Writing, for me, is easiest from the confines of a small, dark room. When I was younger I preferred a view, but now we live on a river where an unidentified bird or duck glues the binoculars to my face. It’s hard to care about rotating Trump buffoonery when a green Heron is standing in stealth, watching his breakfast have its last swim beneath the surface.

Writing columns for a national audience I’ll never meet can feel isolating, but it is ultimately an act of hope. Sussing out man’s inhumanity toward man (and animals) is an expression of shared humanity, an understanding that we are capable of evolving, that eventually we will do better.

In particular, writing about the intersection of politics and law during this tragic time in American history is difficult. Watching leaders act with malice toward innocent victims can cause lingering psychological harm, while experts tell us that gratitude can reverse the damage. So for this Thanksgiving, from a shabby worn recliner shoved sideways into a dark closet, I’m determined to find and share my heartfelt gratitude. This year I’m thankful for:

• The ethically compromised Roberts Court, for liberating all of us from the rule of law and teaching me that 30 years in federal litigation was for naught. Alito and his rightwing band of zealots threw out the constitutional right to abortion not because science or legal precedent had changed, but because they finally had the political power to do it. Now that I understand how Constitutional law is mutable and contingent on who is in power, I, too, am untethered from it. If my advocacy in resisting a corrupt government exceeds legal bounds, who cares? Next year, or the year after that, the legal boundaries will change depending on the High Court’s mood. Or religion. Or the weather.

• Fox News, for teaching me that repeated false propaganda, no matter how preposterous, works. Murdoch and his aligned fossil fuel interests will do whatever is necessary to preserve big oil, and thereby their own wealth. If that means lying constantly to defraud their viewers into putting a huckster in charge of the country, on his promise to drill, baby, drill, that’s what they will do. They have taught Democrats that to win in this media environment, we need to start lying, the more outrageous the lie, the better. They have also freed us, once we realize the jail door is unlocked: it doesn’t matter what we say or do, Fox will gaslight viewers and falsely accuse us of Trump’s own nefarious crimes, so it’s time to earn the accusation.

• Elon Musk, for teaching me that all the money in the world can’t buy happiness. When someone as wealthy as Musk, with the literal means to solve world hunger, decides instead to use that money to harm, defraud and manipulate as many people as possible, it’s a reflection of profound unhappiness, not to mention mental illness. I’m sorry Elon feels hatred for his own transgender daughter, and that he tortured her for being gay while growing up, but hatred, in the end, always consumes its host.

• Christo-nationalists like House Speaker Mike Johnson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, for spewing such ignorant venom in the name of Jesus Christ that Christ returned to his empty tomb, just so he could roll over in it. The original woke hippy, Jesus said we should love each other and consider the lilies. He said we should wash the feet of homeless people, feed them, and treat everyone with dignity, the way we’d like to be treated. I’m not a religious person but Jesus is credited with saying the most beautiful, loving things, only to have these freaks invert his words into weapons of hate. It makes me hope there really is a vengeful god, sitting on a pearly throne, waiting to open an Old Testament can of whoop-ass on these anti-Christ “Christians.”

• Donald Trump. On this day of giving thanks where due, I am most grateful to Donald Trump, for helping me overcome my imposter syndrome. Like too many Americans, I hail from poverty, domestic violence, and repeated cycles of trauma. You name it, it happened, if not under our roof, in the basement of the house next door. Whenever I succeeded in life, no matter where I went, my past always accompanied me, uninvited. First as a Governor’s Fellow, then as General Counsel, then as candidate for US Congress, my imposter’s syndrome wouldn’t shut up. You don’t belong here anyway, it said during business dinners, so have another martini. Your shoes aren’t as nice as your colleagues’, it said, so don’t bother going to their parties. Your parents wouldn’t be welcome in this room, or at this table, and any minute now, you’re going to drop an F bomb during a public debate and everyone will see what an imposter you are.

Well…. Trump silenced that loud and incessant inner voice of self-doubt. If a man with six bankruptcies can market himself as a business expert, if a man with 34 felony convictions can hold the most powerful office in the world, if he can grab women by the p—- and still get their votes, I’d say there’s no such thing as an imposter. We are whatever we claim to be. Perhaps next month I’ll be an astronaut, and for that simple paradigm shift, I will spend this Thanksgiving day in Trump’s debt, feeling a simple, ‘thank you’ in my heart.

And now, with the bread laid out to get stale for the stuffing, I can get back to watching Sandhill Cranes migrate over Chicago.

NOW READ: Democratic leadership missing in action as Trump tightens his grip

America has made a terrible mistake. Despite everything we’ve seen from the right, voters have nonetheless moved toward it.

Rather than the mandate Trump/Musk/Christo-nationalists are claiming from the election, however, US voters merely reflected the same pattern emerging from around the globe, almost universally: Incumbent leaders and parties world-wide have been defeated, or their majorities reduced, in a global ‘radicalizing effect’ still lingering from the Covid economy. Across the political spectrum, voters have punished incumbent parties in Japan, South Africa, Italy, Austria, the UK, France, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, Belgium, Portugal and the Netherlands. As Matthew Yglesias wrote for the NYT, “everywhere you look in the world of affluent democracies, the exact same thing is happening: The incumbent party is losing and often losing quite badly.”

As a healing balm, this may feel thin. After all, other countries don’t have a Trump equivalent (except perhaps Netanyahu, whose war is keeping him in office, and Putin, whose elections are a joke). Americans have seemingly embraced a known monster, someone who sells political violence and hatred, who tried to overthrow the last election. But it’s more complicated than that. Trump supporters in the US consume right wing propaganda far more than the rest of the country, which means they were either not informed about Trump’s sinister plans, or Fox and Musk succeeded in scaring them with a firehose of Harris disinformation.

First Amendment law needs to catch up with an altered media landscape

While it may feel better to think of Trump supporters as misinformed rather than hateful, the downside is that an un-informed public cannot sustain a freely elected democracy. This is exactly what Musk, Murdoch, Putin, and destabilizing forces from around the world are banking on. Like a snake gorging on its own tail, domestic disrupters are weaponizing America’s First Amendment to get rid of it so that the oligarchs funding them can drill, shoot, pollute, and defraud American consumers with impunity.

I’ve been a trial lawyer for decades, and I’ve had the misfortune of litigating arcane aspects of First Amendment law. Fox and Musk have gotten away with spreading disinformation because of a self-serving misapprehension of the political speech doctrine: The First Amendment protects ‘core political speech’ above all other forms of expression. But Musk purchasing the world’s town square only to weaponize it to support his own agenda, and Fox admittedly lying to viewers nonstop to promote Trump, isn’t political speech presumptively entitled to legal protection.

Weaponized disinformation will ultimately kill the First Amendment, which the Supreme Court recognized back in 1969 when it approved the Fairness Doctrine and required accuracy in the media. Even in politics, the foundational role of protecting free speech is the promotion of free ideas, not to protect a nefarious publisher’s monopoly.

Musk, Fox and Putin spread rampant election disinformation

Elon Musk is a disinformation superspreader who weaponized Twitter/X to amplify blatant anti-Harris lies to his 200 million followers. Fox is an admitted network of lies, one with nationwide reach close to that of Musk’s. Russia also disseminated false information to benefit Trump, spreading fake videos and election-related press releases across multiple social media platforms, including a hoax impersonating FBI officials to scare people away from the polls.

US courts need to carefully consider the political speech doctrine before it does us in, if it hasn’t already. Under the theory that only more speech can cure bad ideas, the right to speak one’s mind politically has been and must remain sacrosanct: “(T)he remedy to be applied (to expose falsehoods and fallacies) is more speech, not enforced silence.”Rampant disinformation from the 2024 election reveals the limitations of that approach: monopolized conversations ultimately become one-sided.

The bottom line is that speech is no longer the same because we don’t consume media the same way we did when the First Amendment was written.We don’t even consume media the same way we did more recently, when the Fairness Doctrine was embraced by SCOTUS.

We aren’t hateful.We’re just misinformed.

As I see it, Trump didn’t win this election. Disinformation did, demonstrating that the world’s richest men, funding disinformation, will stop at nothing to end government regulations and taxes, or to defeat democracy itself.

We aren’t a hateful nation, we’re a nation that’s been lied to. By Fox, by Russia, by Elon Musk.We have the strongest economy in the world, we recovered post-Covid better than any other advanced economy, unemployment is low, and the Biden stock market hit more records than Trump’s, yet Fox, Musk and Russia convinced half the country that we’re in economic peril. According to AP VoteCast’s sweeping survey and other network exit polls, most voters were focused on a ‘crumbling’ economy, and they broke hard for Trump.

While it’s true that Biden’s $1.9 trillion rescue plan temporarily exacerbated inflation by up to 3 percentage points, it also powered the US’ stunning comeback from Covid. Economists have observed that the gap between voters’ positive perceptions of their own financial health, compared to their negative perceptions of the country’s economic health, is mainly explained by what they are being told by the media.

