The Dictatorship
This governor’s demand for a campus Charlie Kirk statue is a shameful power play
“We’re going to put a challenge out to the LSU [Louisiana State University] Board of Supervisors to find a place to put a statue of Charlie Kirk to defend the freedom of speech on college campuses,” Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said in a video posted to social media last week.
A monument to Kirk — who was assassinated while speaking at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10 — on the campus where he was wrongly killed could be seen as a tribute to the importance of free speech, but the governor’s push to have a statue installed at a university where Kirk never studied and in a state where he never lived is a blatant play for attention by a politician with a plummeting approval rating. The move also doubles as a textbook illustration of the way obnoxious monuments, such as the ones honoring Confederate leaders, ended up in some places those leaders never set foot and, in some places, where no Civil War battles were fought.
Those monuments weren’t necessarily meant to honor the history of a place, but to show who was in charge of a place.
Those monuments — all of them built after Reconstruction — weren’t necessarily meant to honor the history of a place, but to show who was in charge of a place. An 1884 editorial in the New Orleans Daily Picayune voiced support for the dedication of a monument to Robert E. Lee, defended secession as honorable and said the statue was meant to “show to all coming ages that with us, at least, there dwells no sense of guilt.”
You can trust that the people who live in Washington, D.C., would never choose to have a statue of a Confederate general in that city. But a statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike that was toppled in 2020 during protests after the murder of George Floyd was put up again last week because President Donald Trump and his administration want it to be there. Erecting such a statue where people don’t want it is an attempted display of dominance from Trump.
According to LSU’s student newspaper, university officials declined to comment on Landry’s video. It’s unclear what percentage of LSU students would want a Kirk statue, but because Kirk often sounded like a neo-Confederate himself — defending Confederate monumentsarguing that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a mistakedisparaging Martin Luther King Jr.openly questioning the intellect of prominent Black women whose politics he hated — any LSU statue of Kirk would be built over the objection of a significant proportion of the LSU community.
LSU women’s basketball star Flau’jae Johnson would be among the likely objectors. The championship-winning guard initially responded to Landry’s video with four question marks. Minutes later, referring to Kirk, she wrote, “For the sake of clarity, if you align yourself with or endorse his racist rhetoric and discriminatory views toward people of color, I respectfully ask that you utilize the unfollow option at the top right of my profile.”
Gov. Landry says a Kirk statue would be in celebration of free speech. No. It would be Landry’s celebration of Kirk and what he said, not a monument to free speech in general.
Kirk, after all, led a group that policed the speech of professors it didn’t like, and many of those professors reported being harassed in response to their names being included on Turning Point USA’s “Professor Watchlist.” We also have good reason to be skeptical of Landry’s professed free speech concerns because when he was Louisiana’s attorney general, he got so worked up at an LSU professor who referred to one of Landry’s assistants as a “flunky,” that he demanded that LSU punish him.
It would be Landry’s celebration of Kirk and what he said, not a monument to free speech in general.
Landry also sued — that’s right, sued — a newspaper reporter who filed a public records request as she was pursuing a story about sexual harassment allegations made against an employee in Landry’s office. (The lawsuit, which Landry lostwas intended to stop the reporter from getting the records she sought.)
Moreover, a right-wing politician such as Landry building a monument to a hyperpartisan political figure — after the right has spent more than a decade decrying what it claimed was unjust left-wing politicization on campus — would not just be hypocritical, it would be cynically so. And, given the outrage that would be sure to come, building it would be a way to show those students that they’re not in control.
If you watched this decade’s fight over Confederate monuments, you were likely struck struck by the number of people who felt the need to defend the figures depicted by the monuments recommended for removal. You were probably also struck by their need to create fictional accounts — e.g., traitors who were honorable, slave owners who hated slavery — when the facts said otherwise.
People made those arguments because they believe that monuments tell a story about the people they depict. But as Trump showed us this week, and as Landry is attempting to show us now, monuments tell us whole lot more about the power and politics of the people who put them up.
