Category: Politics

President Donald Trump’s maximalist, command-and-control approach to the GOP faces one of its most significant tests yet, as a band of stubborn Indiana state Senate Republicans threatens his mid-cycle redistricting scheme when it is expected to come to a vote this week.

The Hoosier Republicans will gavel in Monday to decide on a map, passed Friday by the Indiana House, that supporters say would all but guarantee a 9-0 Republican congressional delegation and would be in effect for next year’s pivotal midterm elections. Present maps give the GOP a 7-2 advantage.

Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray, who — along with roughly half his 40-member Republican majority — has resisted a four-month White House pressure campaign to redraw the congressional lines. Indiana Conservation Voters, Club for Growth and Building a Better Economy are among the groups that have spent nearly half-a-million dollars in ads trying to sway public opinion — the first group against redistricting and the second two for — in recent weeks, according to AdImpact. Trump campaign veterans like Chris LaCivita have joined the dark money group Fair Maps Indiana to advance the cause, too.

Speaker Mike Johnson has been calling reluctant Republican state senators in recent days — reported here for the first time, based on accounts from two people granted anonymity to freely discuss sensitive private conversations. One Indiana Republican elected official briefed on the calls said Johnson’s “soft touch” with lawmakers may be moving the needle.

“Anybody who tells you they know how this is going to play out doesn’t know,” this person said.

A Johnson spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

The matter is top of mind for the president, who brought up Indiana redistricting to visitors at a White House Christmas party Sunday attended by Gov. Mike Braun, according to a person present and granted anonymity to disclose the conversation. Trump asked Braun in front of other guests if redistricting would pass, and Braun responded it would.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Trump “thinks we should fight democrats every legal way we can to win the majority and keep accomplishing things for the people,” according to a Republican close to the White House granted anonymity to discuss the president’s motivations.

And on Friday, Turning Point Action announced that it was partnering with several Trump-aligned super PACs to target Indiana Republicans who are blocking the president’s redistricting effort, including threatening to spend millions of dollars to primary resistant members of the Indiana GOP.

Trump needs the backup: The state Senate’s reservations threaten to derail his plans to push new maps across the country to shore up his party’s slim House majority, which Democrats would seize by netting just three seats in an election that is expected to be a repudiation of the party in power.

“These guys and ladies are under intense, 24-hour-a-day pressure and I don’t know if they can withstand it, ultimately — we will see,” said Mike Murphy, a former Republican member of the Indiana House of Representatives. “I feel badly for them and their families, primarily. They came to be public servants, and instead they are pawns in really what I consider to be Trump’s strategy to avoid a third impeachment and potentially set himself up a third term.”

The Trump-backed pressure campaign in Indiana has included two visits from Vice President JD Vance to Indianapolis on Air Force Two, and repeated calls and invitations to Oval Office meetings — including with Trump, Bray and Speaker of the House Todd Huston in August.

Now, lawmakers will convene amid threats of violence following Trump’s series of social media posts ramping up pressure. At least a dozen elected Indiana Republicans have faced swattings — false reports of danger that bring an aggressive law enforcement response designed to intimidate the target — and pipe bomb threats. Few though have publicly reversed their positions against redistricting since they stalemated 19-19last month on a vote that was a close proxy for gerrymandering. That means Trump and the White House would need to flip at least half a dozen GOP senators to secure a simple majority to pass the new maps.

“How does (Trump) have the time to mess with a nobody like me with all of the important matters that are to take his attention as the leader of the executive branch in this nation?” Republican state Sen. Greg Walker told a local newspaper in November.

Three Indiana Republicans close to the process — and granted anonymity to appraise support — said they do not believe there are currently enough votes in the Senate for the map to pass.

Asked whether he felt pressured by the White House to redistrict, Huston would only say, “We had conversations. There was no secret.”

Trump posted twice on Truth Social this weekend about his demand for redistricting in Indiana, the barn-red state he once called “Importantville” and that helped him clinch the GOP nomination in its May 2016 primary, saying, “this new Map would give the incredible people of Indiana the opportunity to elect TWO additional Republicans in the 2026 Midterm Elections.” He also posted the names of nine senators who “need encouragement to make the right decision” as they have not yet declared their position on the new map.

Turning Point last week deployed members of their “strike force” to meet with and whip many of those same senators, but the results of that effort remain unclear. “It’s so hard to judge at this point, because it’s such a fluid situation,” said Brett Galaszewski, Turning Point Action’s national enterprise director.

Meanwhile the Supreme Court reinstated Texas’ newly drawn congressional map last week, staving off a major setback to Trump’s redistricting campaign. Now, the GOP has nine more favorable seats across four states — Texas, Ohio, Missouri and North Carolina. Those will likely be offset by the five Democratic seats California Gov. Gavin Newsom scored in his counterpunch last month.

Redistricting battles are brewing around the country, with Democrat-led Virginia and Maryland headed in opposite directions of one another.

