The Supreme Importance Of Reforming The Supreme Court

The need to reform the Supreme Court has generated wide public debate due to recognition of the obvious (and I must say, shocking) degree of corruption of the current Court majority, but among political scientists and law professors, the need to reform the Court has been a topic for years. When I was teaching Law and Public Policy, I participated–mostly as a “lurker”–for some twenty years in a “Law and Courts” listserv, where scholars of the justice system and the courts discussed problems that long preceded the current Court, and argued about the merits of various proposals to mend those problems.

One significant issue was the diminishing number of cases the Supreme Court was able to decide annually–an issue that led to suggestions for various ways to expand the Court’s capacity, including the addition of judges. Another problem was that Americans live a lot longer now than they did when the Court was established, reducing turnover and raising the likelihood that some Justices would “serve” while senile or otherwise diminished. The most popular “fix” for that issue was a proposal to set term limits–eighteen years was a common proposition because it would be long enough to meet the goal of the Founders to shelter justices from political pressure and popular passion (which was the purpose of lifetime appointments), but short enough to minimize concerns about aging and turnover.

These academic discussions went on long before the elevation of obvious ideologues and political partisans to the highest court, refuting the arguments we hear dismissing the reform movement as ideological “court packing.” The growing recognition of the inadequacies of the current Court are just one example of the structural and systemic problems that have gotten us to the disastrous present. When and if we emerge from our Trumpian nightmare, the goal cannot be to restore what was. Structural changes will be essential–very much including to the Supreme Court.

In a recent post, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo made that point.

It’s not just turning things back to the status quo ante, as we’ve discussed. We’re in an era in which it’s critical to make major structural changes when the opportunity arises and build new structures that are more durable than the ones which have fallen so quickly over the last decade and specifically the last year. So you need smart people putting time into this work during the next three years, really thinking it through and having that list of reforms ready, support built them, etc.

That recognition brings us to the reason that Court reform is so critical. As Marshall points out, thoughtful people can identify numerous needed reforms, from the filibuster to the Electoral College to gerrymandering…the list goes on. But if we are dealing with a corrupt Supreme Court, those reforms are likely to be struck down. This Court has demonstrated that it can just manufacture pseudo-constitutional arguments for getting to the majority’s desired results. As Marshall wrote, “It’s really as simple as that. We’re now locked into public policy which fits an aggressive version of right-wing pseudo-constitutionalism and, even more, a jurisprudence aimed at keeping federal policy in line with the electoral and political interests of the Republican Party.”

The point is that the corruption of the Supreme Court is actually beginning to slow, disincentivize, detour policy work. It could not be more critical that people across the Democratic world — policy, law, electoral politics — have this realization. There’s no reason to accept a situation in which democratic self-government is only allowed now for Republicans.

We the People are gradually coming to recognize that we can’t fix our broken government unless we first fix the Court. And–as Marshall also emphasizes–not only must something be done about it, something can be done about it. “This isn’t like amending the constitution. It can be done. Get a trifecta, kill the filibuster and you can do it all on simple majority votes.”

And it really does have to be done, and not only for the reasons Marshall notes. When a Court deviates so profoundly–and so obviously–from adherence to precedent and established legal reasoning and analysis, citizens lose respect for the very concept of the rule of law. When they see the highest court in the land enabling government corruption and Christian nationalism, their belief in constitutional governance understandably evaporates, and rather than identifying as an American polity, the population devolves into tribes and factions contending for power and influence.

Reforming the Court should top our “to do” list.

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Corruption And Stupidity…What Could Go Wrong?

Two observations today. The first is just more confirmation of the pervasive corruption that has characterized the Trump administration. The second is evidence that the stupidity and incompetence that triggered an illegal war will cause global instability and economic chaos.

#1. ProPublica has made a trove of 3200 documents public and searchable. The documents “detail the finances of more than 1,500 federal officials appointed by President Donald Trump. Records for Trump and Vice President JD Vance are also included.”

The documents reveal a web of financial ties between senior government officials and the industries they help regulate — relationships that have drawn scrutiny as Trump has dismantled ethics safeguards designed to prevent conflicts of interest.

On his first day back in office, Trump rescinded an executive order signed by President Joe Biden that required his appointees to comply with an ethics pledge. The pledge barred them from working on issues related to their former lobbying topics or clients for two years. Weeks later, Trump fired 17 inspectors general charged with investigating fraud, corruption and conflicts of interest across the federal government. Around the same time, he removed the head of the Office of Government Ethics, the agency that oversees ethics compliance throughout the executive branch. The office is currently without a head or a chief of staff.