Jarvis DeBerry is an opinion editor for BLN Daily. He was previously editor-in-chief at the Louisiana Illuminator and a columnist and deputy opinion editor at The Times-Picayune.
Over the weekend, less than two weeks after Iran and the United States signed a memorandum of understanding to end hostilities, the countries exchanged multiple attacks. Iran fired at a ship crossing the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. shot at Iranian missile and drone sites, then both sides launched more strikes while claiming retaliation for the other violating the ceasefire. A meeting between the two countries was called offthough the White House now says there will be new meetings in Qatar.
This isn’t a return to full-scale war, but it isn’t peace either. It is a new phase in the conflict: the fight to control Hormuz. The United States already lost the fight Trump started; it failed to achieve his declared goal of the Iranian regime’s unconditional surrender, or, barring that, Tehran’s acceptance of stringent nuclear restrictions. Now the conflict is over whether Iran controls Hormuz and can charge fees, or if the U.S. can restore the pre-war status quo, with ships transiting freely.
The U.S.-accepted language doesn’t officially acknowledge Iranian control of Hormuz, but, if anything, it favors Tehran’s interpretation.
The two sides are making incompatible claims about the MOU’s contents. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that under the agreement, Iran has sole responsibility for the strait. Meanwhile, the Trump administration asserts that the U.S. will not allow Iran to “illegally control an international waterway.”
The MOU itself is ambiguous enough to allow for either interpretation. But that’s the problem: this core issue was never worked out. The MOU was essentially a negotiated agreement to negotiate an agreement, punting all major points of contention to future talks.
Article 5 of the MOU says “the traffic of commercial vessels will immediately start” and “Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage” but doesn’t say if those arrangements can include tolls. Beyond that, all the MOU does is require Iran to talk with Oman “to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz” while recognizing “the sovereign rights of coastal states.”
The U.S.-accepted language doesn’t officially acknowledge Iranian control of Hormuz, but, if anything, it favors Tehran’s interpretation. Professional diplomats would have demanded more specifics, including on the limits of coastal sovereignty over what has long been treated as an international waterway. But the U.S. negotiating team was led by an inexperienced vice president (JD Vance), the president’s son-in-law (Jared Kushner), and a real estate investor (Steve Witkoff). Perhaps they thought they could use the ambiguity to their advantage, or that any language was worth getting something they could call a deal. Whatever their logic, agreeing to this text set up the fight for Hormuz.
Iran is treating control of Hormuz as a spoil of a successful defensive war. After surviving the initial U.S.-Israeli assault and demonstrating that its military can block Hormuz despite U.S. efforts to prevent it, the Iranian government has consistently asserted that it will control the strait. Last month, Iran set up something called the Persian Gulf Strait Authority and told ships they’ll have to register and sign up for a mandatory insurance policy (which sounds like a euphemism for tolls).
Neither side looks interested in reigniting the high-intensity warfare that ended with a provisional ceasefire on April 8. But they’re still asserting incompatible claims over the strait.
Meanwhile, the United States is acting as if it’s still the predominant military force in the Persian Gulf, as if the war didn’t alter the regional power structure. Trump has been declaring Hormuz totally open and freeand lying that Iran agreed to it. Gulf Arab states are saying they won’t pay tolls. After the signing of the MOU, a stream of ships began exiting the Gulf via a route hugging Omanknown to be clear of Iranian mines. But the vessels are still within easy range for Iranian missiles and drones, as shown by the Iranian attack on a merchant vessel Thursday that kicked off the weekend’s exchanges of fire.
If ships can use this route without registering with the Iranian government, it will establish a corridor through Hormuz outside Iran’s control. That would effectively surrender Iran’s claims to sovereignty over the strait and erase most of Iran’s longer-term geopolitical and economic gains from the war, making this a put-up-or-shut-up moment for the Iranian regime and especially its Revolutionary Guard. That points towards further escalation.
Neither side looks interested in reigniting the high-intensity warfare that ended with a provisional ceasefire on April 8. But they’re still asserting incompatible claims over the strait, so there will likely be further military exchanges.