The richest men in the world bought the election

In the final weeks before the election, Elon Musk hosted town halls throughout battleground states and promoted a fraudulent “lottery” that wasn’t really a lottery at all, giving away $1 million a day to promote Trump. Musk, the richest man in the world, says he and his America PAC, funded with $118 million of his own money, will “keep going after this election, and prepare for the midterms and any intermediate elections.” We shall see.

His and Fox’s willingness to skirt the law show the fruits of an intimidation campaign by Republican attorneys general and legislators designed to force social media to platform falsehoods and hate speech. These same nefarious forces will oppose any efforts to impose fairness in the media’s coverage of politics, because, for now, they benefit politically from the lies.

But there will come a day when their goals run counter to Trump/Musks, and even they, educated by federal courts, will see the value in protecting truth.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. She writes the Substack, The Haake Take.

This is my last column before the election. I am as tired of writing about politics as most Americans are tired of reading, thinking, and hearing about it. The stress of this make-or-break Democracy test feels cruel and unusual. Cruel because of what’s at stake, unusual because it is unrelenting.

For people who inform themselves through fact-based media outlets, the most commonly heard question is, how is this race even close? Of all the craziness we’ve seen and heard, the Nazi-adjacent rhetoric, the venomous threats, the crazed narcissist making the nation’s struggles all about himself, how can half the country still support him? How can half our fellow citizens vote for him, knowing what they know about him? Are they crazy? Are they hateful?

The short answer, IMHO, is no. Most Trump voters are not Nazis, voting for Trump because of who Trump is. MAGA mostly just wants to be entertained, they enjoy the carnival of camaraderie. They don’t know who Trump really is, what his policies really are, because Fox News, again, deliberately hides it from them.

People who watch Fox News support Trump

Forty-three percent of the country watches Fox News, which correlates directly with the percentage of voters who support Trump over Harris.

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More telling, most Fox viewers don’t diversify the information they consume: Viewers with consistently conservative political views get them from a single outlet—Fox News—to a much greater degree than independents and liberals, who inform themselves from a variety of sources. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly half (47%) of consistently conservative Americans get their government and political news just from Fox News.

Fox News topped primetime viewership in August 2024. According to a recent Deadline Report, Fox News’ The Five was “the top regularly scheduled program in cable news, averaging 3.29 million viewers, followed by Jesse Watters Primetime with 2.97 million, Hannity with 2.61 million, Gutfeld! with 2.55 million and The Ingraham Angle with 2.44 million.”

Voters can’t act on what they don’t know

The high percentage of Americans hooked on Fox entertainment-sold-as-news escalates the risks inherent in Fox’s pro-Trump propaganda from fraudulent, to dangerous, to a national security threat. It elevates the stakes from “political speech,” protected by the 1^st A, to weaponized disinformation. The difference is substantive, and both legislature and courts need to deal with it in a meaningful way.

For now, whenever there’s a news cycle unfavorable to Trump, Fox hosts either spin it in the opposite direction to help him, or, more frequently, they redirect their viewers to election topics deemed favorable to Trump, like the border. Over the past several months, Fox has focused obsessively on our broken immigration system, featuring dog whistles meant to frighten white people, but Fox hosts almost never mention how Trump intentionally killed the border bill just so he could campaign on it.

When Fox tires of showing black and brown people committing crimes, and lying about violent crime rates that have actually fallen, Fox programmers switch to pablum like popular hairstyles, dog breeds, and who eats ketchup on their omelets. Meanwhile, ominous and unprecedented national security warnings about the dangers of a second Trump administration, coming in from Trump’s own advisors, are hidden from Fox viewers.

Fox buried warnings from Trump’s own brass

Last week when news broke that John Kelly, Trump’s own Chief of Staff, wanted to warn Americans about Trump, including that Trump wanted generals more like Hitler’s and exhibited fascistic urges, Fox News re-directed viewers to Trump’s publicity stunt where he cosplayed at McDonalds. Fox ran dozens of insipid articles about Trump at McDonalds (Trump standing at the fry counter, Trump claiming Harris never worked there, Trump charming the customers at the drive-through window, etc.) Meanwhile, they reported almost nothing about John Kelly’s warning.

In one of two articles I saw about Kelly’s statements, Fox packaged it as a Harris ploy, reporting last week that, “The Harris campaign on Friday put out a letter penned by 13 ex-Trump administration officials seeking to bolster claims made by former President Trump's former chief of staff John Kelly…” The article then identified 13 fairly low-level Republicans who signed a letter warning about Trump, instead of the hundreds of high ranking Republican advisors issuing the same warnings. Fox focused on Trump smiling in an apron to bury dire statements from heavy hitters including Mark Milley, the highest ranking military officer and Trump’s own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Fox News articles about other Republicans against Trump, including former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, are mostly led with misleading headlines against Democrats and Harris because the vast majority of people- 70 to 80%- read only the headlines. Even after Trump said Liz Cheney should have 9 rifles pointed at her (execution squad style). Fox headlines spun the story against both Cheney and Harris.

Over 300 high ranking Republicans, including military and political leaders, have issued warnings against another Trump administration. As the NYT reports, the list includes “former defense secretaries Chuck Hagel and William S. Cohen; Robert B. Zoellick, former World Bank president; ex-CIA directors Michael V. Hayden and William H. Webster; former director of national intelligence John D. Negroponte; and former Massachusetts Governor William F. Weld,” and former Trump administration officials Miles Taylor and Olivia Troye.

Or, as Fox described the letter from 13 Republicans, “Mike Pence who has signed multiple letters from Republicans attacking Trump, signed this letter, as well.”

No matter what happens Tuesday, we need fairness in the news

One thing we know for sure about domestic politics is that when the pendulum swings, it always swings back, the question is when, and after what.

When the day finally comes that our Supreme Court isn’t ethically compromised—and that day will come— voters will challenge Fox News (and likely Elon Musk) for aiding and abetting election fraud, as Dominion did. The next time around, the outcome for Fox won’t just be the cost of doing business.

We’ve legislated truth in the news before, and we were better for it. In 1969, the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the Fairness Doctrine, which required all news broadcasters to give fair coverage and opposing views on matters of public importance. Balancing publishers’ first amendment rights against the right of the public to be well informed, the Red Lion Court ruled that the public’s right to access full information takes priority over the First Amendment concerns of broadcasters. “It is the purpose of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited market-place of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail, rather than to countenance monopolization of that market.” This is the same legal analysis that should be applied to today’s “political speech defense.” Bottom line, there’s a difference between free speech and weaponized speech, and the law needs to catch up with rapidly changing social media, AI, and monopolized town squares.

Legal change will eventually come, it’s not if but when. We aren’t meant to hate our neighbors, as much as Putin, Xi and Trump want us to. As Harris said, there’s a better way. In the meantime, take a walk in the woods. Leave your phone at home. Vote, speak up, write a column, drive your neighbors to the polls. Then let it go.

ALSO READ: A stupefying poll shows Harris breathing down Trump’s neck in Kansas. Here’s what that means.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. She writes the Substack, The Haake Take.

Dear Mr. Musk,

You are hereby on notice that your recent activities in support of Donald Trump could lead to significant personal liability, both civil and criminal.

You are aiding and abetting a convicted felon with a demonstrated history of inciting violence and civil unrest. The next time someone dies after Trump summons a violent mob and tells them to fight, or succumbs after Trump encourages hate rally attendees to “beat the hell” out of them, you could face liability as a co-defendant and/or co-conspirator.

If Trump is re-elected, he will enjoy expansive legal immunities you do not have. Even if he appoints you to regulate federal agencies you resent having to answer to, actions you undertake between now and January 6, 2025, are as a private citizen, not as a federal employee. An appointed position where you get to regulate your corporate regulatorsmay not confer the tort immunities you hope for in any event.

ALSO READ: MAGA pastor who wants to end female voting rights compares women to 'pigs with gold nose rings'

You and your counsel may want to brush up on the following:

Election crimes

Federal law makes it a crime to offer money in an attempt to sway people to vote. 52 U.S.C. 10307(c) states that “Whoever knowingly or willfully … pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both…,” as the warning letter you just received from the Justice Department suggested. The DOJ Election Crimes Manual specifies that an election bribe may be anything having monetary value, including cash and lottery chances.

When you announced that America PAC will be awarding $1 million every day until the election to a registered swing state voter who signs your petition on the 1st and 2nd amendment, you were clearly targeting Republican voters. (BTW, your schtick of “free speech absolutism” is asinine; the 1^st A has never protected election fraud, consumer fraud, disinformation fraud of any type, threats, speech integral to criminal conduct, verbal assault, libel, defamation, incitement to criminality, conspiracy, or incitement to violence, but I digress.)

Your X activities are partially shielded from liability under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, but there are other applicable laws, including FEC regulations on in-kind campaign contributions. You paid $47 apiece to people who found others to sign a petition, which helped Trump target voters. You have spent in excess of $75 million on the pro-Trump America PAC. According to Open Secrets, you are also behind a disinformation initiative called Progress 2028, claiming ties to Kamala Harris, which is actually run by your own dark money network. ‘Building America’s Future,’ the dark money group at the helm, reportedly received over $100 million in funding from you and other donors.

