I was a guest on C-SPAN on Sunday. You can watch the program and all the fireworks with conservative callers here.

Share

Trump and his legal lickspittles appear — if what Governor Newsom is saying publicly right now turns out to be true — to be playing a very dangerous game with our democracy.

Federal agents have been knocking on the doors of Gavin Newsom’s family, friends, and former employees. Not, according to the Governor yesterday, because they’d found a crime, but because they’re trying to find one.

That’s not my paraphrase; it’s how the Governor of the largest state in the union described what the Trump administration is now doing to him and his wife, and if it’s true it should shock every American who remembers why we built the guardrails we’re now watching get torn down.

“Donald Trump isn’t just coming after me because of my mean tweets,” Governor Newsom said. “He’s coming after me because I am considering running for president.” He then added, “To get me, he’s coming after my wife.”

As my father taught me when I was around 10 years old, the power of a government is awesome. It can legally take everything you own from you, imprison you, and even execute you. No corporation or individual can do any of those things under cover of law, but government — even state and local governments — can.

It can also break you simply by criminally investigating you. The costs of dealing with such investigations can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, as multiple victims of Trump’s witch hunts have now discovered.

This is why it’s so vital — as our nation’s Founders knew when they wrote the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment — that government be constrained by the law and answerable to the largest portion of the people.

Please Support My Writing

After Richard Nixon’s “Enemies List” was made public with his resignation, the Justice Department in 1976 created, within its Criminal Division, a Public Integrity Section; two years later Congress wrote oversight of it into the Ethics in Government Act.

The theory of its creation was that public officials have been chosen by We the People to represent us and going after them for political purposes is a gross violation of our democracy, essentially a denial of our vote.

The Public Integrity Section’s job, thus, was to first examine every investigation, potential investigation, or potential prosecution of any elected official to make sure there’s no taint of politics corrupting the process as Nixon tried to do.

Trump first gutted the Section, reportedly reducing it from roughly 40 full time prosecutors to a mere two attorneys who were functionally no longer able to oversee anything.

He has apparently, since then, built it back up into a powerful weapon: this is reportedly the group spearheading the investigation into Newsome and/or his wife.

If this reporting is right, it no longer bears any resemblance to its origin or purpose. That said, there is also reporting that this inquiry began last year with a California whistleblower and is confined to his wife and her charity.

Time will tell what the real story is here, but the context and the charge are still alarming because of the long history of this sort of thing.

Bыл бы человек, а статья найдётся — “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” — is usually attributed to Stalin’s state prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky, who ran notorious show trials in the 1930s against anybody who pissed off his boss. (Some sources also attribute it to NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria or even Stalin himself.)

It’s simply a more modern version of 17^th century French Cardinal Richelieu’s famous dictum when he was Louis XIII’s secret service minister:

“Show me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough therein to hang him.”

It’s the cornerstone of every corrupt government throughout history, and now Trump has brought it here. So far, it’s claimed as its victims, through direct investigation, indictment, or loss of clearances or other privileges:

James Comey, Letitia James, Mark Kelly, Elissa Slotkin, Maggie Goodlander, Jason Crow, Chrissy Houlahan, Chris DeLuzio, John Bolton, Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook, Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, Chris Christie, Jack Smith, Miles Taylor, Christopher Krebs, Hunter Biden, Ashley Biden, Alejandro Mayorkas, Mike Pompeo, Brian Hook, Mark Milley, Anthony Fauci, Antony Blinken, Jacob Sullivan, Lisa Monaco, Mark Zaid, Norman Eisen, Alvin Bragg, Andrew Weissmann, Hillary Clinton, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Fiona Hill, Alexander Vindman, Kimberly Cheatle, John Brennan, James Clapper Jr., Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, Thomas Fingar, Richard Ledgett, Michael Morell, Michael Vickers, Douglas Wise, Nicholas Rasmussen, Russell Travers, Andrew Liepman, John Moseman, Larry Pfeiffer, Jeremy Bash, Rodney Snyder, Glenn S. Gerstell, David B. Buckley, and the law firms Covington & Burling, Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Milbank, WilmerHale, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and Willkie Farr & Gallagher.

And now, apparently, Governor Gavin Newsom and/or his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom.

Support the Hartmann Report

Ironically, Trump — who has actually been repeatedly convicted of real crimes — started his second administration falsely claiming that the Biden Justice Department was doing to him and his friends exactly what he’s now doing to those he thinks of as his enemies.

A 2025 executive order claims that Biden’s administration “engaged in a systematic campaign against its perceived political opponents, weaponizing the legal force of numerous Federal law enforcement agencies and the Intelligence Community” and describes those actions as “a third‑world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.”

The problem we face with Nixon’s and now Trump’s “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” is that it doesn’t stop with the famous names: Vyshinsky didn’t run out of defendants, and neither did Richelieu.

And neither will Trump, now that he has already started.

A government that can manufacture a case against a sitting Governor or his wife can manufacture one against a county clerk, a school board member, a journalist, or you and me. And that’s the real danger here.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Show Me the Man”

Subscribe so you can comment

Your Daily Meme, suitable to copy and paste into social media or email:

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

Share

Donald Trump is already telling us he’s going to try to steal the 2026 election, and the fact that he’s saying it now, months in advance, is the whole tell.

Back in February he stood up and declared that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” floated taking over the vote in fifteen states his party doesn’t control, and returned to the lie he’s been pushing for a decade, that mail-in ballots are crawling with fraud.

They aren’t. Americans have voted by mail for more than a century and a half, and the Brennan Center has shown over and over that you’re likelier to be struck by lightning than to commit mail-ballot fraud.

The fraud claim was never an argument: it’s an excuse for voter suppression, its own form of election fraud. When you convince tens of millions of people that the only way your side can possibly lose is if the other side cheats, you’ve prepared them to swallow whatever you “have to do to protect the vote,” and to reject the result as illegitimate if you lose anyway. That’s the groundwork, and they’re laying it right now in the open.

The measures themselves are extraordinary. This spring Trump signed an executive order trying to seize federal control over how states run their elections, and when the courts blocked most of it, his administration found a back door through, of all places, the Post Office.

The Postal Service has proposed a rule that would let it refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in any state that won’t first hand over its complete list of mail voters to the federal government, a rule the NAACP says is built to disenfranchise voters and that twenty-three Democratic-led states are now suing to stop.

Steve Bannon went on his podcast and promised that “we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” and when reporters asked the White House to rule it out, the press secretary wouldn’t. More than forty-eight million Americans voted by mail in 2024.

These men want the power to decide whose ballot gets carried to the mailbox and who feels safe enough to show up in person.

If you’re wondering why they’re working this hard to keep you from voting, the answer slipped out of Todd Blanche’s mouth this spring.

Support the Hartmann Report

Standing on a stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) outside Dallas, the man who’d been Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer and who now runs the Justice Department as acting Attorney General told the crowd that :

“[E]verybody’s afraid that the next administration, if we don’t win, we’re going to all be investigated and indicted.”

He meant it as a rallying cry. What he actually delivered was a confession: you don’t spend your evenings bracing for an indictment unless some quiet part of you already knows what you’ve done.

A reckoning is coming for the people breaking the law for this president, and they can feel it.

And now the White House is even discussing completely blowing up the Constitution and the right of habeas corpus, which dates back to the year 1215 when the British elite forced King John to sign the Magna Carta on the plain at Runnymede. As the New York Times reported this morning:

“Suspending habeas corpus was one of two radical ideas Mr. Miller had been pushing that alarmed Mr. Scharf. The other was invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to enforce the law on American streets as protests grew against deportation sweeps.”

Todd Blanche, in particular, has every reason to be worried: he knows who Trump really is, and what he’s capable of.

He’s the lawyer who defended Trump in the New York hush-money trial that ended in thirty-four felony convictions, and in the federal cases over January 6th and the classified documents stashed at Mar-a-Lago.

He’s also the guy who’s now hiding three million Epstein documents and cut the cushy, puppy-filled deal with Ghislaine Maxwell for keeping her mouth shut.

Now he presides over a Justice Department that he and Trump have remade into a personal instrument of vengeance, complete with a Hitler-like 60-foot banner of Trump’s leering face on its façade, and the president has just nominated him to hold the office permanently.

So when Blanche says out loud that he’s afraid, he isn’t being paranoid. He’s being a good lawyer, reading the room, and the room he’s reading is called “history.”

It reminds me of two lawyers I learned about when we lived in Germany, because the men doing Trump’s legal dirty work today are walking a road that better-dressed men walked ninety years ago, and, as a result, we know exactly where it leads.

The first is Hans Frank, who started out as Adolf Hitler’s personal attorney, defending Hitler and his Nazi thugs in court all through the 1920s the way Blanche once stood behind Trump at the defense table.

When Hitler took power, Frank was rewarded. He became the Reich’s chief jurist, president of the Academy for German Law, and eventually Governor-General of occupied Poland, where he presided over ghettos, mass plunder, and slaughter on a scale that’s still hard to grasp.

Frank was the respectable face of the regime, the man who insisted there was a legal theory for everything. At the Nuremberg trials he was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and on October 16, 1946, the respectable lawyer was hanged.

The second man is Roland Freisler, and if Frank shows you what happens to the enabler, Freisler shows you what happens to the judge who decides — like Blanche has argued and John Roberts went along with — that the law is simply whatever Dear Leader wants it to be.

Freisler ran the Volksgerichtshof, the People’s Court, a tribunal stood up outside Germany’s constitutional structure for the express purpose of producing the verdicts the regime demanded. He handed down thousands of death sentences in three years.

He screamed at defendants from the bench, ordered their microphones cut, condemned the young students of the White Rose resistance to the guillotine for the crime of printing leaflets, and sent the officers of the July 20th plot to be hanged within hours of their show trials.

Freisler never faced a Nuremberg of his own, but only because an American bomb fell on his courthouse in February 1945 while he was reportedly clutching a defendant’s case file. The defendant lived; the judge did not. There’s a grim justice in the fact that the one man who most weaponized the law against his fellow citizens was killed holding the very file he was using to destroy one of them.

I stood in the small plaza at the University of Munich back in 1988, the Geschwister-Scholl-Platz, named for Hans and Sophie Scholl, where the two of them were caught scattering their leaflets from the gallery before Freisler sent them to die. They were the Renee Good and Alex Pretti of their time.

Please Support My Writing

The university has since pressed bronze replicas of those scattered leaflets right into the pavement, so that today you walk over them and have to stop.

You think, standing there, about how ordinary the machinery of all this was. It wasn’t run by monsters in uniform alone. It was run by men like Todd Blanche and John Roberts, men with law degrees, men who told themselves they were just interpreting the statutes, just following the orders, just serving the head of state.

And every honest accounting that came afterward, from Nuremberg onward, rejected that excuse and established the principle that a directive from above does not protect the man who carries it out.

That principle is precisely what must be keeping Todd Blanche awake, because we’re already watching the American version, as Mark Twain once said, rhyme.

When Trump wanted his enemies prosecuted, the career professionals balked, so the administration installed Lindsey Halligan, another former Trump personal lawyer with no prosecutorial experience whatsoever, as a U.S. attorney, and she promptly indicted James Comey and Letitia James.

In a contrast with Germany in 1933, a federal judge threw both cases out, ruled her appointment unlawful, and other judges in the district were so disgusted that one of them now puts an asterisk beside her name on every court filing.

Thankfully, at least so far, these are not the actions of a legal system that’s fully surrendered (although Aileen Cannon may soon have a word). They’re the actions of one that’s still fighting back, and that fight is the whole ballgame.

But it gets worse, because that same executive order about mail-in voting also directs the Department of Homeland Security to build its own state-by-state lists of who’s eligible to vote, exactly the kind of national database you’d assemble if your real plan was to pressure states into purging their rolls.

If that sounds like paranoia, it’s only because we’ve already forgotten that we lived through it. In 2000, Jeb Bush’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris, who also happened to be co-chair of his brother George’s Florida campaign, hired a private firm to scrub the voter rolls using a list of supposed felons that included eight thousand names shipped in from Texas.