Virginia Democrats expanded their grip on power in the General Assembly by picking up 13 House seats while flipping three Republican-held statewide offices, including governor, in last month’s elections. Top Democrats in the state legislature appear unfazed by Indiana’s push to redraw its maps. The state’s top Democrat said it was “full steam ahead” – a reference to the state lawmakers clearing a procedural hurdle in October to put a constitutional amendment before voters to allow the Democratic-led legislature to redraw its maps ahead of the 2026 midterms.

“We have a plan and process in place that will facilitate delivery of our maps on time,” state Sen. L. Louise Lucas said via text Saturday. “Virginia is a good place to be.” Don Scott, the Virginia House speaker, opined that a new map could drastically change the delegation makeup in Virginia, which is near parity with six Democrats and five Republicans.

Scott said “10-1 is not out of the realm to be able to draw the maps in a succinct and community-based way,” at a public forum last week.

And in Maryland, Gov. Wes Moore continues to pressure his state lawmakers to take up new maps, but has run into opposition from state Senate President Bill Ferguson, who has refused to entertain bringing up a vote on the matter.

Maryland’s lower chamber appears poised to take up the issue, but House Speaker Adrienne Jones, who earlier this year publicly supported the governor’s redistricting push, stunned many in Annapolis by announcing Thursday she was immediately stepping down.It’s unclear what impact this will have on negotiations to redraw the state’s lines.

Moore’s Redistricting Advisory Commission, set up last month to solicit residents’ feedback on whether to craft new maps, is slated to hold its final public meeting Friday before it issues recommendations to the governor and Maryland General Assembly.

Trump set the latest redistricting arms race in motion when he leaned on Texas to redraw its maps earlier this summer.

“We don’t operate in a vacuum and states are doing this all across the country, red and blue states,” Huston told reporters Friday. “We felt like it was important for us to be a part of that, and to make sure that we used every tool we could to support a strong Republican majority.”

Asked whether he felt “proud” of the maps, Huston, who said in 2021 that he would “defend these maps all day long, six days to Sunday,” did not use that word, saying he felt “very blessed to lead the Indiana House of Representative.”

“I support this, and I support what we’re doing,” he said.

The state Senate committee on elections will meet in the Senate chamber to hear the congressional map Monday afternoon, with a final vote from the whole chamber expected Thursday.

Trump’s demands on Indiana lawmakers though have exposed some of the limits of his power.

“The MAGA movement hasn’t permeated down to the state legislative level,” said an Indiana Republican allied with Trump’s redistricting cause.

But this person, granted anonymity to discuss the tense debate, referenced primaries of resistant Indiana Republicans, saying, “we’re either going to get new maps, or we’re going to get a new Senate.”

“Some people think Trumpworld is bluffing or doesn’t have any juice left and this will just go away if the state Senate rejects the maps,” this person said. “The reality is that will only be the start of a long and brutal campaign to purge the state of anyone who opposed Trump on this issue. And there will likely be collateral damage that hurts even those who supported Trump.”

​Politics

The Supreme Court on Dec. 5, 2025, agreed to review the long-simmering controversy over birthright citizenship. It will likely hand down a ruling next summer.

In January 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order removing the recognition of citizenship for the U.S.-born children of both immigrants here illegally and visitors here only temporarily. The new rule is not retroactive. This change in long-standing U.S. policy sparked a wave of litigation culminating in Trump v. Washington, an appeal by Trump to remove the injunction put in place by federal courts.

When the justices weigh the arguments, they will focus on the meaning of the first sentence of the 14th Amendment, known as the citizenship clause: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Both sides agree that to be granted birthright citizenship under the Constitution, a child must be born inside U.S. borders and the parents must be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. However, each side will give a very different interpretation of what the second requirement means. Who falls under “the jurisdiction” of the United States in this context?

As a close observer of the court, I anticipate a divided outcome grounded in strong arguments from each side.

Arguments for automatic citizenship

Simply put, the argument against the Trump administration is that the 14th Amendment’s expansion of citizenship after the eradication of slavery was meant to be broad rather than narrow, encompassing not only formerly enslaved Black people but all persons who arrived on U.S. soil under the protection of the Constitution.

The Civil War amendments – the 13th, 14th and 15th – established inherent equality as a constitutional value, which embraced all persons born in the nation without reference to race, ethnicity or origin.

One of the strongest arguments that automatic citizenship is the meaning of the Constitution is long-standing practice. Citizenship by birth regardless of parental status – with few exceptions – has been the effective rule since the time of America’s founding.

Advocates also point to precedent: the landmark case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898. When an American-born descendant of resident noncitizens sued after being refused re-entry to San Francisco under the Chinese Exclusion Act, the court recognized his natural-born citizenship.

If we read the Constitution in a living fashion – emphasizing the evolution of American beliefs and values over time – the constitutional commitment to broad citizenship grounded in equality, regardless of ethnicity or economic status, seems even more clear.

However, advocates must try to convince the court’s originalists – Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – who read the Constitution based on its meaning when it was adopted.

