Weeks 22 and 23 and 24 and 25 and 26: Feeling stuck? Me, too.

August 5, 2025

by Marybeth O’Mara

First off, apologies for failing to produce a newsletter these last few weeks. As we have approached and passed the six-month mark of this administration, I have been grappling with the transition from occasional and spontaneous resistance to living with this for the next few years—at least. It seems impossible—but no less urgent—to settle in and figure out how to stay engaged and aware without burning out in exhaustion or despair. What’s got me up at night?

The Supreme Court

I have been fascinated with the Supreme Court since I took a series of 3 classes in college that focused on personal liberties and the first amendment, as defined by Supreme Court cases. My professor was the head of the North Shore chapter of the ACLU and a representative to Illinois’ ACLU board. It was in these classes that I became aware of the ACLU, started noticing SCOTUS decisions in the news, and tuned into nominations to the Court and the confirmation hearings for those nominees. I’ve read several books about the court, starting with Bob Woodward’s The Brethren, right after college, and proceeding to Madiba K. Dennie’s The Originalism Trap, and Elie Mystal’s Allow Me to Retort. I am currently waitlisted for Leah Litman’s Lawless and Steve Vladek’s The Shadow Docket, and I listen to several podcasts that focus on legal and court issues.

The Supreme Court today is not recognizable to me. The increased dependence on the shadow docket and the willingness to overthrow precedents based on “unconventional” understandings of precedent and procedure have led to a series of rulings over the past few years that have led Trump to believe and act as if he is a virtual monarch who cannot be checked by the courts, especially any lower district courts, and for SCOTUS decisions to validate that belief. According to recent news reports and analysis, nearly three quarters of the cases filed at the lower-court level (district and appeals courts) were decided AGAINST the Trump administration (or at least the policies or actions were stayed by lower courts pending advancement to an appeals court). Nearly all of these decisions were appealed by the administration to either a higher court of appeals or directly to the Supreme Court. Of the nineteen emergency appeals accepted by the Supreme Court on its shadow docket, seventeen of them were decided in the Trump administration’s favor, even after the administration deliberately defied lower court rulings. Most of these shadow docket cases will be heard at the Supreme Court in the future, some as soon as this fall, but in the meantime, the administration is permitted to carry on with actions that lower courts, based on a thorough hearing of the facts and the law, decided to stop! Although it is possible that some of these cases will not go the way the Trump admin wants in the long run, they can continue doing work defying individual liberties, dismantling foreign aid programs, and shredding the social safety net. These programs and policies have taken generations to conceptualize and implement and some of them are likely already too damaged to rebuild effectively, even if the courts rule against the Trump admin in the long run.

Given the composition of the current court, and its deference to Trump and his administration, I do not think we can count on the Supreme Court to save democracy.

Authoritarianism

Beyond the Supreme Court, this administration is doing its best to a) make administrative and judicial appointments that would have been unseemly and impossible in any other administration (even earlier in THIS administration—remember Matt Gaetz and Ed Martin? Now we have Senate confirmations for Jeannine Pirro and Emil Bove.); and b) conduct systematic attacks on all of the institutions we have considered independent—journalism and media, health care, universities, cities and states, and many more. The rapid capitulation of universities including Columbia and Penn to “anti-DEI” initiatives, the announcements by almost all Chicago-based university-affiliated hospitals that they are ceasing gender-affirming care for trans-gendered minors, the announcement by PBS that the public television network we have all grown up with and cherished is “winding down” after facing financial disaster in the latest budget bill, the firing of Stephen Colbert as an apparent quid pro quo for administration approval for a CBS merger—these are all signs that the institutions we thought were strongly FOR Independence and public welfare might...not be.

The use of resentment and revenge as the shaper of public policy, the midnight crafting of executive orders, the desire to avoid accountability from voters by eroding voting rights, the stripping of rights and humanity from marginalized groups in order to lay the groundwork for stripping more rights and dignity from most of us—it is hard to see these patterns as they play out with so little pushback from elected officials who are ceding their constitutional authority.

Things happen with such speed and intensity, it is tough to stay focused on anything that happened in the recent past. This is what Trump is counting on by creating distractions from the Epstein files—trying to push them out of the way while Speaker Mike Johnson keeps the House of Representatives on break. Do you remember how upset you were when Trump accepted a nearly billion-dollar jet from Qatar for his personal use after his presidency? What about the ripping out of Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden from the White House?

In her interview on Colbert’s show the other night, Kamala Harris said that she has been surprised by the depth and speed of the institutional capitulation to the demands and whims of Pres. Trump. The targeting of specific institutions and facilities was telegraphed quite clearly in Project 2025, but we (or at least I) did not believe it could be as fast and complete as it seems today. Harris also reminded us that we have the capacity for both resistance and joy in the face of this hardship, but, in my experience, it can be more tiring and physically challenging to hang onto the good and not give into despair.

Wealth

I am increasingly convinced that humans should not have great wealth. I am not talking about the kind of wealth that one acquires by starting a successful mid-sized business and keeping it going for a couple of generations. I am talking billionaires. The process of becoming (outrageously? obscenely?) wealthy seems to change something fundamentally human in us. We have watched it happen in real life with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, as earlier generations did with the robber barons of the 19th Century—Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, etc.

I recently read Careless People, a memoir by Sarah Sarah Wynn-Williams of her time working at Facebook, trying to turn her idealistic impulses into company policy, as she came to terms with the corrupting influence of power and wealth on Zuckerberg and his cronies.

We have messed around with tax policy, especially trickle-down theory, for forty-plus years. During this time, the wealth gap has grown to the largest disparity since the late 1920’s-just before the Great Depression. In the 1960’s, under LBJ’s Great Society, government policy shifted to expanding the New Deal social safety net by creating Medicare and Medicaid, new forms of housing and income assistance, expansion of voting rights, and much more. That was when the government developed a poverty threshold to determine eligibility and measure effectiveness of assistance programs. Today, some experts are proposing the development of an Extreme Wealth Line (EWL) to use statistics and government tools to develop policy to help remediate the harms of excess wealth controlled by a few. For more information, explore here. It feels like it’s time for some new ideas—the Industrialization of the late 1800’s led to the rise of the Robber Barons and, eventually, the rise of government responses designed to level the playing field a little, including the Federal Income Tax.

What are you reading, watching, or doing to energize and refresh yourself? I just finished “Careless People” and am deep into Eve Ewing’s “Original Sins.” I’m traveling to visit out-of-town family this month, and trying to organize some household storage.

Have a good week—and steer clear of the Canadian wildfire smoke that is still affecting Chicago!