The matching was deliberately loose, flagging anyone whose last name was an 80 percent match to a felon’s, and the Brennan Center later found that at least twelve thousand eligible voters were wrongly purged, twenty-two times George W. Bush’s 537-vote margin. Black Floridians were eleven percent of the electorate and forty-one percent of the people thrown off the rolls.

Bush took the presidency by that sliver, and the Florida Supreme Court-ordered recount that would have caught the theft was shut down by a Supreme Court whose deciding majority included a justice his own father had put on the bench, Clarence Thomas, whose wife was at that very moment collecting résumés for a Bush administration, and Antonin Scalia, whose sons worked for firms representing Bush, neither of whom saw any reason to step aside.

That’s the voter merge-and-purge playbook, and they’re dusting it off on a national scale for this November with new, borrowed-from-Putin tweaks. Or at least they’re trying their hardest to.

When the Reichstag finally voted itself out of existence in March 1933, uniformed storm troopers lined the walls of the chamber so the legislators would understand the price of voting no.

That’s the tradition these men are drawing from, and we’d be fools not to be clear-eyed and ready for just about anything between now and November. After all, we all watched what Trump and his lickspittles did on January 6th, 2021, killing four police officers as they tried to “hang Mike Pence.”

But here’s the difference between Germany in 1933 and America in 2026 and, as Wendy Lawrence argues in a brilliant recent essay, it comes down to timing.

The Germans got their decisive vote after the seizure of power, when a newly seated Reichstag rubber-stamped the Enabling Act and handed Hitler everything. We get ours before. Which is why they’re so frantically trying to suppress the vote.

The November midterms will arrive while the courts are still ruling against this administration, while subpoenas can still be issued, while the power of the purse still belongs to whoever controls the House.

A Democratic majority doesn’t need to convict anyone to change everything. It can deny the appropriations that fund the deployments and the detention machine, it can compel sworn testimony and drag the concealed directives into daylight, and it can restore a Justice Department willing to enforce laws like Section 242, the Reconstruction-era statute that makes it a felony for any official to strip any citizen of their constitutional rights.

The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling shields the president’s official acts, but it shields no one beneath him. The agents, the contractors, the lawyers who signed the unlawful papers, all of them remain fully exposed, and a future attorney general can act on that.

Trump understands this perfectly, which is why he told House Republicans that they have to win the midterms because otherwise “they’ll find a reason to impeach me.” It’s why his people muse about ICE at the polls and write rules to choke off the mail. It’s why Stephen Miller is reportedly pushing to suspend habeas corpus. It’s why Trump promised to “pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval [Office].”

These lawyers and judges aren’t afraid of impeachment as an abstraction: they’re afraid of the reckoning that oversight makes possible, the same reckoning Hans Frank met at the end of a rope and Roland Freisler escaped only by dying.

The coming reckoning — unless they can stop it this fall — isn’t vengeance. It’s the rule of law standing back up after being knocked down, and in this country that recovery still runs through a ballot box which the members of the Reichstag of 1933 no longer had.

So, make sure you’re registered, and make sure everyone you know is too, at vote.org, and if you vote by mail, request your ballot early this fall and send it back early so no postal rule can run out the clock on you.

Save the nonpartisan Election Protection hotline in your phone, 866-OUR-VOTE, and call it the moment anyone tries to intimidate you at a polling place, because no badge and no uniform has the right to stand between you and your vote.

Support the Hartmann Report

Call your representatives through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and remind them that funding lawless deployments, gutting oversight, suspending habeas corpus, and letting the Post Office police our ballots are against the Constitution.

Keep an eye on your own statehouse at openstates.org, where this fight is being waged district by district.

And if this piece helped you see the stakes clearly, please share it and support independent journalism here at the Hartmann Report, because the people counting on you to look away are counting just as hard on you to stay home, and the single most dangerous thing you can do to them is to show up.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Will There Be A Reckoning?”

Subscribe so you can comment

Your Daily Meme, suitable to copy and paste into social media or email:

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

FYI, I will be on C-SPAN this morning at 9:15 ET.

Chapter 2: The Courtroom Showdown

The Old Senate Chamber in Washington was warm for January, the heavy air thick with coal smoke and anticipation. On January 26, 1886, two men prepared to argue before the most powerful court in America. One represented the largest corporation on the continent. The other represented a small California county fighting to collect its taxes.

The outcome would shape American democracy for the next century and a half.

The Railroad’s Champion

S.W. Sanderson entered the chamber like a man who owned it. And in a sense, he did. The chief legal counsel for the Southern Pacific Railroad stood more than six feet tall, an aristocratic bear of a man with neatly combed gray hair and an elegantly trimmed white goatee. For more than two decades, Sanderson had made himself rich litigating for the nation’s largest railroads, defending the interests of oligarchs like Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington, and Mark Hopkins.

Sanderson was famous enough that artist Thomas Hill had included him in his painting The Last Spike, commemorating the 1869 transcontinental meeting of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads at Promontory Summit, Utah. In that painting, Sanderson appears portentous and dignified, standing among the railroad barons who had conquered a continent. He saw himself as their equal.

That day he would ask the Supreme Court to grant his corporate clients something they had been seeking for decades: the constitutional rights of human beings.

Sanderson had argued versions of this claim before. The railroads had lost every time. In 1873, the Court had declared that the Fourteenth Amendment’s “one pervading purpose” was “the freedom of the slave race.” In 1877, the railroads brought four different cases to the Supreme Court, arguing that they deserved constitutional protection as “persons” under that same amendment. They lost all four.

But Sanderson kept coming back. The oligarchs he served had unlimited resources, unlimited patience, and unlimited ambition. They would keep filing cases until they found a way to win.

The People’s Advocate

Santa Clara County’s lawyer Delphin M. Delmas was everything Sanderson was not. Where Sanderson was large and imposing, Delmas was small and unimposing, a fastidious man known to wear a frock coat, gray-striped trousers, a wing collar, and an ascot tie. He had a substantial nose and a broad forehead only slightly covered with a wispy bit of thinning hair. He looked like a clerk, not a gladiator.

But in the courtroom, Delmas transformed. His voice thrummed with emotion. He was nationally known as the “master dramatist of America’s courtrooms,” and by 1904 would be called “the Silver-Tongued Orator of the West” when elected a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

His courtroom performances were legendary. The nation would later learn just how brilliant he was in 1908, when he successfully defended Harry K. Thaw for murder in the most sensational case of the first half of the century, later made into the 1955 movie The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, starring Ray Milland and Joan Collins. Luther Adler played Delmas.

But on this January day in 1886, Delmas was not yet famous. He was simply the young lead attorney for Santa Clara County, California, a small government entity suing the massive Southern Pacific Railroad for six years of unpaid property taxes.

While Sanderson had spent his career serving the richest men in America, Delmas had always worked on behalf of local governments and ordinary citizens. He had passionately argued, pro bono, before the California legislature for a law to protect the nation’s last remaining redwood forests. He was fiercely defensive about the rights of natural persons, of actual human beings, against the artificial creatures of law that sought to usurp their place.

For Delmas, this case was about something far larger than taxes. It was about whether corporations created by state law could claim the constitutional rights won by flesh-and-blood human beings who had fought and died for independence and then triumphed over the South’s brutal oligarchs in the Civil War.

The Stakes

The case itself was almost comically trivial. The Southern Pacific Railroad owed Santa Clara County approximately $30,000 in back taxes on property with a $30 million mortgage. That’s like having a $10,000 car and refusing to pay a $10 tax on it, then taking the case all the way to the Supreme Court.

One of the railroad’s defenses was even more absurd: when the state assessed the value of the railroad’s property, it had accidentally included the value of fences built by private landowners along the right-of-way. The county, not the state, should have separately assessed those fences. Therefore, the railroad argued, the tax was “unequal” compared to what they paid in other counties.

But the railroad’s lawyers had slipped something else into their arguments, something that had nothing to do with fences or tax assessments. They claimed that the railroad corporation was a “person” under the Fourteenth Amendment, entitled to the same constitutional protections as the freed slaves that amendment was written to protect.

If the Court agreed, it would transform American law. Corporations would gain the power to challenge any regulation, any tax, any democratic decision that treated them differently from human citizens. They would gain access to the Bill of Rights, to due process, to equal protection. They would become, in the eyes of the Constitution, the equals of the human beings who’d created them.

Sanderson’s Argument

Sanderson rose to address the Court. Chief Justice Morrison Waite looked down from the bench, a square-headed man with a bristly graying beard that shot out in every direction. Waite himself was a former railroad attorney who had never served as a judge before being appointed Chief Justice. He owed his position to President Grant, whose administration was so wracked with railroad bribery scandals that his own Republican Party refused to renominate him for the presidency.

“I believe,” Sanderson declared, “that the clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in relation to equal protection means the same thing as the plain and simple yet sublime words found in our Declaration of Independence: ‘all men are created equal.’ Not equal in physical or mental power, not equal in fortune or social position, but equal before the law.”

It was audacious. Sanderson was claiming that a railroad corporation, an artificial entity created by state law and owned by some of the richest oligarchs in America, deserved the same constitutional protections as freed slaves emerging from centuries of bondage. He was hijacking the language of liberation to serve the interests of concentrated wealth.

Sanderson’s fellow lawyer for the railroads, George F. Edmunds, added that the Fourteenth Amendment created a “broad and catholic provision for universal security, resting upon citizenship as it regarded political rights, and resting upon humanity as it regarded private rights.”

Humanity. The railroad lawyers were claiming their corporate clients were human.

Delmas Responds

When Delmas rose to speak, his transformation began. The small, fastidious man became something else entirely—a prophet of democratic rage: “The defendant claims that California’s taxation policy violates that portion of the Fourteenth Amendment which provides that no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” Delmas began, his voice thrumming with barely controlled fury. Such an argument, he said, “if tenable, would place the organic law of California in a position ridiculous to the extreme.”

Then Delmas went on the attack:

The shield behind which the Southern Pacific Railroad attacks the Constitution and laws of California is the Fourteenth Amendment. It argues that the amendment guarantees to every person within the jurisdiction of the State the equal protection of the laws; that a corporation is a person; that, therefore, it must receive the same protection as that accorded to all other persons in like circumstances . . . ​. To my mind, the fallacy of the argument lies in the assumption that corporations are entitled to be governed by the laws that are applicable to natural persons.

Delmas reached for the ultimate authority, the book that the Founders themselves had consulted when writing the Constitution: Sir William Blackstone’s 1765 Commentaries on the Laws of England. He quoted Blackstone: “Persons are divided by the law into either natural persons or artificial. Natural persons are such as the God of nature formed us; artificial are such as are created and devised by human laws for the purposes of society and government, which are called corporations or bodies politic.”

Delmas moved from legal authority to common sense. If a corporation was truly a “person,” why could it not make out a will or get married?

“This definition suggests at once that though a corporation is a person, it is not the same kind of person as a human being, and need not, nay, in the very nature of things, cannot enjoy all the rights of such or be governed by the same laws. When the law says, ‘Any person being of sound mind and of the age of discretion may make a will,’ or ‘any person having arrived at the age of majority may marry,’ I presume the most ardent advocate of equality of protection would hardly contend that corporations must enjoy the right of testamentary disposition or of contracting matrimony.”

The Heart of the Matter

Now Delmas reached the heart of his argument. Everyone in that chamber knew the history of the Fourteenth Amendment. It had been written to protect freed slaves, to ensure that the men and women who had been held in bondage would have the same rights as their former masters. The blood of a civil war was still fresh on the ground. The memory of slavery was still alive.

He continued: “The whole history of the Fourteenth Amendment demonstrates beyond dispute that its whole scope and object was to establish equality between men, an attainable result, and not to establish equality between natural and artificial beings, an impossible result.”

Delmas was trembling now, his small frame vibrating with righteous indignation. He was a California Democrat who had spent his life fighting for the little guy, and he knew, as did anyone who read the newspapers of that era, exactly what the Fourteenth Amendment meant and why it had been written.

