You may be thinking that Donald Trump and his Republicans have lost the immigration issue because voters are disgusted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s indiscriminate roundups, thuggish behavior and their killings of peaceful protesters who happen to be U.S. citizens. Indeed, the polls are clear. Voters have turned against ICE’s methods — but only their methods. Republicans are feeling heat.

Democrats hope they’ll benefit from anti-ICE backlash in the midterm elections. If that pans out, they’ll be winning a battle while losing the war.

Most people still want to deport illegal immigrants. When Democrats were in power, they promoted open borders — and Americans hate that. Both parties are losing the immigration game.

“Why?” my best friend asked me recently. “Why are people so angry at immigrants?”

I tried to explain. I’m white and male and able-bodied and cis and Ivy-educated and well connected — big pluses — yet if I set out to find a 9-to-5 job, I told him, I probably wouldn’t be able to find one. All my life (I’m 62), finding work has been nearly impossible. Countless demoralizing rejections, ridiculous hoops, stupid certifications, lengthy interviews, withdrawn job offers. Finding good work? I hardly ever did — and then it felt like winning a lottery. The job market always sucks.

I don’t know anyone — white, Black, rich, poor, male, female — who would dispute that.

Anything that contributes to America’s crappy job-finding landscape — as immigration, legal or illegal, does — is going to piss off workers.

When resources are abundant, human beings are generous. Charitable giving soars along with the stock market. When things are scarce, people are disinclined to share — like the rats in a cage who turn mean when food rations are reduced. In the U.S., jobs are an exceedingly rare resource.

It has always been tough to find a job in the U.S., especially a good one. And it keeps getting tougher. The unemployment rate among recent college graduates is 9.7%. More than half of workers over 55 lose a job that results in a permanent loss of half their income. Many online listings are for “ghost jobs” that employers have no intention of filling. More than 25% of Americans are functionally unemployed, meaning that they are jobless, reduced to working part-time or earning poverty-level wages. Another third are overqualified, working jobs that are beneath their education and experience.

Sixty percent of Americans say they’re toiling at a low-quality job or aren’t working at all.

They tell us to study STEM. But even going full nerd doesn’t guarantee employment. Between 6.1% and 7.8% of recent computer engineering and physics majors are unemployed; 45% of STEM majors are forced to take non-STEM jobs.

Given how hard it is in our piss-poor excuse for a capitalist economy for a hardworking American to find any job, much less a decent one, the last thing our miserables need is competition from new immigrants. People aren’t as angry at immigrants in particular as they are at immigration in general. Why is the U.S. importing workers from overseas when millions of Americans who were born here can’t find work?

Employers and pro-immigration politicians offer two standard rebuttals: skills mismatches and laziness. Americans, they say, don’t have the skills they need. And they don’t want to work backbreaking jobs like picking fruits and vegetables.

American companies have all but eliminated on-the-job training to the point that half of all workers, of all ages, say they don’t know what their boss expects from them. Expecting every new hire to hit the ground running is insane — yet it’s become standard. Employers have no one but themselves to blame for the “skills gap.” Want skilled workers? Train them. Bring back the corporate educational institutions and apprenticeships that turned promising workers into skilled workers a century ago.

The same goes for companies who whine that they get no takers for hard jobs that offer low wages. Pay more. Americans work a ton of hard, dirty and dangerous jobs — oil rig worker, crime scene cleaner, sanitation, commercial diver/welder, crab fisherman, mortician — because they pay decently. A farmer who can’t find a fruit picker for $15 an hour may have to offer $20. No takers? Offer $25. Repeat as necessary. Go high enough and eventually you will find U.S. citizens happy to work for you.

Can’t afford to pay the market rate — i.e., a salary high enough to find applicants? Raise your prices or close your farm; you can’t afford to stay in business. Will higher wages increase inflation? Yes. So tweak monetary policy.

The H-1B visa program epitomizes how immigration policies have been cynically deployed in order to depress wages. To qualify for the program, tech and other companies certify to the federal government that they can’t find the skilled workers they need here in the United States, so they need to import them, typically from India. Yet in countless well-documented instances, H-1B workers are hired by well-heeled corporations to displace American workers — who have the right skills — whose final assignment is to train their replacements before they join the ranks of the unemployed. There was no skills gap, only corporate greed. Why wouldn’t victims be angry?

