hailed the legislation “as the shot heard around the world for workplace freedom.”

The passage of right-to-work laws has gone hand-in-hand with declining support for the Democratic Party in the Midwest. Until Trump’s victory in 2016, Michigan and Wisconsin had not elected a Republican president since the 1980s. “Unions have a long history of turning out Democratic voters,” said Windham, the labor expert from Georgetown. “Without unions to promote a working-class agenda, people are left to listen to right-wing radio. We have to think about that to understand what happened in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in 2016.”

But there is also a strong feeling that the Democratic Party has lost touch with its union roots, allowing a supposed populist like Trump to make inroads with working voters. That is starting to change, thanks in no small part to the wake-up call delivered by the 2016 election, which made it clear that Democrats cannot take those voters for granted. But there are other reasons some Democrats are re-embracing union politics, including a wave of teacher strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, and Colorado that galvanized voters this year, as well as a growing realization that the face of union membership has changed, from the white industrial worker of the past century to a diverse coalition of women, immigrants, and minorities working in industries like hospitality, telecommunications, nursing, and media.

Ironically, low employment across the Midwest gives workers the upper hand. Last year saw a slight uptick in union membership in the United States. Employers are eager to retain and hire workers, giving workers leverage to form and expand unions. Alongside fresh leadership, this provides an opportunity for workers to stage strikes, form unions, and restore the rights they have lost.

The backlash to the GOP’s anti-union efforts is also producing tangible results. Voters in Michigan elected Gretchen Whitmer as governor with the backing of the state’s unions. In Illinois, voters ousted the union-busting Republican incumbent Rauner, who vetoed a $15 minimum wage bill and fought to pass right-to-work laws. “I think the public perception of unions is getting better each and every day. We are seeing young people responding very well to unions,” said Stephanie Bloomingdale, president of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO. In Missouri’s August referendum on the state’s right-to-work laws, a full 65 percent of voters opted to overturn them.

Still, rebuilding the labor movement in the Midwest will be a herculean task. Although the majority of Americans say they support unions, only 11 percent of U.S. workers belonged to unions in 2017. “A defeat of Walker is a major victory,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, a history professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, “but there is much ideological and organizational work to be done before liberalism and unionism are once again joined at the hip.”

Jair Bolsonaro isn’t big on democracy. The newly elected president has dismissed the notion of human rights as a “disservice” to Brazil. He has bemoaned the fact that its police force, one of the deadliest in the world, does not have the right to kill more freely, promising to give it “carte blanche” under his administration. He once proposed using a helicopter to drop pamphlets warning drug dealers to leave poor communities, or be fired upon indiscriminately.

Bolsonaro is by far the most prominent elected official to praise the harsh military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985. A retired army captain who served in the military from 1977 to 1988, he was a lackluster soldier whose outsize political ambitions often rubbed senior military figures the wrong way. In 1986, for example, he complained to the press about the lack of pay raises and the dearth of professional prospects for soldiers on active duty. Soon after, he was court-martialed for stoking unrest. (He was accused of plotting to bomb a military barracks and was convicted, but won on appeal, and the charges against him were eventually dropped.) At the time, the military had only recently returned the government to civilian control. But Bolsonaro, unlike many leading figures in the military, never accepted its diminished role in Brazilian life. In his presidential campaign, he selected a general as his vice president and promised to name other military men to key posts in government. He wants to militarize Brazil’s borders and has described the Landless Workers Movement, an organization that occupies large, unproductive estates in the countryside to advocate for land reform and denounce rural inequality, as a terrorist organization. He has pledged, in short, to revive, in spirit if not necessarily by law, the repressive thrust of the military regime.

Bolsonaro’s alignment with the armed forces follows a clear political logic. The military is the most trusted public institution in Brazil, polling much higher than Congress, which Brazilians see as hopelessly corrupt, or the judiciary, which is viewed as an insular cabal more interested in preserving its own privileges than in administering justice. (Brazilian judges are among the highest paid in the world.)

In recent years, other leaders in Latin America have profited from a right-wing wave. Mauricio Macri, a conservative multimillionaire, became president of Argentina in 2015; and in 2017, Chileans elected Sebastian Piñera, who has brought into his cabinet officials tied to the brutal regime of Augusto Pinochet. But Bolsonaro stands apart for having accomplished something no politician has attempted since democracy was restored across the region almost 30 years ago: He has won a national election as an unabashed champion of military dictatorship.