The originalist argument in favor of birthright citizenship is that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” was meant to invoke only a small set of exceptions found in traditional British common law. In the Wong Kim Ark ruling, the court relied on this “customary law of England, brought to America by the colonists.”

One exception to birthright citizenship covered by this line of rulings is the child of a foreign diplomat, whose parents represent the interests of another country. Another exception is the children of invading foreign armies. A third exception discussed explicitly by the framers of the 14th Amendment was Native Americans, who at the time were understood to be under the jurisdiction of their tribal government as a separate sovereign. That category of exclusion faded away after Congress recognized the citizenship of Native Americans in 1924.

The advocates of automatic birthright citizenship conclude that whether the 14th Amendment is interpreted in a living or in an original way, its small set of exceptions do not override its broad message of citizenship grounded in human equality.

Opposition to birthright citizenship

The opposing argument begins with a simple intuition: In a society defined by self-government, as America is, there is no such thing as citizenship without consent. In the same way that an American citizen cannot declare himself a French citizen and vote in French elections without consent from the French government, a foreign national cannot declare himself a U.S. citizen without consent.

This argument emphasizes that citizenship in a democracy means holding equal political power over our collective decisions. That is something only existing citizens hold the right to offer to others, something which must be decided through elections and the lawmaking process.

The court’s ruling in Elk v. Wilkins in 1884 – just 16 years after the ratification of the 14th Amendment – endorses “the principle that no one can become a citizen of a nation without its consent.” By making entry into the United States without approval a federal offense, Congress has effectively denied that consent.

Scholars who support this view argue that the 14th Amendment does not provide this consent. Instead it sets a limitation. To the authors of the 14th Amendment, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” conveyed a limit to natural citizenship grounded in mutual allegiance. That means if people are free to deny their old national allegiance, and an independent nation is free to decide its own membership, the recognition of a new national identity must be mutual.

Immigrants living in the United States illegally have not accepted the sovereignty of the nation’s laws. On the other side of the coin, the government has not officially accepted them as residents under its protection.

If mutual recognition of allegiance is the meaning of the 14th Amendment, the Trump administration has not violated it.

The opponents of birthright citizenship argue that the Wong Kim Ark ruling has been misrepresented. In that case, the court only considered permanent legal residents like Wong Kim Ark’s parents, but not residents here illegally or temporarily. The focus on British common law in that ruling is simply misguided because the findings of Calvin’s Case or any other precedents dealing with British subjects were voided by the American Revolution.

In this view, the Declaration of Independence replaced subjects with citizens. The power to determine national membership was taken away from kings and placed in the hands of democratic majorities.

For opponents of birthright citizenship, the 14th Amendment does not take that power away from citizens but instead codifies the rule that mutual consent is the touchstone of admission. The requirement to be “subject to the jurisdiction” provides the mechanism of that consent.

Congress can determine who is accepted as a member of the national community under its jurisdiction. In this view, Congress – and the American people – have spoken: Current federal laws make entry into U.S. borders without permission a crime rather than a forced acceptance of political membership.

What might happen

The court will likely announce a ruling in summer 2026 before early July, just in time for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The court will ultimately decide whether the Constitution endorses the declaration’s invocation of essential equality or its creation of a sovereign people empowered to determine the boundaries of national membership.

The court’s three Democratic-appointed justices – Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor – will surely side against the Trump administration. The six Republican-appointed justices seem likely to divide, a symptom of disagreements within the originalist camp.

The liberal justices need at least two of the conservatives to join them to form a majority of five to uphold universal birthright citizenship. This will likely be some combination of Chief Justice John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

The Trump administration will prevail only if five out of the six conservatives reject the British common law foundations of the Wong Kim Ark ruling in favor of citizenship by consent alone.

America should know by July Fourth.

Morgan Marietta does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

How can society police the global spread of online far-right extremism while still protecting free speech? That’s a question policymakers and watchdog organizations confronted as early as the 1980s and ’90s – and it hasn’t gone away.

Decades before artificial intelligence, Telegram and white nationalist Nick Fuentes’ livestreams, far-right extremists embraced the early days of home computing and the internet. These new technologies offered them a bastion of free speech and a global platform. They could share propaganda, spew hatred, incite violence and gain international followers like never before.

Before the digital era, far-right extremists radicalized each other primarily using print propaganda. They wrote their own newsletters and reprinted far-right tracts such as Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and American neo-Nazi William Pierce’s “The Turner Diaries,” a dystopian work of fiction describing a race war. Then, they mailed this propaganda to supporters at home and abroad.

I’m a historian who studies neo-Nazis and far-right extremism. As my research shows, most of the neo-Nazi propaganda confiscated in Germany from the 1970s through the 1990s came from the United States. American neo-Nazis exploited their free speech under the First Amendment to bypass German censorship laws. German neo-Nazis then picked up this print propaganda and distributed it throughout the country.

This strategy wasn’t foolproof, however. Print propaganda could get lost in the mail or be confiscated, especially when crossing into Germany. Producing and shipping it was also expensive and time-consuming, and far-right organizations were chronically understaffed and strapped for cash.