The Fourteenth Amendment, he declared, “is as broad as humanity itself”:

Wherever man is found within the confines of this Union, whatever his race, religion, or color, be he Caucasian, African, or Mongolian, be he Christian, infidel, or idolater, be he white, black, or copper-colored, he may take shelter under this great law as under a shield against individual oppression in any form, individual injustice in any shape. It is a protection to all men because they are men, members of the same great family, children of the same omnipotent Creator.

In its comprehensive words I find written by the hand of a nation of sixty millions in the firmament of imperishable law the sentiment uttered more than a hundred years ago by the philosopher of Geneva, and re-echoed in this country by the authors of the Declaration of the Thirteen Colonies: Proclaim to the world the equality of man.

The Mission of the Amendment

Speaking of the object of the Fourteenth Amendment, Delmas laid it out plain:

Its mission was to raise the humble, the down-trodden, and the oppressed to the level of the most exalted upon the broad plain of humanity, to make man the equal of man; but not to make the creature of the State, the bodiless, soulless, and mystic creature called a corporation, the equal of the creature of God. . . ​.

Therefore, I venture to repeat that the Fourteenth Amendment does not command equality between human beings and corporations.

The bodiless, soulless, and mystic creature called a corporation. Delmas had found the phrase that captured exactly what the railroads were asking for: to make an artificial creation of law the constitutional equal of a child of God.

The Warning

In closing, Delmas issued a warning. This case, he suggested, could be one of the most important in the history of the United States. If corporations were given the powerful cudgel of human rights secured by the Bill of Rights, their ability to amass wealth and power could lead to death, war, and the impoverishment of actual human beings on a massive scale.

“I have now done,” he said. “Yet I cannot but think that the controversy now debated before your Honors is one of no ordinary importance.”

The chamber fell silent. Delmas had laid before the Court the full stakes of what the railroad was asking. He had traced the history of the Fourteenth Amendment from the American Revolution to the blood of the Civil War to this moment, from Declaration of Independence to the liberation of enslaved human beings to the attempted liberation of soulless corporations.

The question was whether the Court would listen.

The Long Wait

A year and five months passed while the Supreme Court debated the issues in private.

In that time, the railroad oligarchs waited. Leland Stanford continued expanding his empire. Collis Huntington continued buying politicians. The Southern Pacific Railroad continued to refuse to pay its taxes, its lawyers confident that their strategy would eventually succeed.

And then came May 10, 1886.

That afternoon, in the same Old Senate Chamber where Delmas had delivered his passionate defense of human rights, Chief Justice Waite prepared to announce the Court’s decision. Delmas was there. Sanderson was there. The fate of American democracy hung in the balance.

What happened next would not become clear for another eighty years. The crime was about to be committed, and it would be hidden in plain sight for generations.

Delmas had won the argument. He would lose the war.

A Discovery Across Time

I searched for the better part of a year for copies of the arguments made in the Santa Clara case. The Supreme Court kept no detailed notes of oral arguments in those days. Most of what was said in that chamber was lost to history.

Then, in an antiquarian bookstore in San Francisco, I found a treasure: Speeches and Addresses by D.M. Delmas. It was a hardbound collection that Delmas had personally paid to self-publish in 1901, containing his most important courtroom arguments, including his full presentation before the Supreme Court in the Santa Clara case.

Holding that book was like holding a time machine. Delmas’s arguments were as brilliant and persuasive as any words that Erle Stanley Gardner ever put into the mouth of Perry Mason. Here was the voice of a man fighting for the soul of American democracy, preserved across more than a century.

He was right about everything. Corporations were artificial creations of law, not natural persons. The Fourteenth Amendment was written to protect freed slaves, not railroad barons. Granting corporations constitutional rights would distort American democracy for generations to come. It could even empower a would-be dictator to take over America with the help of corporate money.

Delmas saw it all, warned of it all, fought against it with every tool at his disposal.

And he lost anyway. Not because his arguments were wrong, but because the fix was already in. The conspiracy was already underway.

What Delmas could not know, standing in that courtroom, was that Justice Stephen J. Field was sitting on the bench with a plan. Field had already ruled repeatedly (including in the Santa Clara case) as a circuit court judge in California that corporations were persons under the Fourteenth Amendment. He owned railroad stock. He socialized with railroad executives. He harbored presidential ambitions that he hoped the oligarchs would finance.

And he had a friend in the court reporter’s office.

Share

— Forty-five years of Reaganomics finally rolled off the assembly line this week with its crowning achievement: the world’s first trillionaire. When SpaceX shares hit the public markets in the largest IPO in human history, Elon Musk’s net worth sailed past one thousand billion dollars, a figure with so many zeroes you need a calculator to count them and a heart of solid granite to defend them. Back in 1981, Reagan promised that if we just showered the wealthy with tax cuts and stopped enforcing antitrust laws, the blessings would trickle down onto the rest of us. Forty-five years later, the trickle has arrived: one man now commands more money than most countries while the people who actually build his rockets and bolt together his cars are still scrapping for a living wage and desperately begging for a union. Within hours, calls went up for an aggressive wealth tax, with one campaigner noting that a fortune this size “requires human exploitation, wage theft, wage suppression” as well as a tax code lovingly written by and for the man it enriches. The critics are right that trillionaires shouldn’t exist, and not out of envy: no human being earns a trillion dollars, they extract it, a dime at a time, from everyone standing below them. Musk didn’t break the system to get here. The system performed flawlessly, exactly as Reagan and the GOP’s billionaires designed it. The only question left is whether we keep calling this capitalism or finally admit it’s a just the 21st century version of a feudal estate with modern branding.

— The Trump administration has a bold new idea for Americans who can’t afford their medical bills: borrow the money from the very insurance company that’s already refusing to pay them. Under a White House proposal floated this week, cash-strapped patients would take out loans from their health insurers to cover the bills those same insurers helped inflate. It’s a scheme one Democratic congresswoman warned could “ruin people’s finances” while handing insurers a shiny new incentive to deny your care and then collect a fortune in interest on your desperation. I suppose we should admire the elegance of the GOP’s newest scam: the massive Republican donors win when you get sick, win again when you borrow, and win a third time when you default and they get a court to take away your house to repay your loan. That’s not a healthcare system that any other country in the world would recognize; it’s a payday-loan window with a stethoscope hanging in it. And before anyone wrings their hands about how we “simply can’t afford” something humane like Medicare for All, note that the Republican increase in Pentagon spending this year alone dwarfs the entire projected Social Security shortfall for 2034, which is the very “crisis” they keep invoking to justify gutting your retirement. We have bottomless money for missiles and putting Trump‘s name on everything, but not a nickel for Grandma’s knee replacement, and somehow the corporate media never quite finds the column inches to mention it. Forty-five years after Reagan taught us that government was the problem, we’ve finally built a GOP-run government that fulfills his claim.

Please Support My Writing

— It turns out the “Advantage” in Medicare Advantage belongs entirely to the insurance companies. A pair of reports from the HHS inspector general released this week found that the nation’s largest Medicare Advantage plans — UnitedHealthcare, CVS Health, and Humana — rejected prior-authorization requests for long-term and rehabilitative care at rates that, in some cases, sailed past 70 percent. Across the industry, denial rates for long-term care ran anywhere from 8 percent up to a jaw-dropping 80 percent, a spread the inspector general’s office found genuinely alarming, and one University of Pittsburgh health-policy professor called “quite staggering.” Here’s the detail that most clearly shows what a scam this is: when patients actually appealed, the plans reversed their own denials a remarkable 95 percent of the time, meaning that first “no” was wrong almost every single time anyone bothered to take the (considerable) time and effort necessary to challenge it. Medicare Advantage plans collect a flat fee per patient from our government and then pocket whatever they don’t spend on your stroke recovery or your shattered hip, which means saying “no” to your care is, quite literally, how they enrich their shareholders and pay their senior executives with their multi-million-dollar-a-year salaries. Nearly 20 million Americans are enrolled with just these three companies, most blissfully unaware that their “coverage” is engineered to refuse first and pay later, if ever. For-profit insurers, the report found, deny more than nonprofits, because of course they do. And all of them deny more than real Medicare, which doesn’t even do pre-clearance so it never denies anybody. This is what you get when you hand Wall Street the keys to Grandma’s hospital room: the corporation always wins, and the patient always loses.

— A federal judge just slammed the brakes — again — on Trump’s $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund for his violent, murderous cult members. This week, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema extended her block on the grandly titled “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” a $1.8 billion pile of your money that Trump’s Justice Department invented to compensate “victims of weaponization,” a category that conveniently sweeps in the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, smeared shit on the walls, and killed four cops while trying to “hang Mike Pence.” The whole thing sprang from Trump’s preposterous $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his own tax returns (total tax bill $750), and even congressional Republicans gagged hard enough to force acting Attorney General (and Trump criminal defense lawyer) Todd Blanche to declare “we’re not moving forward with the fund, period.” But hold the champagne. As Reuters reports, Trump’s allies already have a Plan B teed up: funneling payouts to loyalists through the 1946 Federal Tort Claims Act, which lets aggrieved insurrectionists file claims and lawsuits against the government and quietly settle out of court. “At my level, the fund is dead,” shrugged one senior DOJ official, all while leaving the back door propped wide open for the same money to stroll out a different exit. Hundreds of January 6th defendants have already filed their claims. With the Trump Crime Family and their shock troops, the grift doesn’t die; it just files an amended complaint.

— Nothing says “law and order” quite like masked federal agents tackling a man to the pavement at his kid’s preschool graduation while toddlers scream. That is precisely what unfolded in Baltimore this week, where ICE agents arrested two parents in the parking lot of Commodore John Rodgers Elementary School during a graduation ceremony as witnesses filmed and children wailed. The parents had their kids in the back seat when they were “ripped from the car,” according to Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson, and teachers rushed the children indoors to spare them the spectacle. A parent recording the scene can be heard shouting that the agents were on school property, a fact that registered not at all with these masked, murderous thugs who increasingly treat the Constitution as if it were merely a polite suggestion. Baltimore had passed an emergency ordinance barely a month ago barring federal agents from arrests at “sensitive locations” like schools; doing their best imitation of Putin’s secret police, ICE shredded it like confetti while spitting on the graves of the authors of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Mayor Brandon Scott condemned the raid as a “disturbing incident” and made plain this kind of enforcement isn’t welcome in his city, while Governor Wes Moore noted that terrorizing children at their own schools makes precisely no one safer. But safety was never the point for these fascists. The point is the fear: the theater of masked, unidentified, armed, uniformed men snatching parents in front of weeping four-year-olds and broadcasting it as a warning to every family in America. This is what a fascist secret police force looks like in its toddler-traumatizing phase.

Please Support My Writing

— Citizens United Alert! Maine’s Susan Collins — the senator who has elevated the furrowed brow of “deep concern” into performance art all while reliably voting however her biggest donors prefer — is mounting her reelection bid with the backing of nearly 100 billionaires. Her campaign has become an oligarchs’ support group project! Her opponent, Graham Platner, points out that his own operation runs on an average donation of $26 from actual human beings, even as corporate dark money floods into Maine to keep Collins right where the donor class wants her. This is the exact world five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court conjured when they ruled 5:4 in Citizens United that money is speech and corporations are people: sixteen years on, a hundred billionaires can simply buy a senator and call the receipt “democracy.” Concerned yet, Susan?

— Strange Alert! Our nation’s heroin addict health secretary, Bob Kennedy, is now actively cheering on clinics that inject autistic children — some as young as 18 months — with umbilical-cord stem cells in unapproved, unproven “treatments” that can run $20,000 a pop, occasionally after sedating the toddler with ketamine first. Desperate parents are promised near-miracles; what the FDA actually documented back in 2021 were reports of “blindness, tumor formation, infections” and worse. In sixteen months on the job, Kennedy has fired thousands of health officials, defunded $31 million in autism research, and waged open war on childhood vaccines, all while rolling out the welcome mat for the snake-oil salesmen he apparently regards as colleagues. The quack is coming from inside the house.