No sane American can begrudge the ambition and desperation of those who leave the land of their birth to seek their fortunes here. Most of us are descended from foreigners who did exactly that. In most of those cases, however, Americans’ ancestors arrived in great waves of immigration, permitted entry into an economy suffering from labor shortages as the nation was expanding.

I don’t blame immigrants. They just want to survive, even thrive. Like native-born American workers, they’re victims of greedy capitalists who pit us against each other. It’s too bad not everyone can see that.

In the end, however, a government’s first duty is to protect and help its citizens. No one younger than 80 can remember a time when employers needed to turn abroad to fill their employment rosters. So I have a question for corporate America and the government officials it owns: Why, as long as the unemployment rate is higher than 0.0%, are we inviting people from other countries to fill American jobs?

Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new “What’s Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems.” He co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.

Many people assume that Germany instantly transitioned from representative democracy to totalitarianism following the ascension of Adolf Hitler to chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933. Actually, the Weimar Republic had already been reeling from the global Great Depression, unpopular austerity measures and overreliance on emergency decrees that restricted civil rights. Throughout the 1930s until the invasion of Poland formally marked the start of World War II, the Nazi leadership had to tolerate — less so as time passed and they consolidated power — the German deep state: conservative economists, a military general staff dominated by Prussian aristocrats whom the former Austrian corporal couldn’t stand yet couldn’t do without, the civil service lifers who kept the bureaucracy functioning, and the legacy German judiciary and its overlapping state and national courts presided over by judges beholden mostly to laws passed before the fascist seizure of power.

The Enabling Act of 1933 turned the Reichstag into a rubber-stamp parliamentary validation for anything the Fuhrer State proposed. Even so, during the early years of his reign, Hitler’s regime focused on big-picture policies like economics while leaving intact thousands of pre-Third Reich civil and criminal laws concerning picayune administrative matters like tax rules and traffic regulations and street crime.

The tension between a Nazi regime hellbent on savaging its enemies and a German state based on law and order manifested itself in the Sturmabteilung (SA) — the stormtroopers known as Brownshirts — and the Schutzstaffel (SS). Theoretically, both organizations were incorporated into the formal state and military apparatus. But members swore personal loyalty to Hitler. These paramilitaries were assigned to do his dirty work — and assured that they would never be held to account under those pesky old pre-Nazi laws that remained on the books.

Surprisingly, Richard J. Evans writes in “The Third Reich in Power,” SA goons were sometimes arrested for assaulting Jews and leftists. And not just these enemies of the state. “Gangs of stormtroopers got drunk, caused disturbances late at night, beat up innocent passersby, and attacked the police if they tried to stop them.”

As a result, there were, Evans writes, “more than 4,000 prosecutions of SA and SS men for crimes of various kinds that were still before the courts in May 1934. … Many others had been quashed, and more offenses still had never been prosecuted in the first place, but this was still a considerable number.” Even among upright local cops in Berlin and other cities, the authorities sussed that the fix was in, the mooks were protected, and that they — and any judge with the courage to convict one and send him to prison — imperiled their careers and their persons unless they turned a blind eye. Prosecutions ended.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Donald Trump is rapidly becoming his SA: overwhelming, vicious, gleefully assaulting anyone and everyone, in charge of their own private network of concentration camps, personally loyal to The Leader, above the law and thus able to operate with impunity. Local police are afraid of ICE.

State violence in which the government self-servingly ignored its own laws in order to randomly attack political opponents and scapegoats was a key building block of the Nazis’ consolidation of power.

It’s nearly impossible to overstate the traumatizing impact of state violence on the population of an ordered society. You can’t trust anyone or anything. You pay taxes, but the government does nothing for you. You’re on your own. I gained insight into the psychology of state violence when a high-ranked officer of the New York City Police Department neglected to block his caller ID before he left a death threat on my voicemail, and a truckload of right-wing firefighters smashed the door of my apartment building. Who could I report him to — the NYPD? Perhaps, counting on his de facto immunity as he committed a felony and a firing offense, he didn’t bother to cover himself up. The firemen went away after my journalist buddy appeared with his camera.