Bolsonaro served in the army at a time when its more moderate officials were negotiating a return to civilian government. There were still, however, hardliners who believed handing power back to the same corrupt political class the military had largely uprooted in 1964 was a mistake. They wanted, in other words, to continue hunting down leftists. Bolsonaro almost certainly belonged to this group. During his three decades in Congress, he often lamented that the regime was not more deadly, arguing that killing 30,000 political enemies during the dictatorship would have been better than the several hundred who actually died. (“The dictatorship erred by torturing and not killing,” is a common line.) It makes sense that such militaristic rhetoric would have endeared Bolsonaro to the armed forces, but it’s not clear why the rest of Brazil was taken in by it. Only a tiny minority has called for a military intervention like the one that ushered in dictatorship in 1964. What explains his victory?

One simple answer is the recession. Brazil has been mired in deep economic trouble since 2014. To the poorest Brazilians, Bolsonaro has promised gainful employment and the preservation of their government benefits; to the middle class, a return of the status they lost while the left-wing Workers’ Party was in power; and to the wealthiest Brazilians and investors, open markets, less stringent labor laws, and lower taxes. It’s an attractive agenda for those who believe the economy will only bounce back if the government gets out of the way. Bolsonaro has also promised to eradicate crime, something even his more ardent opponents have welcomed. But few voters would have taken his violent solutions seriously, nor seen him as a legitimate candidate, were it not for the gradual rehabilitation of the dictatorship in the public consciousness. It’s been 33 years since military rule ended in Brazil. And as painful memories of that period recede into the past, the regime’s hard edges have softened, helped along by a new wave of politicians, economists, movements, pundits, and intellectuals who have sought to counter what they see as the leftist stranglehold on Brazilian political life over the last decade and a half.

It remains to be seen whether Bolsonaro’s militaristic nationalist appeal will endure if Brazil’s economy is slow to recover. Then again, it may not matter, assuming Bolsonaro succeeds in his goals of shoring up the repressive powers of the state. The people of Brazil have volunteered their support for him; they may not be allowed to withdraw it.

In early 2011, when new census figures showed that Evergreen, Alabama, a small city midway between Montgomery and Mobile, had grown from 53 to 62 percent black over the previous ten years, the white majority on the city council took steps to maintain its political dominance. They redrew precinct lines, pushing almost all the city’s black voters into two city council districts. Then, election administrators used utility information to purge roughly 500 registered black voters from the rolls, all but ensuring that whites would maintain their majority on the council and keep control of Evergreen.

That kind of voter suppression is exactly what the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed to prevent. For 48 years, its “preclearance” provision barred election officials in states with histories of voter suppression from making changes to election procedures without permission from the federal government. It was far from a perfect system—even with preclearance in place, Evergreen officials were able to purge the rolls—but it did help hundreds of thousands of black Southerners vote. By 1972, black registration rates had reached 50 percent in all but a few Southern states. In 2013, however, in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, striking down the provisions of the law that defined which states fell under preclearance.

Since then, efforts to keep people from voting have intensified. Officials in three states have shrunk early voting time lines, and one eliminated same-day registration. Five have implemented new voter ID laws. In Texas, someone can now vote with a handgun license but not a student ID. Georgia forces voters to use the same name on their application as the one on their ID card; something as trivial as an errant or missing hyphen, a dropped middle name, or the inclusion of an extra initial on an application could prevent someone from voting. (That was how Georgia’s Secretary of State and then–Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp was able to block, if only temporarily, some 53,000 voter registrations, mostly from African Americans.) This year, South Dakota has said people must have a street address to cast a ballot, disenfranchising many Native Americans who, because they live on reservations, only have post office boxes. And just weeks before the midterms, reporters in Dodge City, Kansas, which has a growing Latino population, discovered that election officials gave newly registered voters the wrong polling site address. (The real location was outside of town, a mile from the nearest bus stop.) All told, voters in 23 states faced greater obstacles at their polling places than they did in the midterms eight years ago, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. (There are occasional, if rare, successes. In 2014, for example, citizens of Evergreen were able to bring the city back under federal control after 14 months in federal court.)