Subscribe so you can comment

Your Daily Meme, suitable to copy and paste into social media or email:

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

Share

Earlier this week, a Cable TV host did an extended rant about how many cases Trump has lost in court, arguing that “these guys are really bad at what they do” or words to that effect. I beg to differ: they know exactly what they’re doing, and getting convictions to imprison protesters isn’t (yet — they haven’t yet finished building out their network of concentration camps) their real goal.

Stop thinking of it as law enforcement and start thinking about it as punishment and intimidation. That’s their real goal, at least for the moment.

The indictment, the predawn FBI raid, the mugshot, the bail hearing, the ankle monitor, the year of massive, retirement-fund-draining legal bills and sleepless nights, and the GoFundMe that a protestor, politician, schoolteacher, or a local trustee has to set up just to defend herself against the most powerful government on Earth: those are the punishments that Trump and his lickspittles are so gleeful about inflicting on those of us they decide to target.

Former Trump DHS Chief of Staff Miles Taylor, noting this morning that he’s heard more indictments of Trump “enemies” are coming soon, summarized it this way:

“The Soviet-ization of American life is farther along than most people realize.”

The eventual dismissal in court or quiet non-indictment by a grand jury is just paperwork stapled to the end of a campaign of brutal intimidation that already did exactly what it was built to do.

A prosecutor who only brings cases he expects to win is enforcing the law. But, in Trump’s case, corrupt prosecutors who keep bringing cases that grand juries reject, that judges ridicule, that they themselves abandon the moment real scrutiny shows up, aren’t trying to win at all. They’re trying to make examples of people, to destroy them financially, and to intimidate anybody else who may think of speaking out.

Because making examples of people who criticize those in power is Rule One in the Dictator’s Playbook.

Support the Hartmann Report

This isn’t even a new or modern idea here in America.

Back in 1798, President John Adams and his rightwing Federalists pushed through the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to publish anything false, scandalous, or malicious about the president. The most dramatic target was a sitting liberal congressman from Vermont named Matthew Lyon, who went to jail for writing that Adams had “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp.”

Adams had his federal prosecutors go after more than two dozen people, most of them opposition newspaper editors, for the “crime” of criticizing him. It was such a naked abuse of power that horrified Americans swept Adams out of office in the election of 1800 and handed the presidency to Thomas Jefferson, who pardoned every last one of them and expired most of the law.

The Framers had just finished writing into the First Amendment the right of the people “peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances,” and Adams turned right around and tried to make exactly that a felony.

Everything Trump’s DOJ is doing right now is a sequel to that story, with an even more fascist edge to it.

For example, you can see the whole brutal scam running in a case just outside Chicago. Six immigration-rights allies, including a former congressional candidate, an Oak Park village trustee, and a Democratic ward committeeperson, got hit with a felony conspiracy charge for allegedly surrounding an ICE agent’s SUV at a protest outside the Broadview detention facility.

They were painted as a “violent mob” in the media, each faced up to seven years in prison, and they spent the better part of a year raising money and living with all of that hanging over their heads. It was a living hell, the sort of thing that disrupts lives, loses jobs, and even can stress marriages to the point of breaking, which is exactly what Trump’s malicious legal goons intended.

Then — in a move I suspect they hadn’t anticipated — a curious federal judge pried loose the original grand jury transcripts, and the whole thing came apart in dramatic fashion.

The transcripts show the grand jury had actually refused to indict, returning a rare “no bill,” and that when one juror said out loud that the case was a “crock of shit,” the lead prosecutor simply dismissed him and sent him home.

It took the ethics-free lawyers still willing to work for Trump and Blanche three separate tries before prosecutors finally squeezed out the indictment they wanted, and the judge later said she’d never before seen the kind of misconduct she saw in those pages.

To avoid a public humiliation, days before the trial was set to begin the U.S. Attorney dropped everything with prejudice, meaning it can never be refiled; one of the defendants broke down in tears and cried out loud in the courtroom when she finally heard it was over.

If Broadview was a fluke, you could chalk it up to one rogue prosecutor having a bad year. But it wasn’t a fluke. It’s the template.

Out in Los Angeles, a former Marine and longtime community activist named Alejandro Orellana got indicted on felony conspiracy and civil-disorder charges, facing up to ten years, for the crime of handing out protective face shields to people demonstrating against ICE.

The FBI raided his home and ripped it apart; the U.S. Attorney went on social media to brand him part of a “shadowy network funding riots.” Six weeks later, prosecutors quietly moved to dismiss the case. By then the Los Angeles Times had documented dozens of protest-related arrests that had collapsed or been quietly downgraded, none of them walked back with anything like the fanfare of the original perp walks.

Please Support My Writing

In each case, people were hit with tens of thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of dollars in legal bills, had their lives and homes turned upside down, and were doxxed in ways that, for many, brought death threats and harassment from Trump’s most violent and fervent cultists.

This Russia-like racket runs all the way up to Capitol Hill.

When six Democratic members of Congress, including Senator Elissa Slotkin from my home state of Michigan and combat hero Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, recorded a ninety-second video reminding service members that they have a legal duty to refuse unlawful orders, Trump called it seditious behavior “punishable by DEATH” and demanded they be arrested and put on trial.

His DOJ actually carried it to a grand jury, which flatly refused to indict anyone. The same thing kept happening to other marquee targets: the cases against James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James were thrown out, and a second grand jury refused to charge James even on a do-over, something her lawyer called unprecedented, because it nearly is.

Nonetheless, all of their lives were disrupted, all of them had to raise a small fortune to cover their legal costs, and their reputations were sullied. That was Trump’s real goal.

And it’s not just individuals.

When DOJ leadership went after the Southern Poverty Law Center, whistleblowers inside the department told Congress that senior officials ordered prosecutors to fast-track a “legally deficient” (i.e. “bullshit”) indictment even though they couldn’t point to a single victim or any actual deception, and that the standing instruction was to “go big” and “go loud” against protesters and critics like the SPLC.

That’s why career lawyers — literally thousands — have been resigning from federal positions in waves rather than sign their names to this kind of fascistic, bullying, punitive crap.

The cruelty of the thing is the point: the people running these legal grifts know they’ll lose most of these cases, but they don’t care, because winning in court was never the goal. The goal is to hurt the protestors and intimidate into silence anyone else who may be watching.

It’s the next teacher who thinks about marching in a protest, the next county trustee who thinks about signing an open letter, the next reporter who thinks about publishing a leaked memo and decides it just isn’t worth a year of her life and a hundred thousand dollars in legal fees to find out whether she’d eventually be vindicated.

Joe McCarthy understood this in the 1950s, when he and Roy Cohn (also Trump’s attorney and pre-Putin mentor) barely convicted anybody of anything yet gleefully destroyed thousands of lives. The subpoenas, the televised hearings, and the blacklist did all the work, and careers and lives were turned upside-down on accusations alone.

Watchdog groups like Protect Democracy are now keeping running tallies of these retaliatory cases precisely because the pattern has become too consistent to pass off as a string of honest mistakes like they keep trying to pretend they are.

So let’s name it plainly: when prosecutors keep bringing cases that grand juries don’t want, that judges openly mock, and that they themselves abandon the instant a real court starts asking real questions, they aren’t fumbling.

They’re trying to bleed and then delete the right to peaceably assemble and petition for a redress of grievances, the right to free speech, the right to hold an anti-Trump or anti-fascist opinion right out of the Constitution, one frightened citizen at a time.

The sentence gets served long before any jury votes, and the verdict they’re actually chasing is our silence.

Don’t hand it to them. Call your senators and your representative through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and demand real and serious oversight of a Justice Department that’s being run as a McCarthy-like revenge and intimidation operation, and insist that the people dragged through these sham prosecutions be protected and made whole.

Back the organizations defending them, from Protect Democracy to the ACLU, and stand behind the local prosecutors and judges who’re refusing to go along.

Make sure everyone you know is registered at vote.org and find out who’s actually on your ballot at openstates.org, because the surest way to end a weaponized Justice Department is to elect the people who will dismantle it.

Support the Hartmann Report

The Framers gave us the right to petition our own government precisely so that we’d never have to be afraid of it, and the only way to keep that right alive is to use it loudly enough that they’re forced to remember why it exists.

And if this piece helped you see the pattern more clearly, please share it, forward it, and pass it along, because their whole corrupt, evil strategy depends on people feeling alone and outgunned: the simple act of making sure your neighbors understand what’s happening is its own quiet form of resistance.

You can support this work and find more of it at hartmannreport.com, and every time you share it you make the next person a little less afraid to stand up. And that’s how we rescue our democracy.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Crush One to Warn a Thousand”

Your Daily Meme, suitable to copy and paste into social media or email:

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

Share

These people are monsters.

Louise and I know what child abuse can do to children. In our late 20s, back in 1978, we started a residential treatment facility for severely abused children and ran it for five years.

Louise’s first intake was a girl who was the daughter of her sister by her father; he’d then started in on her at age 10. Our second was a boy who came to the attention of the authorities because his older brother had been tied to a pole in the basement by his parents where he starved to death; it was the smell that provoked the neighbors to call the police.

And those weren’t the worse.

We saw kids covered with cigarette burns, the victims of rape and torture, beatings, and human trafficking.

Our job (and that of our professional staff: the program continued for another 30 years) was to help them recover their humanity, to find a meaningful sense of self, to overcome the PTSD and trauma of those early experiences; it was nothing short of herculean.

It takes years and years of intense work, and even at that these kids are scarred for life, leaving them with challenges and memories that will haunt them to their dying days.

Support the Hartmann Report

My dear old friend, the late Joseph Chilton Pearce (I wrote the foreword to his internationally bestselling 1971 book The Crack in the Cosmic Egg), wrote a brilliant book on childhood development, The Magical Child, that lays out the vital importance of children feeling safe and loved during their early years. One of his most well-known quotes is:

“All children want to do is play in worlds they create and project on their external world. If allowed to do that, they are constantly building new neural structures for creating internal worlds and projecting them on their external world. And they build up an enormous self-esteem and feeling of power over the external world through their own capacities.”

His observation is corroborated by over a century of science. As researchers at Harvard noted in a paper presented at the National Symposium on Early Childhood Science and Policy:

“The basic architecture of the brain is constructed through an ongoing process that begins before birth and continues into adulthood. Early experiences affect the quality of that architecture by establishing either a sturdy or a fragile foundation for all of the learning, health, and behavior that follow.

“In the first few years of life, more than 1 million new neural connections are formed every second.”

Which is why it’s so obscene that the psychopaths and monsters in the Trump administration are gleefully holding brown-skinned babies, toddlers, and young children in brutal, cold, fluorescent-lit-all-night cages for months at a time and longer.

As the Marshall Project documents:

In March, two-year-old Kaleth went with his parents to a routine immigration check-in in California, an appointment the asylum-seeking family had never missed, and ICE jailed all three of them anyway. They handcuffed his father and drove him to an adult facility while Kaleth and his mother were flown to the Dilley detention center in Texas.

Torn from his dad, the boy kept dragging a little table under a wall-mounted internal prison phone, trying to climb up to reach a father he had no way to call. Then he stopped eating for twelve days, vomiting when his mother tried to feed him, his cheeks going hollow and his eyes sinking into their sockets while staff called it “depression.”

Welcome to the work of the Republican hypocrites who piously proclaim their “Christian” commitment to “life” and claim concern “for the children,” even as they refuse to release the Trump-Epstein files and are now working as hard and fast as they can to expand their concentration camp system for kids and their parents.

Just this week they voted to spend another $70 billion to expand their violent, murderous, masked secret police force and its for-profit mass detention system.

Which children, after all, would Jesus lock up?

Hundreds of young children are now victims of Trump’s brutal, vicious system designed to “purify” America of Black, Brown, and Middle Eastern people and their kids and grandkids. Prior to Trump’s second term, there were rarely more than 3 children in the entire nationwide system awaiting deportation, and they were typically held in more humane conditions, with their parents, and for brief periods.

