I like Thom Hartmann. I do. Despite having spent time on RT (Russia Today) before wisely leaving the Kremlin’s shitty propaganda network, Hartmann is unapologetically progressive without spending all of his time trying to keep Republicans in power. Unlike, for instance, Cenk Uygur and The Young Turks, a group of “progressives” who are openly opposed to the progressive agenda if it helps minorities and women and the homeless and the Trans community and and and.

One of the things I like most about Hartmann is that he focuses on wealth inequality, but not in a way that throws marginalized communities under the bus. Usually. There are other times, however, where he has a bit of a blind spot for who and what the American right wing really is.

Thank the gods he doesn’t take the alt-left position that our tent is so wide, we should have room for literal Nazis and other assorted monsters as long as they’re pro-universal healthcare. That is a core tenet of the liars who call themselves “progressives” and then go against everything actual progressives advocate for.

Hartmann does not do that. He does, however, think that if Republican voters could just see through right-wing propaganda, they would totally be on our side:

The entire con depends on voters on the right never turning around and realizing they’re mourning the same identical loss that progressive Democrats are trying so hard to repair.

The instant working people stop asking “who’s the enemy who looks, prays, or loves differently than I do” and start asking “who took my dad’s paycheck,” the whole game is over.

That’s the one conversation the billionaires and their bought-off lickspittle politicians are truly terrified of.

So have it. Have it at the summer picnic with your MAGA brother-in-law and your progressive niece sitting side by side, and watch what happens when you skip the slogans and ask them both what kind of country they actually want to live in.

You’ll find (outside of the unrepentant and largely unreachable racists) that they want the very same America back, the one where an honest week’s work bought a decent life.

And I get it. It seems like a really obvious truth. Right-wing voters, especially the poor and working class, are being fucked non-stop by the policies they vote for. Every year, they get a little bit poorer. Every year, a little bit more economically insecure. Every year, a hell of a lot angrier.

We all know why this is happening. Billionaires are looting the country, and the Republican Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of Billionaire, Inc. The people screaming the loudest about being abandoned and ignored by the system are right-wing voters. They want economic justice! They want jobs! They want schools and roads and hospitals! They want a future! Our lives are a pile of shit, and we want something better!

Then they vote for the party who explicilty tells them that they’re going to cut taxes for the rich, kill millions of jobs, and close down their schools and hospitals. And take away their future.

Now, Hartmann believes this is because they’ve been conned by culture war issues in order to ignore the class war the rich have been waging on us for generations. It’s a really tempting narrative. It means that millions of Americans are just one revelation away from joining us in moving this country forward in leaps and bounds. If we can JUST reach them, everything will change.

But, I’m sorry Thom, that is just not going to fucking happen. Ever. I’d love to believe it could, but even though I will work to manifest a future where Republicans and ICE and CBP and the billionaires funding it all are dragged before tribunals and sentenced to life in prison or the gallows, I cannot engage in pure fantasy.

The cold, hard, and deeply depressing truth is that Republican voters are not being conned. Not really. For a con to be a con, you have to be unaware that you’re being lied to and manipulated. That simply is not the case here.

Republican voters know they’re being lied to. They know they’re being manipulated. They know the culture war stuff is bullshit. Obama’s tan suit? Hunter Biden’s laptop? Hillary’s secret pedophile sex dungeon? They know none of that was real or mattered. Republican voters know children are not getting sex change operations at school. They know Haitians are not eating cats and dogs. They know Central American drug gangs are not lurking around every corner.

Republican voters fucking know this is all bullshit or wild exaggerations. Their fuckwit of a Vice President literally told them he was making shit up: “Mr. Vance, who amplified false claims that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets, said he was willing “to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention.”

I know we all love to joke about how stupid MAGA is, and it’s true. They are willing to say the dumbest shit imaginable and insist it’s factual, no matter what the reality is. But a lot of that is performative nonsense. It’s an act. It’s a show of fealty to their tribe. It tells them that they belong and gives them permission to hate and oppress the people they fear.