It’s time Democrats think seriously about restoring some of the provisions lost to Shelby. If there is one lesson to draw from the midterms, it’s that the right to vote is a partisan issue. Suppression, framed as election security or a last defense against voter fraud, has become a fundamental tactic of Republican efforts to exhaust, confuse, and disqualify Democratic voters—and to win elections. Democrats must fight for access to the ballot for all citizens, and for the federal oversight necessary to assure it. The new Democratic majority in the House cannot be otherwise sustained.

Such a bill would have to accomplish a few things: In 2013, the Supreme Court’s conservative justices ruled that the Voting Rights Act unfairly singled out states for federal control because they had histories of discriminatory voting practices. But Democrats can sidestep those concerns by drafting new criteria to determine which jurisdictions have to submit to federal oversight. If, say, the share of citizens registered to vote drops suddenly, or the portion of registered voters who participate in elections goes below a certain point, that might be cause to bring a jurisdiction under federal control. It wouldn’t matter whether the state had a history of discrimination; any state, no matter where it was, could be put under federal oversight so long as there were indications that discrimination was taking place now. Congress might also mandate that any voting law, like a strict voter ID requirement, that has historically prevented people of color from voting be proposed first to the federal government before it’s implemented.

“Republicans love voter ID; they think it is great,” said Charles S. Bullock III, co-author of The Rise and Fall of the Voting Rights Act. “But photo ID has also worked for Democrats, in a different way. Try to restrain the right to vote from anyone, and voting becomes the most important thing in the world. It’s basic human nature.”

That should aid Democrats in their push to find the votes to pass such a bill. Of course, the chances of President Donald Trump signing one into law are remote. But a few Republicans in the Senate, eager to defend American ideals, might be willing to support it. After all, the more time and energy they commit to voter suppression, the more their party exposes its uneasiness with representative democracy.

Boris Johnson—former mayor of London, gadfly of the British political establishment, and, most recently, Brexit’s cheerleader-in-chief—has a colorful range of rebuttals when asked about his evident desire to be prime minister. “As I never tire of saying, my chances of becoming prime minister are only slightly better than being decapitated by a frisbee, blinded by a champagne cork, locked in a fridge, or being reincarnated as an olive,” he said in 2012. In the 2013 BBC documentary, Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise, he delivered another: “I think it’s a very tough job being prime minister, a very tough job,” he said. “I mean, obviously, if the ball came loose from the back of a scrum—which it won’t, of course—it would be a great, great thing to have a crack at. But it’s not going to happen.” 

On June 24, 2016, the day after Britain voted to leave the European Union, the ball did come loose. David Cameron, prime minister since 2010, announced that, having campaigned for Britain to remain inside the EU, he was not the right leader for leaving it. Cameron knew that holding the referendum would threaten his leadership, since it would galvanize the Brexit wing of his Conservative Party. (“The only person this will help is Boris Johnson, who is clearly after my job,” he reportedly told a colleague in the build-up.) But the speed of Cameron’s resignation was still a surprise. Johnson never expected to win the referendum. And when he did, he did not expect Cameron to quit so quickly. 

With the country in chaos, Johnson suddenly found himself exactly where he wanted to be. His Brexit-cum-leadership campaign had been, personally, a great success. He stood as the immediate and obvious favorite to replace Cameron. Theresa May, who backed staying in the EU but remained tactfully taciturn throughout, was a distant second. In the days that followed, Johnson assembled his Brexit “dream team,” with Conservative MP Michael Gove as manager and their fellow Brexiteer Andrea Leadsom alongside them. His fantasy had never felt so tangible: On the rugby pitch of British politics, Johnson could see the ball bumbling along the grass before him, all but within his grasp.

But then, as if to prove it really was only a dream—could only ever be a dream—Johnson’s leadership chances collapsed as quickly as they converged. First Leadsom withdrew her support—unconvinced by Johnson’s promises, she decided to run herself—and then Gove, incredibly, did the same. It remains one of the great betrayals of British politics, and perhaps the most brutal moment of Johnson’s career: Gove was supposed to be Johnson’s closest ally, the team behind the dream. Johnson withdrew from the race, aware his support no longer added up. Gove and Leadsome blundered, and May became prime minister, almost unopposed. 

Shortly after, as May formed her cabinet, she took the surprise step of appointing Johnson as her foreign secretary. It was a calculated consolation, premised on what by now was ancient party wisdom: Johnson is far more of a threat outside the cabinet than inside. Two years later, however, as May’s Brexit plan seemed destined to split the party, Johnson stepped down from his post, putting himself outside the scrum once more, ready for another opportunity.

