“There are lots of people who say, ‘Nimby, nimby, nimby,’ and the people who say, ‘Nimby, nimby, nimby,’ they don’t live right next door to it.”

That’s what one retiree told Reveal’s Jonathan Jones when he traveled to upstate New York to find out why so many people in the rural town of Copake are fighting to stop a massive solar energy project from being built.

Jonathan’s story, a version of which first aired in January, sheds light on one of the key reasons why it’s so difficult to build the green energy infrastructure we need to transition away from fossil fuels—even in a deep-blue state. “We are not climate deniers, nor are we NIMBYists,” another resident told Jonathan. “We believe in the need for renewable energy, and we just want to have a say in how it’s done so that it’s reasonable and is consonant with the kind of community that we have and what we want.”

The result: The solar project—which is supposed to supply enough renewable power for 15,000 households—has been stalled for years.

The situation in Copake is far from unique. Once you’ve listened to the Reveal podcast, I also recommend reading Henry Carnell’s recent Mother Jones story about the decade-long legal morass that has delayed the completion of a transmission line that’s supposed to deliver power from 161 midwestern wind and solar projects.

I’ve been thinking about Chin Rodger’s words a lot lately. Chin is the subject of Mark Follman’s wrenching Mother Jones cover story about the massacre that her son, Elliot, perpetrated in the California college town of Isla Vista in 2014. Chin opened up to Mark about the depths of her grief and sorrow after the mass shooting and the almost unimaginable strength she’s shown in the aftermath. As Mark writes, Chin made the “grueling choice” to reconstruct her son’s path to horrific violence and suicide, so that she can help threat assessment experts understand what went wrong and how to avert future tragedies.

I had the privilege of editing Mark’s magazine story, so I’ve read Chin’s words over and over these past few months. They are haunting and deeply moving every time. But actually hearing Chin say them is something else entirely. The pain, the resilience, the determination to make a real difference for other children and parents—it all comes through so powerfully in a new audio investigation from our colleagues at ReveaI.

Please give it a listen. You can hear Chin speaking out publicly for the first time about the shooting and about her determination to help prevent future violence. You can hear about the trove of new evidence Mark found, shedding light on what drove Elliot to do what he did. And you can hear Mark’s interviews with the threat assessment practitioners who are using Chin’s insights in their efforts to reach troubled people before they harm themselves or others.

“The nightmare that I’m living, that the victims and the families are living, these nightmares are real, and these nightmares could be your reality any day,” Chin warns. “So we must work harder in coming together and try and prevent these horrific acts from happening again and again.”

If you or someone you care about may be at risk of harming yourself or others, call or text 988, or go to 988lifeline.org.

But another aspect of the ruling has gotten less attention: what it says about the conduct of prosecutors and about the state of the criminal justice system as a whole. And what it says isn’t good—especially for defendants who don’t have the same resources that Donald Trump does. As journalists Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman note in their recently released book Find Me the Votes, Willis ran for office in 2020 as a tough-on-crime prosecutor. Like other DAs across the country, she has faced criticism from progressives and civil libertarians over her law-and-order approach in cases where the accused are far more disadvantaged than the former president. It’s hard to imagine that every criminal defendant in Georgia will enjoy the same opportunity Trump did to interrogate the actions of prosecutors.

Trump’s opportunity to confront the DA’s office was extensive, indeed. After days of hearings prying into the personal and professional lives of Willis and her colleagues, McAfee rejected the defendants’ argument that the DA’s romantic relationship with Nathan Wade—the outside attorney she’d hired to investigate and prosecute the case—amounted to an “actual conflict of interest” under which Willis had supposedly benefited financially. Even so, McAfee found that there was still a “significant appearance of impropriety” that could only be remedied if either Willis—and with her the entire Fulton DA’s office—or Wade, stepped aside. Wade promptly resigned, which means the case will proceed in Fulton County rather than entering a protracted legal limbo.

McAfee was scathing. He wrote that while the defense had failed to prove that Wade and Willis had been romantically involved before Wade’s hiring, “the District Attorney chose to continue supervising and paying Wade while maintaining such a relationship.” McAfee opined that Wade’s “patently unpersuasive explanation” for inaccurate statements he had made in his own divorce case “indicates a willingness on his part to wrongly conceal his relationship with the District Attorney.” All this could leave Georgians to “reasonably think that the District Attorney is not exercising her independent professional judgment totally free of any compromising influences” were Wade to continue on the prosecution team, the judge found.