#2.  As one pundit recently observed, the focus on Trump’s malevolence has obscured the extent of his stupidity. His inability to plan, his dismissal of expertise, his inability to read briefings and his life-long reliance on “gut feelings” rather than data or logic led to his adventurism in Iran. Evidently, he confused warfare with video gaming.

Trump displays total ignorance of global strategic and economic interrelationships.

So now we are seeing results that were predictable, but clearly unanticipated: civilian casualties, the deaths and severe wounding of U.S. soldiers, huge financial costs, energy-market shocks, strengthened geopolitical rivals, regional instability…the list goes on.

Trump was evidently unaware of the global importance of the Strait of Hormuz and unprepared for the spiking costs of gas. Given the worldwide agricultural dependence on the fertilizer that also comes through the Strait, it will take longer to see the effect on prices at the supermarket, but those are coming.

And then there’s Taiwan, which has little domestic fuel and relies on imported liquid natural gas (LNG) that comes–you guessed it!–through the Strait of Hormuz. Due to storage issues, Taiwan can keep only 10-14 days of LNG reserves. If the Strait is closed long enough to cut off Taiwan’s LNG supply, the effect on its semiconductor industry would be rapid and severe;  chip manufacturing is extremely energy-intensive and Taiwan’s power system depends heavily on imported fuel.

If semiconductor supply from Taiwan is significantly reduced, the economic effects will be global. In today’s world, chips are embedded in thousands of products. (When there were shortages and supply chain disruptions during the pandemic, prices rose sharply and production fell in multiple industries.)  Taiwan manufactures most of the world’s advanced chips, and a reduction in its capacity would lead to shortages and huge price spikes in everything from automobiles to consumer electronics to household appliances to medical equipment.

It is abundantly clear that the administration didn’t think about–or know–any of this. It obviously never occurred to Trump or Hegseth that there might be strong reasons past administrations had decided not to start a war in the already volatile Middle East, and that it might be prudent to consult intelligence experts. (Whoops! I forgot–experts have been routinely purged…)

And as The Bulwark recently reported, the administration’s few articulated goals have not been met. There has been no regime change. Intelligence reports provide “consistent analysis that the regime is not in danger” of collapse and “retains control of the Iranian public.” ‌

Trump was confident the Strait of Hormuz would be kept open because we could prevent the Iranian Navy from laying mines. “But it turned out that the mere fact of risk was enough to cause maritime insurers to refuse to cover shipping vessels. Which had the same effect as a waterway full of mines. The Trump administration was completely blindsided by this completely predictable situation.”

There’s much, much more, but I’ll just leave you with the last paragraphs of the Bulwark report.

The Iran war is also burning through Patriot missiles and other air defense munitions that are needed in Ukraine. Which strengthens Russia’s position, makes Putin less likely to seek a ceasefire, and increases the risk of wider European destabilization.

All of which is much worse for American economic and security interests than a destabilized Iran reeling from air strikes and internal unrest was three weeks ago.

Elect a clown, expect a circus….

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Those “Fiscal Conservatives”

Heather Cox Richardson is a national treasure for many reasons–primarily, for providing her multitude of readers with historical context helping us better understand how we’ve come to where we are. But on March 11th, her daily letter shared information that should be far more widely known, information that confirms what critics of today’s GOP–of whom I am one–have been saying: the party that once proclaimed its devotion to fiscal sanity has become a cult that has enabled an administration of grifters and wild spenders; and none of that spending is even arguably for the public good. Instead, the self-serving indulgences of the totally incompetent clowns who currently occupy positions of authority come at the expense of the rest of us, but especially the poor. 

Richardson began her letter by quoting Senators appalled by the costs of Trump’s illegal war against Iran. She reminded readers that the Framers had given the power to declare war to Congress because they were familiar with the history of European kings who had launched wars of choice that had reduced their subjects to poverty. “If the debate over war went to Congress, voters could hear the reasoning for the war hashed out and decide for themselves if the cost in lives and treasure was worth it to them.” 

Fast forward to our would-be King and his retinue.

Trump is spending a billion dollars a day in his attacks on Iran– after slashing government programs that help Americans.  “About 23 million people signed up for ACA coverage this year, down by more than 1.2 million from last year,” and the administration has announced plans to cut another 4 million off the rolls in its effort to target “waste, fraud, and abuse.” In October, millions of Americans lost food benefits when the government declined to fund SNAP during the government shutdown.

Meanwhile, “Pete Hegseth blew through $93.4 billion in September 2025 alone, with more than $50 billion going out in the last five days of the month alone.”

A recitation of where that money went is both instructive and infuriating. 