For Johnson, the foreign secretary’s office had been his most senior political position to date. But it paled next to what he had been preparing for his whole career. “I don’t believe this man is ready,” Gove had told the Spectator in July 2016, justifying his decision to ditch Johnson. Those words must have pricked Johnson’s pride. In his eyes, he was born ready. If anything, at the age of 54, he is running late.

When people speak of the “rise” of Boris Johnson, they miss the defining feature of his career. It is neither the ascent, nor the frequent falls—nor even the rapid comebacks from the controversies. It is the remarkable constancy. Since his education at Eton, the elite boarding-school that has taught a third of Britain’s prime ministers, and then the University of Oxford, which housed half of them, Johnson has always hovered near the peak of British politics.

At Eton, which he joined at 13, he found a suitably regal setting for his ambition. He became secretary of the school debating society, editor of the school newspaper, and, at 17, joined the exclusive Eton Society, an elite-within-the-elite that permitted members to wear a special uniform of “spongebag trousers” alongside other quaint privileges.

At Oxford, Johnson pursued the same path. He co-edited the university’s satirical magazine and joined the notorious Bullingdon Club, another ultra-privileged group infamous for vandalizing restaurants, paying for the damage with parents’ credit cards, and burning £50 notes in front of homeless people. He became secretary of the Oxford Union, the university’s prestigious debating society, and then, on the second attempt, its president. Of all his youthful conquests, this final one was the most revealing. After Johnson initially lost the election in 1984, campaigning as a free-market conservative, he returned with a renewed brand: an unlikely sympathizer of the Social Democrat Party, broadening his appeal to victory.

It’s a strategy that he has replicated ever since. The result is that, even after so long in the public eye and even by the ignominious standards of a politician, Boris Johnson’s sincerity is never certain, his genuine political beliefs elusive. At a time when most British politicians seem bland and one-dimensional, Johnson has mastered the art of holding multiple identities at once—a man of so many masks that, one stacked upon the other, they have granted him a rare depth. He’s a conservative who believes in a small state and the sanctity of the market—in a 2013 lecture to honor Margaret Thatcher, he praised “greed” as “a valuable spur to economic activity”—but even this is easy to miss in the absence of any clear policy positions. While his stances on social issues can suggest he’s a liberal, the language he uses, the casual racism it contains, the causes he pursues, and the company he keeps often suggest that he is not.

Regardless of how emphatically Johnson holds a position, there is always the possibility, even the inevitability, that he will contradict it later down the line. While mayor of London, Johnson described Donald Trump as “clearly out of his mind” and “betraying a quite stupefying ignorance that makes him frankly unfit to hold the office of president of the United States.” As foreign secretary, he passionately defended the U.S. president. “I am increasingly admiring of Donald Trump,” Johnson said, in comments leaked ahead of Trump’s U.K. visit in July. “I have become more and more convinced that there is method in his madness.”

Ideally, Johnson appeals to two opposing sides simultaneously. So when he recently described Muslim women who wear burqas as “looking like letter-boxes,” he did so in an article that actually defended their right to wear them—endearing himself with the far-right and affirming his supposed liberalism at once. In a 2007 interview with Pink News, as Johnson tried to court the gay vote in his campaign to be mayor of London, he appeared to acknowledge this as a deliberate tactic. He dismissed a range of offensive things he had previously written about the gay community, saying: “I am on record with loads of provocative articles about loads of things, but if you take the article as a whole, they always amount to robust common sense.” The incriminating claims included that, if gay marriage were legal, then you could have marital unions “consecrated between three men, as well as two men, or indeed three men and a dog.”

Johnson’s flakiness has always been there, co-existing with but never counteracting his ostensible charm. With an affability that most politicians lack, this unpredictability is passed off as eccentricity, the essence of his appeal. “Boris is Boris” is the unthinking tautology deployed by colleagues and sympathetic commentators to justify Johnson’s actions, however dubious. On a recent trip to Washington, D.C., Johnson was asked what his biggest mistake was. “My strategy is to litter my career with so many decoy mistakes, nobody knows which one to attack,” Johnson replied. 