Going digital

Computers, which entered the mass market in 1977, promised to help resolve these problems. In 1981, Matt Koehl, head of the National Socialist White People’s Party in the United States, solicited donations to “Help the Party Enter The Computer Age.” The American neo-Nazi Harold Covington begged for a printer, scanner and “serious PC” that could run WordPerfect word processing software. “Our multifarious enemies already possess this technology,” he noted, referring to Jews and government officials.

Soon, far-right extremists figured out how to connect their computers to one another. They did so by using online bulletin board systems, or BBSes, a precursor to the internet. A BBS was hosted on a personal computer, and other computers could dial in to the BBS using a modem and a terminal software program, allowing users to exchange messages, documents and software.

With BBSes, anyone interested in accessing far-right propaganda could simply turn on their computer and dial in to an organization’s advertised phone number. Once connected, they could read the organization’s public posts, exchange messages and upload and download files.

The first far-right bulletin board system, the Aryan Nations Liberty Net, was established in 1984 by Louis Beam, a high-ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations. Beam explained: “Imagine, if you can, a single computer to which all leaders and strategists of the patriotic movement are connected. Imagine further that any patriot in the country is able to tap into this computer at will in order to reap the benefit of all accumulative knowledge and wisdom of the leaders. ‘Someday,’ you may say? How about today?”

Then came violent neo-Nazi computer games. Neo-Nazis in the United States and elsewhere could upload and download these games via bulletin board systems, copy them onto disks and distribute them widely, especially to schoolchildren.

In the German computer game KZ Manager, players role-played as a commandant in a Nazi concentration camp that murdered Jews, Sinti and Roma, and Turkish immigrants. An early 1990s poll revealed that 39% of Austrian high schoolers knew of such games and 22% had seen them.

Arrival of the web

By the mid-1990s, with the introduction of the more user-friendly World Wide Web, bulletin boards fell out of favor. The first major racial hate website on the internet, Stormfront, was founded in 1995 by the American white supremacist Don Black. The civil rights organization Southern Poverty Law Center found that almost 100 murders were linked to Stormfront.

By 2000, the German government had discovered, and banned, over 300 German websites with right-wing content – a tenfold increase within just four years.

In response, American white supremacists again exploited their free speech rights to bypass German censorship bans. They gave international far-right extremists the opportunity to host their websites safely and anonymously on unregulated American servers – a strategy that continues today.

Up next: AI

The next frontier for far-right extremists is AI. They are using AI tools to create targeted propaganda, manipulate images, audio and videos, and evade detection. The far-right social network Gab created a Hitler chatbot that users can talk to.

AI chatbots are also adopting the far-right views of social media users. Grok, the chatbot on Elon Musk’s X, recently called itself “MechaHitler,” spewed antisemitic hate speech and denied the Holocaust.

Countering extremism

Combating online hate is a global imperative. It requires comprehensive international cooperation among governments, nongovernmental organizations, watchdog organizations, communities and tech corporations.

Far-right extremists have long pioneered innovative ways to exploit technological progress and free speech. Efforts to counter this radicalization are challenged to stay one step ahead of the far right’s technological advances.

Michelle Lynn Kahn has received funding from the National Humanities Center, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, American Historical Association, and American Jewish Archives.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

A MAGA World Cup? | The Playbook Podcast

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​Politics

Accounts of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for New York City mayor have highlighted both his online presence and his ground game.

Mamdani won the general election with 50.4% of the vote, a larger share than was predicted by most polls, and his get-out-the-vote campaign has received some of the credit. Mamdani claims that his campaign had over 100,000 volunteers knocking on doors across New York City.

This focus on on-the-ground mobilization stands out given the increasing attention devoted to online campaigning over the past 15 years.

Particularly during that time period, online platforms have been a major focus of political campaigns and campaign research. Targeted advertising and new media strategies are increasingly viewed as central to campaign success. So is coverage of the campaign by legacy and social media more generally.

Moreover, solid empirical evidence of the effectiveness of door-to-door canvassing is limited. Recent work finds very few effects of in-person canvassing, except in very specific circumstances. One recent paper suggests that door-to-door canvassing by the candidate can make a difference to election outcomes. But in a race in New York City, it is not likely that Mamdani himself was able to reach enough voters to make a difference.

How much did Mamdani’s ground game contribute to his victory? As a political communication scholar, I know that assessing the impact of different methods used by political campaigns is difficult – in part because political campaigns include multiple lines of communication.

‘Hybrid’ campaigns

No campaign exists in isolation — nearly every candidate’s campaign occurs alongside opposing candidates’ campaigns. The effects of one campaign are often masked by the countering effects of the other.

The size of a campaign on one platform also tends to be correlated with the size of that candidate’s campaign on other platforms. When television advertising increases alongside social media advertising and door-to-door canvassing, identifying the effects of any single platform can be difficult.

Clever research designs are in some instances able to identify effects. These generally find that the impact of not just door-knocking but also ads and online advertising can be relatively limited.