Because the very foundation of who these people are is nothing more than fear and hate, and they goddamn well know it. These are the mediocre, racist white people who see every minority as a threat to the unearned privilege that keeps them in power. It doesn’t matter if it’s social, cultural, or economic power. They all respond the same way: With hate and rage at any minority that challenges their domination.

Black and Latino voters will vote for Black and Latino candidates. Not enough of those candidates will be champions of white supremacy.

Women have an annoying habit of not voting for misogyny and rape culture. How is THAT fair to mediocre white men? Won't someone think of THEIR needs?!

Muslims and Jews and atheists tend to vote for people who won’t force Christianity on them. But without JAY-zus, how will mediocre racist white people justify oppressing The Gays and stripping women of their reproductive rights?

Republican voters know full well that their party of pedophiles and traitors and grifters does not represent their economic needs. But at the same time Republicans are emptying the national treasure into the bank accounts of billionaires and their buddies, they will abuse their power to crush everyone the right hates.

They will pass laws targeting Trans kids. All 1% of the population of them.

They will pass laws turning women into breeding cattle to be disposed of at will.

They will pass laws making protests against fascism a crime.

They will pass laws making it legal to kill anyone as long as you are white and can pretend you were afraid.

They will pass laws stripping black voters of their rights.

They will pass laws to put Latino children in cages.

Republican voters see this, and they celebrate. The black empty void where their souls should be rejoices at the cruelty and violence and evil. They’ll tell themselves they’re the heroes of the story, but they don’t really care one way or another. As long as Those People suffer, Republicans can do literally anything.

Exaggeration? Cool. Riddle me this, then: The right spent years, fucking YEARS!, screaming their rage at the global cabal of pedophiles they KNEW for a fact existed. They thought the cabal was comprised of Jews and Democrats and liberal elites. What happened when they discovered that the cabal was actually real and a lot of Republicans, including their beloved Dear Leader, were among the names of the child rapists?

Well…is it really THAT important to see all of the Epstein Files? Can we really hold the Trump regime accountable for not releasing all of them? Aren’t Democrats really just as bad anyway?

Sure, the press keeps telling us that MAGAland is furious about the Epstein Files. Are any of them willing to vote for a Democrat to get them released? Are any of them looking to put Republicans in prison for obstruction and cover-ups?

Motherfucker, please.

Republican voters will make a big show of outrage and then pull that lever for any name with an "R" next to it. All of their big sobby tears vanish in the blazing heat of the racism and misogyny that really gets them up and moving in the morning. It has been this way since before the Civil War, when a handful of mediocre, racist slave owners convinced hundreds of thousands of medicocre racist white men to die horrifically, just to preserve their place in the racial hierarchy.

Medicocre, racist white people have been dying for racism for generations. Our generation is watching rural America be ravaged by opioids, and we’ll never know how many Republican voters died of Covid to “own the libs.” Then they voted for the party that murdered their friends and loved ones with a smile on their face and song in their hearts. Why? Because Trump promised them white nationalism, and that was more important than a prosperous future for themselves or their children. They traded it all away to hurt the people they hate, even at the cost of their own financial security.

So when Thom Hartmann says all we have to do is convince Republican voters that the racism and bigotry and misogyny are a con, I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. The hate is not the con. The hate is the entire point.

I wish it weren’t true, but we can’t pretend it’s not. These people are lost to us. Forever? Maybe. Maybe not. But until the pain of wallowing in hate becomes intolerable, they will never abandon those who promise to feed their addiction. Our job is to either cut off their supply or make the cost so high, they give it up. Nothing else will ever make them stop. They love it too much to walk away. They’re willing to die and sacrifice their own children to get more, and that’s the ugly truth Hartmann doesn’t want to confront.

Trump has got himself in a pickle with the most difficult people in the world to deal with.