Aiding and abetting acts of violence

Your legal exposure for abetting acts of violence may be even greater. Disinformation on X since you bought it is well documented, and has helped fuel racist far-right riots and attacks. It’s only a matter of time before you’re sued for the violence and solicitation of violence you’re helping Trump promote. The law has long held that a person who aids and abets a crime is generally criminally liable to the same extent as the person who commits the crime.

Encouraging political violence before, during or after the election will also subject you to laws governing criminal incitement. Manipulating algorithms, amplifying calls on X and elsewhere that encourage militia members and extremists to intimidate voters, or spreading enthusiasm for a “civil war” like you did in the UK, will support claims against you when they lead, predictably, to violence.

Dozens of cases invoking Trump in connection with violent criminal acts have already been identified; it’s only a matter of time before someone else gets killed. Bullets fired into the Democratic Party office in Phoenix, AZ last week are only the most recent example. The building’s glass front door was shattered by bullet spray; anyone sitting behind it would have been killed. The perpetrator, an extreme MAGA supporter, had more than 120 guns, 250,000 rounds of ammunition and a grenade launcher at his home.

History of Trump-inspired violence as prologue

You may protest that grenades and partisan acts of violence are too speculative to pin on you, or, alternatively, that you had no idea Trump would make good on his serial promises of retribution. But the civil law standard for ordinary negligence is simple: if you knew, or should have known, that someone (including Trump) would carry out Trump’s call for violence, you may be found liable for amplifying that call.

Whether references to violence are genuine threats or merely rhetorical depends on context and the surrounding circumstances. Here, there can be no doubt that Trump means it, as evidenced by his encouragement for the J6 mob and his failure to call them off for more than 3 hours while he watched them. Even if you and Trump claim you didn’t “intend” for MAGA supporters to commit acts of violence, the Supreme Court recently held that recklessness in using violent rhetoric is sufficient to support liability for violence that ensues.

You also may think that manipulating algorithms, posting/liking/re-posting disinformation, or amplifying calls for violence against Democrats is not enough to sustain legal liability. But a defendant who shares in the criminal desires of the principal, and acts in some affirmative manner in aid is liable, and the level of participation may be relatively slight. It is not hard to satisfy once the defendant's knowledge of the unlawful intent is established, and if you read any news outside the Fox bubble, you cannot lack knowledge that Trump intends to orchestrate fresh political violence.

To more fully preclude your “But I couldn’t have predicted violence” defense, Trump’s own high ranking military officials have warned that Trump’s calls for violence are real. Retired General Mark Milley and his wife have faced constant death threats following Trump’s incitements.

You are also no doubt aware that Trump has made public comments calling half the American people “the enemy within;” if you weren’t aware before, you are now. Within the last two weeks, Trump has promised to prioritize the prosecution of U.S. citizens using military force if necessary. His threat to sic the military on political rivals is the stuff of murderous regimes; Trump’s recently surfaced wish for generals who were “more like Hitler’s generals” surprised exactly no-one on the left.

Dark money, dark influence

Because you have been a great technology innovator, too many young men presume you are smarter than they are about other things, which elevates your actions on X to recklessness. After you bought Twitter, you restored accounts of far-right figures including white nationalist Nick Fuentes and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. You also relaxed content moderation policies and terminated most of the company’s trust and safety and election integrity teams. If you didn’t intend to endanger people, at minimum it would appear reckless to a jury.

When you then post pro-Trump disinformation on your own account with nearly 200 million followers, and place the disinformation into users’ feeds as “recommended content” whether they want it or not, you exceed the bounds of protected “political speech.” You lured Trump back onto the platform after he was banned previously for incitement to violence following the J6 attack, so there is no way you can plead ignorance--Trump was banned for inciting violence by your own corporate predecessor.

In sum, Trump has been given a get out of jail card from the Supreme Court, but you have not, and Trump cannot pardon anyone for state crimes and judgements. Govern yourself accordingly.

Sincerely,

Sabrina Haake

NOW READ: Why Trump tariffs would be world’s biggest protection racket

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. She writes the Substack, The Haake Take.

I grew up in a violent home. You name it, it happened, usually more than once. I was also raised Catholic, complete with Catholic schools, where I learned first-hand how religion could be bent into a cruel and uncaring tool. The upshot is that I’ve never had much faith in organized religion, or in man’s fairness when no one is looking.

When I ran for Congress, imposter syndrome kicked in and I didn’t talk about my early years. Instead, I leaned on my Constitutional law pedigree, a diversion I hoped would highlight my competence and hide my origins. But the truth is, I turned to law because I needed something believe in.

I found my faith when I read the Federalist papers. In the mid 18^th century, when people were still governed by brute force, our founders conceived of a brilliant concept: that all men should be equal before the law. Jefferson, Washington et al. had the singular insight to understand that governance by the rule of law would check the capricious whims of an indulged king.

I was smitten. For twenty years, I clung to Constitutional law like it was a life raft. As a federal trial lawyer, I drank and passed the koolaid with conviction.

I believed… until Dobbs

All of that changed in 2022 with Dobbs, when the Supreme Court threw out Roe v. Wade, not because science or facts had changed, but because six religious zealots finally had enough votes to do it. I understood from Dobbs that Constitutional law is mutable and politics-contingent, that what it says depends on who’s talking.

I have written enough about the legal infirmity of Dobbs, and how Alito, a lifelong misogynist, essentially spit at Equal Protection for women. But, with half the country supporting Trump, many Americans don’t fully grasp why “letting states decide” is so flawed.

Why “letting states decide” offends the 14^th A

Last week Trump appeared on Fox News and demonstrated his complete ignorance of American history and the Civil War. His comments illustrated why states can’t vote on a woman’s body any more than states can vote on human bondage.

In the interview, Trump doubled down on comments he previously made about the Civil War, saying, “Lincoln was probably a great president, although I’ve always said, why wasn’t that settled, y’know? it doesn’t make sense, we had a Civil War.”

Trump would have "settled" the civil war the same way the rightwing hacks on SCOTUS “settled” abortion: by letting states decide.

What the 14 Amendment requires

On June 8, 1866, the 14^th A was passed by the Senate; it was ratified two years later, granting citizenship to all persons including formerly enslaved people. Crucially, it also guaranteed that all citizens would have equal protection under the laws.

The language explicitly extended protections under the Bill of Rights to the states: if the federal government had to respect the freedom in question, state governments had to respect and protect it as well. This meant states no longer had the right to “vote” to keep slavery. Black men were entitled to the same legal protections under the law as white men, regardless of how the majority voted.

The whole point of the 14th A, adopted after the Civil War, was to remove fundamental freedoms from the whims of public opinion, because public opinion is easily manipulated.

The 14th A prohibits all states from making or enforcing any law that denies the equal protection of the laws to all citizens, or that deprives any person of liberty without due process of law; it does not subject these rights to periodic revision as popular opinion fluctuates.

Applying the same Equal Protection analysis to women, states don't get to force women to give birth by voting on it any more than they get to put people in chains by voting on it.

The court in Roe v. Wade ruled that a woman’s decision to terminate her pregnancy is a “liberty” protected against state interference by the Due Process and Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. When overturning Roe, Justice Alito wrote disingenuously that the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause did not protect women’s medical privacy because “that theory is squarely foreclosed by the Court’s precedents, which establish that a State’s regulation of abortion is not a sex-based classification,” prioritizing the Court’s “classification precedent” over 50 years of substantive due process.

Subjecting women’s bodies and their freedom to state by state popular vote means they no longer have Equal Protection under the law; their fundamental liberty rights are different from one state to the next. Trump’s moronic claim that he’d have “settled” slavery instead of going to war illustrates the ignorance of letting states decide abortion—we already fought a Civil War to decide that basic liberties can’t vary by state.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. She writes the Substack, The Haake Take.

I used to be a Republican. Right out of college, I worked for the legislature, then governor, of a conservative state. Governor Robert Orr (R-Ind.) was disciplined and kind, and his ethics were beyond reproach.

Fast forward three decades and time spent among different cultures. After seeing trickle-down up close, how it benefits wealthy donors but few others, my perspective changed. When I ran for Congress in 2020, it was as a Democrat.

There’s a wide chasm between policy disagreements and hate, and although my viewpoint evolved over the years, I never hated conservatives. Indiana Republicans, back then, saw political disagreements as healthy conduits to better outcomes. I never heard Orr, or other Republican officials, express hatred for their opponents. They sometimes disparaged them, especially over plans that would leach money from their own pockets, but I never once heard the word ‘hate,’ even behind closed doors.

Enter Donald Trump and JD Vance, who package and sell hatred as a national commodity.

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Hatred hurts its host in the end

Trump’s belief that he can foment hatred and infect half the country with it— without it boomeranging back on him—reflects a lack of emotional intelligence.