“An odor of mendacity remains,” wrote McAfee, prompting “reasonable questions” about whether Willis and Wade “testified untruthfully about the timing of their relationship.” 

McAfee’s order, the judge wrote, “is by no means an indication that the Court condones this tremendous lapse in judgment or the unprofessional manner” of Willis’ testimony during a hearing on the matter. Georgia law, he explained, simply did not “permit the finding of an actual conflict for simply making bad choices—even repeatedly.” The judge went on to say that televised remarks Willis had recently made about the case were “legally improper,” and he threatened to bar prosecutors from further discussing the case in public.

And while McAfee declined to throw out the case or disqualify Willis from prosecuting it, he suggested that there are other entities—”such as the General Assembly, the Georgia State Ethics Commission, the State Bar of Georgia, the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, or the voters of Fulton County”—that could hold the DA accountable.

On a moral level, Trump is obviously guilty of attempting to pull off a coup. His actions tore the nation apart and destroyed people’s lives. He may well be guilty legally, as well. But he is entitled to a fair trial and, with democracy on the line, it’s good that defense attorneys, judges, and other officials are closely scrutinizing the DA’s actions. Yet a lot of people less powerful than Trump are prosecuted in Fulton County, too. Rightly or wrongly, their liberty is in jeopardy, as well. And their cases won’t always receive that same scrutiny.

In pursuing Trump and his cronies, Willis has long maintained that she is treating the former president no differently than any other defendant. In their book, Isikoff and Klaidman recount how Willis persuaded the Fulton County sheriff to subject Trump to a mugshot after his indictment. “If you don’t mugshot him, you’re going to need to explain to our constituents why you mugshot their nephews and not the president of the United States,” she argued. “He needs to be treated like everybody else.”

That equal treatment works both ways. Trump and his well-heeled allies have an army of high-priced lawyers who can protect their rights in the face of prosecutors’ improper conduct. A lot of Willis’ other constituents don’t.

With his massive victory over Nikki Haley in Michigan, Trump has now been victorious in all six states that have held Republican primaries or caucuses so far this year. His Michigan win is especially significant given that the state was a major epicenter of Trump’s failed, and allegedly criminal, efforts to overturn the 2020 election. 

For months, New Hampshire—with its famously independent electorate and its history of upending primary campaigns—had seemed like the best chance for a Republican to stop the MAGA machine. It wasn’t. On Tuesday, Trump defeated his one remaining GOP opponent, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, in the Granite State’s Republican contest, according to media projections.

In many ways, Trump’s continued dominance among New Hampshire’s Republican voters is remarkable. After a second-place finish in Iowa eight years ago, he easily won the 2016 New Hampshire GOP race, setting him on a path to the nomination. But he lost the state’s general elections in both 2016 and 2020. Recent polls suggest that this coming November, Haley would be a far stronger candidate there than Trump in a race against Joe Biden. But none of that seems to matter to the GOP electorate, which once again rallied around the aging, twice-impeached, four-times-indicted former president.

Trump isn’t the nominee yet, but the list of events that could derail his bid is rapidly shrinking. A 2020 rematch, it seems, is likely.

Trump—who in 2020 tried to overturn the general election and illegally hold on to power—is facing four indictments covering a whopping 91 criminal counts, an array of civil suits, and a Supreme Court fight over whether he can even appear on the ballot in some states. But none of that seems to have turned off Iowa Republicans. Instead, they rewarded him for it.

These thinly veiled calls for ethnic cleansing have been widely condemned—both within Israel and by the Biden administration. Some Republicans have also gone on record rejecting the idea. “I don’t think you have to remove Palestinians from Gaza,” GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley told CNN last week. “I think you have to remove Hamas from Gaza.”

Ron DeSantis apparently has a different view. During Wednesday night’s Republican debate, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked the Florida governor whether he would support “the mass-removal of Palestinians from Gaza.” DeSantis’ response was less than clear, but he seemed to suggest that if the Israeli government did decide to remove millions of Palestinians from Gaza, he wouldn’t stand in the way of that egregious human rights violation.

