With the big news out of Virginia this morning, in addition to the Callais decision we decided that an instapod edition of the podcast was important to bring you up to date with what all this means. Kate and I recorded one about an hour ago and it should be in your podcast feeds this afternoon. So if you’re eager to know what all these means Kate and I will be answering those questions in this emergency edition of the podcast.

Yesterday, Lauren Egan — who authors The Bulwark’s newsletter about Democrats — sent out a newsletter edition entitled “Get Ready for the Dem Court-Expansion Litmus Test.” (Egan tends to be fairly dismissive of Democrats’ intentions, with a kind of mainstream media vibe.) Today Chief Justice John Roberts is complaining that the public is misinformed thinking that the Supreme Court is made up of corrupt political actors. As I’ve written repeatedly, there are deep inertia pools of opposition to Supreme Court reform. It’s a much heavier, though just as critical, lift than contesting the gerrymandering wars or abolishing the filibuster. But these and other hints show that a movement and a coherent push are beginning to take shape.

Yesterday I wrote a post basically arguing for a broad resistance to allowing the avalanche of corrupt and criminal conduct under the second Trump administration to take on the color of normality and acceptability. The answer to that is broad criminal accountability. The post was entitled, “The Law is Coming.” This was partly a reference to a phrase I used frequently during the first Trump administration, after which the cause of accountability was at best uneven and ultimately a failure, a story we all know well and from bitter experience.

I’m hoping to bring you some news on the DOJ-in-Exile front in the not-too-distant-future. It was probably simply too early in the spring and summer of 2025. It’s not too early now. But the DOJ-in-Exile idea was and is part of a more general ambition and agenda — to create a baseline record, a predicate and an expectation of future accountability for the Trump administration’s criminal conduct. Some of that effort is a kind of opposition therapy, resisting the authoritarian aim of convincing the public that the law, the ecosystem of criminal accountability has disappeared. It heartens people. It provides a framework of expectation: the law hasn’t disappeared. We’re in an interregnum. It will return, as will accountability. The battle over expectations about the future is a central battle in any authoritarian takeover.

But it’s not solely a matter of heartening, strengthening the morale of the opposition. It is also very directly and literally laying the groundwork for criminal accountability for a renegade executive and all the corrupt actors and criminals who now populate the executive branch.

And there you have it. As the White House licks its wounds after Virginia’s successful move to redistrict its House map and net Democrats as many as four new seats, the leader of that effort (and most high-profile advocate) has her office raided by the FBI in some hitherto unknown federal investigation. The fact that the Feds tipped Fox News to the raid on state Senate President Pro Tempore Louise Lucas’s office probably tells us all we need to know about this FBI action.

Living as we must, in history, it is always important to distinguish between the mostly contingent events of the moment and the deeper trends that will affect the future. Call it, perhaps, the difference between the libretto and the score. I was thinking about this while I was trying to make sense of the latest jousting over the Strait of Hormuz. Trump remains in the same space, having gotten himself into the crisis with no plan for how to get out of it. He’s now making limited efforts to contest control of the Strait. Iran says it remains completely in control of it. But, in a way, that’s a trap for Trump, because if passage through the Strait requires using military force, it’s precisely the use of military force, the danger and uncertainty it creates, which makes it impossible to use the Strait as a secure and safe means of transit. Force may be the medium-term answer to Trump’s problem. But in the short term it makes things worse. And Trump’s not a delaying-gratification, thinking-long-term kind of guy.

But the deeper impact of this crisis, one entirely of Trump’s own making, has been to convince many countries, especially but not only in East Asia, that oil and gas are too vulnerable to price shocks and supply instability. Meanwhile, renewables like solar and wind have now crossed the threshold where they are not only simply cheaper than fossils fuels but, as a tech product, will continue to get cheaper over time. Wind and solar energy can be produced entirely within your sovereign borders. So the Strait crisis is looking like it may be a turning point in the climate/renewables energy transition.

This is just a short follow-up on the topic of administration vs. ownership, which I discussed yesterday. There’s a huge amount of ground to cover in just how much Donald Trump has willfully and illegally destroyed in his second term, acts which go to the heart of the idea that the president, elected merely for a four year term, owns not only the government but in a sense the country itself. I discussed this with regards to USAID, the Department of Education and so forth. But nowhere is it more clear or is the damage more permanent than in biomedical research and the sciences. There the administration, wholly illegally, has blasted through institutions and processes and national assets that took decades and generations to build. These are latticeworks of expertise, money, experience and connections between the government and the nation’s research universities. They have not only created huge advances in hard sciences and cures. They’ve been been a generator of national power and economic might. A president hired for a four-year term had no legal right to destroy these things the American people had created.

Trump’s ballroom is getting a huge chunk of money in Senate Republicans’ new reconciliation bill, released late last night. That’s the headline today on many pieces about the legislation.

And it is important: the White House insisted that private donors, not taxpayers, would foot the bill for the ballroom. Now, through a vote where — due to Senate rules — Republicans do not need Democratic support, senators will in fact direct $1 billion of taxpayer funding to security features for the project, which, at times, seems to be all Trump truly cares about.

We, however, have been emphasizing another point about this legislation: it lasts for three years. That means if Democrats retake the House or Senate or both later this year, they’ll be deprived, via this reconciliation bill, of a key mechanism for reining in ICE and CBP: funding. The Constitution equipped Congress to check the executive branch via its power of the purse. This reconciliation bill is just the latest example of Republicans doing all they can to shrug off that responsibility.

I’ve been talking over the last few weeks about critical reforms that are necessary to make any kind of civic democratic revival in the U.S. even possible. The ending the filibuster and reforming the Supreme Court are high on that list. I want to talk about related topic today that we can only see if we take few steps back from the immediacy of day to day events over the last year and a half. These are tied to the over-mighty nature of the American presidency — or rather, the over-mighty potential of the American presidency, which a mix of Donald Trump’s degenerate personality and the theories of the conservative legal movement have brought to the fore.

The difference I want to note is between administration and ownership. We talk a lot these days about how Donald Trump seems to think he owns the United States – he puts his brand, his likeness, his signature on everything. He talks about his generals, his military, etc. But there’s a more concrete and specific way this is true and it goes to the heart of what needs to be fixed about the American presidency and the whole constitutional system.

We’re talking a lot today about gerrymandering and Court reform. I want to note one among many ways the two issues intersect. Democrats are consistent on redistricting. They have and continue to support a national gerrymandering law to outlaw the practice. They restated that commitment today even as they prepare to counter new GOP demands to eliminate Black legislative representation across the South.