From the beginning, Trump’s hate-filled rhetoric has been spiked with violence. Reciting a list is like shoveling while it’s still snowing, but last week’s second assassination attempt in as many months sparks a flashback. Trump offered to pay the legal bills of anyone who punched his hecklers; suggested peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square be shot; mused that “Second Amendment people” could take out Hillary Clinton; encouraged a violent mob who would hang Mike Pence, now calling them “patriots” and “hostages”; seriously discussed executing Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley; and joked about the hammer attack on Speaker Pelosi’s elderly husband. Now we have bomb threats in hospitals and elementary schools in Springfield, Ohio after he and Vance falsely claimed that lawful immigrants there are eating their neighbors’ pets.

From "stand back and stand by" to complimenting "very fine people on both sides" of a Nazi demonstration, Trump’s coded vitriol against judges, prosecutors, poll workers, critics, Democrats and his own former staff has led to multiple death threats, and yet he persists.

Trump habitually projects his own criminal impulses onto his opponents, so it’s not a leap that he’s now blaming Democrats’ rhetoric for the assassination attempts. It is apparently irrelevant that both would-be assassins were Republicans with mental health problems: Crooks was a registered Republican; Routh voted for Trump in 2016 then supported Ramaswamy in the last primary. Both had guns, while Trump himself revoked mental health checks for gun owners.

Vance, who is young, has said that Republicans are “hating the right people,” as if hatred is a finite and targeted commodity. How old will he be when he learns that once hatred takes hold, it can’t be contained, directed or controlled?

Hatred triggers the addiction center of the brain

Hatred can become a powerful addiction, and Trump’s followers are hooked. Hatred affects dopamine receptor binding; addiction to hatred is as strong as an addiction to cocaine and more destructive. A shared addiction to hatred forms a strong social bond, because listening to someone spew hatred triggers the same gratifying chemical hit, whereas watching someone snort cocaine does not.

Hatred also creates motivational bias, which means adherents can see only evidence that supports their beliefs. At the addictive stage, they are blind to any information that challenges their narrative. That’s why reasoning with a hate-infected person won’t work.

When it comes to juicing neuro-chemical hits in the brain, the target of hatred doesn’t matter. It’s hatred itself that’s addictive, as our brain pays more attention to negative than positive thoughts as an evolutionary, flight-or-fight response. Hatred operates in the same parts of the brain, the cortex and subcortex, that manage aggression, making the path between political hatred and political violence obvious. When wielded as a political tool, the hatred of “other” has re-shaped continents.

In encouraging hatred of legal immigrants, trans, racial minorities, gays, women and anyone else they can “other,” Trump and Vance know exactly what they are doing. When asked about the bomb threats in Springfield Ohio, Trump doubled down. “I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats. I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants and that’s a terrible thing … now they’re going through hell.” He omitted the fact he and Vance intentionally created that hell.

Drawing from Zen Buddhism, Eckhart Tolle teaches that angry and violent people are addicted to their thoughts. They hear them on repeat, over and over, and can’t shut them off. Hatred and negativity are so consuming, they look for others to infect.

Hatred, like many untreated addictions, can consume its host in the end. Meanwhile, the nation’s addicts will keep marching toward rock bottom, from where, eventually, they will begin the ascent back toward sanity.

NOW READ: The simple yet powerful way Tim Walz just exposed Donald Trump

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

At 8 a.m. this morning, another Trump abortion ban took effect.

As the state of Iowa joins the growing ranks of Republican-led states banning abortion at six weeks, Iowans will wake up to new realities of state-forced birth, where the government controls private medical decisions for over half the state’s population.

ALSO READ: Boebert, MTG and far-fight friends derail Speaker Mike Johnson’s summer plans

Kamala Harris will also wake up to a new reality. After President Joe Biden withdrew and endorsed Harris as the 2024 Democratic nominee, Harris campaign committee, along with other supportive committees and super PACs, together raised an historic $250 million in campaign donations in under three days, much of it from first time donors. Young voter registration surged in a day-over-day increase by 700 percent.

Anyone missing the connection between Trump’s abortion bans and the drumbeat for Harris isn’t paying attention.

Harris won’t let Trump/Vance flip the script on abortion

Although abortion was carefully scripted out of the headlines and speeches at the Republican National Convention, Harris will remind Americans how Trump bragged about overturning Roe v. Wade. He appointed three radical Supreme Court justices who were willing to lie to Congress under oath — and trash the credibility of the high court in the process — to overturn abortion rights.

Harris will also remind voters how Trump publicly congratulated himself, bragging in writing that:

“After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v. Wade, much to the ‘shock’ of everyone… Without me, there would be no 6 weeks, 10 weeks, 15 weeks, or whatever is finally agreed to. Without me the pro Life movement would have just kept losing. Thank you President TRUMP!!!”

Indeed, thank you Donald Trump, for confirming in writing that you’re responsible for women’s-life-threatening six-week abortion bans, you’re responsible for forcing women and girls to flee their home states to stay alive, you’re responsible for Republicans gunning for armed menstruation police, you’re responsible for pushing frightened women to the brink of death before doctors can intervene to save them.

Very well done, “President TRUMP!!!”. Bragging about the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision was probably the most consequential self-own you will ever make.

Why Trump/Vance efforts to “soften” state forced birth won’t work

Faced with opinion polls showing that a strong majority of Americans think Trump overturning Roe v. Wade was a “bad thing,” Trump is now marketing a softer position on abortion, saying that rather than a national ban, it should be left up to individual states to decide.

Vice presidential candidate and anti-abortion extremist J.D. Vance, who would criminalize abortion even in cases of rape and incest because “two wrongs don’t make a right,” and who thinks “childless cat ladies” should not equally participate in democracy, now parrots Trump’s “softening,”

Letting states decide via popular vote whether women — or the government — should make private health care decisions is more gaslighting than softening.

Under the 14th Amendment, all persons born or naturalized in the United States have been entitled to the same equal protection under the law since 1866, regardless of popular whim. The whole point of the 14th amendment was to remove fundamental human rights from the vicissitudes of popular opinion, which, as MAGA illustrates, is easily manipulated.

The 14th Amendment prohibits all states from making or enforcing any law that denies the equal protection of the laws to all citizens, or that deprives any person of liberty without due process of law; it does not subject these rights to periodic revision as popular opinion fluctuates.

ALSO READ: How much access did $50,000 buy someone at the Republican National Convention?

When writing Dobbs, lifelong misogynist Justice Samuel Alito wrote deceptively that the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause could not protect women’s medical privacy, or abortion access, because “that theory is squarely foreclosed by the Court’s precedents, which establish that a State’s regulation of abortion is not a sex-based classification.”

In case you missed it, that was Alito selectively choosing to prioritize the Supreme Court’s “classification precedent” over 50 years of substantive due process precedent to reach his desired outcome.

Alito summarily rejected Roe v. Wade’s determination that a woman’s decision to terminate her pregnancy is a “liberty” protected against state interference by the substantive component of the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. State-forced pregnancy and state-forced birth restrict women’s liberty for — at minimum — nine months. That’s not including however many days of painful labor, 18 years or more of financial struggle for most single moms and a lifetime of permanent medical changes resulting from pregnancy and childbirth.

Harris will stop the gaslighting

Helping themselves to Alito’s smug and dishonest dismissal of Equal Protection for women, Trump/Vance’s “let-each-state-decide” abortion stance subjects women’s bodies and lives to the whims of popular vote.

After owning Miss USA and similar beauty pageants for decades, it’s not surprising that Trump continues to see women’s bodies on a catwalk, subject to popular opinion and scorecards.

Harris will serve it back in ways Biden never could, due to Biden’s Catholic reluctance to say the word “abortion” in public. As recently as 2012, Biden affirmed his personal opposition to abortion in the most public of settings.

Harris isn’t reluctant. She has read, and understands, the assignment. She can communicate how abortion bans have increased maternal and infant mortality and decreased women’s equal opportunity to earn a living. She can explain how Republicans have unconstitutionally stripped half the U.S. population of equal protection under the 14th Amendment because Trump justices said they could.

Believed to be the first vice president to ever visit an abortion clinic, Harris talks about abortion rights clearly, forcefully and unapologetically, and she will help shape abortion into the pivotal issue in November — second only to preserving our republic from the marching threat of fascism.

Harris now shoulders the burden of defending the country from two ranting, misogynistic authoritarians, a relentless rightwing propaganda machine and deep pocketed corporate donors happy to sacrifice women’s civil rights if doing so will lower taxes and government regulations.

In stepping away from power despite his strong conviction that he could and should serve a second term, Biden displayed as selfless an act of sacrifice and patriotism as any president since George Washington. As heart-wrenching as it was to watch his Oval Office address last Wednesday, women who have had it up to here with Republicans’ cruel machinations under Dobbs are grateful finally to have a fierce messenger.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

Just as parts of the world are becoming uninhabitable and nearly half the United States is under an extreme heat advisory, extremists on the Supreme Court have decided they know more about climate change than scientists and meteorologists.