“We’ve got to support Israel in word and in deed, in public and in private, and they’ve got to be able to finish the job,” DeSantis said. “I think to be a good ally, you back them in the decisions that they’re making with respect to Gaza. Look, there’s a lot of pluses and minuses with how you’re doing this. But for us to be sitting in Washington second-guessing them, I don’t think that’s the right way.”

Tapper pressed for clarity. “Do you support the mass-removal of Palestinians from Gaza?” he asked again.

“As president, I am not going to tell them to do that. I think there’s a lot of issues with that,” DeSantis answered. “But if they make the calculation that to avert a second Holocaust, they need to do that—I think some of these Palestinian Arabs, Saudi Arabia should take some. Egypt should take some.”

DeSantis’ claim that he isn’t “going to tell” Israel to commit war crimes is less than reassuring. Many Israeli officials—even officials within Netanyahu’s government—oppose ethnic cleansing for moral reasons, and they would presumably reject such a suggestion from a US president. But other Israeli politicians have criticized calls for “voluntary migration” precisely because they don’t think the United States would ever permit it. “It’s not realistic, and it’s clear that the international community will not accept it…we see the repercussions, we see what happened with the Americans,” one Likud minister told Israel’s Ynet news outlet.

Under increasing pressure to disavow his allies’ demands for Palestinian expulsion, Netanyahu asserted Wednesday that “Israel has no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population.” Another influential Likud lawmaker, Danny Danon, told the Times of Israel that Netanyahu only came around to that position because of American insistence:

“We had a faction meeting a few weeks ago when I asked him about voluntary relocation and he said it’s a good idea and not easy to find countries that would accept Gazans,” Danon confirmed, adding that he understood that Netanyahu’s change of heart was due to American pressure.

“In the last few days, because of the pressure coming from a few countries, he stated that it’s not the position of the government and Israel is not promoting it. [US Secretary of State Antony] Blinken said he got assurances,” the lawmaker said.

And that’s what makes DeSantis’ comments so dangerous. He’s giving a green light to ethnic cleansing.

Update, January 11: This story has been revised to include comments from Netanyahu and Danon.

On Friday, the court agreed to hear the ex-president’s appeal of a recent Colorado ruling that Trump, due to his role in fomenting the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, is prohibited by the 14th Amendment from running for office again. The case—which could impact the presidential election in other states, as well—will likely be one of the most important that SCOTUS has ever considered. The constitutional issues are incredibly complex, and the stakes are as high as they get. The right answer isn’t obvious. Some influential conservative legal scholars have argued that Trump should be legally barred from the ballot; some high-profile liberals have countered that in a democracy, the decision should be left to the voters.

No one knows how the case will come out, and it’s entirely possible that the court will rule overwhelmingly, perhaps even unanimously, to let Trump run for office. But one thing seems reasonably clear: If the Supreme Court does decide to ban Trump from running (or to allow individual states to keep him off their ballots), it will likely be because at least one of the justices Trump appointed votes to do so.

The math is fairly simple. Assuming Clarence Thomas doesn’t recuse himself, it will take five votes to uphold the Colorado decision. Three of those would presumably come from the three Democratic appointees. The two most conservative justices on the court—Thomas and Samuel Alito—are probably the least likely to vote against Trump. So to win, Trump will probably need to convince three of the remaining four jurists, a group that includes Chief Justice John Roberts and the three associate justices that Trump himself put on the court.

Trump’s team is well aware of this dynamic. Appearing on Fox News this week, Trump attorney Alina Habba said, “I think it should be a slam dunk in the Supreme Court. I have faith in them.”

“People like Kavanaugh, who the president fought for, who the president went through hell to get into place, he’ll step up, those people will step up,” she added, “not because they’re pro-Trump, but because they’re pro-law, because they’re pro-fairness. And the law on this is very clear.”

Habba: I think it should be a slam dunk in the supreme court. I have faith in them. You know, people like Kavanaugh, who the president fought for, who the president went through hell to get into place. He'll step up. pic.twitter.com/gQo1h55t6N

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 5, 2024

The “hell” that Trump and Republicans went through to get these justices on the court is well documented. Neil Gorsuch owes his position to unprecedented GOP obstructionism and an unlikely Trump victory in 2016. Trump stayed loyal to Brett Kavanaugh as Kavanaugh denied sexual assault allegations during his confirmation battle. And Amy Coney Barrett was the beneficiary of outlandish Republican hypocrisy when Trump pushed through her appointment after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in the run-up to the 2020 election.