Trump announced today that Iran walked out of the negotiating room and said we want some changes to the ceasefire agreement. “I said we’re not going to make changes. You know, they’re professional negotiators.” He said this in a call to Fox and Friends, because Fox and Friends is where he does his diplomacy and his war planning. I’m sure they’re tuned into Fox News in Tehran. Of course they are.

Iran came back and said it was the United States that walked out of the Oman talks. “Interpretation against the text is not permissible,” said Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei. “Lying has become part of the U.S. administration’s behavioral pattern, and they have become addicted to it.”

The dude gets it, doesn’t he?

Iran hit a Cypriot-flagged ship on Sunday as it passed through the Strait close to the shores of Oman, a no-go area in the Strait for shipping, according to rules established by the Iranian regime, because they control the Strait of Hormuz. Trump fired back by striking what the Pentagon called “140 targets” along the coast of Iran. The Wall Street Journal reported that “the attacks, like previous rounds, were designed to degrade Iran’s ability to launch attacks on commercial vessels transiting the strait.”

Let me tell you what’s going on when the Pentagon deploys the word “degrade” to describe what they’re doing. They know that they don’t have enough bombs and missiles to destroy all the missile and drone emplacements along Iran’s coast on the Strait of Hormuz. This is a screenshot from Google maps of just one stretch of the 600 miles of Iran’s coast on the Gulf:

Here is another screenshot:

There are miles and miles more coastline of Iran along the Strait of Hormuz. It’s hard to see in these screenshots, but all those dark sqiggly areas inland from the Gulf are mountains. In both screenshots, all the lettering along the edge of the Gulf and slightly inland are the names of villages. There are people in those villages, buildings, and houses. The Iranian regime can move in and take over a house from a family and install a missile launcher in their living room overlooking the Gulf. The launcher will be invisible to any form of surveillance – U.S. aircraft, satellites, Reaper drones fixed with surveillance cameras. They can’t look through the roofs of buildings. In the mountains themselves, there are hundreds of caves that can contain missile and drone launchers. Hundreds. Miles and miles and miles of them. There are dozens of villages with thousands of houses that can be appropriated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) and used to launch missiles at ships in the Gulf or even targets in Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE, and Jordan, all of which were hit by Iran on Sunday during their half of the tit-for-tat missile barrage.

There never was a ceasefire. There were two pages of paper with a list of 14 agreements, or aims, or promises or whatever the hell they were. The pieces of paper allowed Trump to get oil and gas prices down temporarily, which was the aim of the negotiations that his real estate trust-funders held in Geneva with representatives of Iran. The whole thing was for show.

Let me tell you what the Iranians knew the whole time. They knew Trump is in trouble politically in the U.S. They watch every point by point drop of Trump’s approval in the domestic polls. They know right where he stands moment to moment. They read his insane rants filled with lies on Truth Social. They watched Trump’s new chairman of the Federal Reserve take office. They watched as the Fed did not cut interest rates because inflation is still too high. The Iranians know why U.S. inflation is high. It’s because of Trump’s tit-for-tat war with Iran.

Now, let’s play a game. You’re a leader in Iran, it doesn’t matter who – Khamenei Jr. or one of the militant generals who are said to have gained power within the IRGC and according to some reports are really running things in Iran. As a leader of Iran, what are you going to do?

If you saw the same videos on the news last night that I saw, you saw the deck of a U.S. destroyer, or maybe two of them, all lit up with a gigantic flash of fire. Do you know what that was? A cruise missile taking off. Let’s go back to the Iranian IRGC commander. He’s got CNN, just like you and I do. He saw the Tomahawk missiles blasting off. He can count. He probably has an office somewhere with guys at computer screens keeping a running record of how many cruise missiles we’ve fired, and how many of them we have left in our arsenal.

If you’re the IRGC guy, what would you do? Would you go back to the negotiating table – wherever the hell that is these days – and keep talking with the representatives of a man who has never abided by a treaty or kept a promise in his life? Or would you fire off a few more cheapie missiles and drones at U.S. targets in Kuwait and Jordan and Bahrain and take a couple of pot-shots at ships attempting to sail through the Strait of Hormuz, so Trump will get pissed and say “we’re going to hit them very hard” and waste more of his Tomahawk missiles?