Granting the wishes of private industry, particularly the fossil-fuel industry, the Supreme Court in Loper Bright Enterprises vs. Raimondo effectively gutted the administrative state, overturning what’s known as the Chevron doctrine, which had guided federal agencies and federal law for four decades.

Under Chevron, courts deferred to a federal government agency’s professional expertise in interpreting ambiguities in federal legislation. Those agency interpretations were developed over years and relied on the professional expertise of scientists, doctors and engineers. So long as agencies’ expert interpretation made sense, comported with Congress’ intentions and was reasonable, courts accepted it.

EXCLUSIVE: Trump’s ‘secretary of retribution’ has a ‘target list’ of 350 people he wants arrested

Trump supporters and organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, while pushing Trump’s Project 2025, have obsessed over Chevron and sought to dismantle the “deep state” for years. Their lobbying efforts and massive dark money campaigns focused on judicial appointments of zealot judges committed to weakening the federal government, largely to promote Christian Nationalism and protect corporate profits threatened by federal regulations.

Extreme rulings from zealots on today’s Supreme Court could not be any more destructive or disruptive. So much for judicial restraint.

The dangerous gutting of Chevron

After Trump packed the Supreme Court with three like-minded justices, these and other extremist justices finally constituted a sufficient majority to deal a death blow to federal agency administration.

In the recent Loper decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote outrageously that federal agencies “have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.” Loper overturned the longstanding Chevron doctrine by ruling that judges should substitute their own opinions for scientific expertise in interpreting federal statutes.

The absurdity of letting self-impressed men such as Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch substitute their personal, lay opinions for those of trained scientists, engineers and experts is worse than partisan — it’s suicidal. Thomas recently shot down the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ expert opinion that gun bump stocks keep firing the trigger like a machine gun, while Gorsuch repeatedly confused an air pollutant with laughing gas when gutting EPA protections for the environment.

The prospect of Trump-appointed judges deciding for themselves how many tons of toxic emissions our forests, farms and lungs can handle is terrifying. Think of Aileen Cannon from the Southern District of Florida slow-walking Trump’s straightforward documents case, or Matthew Kacsmaryk from the Northern District of Texas imposing a nationwide mifepristone ban.

The Supreme Court has now given all right-wing fanatics in black robes the green light to deploy junk science, consult their navels or review the Old Testament to arrive at their preferred conclusion in climate and other science-dependent cases.

This is how right-wing plaintiffs succeed

Deep pocketed right-wing plaintiffs, such as the anti-abortion doctors who challenged mifepristone even though they don’t administer the drug and have nothing to do with it, often fund lawsuits to challenge policies they dislike, and they know how to forum shop.

As the American Civil Liberties Union notes in the case involving mifepristone, for example, plaintiffs filed the case in Amarillo, Texas, “where they could guarantee it would be heard by a Trump-appointed district court judge with a record of hostility to abortion. That district judge rubber-stamped all of their requests, and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals largely did the same – overriding the consensus of the Food and Drug Administration and every leading national medical authority in order to impose medically unnecessary restrictions on mifepristone.”

As the climate heats up and people lose their homes and livelihood to extreme weather, Big Oil will accelerate its challenge to barely-there climate legislation and EPA regulations. Congress won’t be able to keep up even if it wants to, as it disassembles into sophomoric antics in a Trump-divided country.

When they legislate at all, Congress often passes ambiguous legislation, knowing that agencies will tap professional expertise to fill in the gaps to effectuate Congress’ meaning. But under Loper, when an already dysfunctional Congress fails to map out every law with scientific specificity, more extremist judges will be invited to rely on their own personal opinions, drawing from their own personal bias.

Conflicted justices should recuse from all climate cases

Climate advocates challenging fossil fuels are also becoming more aggressive as lives, livelihoods and habitats are threatened. Fossil fuel cases are already among the most expensive to litigate, because they threaten the richest defendants in the world.

More troubling, in terms of whether the human race will survive its biggest threat, is that zealots on the current Supreme Court have solid ties to the fossil fuel industry.

As Politico reported, Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s father was a “highly active and respected member of the American Petroleum Institute for more than two decades,” raising concerns about Barrett’s participation in climate cases. During her confirmation hearing, she testified, “I don’t think that my views on global warming or climate change are relevant to the job I would do as a judge ... I’m not really in a position to offer any kind of informed opinion.”

Her decision in Loper says otherwise.

Meanwhile, Justice Samuel Alito’s family leases more than 100 acres of land for oil and gas development, yet he failed to recuse from the case that hobbled the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions. It has also become known that Thomas, who has accepted over $4 million in “gifts” from conservative donors, has been in fossil fuel investor Harlan Crow’s pocket for years.

Aside from obvious personal conflicts presented for Coney Barrett, Alito and Thomas because of their ties to fossil fuel wealth, all six conservative justices belong to the Federalist Society, and have ties to the Heritage Foundation. Both organizations are backed by fossil fuel money — in particular, Koch money.

The Heritage Foundation is a network of conservatives financed by the Koch brothers largely to promote climate change denial, and in particular to lobby against the government’s climate change efforts. Thomas has listed the Heritage Foundation on his disclosure forms, and the Heritage Foundation vetted lists of judges and current conservative justices for Trump appointments.

Koch and its subsidiaries also support the Federalist Society, which is focused on shifting federal power to gerrymandered and Republican-controlled states. Koch is the second largest private corporation in the United States, with $115 billion in annual revenue, operating in oil and gas exploration, pipelines and refining, and chemical and fertilizer production. Greenpeace describes Koch as “the oil and gas industry's top lobbying spender, one of the top polluters, a massive funding source to climate-denial front-groups, and major force fighting against clean energy policies.”

Meanwhile, the heat is terrible, and getting worse

More than just uncomfortable for people (and helpless animals!), extreme temperatures are dangerous. In the face of Congressional inaction, the world’s oceans have surged to record levels of warmth, threatening marine life and the global food supply.

Rising temperatures are also causing more extreme and frequent weather events. Deadly hurricanes used to begin in October; last week, Hurricane Beryl was the earliest category five hurricane ever recorded as deadly hurricanes are predicted to double and intensify this year, compared to prior hurricane seasons.

Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies wrote in Nature that, “For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records each month by up to 0.2 °C — a huge margin at the planetary scale. A general warming trend is expected because of rising greenhouse-gas emissions… We need answers for why 2023 turned out to be the warmest year in possibly the past 100,000 years. And we need them quickly.”

Drill, baby, drill

It’s a safe bet that any politician who calls climate change a hoax is profiting from it.

Trump’s Project 2025 should be required reading for every American who cares about climate change.

Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and chief antagonist against the “deep state” destroyed in Loper, has acknowledged the potential for violence in pursuing Project 2025’s extremist, authoritarian objectives, including the protection of fossil fuels.

Just as the first Civil War was fought to protect slavery wealth, the MAGA confederacy is protecting fossil fuel wealth with the Supreme Court’s help, even though the base doesn’t understand the connection. Trump voters won’t realize they have done the bidding of the industry destroying their homes until it is too late.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

I love the “For Dummies” book series. They can teach an old dog new tricks without making the old dog feel stupid, although, I admit, “Getting Out of Debt For Dummies”” wasn’t particularly useful. (Turns out one must spend less than one earns; if they had just written that on the cover I’d be $18.79 closer to my financial goals.)

But the series pretty much answers all of life’s questions, from how to stop killing houseplants to understanding the basics of astrophysics.

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So, naturally, when confronted with last week’s dizzying patchwork from the U.S. Supreme Court, I turned to “Critical Thinking for Dummies” desperate to understand how “federalism” means one thing when the court talks about corruption, but something else entirely when it talks about abortion or guns.

Despite nearly 30 years as an attorney prowling the chambers of federal courts, my brain hurts.

Federalism’s new definition of corruption

Last week, Republicans on the Supreme Court stripped the executive branch of key power.

They also decided that bribing an elected official isn’t bribery if you wait a few days and call it a gratuity instead. In Snyder, six conservative justices agreed that gifts, money or things of value from grateful citizens who simply wish to “thank” public officials for their service is a “gratuity,” not a “bribe,” so the federal bribery statute doesn’t apply. No doubt Clarence Thomas, who has been thanked to the tune of $4 million for his devotion to guns, fossil fuels and culture wars, appreciated his colleagues’ skillful parsing.

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Before conservatives got out their X-Acto knives, the federal anti-corruption statute, 18 U.S. Code § 666, made it “a crime for most state and local officials to corruptly solicit, accept, or agree to accept anything of value intending to be influenced or rewarded in connection with” any business or transaction worth $5,000 or more. James Snyder, former mayor of Portage, Indiana, stepped in it when he steered more than $1 million in city contracts to a local truck dealership, which then turned around and cut Snyder a $13,000 check.

Snyder called the money payment for consulting services; the feds called it illegal.