Maybe Iran re-establishes enough of a threat, including over the Oman corridor, that ships won’t risk transit. But that would undo the MOU, which in practical terms means economic benefits for Iran in exchange for allowing ships in and out of Hormuz. Iran is already enjoying the removal of the naval blockade the U.S. imposed in April and waivers for U.S. sanctions, thereby facilitating the sale of Iranian oil. They want other economic benefits the MOU promises, but they likely want the strategic and economic benefits of controlling Hormuz more.
And time is on Iran’s side. Disrupted shipping in the Gulf harms the global economy, and the bigger the economic damage, the more that the U.S. attacking Iran becomes a cautionary tale. For now, countries and companies are covering the oil shortfall by drawing down reserves, but reserves are running out.
Fear of a big energy market disruption, when daily oil demand increasingly exceeds available supply, was a main reason Trump surrendered to Iran in the first place. At the G7 summit on June 17, Trump said“We run out of reserves at about four weeks.” That would put the deadline in mid-July.
Maybe it’s more like August or September, but whatever the deadline, big economic problems will come if oil reserves run out and ships from the Gulf aren’t on the way bringing more. The markets did react positively when shipping began to pick up after the MOU, with oil futures dropping to around pre-war levels. But that won’t last if conditions stagnate or worsen.
Either way, Trump messed up this war so badly that the U.S. aim now is just to get back to something like the pre-war status quo. And at this point, even that looks unachievable.
Nicholas Grossman is a political science professor at the University of Illinois, editor of Arc Digital and the author of “Drones and Terrorism.”
The Supreme Court has handed President Donald Trump precious few losses over its last two terms. On Monday, though, five justices voted to block the Republican National Committee’s efforts to limit the window for counting absentee ballots in federal elections. It’s a commonsense decision, something that has been exceedingly rare on the court in recent years, that allows states to count ballots postmarked by Election Day but received afterward. But common sense hasn’t stopped Trump’s outlandish demands before, so it’s hard to see that changing now.
Trump has jumped on and off the vote-by-mail train over the years since his 2020 presidential election loss
Trump has jumped on and off the vote-by-mail train over the years since his 2020 presidential election loss, at times being okay with the method and at others calling it rampant with (nonexistent) fraud. He’s revived those complaints in the aftermath of California’s most recent elections earlier this month. The state has voted almost entirely by mail in recent years, with over 80% of ballots coming in via post.
The surge of ballots being processed at California post offices on Election Day means that it can take days, or weeks, for all of them to come in and be properly tallied. As a result, there can often be phantom results based on the tabulations of in-person ballots that are then quickly eaten away as more mail-in votes are counted. We saw as much during the 2020 presidential race — and despite warnings that this would be the case, the “red mirage” that eventually flipped into a Trump loss became a major rage point for Trump.
Pennsylvania Republicans attempted to challenge ballots that came in after Election Day in 2020, but a deadlocked Supreme Court ultimately allowed those votes to be counted. The Republican National Committee opted to try again in 2024, this time joining the Mississippi State GOP in challenging its state’s law providing a five-day grace period for ballots postmarked on Election Day to be considered valid. In doing so, the Republican plaintiffs claimed, Mississippi ignored federal laws that set Election Day as the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, not whenever the ballots were received.
Among the arguments in the RNC’s initial lawsuit also brought was that because more Democrats vote by mail than Republicans, it offers them an unfair advantage: “For example, according to the MIT Election Lab, 46% of Democratic voters in the 2022 General Election mailed in their ballots, compared to only 27% of Republicans… That means the late-arriving mail-in ballots that are counted for five additional days disproportionately break for Democrats.”
It’s a novel claim, especially when you consider it is primarily Trump’s fault that mail-in balloting is now considered a partisan issue.
