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They’ve built plenty of prisons….the fascists have been studying us. The ultra-wealthy worldwide are comfortably united, not along national boundaries, but along exploitative ones. And let me tell you, they have our number. They aren’t scared by people in the street. It doesn’t do what it used to do. Erica Chenoweth, whose research shaped a generation of activist strategy, has found that the success rate of mass nonviolent movements has fallen from roughly half to about a third, and she traces the drop to authoritarian regimes learning from one another, sharing tactics, and training their police and soldiers to hold the line before a protest can grow. We too must evolve.

…snip…

…intelligence agencies…study what works. They gather information. They identify vulnerabilities. They apply pressure through coordinated operations.

…snip…

An operative understands exactly how power works in their specific context. They have the skills to independently gather intelligence and act effectively. An operative can make their target organization, or individual, feel the consequences of their choices every single day.

I want to be completely clear. I don’t advocate for violence. Not because I have a moral problem with violence. I don’t advocate for violence because the evidence unequivocally shows it is ineffective against authoritarian movements. If it worked I’d encourage it. It doesn’t. So I don’t. What works is making power too costly to exercise. What works is making them think about you when they’re trying to fall asleep.

They’ve built plenty of prisons….the fascists have been studying us. The ultra-wealthy worldwide are comfortably united, not along national boundaries, but along exploitative ones. And let me tell you, they have our number. They aren’t scared by people in the street. It doesn’t do what it used to do. Erica Chenoweth, whose research shaped a generation of activist strategy, has found that the success rate of mass nonviolent movements has fallen from roughly half to about a third, and she traces the drop to authoritarian regimes learning from one another, sharing tactics, and training their police and soldiers to hold the line before a protest can grow. We too must evolve.

…snip…

…intelligence agencies…study what works. They gather information. They identify vulnerabilities. They apply pressure through coordinated operations.

…snip…

An operative understands exactly how power works in their specific context. They have the skills to independently gather intelligence and act effectively. An operative can make their target organization, or individual, feel the consequences of their choices every single day.

I want to be completely clear. I don’t advocate for violence. Not because I have a moral problem with violence. I don’t advocate for violence because the evidence unequivocally shows it is ineffective against authoritarian movements. If it worked I’d encourage it. It doesn’t. So I don’t. What works is making power too costly to exercise. What works is making them think about you when they’re trying to fall asleep.

The Federalist Society spent forty years building a captured federal judiciary, and we are now living inside the result. The doctrine they built it around has a name, unitary executive theory, and the doctrine has a method. The method is to read every Democratic exercise of power narrowly and every Republican exercise of power broadly, until the Constitution comes to mean whatever the conservative legal movement requires it to mean on any given Tuesday. This piece does three things. It explains what unitary executive theory actually claims and where the doctrine came from. It shows how the same justices who built the doctrine apply it selectively along partisan lines, using the student loan ruling and the presidential immunity ruling as the central exhibits. And it makes the case that membership in the Federalist Society or endorsement of unitary executive theory should disqualify a judge from federal office, with impeachment and removal as the constitutional mechanism the framers built for exactly this situation.

Let’s start with the doctrine. Unitary executive theory says the president alone controls the entire executive branch of the federal government. Every official who enforces federal law, from cabinet secretaries down to line prosecutors and agency inspectors, works under presidential command. The president can hire them, fire them, override their decisions, and direct their actions. No part of the executive branch operates independently of the president’s will. The theory rests on the opening line of Article II, which vests “the executive Power” in a president, and proponents read that grant as complete. If executive power belongs to the president, the argument goes, then anyone exercising executive power must answer to the president, and Congress cannot insulate executive officials from presidential control.

Unitary executive theory (UET) is a forty years old legal theory, attached to “originalism, although the Constitution it claims to interpret is nearly two hundred and fifty years old. UET was invented in the Reagan administration, by lawyers who needed a constitutional argument that would expand presidential power in directions the conservative movement wanted it expanded. Reagan took office in 1981 and the Federalist Society launched the following year at Yale and the University of Chicago, founded by law students who would become the architects of the project, including Steven Calabresi, who would later coauthor the foundational law review articles claiming unitary executive theory as the framers’ original design. Edwin Meese became Attorney General in 1985 and turned the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel into a workshop for the new doctrine, producing the originalist briefs and internal memoranda that would become the movement’s intellectual scaffolding. Antonin Scalia joined the Court in 1986 and wrote the founding dissent of the project two years later in Morrison v. Olson, arguing the independent counsel statute violated the Constitution by placing an executive officer outside presidential control. That dissent became scripture, taught in Federalist Society reading groups and cited in law review articles as the suppressed truth about Article II.

The historical claim was always thin. The first Congress, sitting with many of the same people who wrote the Constitution, created executive offices with mixed structures and debated removal at length without treating presidential control as absolute. Alexander Hamilton, the framer most associated with executive powers, wrote in Federalist 77 that the Senate’s advice and consent role extended to removal, a position the strong unitary theory cannot accommodate. The Comptroller of the Treasury, established in 1789, operated with explicit independence from presidential direction. Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, decided in 1935, upheld for-cause removal protections for Federal Trade Commission commissioners and stood as settled law for nearly ninety years. Constitutional scholars including Jed Shugerman, Jane Manners, and Lev Menand have documented in recent work how thin the originalist case becomes when the sources receive honest treatment. The theory’s proponents knew this. They built the doctrine anyway, because the doctrine was useful, and they spent four decades credentialing the lawyers who would become the judges who would convert a Reagan-era policy preference into binding constitutional law.

The Senate has it on record. The press doesn’t. Here is the document, the history, and the gap between them.

STATEMENT FROM MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS; Congressional Record Vol. 172, No. 76 (Senate - April 30, 2026)
https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/volume-172/issue-76/senate-section/article/S2162-1

Within days of the Supreme Court’s decision Wednesday to gut the Voting Rights Act (VRA), its devastating effects are already unfolding— throwing voting rights cases across the country into chaos as courts pause proceedings and GOP state officials rush to shut down claims and redraw maps.

The immediate wave of filings and court orders offers a stark preview of what’s to come as the heart of the VRA becomes almost impossible to enforce and the consequences unravel ahead of the 2026 elections.

Snip…

A day after the decision, U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) called on the Justice Department to review congressional maps across the country and identify districts “improperly drawn using race,” urging officials to reopen Section 2 cases and issue new guidance reflecting the court’s ruling.

“Senator — we are ON IT!” Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon wrote in response.

The exchange signals that a law long used to protect minority voters could now be deployed to target the very districts created to ensure those voters have a voice.