In the modern technological environment, the impact of any single aspect of a campaign may be especially difficult to assess. Campaigning increasingly occurs in what researchers have called a “hybrid media” environment. Campaigns are waged in person, on the news and across multiple social media.

Each of these platforms comes with different advantages and disadvantages. Each also prioritizes different kinds of information.

Plainly stating your policy platform may work for coverage of a campaign stop on the evening news. But if you want that policy to go viral on TikTok, then you may need to add a dance – or an influencer.

Find volunteers online, send them knocking

Candidates have increasingly recognized the need to tailor messages for different communication platforms, such as television ads, Facebook posts and TikToks, building hybrid campaigns that attempt to spread a message across multiple, different spaces.

This interactivity across platforms has been especially evident in postelection assessments of the Mamdani campaign. His social media campaign was adept at producing the kinds of content that attract attention online. That campaign also appears to have been able to convert online engagement into real-world activism, including door-to-door canvassing.

There have been growing concerns among academics and campaign organizers about “slacktivism” — activism that amounts to one or two clicks online but nothing more. One worry is that a quick online endorsement may in some instances give people a sense that they have done their share and limit more active forms of engagement. The Mamdani campaign appears to have overcome this problem, at least in part.

But 100,000 people knocking on doors probably does not happen without the success of an online campaign. Finding and mobilizing campaigners was one important focus of Mamdani’s engagement online, after all.

Do it yourself − then repeat on socials

In-person campaigning by Mamdani, on the street and in the taxi line, is almost certainly made more effective through circulation on Instagram and TikTok.

Using mass media to broadcast campaign stops is not new, of course.

The construction of campaign stops that produce good social media content is becoming more common, however. The ways in which campaigns unfold in person are increasingly intertwined with the way they unfold online.

In this way, the Mamdani campaign may have been a textbook example of a modern hybrid campaign and an illustration of the coevolution of digital and on-the-ground campaigning.

To be clear, the success of the Mamdani campaign is probably not about his online presence or his ground game, but both at the same time.

Stuart Soroka research has been funded from the National Science Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The Declaration of Independence’s 250th anniversary in 2026 is certain to be a time of national reflection.

Americans tend to look to the Constitution to assess whether the nation is living up to its founding principles when navigating major social and political issues.

But it is the declaration, signed on July 4, 1776, that declares the nation’s credo, that “all men are created equal.”

Throughout history, Americans have turned to the declaration for guidance about what the nation should stand for.

As a historian of the United States and the coordinator for the University of Richmond’s Forging a New Nation initiative, which commemorates the Declaration of Independence’s 250th anniversary, I have been thinking a lot about this phenomenon.

Particularly during times of social and political upheaval, Americans have sought out the Declaration of Independence when they wanted to remedy contemporary problems and create new visions for the country’s future. Many of the nation’s greatest leaders have praised and memorialized its rhetoric and ideas in the promotion of their own.

Inalienable rights?

During the turbulent 1850s, the divisive issue of slavery permeated every facet of American life and challenged basic precepts of American freedom.

In his 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Frederick Douglass, the formerly enslaved abolitionist, used the declaration to set a standard for American society. As a Black American, Douglass insisted he was “not included within the pale” who enjoyed the “inalienable rights” articulated in the declaration.

Nonetheless, the “great principles of the Declaration” gave Douglass hope and cause for optimism. He predicted that the “glorious hour” would soon arrive when all Americans would be defined “by equal birth.”

Conceived in liberty

In its 1857 Dred Scott v. Sanford decision, the Supreme Court denied Black Americans the rights of citizenship.

Abraham Lincoln denounced the decision and countered by defining a more capacious view of American freedom based on the declaration.

Lincoln told one audience that Thomas Jefferson and the signers of the declaration “set up a standard maxim for free society,” which they “intended to include all men” and to be “constantly looked to, constantly labored for.”

Their goal, Lincoln said, was “augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”

As civil war ravaged the country and claimed thousands of American lives, Lincoln again drew on the declaration to articulate a vision for the country as president.

In his 1863 Gettysburg Address, commemorating the dead on that Pennsylvania battlefield, Lincoln described the United States as a “nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

The nation, he said, was undergoing a “new birth of freedom” as it waged war on slavery and defended its government against domestic rebellion.

Self-evident truth

Seventy years later, the declaration provided inspiration for President Franklin D. Roosevelt as he steered the nation through a crippling economic depression and the run-up to a world war. Roosevelt advocated for building America’s first social safety net by drawing on the declaration.

Reflecting Roosevelt’s aims, the 1936 Democratic Party platform illustrated this rhetorical strategy, borrowing from the declaration at its very beginning: “We hold this truth to be self evident – that government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens.”

During his 1944 State of the Union Address, Roosevelt said the nation was built on the rights embedded in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But, he argued, “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”

All created equal

Amid the political and social upheaval of the 1960s, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. drew directly and self-consciously on the declaration.

In his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, King defined an America that “guaranteed unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to its citizens.