Snyder was convicted by a federal jury, sentenced to 21 months in prison, and appealed.In reversing the decision, and writing for the 6-3 Republican majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh admitted that federal law prohibits bribery, but determined that bribing an official up front wasn’t the same as tipping them for highly agreeable service after the fact. Treating mere “gratuities” like bribery, he wrote, would infringe on “bedrock federalism principles” and thereby offend states’ “prerogative to regulate” graft for themselves. Kavanaugh reasoned that if the feds apply section 666 alongside state enforcement, some hapless elected official could get “trapped” by a law that leaves him “entirely at sea,” guessing which expensive gifts he is allowed to accept.

“‘Just Say No’ for Dummies,” anyone?

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s snarky and spot-on dissent called Kavanaugh’s “absurd and atextual reading of the statute” an interpretation that “only today’s Court could love.” Ignoring the advice she read in “Blind Deference for Dummies,” Jackson wrote forcefully that, “The Court’s reasoning elevates nonexistent federalism concerns over the plain text” of the federal anti-corruption statute.

Federalism means something else when it comes to guns

The court’s newfound respect for state law on corruption — finding there was no corruption — is hard to square with its earlier decisions annihilating state law.

Take guns, for example. In 2022, the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision struck down New York’s conceal carry law. Citing federalism four times, the court struck New York’s law because the state couldn’t identify a concealed carry law that existed in 1790. Never mind that colonial era muskets, pistols and bayonets were too large to be concealed in anyone’s haversacks; colonial law didn’t bar people from strapping loaded cannons onto their backs, either.

But then, last week’s Rahimi case — about domestic violence and guns — forced conservative justices to see Bruen’s “historical antecedent” absurdity up close.

In Rahimi, Texas’ blood-red Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit followed Bruen and ruled that violent offenders under restraining orders could have guns because there was no law from 1790 that said they couldn’t.

Citing the Federalist papers nine times, Rahimi revealed the stink of Bruen’s “trapped in amber” jurisprudence, and left the Supreme Court with a choice: stick to Clarence Thomas’ wholly made up “historical antecedent” requirement by arming known violent offenders — and shed the Court’s last hair of credibility — or follow common sense and admit they were wrong. They didn’t quite admit error (see,“Reluctant Mea Culpa for Dummies”), but they did decide that violent men who brutalized their victims ought not have a gun to finish the job.

Using federalism to defeat equal protection

This rant closes, as it must, with Dobbs, another bombshell decision spurred by Donald Trump and animated by Republicans on the high court.

Whatever you think about abortion, bracket that opinion long enough to consider this: Would federalism allow states to mandate vasectomies for all men under 50, given that states now have the power to make life and death decisions without regard to pesky strictures of equal protection?

If state legislatures truly wanted to end abortion, wouldn’t mandatory vasectomies make more sense than state-forced birth? Vasectomies are effectively risk-free, while the maternal mortality rate is 32.9 deaths per 100,000 births. Vasectomies cost around $1,000; giving birth averages $19,000, to say nothing of more than $300,000 to raise a child. Ninety percent of vasectomies are reversible, while live birth causes permanent physical/chemical changes. Most importantly, for legal review, vasectomies, unlike forced birth laws, are nearly 100 percent effective.

If the vasectomy question ever found its way to Justice Samuel Alito, you can bet he would tap the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection for men, even as he callously denied it for women.

States can now, by popular vote, force women into nine months of medical confinement, financial instability and excruciating childbirth pain — too frequently leading to death — but this Supreme Court would invoke federalism (or its twin corollary “originalism”) to strike state-forced vasectomies as “mere pretext” for “invidious discrimination” against men.

Up next: “How to Impeach Justices Who Lie to Congress During Their Confirmation Hearings for Dummies.”

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

I was raised Catholic. When I was nine years old, waiting in enormous St. Benedict’s slow line for Communion, I studied the violent imagery adorning every window, crevice and corner of the church.

Romans were fond of crucifying people, and Jesus was no exception. The walls of the church depicted violence everywhere: the stations of the cross, nailed body parts, Pontius Pilate’s whips, stab wounds, bloody crowns of thorns. To top it off, a 20-foot-tall crucifixion with the same lifelike details loomed over the altar. It hit me that these images weren’t meant to comfort. They were meant to manipulate through fear, guilt and control.

My dad had already taught our family the causal link between mortal fear and control, my mom had left him for that reason, and I didn’t need a repeat of the same lesson. It also didn’t sit right with me that we were surviving on peanut butter sandwiches, yet the tax-free church still wanted 10 percent of my mom’s barely-there wages, and what was up with priests having all the power while nuns did all the work?

I decided in that communion line that organized religion was mostly about power, control and money, and not in that order. Although Jesus’ woke messages of peace and love were transcendent and ethereally beautiful — Consider the lilies. Do unto others. Do not judge. Turn the other cheek … — men ruling the Catholic church ditched the beauty and embraced the power hundreds of years ago.

Using the High Court to promote religion

As a lapsed Catholic and long-in-the-tooth federal trial lawyer, I am more familiar with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s religious nuttery than I want to be. I certainly didn’t need any more proof that his jurisprudence — as well as his misogyny — has deep Catholic roots, but last week, filmmaker Lauren Windsor brought the receipts anyway.

A couple weeks ago, at the annual dinner for the Supreme Court Historical Society, Windsor secretly taped Alito agreeing with a stated goal of fighting to return “our country to a place of godliness.” I’m not a fan of secret wiretaps, but every public figure with a lifetime federal appointment should assume that what they say to strangers in public places could become public.

When Windsor asked Alito about the nation’s current polarization, Alito replied that “one side or the other is going to win … you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised. They really can’t be compromised. So it’s not like you are going to split the difference.” So much for being a neutral arbiter, or an umpire calling balls and strikes where they fall.

Alito’s religious bias shows

Rolling Stone first reported the exchange, and observed that Alito, a George W. Bush appointee who’s served on the Supreme Court since 2006, makes little effort to hide that he is a partisan member of a hard-right judicial faction.

Alito’s statement that “fundamental things really can’t be compromised” suggests he sees cases as zero-sum affairs. Instead of serving as an arbiter trying to craft a just result based on established precedent, Alito picks sides, then drives his selective analysis toward his desired result.

Vox conducted an assessment of Alito’s “standing” decisions — cases that examine whether federal courts have jurisdiction to decide a particular dispute — and found that Alito has ruled in favor of conservative litigants 100 percent of the time. Standing means plaintiffs must have a personal stake in the dispute; they can’t just be interested bystanders. Finding standing among 100 percent of conservative plaintiffs — and zero percent among liberal plaintiffs — exposes irrefutable bias.

Alito seems particularly inclined to find standing when religious beliefs are offended, as crystallized in 303 Creative LLC, a case involving a homophobic web designer.

In 303 Creative, Alito and the conservative majority allowed business owners to refuse to do businesses with gay couples on the grounds that gay marriage offends their religious beliefs. The plaintiff, a web designer, didn’t have standing to sue — no gay clients sought her services, she claimed she was afraid that Colorado’s non-discrimination law meant she might have to design a wedding website for gay couples.

Alito and the conservative majority found standing anyway, and they issued what amounts to an advisory opinion, simply to set anti-LGBT policy for the nation.

So much for Federalists not legislating from the bench.

Alito’s Catholicism-driven misogyny comes through in Casey, Hobby Lobby and Dobbs

When Alito served on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, his dissent in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey would have required women to notify their husbands prior to getting an abortion. Equating a husband’s control with parental control, Alito showed complete indifference to women brutalized by domestic violence who would have risked their lives by notifying their abuser of their plans to abort.

Then, in 2014, in Hobby Lobby, in a 5-4 split, Alito wrote that an employer had the right to exclude contraceptive coverage from employee insurance plans based on the employer’s religious beliefs.

Contraceptives are routinely included in most health care plans under the Affordable Care Act. To circumvent the ACA, Alito focused on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which allows religious objectors to be exempt from federal law unless compliance is “necessary to a compelling government interest.”

In Alito’s final analysis, allowing women to avoid unwanted pregnancies so they can earn a living was less “compelling” than employers’ religious beliefs that God meant women as birthing vessels first, employees second.

In his infamous Dobbs opinion, Alito revived a 13th century treatise on English law and custom, written when women were burned alive as witches.

Alito’s sleight of hand used selective misrepresentations of ancient common law history to overturn 50 years of constitutional protection for reproductive choice. He determined that legal abortion did not exist as common law, despite his own passages detailing how “abortion was a crime after ‘quickening’ (around 25 weeks) throughout common law. Pages 16 through 28 of Alito’s own opinion describe how abortion was legal up to 25 weeks, for centuries, so when Alito said there was no abortion throughout centuries of common law, he was lying to reach his preferred outcome.

Alito’s hubris and refusal to recuse should lead to his impeachment

During oral argument on former President Donald Trump’s election interference case, Alito offered a crazy argument that presidents need broad immunity from criminal consequences, because an incumbent president who “loses a very close, hotly contested election” would not “leave office peacefully” if they could be prosecuted by the incoming administration.