It’s not a hard choice, is it? The choice is made easy for the Iranians by one Donald Trump who has a constant need to go on Fox News and his insane Truth Social account to brag about how tough he is, how strong our military is, how he has “obliterated” Iran’s navy and air forces and its defenses. Take a guess at who knows the truth about how much damage Trump’s tit-for-tat air war has done to Iran. Uhhh, maybe the Iranians themselves, who have spent the ceasefire, such as it was, rebuilding their missile and drone capability and repairing their launchers and resupplying all those caves along the Gulf with new missiles and new drones.

Are you getting a picture of how easy this is for Iran? Trump can bluster all he wants about how he is reimposing the blockade on Iran’s ports. He can go on Fox News and brag that he is the one who controls the Strait of Hormuz.

But do you know who controls it? The Iranian military. They live there. They built all the missile emplacements. They built the single Shahed drone that the Washington Post reported yesterday wiped out a command headquarters in Kuwait on the second day of the war, killing six Americans and wounding – get this – 400 more. The Post story is extraordinary. It goes into how the soldiers’ wounds were understated in communications with the military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, causing the hospital to not be adequately prepared to receive the wounded. Wounds that were severe were listed as moderate. Wounds that were moderate were listed as minor. All the wounds were bad enough that the soldiers were being airlifted out of Kuwait thousands of miles away to Germany to be treated in a hospital. Hegseth lied about the soldiers’ wounds so the Pentagon would not have to report to the press how much damage had been done to the American military by Iran – on the second day of the war.

The Shahed drone that hit the building on the American base in Kuwait cost about $25,000. The first evacuation flight out of Kuwait carrying wounded soldiers to the military hospital in Germany cost that much just in fuel to get off the ground when the C-17 took off.

Tit-for-tat is exactly the kind of war Iran wants with the U.S. because it is so gravely and completely unbalanced. It costs the U.S. a million dollars each day just to wake up the sailors on the ships we have in the Indian Ocean and feed them breakfast. It costs millions of dollars a day just to keep our ships sailing around the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Oman. It costs tens of millions of dollars to fire off a few Tomahawk missiles. It costs tens of millions of dollars for us to put enough U.S. fighter aircraft in the air to bomb and fire missiles at military targets along Iran’s Gulf coast. It costs many more millions of dollars for the missiles the jets fire and the bombs they drop.

It costs less than one million dollars for Iran to fire 40 Shahed drones at U.S. bases we have in Kuwait and the UAE and Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Who has the upper hand in Trump’s tit-for-tat war? I’ll give you a hint. It’s not the guy whose name begins with a “T” and ends with a “P” who the Iranians call the biggest liar they’ve ever dealt with.

Iran has been dealing with invaders of every stripe for about 3,000 years. Alexander and the Greeks came and went. The Arab armies invaded and before leaving, gave the Persians the Muslim faith. The Turks and Mongols came and went. The Americans came in 1953 with their CIA and overthrew the Iranian government and installed the Shah. The Iraqis did their best during eight years starting in 1980 before both sides gave up after suffering a combined one million casualties.

Now comes Donald Trump. Do you think the leadership in Iran is intimidated by a man wearing orange pancake makeup with confectioner’s hair who spends more time thinking about gold-leafing another piece of gimcrackery for the Oval Office and worrying about his ballroom and the reflecting pool and his ridiculous arch and now the front columns of the White House than he does thinking about his war?

Pray for the power of Trump’s ego. It’s driving him to lose his war with Iran, and they will ensure the tit-for-tat war goes on long enough to cost him the midterm elections. The Iranians have been at this game for centuries. They’re players. He’s a putz.