Now they’re in barbaric prisons, often separated from their parents, kept awake all night by the lights and noise, touched by nobody unless it’s to abuse them, their brains being reprogrammed for a lifetime of pain and emotional and spiritual struggle.

Please Support My Writing

Courts set a 20-day limit on ICE holding young children, but the Trump regime and their for-profit prison partners making $200 per person per day or more routinely ignore those orders.

Alsu and Azat fled Russia with their one-year-old, Amir, fearing that their opposition to the war in Ukraine would send them to prison and their son to an orphanage, but, presumably because of Trump’s affection for Putin, they were locked in American immigration detention.

Inside the concentration camp they watched their once-lively boy go silent, start hitting himself in the face, and lose so much speech that he could say nothing beyond “mom” and “dad.”

Staff forced his mother to wean him off formula and offered only food unfit for a one-year-old, leaving her so desperate she hid cereal in her socks so he wouldn’t go to bed hungry. When the parents complained, Azat says the for-profit guards woke him in the night and threatened to split the family up and send Amir to foster care if they didn’t stop.

Trump signed the $70 billion Secure America Act this week to fund more of these concentration camps over the next three years — to lock up as many as 120,000+ more people — vastly expanding the system.

Trump has already officially designated “leftists” as “domestic terrorists,” just has Hitler did in 1933 and Putin did a decade ago. Monsters, all.

Speaker Mike Johnson said after the House vote that passed without a single Democratic participant:

“It was Republicans and Republicans alone who did the responsible thing and funded these critically important agencies at this critical time.”

Majority Leader Louisiana’s Steve (“David Duke without the baggage”) Scalise reduced the whole fight to a pathetic attempt at a slogan, lying that Democrats didn’t want to fund more arrests and prisons “because they want open borders.”

Please Support My Writing

Senate Majority Leader John Thune caved in (as usual) and joined Trump at the Oval Office signing; the president praised the Camp agents and guards themselves, with Trump calling them heroes:

“That’s what they are, they’re heroes, what they have to go through to keep us safe, them, heroes for what they go through to keep us safe.”

Monsters.

Amalia was one year old when she spiked a fever inside Dilley, and her parents say every trip to the clinic got them Tylenol and a warning not to complain. When the baby lost consciousness, her mother went back and begged the staff, asking how long they meant to leave her like this and whether they were going to let her die.

Only after the child’s oxygen fell to dangerous levels was she sent to a hospital, where she spent more than a week and was diagnosed with COVID-19, an ear infection, pneumonia, bronchitis, and RSV all at once.

Republican Congressman Tony Gonzales, whose Texas district contains the Dilley facility, is the single largest House recipient of money from the PAC funded by the for-profit company that runs that prison.

This monster told Bari Weiss’s “Face the Nation” on CBS that he said he’d visited Dilley “many times,” called it a “nice facility,” and said it was “nicer than some elementary schools in San Antonio.” He dismissed Democratic critics (who don’t also get money from CoreCivic’s PAC) as “grandstanding.”

Inside Dilley, the children have described the place in their own words. One 14-year-old wrote that there “all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression,” and another child’s drawing carried a plea scrawled across it:

“I am not happy, please get me out of here.”

Health care is also at the heart of the fight over conditions there. The immigrant advocacy group RAICES told a court that families at Dilley had raised concerns about inadequate medical care on at least 700 occasions since August 2025, citing delays and a lack of follow-up on children’s complaints.

Mothers of children held in detention told reporters for Texas Public Radio that their kids were sick again and again, couldn’t sleep on the metal bunks crammed into overcrowded rooms, and at times refused to eat after finding worms or mold in the food.

But, hey, as monsters like Trump, Miller, Hegseth, and Vance will be the first to tell you, they have to save “western civilization” by purging America of those people whose skin is darker than your average European.

Even if it does mean destroying children’s minds and lives forever.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Monsters Among Us”

Subscribe so you can comment

Your Daily Meme, suitable to copy and paste into social media or email:

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

I’ve fixed it on the website itself, and thanks to those of you who sent me a note pointing it out, so if you share the story with friends do it from the website rather than the email.

I guess the good news is that this is the first time in the five years I’ve been doing this newsletter that I’ve screwed anything up this badly. Apologies. I always try to make sure that absolutely everything I say or write is solid, and on this one, I blew it.

— Thom

Share

Against all odds and massive dark money, Graham Platner won. And won big.

The oyster farmer and Marine Corps veteran who turned a long-shot run into a movement just took the Democratic nomination to challenge Susan Collins for her Senate seat in Maine, and he did it the hard way, the clean way, the way that’s supposed to be impossible in this age of unlimited corporate and billionaire money.

He out-raised a sitting governor backed by the entire party establishment and their corporate funders, he packed arenas with Fighting Oligarchy rallies alongside Bernie Sanders, and he built the whole thing out of small-dollar donations from working Mainers rather than checks from corporate political action committees.

He’s been a sharp critic of AIPAC and the river of industry cash that flows through our politics, and he’s pledged to keep that money out of his campaign.

Now look at the woman he’s running against. Susan Collins is the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which means she sits atop the federal spending faucet for defense contractors, pharmaceutical companies, banks, and agribusiness, and wouldn’t you know it, those are exactly the industries pouring money into her reelection.

The single largest organized source of cash in her campaign is AIPAC, the pro-Netanyahu lobby that bundled more than half a million dollars for her in a single filing period and accounted for nearly a fifth of everything she raised last year.

Support the Hartmann Report

It’s a nonprofit corporation working on behalf of a foreign government’s leader’s agenda, doing in American elections exactly what Citizens United made legal when Stevens’ dissent pointed out the decision “would have given Tokyo Rose” a voice in US elections during WWII.

Roughly ninety-five percent of Collins’ money comes from outside Maine. And when Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman dropped two million dollars into a pro-Collins super PAC in the summer of 2025, she voted the very next day to advance Trump’s tax bill, stuffed with giveaways to the private equity industry that had just paid to keep her in office. That’s the whole transaction, in miniature, right there in the open.

If you want to see the same machine running at full industrial scale, just watch what Donald Trump and his sons have been doing for the past year and a half.

— A Reynolds tobacco subsidiary gave five million dollars to a Trump super PAC, and five days later the FDA cleared fruit and candy flavored vapes for the American market, with Trump’s own FDA commissioner resigning rather than sign off on addicting kids.

— Bayer and Monsanto wanted protection from the tens of thousands of cancer victims suing them over Roundup, so Trump handed them a February executive order granting glyphosate producers immunity from lawsuits, then sent his own lawyers to the Supreme Court to argue Bayer’s case. And the saddest part of that one is Bob Kennedy, the lawyer who once won nearly $300 million suing Monsanto over Roundup and built his whole brand calling glyphosate a cancer-causing poison, as Health Secretary rolled over and praised the bought-and-paid-for order as “putting America first,” betraying the very people who trusted him.

— Crypto financier Justin Sun poured something like ninety million dollars into Trump family crypto ventures, and the SEC promptly paused and dropped its fraud case against him, part of a pattern in which the agency walked away from roughly sixty percent of its crypto enforcement after those firms donated to the inauguration.

— Big Oil executives gathered at Mar-a-Lago in 2024, where Trump asked them for a billion dollars and promised to gut Biden’s climate rules in return, a promise he’s since kept by killing wind, solar, and EV incentives, opening federal lands to drilling, and even paying a French company nearly a billion of your tax dollars to cancel offshore wind farms.

— And Tim Cook handed Trump a personal million-dollar inauguration check and a slab of gold, and walked away with tariff exemptions worth billions to Apple while the rest of the country pays the price at the cash register.

Every one of those deals is sleazy, and every one of them is also perfectly legal, and the reason they’re legal is a Supreme Court decision that I’d argue is the single most corrupt ruling in the history of the Court.

Please Support My Writing

In 2010, in Citizens United, five Republican-appointed justices declared that corporations have a constitutional right to spend unlimited money influencing our elections, building on a 1978 case written by Lewis Powell himself (of Powell Memo infamy) called Bellotti that had first cracked the door open.

This, despite the fact that the word “corporation” does not even appear in the Constitution.

In that five-to-four ruling every vote in the majority was a deciding vote, and one of those five was Clarence Thomas, who for decades had been quietly pocketing gifts, luxury trips, private jet and yacht rides, and tuition payments from Harlan Crow, the Texas billionaire whose Dallas mansion famously houses a collection of Nazi memorabilia including two Hitler paintings and a signed copy of Mein Kampf.

Just weeks before the Citizens United ruling, Crow even helped fund a dark money group co-founded by Thomas’s own wife. The man who cast a deciding vote to legalize secret corporate money in our elections was himself bought-and-paid-for, and he never considered recusing himself for a second.

For fifteen years now, we’ve been told there’s nothing to be done about this short of a constitutional amendment, and every attempt at one has died at Republican hands in Congress. But a handful of states have now found a crack in the wall, and it’s so elegant it’s almost funny.

Hawaii just became the first state in the nation to redefine what a corporation even is. States are the entities that charter corporations and grant them their powers in the first place, so Hawaii simply rewrote the definition to say that a corporation operating in the state does not have the power to spend money influencing elections or ballot measures.

It’s not regulation, it’s redefinition, which is the brainchild of Tom Moore at the Center for American Progress, and the beauty of it is that the Supreme Court has held for two hundred years that defining the abilities and powers of corporations is a matter of state law the federal courts have no business touching.

Hawaii didn’t overturn Citizens United: it just made the ruling meaningless inside its borders, where every dollar spent on an election will now have to come from a human being. Montana is gathering signatures to put the same idea on their November ballot, with a measure that would take effect even sooner than Hawaii’s, and at least fourteen states, including New York and California, are today considering versions of their own.

There are limitations to this approach: redefining corporate power at the state level won’t stop the billionaires. It won’t stop Harlan Crow or Elon Musk or the oil and crypto and pharma tycoons who spend as individuals, because they’re flesh-and-blood people, not corporate charters, and reaching them still requires either overturning Citizens United through a constitutional amendment or changing the composition of the Court that handed it down.

But it’s a real start, and just as importantly it drags the whole rotten arrangement back into the daylight, forcing Americans to look at what Thomas and Roberts and the rest of the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court did to us and our democracy, and ask why we ever let corporations buy our government in the first place.

I’ve spent a good chunk of my life writing and broadcasting about how we got here, and in my new book, Who Killed the American Dream, I trace this entire catastrophe back past Citizens United, back past Bellotti, all the way to an 1886 Supreme Court headnote, written not by a justice but by a court reporter, that falsely declared corporations to be persons under the Fourteenth Amendment and threw us to the mercy of the oligarchs. The book lays out the other solutions, too, the ones that reach the billionaires and not just the corporations.

The biggest, most critical crisis for America that Citizens United caused is that the oligarchy it produced isn’t a stable form of government: it’s a transitional one, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.

When a tiny class of the very rich — billionaires, corporations, or both — captures the machinery of the state, as they’ve now done in the Trump White House and across the entire Republican Party, the people eventually figure it out and rebel as we’re seeing today with the No Kings and other protests.

At that point, the oligarchs are left with only two choices. They can back down and let the country become less corrupt, the way America did during the Progressive Era and the New Deal, or they can come down with what Democratic President Grover Cleveland, warning Congress about corporate power back in 1888, called an “iron heel,” crushing the opposition rather than loosening their grip.

That second path is the one that Trump’s mentor, Vladimir Putin, chose. Russia had become an oligarchy in the neoliberal chaos of the 1990s, and when Putin took over he gave the Russian oligarchs a simple bargain: keep your billions, pay me off, and don’t challenge anything I do. When billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky crossed that line, Putin destroyed him, seizing his oil company and locking him away for a decade.

That’s the fork in the road we’re approaching, and it’s why what Hawaii just did is so much bigger than just Hawaii.