I’ve experienced state violence firsthand in the U.S., where cops have roughed me up and falsely accused me of offenses, big and small, I didn’t commit, and judges have sided with them despite their brazen lies. And I’m a white guy.

I’ve witnessed state violence during my travels to places like the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Visiting a friend in Kazakhstan in the late 1990s, my traveling companion was shocked to encounter a rotting corpse of a man who’d gotten run over by a car days earlier, still lying in the street. “Aren’t you going to call the police?” my friend asked our Kazakh host. Shooting me a knowing glance and dark grin, the Kazakh laughed: “Your friend, this is his first time here, yes?” In a country with state violence, you don’t call the cops to go after criminals. Cops are the criminals.

State violence is worse than anarchy. Where there is no state, you can be robbed or raped or killed and nothing will happen to your robber or rapist or killer. It’s deeply unsettling. On the other hand, you also enjoy perfect immunity for self-defense or revenge. If you get the better of your assailant or get even with him, nothing will happen to you either. You’re on your own but, with luck and smarts and strength and charm, you may thrive. It’s Darwin’s world; we live in it until someone eats us up.

I’ve seen anarchy in places like Afghanistan, when there were no police or courts or other authorities. I often feared for my life. On a few occasions, I caused others to fear for theirs. Over time, I connected enough friends and allies to create, if not civilization, a working modus operandi. Now, under the Taliban, there is law and order. It’s the main thing that government is able to provide, but don’t shortchange it — few things are more valuable than law and order when they’re absent.

A lawless state is the worst of both worlds. You have neither the freedom to kill or be killed, nor freedom from a hypocritical state that accuses you of everything and shows no mercy while refusing to even pretend to hold itself to the same rules.

A lawless state declares that the right to carry a firearm is a sacred constitutional right unless it doesn’t care for your apparent political affiliation, in which case it can kill you. It investigates its foes with punitive legal fishing expeditions while refusing to investigate when its agents gun down peaceful unarmed citizens. It fights for the free speech rights of its allies overseas as it arrests its enemies for barely saying a word out of turn.

A government fully committed to state violence, as Nazi Germany’s government would wink at the murderers in its employ years before the first pellet of Zyklon B was used to murder a person, and as the U.S. is doing now — not even bothering to lie decently about the Venezuelan fishermen and peaceful Minnesotans it slaughters to amuse itself — makes one long for the far better non-system system of anarchy.

Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new “What’s Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems.” He co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.

As a leftist, I’m heartened by the reactions of the citizens of Minneapolis and its neighboring municipalities to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s assault against their noncitizen neighbors. The killing of Renee Good makes the risk of confronting illiterate armed paramilitaries hopped up on aggression-fueling steroids brutally clear. Plus, this is Minnesota in January. Mixing it up with government goons in the tundra isn’t a weekend walk in the park, or a performative, city-licensed, thrice-yearly “No Kings” stroll down Fifth Avenue.

I was similarly pleased by previous spasms of protest: Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, March for Our Lives, Ferguson, Women’s Marches, the Battle of Seattle. America has leftists. Leftists get angry. Leftists show up.

This is not, at least totally, a conservative country. You wouldn’t know that from our news media. I’m still waiting to see an on-air discussion about a foreign policy crisis in which a guest suggests it’s not our business and that we shouldn’t get involved.

Peaceful protests and violent uprisings like the Los Angeles riots prove that leftists exist.

We exist. But we don’t last.

The trouble is, the American Left post-1970 is congenitally incapable of sustained street activism, of keeping up the energy level beyond a few months at a time — at most. Identity-based movements like MeToo overshoot, discredit themselves and collapse as they eat their own. Issue-oriented demonstrations like the anti-Iraq War marches fade away as defeat breeds demoralization. Because movements based on class- and economic-driven grievances pose the greatest threat to ruling elites, the system crushes them with violent force, as Barack Obama did to Occupy.