“Pentagon officials bought “a $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, $5.3 million for Apple devices such as the new iPad, and an astronomical amount of shellfish, including $2 million for Alaskan king crab and $6.9 million worth of lobster tail. (Lobster tail is apparently a favorite of Hegseth’s Pentagon—the department spent more than $7.4 million total on the luxury item in March, May, June, and October.) In other pricey food purchases, the government decided to drop $15.1 million for ribeye steak (again, just in September), $124,000 for ice cream machines, and $139,224 on 272 orders of doughnuts.”

Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico noted that he’d recently been in Sand Branch, Texas, “a community south of Dallas that doesn’t have running water. It doesn’t have basic sewer infrastructure… So every dollar we spend bombing people in the Middle East is a dollar we’re not spending in Sand Branch, Texas, or in our communities here at home.”

True enough, but as Richardson reported, DOD isn’t even spending all that money on the bombs being illegally dropped on Iran. It’s spending our tax dollars on steak, king crab, lobster and shrimp for the plates of people who are already very well-fed.

Richardson shared an oft-quoted speech from Eisenhower in which he lamented the amounts spent on weapons of war. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” 

For years, America’s governments have funded a wildly bloated defense establishment. National budgets have subsidized fossil fuel companies and “rewarded” the corporate entities that have the means to lobby and donate, while ignoring the needs of the poor and dispossessed and making a mockery of the very concept of social welfare. 

I didn’t think this corrupt and evil administration could make me any angrier, but I was wrong. 

This year, the United States is “celebrating” its 250th anniversary. This will be the year we either throw the bums out and reclaim the promise of a government focused on the public good, or it will be the year we go the way of so many past world powers–brought down by the incompetence, cruelty and overwhelming greed of the privileged few.

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Fraud And Abuse By ‘Those People.”

The Hill recently published an article that should be filed under “telling it like it is.” The title is explanatory: “The War on Fraud is Really a War on the Poor.”

I’ve published several recent posts addressing the multiple inadequacies of what passes for America’s social safety net,  especially focusing on the fact that very little of the money we spend on welfare  programs actually gets to the beneficiaries of those programs; thanks to lawmakers’ obsession with determining recipients’ “merit,” we’ve erected a large and costly bureaucracy to screen applicants and to eliminate those perennial bugaboos “fraud and waste.”

As The Hill points out, what is described as a war on fraud and waste is really a war on poor people.

Every few years, someone digs up an example of someone gaming the system, and the response is always the same: “more paperwork, more surveillance, more hoops to jump through for people who are already struggling. The United States has long organized its anti-poverty programs around one overriding assumption: that poor people are likely to cheat.”

The article notes the costs of this misperception–including the expense of the enormous bureaucracy we’ve erected to ensure that no poor person gets a penny to which s/he is not “entitled.”

Families who claim the Earned Income Tax Credit are audited at dramatically higher rates than wealthier taxpayers. Families applying for SNAP benefits–aka Food Stamps–have to document income, housing and household composition not just when they first apply, but in “re-certifications” every few months. Those who miss a deadline or misunderstand a form lose their benefits — not because they did something fraudulent, but because they “failed to navigate an administrative maze designed to catch it.”

And cash benefits? As the article notes, after decades of “reform” intended to weed out the fraudulent and ineligible, only  one in five eligible families currently receives any cash assistance, and even for those who do, benefit levels don’t begin to cover basic needs.

This approach also corrodes trust. When every interaction with the government begins with suspicion — when benefits arrive late, disappear without warning or require endless proof — people learn that institutions are not there to help them. They disengage. They stop applying.

None of this means fraud should be ignored. Public programs need safeguards. Taxpayer dollars matter. But fraud losses are a cost of doing business in every system — from corporate accounting to defense contracting. We don’t respond to those risks by forcing CEOs to recertify their eligibility every six months or freezing entire programs over isolated scandals. We reserve that treatment for those living in poverty, and it doesn’t have to be this way.

This obsession with suspected “Welfare Queens” who abuse government generosity isn’t based on experience or data; multiple audits have found that actual fraud by benefit recipients is rare. Improper payments — most of which are errors, not fraud — make up only a small fraction of spending. As the linked article points out, “We have constructed a massive enforcement apparatus to root out a small minority, and in the process, we have made life materially harder for millions.”

What is particularly galling about this war on poor people is the mounting, irrefutable evidence that the people looting the treasury aren’t poor single mothers “raking in” $450 a month. The real “fraud and waste” comes from the millionaires and billionaires making shady (or worse) deals with the Trump administration, and they’re making out like bandits.

As numerous watchdog organizations, including the Campaign Legal Center, have reported,  Trump has been rewarding his biggest donors with political favors and providing his donors and friends with countless opportunities to enrich themselves at the expense of the American people. Crew reports that 20 cabinet members have directed at least 30 million dollars to “pad Trump’s political coffers, pet projects or personal bottom line.” Government officials and secret service members have spent untold hours at Trump resorts, paying inflated rates and filling Trump family coffers. The list goes on.