Despite her caveat about these justices being “pro-law” and not “pro-Trump,” it seems pretty clear that Habba was suggesting they owe a favor to the man who gave them their lifetime gigs. But here’s the thing: If the justices do harbor any residual loyalty to Trump, they haven’t shown it in the raft of litigation that has followed the 2020 race. They didn’t protect Trump from the January 6 committee, and they haven’t (so far) insulated him or his allies from prosecution. Not a single one of them, not even Thomas and Alito, voted to overturn Biden’s victory when they had the chance. That’s been true at all levels of the federal judiciary. Over and over, (most) conservative judges have followed the law—protecting legitimate election results, holding January 6 rioters accountable, and declining to help MAGA World rig the 2024 election.

No matter what the Supreme Court does with the Colorado case, millions of Americans will be enraged. Having lived through January 6, I certainly don’t imagine that Trump’s fans would react calmly if the court kicks him off the ballot, depriving Republicans of the opportunity to vote for their party’s clear frontrunner. But if one of Trump’s appointees does cast the deciding vote against the former president, it will be difficult for the rest of the country to question the legitimacy of that ruling.

Rodrigues and Greenblatt based their demands in large part on a public relations “toolkit” in which the national SJP described the October 7 attack as “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.”

“SJP chapters are supporting & praising Hamas terrorism,” Greenblatt wrote after the toolkit became public. “This is unacceptable, dangerous & despicable.” That may be so, but as attorney Greg Lukianoff explains, the document wasn’t evidence of a crime—and it certainly shouldn’t be used by universities to interfere with constitutionally protected speech. “We don’t even think the analysis is particularly hard,” he told me last week during a wide-ranging interview about threats to campus free speech during the Israel-Hamas war.

Lukianoff—the co-author of the new book The Canceling of the American Mind—is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a civil liberties group that for years has battled to protect the free speech rights of college students, staff, and faculty. After Rodrigues ordered the closure of SJP chapters, FIRE wrote its own letter to Florida universities, calling on them to “refuse the State of Florida’s order to violate” students’ rights. To do otherwise, FIRE argued, would represent “unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.” (Disclosure: I’ve donated a small amount of money to FIRE.)

Since we spoke last week, there’s been a bit of hopeful news. According to one key DeSantis ally, two of Florida’s most prominent public universities are “openly disobeying” the order to disband SJP chapters. The schools, according to Politico, cite “lingering legal concerns” for their unwillingness to immediately comply with the governor’s demands.

But elsewhere, the crackdown on campus speech has only accelerated, as Republicans, including DeSantis, demand the deportation of foreign students who they accuse of harboring sympathies for Hamas. On Monday, Brandeis University announced it was shuttering its SJP chapter. “This decision was not made lightly, as Brandeis is dedicated to upholding free speech principles,” the university insisted, according to Jewish Insider. The school went on to explain that the group would “no longer be eligible to receive funding, be permitted to conduct activities on campus, or use the Brandeis name and logo in promoting itself or its activities, including through social media channels.”

Here’s my conversation with Lukianoff, which has been edited for length and clarity.

The DeSantis administration in Florida—

Yes. The DeSantis administration gives us a lot of work.

You demanded that universities refuse to comply with the governor’s order that they decertify Students for Justice in Palestine chapters. Can you tell me why you think what Florida is trying to do is unconstitutional?

We don’t even think the analysis is particularly hard. Essentially, what Florida is claiming is that SJP chapters are materially supporting a terrorist organization. And one of the reasons why you have to look at this in some amount of puzzlement is because if they really had the goods, if they really knew that these students and student groups were funneling material support to Hamas, they would be prosecuted. That’s a felony. And as best we can tell from DeSantis’ own statements, he’s just basing it on some of the rhetoric in SJP’s “toolkit”…If they had real evidence, that would be a very different case. But it’s clear, at least to me, at this point, they don’t have real evidence.

A day after Florida’s letter, the Anti-Defamation League came out with a similar letter, asking for an investigation into whether these groups were “materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization.”