Though the nation had “defaulted on this promissory note insofar as its citizens of color are concerned,” King said, the declaration still offered him hope: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.”

In 2025, Americans saw the deployment of U.S. troops in major cities, as well as mass immigrant deportations. These changes have upended communities and challenged basic norms of civil society. They have also challenged Americans’ understanding of themselves as a nation of immigrants.

With the declaration’s anniversary coming up at a time when so much about contemporary society and politics are being contested, Americans may well return once again to this founding document to define themselves as a people and a nation.

Graeme Mack does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Reducing the visibility of polarizing content in social media feeds can measurably lower partisan animosity. To come up with this finding, my colleagues and I developed a method that let us alter the ranking of people’s feeds, previously something only the social media companies could do.

Reranking social media feeds to reduce exposure to posts expressing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity affected people’s emotions and their views of people with opposing political views.

I’m a computer scientist who studies social computing, artificial intelligence and the web. Because only social media platforms can modify their algorithms, we developed and released an open-source web tool that allowed us to rerank the feeds of consenting participants on X, formerly Twitter, in real time.

Drawing on social science theory, we used a large language model to identify posts likely to polarize people, such as those advocating political violence or calling for the imprisonment of members of the opposing party. These posts were not removed; they were simply ranked lower, requiring users to scroll further to see them. This reduced the number of those posts users saw.

We ran this experiment for 10 days in the weeks before the 2024 U.S. presidential election. We found that reducing exposure to polarizing content measurably improved participants’ feelings toward people from the opposing party and reduced their negative emotions while scrolling their feed. Importantly, these effects were similar across political affiliations, suggesting that the intervention benefits users regardless of their political party.

Why it matters

A common misconception is that people must choose between two extremes: engagement-based algorithms or purely chronological feeds. In reality, there is a wide spectrum of intermediate approaches depending on what they are optimized to do.

Feed algorithms are typically optimized to capture your attention, and as a result, they have a significant impact on your attitudes, moods and perceptions of others. For this reason, there is an urgent need for frameworks that enable independent researchers to test new approaches under realistic conditions.

Our work offers a path forward, showing how researchers can study and prototype alternative algorithms at scale, and it demonstrates that, thanks to large language models, platforms finally have the technical means to detect polarizing content that can affect their users’ democratic attitudes.

What other research is being done in this field

Testing the impact of alternative feed algorithms on live platforms is difficult, and such studies have only recently increased in number.

For instance, a recent collaboration between academics and Meta found that changing the algorithmic feed to a chronological one was not sufficient to show an impact on polarization. A related effort, the Prosocial Ranking Challenge led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, explores ranking alternatives across multiple platforms to promote beneficial social outcomes.

At the same time, the progress in large language model development enables richer ways to model how people think, feel and interact with others. We are seeing growing interest in giving users more control, allowing people to decide what principles should guide what they see in their feeds – for example the Alexandria library of pluralistic values and the Bonsai feed reranking system. Social media platforms, including Bluesky and X, are heading this way, as well.

What’s next

This study represents our first step toward designing algorithms that are aware of their potential social impact. Many questions remain open.

We plan to investigate the long-term effects of these interventions and test new ranking objectives to address other risks to online well-being, such as mental health and life satisfaction. Future work will explore how to balance multiple goals, such as cultural context, personal values and user control, to create online spaces that better support healthy social and civic interaction.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

This research was partially supported by a Hoffman-Yee grant from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

News reports about a U.S. military attack on a boat in the Caribbean allegedly carrying drugs have raised critical questions about the military campaign against drug smugglers being carried out by the Trump administration in that region.

Among them: whether Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth or others face criminal liability for any of the attacks. Those attacks killed people alleged to have been involved in illegal narcotics trafficking.

Congressional investigations have begun into allegations that a Sept. 2, 2025, follow-up attack on two survivors of an earlier attack was illegal and ordered by Hegseth. Some legal scholars have cited violations of international and United States criminal law that could come into play.

But as a military law scholar who spent 20 years as a lawyer and judge in the U.S. Air Force, I know that there aren’t enough facts known yet to determine who is responsible for what. There are five investigative mechanisms that could be used to determine the facts and whether there is criminal liability on the part of both senior civilian officials and military members involved in the now extensively reported second strike on the suspected drug boat that resulted in the deaths of civilians.

There are two caveats to this analysis. The first is that the Constitution says a person is to be presumed innocent before being proved guilty. The second is that the story from the White House and the Pentagon has changed over time.

Congressional committees investigate

The first investigative mechanism is the Congress itself.

The House of Representatives and the Senate each have an armed services committee and a foreign relations or foreign affairs committee. In theory, any of these committees can place people under oath and have them testify, as well as issue subpoenas to obtain information.

This concept isn’t new.

Multiple committees examined the country’s lack of preparedness preceding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and other military installations in 1941.