The Hawaii-style fix doesn’t require Congress, it requires your statehouse, which means your own state representative and state senator are the people who can make this happen where you live.

Look them up and contact them at openstates.org, and tell them in plain words that you want them to do what Hawaii did and what Montana is about to do, and to redefine corporate power so that only human beings can spend money in your state’s elections.

Support the Hartmann Report

Make sure you and everyone you know is registered and ready to vote at vote.org, because the same ballot box that elects a Platner can pass these measures. If you’re in Montana, go find the signature drive and sign it.

And on the federal side, the road to actually overturning all of Citizens United, call your senators and representative through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them to back a constitutional amendment and meaningful Supreme Court reform.

None of this current state of corruption fixes itself: it requires citizen action, or the special interests and billionaires will prevail. So, share this piece with the people in your life who’ve given up believing anything can be done about the money, because something finally can, and forward it to the friend who thinks corruption is just like the weather, something about which nothing can be done.

Support independent journalism at the Hartmann Report so we can keep dragging this into the light. The oligarchs are counting on you to believe the game is rigged forever. Hawaii just proved it isn’t.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Islands Rise”

Subscribe so you can comment

Your Daily Meme, suitable to copy and paste into social media or email:

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

Share

If you’ve wandered anywhere near the White House this past week, you couldn’t have missed it, because there’s now a ninety-two-foot, six-hundred-ton tangle of steel and floodlights squatting on the South Lawn like a carnival ride that ate a cathedral. The UFC calls it “The Claw.”

It’s taller than the White House itself, tricked out like a Fourth of July beer can, and bolted down right over the patch of grass where Marine One usually lands, all so that on Trump’s birthday, June 14th, two grown men can punch and choke each other bloody in front of thousands of howling fans.

Trump liked it so much he floated leaving it up forever, then had his handlers walk it back when somebody gently reminded him the President still occasionally needs a helicopter. Replacing the torn-up lawn afterward will run about seven hundred thousand dollars, which is roughly seven hundred thousand dollars more than this spectacle is worth.

There’s an ancient phrase for governing this way, and it isn’t a compliment. The Roman poet Juvenal, watching his republic rot into empire, sneered that a people who once handed out commands and legions had shrunk their whole appetite down to two things, panem et circenses, bread and circuses.

Keep the mob fed and entertained with a little blood, and they’ll never notice the men in charge stripping the place down to the studs. Nero fiddled, so the story goes, while Rome burned, and Caligula reportedly wanted to make his horse a Consul, which honestly would’ve been a step up in competence from a few of Trump’s Cabinet picks.

The line from those emperors to a reality-show host who wants cage fighters walking to the Octagon from the Oval Office isn’t hard to trace, and I wrote about exactly this hunger, the narcissistic strongman who governs by spectacle, in The Last American President.

The men who built our republic studied Rome until their eyes bled, and the thing they feared most is sitting right where Trump sits now, a demagogue who keeps a restless public dazzled and furious while the actual work of self-government quietly dies of neglect.

Please Support My Writing

And now a federal judge is being asked to pull the plug on this tacky display. A lawsuit filed this past weekend by the Public Integrity Project, on behalf of an activist and a Vietnam veteran, argues that:

— Staging a private, for-profit prizefight on federal parkland (which is what the White House lawn is) breaks National Park Service rules;
— That the giant cage went up without the congressional sign-off the law plainly requires, and that
— The administration is simply handing the South Lawn and the Lincoln Memorial, where they plan to hold the ceremonial weigh-ins, to a for-profit corporation so it can fatten its bottom line which will no-doubt recycle back to Trump’s personal money bin in some way.

And there’s nothing subtle about whose bottom line will get fattened. Trump’s own financial disclosures from last month show that back in March he bought stock in TKO, the company that owns the UFC.

So the President of the United States is throwing a for-profit cage match, on land that you and I own and pay for with our payroll deductions, promoting a company he’s personally invested in, on his own eightieth birthday, and slapping a “250th anniversary of America” sticker on it as though that fools a single soul.

The lead attorney challenging this money-making spectacle on our property, Brendan Ballou, a former federal prosecutor who spent two years putting January 6th rioters in prison, didn’t bother with euphemism, calling it flatly “a private, commercial, corrupt use of our most sacred national monuments for private gain.”

He went out of his way to say this isn’t a swipe at mixed martial arts, a sport he respects, but at the corruption greasing it, and he pointed to the roughly one-and-a-half-million-dollar sponsorship packages the UFC is hawking, the arrangement that makes fans cough up for a Paramount+ subscription to watch the main card, and the advertising they intend to drape over the Octagon and, I kid you not, the Lincoln Memorial.

Paramount+, of course, is owned by the same nepo-baby billionaire who’s now taking apart CBS News and is trying to get his hands on CNN, all to slobber over and curry favor with Orange Caligula.

The White House waved the whole thing off as “obstructionist, baseless, and dilatory,” which is precisely how self-dealing always sounds the moment somebody catches Trump or any other con artist with his hand in the till.

This is the same tasteless grifter, remember, who’s spent his second term treating the most sacred public building in the country like a distressed property he picked up at a foreclosure auction.

Last summer he paved over the Rose Garden, the one John Kennedy and Bunny Mellon designed in 1962, ripping out the lawn and pouring a stone patio with drainage grates stamped in the shape of little American flags, because nothing honors the republic quite like a Mar-a-Lago veranda with patriotic sewer covers.

Then he bulldozed the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden, the quiet, tree-shaded space dedicated to her in 1965, I.M. Pei pergola and all, to clear ground for a ninety-thousand-square-foot, four-hundred-million-dollar ballroom that a federal judge has already ordered halted, at least for now.

And when he was in Beijing last month gushing over President Xi’s roses, he justified the whole demolition by posting that “China has a Ballroom, and so should the U.S.A.!”

That ought to settle, once and for all, the argument about who he’s modeling himself after. Dictator Xi, ever the gracious host, gave him rose seeds for the very garden Trump had just entombed in concrete, a gift so exquisitely polite it doubled as a political and diplomatic knife to the gut.

Support the Hartmann Report

Even worse, our country’s 250th birthday was always meant to be run by America250, the official, nonpartisan commission Congress created back in 2016, the one whose honorary co-chairs are George W. Bush and Barack Obama, a Republican and a Democrat lending their names to a shared national milestone, exactly the way the thing is supposed to work.

Trump, though, wasn’t interested in sharing anything with anybody. Within days of taking office he signed an executive order creating his own “Task Force 250,” chaired by himself with JD Vance riding shotgun, and stood up a MAGA-branded operation called Freedom 250, the very name now stamped on his birthday cage match.

His own administration then elbowed the official, bipartisan commemoration into the shadows and shoved Freedom 250 out front as if it were the real thing.

He didn’t just crash our nation’s birthday party. He threw out the hosts and slapped his own name on the invitations!

I take this one personally: back in 2009, when Louise and I were living in Washington and I was broadcasting my radio and television show from there, I was invited into the East Wing for a briefing with the economist Jared Bernstein, who was then working for Vice President Biden.

I still remember the quiet dignity of the place, the beautiful parquet floors, the sense that you were walking through rooms where First Ladies had shaped the country for the better part of a century.

That East Wing is a pile of rubble now. Trump knocked down a hundred and twenty-three years of American history, the offices where every modern First Lady did her work, so he could build himself a gold-plated Epstein Dance Hall, and now he’s going to cram a cage fight into the nation’s birthday celebration before the dust from those rooms has even finished settling.

And nobody, it seems, wants to have anything to do with it. The regime’s Freedom 250 concert series, meant to pack the National Mall in the run-up, came apart at the seams as act after act bolted for the exits. Martina McBride, Bret Michaels, Young MC, the Commodores, and Morris Day and the Time were among them, several of them saying they’d been promised a nonpartisan show and refused to be turned into set dressing for a tricked out MAGA rally.

Please Support My Writing

Trump took the snub about as gracefully as you’d imagine, hopping on Truth Social to write the performers off as “highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists’” whose music “nobody wants to hear,” announcing that he’d simply replace the lot of them with himself since he pulls bigger crowds “than Elvis in his prime,” and instructing his own people to “Cancel it.”

Nero, you’ll recall, also considered himself the finest performer of his age. He was famously good with the fiddle.

Now the cage match is getting the identical cold shoulder. Dana White mailed invitations to Dwayne Johnson, who literally sits on the board of the UFC’s own parent company, along with Adam Sandler, Jared Leto, and Mario Lopez, and one after another they’ve politely declined, with even Lopez, a self-described conservative, suddenly recalling he had somewhere else to be.

When the A-list names your own promoter is bragging about won’t come within an area code of the thing, and the biggest celebrity willing to show his face is Vanilla Ice, you’ve pretty well answered the question of whether this is a proud national celebration or a pathetic eighty-year-old man’s birthday party draped in a stolen flag.

Americans need to ask ourselves what all of this noise is engineered to keep us from looking at.

Gas, healthcare, and groceries are still gutting working families, which is why even Governor Gavin Newsom’s office cut straight through the racket with one dry line aimed at the White House, “Mr. President, we just want lower gas prices.”

We’re being marched toward a wider war with Iran, with 13 Americans dead, hundreds injured (who Trump refused to visit when he went to Walter Reed), and hundreds of billions in military hardware destroyed along with our reputation worldwide.

And the administration’s grand answer to all of it is a six-hundred-ton fighting cage and a fireworks budget.

When even Joe Rogan, the UFC’s own broadcaster and one of the loudest voices that helped haul Trump back into office, took one look and called the whole thing “odd” and admitted he didn’t like it, you know the carnival has gotten too garish even for the carnies running it.

The Founders didn’t put their necks in a noose fighting a king so that, two and a half centuries later, a grifter president could rent out the People’s House as a self-enriching pay-per-view backdrop for his own birthday.

But this republic still belongs to us and not to him, and the people pushing back are already in court.

Pick up the phone and call your representatives through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121, and tell them in plain words that public land and the People’s House are not props for a president’s birthday or his stock portfolio, and that Congress needs to take back its say over what gets bolted onto federal parkland.

Support the Hartmann Report

Throw your weight behind the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which is fighting the ballroom demolition in court, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which chases exactly this brand of self-dealing for a living.

Make sure you’re registered and ready to go at vote.org, and find out who represents you back home through openstates.org, because a great many of the people who will either rubber-stamp this circus or shut it down are sitting on your ballot this year.

And if this piece helped you see what’s really going on behind The Claw, share it, forward it, talk about it at the dinner table, and think about subscribing to the Hartmann Report so we can keep doing this work together.

Bread and circuses only work on a crowd that isn’t paying attention to the scheme behind them. Let’s go ahead and ruin the show.

Louise’s Daily Song: “They Built a Colosseum”

Subscribe so you can comment

Your Daily Meme, suitable to copy and paste into social media or email:

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

Share

Yesterday, Louise and I drove home from a ham radio convention in Seaside, Oregon and on the roughly 2-hour drive listened to rightwing radio. It was like stepping into a time machine tuned to the 1860s.

One host was pounding on how “our tax dollars” are being used to support “those dirty Somalis” in Minnesota who were committing “massive welfare fraud that’s just fine with Tim Walz and the Democrats.”

Louise and I were astonished as we heard another note that immigration across the Southern “open border” during the Obama and Biden administrations not only brought us “rapists and murderers,” but these (mostly Catholic) people carried a “dangerous ideology” to America. They were wiping out our healthcare system and depriving “good [white] Americans” of benefits through their “massive fraud.”

These Black and Brown people are even fraudulently voting, handing elections to Democrats, another ranted, lying that that’s “why Democrats always open the borders.”

Meanwhile, rightwing news sites brag that under Trump, Vance, and Miller, only white people have been legally admitted into the US during the last 6 months (true) because Trump is “protecting the [racial] integrity of America.” It echoed Trump’s false complaint that the white people of South Africa are experiencing a “genocide.”

And one host we heard proudly proclaimed he was an “evil, heartless bastard” for his opposition to social programs that may help minorities, particularly Black Somalis and Puerto Ricans. Callers to his show proudly proclaimed that they, too, were “evil heartless bastards.”