Causes come and go, as do expressions of support and disapproval. But nothing close to a sustained left-wing political movement, or party, takes flight.

Millions of words have been strung together to try to explain why Americans haven’t formed a socialist or other leftist force able to counter the government, corporations and their reactionary allies in the media long enough and forcefully enough to win battles for issues like abortion rights and against problems like deindustrialization. Some of those words were mine. Here, now, I want to explain why the Left keeps losing and why our protest movements keep running out of steam.

It’s the lack of a broad-based, grassroots organization, stupid.

Why don’t we have such an organization? Because leftists keep getting distracted by the Democratic Party, stupid.

When Americans protest, it’s usually in reaction to a news event. A white cop kills an unarmed Black man, or there’s a mass shooting at a school. Obviously, these demonstrations address an underlying issue: racism, militarization of the police, gun control, school security. Because they are reactive, however, the rage inevitably subsides. That’s how rage works. It ebbs. We pack up our placards and go home.

Sometimes a movement coalesces around an issue without any specific trigger. After years of rising income inequality, Occupy Wall Street was announced in a magazine. MeToo centered around a spreadsheet passed around by women that listed men and their alleged depredations in the workplace. Those issue-focused movements lasted longer. After everything was said and argued over, they fizzled out.

A leftist organization would perform two functions we desperately need. First, it would act as an “in case of emergency, break glass” force that could be called upon to act quickly, in force, when and where and as needed. The powers that be would pay more attention if, the next time one of their cops murdered one of us, millions of Americans went on strike.

An organization could cross-pollinate the Left with the solidarity a real left needs in order to succeed. Environmentalists could support feminists; economic Marxists could come to the aid of racial justice warriors.

Most importantly, an organization could reframe activism. Rather than responding to each outrage a la carte, only to see interest and energy peter out after having begun only with those who care most about that one issue, a real left organization — as exists in many other countries — could cast the struggle for change as a permanent commitment to a lifetime of fighting the system.

When you join a book club, you choose a new book to read after you discuss the last one. Reading isn’t a one-time thing. The religiously devout go to church weekly, but they also study and volunteer and proselytize and attend prayer meetings. When you’re a true fan of a sports team, you watch and cheer through thick and thin. Only in America is politics so remarkably unsustained and undemanding of people’s time and attention.

When I reference “politics,” I’m talking about opposition outside electoral, two-party nonsense. A leftist organization trains its members, educates them, organizes them, prepares them for whatever may be needed in the future. Rather than react to horrific headlines, it develops a disciplined, consistent platform of issues for which it fights relentlessly, day after day, for years, until victory is achieved — forever, if need be. It sets agendas. Our enemies — the government, Donald Trump, ICE, Wall Street, the warmongers — work every single day. How can we defeat them in our current state?

We need organization and we need focus. Our politics should center around the politics that serve us — nothing else deserves our participation.

Every vote you cast for the Democrats legitimizes their party. Every minute you spend thinking about them or canvassing for them or agitating for them over workplace water coolers and family dinners is a minute sucked away from actual struggle. Giving even the slightest consideration to the possibility that Democrats might someday come through for us on some issue of note is a foolish distraction, self-delusion, pure stupidity.

By all means, keep on protesting in response to the latest atrocity. But if you really want to throw off the shackles of the systemic oppression that creates the incidents that make you so angry, you’ve also got to start building a national leftist organization, outside the Democratic distraction machine, from the bottom up.

Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new “What’s Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems.” He co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.

The killing of Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in a Minneapolis suburb has prompted a familiar debate over civil disobedience and government policing of the sort that typically follows these incidents, in which justification of the use of force, or lack thereof, depends on your political stance. There is, however, an aspect here that everyone ought to be able to agree about regardless of where they stand on the libertarian-to-authoritarian spectrum: ICE behaves highly unprofessionally.

All you have to do is look at them. Cops wear matching uniforms. So do soldiers. Cops identify themselves and drive clearly marked vehicles. Soldiers even identify themselves to the enemy if they’re captured in battle. ICE agents — assuming the unidentified, masked dudes terrorizing cities are actually ICE and not rapists and kidnappers masquerading as government deporters — wear a hodgepodge of off-the-shelf vests and insignia, cruise around in rented vehicles, and illegally change their license plates daily to avoid accountability.