Almost every month during the Vietnam War, one or more of these committees investigated military matters, including one of the most notorious war crimes in U.S. history. In 1968, Army Lt. William Laws Calley commanded a platoon of soldiers who murdered close to 500 villagers in My Lai, including children and the elderly, none of whom posed a threat and none of whom were lawful targets.

But congressional investigations can be highly political. Even during the My Lai investigation, at least one member of the House, Mendel Rivers, a South Carolina Democrat who was at that time chairman of the Committee on Armed Services, attempted to shield officers in the chain of command. There is little reason to believe that a current investigation, conducted by a dramatically polarized Congress, will be free of partisan politics.

Attorney general investigates

A second means of investigating is for the U.S. attorney general to preliminarily conclude that crimes have been committed and to convene a grand jury to investigate. A federal grand jury is a constitutional body consisting of ordinary adult citizens. Its operations are governed by the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, and its role is to investigate whether there is probable cause to determine that a person has violated the criminal laws.

A federal statute prohibits murder. As far back as 1820, if not before, federal grand juries have investigated the crime of “murder on the high seas.”

No member of the president’s administration is immune from the criminal laws of the country, with the exception of the president himself when he has acted in the capacity of president or commander in chief. The Supreme Court in 2024 determined that the president is mostly immune from prosecution under criminal law.

But I believe this type of investigation is unlikely. That’s because members of the administration have argued that their actions were legal and that the men killed in the second strike were continuing in their mission and posed a threat.

Moreover, the attorney general is supposed to act in an independent capacity from the White House. But Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, has demonstrated her loyalty to the president and his agenda in many instances.

Another consideration is that federal agency heads who rely on their attorneys in good faith are presumed to be immune from the law. This may be why Hegseth has stated that lawyers had advised the mission’s commanders.

Congress and the AG work a case

It is possible that during a congressional investigation one or more witnesses will be accused of lying under oath or accused of contempt.

Congress has the authority to hold individuals in contempt and fine and sentence them, but this is rare. Usually, Congress forwards the claim to the attorney general. Contempt of Congress is a federal misdemeanor offense, meaning a person cannot be sentenced to more than a year. Again, I believe it is unlikely that the attorney general would pursue a contempt charge in a federal court from these events.

Inspector general investigates

The Department of Defense’s inspector general can investigate allegations of wrongdoing in the department, and this includes the secretary. In the past, inspectors general have discovered criminal activity, written a publicly releasable report, and then a senior official was prosecuted.

In 2003, the Department of Defense investigated Darleen Druyun, a senior contracting official, for wrongly steering multimillion-dollar contracts to Boeing. The investigative report resulted in criminal charges from the Justice Department, and Druyun was found guilty in a criminal trial. Boeing officials also left the company, and the company was fined.

The military can investigate its civilian members but cannot prosecute them. The Uniform Code of Military Justice does not apply to civilians. That includes the president and secretary of defense, even though they are at the pinnacle of the chain of command.

International courts investigate

Finally, an investigation could be mounted through international law as enforced by courts outside of the United States.

Superpowers such as the United States and Russia often get a free pass from international law enforcement. In 1986, the International Court of Justice – a body partly created by the United States – ruled that the United States under the Reagan administration violated Nicaragua’s sovereignty during its civil war.

The Reagan administration’s response was that because other nations had disregarded the court, so too would the United States. No American official was ever held to account for the mining of Nicaragua’s main port or for the arming of rebels that led to the deaths of Nicaraguans.

It’s not clear which, if any, of these mechanisms will be used to hold accountable those who ordered and carried out the September 2025 operation in the Caribbean that killed two survivors of an earlier attack. What is clear is that the methods exist to find the facts – and make judgments based on them.

Joshua Kastenberg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Republicans and Democrats are quietly pouring millions of dollars into a fight trying to block Missouri’s new gerrymandered congressional map, as each party scrambles for any advantage they can find in the national fight for the House majority in 2026.

Missouri is one of six states that have redrawn their congressional lines — after President Donald Trump kicked off the redistricting war by pushing Texas to redraw — with the GOP-dominated legislature passing a new map in September that would eliminate Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s Kansas City-based seat.

But unlike in many other states, Democrats have a clearer path to try to block the map, at least for next year’s midterms. They’ve now launched an effort that operatives in the state say is attracting an unprecedented amount of money — and legal fights.

“Imagine the kind of democratic paralysis our state would be in if this happened every 10 years, or every time we decided to draw new maps,” said Aaron Baker, a GOP strategist based in Missouri. “That would just be chaos.”

Almost immediately after the map passed, Democrats in the state organized a campaign to repeal the new map through popular referendum. The campaign committee, People Not Politicians, will need to submit about 107,000 valid signatures before the Dec. 11 deadline to send the new maps to a referendum. If they submit enough valid signatures, the state would be temporarily unable to enact the new maps until voters can weigh in on the ballot measure.

Well-funded organizations on both sides have since rushed into the state, duking it out in a fight that has already spawned a complicated nest of court cases and some aggressive tactics seeking to undermine Democrats’ referendum campaign.