While the deeply conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals saw merit to the GOP’s arguments, Justice Amy Coney Barrett did not. She authored the majority opinion overturning the 5th Circuit’s decision, finding along with four of her fellow justices that federal law as written doesn’t override states’ constitutional role in running elections. Not content to break out the Webster’s dictionary definition of “election” — “[t]he act of choosing a person to fill an office,” for the record — Barrett hammered home that just because everyone voted in person at one point in U.S. history does not magically make federal law say that all votes must be received and counted before Election Day ends.
Barrett’s decision not only should have been a foregone conclusion, but it should also silence any future challenges to states’ ability to set a grace period for ballots received after Election Day. And yet we know that’s not the case with Trump, who has already used it to push for the SAVE America Acta bill that would make it harder for many Americans to register to vote and cast their ballots. As the president put it on social mediahe believes that there should be “NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS (EXCEPT FOR ILLNESS, DISABILITY, MILITARY DEPLOYMENT, OR TRAVEL!)”
It’s ironic, though, that the court’s decision did in its own way prove why the SAVE America Act is required for Trump to get his way on mail-in voting.
It’s ironic, though, that the court’s decision did in its own way prove why the SAVE America Act is required for Trump to get his way on mail-in voting. The president signed an executive order in March attempting to place new restrictions on absentee voting unilaterally, once again attempting to snipe authority over elections from the states. If implemented, the Postal Service would be required to develop a rule allowing it to check absentee ballots against a “state citizenship list” and discard any that it found lacking. A federal judge has already blocked that orderagreeing with plaintiffs that “the Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling helped reaffirm that states still possess the full ability to determine their electoral processes so long as they fit within federal law. It would require an act of Congress to change what those laws say, no matter how much Trump may wish otherwise — and he does clearly wish otherwise. But while his proposed USPS workaround is still a concern, the idea that he possesses a power over elections beyond what has been afforded to him by Congress seems unlikely to go over well with these justices.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.
The Dictatorship
Supreme Court to rule on birthright citizenship, campaign finance and transgender athletes
The Supreme Court on Tuesday is set to hand down its final opinions in cases argued this term, with three big matters left: birthright citizenship, campaign finance and bans on transgender athletes.
Announcements in the trio of closely watched issues will cap a high court term that has already featured several significant rulings on tariffs, voting rights, immigrationand more.
The Republican-appointed court majority, which includes three justices appointed by Trump, has broadly empowered the president in his second term in office but hasn’t always sided with him. Monday’s 5-4 ruling on mail-in ballotsauthored by Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett, was one of the latest examples.
The president himself has said he expects the birthright citizenship case to join his short list of big losses, but as always, we won’t know the answer until the opinion comes. Here’s a recap of the cases in which we expect rulings when the justices take the bench Tuesday morning in Washington, D.C.
Birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara
When Trump returned to the White House last year, he signed an executive orderthat purports to end automatic citizenship for babies born in this country. The order hasn’t taken effect because it’s “blatantly unconstitutional,” as one of the several judges who ruled against Trump in the lower courts observed.
Now, the Supreme Court must decide whether to maintain the status quo or to green-light one of the president’s most lawless moves yet.
Campaign finance in NRSC v. FEC
The court is considering whether to loosen campaign finance restrictions further, in a GOP challengeto limits on political parties’ coordination with candidates on campaign spending. The case was brought by Vice President JD Vancewhen he was a Senate candidate, along with national senatorial and congressional committees of the Republican Party and former Ohio GOP Rep. Steve Chabot.
Their appeal questions the precedent that upheld those limits in 2001by a 5-4 vote. They calledit a “5-4 aberration” that was “plainly wrong the day it was decided.” The only justice still on the court from that 2001 case is Clarence Thomaswho dissented at the time. The current majority is more aligned with his view.
Transgender athletes in West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox
The court is also set to rule on whether states can ban transgender women and girls from competing in women’s and girls’ sports. There are two separate cases, regarding bans in Idaho and West Virginia, respectively. The court seemed likelyto rule against the athletes on the issue that affects similar laws in more than half the states in the country.
Last term, the majority upheld a ban on gender-affirming care for minors in the Skrmetti case. Earlier this term, the majority sided with California parentswho were against school policies to prevent outing transgender students.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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