Alito addressed a hypothetical future president’s fear, instead of addressing what actually happened when Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election.

That Alito allowed an insurrectionist flag to be flown at his home and allowed a Christian Nationalist flag to be flown at his vacation home, should have triggered his recusal from all cases dealing with Trump’s insurrection.

But it didn’t.

Federal law on federal judges’ recusal requires any justice to recuse “in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” i.e., you can’t fly your freak flag and pretend not to be a freak.

ALSO READ: Republicans weaponizing ignorance is a dangerous game

Alito’s strident ideological bias, entitled hubris and decades of misogynistic rulings have brought the nation’s opinion of the High Court to an unprecedented low. In his quest to rewrite history to fuse church and state, Alito disregards centuries of violence and wars carried out in the name of religion. He has bastardized the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment — a venerated shield protecting religious freedom — into a sword for imposing his religious worldview onto others.

The weapon of federal law should be turned on him. Democrats and moderates need to make Court reform a top campaign issue, use Alito’s (and Clarence Thomas’) outrageously unethical conduct to win a sufficient majority in both chambers, and impeach them as the first order of business.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake, is free.

Donald Trump’s felony convictions are fueling another disinformation campaign, this one equal in destructive force to his Big Lie. Orchestrating a unified response reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s, House Speaker Mike Johnson and his Trump acolytes are weaving Trump’s criminality into a false indictment of the American legal system.

Republicans are falsely blaming Joe Biden for outcomes over which a sitting U.S. president has no control: convictions of Trump on 34 felony counts, pursued by an independently elected DA, pursuant to a state criminal code, as determined by 12 independent jurors, selected with the help of Trump’s own trial team.

The GOP’s target? Low-information voters.

Their weapon? Blatant disinformation.

Their allies? Fox News and the right-wing propaganda machine.

Their illiberal objective tracks the geopolitical strategies of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and strongman dictators adversarial to democratic systems in general: Weakening institutions through chaos that exhausts voters, allowing oligarch-backed extremists to seize power, peacefully or otherwise, amid the mayhem.

Feigned outrage to entertain the masses

The performative outrage in this week’s program includes eight Republican senators vowing retaliation for Trump’s convictions by opposing any legislation authored by Democrats; they also promise to withhold Senate confirmations.

Meanwhile, Johnson revealed his “three-pronged approach” to retaliation, including withholding congressional appropriations for the Department of Justice. Declaring that Republicans would “do everything we can” to exact revenge for Trump, Johnson and his Republican colleagues are currently pursuing legislation that would allow Trump to pardon himself of state crimes if he retakes the presidency.

Johnson has also suggested the "Trump-ed up" Supreme Court would “step in” to overturn Trump’s state convictions, the irony of simultaneously claiming that Biden controls the judiciary apparently over his head.

Advocating illegal acts is itself illegal.

Trump strategists Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon — the latter headed to prison soon himself — are openly urging Republican officeholders to use their offices to attack Democrats. They clearly need reminding — almost as much as they need fast, effective counsel — that using public resources for partisan purposes violates federal law.

Demanding that Republican district attorneys open investigations into Democrats, they urge attorneys general in Republican-controlled states to target Democrats for unspecified crimes.

Jeff Clark, the former Trump Justice Department official indicted in the Georgia election case, has broadened the call, urging “brave” district attorneys in conservative areas to file lawsuits in federal court against anyone involved in criminal cases against Trump.

Openly advocating illegal acts, and doing so in writing no less, suggests these fools have themselves for clients.

Republicans’ gaslighting campaign is reckless

Trump, for his part, is priming Fox News viewers for violence in the event he is sentenced to serve time in prison, saying, "I'm not sure the public would stand for (my potential prison sentence) ... You know, at a certain point, there's a breaking point."

The right’s gaslighting-of-the-uninformed campaign is working, as evidenced by online demands for bloody revenge. In trying to dox the jurors in Trump’s Manhattan hush money case, one of Trump’s supporters posted, “Hang everyone. 1,000,000 men (armed) need to go to Washington and hang everyone. That's the only solution.”

A Proud Boys writer chimed in, “Now you understand. To save your nation, you must fight. The time to respond is now. Franco Friday has begun.”

Without considering what comes next when the rule of law is hobbled — paramilitary hillbillies rounding up foreigners come to mind, as do drug cartels dropping roadside bombs from drones — Republicans are defending Trump by viciously attacking the judge, jurors, prosecutor, evidentiary rulings, jury instructions, the attorney general, the Department of Justice and mainstream media; they have also threatened to end the career of any GOP candidate who dares to voice respect for the American legal system.

So much for “law and order.”

Like a man blaming his wife as he kicks her down the stairs, Trump tells anyone who will listen — which apparently includes most media outlets — that Democrats have “forced” him to “take revenge” against government adversaries. Salivating over the possibility that he will finally get to imprison his political foes, brandishing his prison shiv, Trump told Newsmax, “It’s a terrible, terrible path that they’re leading us to, and it’s very possible that it’s going to have to happen to them…”

One is almost tempted to have compassion for Melania.

From whence does the GOP’s amnesia come?

Republican outrage is overplayed, as if everyone has forgotten about Trump’s well-documented criminality, played out over decades.

In 1998, the Treasury Department imposed the then-largest fine of $477,000 on Trump Taj Mahal casino for money laundering; Trump admitted that he pocketed millions of dollars raised from charity; he was ordered to pay $2 million for diverting donations from a televised fundraiser for veterans; in 2023, a civil jury adjudicated him a rapist; he was previously found to have engaged in business fraud to the tune of $354 million dollars.

When his niece Mary Trump sued him for allegedly defrauding her out of tens of millions of dollars — she said Trump extorted her by threatening to withhold medical coverage from a severely disabled nephew — she declared “Fraud was not just the family business — it was a way of life.”

Despite his consistent criminality and organized crime connections, Trump’s felony convictions hit differently, triggering the GOP’s kamikaze declaration of war as three more criminal trials and 54 combined felony counts loom.

Democrats must punch back harder

Republicans are using disinformation as a weapon against uninformed voters to keep them aligned with Trump. Their ploy seems to be working, as Trump informally reported a $52.8 million haul in online donations in the first 24 hours after the verdict was announced.

Instead of confessing to the obvious that Trump’s criminality is driving his legal woes — not Biden, not the “Deep State,” not rigged justice — MAGA Republicans would prefer to round up Trump’s adversaries as political prisoners.

After Trump’s deadly mob wanted to hang Vice President Mike Pence to block Trump’s 2020 loss, they are lusting for another fight; historically, coups are regularly attempted more than once.

It is clear that the United States is under siege by illiberal forces, aided by a relentless propaganda machine committed to fomenting violence. My money is on the justice system — and on voters being smart enough to detect the ruse.

The politically moderate sports announcer Colin Cowherd recently summed it up: “If everybody in your circle is a felon, maybe it’s not rigged. Maybe the world isn’t against you… Trump’s campaign chairman was a felon. So is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyer, his chief strategist, his national security adviser, his trade adviser, his foreign policy adviser, his campaign fixer, and his company CFO. They’re all felons… It’s a cabal of convicts.”

Here's to slapping back.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

In the 1850s, British naturalist Charles Darwin proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection. In his book, On the Origin of Species, Darwin presented years of data, notations he’d made while observing plants and animals in their natural habitats.

Over decades of painstaking observation, Darwin discovered that organisms with traits that favor survival tend to leave more offspring, causing survivalist traits to increase in frequency over time among successful species. In a word, Darwin concluded, successful survival of all living organisms requires them to adapt.

Species that fail to adapt? They go extinct, some more rapidly than others.

We are approaching unsurvivable temperatures

Last year was the hottest of the past 170 years, which is when meteorologists first began tracking global temperatures. According to NASA, the 10 warmest years since Darwin’s 1850s have all occurred during the last decade, with the same predicted for 2024.

Dead monkeys are falling out of trees in Mexico. Other primates are dying, along with toucans, parrots, insects, bats and one million other species. Animals are dying from heat and dehydration at such alarming rates that even Fox News has reported on it — though they have not yet found a way to blame President Joe Biden or the border.

ALSO READ: Justice delayed is not always justice denied

Last week, avoiding the words “climate change,” Fox News quoted the director of an eco-conservation park in Mexico saying they’d “never seen a situation like what’s happening right now.” The conservation park resuscitates and rehydrates dying animals for re-release into the wild, but if heat like this continues, the director predicted, “there is not going to be much we can do for the animals.”

As animals go, so go we

Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology report that a “wet-bulb” temperature of 95° F — a measure that considers both heat and humidity — is the absolute limit of human survival. The human body temperature is around 98° F, allowing for a constant balance between heat loss and heat gain. But there’s a temperature/humidity point at which the human body can’t lose heat fast enough. At that point, everything in the body, from enzymes to organs, including kidneys, lungs, heart and brain, begins to shut down.