At the heart of his staying power is his sense of humor. Johnson has found that the truth matters less if you can make people laugh. Your words and your actions will be forgotten, but your name and your face will be remembered, smilingly. Johnson’s self-deprecating jests protect him from the usual charges laid against politicians, even—or especially—those he exhibits to a more extreme degree: evasiveness, selfishness, and hypocrisy. For Johnson, who can decide in reverse when he is or isn’t being serious, any incriminating example can be laughed off as a joke or, even better, with one.

In a fawning 2003 profile by The Observer, the Sunday edition of The Guardian, Johnson was described in effusive terms. “Five minutes in his company and I was totally charmed,” the interviewer, Lynn Barber, declared. “I am now a fully signed-up member of the Boris Johnson Fan Club.” But doubts still lingered as Barber wondered: “Johnson is so larky, so ready to retract an opinion, or agree with criticism, that it is very difficult to sort out what he really believes. ... What would he consider a resigning matter?” Johnson laughed off Barber’s question. “I’m a bit of an optimist so it doesn’t tend to occur to me to resign,” he said. 

Of course, Johnson can now claim he has found his resigning matter: Brexit. He cited May’s Brexit proposal as the reason, declaring in his July 9 resignation letter that, by planning to keep Britain at the behest of the EU’s regulatory system but without the benefits of membership, it meant Britain was “truly headed for the status of colony.”

Johnson has a sixth sense, or at least a second stomach, for publicity, and so it was not enough to resign with such a provocative claim. He also arranged for a Daily Telegraph photographer to capture the moment he signed his resignation letter. In the photograph, he is sitting pensively at his office desk, an air of gravity about him, the stare of a statesman, posing with his paper and pen. A future prime minister, perhaps? He looked the part, at least. And for Johnson, a man of surfaces who sometimes seems imprisoned by his own jocular self-image, that would be enough for now.

For all the bluster about Britain becoming a colony, Johnson’s Brexit posturing may be the paradigmatic example of his own post-truth approach to politics—one that predated the current vogue. As a journalist in Brussels for the Daily Telegraph in the 1990s, Johnson was known for filing far-fetched stories that stoked anti-EU sentiment in Britain: They were often false, but they consciously fed into a structure of feeling, now ubiquitous, that framed the EU as a bureaucratic beast, malignly meddling in British affairs. The spirit of those reports—either invented or exaggerated with a comic’s panache—infused some of his more infamous claims about the EU: that it wanted to introduce one-size-fits-all condoms, stop Brits dipping their bread in olive oil, ban prawn-and-cocktail flavored crisps (a British favorite), and swallow the nation in a federalizing frenzy.

What drives Johnson’s actions are not beliefs, however, but rather a desire, a demand, to be at the heart of things. These inflammatory reports were not ideologically motivated in opposition to the EU. They were a way of putting himself into the fray of the Conservative Party politics, where EU membership has always verged on an obsession. (When Cameron first became leader of the Conservatives in 2005, he told the party to stop “banging on about Europe.”) As Johnson explained in 2005, “Everything I wrote from Brussels, I found I was sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory party, and it really gave me this rather weird sense of power.”

Though his true intentions can never be known, Johnson’s decision to cast his lot with the “Leave” campaign during the referendum was almost certainly made with his leadership ambitions in mind: backing Brexit gave Johnson an unprecedented publicity run and the chance to position himself as the unlikely opponent of the British establishment. Johnson can say that he fought for Brexit, that he believes in it more than anyone else, and, now, that he has resigned over it. But when David Cameron called the referendum, Johnson was one of the last to decide which way he would campaign. 

Johnson’s declared his decision on a Sunday afternoon, February 21, 2016. Only two weeks earlier, he had written that leaving the EU would be an arduous task that diverted “energy from the real problems of this country—low skills, low social mobility, low investment, etc.—that have nothing to do with Europe.” Some senior colleagues were infuriated with his decision. Others, especially backbench Conservative MPs, were delighted. Nigel Farage, Britain’s infamous anti-immigration impresario, said he “jumped for joy.” 

The following day, he published a column in the Daily Telegraph explaining his decision. The message was typically convoluted, suggesting that voting to leave the EU, rather than Britain actually leaving the EU, was the aim: “All EU history shows that they only really listen to a population when it says No.” Over the course of the campaign, as he led the “Leave” side with his ally Michael Gove, Johnson maintained his double-act. In one moment he would declare that the EU was “born of the highest motives—to keep the peace in Europe”; in another he would compare it to Hitler’s plan to conquer Europe. He dismissed the idea that the Brexit campaign was inciting xenophobia by maintaining that he was personally very pro-immigration, at the same time as he implied that Turkey’s imminent (and imagined) membership of the EU was an existential threat. This lie, with its tacit warning of a sudden influx of millions of Turkish citizens, had clear racist undertones. The Leave campaign exploited it unashamedly: They put it up on billboards and, a week before the vote, Johnson and Gove wrote a public letter demanding that Cameron “guarantee” that Turkey would never join the European Union.