I actually hadn’t seen that letter. And if they produce some kind of, you know, something that indicates probable cause that essentially this might actually be really happening, then I think this becomes quite a different case. But so far, I haven’t seen any real evidence that…actually would undergird that. And I think that’s a very serious charge to make, and you better have some evidence when you make it.

The ADL also said, “If universities do not check the activities of their SJP chapters, they may be violating their Jewish students’ legal rights to be free of harassment and discrimination on campus.” How do you think about balancing whose rights are being protected?

We have come to the defense of Jewish students, we’ve come to defense of SJP, in many, many cases [over the years]. They are some of the least fun cases we’re involved in—anything related to Israel-Palestine—because they’re just so entrenched, and they can be so intense.

You have to take all of these on a case-by-case basis. Given the intensity of what’s going on on campus, I do think schools have an obligation to look into threats, intimidation—incitement is a very hard standard to meet, but that could possibly be there—and claims of discriminatory harassment. In order to make the discriminatory harassment standard not something that swallows freedom of speech, it has to be severe and persistent, targeted harassment. And if schools are following that high standard, we have seen situations in the past that actually do meet it. So this is a situation where schools should definitely be investigating claims of discriminatory harassment and threats. But students deserve due process.

In terms of things that crossed the line, there was a Stanford class where the students allege that the professor had Jewish students self-identify, [separated them from] their stuff…and then called them colonizers and said that [colonizers] were responsible for more people than were killed in the Holocaust. And the analysis there, of course, it’s just simple discrimination. And as far as that professor being punished in that context—if the facts are true, and of course, again, deserves due process—that’s something that you could punish a professor for.

Have you seen ways in which universities have found more appropriate or more constructive ways to counter antisemitism or Islamophobia in recent weeks?

I do think that most schools are kind of struggling at the moment. And I think it’s been an interesting time, because FIRE has always advocated for the “Kalven Report,” which is the 1967 statement by the University of Chicago that the university will restrain itself from commenting on matters of international news, national news—things that don’t directly impact the campus. I used to be a little bit of a skeptic of the Kalven Report…but over the years, I realized that the statements that universities officially make can create a serious problem for academic institutions, which is that academic freedom relies on universities not creating an orthodoxy that essentially there are correct views coming from the top down.

I started right after 9/11 at FIRE. So a lot of my early cases were highly unsympathetic. Literally, the first letter I wrote was for Professor Richard Berthold at the University of New Mexico, who joked in his class that “anyone who can bomb the Pentagon has my vote.” But one thing that is very predictable is anytime academia perceives the threat to free speech or academic freedom coming from their donors, or coming from outside forces, they immediately circle the wagons and rediscover free speech. That’s one of the reasons why I am kind of skeptical of these schools that are issuing these free speech statements.

We like that they’re issuing free speech statements. But the real test, the one that universities consistently fail, is if there’s a call for firing or professor or expelling a student that comes from on campus—they’re much more cowardly in the face of on campus pressures. I hope to be wrong this time around. I hope this really is a change for the better for the speech of all students, but it will take years of good behavior by some of these institutions to begin to convince me.

My first time on Hannity and Colmes on Fox News, we had a case at DePaul University, where people were putting up actual quotes from Ward Churchill that were just really offensive. And they got accused by the university of distributing “propaganda”—like they made up a new offense, and they got torn down, and the students got disciplined. But at the same time, we were defending Ward Churchill’s free speech rights. Hannity and Colmes couldn’t wrap their head around it…They couldn’t get the idea that we weren’t actually on one side—we were on free speech’s side. A perfect microcosm of the culture war.

We’re not seeing the level of case submissions from professors and students getting in trouble like we saw after 9/11. That was much worse in terms of an uptick in case submissions. And we’ve never seen as big an uptick in demands to get professors and students fired or expelled as we saw in 2020 and 2021.

2020, 2021—that had a lot to do with the racial reckoning?

That was one of the great disappointments of my career—because I’m a civil libertarian. So when I saw the horrifying George Floyd murder, I thought, this is an opportunity for meaningful police reform to prevent this kind of thing from ever happening again, or at least make it much less likely. And instead, on campus, the thing that was really shocking was that it seemed to be taken as an opportunity to settle old scores with students or professors you didn’t like.