The Intercept reports that Trump–with the help of the Republicans in Congress– funded his tax cuts for corporations and the uber-rich by cutting  billions of dollars in services for the poor and for working people, including Medicaid, and that large numbers of corporate executives are “quietly enriching themselves on Trump’s policies.”

And while massive grift and theft goes on at the top, our intrepid lawmakers are making sure that no one can spend their food stamps on sodas…

We’re waging war on the wrong people.

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Defining Nonprofit

When I began this blog–nearly twenty years ago!–I would occasionally run out of likely subjects, and ask my husband to suggest something. That problem has vanished; today, the challenge is to choose which aspect of a tumultuous time to consider. I share this small dilemma because today’s post is centered on a problem that probably doesn’t rank high in the universe of challenges we face, but still deserves attention–and ultimately, a remedy.

That problem is the definition of nonprofit.

Back before I decamped from legal practice to join academia, I was aware that a good lawyer could often turn what was really  a for-profit endeavor into a nonprofit organization. Assuming an arguable existence of a public good, it was possible to create a corporation that didn’t have a positive bottom line. You would simply transfer amounts that would otherwise be taxable profits into overhead costs, mainly salaries and perks for those in charge, and avoid those pesky taxes.

That clever lawyering has given us (among other things) “nonprofit” hospitals paying executive salaries of over a million dollars a year (Hospital CEO’s are paid an average of I.3 million according to a recent study from Rice University.)

The effects of that blurry line between for-profit and nonprofit was the subject of a recent opinion piece in the Washington Post that called it a 2.8 trillion dollar tax shelter. As the author noted, a growing number of supposed “charities” have become big businesses.

Granted, many charities are authentic and truly benevolent, but it is also true that the nonprofit sector is dominated by  companies that are exempt from the tax obligations that burden their virtually indistinguishable for-profit competitors. According to the linked essay, “the commercial revenue generated by these nonprofits totaled $2.8 trillion in 2023, nearly three times the amount nonprofits receive from donations and government grants.”

In 1909, Congress exempted charitable organizations from the corporate income tax, intending to protect “small fraternal societies providing insurance to widows and tending to the poor.” But the exemption also applied to mutual lending and insurance companies, which opened the door to exempting other “businesslike” companies. As a result, the “past century of special-interest lobbying has transformed a modest carve-out into a sprawling network of billion-dollar enterprises that look, act and compete like businesses — while enjoying privileged tax status.”

Consider nonprofit hospitals and health care plans: In 2023, they generated $1.3 trillion in revenue and nearly $45 billion in tax-free profits. The largest, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and its affiliated hospitals, recently announced over $127 billion in revenue in 2025 — more than many of America’s largest for-profit companies — yet paid no corporate income tax on more than $9.3 billion in net income. The justification? In exchange for their tax exemption, nonprofit hospitals are supposed to provide charity care for the poor. However, studies consistently find that tax-exempt hospitals don’t provide more free or discounted care to low-income patients than their taxpaying competitors.

Or take AARP, an advocacy group for older Americans, which earned $9.9 billion in tax-free royalties in 2024 by licensing the use of its name to for-profit companies. AARP signed a sponsorship deal last year with the Washington Nationals to place its logo on players’ uniforms. Hardly the action of your neighborhood nonprofit.

Other organizations that fall into that category include the PGA–which pays no income taxes on the hundreds of millions it makes from television or tournament sponsorships, and the U.S. Tennis Association, the U.S. Polo Association, the WTA Tour, the Breeder’s Cup and the National Hot Rod Association. The list also includes profitable award shows like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Oscars ($147 million tax-free in 2023), and the Grammys (nearly $93 million from TV, sponsorships and ticket sales in 2024.)

Then there’s the credit union industry, which was originally exempted to serve working-class people of “small means.”  They are now indistinguishable from commercial banks–in fact, over the past decade, they’ve purchased nearly 100 commercial banks, converting taxpaying businesses into tax-exempt ones.

We can exempt genuinely charitable endeavors like food banks, homeless shelters and others serving the needy from taxation, but it is long past time to distinguish between truly charitable endeavors and what the essay calls “commercial enterprises wearing nonprofit clothing. If it walks and quacks like a business, tax it like one.”

There is serious money at stake. The essay points out that taxing the net business income of these faux nonprofits at the standard 21 percent corporate rate would raise $51 billion annually — and would do so without raising rates on anyone  currently being taxed.

It’s past time to treat these pretenders like the for-profit businesses they really are. Put this reform on your list of things we must do when we emerge from our current nightmare.

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