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Watching people claiming to be “progressives” spend days defending Graham Platner with Republican talking points was pretty fucking depressing. No, the Jews did not sabotage Platner. He did that himself. No, his victim didn’t have to come forward years ago to be credible. We on the left know for a fucking fact women sometimes take decades to talk about their trauma. No, Platner’s victim is not responsible for Platner coming over and raping her. Platner is responsible for not stopping when she said, “No.”

If your candidate is more important than your morality, you were always immoral. Go put on the red hat of hate and stop pretending you’re a good person.

Anywho! Lots to catch up on this week! Let’s turn back that clock and see what you missed.

Monday: Forecast for this week - Peak White Victimization Complex

Tuesday: White Nationalism is all they know.

Wednesday: Recording and editing and writing!

Thursday: Podcast!

Also Thursday: Masterful gambit, Trump! This will definitely win you the midterms!

Friday: Dungeons & Dragons scripting and cleaning.

5 Things I Found Interesting This Week

The Hartmann Report

They're Shocked We Won't Pretend Anymore

The “partisan split” of Americans showed up in a big way at Fourth of July celebrations and backyard barbecues last week, but the media, while noting or even complaining about it, rarely mentions exactly why it’s happening…

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6 days ago · 3455 likes · 32 comments · Thom Hartmann

News from Underground

All You Had To Do Was Be Nice

Greetings from The Underground…

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5 days ago · 43 likes · 21 comments · Evan Fields

Skeptical Sociopath

The Emasculation of Mark Rutte

Metaphorically speaking, Rutte is a bottom. He’s submissive, a serial groveler, and he seems to enjoy being slightly humiliated by those he calls ‘daddy’. I am not one to yuck anyone’s yum, but in this case, I absolutely will. Mark Rutte’s unbearable ass-kissing of Donald Trump is not only an embarrassment; it’s extremely dangerous. “Unbefitting” is the…

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2 months ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · Skeptical Sociopath

DEFIANT Dispatches

The Make-A-Wish Presidency

Somewhere in America right now, a kid with a terminal illness is getting the best day of their life. A trip to Disney World. A locker room visit with their favorite team. A afternoon that costs some stranger money and asks for nothing back except a smile…

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2 days ago · 16 likes · BrooklynDad_Defiant!

Donald Trump doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.

He put up a post on Truth Social this morning telling Iran that the cease fire is over. He told his fellow national leaders and anyone else who would listen at the NATO summit in Turkey that the cease fire with Iran is over. The cease fire was the greatest thing since cheating at golf when he first made the deal that wasn’t a deal with Iran and stopped the shooting war and replaced it with a bunch of wishy-washy promises from Iran to be good boys and let oil flow through the Strait of Hormuz while Trump’s real estate trust funders ran the negotiations with Iran’s let’s-wait-around-until-they-get-tired-and-go-home diplomatic brain trust.

Iran shot some missiles at an oil tanker and a couple of cargo ships the other day, and the Strait of Hormuz closed. That’s all Iran had to do – fire a couple of missiles or fly a couple of drones and bingo, oil prices shot up, gas prices did an about face, and high prices at supermarkets and everywhere else remained inflated from where they were four months ago.

That is the sum total of what Donald Trump has accomplished with his war on Iran. The war he started on February 28 is the stupidest, most pointless, most useless war the United States has been engaged in since Vietnam. MAGA types and right-wing pundits will argue that Trump hasn’t gotten us into the kind of quagmire that Democrats got us into with Vietnam.

Phooey. It’s a goddamn quagmire and a half, because if Iran wants to keep fucking around with stopping oil shipments from passing through the Strait of Hormuz, they will. There is nothing the U.S. or anybody else can do to stop them. Trump goes on Truth Social and gets in front of the press and says shit like, “we hit them very hard last night.” Do you know what that means? Exactly nothing. Are oil tankers passing freely through the Strait today? Nope. So, what good did it do that we shot some missiles and dropped bombs on “targets” along Iran’s coastline on the Persian Gulf? Nothing.

I can’t make up my mind whether to call this clusterfuck the War of the Dullards or the Nothing War, because nothing we have done since Trump started the damn thing has worked.