A conservative professor, who I’d known for a long time and defended after 9/11, his name was Mike Adams—a very in-your-face kind of right-wing guy. But his whole spirit was always kind of like jokey and irreverent, trying to be obnoxious. He had a tweet likening [Covid] lockdowns to slavery, saying, “Massa [Gov. Roy] Cooper, let my people go!” And that became a really big deal at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Eventually, he got a severance to be forced out. And I actually thought the guy was going to be entirely fine, because he always seemed so confident. But I checked in on him in mid-July [2020], and he wasn’t doing well…People were still giving him harassing phone calls. He’d actually even filed a police report, which didn’t sound like him at all. And he killed himself the next week. I mean, my whole journey in this—[writing the book] The Coddling of the American Mind—started with me getting suicidally depressed back in 2007. So I understand how it can really mess with your head.

That actually makes me think about the Harvard students who anonymously signed the anti-Israel letter after the October 7 attacks. The response has been pretty vicious. A lot of them have been doxxed. They’ve been harassed. There’s a truck circling the campus with their faces on it. What do you make of that? I don’t know if any of that crosses a legal line, but is that just normal counter-speech and consequences? Or does that cross a pretty important line?

Oh, man, there’s a lot in there. None of this crosses any legal lines, to be clear. You just have to sort of evaluate it from the point of view of someone who wants a country where people are less afraid to say what they really think. And I think the letter that those students signed—saying Israel is entirely at fault, at a time when the attacks were still happening, when the murders and kidnapping was still going on—I don’t blame anybody in the world for being really angry about that. I did think that it points out some of the problems with blacklists, because what ended up happening was there were a lot of students who didn’t even know that they’d had been signed on to this letter and we’re pretty horrified to discover that people thought they supported it.

There’s also a double standard here, because at Stanford—when the Federalist Society invited [conservative appellate judge] Kyle Duncan—Stanford came to me to ask: They’re putting up posters with the faces of the Federalist Society members and their names under them saying that they should be ashamed, like all over campus. And I’m like: It’s not a tactic I like, but they absolutely can do that. So I think it’s interesting, watching how people react so predictably—whether they’re being the censors or being the censored.

One thing I really want to be clear on, though: There were claims that there were death threats directed at the Harvard students, that there was harassment directed at the Harvard students. That’s a situation where you punish the person making the death threats, you punish the person doing the harassing. And it’s important that that be done, because [otherwise] it gives people the impression that it’s legal to make terroristic threats of harm or death threats. It’s not, nor should it be.

But putting someone’s face on a truck or writing the name online on a blacklist is not, legally, harassment?

 No.

What lessons about free speech would you want progressives to take away from everything that’s happened in the last month?

I would really hope that they would look into the recent past of people getting in trouble on campus, because it’s been really bad for about five years now. And to be clear, an awful lot of liberals and progressives get in trouble. Also, to be clear, sometimes they get in trouble from other progressives and other liberals. Sometimes they get in trouble from off-campus conservatives. There’s the Turning Point USA professor watchlist, for example. Or Fox News decides they hate a professor—that can always end really poorly.

I want people to stop unreflectively using the terms “accountability culture” or “consequence culture,” because all that ever has ever said to me is that people haven’t looked into the real cases. They’re not particularly inclined to look into the real cases. It’s just kind of a lazy sort of assertion that everybody who’s been canceled had it coming. And you can’t actually look at these cases and say to yourself, these are all people who deserved to be fired, expelled, etc. They’re not as simple as I think people believe. And now that you’re actually seeing voices they might be more sympathetic to being targeted—I hope they will not just take threats to people they like more seriously. I hope they’ll even take seriously threats to people they don’t particularly like.

And House Democrats helped make it possible.

Yes, I am aware that this has somehow become a controversial take—as if acknowledging Democratic culpability somehow excuses GOP extremism and the complicity of so-called “moderate” Republicans. But that culpability is real.

Back on October 3, every single Democrat present—all 208 of them—teamed up with eight ultra-conservative Republicans to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy. The GOP rebels, led by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.)—who has always loathed McCarthy—were angry that, after weeks of chaos, McCarthy had averted a government shutdown by working with Democrats to pass a temporary spending bill.