Johnson, whose great-grandfather was Turkish (as he made a point of noting while mayor of cosmopolitan London), was actually one of the biggest proponents for Turkey joining the EU before the referendum. “What are we saying if we perpetually keep Turkey out of the European Union just because it’s Muslim?” he said in 2006. “It sends out the worst possible signal to moderates in the Islamic world.” Since the referendum, he has once again expressed his support for Turkey’s membership.

On June 22, 2016, the eve of the vote, Johnson confirmed reports that, on the weekend that he wrote his article explaining why he was backing Leave, he also wrote a separate article, explaining why he was backing Remain. “Shut your eyes,” he wrote, in the article eventually leaked to The Sunday Times in October, later that year. “Hold your breath. Think of Britain. Think of the rest of the EU. Think of the future. Think of the desire of your children, and your grandchildren to live and work in other European countries; to sell things there, to make things there and perhaps to find partners there. Ask yourself: in spite of all the defects and disappointments of this exercise—do you really, truly, definitely want Britain to pull out of the European Union? Now?” 

You can almost picture Johnson on that decisive, late-winter weekend with a mask in either hand, wondering to himself: Which one shall I wear? Perhaps he was aware that, whichever one he chose this time, he might not be able to take it off.

Two and a half years after the vote, Britain remains inside the EU. But at 11pm local time on March, 29, 2019—the default deadline for Brexit negotiations—either Britain leaves the European Union with a new relationship in place (and a 21-month “transition period” to adjust) or, more worryingly, the negotiations end unsuccessfully and Britain leaves the EU without one. This latter scenario is known as a “no deal,” whereby Britain is effectively ejected from the EU overnight: four decades of legal and institutional integration suddenly become void, jeopardizing the most basic functions of the British state.

According to almost every analysis, a “no deal” would be the worst outcome for both Britain and the EU, albeit far more so for the former. The consequences would be immediate and long-lasting. Supermarkets and pharmaceutical companies have started stockpiling essential supplies in anticipation of border chaos, GDP is forecasted to fall by several percentage points, and the value of the pound is expected to plummet. 

But May’s most obstinate obstacle to the best possible deal is not her negotiating opponent, the EU, but rather her own divided side. Any deal needs to be ratified by Parliament, where May holds a slender working majority of 13 seats thanks to a coalition with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), a small, hard-line party from Northern Ireland. The DUP have warned that they will not blindly back any Brexit deal. At the moment, however, May cannot even appease her own party.

Whereas May favors continuity and access to the Single Market, in line with the wishes of most British businesses, Brexiteers deem this “Brexit in name only” and demand a clean break from the EU. In their eyes, EU regulations—which include pro-labor policies and relatively high environmental standards—constrain the sanctity of the market. With as many as 80 MPs among their ranks, these Conservatives look set to vote down May’s deal in Parliament, threatening a leadership election. Their chosen candidate is clear, and Johnson is all too happy to fan their fury. In early November, amid reports that May was close to a deal with the EU, Johnson swiftly wrote a column denouncing it as a “national humiliation” that would result in “wholesale subjection.” He reiterated his claim that Britain would become “a vassal state—a colony.”

Johnson’s baseless bravado, coupled with his indifference to the details, may make him an ideal leader for Britain in the age of Brexit—a realm of fantasy where the details, with all their real-world consequences, are anathema. According to Johnson, Britain will do “very well” even in the case of no deal. His sense of entitlement is also fitting. Just as Johnson sees himself as above and beyond his own party—Boris is Boris before he is a Conservative—so too does Britain imagine itself to be superior to its neighbors: a nation simply too great to be subsumed within a supranational organization like the EU. 

So even as one bleak forecast follows another, Johnson’s positivity regarding Brexit never wavers. “If I have a function here today,” he declared at the annual Conservative Party conference in October, “it is to try, with all humility, to put some lead in the collective pencil, to stop what seems to me to be a ridiculous seeping away of our self-belief.” When Johnson resigned as foreign secretary, he rued how the Brexit “dream is dying.”