Why was it that Trump started the war again? Oh, I remember now! He said he was going to make sure Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. What did CNN report this afternoon? Satellite images show that Iran “may be” rebuilding its nuclear facilities.

May be rebuilding? Of course they are. The minute Trump agreed to his almighty ceasefire, Iran started restocking and rebuilding everything that the U.S. “hit very hard” during the weeks that we waged war on Iran, entirely by air. They’ve got their missile factories going again at top speed. They’re building Shahed drones as fast as they can. They’re working on repairing and rebuilding their small-boat navy that can place mines in the gulf and fire missiles and drones at civilian ships.

And you know what? We don’t have a clue what they’re doing in their underground factories and storage facilities, because we can’t see them, and we don’t have good intelligence about what is happening in that country of 636,000 square miles and 92 million people. That’s a lot of area to keep an eye on. That’s a lot of people who can move around freely on roads that we haven’t blown up, cross bridges we didn’t bomb, and wait until it gets dark so they can enter their underground arms facilities and continue to build all the stuff they need to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed.

Which isn’t much, when you think about it. All they had to do to close it the other day was fire a missile at a tanker, and it was like a gigantic door shut blocking the Strait. Nobody will insure ships that run the risk of being blown out of the water. Nobody will insure the precious cargo carried by the ships, the millions of barrels of oil, the phosphorus that makes fertilizer, the helium used to manufacture the computer chips that power all the almighty AI infrastructure that is supposed to create this big economy of the future that everyone is banking on to the extent that the Smart Guys are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build the data centers and all the other shit that is supposed to solve every problem we will ever have and keep our economy humming.

Think about this: Iran can just shut down the entire machinery of western wealth by firing a couple of missiles that cost less than what Kash Patel spends to go see his girlfriend sing the National Anthem at some redneck sporting event.

What kind of sense does that make? No sense at all is the answer. What kind of sense has Trump’s war on Iran made? Less than no sense. We have had hurtlocker economic numbers ever since the day Secretary “I ain’t drinkin’ but I’m still stinkin’” Hegseth announced Operation Epic Fury. Isn’t he proud? It’s like all you’ve got to do is think up some macho name for your war, and everything will be peachy keen. What did Iran do when they read on the internet that they were being hit by Operation Epic Fury?

They launched Operation We’re Closing Absolutely Essential to the Entire World Strait of Hormuz. Then they threw a bunch of missiles and drones at their Gulf state neighbors and knocked out our 5^th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain and every other military installation we had east of Cyprus and just sat back and said to Trump and Hegseth, what are you going to do about it, boys?

Man, I’ve been writing about stupid shit done by stupid men for decades, and this just plain-ass takes the cake. It wasn’t enough to waste tens of billions of dollars of our defense money and put thousands of our service members at risk and kill 13 of them. Noooooo. They had to completely fuck up the entire world economy by revealing to Iran a strategic advantage that they hadn’t realized they already had. Iran can nuke the economy of the whole world with a single missile fired at a single ship in the Strait of Hormuz.

For whatever reason, that idea had never occurred to the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran. But it has occurred to them now because Donald Trump pissed them off. Trump caused considerable damage to our national security because of the oil shortage that he created and by telling Hegseth to go ahead and shoot off about two-thirds of all our important weapons such as Tomahawk and Patriot missiles and a whole bunch of other missiles we haven’t even been told about yet.

Even some of his MAGA minions have begun getting the message. He got us into the kind of dumbass war he promised he would never start. He’s turned Washington D.C. into a goddamned disaster with monuments and the White House itself blocked-off behind chain link fences patrolled by bored National Guard soldiers.

Late today, U.S. “officials” announced that the Strait of Hormuz “will soon reopen,” according to the New York Times. They also assured us that the recent attacks on ships were carried out by “rogue military units.”

Ri-i-i-i-ight. All those rogue Iranians who have known since they were in diapers that if they did anything to piss off the Mullahs their heads would end up in baskets.