ICE’s defenders argue that agent Jonathan Ross was justified in using deadly force against Good because she was a “domestic terrorist” who had “weaponized her vehicle,” in the words of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and he had to defend himself. Policing experts who have examined videos of Good’s death point out that a properly trained law enforcement officer never should have been standing in front (or behind) her car in the first place — in other words, he shouldn’t have been in a position to make that determination. Noem’s intemperate description of a dead American, a mother of three, reminds us that her administration only cares about U.S. citizens who voted for Trump and support his policies.

Other aspects of the videotaped encounter point to an organization for whom professionalism appears to be an alien concern.

In the videos, Ross and his colleagues rapidly escalate a situation that, let’s bear in mind, begins with an unarmed woman sitting in her car, smiling. Sure, she’s sarcastic. Sure, her car is parked diagonally, partly impeding traffic. It’s easy to see why ICE agents might feel irritated — that, after all, is one of the goals of a passive-resistance tactic like ICE Watch — but law enforcement officers are supposed to calmly refrain from reactions based on feeling triggered or provoked. Good may have been annoying. She certainly wasn’t dangerous.

Multiple agents race toward Good’s car. Why the urgency? She hasn’t moved in minutes. They shout. Why not talk normally? They shout conflicting commands — one tells her to leave, while another orders her to “get out of the fucking car!” One agent should do the talking, to avoid confusion and to avoid a fight-or-flight response. Cursing conveys hostility and raises the temperature. Federal officers should not swear at the public who pays their salary.

Inexplicably, because Ross was injured last year when he did the same thing and police are trained never to do it, one of the agents reaches through Good’s car window to try to open her door. Good does what many people would do in such a situation, especially if one is a woman and the intruder is a heavily armed masked male: She pushes the gas. Never mind Good; the agents endangered themselves and others with their reckless actions.

As a coda to an episode epitomizing unprofessionalism, someone — Ross or another agent — is heard shouting “fucking bitch” as Good begins to move.

This sound is captured on video that should not exist. Ross was holding his personal cellphone to record the encounter. His other hand holds his gun. But he was wearing a body camera. “Now that we can see he’s holding a gun in one hand and a cellphone in the other (hand) filming, I want to see the officer training that permits that,” Geoff Alpert, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina, told NPR. Why did Ross constrain himself, unless it was to create images he could control and edit?

Adding to the chaotic impression created by manic, masked, armed men running around the suburbs in unmarked vehicles in search of anyone who looks vaguely Latino, the ICE paramilitaries allowed Ross to flee the scene.

As Good sat in her car dying, they refused to allow a physician bystander to attend to her.

“It’d be unprofessional to comment on what I think happened in that situation,” border czar Tom Homan, a former ICE director, initially told CBS News. Noem, as well as the president and vice president, stated within hours of the shooting that Good was at fault and a “domestic terrorist,” and that the ICE agent was blameless. A few days later, official government social media feeds were calling for citizens to defend ICE.

That the Trump administration falls short of basic standards of professionalism is beyond dispute. The question is, are Trump’s hiring managers incompetent? Or is the deprofessionalization of government an intentional tactic deployed by the first president to have neither political nor military experience? If ICE — the agency receiving the biggest pay increase and hiring the most new workers — is an indication, the answer is clearly yes. Just about any thug over age 18 with a pulse can get hired by ICE: drug addicts, gangsters, white nationalists, criminals, illiterate morons.

As the Nazis learned in the 1930s, underqualified workers, especially very young ones and those on the margins of legality, are likelier to be malleable. They’ll probably be willing to bend the law. Knowing that they’re overpaid and given more responsibility than they deserve — and that they’d never find as good a job anywhere else — ICE recruits may not be intelligent or kind or thoughtful, but they will be loyal. They’ll do what they’re told, no matter how violent or unethical.

The Trump administration will require this blind obedience as they segue from imprisoning illegal immigrants to jailing American citizens.

Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new “What’s Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems.” He co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.

Checks and balances, our teachers taught us, were America’s ace in the hole. Human beings are highly fallible and easily corruptible. Because the Founding Fathers knew that — “The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted,” James Madison — warned they crafted the three branches of the new federal government as counterweights in which the natural impulse of officials to jealously preserve their power and prerogatives was accepted as a given rather than as an evil to be controlled. Accepting human nature as it was formed the basis of what was credited as one of the most ingenious systems ever created in the West.

Checks and balances, it turns out, are bullshit. Because sometimes, like now, the desire to accrue and preserve personal and organizational power takes a backseat to sycophancy and cowardice.

The 25th Amendment created a mechanism for suspending the authority of a physically or otherwise unfit president. Those who drafted it invested that power in the hands of an officeholder with great interest in enforcing it, the vice president who would take over. All they needed to remove an incompetent or dangerous head of state was a simple majority vote of the cabinet.

What these lawmakers failed to consider were party loyalty and the desire not to be perceived as self-dealing. Kamala Harris knew Joe Biden wasn’t up to the job. But she wouldn’t have triggered the 25th, even had the president been more of a wreck. Party fealty trumped everything, even patriotism.

Now we find ourselves with a president who has gone rogue. Not only has his lust for emoluments achieved the level of a 20th-century third-world dictator, deporting U.S. citizens and deploying federal troops to American cities in the absence of civil strife, he is bombing and invading and threatening to attack countries without the flimsiest thread of a legal pretext, dressed up in brazen lies and misrepresentations — some of those countries are close U.S. allies — and he keeps threatening to seek a third term. All these actions are serious violations of the Constitution, federal law, international law, traditional norms and common decency.

If this situation were framed theoretically, as a blank TK without naming a specific person or party, most political experts would predict a bipartisan response. The president would be removed, whether by the 25th, pressuring him to resign, or via impeachment. Congress would act to protect its war powers, the party whose president was acting erratically would seek to staunch the bleeding by refusing to defend the indefensible, and the courts would demand that laws be enforced.

Alas, we don’t live in theoreticals. As heir apparent, the vice president is biding his time until his coronation for the nomination. The GOP has embraced a base-above-all strategy, which has been working, and is thus reflexively disinclined to cooperate with any Democratic initiative, least of all one that would involve the removal of their own two-term president. The Republican-led House is the most supine in memory — perhaps ever — so much so that it refuses even to protect its power over the purse, not to mention its war powers. (In fairness, congresses of both parties have surrendered their control of the military to the executive branch.)

Checks and balances rely on the assumption that officials prioritize powers and privileges. These days, however, politicians believe that they maintain their positions only as long as they curry favor with the president. (Note that I said “president” rather than Donald Trump. The same calculus applied under Democrats.) Our system has evolved. Two hundred fifty years into the American experiment, elected officials crave titles and status above all else, and the money they confer. Power is still important, but not for them to hold personally. Leaders like Speaker Mike Johnson sell their power to the president, who himself exercises his expanded prerogatives, primarily to build his empire of official grift.

At first glance, the lickspittle rulings of the Republican majority of the Supreme Court appear to deviate from the new model. Don’t justices enjoy guaranteed lifetime employment?

Like a homebuyer signing a lien on “their” home to a bank, most of the six obtained endorsements by the right-wing Federalist Society, whose imprimatur Trump and his GOP predecessors required to nominate them to the court. Conservative Supreme Court nominees mortgaged their would-have-been future judicial independence by signaling their adherence to outlandish, conservative legal doctrines like “originalism” — a concept considered fringe a generation ago but now so au courant with the Right that even Biden’s “liberal” justice told the Senate she believed in it. True, they could welsh on that bargain once they sat on the bench. But then they would risk impeachment over some unrelated matter. The justices’ sellout differs only in chronology.

At the root of assurances that checks and balances worked and will (eventually) work again is the question: Who or what will save us?

Not the press — it’s dead. Not a peaceful protest movement — there isn’t one, and if there were one, there is little reason to believe it would be effective. And certainly not checks and balances.

Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new “What’s Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems.” He co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.