The dream must end eventually. The emancipatory promise of leaving will soon confront the laborious and costly process of living alone. Johnson will do everything he can to resist and delay this confrontation. The Brexit dream cannot be weighed down with details because it is now bound up with another dream—the only one Johnson knows. His principled resignation in protest of May’s plan thus belied a more pragmatic purpose: a fear of being outflanked by rival Brexiteers, two of whom resigned the day before him. 

Now, having quit May’s cabinet, Johnson maintains that, despite all his attacks on May’s government and his clamor for attention, he does not want to take her place. He simply wants what’s best for Britain. “I am like a loyal and faithful labrador that is relentlessly returning to her an object that she has mistakenly chucked away in the form of her own first instincts about how to do this,” he said in a recent interview, alluding to an earlier vision of Brexit May laid out in vague speech in January 2017, which he reportedly helped to write.  

For Johnson, questions about his intentions arrive like cues in a comedy routine, but his own dogged ambition is clear. “Unlike the prime minister, I campaigned for Brexit. Unlike the prime minister, I fought for this, I believe in it, I think it’s the right thing for our country,” he said in the same interview. But it is an empty ambition, devoid of vision and hungry only for the top prize. With no obvious ideal other than his own self-image, Johnson’s convictions are more like crutches, carrying him to the next career goal where they can be replaced with new ones.

The problem is that, as the trail of betrayal and broken promises extends behind him, the foundations of his success—his liquidity, his unseriousness, his contradictions—now inhibit him from going any further. There are times when he seems to sense this himself, worrying that he has been typecast as Parliament’s jester. Yet Johnson’s weakness is not that people don’t take him seriously—that has always been his strength—it’s that now they do and they don’t trust his intentions. 

Johnson has become deeply unpopular within his own party, even as he is accepted as an important asset. One prominent Conservative MP, Dominic Grieve, has said he would leave the party if he became their leader. There are reportedly plans in place, when any new leadership election occurs, to thwart him. Such a plan was already getting into gear when May was elected, under the acronym ABB: Anyone But Boris. There are signs that this antipathy is seeping into Conservative voters as well: In October, YouGov’s favorability tracker on Johnson reached its lowest level since it was launched in 2016. On November 2, the Sun quoted close friends of Johnson saying that he had “given up” replacing May.

But if Johnson’s career has shown anything, it is that he is willing to wait. His decision to resign as foreign secretary re-ingratiated himself with the Conservative Party membership, dwindling as it may be. (Party membership has dropped so low that, in 2017, the Conservatives received more money from bequests from the dead than living members.) Johnson is adored by this shrinking faction both for his humor and enthusiasm. Whereas May pursues a more moderate Brexit position, constrained by the demands of practicality, Johnson presents himself as the Brexit Dream embodied, invoking fantasies of empire with an implausible optimism.

Besides, Johnson now enjoys friends outside the mainstream: beyond the party and even, occasionally, beyond the country. With his new appeals to the far right, Breitbart has become a loyal proponent. Arron Banks, one of the main financial backers of Brexit with ties to Trump (and currently under criminal investigation for his role in the referendum), has expressed his intention to run a new digital advertising campaign to elect Johnson as leader of the Conservative Party. Trump himself, on his latest trip to London, said Johnson would “make a great prime minister.” Steve Bannon, with whom Johnson is reportedly in regular contact, said the same: “Boris just needs to be Boris—true to his nature and his calling—and I think he has potential to be a great prime minister, not a good one.” 

In a sense, this support sums up Johnson’s career: having been mayor of London for two terms—a city that voted overwhelmingly against Brexit—and having been, at best, personally torn on the issue of Brexit, Johnson has now made Brexit his true calling, presenting himself as its inveterate advocate. His new allies on the alt-right are a testament to how far he has drifted, and to how hollow his politics have always been.

In London, a city that sang his name during the 2012 Olympics, when he was the country’s most popular politician, a gym has started offering “Brexfit” classes that let gym-goers “unload their Brexit anger.” Alongside other politician-themed activities, there are now punching bags with Johnson’s face, one of the main attractions. They are a fitting monument to Johnson, not only to his transformation—from a beloved, deviant clown to a figure of hate—but also to his unshakeable staying power amidst it all. For all the punches thrown at him, the face of Boris Johnson keeps bouncing back.