Donald Trump is going down in history as the Hormuz president, and there is nothing he can do about it. Iran is in charge, not him.

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Chief Justice Roberts did not do his reading on the Federalist Papers. Hamilton himself clarified what he meant, contradicting Roberts’s interpretation.

This is the third daily fact-check on the Roberts Court, now turning to Slaughter. In the entirety of the Ratification debates, not a single Federalist or Anti-Federalist speaker or writer either suggested that the Constitution implied a presidential removal power — and even more tellingly, nor did any Anti-Federalist warn that the Constitution could imply a general removal power, even as they often warned about other presidential power.

Chief Justice Roberts was left inferring from the Federalist Papers on other aspects of the presidency — and it is telling that he could not come up with anything on point. (We’ll get to his obvious misuse of Federalist No. 66 later.)

It turns out the Federalist Papers twice contradicted the unitary executive theory, of any implied power of presidential removal (whether with cause or without cause!), both Madison in Federalist No. 39 and Hamilton in Federalist No. 77.

Let’s start with the clearest passage, Hamilton’s Federalist No. 77: “The consent of [the Senate] would be necessary to displace as well as to appoint.” Displace was a common synonym of “remove,” and those two words were used interchangeably, almost equally. Hamilton was following the common law default rule that removal/displacement followed appointment, and because the Senate consent was necessary to appoint, the symmetry rule applied, so Senate consent was necessary to remove/displace.

Even though the plain meaning of Federalist No. 77 contradicts his argument, Roberts claimed that this sentence was ambiguous, writing that “scholars disagree…” So nevermind that specific sentence directly addressing removal, and just follow my vibes on the other Federalist Papers about other questions.

TL;dr: It does not matter if scholars disagree. Two scholars (Jonathan Gienapp and I) have identified that HAMILTON HIMSELF, during the First Congress debates, clarified what he actually meant, and lo and behold, it was the plain meaning contradicting the Roberts Court and the unitary executive theory. Roberts did not read the articles or amicus briefs addressing his previous misunderstanding with the original historical evidence of Hamilton’s explanation.

Start with Justice Sotomayor’s concurrence at p. 15-16, which is entirely correct:

Removal also “was not discussed in the Constitutional Convention,” Myers v. United States, 272 U. S. 52, 109–110 (1926), making an expansion of preratification executive power unlikely. Alexander Hamilton, then writing to support the States’ ratification of the Constitution, explained that because the power to remove traditionally followed the power to appoint, “[t]he consent of [the Senate] would be necessary to displace as well as to appoint.” The Federalist No. 77, p. 458 (C. Rossiter & C. Kesler eds. 1999). This was a selling point for the Constitution, as it meant that “[a] change of the [President] would not occasion so violent or so general a revolution in the officers of the government as might be expected if he were the sole disposer of offices.” Ibid.6 Madison also explained that “[t]he tenure of the ministerial offices, generally, will be a subject of legal regulation, conformably to the reason of the case and the example of the State constitutions.” Id., No. 39, at 238.

Jonathan Gienapp and I confirmed Hamilton’s meaning from Hamilton himself, as reported by the participants in the First Congress’s debates:

Here is what I wrote in my article “Indecisions of 1789” at p. 778:

There are some highlights from this week worth noting. Early on in the very first day of these debates-indeed, in just the second speech-William Loughton Smith of South Carolina, the leading “impeachment only” member, came prepared with The Federalist. Smith argued that he could see only one other constitutional possibility for removing executive officers aside from the impeachment clauses: the “senatorial” position.130 He quoted Hamilton’s Federalist No. 77 at length, which provided, “[t]he consent of [the Senate] would be necessary to displace as well as to appoint.”131 Smith recounted the following exchange in a letter:

“[T]he next day Benson sent me a note across the house to this effect: that Publius [Hamilton] had informed him since the preceding day’s debate, that upon more mature reflection he had changed his opinion & was now convinced that the [president] alone [should] have the power of removal at pleasure; [h]e is a Candidate for the office of Secretary of Finance!”