Gaetz and his allies couldn’t have removed the GOP speaker on their own. They needed a lot of help from across the aisle. And the Dems delivered. They offered a lot of reasons—many of them pretty compelling—for refusing to bail out McCarthy: McCarthy had voted to overturn the 2020 election. McCarthy had tried to thwart Congress’ January 6 investigation. McCarthy had launched a partisan impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden. McCarthy couldn’t be trusted. McCarthy refused to make any concessions to Democrats. McCarthy was largely subservient to the Trumpist right. And so on.

Hours before McCarthy’s ouster, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi—who wasn’t in DC for the vote—made her views clear: McCarthy’s fate, she insisted, wasn’t the Democrats’ problem. “The Speaker of the House is chosen by the Majority Party,” she tweeted. “In this Congress, it is the responsibility of House Republicans to choose a nominee & elect the Speaker on the Floor. At this time there is no justification for a departure from this tradition.” 

That may well be. But refusing to depart “from this tradition” wasn’t some grand law of nature or principle of democracy that Democrats were compelled to honor. It was a choice. They opted to make what they saw as a principled stand against McCarthy—knowing full well that the end result might be a speaker who is worse. Dems had their chance to stop McCarthy’s far-right detractors from seizing power, but instead, they chose to help Gaetz.

In a widely circulated thread after the October 3 vote, Aaron Fritschner, a Democratic House staffer, laid out the logic behind removing McCarthy. It’s a fascinating insider account and well worth the read. Fritschner makes a strong case. “We did not trust Kevin McCarthy and he gave us no reason to,” Fritschner argues. “He could have done so (and I suspect saved his gavel) through fairly simple actions. He chose not to do that.”

Even after all that happened – January 6th, the debt limit crisis, his vengeance against our members, breaking his word to the President, impeachment, empowering the right wing – there were Democrats who were imho willing to help McCarthy if he had given them a reason. He didn't.

— Aaron Fritschner (@Fritschner) October 4, 2023

“Will the next Speaker be worse?” Fritschner asked. “Nobody can possibly know who it’ll be or what the dynamic will be.”

That wasn’t necessarily wrong. The last three weeks have seen the GOP caucus lurching back and forth between pragmatic conservatives and MAGA diehards like Jim Jordan. Reps. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) and Tom Emmer (R-Minn.)—both of whom voted to certify Biden’s victory—each had a shot at becoming speaker. There was even talk of Republicans cutting deals with Democrats.

But that isn’t where the dice landed. In the end, mainstream Republicans—even the ones who had repeatedly thwarted Jordan’s speakership bid—fell in line behind Johnson. The Louisianan may be less personally obnoxious than his better-known Ohio ally, but he’s still pretty extreme. Like Jordan, Johnson played an indispensable role in Trump’s coup attempt, pressuring his colleagues to sign on to an effort to get the Supreme Court to overturn the election. As the Times reported:

Mr. Johnson drafted a supporting brief that focused on the constitutional argument. As chairman of the Republican Study Committee, he pushed its members to sign the brief, and he also wrote an email to all Republican lawmakers warning in bold red letters that Mr. Trump would be tracking their response. “He said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review,” he wrote.

The lawyer for the House Republican leadership told Mr. Johnson that his arguments were unconstitutional, according to three people involved in the conversations, and Ms. Cheney, also a lawyer, called the brief “embarrassing.” Mr. McCarthy, the Republican leader, told members that he refused to sign, the three people said.

Nonetheless, Mr. Johnson pushed ahead and filed the brief on Dec. 10 with 105 lawmakers as co-signers, and within a day he had added 20 more—including Mr. McCarthy.

Even after the court flatly rejected this lawsuit, Johnson pressed on, rallying Republicans to vote on the House floor to throw out the electoral votes of swing states Biden won. According to the Times, three-quarters of the lawmakers who voted in favor of handing the election to Trump justified their actions by citing Johnson’s legal arguments.

McCarthy, of course, was one of those lawmakers. There is no question that McCarthy went along with Trump’s coup attempt. It’s impossible to know whether, in practice, Johnson will really be much different. But Gaetz certainly sees it as a victory. “If you don’t think that moving from Kevin McCarthy to MAGA Mike Johnson shows the ascendance of this movement and where the power in the Republican Party truly lies, then you’re not paying attention,” he told Steve Bannon on Wednesday.

That’s a change that Democrats helped make possible. And they bear at least some of the responsibility for whatever happens next.