This is the modern version of the language of the white supremacist Confederacy, an oligarchic, fascist, race-based movement/government that had fully ended democracy in the South by the mid-1850s, seized control of the press, imprisoned its opponents, and then attacked the rest of America to end democracy nationally. (I write about this at length in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.)

Support the Hartmann Report

And what’s most astonishing is that our mainstream media, much like Confederate newspapers in the 1850s, never, ever call it what it is: racism.

It’s not like it’s not obvious. “Whiskey Pete” Hegseth fired Black and female flag officers and is blocking the promotions of Black and Hispanic officers, and on D-Day went to Normandy to lecture Europeans about the brown hordes they’re allowing to gain refugee status, claiming soldiers like my dad who volunteered for World War II were battling for white supremacy:

“It’s past time we remember what they [who fought at Normandy] knew. Their legacy demands far more than quiet reflection. it requires our active vigilance. Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion, or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not.”

The Klan, like some rightwing groups today, described themselves as a Christian “political and social” society and justified their terror campaigns as “restoring order” against supposed Black lawlessness and had a famous slogan that “all Black men are potential rapists, all white women potential victims.”

Alexander Stephens, author of the infamous Cornerstone Speech that kicked off the Civil War, referred to the need to enslave Black people and prevent them from participating in society to “protect our form of civilization” because racial equality is “fundamentally wrong” and “a violation of the laws of nature,” sentiments with which Trump et al, appear to agree.

On March 21, 1861, three weeks before the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, Stephens proclaimed that the idea of “Negro equality” and Blacks and whites living together was fundamentally wrong, both scientifically and morally:

“Our new [Confederate] government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

His “scientific truth” framing echoes how modern “conservative” movements launder bigotry as hard-nosed realism with only thinly concealed complaints about manufactured outrages including references to “low IQ individuals” (Trump’s favorite phrase for Black politicians and reporters) and lies like “they’re eating our cats and dogs”:

“This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.”

He even explicitly listed Galileo, Adam Smith, and Harvey’s discovery of blood circulation as precedents, positioning racial hierarchy as a “scientific fact” that northern ideologues were trying to “suppress.” He also branded his white opponents as mentally defective zealots:

“Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity.”

Please Support My Writing

That last quote has a direct lineage to Trump’s constant slander of “deranged leftists” and “insane Democrats.” Speaking of Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, two women of color, he wrote on his failing, Nazi-infested social media site that the two:

“had the bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people, LUNATICS, mentally deranged and sick who, frankly, look like they should be institutionalized,” adding that they should be “sent back from where they came.”

The foundation of this GOP racism goes beyond skin-color-based tribalism; there’s a widespread belief across white supremacist movements that non-white people are genetically inferior to whites. Trump himself constantly refers to his own “great genes,” as if white racial superiority were a simple fact. As he told rightwing talk-show host Hugh Hewitt:

“We’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

The hosts we listened to yesterday echoed that language repeatedly albeit in a bit more subtle code than the use of the word “genes.”

As did JD Vance when he went to Germany to support the neo-Nazi-aligned Alternative For Germany (AfD) party there, condemning Germany’s laws against open Nazi symbolism and language and their condemnation of Musk’s Nazi salutes and white supremacist rhetoric:

“Speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference, even when people express views outside your own country and even when those people are very influential. and trust me, I say this with all humor. If American democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.

“But what German democracy — what no democracy, American, German or European — will survive is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns [about whiteness in Europe], their aspirations, their pleas for relief, are invalid, or unworthy of even being considered. Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. there’s no room for firewalls.”

When Putin bombed the crap out of Syria to protect that nation’s dictator (who allowed Russia to use his deepwater ports) against a popular uprising, millions of brown-skinned Muslim refugees fled north into Europe.

Germany took in a million, and most other European countries took in hundreds of thousands as a humanitarian gesture. All those brown non-Christians, at first welcomed, have since become the rallying cry for Europe’s right, arguing that Europe was a white continent and must stay that way for its “civilization” to survive.

From Sweden to France to Germany to Hungary (where Orbán campaigned successfully for prime minister on the slogan of “build the wall” to keep them out), that wave of immigration has led directly to the rise of powerful, racist, rightwing movements across the continent.

Similarly, here in America there’s been a recent change in our racial composition. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act used the census of 1890 — one that preceded most all early 20th century non-white immigration, when America was nearly entirely white (except for “separate but equal” Blacks and Native Americans) — to set specific racial quotas for legal immigration, explicitly to ensure America would stay overwhelmingly majority-white.

Support the Hartmann Report

In 1965, President Johnson and a mixed bag of northern Democrats and southern Republicans pushed through the Hart-Cellar Act that ended those quotas; it was followed by an explosion of immigration by Black, Hispanic, and Asian people.

Between then and now the racial composition of America has been so changed that nine states are now majority-minority (Hawaii – 20.7% non-Hispanic white; California – 32.6% white; New Mexico –35.1% white, Texas – 37.8% white; Nevada – 42.8% white; Maryland – 45.3% white; Georgia – 48.0% white; Florida – 49.1% white; New Jersey – 49.5% white), and the entire US is predicted to go that way within two decades.

This explains Trump’s, Vance’s, and Miller’s near-hysterical efforts to rid America of non-white people while they’re also blocking the entrance of anybody except whites. His opposition to birthright citizenship, which the Supreme Court will soon rule on, ties directly to his desire to denaturalize — strip of American citizenship — as many Black, Hispanic, and Asian people as possible.

Today there are an estimated 140 million non-white people in America, the vast majority first- and second-generation American citizens. Thus, Kristi Noem’s DHS’s official twitter feed calling for 100 million Americans to be deported — necessitating massive denaturalization, all to restore America to a supermajority of white people like in the 1890 census — makes a lot of sense to Republicans. Trump himself said:

“We have criminals that came into our country and they were naturalized maybe through [President Joe] Biden or somebody that didn’t know what they were doing… If I have the power to do it — I’m not sure that I do, but if I do — I would denaturalize, absolutely. We don’t want those people… they shouldn’t be in our country.”

This racist, white supremacist movement has even moved from the White House and Pentagon into our media, as Scott Pelley revealed last week that the new CBS News head, Bari Weiss, was demanding that the protesters against ICE treatment of non-white people be portrayed as more violent than they were and that CBS should report that Renee Good was trying to kill a cop when she was murdered. He told The New York Times:

“Two of the things in the email include, ‘Can we make the protesters look more violent?’ Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.”

The common thread that runs through all of this is the racism that animated the Confederacy and has repeatedly torn this country apart over the centuries, now officially adopted by the Republican Party in their endorsement of Trump, ICE, detention centers, denaturalization, a freeze on all non-white immigration, and deportations. It’s now amplified by “conservative” media, much like the newspapers in the Confederacy prior to the Civil War.

Please Support My Writing

It wouldn’t be a stretch to claim — as I’m doing here — that the Trump administration is trying to restore the Confederacy and this time have them finally defeat the United States’ democracy to replace it with a nationwide system of white supremacy using Christianity and “crime” as their foils.

As fascism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, their plan is explicitly for America to become “a White Christian Ethnostate.” Evil and heartless, in other words, as the talk show host so gleefully proclaimed.

The fact that our mainstream media and virtually ever elected Republican across the nation are afraid to explicitly name the racist foundation of so many of these actions, even as the Trump regime trumpets them and strips our history of references to the tribulations or contributions of Native, Black, Asian, and Hispanic people, is a deeply troubling sign that their campaign is succeeding.

So, the next time you see a media outlet whitewashing Trump’s racist behavior and comments, or those of his lickspittles, call them out. Our democracy depends on each us standing up for all of us.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Evil, Heartless Bastards”

Subscribe so you can comment

Your Daily Meme, suitable to copy and paste into social media or email:

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

The Scene of the Crime

The crime took place in Washington, DC, but its seeds were planted in California, where the most powerful corporation in America was waging war against democracy itself.

The Dawn of the First Progressive Era

To truly grasp the scope of the crime of 1886, you first have to understand what America was becoming at the time, and what the oligarchs were desperately trying to stop.

The 1880s started what historians would later call the First Progressive Era. After decades of unfettered corporate power following the Civil War, leading to brutal practices against workers, Americans were finally waking up and organizing. This rise of the new power of labor and communities demanding progressive changes had that era’s oligarchs terrified.

By 1886, the Knights of Labor had grown to seven hundred thousand members, which made it the largest labor organization in American history. Workers, who’d been treated as disposable, were discovering their collective power and demanding an eight-hour workday, safer working conditions, and an actual living wage so they could support their families with dignity.

States were also beginning to regulate corporations in serious ways. These included new laws that limited working hours, required basic safety standards in factories and mines, and taxed corporate property to fund public schools, roads, mass transit, and other infrastructure that would benefit ordinary citizens beyond just the morbidly rich.

Farmers were organizing into state-based cooperatives, pooling their resources to escape the stranglehold of the railroad shipping monopolies and grain elevator cartels. The Grange movement had already won major victories in several states, confirming the newly recognized principle that state governments had the power to regulate corporations by citing the “public interest.”

In short, the seeds of the American Dream—the promise that hard work would be rewarded with security and dignity, that ordinary people could own their own homes and businesses, that children would have opportunities their parents never had—were just beginning to sprout. The Progressive Era that would transform America and create the world’s first widespread middle class was dawning.

The oligarchs and “conservative” politicians of that day well understood what was at stake. If this movement succeeded, if workers gained real power, if states could effectively regulate corporate activities, if taxes on the wealthy funded public goods that lifted all boats, then the era of rampant, unchecked corporate dominance would end. The railroad barons, the steel magnates, and the banking titans (among others) who’d accumulated unprecedented fortunes would have to share that power with America’s democratic majority.

The oligarchs thus needed a weapon to fight back. They searched for years and finally found it in the Fourteenth Amendment, written to protect freed slaves but now soon to be perverted to protect corporate profits and oligarchic wealth.

The Railroad Oligarchs

In the 1880s, the Southern Pacific Railroad wasn’t just a company: it essentially functioned as if it were a government unto itself.

The railroad controlled California’s politics completely. Its executives owned senators, judges, governors, and newspaper editors. It had its own police force, its own courts and jails, and its own laws. When the railroad wanted something, the railroad got it. When it didn’t want something, that thing didn’t happen.

The men who owned the Southern Pacific—Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker, known as the “Big Four”—were America’s first oligarchs (other than the Southern plantation owners who’d tried to overthrow democracy and were defeated in the Civil War). They weren’t just rich; they wielded their wealth as a weapon to bend local, state, and even the federal government to their collective will.

Stanford would later found Stanford University, laundering his reputation through philanthropy, the way many oligarchs have done ever since. But that came later; in the 1880s he was a railroad baron who saw democracy as an infuriating obstacle to ever-increasing profits and a challenge to his own personal wealth and political power.

And his railroad had a problem. California counties, under pressure from voters, were passing legislation that taxed railroad property to pay for public improvements including schools, roads, and bridges. The railroad barons, incensed, called this theft. They’d built their empires via federal land grants (Lincoln gave them tens of millions of acres during the Civil War), political corruption, and absolutely ruthless business practices. The idea that local communities could tax them to fund the common good seemed, to these railroad oligarchs, like an outrageous violation of their rights.

Most importantly, those taxes weren’t just about revenue; they were also about power. They were about democratic communities saying out loud that they could control the corporations that operated in their territory. They claimed that corporations existed to serve public purposes, not the other way around.

If California could tax the railroads to fund public schools, the oligarchs reasoned, then children of workers might get educated. Educated workers would know how to demand better wages. Better wages would cut into railroad profits. If these affronts were allowed to stand, the whole system that kept the oligarchs on top might start to unravel.

So, Stanford and his buddies decided to manufacture a constitutional right that didn’t exist: the right of corporations to be treated as “persons” under the Fourteenth Amendment. It was a preemptive strike against the Progressive Era before it had even fully emerged.