Smith seemed to imply that Hamilton was changing his opinion with personal ambition and insider patronage “court” politics on his mind.

I cited Gienapp’s The Second Creation, too:

GIENAPP, THE SECOND CREATION, supra note 3, at 154-55 (”While [Benson’s note] complicated Smith’s use of the Federalist, it only reinforced his broader point: that his opponents were treating the Constitution as an object of freedom rather than constraint.”)

Here’s the bottom line: 1) The historical record shows Hamilton himself explaining what he actually meant in Federalist No. 77, which was consistent with the plain meaning — and it obviously bears more weight than commentators decades or centuries later. Keep in mind that Hamilton had every reason to fudge the meaning if he wanted to and if his audience would have bought it.

And 2) These records show how the “public” engaged in these debates (i.e., Congressman Smith and the House) understood what he meant: Senate consent was necessary to remove! Otherwise, Smith would not have cited Federalist No. 77 as clear evidence against presidential removal.

If you’re going to make originalist arguments, read the primary sources carefully, and if they are confusing, maybe read the full record for context.

Well, that was interesting.

Some quick thoughts below the cut.



So I’ve recently become much more aware of the Discourse about air conditioning that is common to much of northern Europe.  There’s a lot of weirdness generally, but there are certain strains that pop up regularly.

One is Left / green concern about emissions.  Unlike a lot of Left / green concerns, this one doesn’t stop at hand-wringing.  It tends to go straight to moral condemnation and direct action.  A surprising lot of northern European greens view aircon as somewhere between “acceptable only in the direst of needs” and “just inherently very wicked”.

Another is a strain of what I can only call machismo.   Find an online discussion about aircon, and within a few comments you’ll find the guy — it’s always a guy — who wants you to know that he was with British Forces Arabian Penninsula at Aden back in the day, and nobody had ever heard of this aircon nonsense, and they were just fine, damn your eyes.  Or the guy — it’s always a guy — who is living in a house his great-grandfather built with his own two hands, insulated proper-like and with real brass fittings, warm in winter and cool in summer, add a ceiling fan and that’s all a man should ever need. 

Related to that last one is Anything But Aircon.  You see, if you just install a geothermal heat pump, and get better insulation, and plant trees around the house and ivy on outer walls, and add awnings and external shading, and paint your roof white, and get double- glazed windows with louvers, and a ceiling fan in every room, and fill your living spaces with large house plants, and also sleep with a mattress topper and 100% breathable linen or high-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, then you should be completely fine.

Yet another is, not exactly anti-Americanism, but defining-us-against-Americanism.  Those huge malls — icy cold, I needed a sweater!  Have you heard they have stadiums that are air-conditioned?  And ice in their beer!

Apropos of that last point.  Here’s a temporal heat map of London:

and one for New York City:


— But NYC has a relatively mild climate by North American standards.  Here’s Kansas City:



In Kansas City, nature is actively trying to kill you quite a lot of the time.  There’s literally no place in Europe, from Cornwall to the Urals, that has a climate as extreme as Kansas City.

And these are the temperate parts of the USA — the bits where average temperatures are comparable to much of Europe.  I’m not even going to bother with maps from Houston or New Orleans or Los Angeles.  

Do Americans overuse aircon?  Oh yes, we absolutely do.  But do we need aircon?  Also yes.  Most of us do, at least some of the time.   There are a couple of corners of the country where it rarely gets that warm — upper New England, a strip along the Pacific coast, the airier bits of the mountain West.  But around 80 percent of the US population lives in places where summers without aircon are not just unpleasant, but actively bad for mental and physical health.   99% of homes in Houston have aircon.  And if you’ve ever spent a summer in Houston, that statistic will leave you wondering how there can possibly be 1% that don’t.

On the positive side, the US has built about all the aircon it’s going to.   

This is very much not the case around the world! Here’s a projection of the growth of aircon worldwide.