If the state’s new maps do come to a referendum, some Republicans are concerned voters might reject their bid to aid Trump’s effort to skew the odds of maintaining control of the House in Republicans’ favor.

“It will be a very uphill battle for Republicans if [the referendum] is on the ballot,” Baker said.

Democrats in Missouri, meanwhile, are confident they’ll have enough signatures to push the maps to a referendum — and they’re optimistic voters will be on their side when it comes time to vote on the maps.

“[Republicans] are afraid for this to go on the ballot, because they believe that Missourians will vote it down,” said Doug Beck, the top Democrat in the state Senate. “That’s why they’re trying as hard as they can to not let it go to the ballot.”

The Republican National Committee and the National Republican Campaign Committee donated a combined $100,000 days after the Put Missouri First PAC, the GOP’s ballot measure-focused committee, was formed. That was followed by two separate $1 million contributions from the Trump-aligned Securing American Greatness PAC and the American Action Network, the nonprofit arm of House Republicans’ primary super PAC.

Officers for Put Missouri First — including the group’s treasurer and a law firm that shares the organization’s address — did not respond to interview requests.

On Wednesday, Donald Trump Jr. urged his social media followers to support the effort to block the referendum — a sign of the battle’s growing significance to Republicans outside of the state.

For the most part, Democrats in Washington have stayed out of People Not Politicians’ signature gathering campaign. But Democratic-aligned dark money groups have stepped in to contribute over $1.25 million to People Not Politicians, including a $500,000 contribution from American Opportunity Action, a newly-created left-leaning nonprofit that is also supporting a ballot measure campaign in Michigan to block a rewriting of the state’s constitution.

The committee also received $250,000 from former Rep. Cori Bush, the Missouri progressive who was first elected in 2020 but lost a primary in her St. Louis-area district last year. Bush is running for Congress again in the same seat, which would be largely unaffected by Missouri’s new map.

That level of fundraising from both parties is striking for a ballot measure fight in a state with a long history of referendum battles. Benjamin Singer — who has worked on different referendum committees in Missouri since 2018, and is the campaign director for a group seeking to put a constitutional amendment in front of voters to strengthen the state’s referendum laws — said he’s never seen a ballot measure fight with as much money coming in for both sides of the issue.

“They haven’t dominated with the big money, because they haven’t needed to,” he said.

Some opponents are seeking to impede Democrats’ signature collecting through questionable tactics. The Kansas City Star obtained a copy of a contract offering a canvasser for People Not Politicians $5,000 to stop collecting signatures. The paper could not identify the source of the contract, which POLITICO has not independently verified.

And Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, a Republican, has sought to use Trump’s aggressive anti-immigration moves to target a firm working on signature collection for People Not Politicians that she accused of employing “illegal aliens.”

In a pair of social media statements, Hanaway said her office is investigating the firm, Advanced Micro Targeting, and said she’s contacted ICE about the situation. Advanced Micro Targeting has denied Hanaway’s claims.

Hanaway is also fighting against a potential referendum in the courtroom — she filed a federal lawsuit asking a judge to declare that a referendum to block the legislature’s new maps violates both the U.S. Constitution and Missouri’s Constitution, leaning on principles of the “independent state legislature” theory that the Supreme Court largely rejected in the Moore v. Harper case in 2023.

In a statement, Hanaway said “Missouri will not allow out-of-state political groups to silence the voices of our citizens or override our state’s constitutional process. The Missouri Attorney General’s Office will defend the authority of Missouri’s elected representatives at every turn.”

Zachary Bluestone, a Trump-appointed judge assigned to the case, said he’ll decide whether to block the referendum ahead of the Dec. 11 deadline to submit signatures.

The federal case is one of at least seven lawsuits filed over the new maps or the potential referendum. Among those is a case brought to a Missouri state court by the ACLU, which has partnered with People Not Politicians, seeking to nullify the new congressional districts on the grounds that mid-decade redistricting violates a clause in the state’s constitution.

People Not Politicians is separately suing Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins for his handling of referendum procedure, including authoring language for the potential ballot measure that frames the old maps with six GOP-leaning seats as “gerrymandered,” and the new district lines with seven GOP-leaning seats as being a “more compact” map that “better reflects statewide voting patterns.”

“What’s going on in Missouri is an example of constitutional hardball,” said Travis Crum, a professor at Washington University Law School in St. Louis who specializes in election law.

And even if the ballot referendum goes in front of voters, it isn’t a guarantee the map will be blocked for 2026. The plethora of redistricting-related court cases in Missouri are being adjudicated in hearings and rulings that will likely occur before the end of January — giving state election officials enough time to schedule a potential ballot measure election next year, operatives and court watchers said.

“I just think the noise has peaked or will be peaking between now and mid-January,” Baker, the GOP consultant, said.

A version of this article first appeared in POLITICO Pro’s Morning Score. Want to receive the newsletter every weekday? Subscribe to POLITICO Pro. You’ll also receive daily policy news and other intelligence you need to act on the day’s biggest stories.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report misstated GOP strategist Aaron Baker’s surname.

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