The Amendment Written in Blood

The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, just three years after the Civil War ended. Its purpose was singular and clear: to guarantee that freed slaves would be recognized as full citizens with constitutional rights.

Section 1 contains the key language: “No State shall . . . ​ deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Over six hundred thousand Americans died in the Civil War; the Fourteenth Amendment was drafted in their blood. It was meant to ensure that the Black Americans for whom the war was fought would be protected by the Constitution. It was meant to guarantee that the promise of America—that all men are created equal, that every American deserved a chance at what Jefferson called “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—would finally apply to all Americans, regardless of the color of their skin.

The amendment carried the potential for real power, and it had already begun to transform the nature of America through Reconstruction, so the railroad oligarchs decided to exploit and corrupt it for their own purposes.

They’d tried before. During the first two decades after the Civil War following its ratification, corporations brought case after case to court, arguing that they were “persons” entitled to Fourteenth Amendment protections and thus access to the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution). They lost. Repeatedly.

For example, in 1877, in Munn v. Illinois, the Supreme Court explicitly rejected the idea that corporations had the same rights as natural persons. Chief Justice Morrison Waite wrote for the majority that corporations were subject to “regulation . . . ​for the public good.” Although they had a limited form of what today we’d call artificial personhood so they could sign contracts and pay taxes, they were not protected as if they were human persons under the Fourteenth Amendment.

That decision was a victory for democracy. It affirmed what the Founders understood: that corporations are creations of law, subject to democratic control, not autonomous entities with the same “inherent rights” recognized for humans in the Bill of Rights. It meant that each of the states could regulate businesses in its own way, tax them fairly, and require them to serve the public interest.

If Munn v. Illinois had remained the law of the land, the reforms of the Progressive Era that followed might have been easier to achieve and harder to reverse. The American Dream might have taken root even earlier, and today we’d probably be far ahead even of Europe’s most progressive democracies like Norway and Denmark, since we would have had such a huge head-start.

That failing, the oligarchs needed a new strategy.

The Tax Case

In 1882, the Southern Pacific Railroad simply stopped paying property taxes in several California counties, claiming the taxes were illegitimate. The counties sued, and the railroad fought back with an entirely new legal argument.

They claimed that those California counties’ tax assessment methods violated the Fourteenth Amendment because they treated railroad property differently from other property, and that different counties had different tax rates. This “unequal protection,” they argued, violated their rights as “persons” under the Constitution.

The case was Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. It worked its way through the lower courts for four years and finally reached the Supreme Court for the 1885/1886 term.

The railroad had advantages that most litigants lack. They had unlimited money for legal fees, political connections to judges and politicians, and, most importantly, they had something else: a friend on the Supreme Court itself.

US Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen J. Field was a Californian who’d made his fortune during the Gold Rush. He owned railroad stock, socialized with railroad oligarchs, and believed, passionately, that corporations deserved constitutional protection from democratic governance.

Field’s vision could be described as feudal. Like Edmund Burke generations earlier, he believed a small class of property owners should rule America, protected by the Constitution from the whims of the democratic majority. Wealth, he believed, was proof of goodness, wisdom, and competence, and poverty was a failure of the will.

The emerging middle class of the late mid-nineteenth century threatened this vision, in Field’s view. Workers organizing into unions, farmers forming cooperatives, small businesses openly fighting the monopolies: all of this had to be stopped.

Field had been waiting for the right case, and Santa Clara would be it.

It started in 1883 because back then Supreme Court judges also “rode the circuit,” working in their states as chief judges of the appeals courts most months of the year, and just spending a few months every year in Washington, DC, as justices of the Supreme Court.

So, in 1883, that case first came before Field in his capacity on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. He ruled in favor of the railroad, writing in his decision:

The Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, in declaring that no State shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the “equal protection of the laws,” imposes a limitation upon the exercise of all the powers of the State which can touch the individual or his property, including that of taxation.

The “equal protection of the laws” to any one implies not only that the means for the security of his private rights shall be accessible to him on the same terms with others, but also that he shall be exempt from any greater burdens or charges than such as are equally imposed upon all others under like circumstances. This equal protection forbids unequal exactions of any kind, and among them that of unequal taxation.

Once Santa Clara County appealed their loss in the 9th Circuit, the case came before the US Supreme Court with Field himself as one of the men sitting in judgement.

The Oral Arguments

On January 26, 1886, the Supreme Court—with Justice Stephen J. Field in attendance—heard oral arguments in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. J.C. Bancroft Davis, the Court’s official reporter, took the notes, as did the county’s lawyer, Delphin Delmas.

The railroad’s lawyers made their pitch, echoing Field’s decision in the 9th Circuit case: “The Fourteenth Amendment protects ‘persons’ from unequal treatment. Corporations are persons. Therefore, California’s unequal tax assessment violates the railroad’s constitutional rights.”

The county’s lawyers countered: “The Fourteenth Amendment was written to protect freed slaves who are actual humans, not railroad corporations. The framers never intended to grant constitutional rights to corporate artificial entities created by state law.”

Then something weird happened.

Chief Justice Morrison Remick Waite interrupted the arguments. According to court records, he made an announcement: “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.”

The county’s lawyer, trying to argue against the railroad’s assertion that they were “persons” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, was essentially told not to bother. The Court had already decided.

Or had it?

The Decision That Wasn’t

On May 10, 1886, the Supreme Court laid down its decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company.

Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote the majority opinion. It’s a technical, somewhat boring ruling about fence valuations and tax assessment procedures. The Court found in favor of the railroad, but not because of the Fourteenth Amendment; instead, it ruled that California had illegally included the value of the fences along the railroad right-of-way in the land’s assessment in violation of its own laws.

Here’s what Justice Harlan actually wrote in the Santa Clara opinion about corporate constitutional rights: nothing.

The Court’s decision explicitly avoided the constitutional question. The Court instead ruled on narrow technical grounds having to do with California tax law that had nothing whatsoever to do with whether corporations were persons under the Fourteenth Amendment.

In fact, Harlan’s decision begins by noting that since the Court could dispose of the case on other grounds, “it is not necessary to consider” whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to corporations.

It doesn’t get more explicit: “it is not necessary to consider.”

The Supreme Court explicitly refused to rule on corporate constitutional rights.

So where did the idea that Santa Clara established corporate constitutional rights come from?

The Headnote

J.C. Bancroft Davis was the Supreme Court’s Reporter of Decisions, what we today call the court reporter. His job was to take notes and then publish the Court’s written opinions in officially sanctioned volumes, adding brief headnotes to summarize each case.

For Santa Clara, Davis wrote: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

That sentence appears before the decision itself. It looks official. It’s printed in the United States Reports, the official record of Supreme Court decisions.

But it’s not part of the decision. It’s not law; it’s just Davis’s statement. And Davis’s statement directly contradicts what the decision actually says.

The decision itself said the Court was definitely not deciding the corporate constitutional rights question: it was “not necessary to consider” because they were only going to rule on whether the county illegally counted the value of fenceposts when calculating the value of the land for property taxes.

The headnote, on the other hand, explicitly says the Court decided that corporations are persons.

One of them was clearly and blatantly lying. And since the decision was the official ruling of the Supreme Court, written by Justice Harlan and agreed to by the other justices, the liar had to be Davis.

Davis, we now can see, put words in the Court’s mouth—words the Court never said, using language that would alter the course of American history for more than a century.

The question is why?

The Cover-Up Begins

Within months of the publication of the Santa Clara decision, lawyers for corporations began citing it as precedent for corporate constitutional rights, pointing to the headnote instead of the decision.

Judges, seeing that citation in the official United States Reports, assumed it was accurate and, within a decade, began to rely on it. Soon, other cases were citing Santa Clara as having finally and firmly established that corporations are persons under the Fourteenth Amendment and entitled to the rights previously enjoyed only by humans.

Nobody, it appears, bothered to check the actual decision. Why would they? After all, it was right there in the official record, summarized by the Supreme Court’s own official reporter, a wealthy and powerful man with a well-known reputation who was the son of the Massachusetts governor.

In 1889, just three years after Santa Clara, corporate lawyers first successfully established that damnable headnote as precedent. In Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway Co. v. Beckwith, the Supreme Court cited Santa Clara, claiming in an actual decision that corporations are persons under the Fourteenth Amendment.

With that case, now in an actual decision by the Court itself and not just a statement by the Court’s reporter, the lie became the law.

And today, much to the detriment of both democracy and America’s working class, 137 years later, it still is.

What Was Lost

The fraud of 1886 didn’t just corrupt constitutional law. It altered the entire course of American history.

The Progressive Era still happened, and the labor movement still won important victories. The income tax was established. Antitrust laws were passed. Women won the right to vote. The First Progressive Era, from the 1890s through 1920, identified crucial reforms, most of which just made America’s oligarchs even more determined to fight back.

And when the Republican Great Depression showed what unrestrained corporate power really meant—banks failing, families starving, millions homeless—Franklin Roosevelt reinvented American politics and economics to create the Second Progressive Era, what he called the New Deal. It included Social Security, the right to organize unions, regulations that prevented banks from gambling with depositors’ money, and a tax system that required the wealthy to pay their fair share.

By 1981 when Reagan was sworn into office, the American Dream was real for fully two-thirds of Americans. A single income could support a family. You could buy a house for three times your annual salary. College was affordable or, in some states, even free. Healthcare didn’t bankrupt families. Retirement was secure. Children had better opportunities than their parents.

But throughout that entire period, Field’s and Davis’s doctrine of corporate constitutional rights remained embedded in constitutional law like a dormant virus or an unexploded landmine. The oligarchs had lost battle after battle during the Progressive Eras, but they succeeded in hanging onto their ultimate weapon: the fraudulent claim that corporations had constitutional rights.

When Ronald Reagan’s “conservative (neoliberal oligarchic) revolution” began in 1981, that weapon was activated. Corporate constitutional rights became the battering ram that destroyed the American Dream, piece by piece, decade by decade, until we arrived at today, when Millennials own just 4.6 percent of the nation’s wealth compared to the 21.3 percent Boomers owned at the same age, and our president is openly dancing to the tunes of major polluters and fossil fuel corporations in exchange for campaign contributions and gifts.

The railroad oligarchs and their shills of 1886, J.C. Bancroft Davis and Stephen J. Field, planted a bomb in the Constitution. It took five generations to fully detonate it, but when the oligarchs of the 1970s and 1980s finally did, it laid waste to almost everything the Progressive Eras had built.

Understanding how that bomb was planted—and who planted it—is critical to knowing how to defuse it.

That’s what brings us to the triggerman: J.C. Bancroft Davis.

The Crime Scene

How Corporations Stole Human Rights in 1886

THE CASE

Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company,
US Supreme Court, 1886

Actual issue: A county sued a railroad over $30,000 in unpaid property taxes.

THE CONSPIRATORS

THE TRIGGERMAN: J.C. Bancroft Davis, Supreme Court Reporter
Former railroad president • Railroad stock owner

His crime: Wrote a fraudulent summary claiming the Court ruled corporations are “persons”

THE MASTERMIND: Justice Stephen J. Field, Supreme Court Justice
Railroad stock owner • Friend of railroad oligarchs

His goal: Corporate constitutional rights through decades of failed court cases

THE FRAUD:

WHAT DAVIS WROTE: The Headnote: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment . . . ​”

THIS IS NOT LAW: Headnotes are summaries with no legal standing.

WHAT THE COURT ACTUALLY RULED: “It is not necessary to consider” whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to corporations.

THE COURT REFUSED TO DECIDE: They ruled only on a technicality about fence taxes.

THE RESULT: For 140 years, courts cited Davis’s fraudulent headnote as if it were law.

One lie became the foundation for

Citizens United: corporate “free speech” to buy elections

Hobby Lobby: corporate “religious freedom”

Corporate “privacy” to hide pollution and crimes

Corporate “due process” to block regulations

The Supreme Court never ruled that corporations are people.
A court reporter made it up.

Source: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 118 US 394 (1886)

Read more