According to MIT, a sunny area with 50 percent humidity and no wind will hit an unlivable wet-bulb temperature of 95°F when the thermometer reaches only 109 °F.

Last year, temperatures in many U.S. cities, especially in Texas, Florida and Arizona, repeatedly exceeded 109 °F, to say nothing of newly uninhabitable regions in Mexico, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

Many U.S. cities will again surpass 109 °F this year, causing heat-related deaths and illness. Between 2004 and 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports, heat-related deaths in the U.S. increased by a whopping 439 percent.

Oil-funded Republicans refuse to adapt

No serious debate remains about what is causing the climate to change. Scientists have known, for decades, that this point was coming. We have the technology to reduce carbon emissions and re-develop an energy grid with sufficient capacity; engineers and scientists calculated years ago that there’s more than enough wind, solar and hydro power to meet the needs of all people — and manufacturers — on earth.

ALSO READ: Michael Cohen, Red Finch and the fateful moment Trump lost the jury

The intelligent adaptation to dead animals falling from the sky would be a transition to renewable energy as quickly as practicable, blending a graduated mix of alternative fuels with decreasing reliance on petrofuels.

But instead of modeling Darwin’s survival of the fittest and adapting new energy strategies, Republican governors of southern states — states experiencing climate change at accelerated rates — are modeling what happens when species refuse to adapt.

Emboldened by former President Donald Trump, these strutting dodo birds are attacking climate science while at the same time seeking extraordinary federal funding for climate mitigation. (President Biden: awarding climate mitigation funds to governors who lie about climate science is self-defeating.)

Darwinism on display

In Florida this spring, cities such as Miami were hit with extreme heat even before the arrival of summer.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, addicted to culture wars and language bans, just signed a law that removes the words “climate change” from state publications, forbids the construction of offshore windmills and halts the state’s clean energy goals.

To DeSantis, people concerned about climate change are “radical green zealots.” Meanwhile, his state’s beloved manatees are disappearing, storm-battered Floridians can’t afford property insurance and buildings are collapsing in coastal cities.

In Texas, another of the most threatened U.S. states when it comes to sea level rise, hurricanes and extreme heat, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott refers to Biden’s climate efforts as “an attack” on Texas jobs, and he vowed to “fight” the “climate agenda.”

Even though Texas has ranked first in the number of billion-dollar disasters per year since 2001, Abbott has vowed to “exclude renewables from any revived economic incentive program,” and he supported bills to lower support for wind and solar projects while forcing renewable energy to subsidize fossil fuel expansion.

Livestock farming, a major methane contributor, creates deplorable lives for the animals while simultaneously warming the planet. There are humane solutions that could alleviate both problems. What are Republican governors doing? They are banning or trying to ban cruelty-free meat produced in a lab — dictating to everyone else what they can and cannot eat, and effectively mandating animal cruelty and methane emissions at the same time.

The list of GOP maladaptions goes on. Republican leaders are attacking science overall, while on a parallel crusade to delegitimize truth, the rule of law and democratic institutions. They’re turning American ignorance into a malignant tumor hellbent on killing its host.

DeSantis and Abbott deserve Darwin Awards

DeSantis and Abbott, along with Republican attorneys general in 19 states who just asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block climate action, are entertaining know-nothing voters, attacking climate science frontstage and collecting donations from Koch Industries’ backstage. It’s all performative ignorance, like watching Cro-Magnon men show up at a ballet, dragging women by the hair.

The unfortunate twist is that, as long as we share the same planet, the Cro-Magnon is dragging all of us by our hair.

Darwin Awards commemorate idiots who protect our gene pool by dying in an extraordinarily idiotic manner, thereby improving our species’ chances of long-term survival.

We need a parallel award when the most ignorant members of a species doom the rest of it.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

I have an unusually high win record with jury trials, partly because I’m chubby and matronly, traits jurors seem to find trustworthy. When smart things come out of my pudgy mouth, it’s a novelty to them, like a stuffed animal come to life, and what juror doesn’t want a warm cuddly friend offering life advice?

About 15 years ago, I tried an injury case before a jury in Chicago. This was before Ozempic; I was even fatter. The plaintiff, my client, was walking her dog on a jogging path when she was hit smack in the eye by a golf ball. The ball had sliced 90 degrees right off the first tee from the adjacent public golf course.

It wasn’t my client’s fault, it wasn’t the golfer’s fault. It was management’s fault, because golf course employees saw so many first tees repeatedly slice right toward the jogging path, they took bets on which ones would hit people. From a damages perspective, it would have cost less for management to erect a net barrier than my client paid in medical bills for her eye, and I suited up in the morning seeing dollar signs.

ALSO READ: How Donald Trump could run for president — and lead the nation — from prison

The trial was going well, I knew jurors were sympathetic. Plaintiff’s injury was permanent: the muscle controlling her iris (pupillary sphincter, you’re welcome) could no longer constrict in response to sunlight or other light, affecting her depth perception. She was credible — she neither overstated nor understated how it felt to rely on a cane to step off a curb — until defense counsel asked her about wearing a self-adjusting contact lens. (It seems there are contact lenses that automatically adjust to differing light. Technology, go figure.)

My client said yes, yes she could wear one of those lenses. But then she hesitated. She reconsidered. She got snarky. She appended her “yes” with, “I could, but why should I have to, I’m not the one who caused this, am I?”

I wanted to kick her. She had had the jury in her palm, then she flicked them away, haughtily. She should have conceded that yes, there were adjustments she’d be willing to make. Yes, she would learn to live with this inconvenience, but she’d do it. She’d adjust. Accidents happen, she was lucky she still had her eye, too bad there wasn’t a net to protect pedestrians.

ALSO READ: Justice delayed is not always justice denied

Instead, she showed defiance. And aggression. If jurors don’t like defiance, they like aggression even less.

With that tone, the jurors shifted. I felt their collective demeanor realign. That snark — that tiny entitled bit of victimhood — caused jurors to look mostly down when I re-directed her. They shifted their eye contact from me to the defense counsel, who slyly sneered my way in recognition of my misfortune.

I could have transmogrified into a talking teddy bear in that moment and it wouldn’t have mattered. Most trial lawyers have experienced this dreaded transition among jurors at some point in their careers: That moment when they know their client has either offended the jury or lost their sympathies, and there’s really no effective way to rehabilitate them.

Red Finch jury shift

For me, during the Trump trial — which I considered more an election fraud case than anything — that shift moment came when Michael Cohen was asked about his dealings with Red Finch, a tech firm.

Defense counsel asked Cohen about stealing from Trump payments intended for Red Finch. The goal: to show jurors that Cohen could not be trusted.

Cohen had admittedly lied in Trump’s service, repeatedly, so that made him a liar, and how could jurors trust a liar to tell the truth? Now Cohen was also admitting to stealing — he paid Red Finch only $20,000 of Trump’s $50,000 payment and pocketed the $30,000. That made him a thief as well as a liar, and wasn’t he really just out to extort President Trump all along?

“You stole it from the Trump Organization?” Trump lawyer Todd Blanche asked about the $30,000, to which Cohen replied, essentially, “yes.”

On redirect, winding up for the pitch — prosecutor Susan Hoffinger asked Cohen: What, exactly, was the purpose of Red Finch, anyway?

Cohen then explained that Red Finch was an online tech company Trump hired to artificially boost Trump’s ranking in an online opinion poll.

Michael Cohen is seen on May 20, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Andrea Renault/Star Max/GC Images via Getty Images)

The opinion poll wasn’t even marginally important — it was a poll soliciting public opinion about “history’s most notable business leaders.” Trump owed Red Finch the $50,000 fee for fraudulently skewing the results of the poll in his favor. When Cohen told jurors about the arrangement, the curtain was pulled back to reveal a green haze of sleaze.

Trump paying Red Finch $50,000 to lie for him, to present pathetically fraudulent proof that people liked Trump more than they really did, was a business decision no amount of cross examination could wash off.

When the truth about Red Finch came out, there was nothing defense lawyers could do to fix it. Here was Trump, a man so steeped in fraud, so accustomed to lying to the public, that he was paying a tech firm to skew the results of a largely irrelevant opinion poll on his behalf. Having opened the door, defense counsel couldn’t move to strike it from the record, and even if they had, the green sleaze oozing out from under Trump couldn’t be unseen.

I remembered jurors’ faces when my golf ball client said she shouldn’t have to wear a corrective lens. No doubt Trump’s team began to see the same faces.

It was an examination gamble that backfired. Cohen shouldn’t have kept the $30,000, but jurors forgot about Cohen’s deceit when Trump’s deceit upstaged it.

Worse for Todd Blanche, Trump paying Red Finch to fraudulently manipulate public opinion tracked perfectly with Trump paying Cohen, Daniels and the National Enquirer to fraudulently influence the 2016 election.

Whether Trump meant to lie to the Federal Election Commission or not (yes, he meant to), I don’t think there’s any fact, evidence or argument that could have dislodged this proof from jurors’ minds.

In the end, the jury gave Trump 34 reasons to regret his choices.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.