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No More Kings: Time to End Sovereign Immunity
If we’re serious about addressing protections for misconduct and abuses of power, ending these special rights—originally justified as a divine right—should be our top priority.
May 02, 2026
On three major occasions in President Trump’s second term, his opponents, including many elected officials, have taken to the streets under the banner of “No Kings.” And yet just this week, King Charles III spoke before our joint houses of Congress, where his comments about governmental checks and balances drew a standing ovation from everyone there.
A contradiction lies here, between our history and our perception of it. The truth is, the law that made kings untouchable—that “the king can do no wrong”—has never gone away in the United States. Instead, it multiplied. Today we call it “sovereign immunity.”
The Declaration of Independence blamed the King for its grievances, claiming his actions showed an “absolute Despotism” and “absolute Tyranny over these States.” But the taxes it complained about came from Parliament, which in 1688 had subordinated the King’s political role to itself and its Prime Minister. True, the monarch retained a total legislative veto (among other powers), but it last invoked that power in 1708. Colonial complaints about the King not recognizing colonial legislatures suggest the opposite of the grievance—a monarchical commitment against tyranny, by declining to override and usurp Parliament’s powers via royal whim.
Describing the 1789 Constitution, Alexander Hamilton wrote that, except for a few important “particulars, the power of the President will resemble equally that of the king of Great Britain.” Some changes shed the aristocracy; others infused more checks and balances, like making the veto power conditional. As for the right of kings, Hamilton argued that the impeachment power of Congress addressed it, because an impeached president would be subject to prosecution “in the ordinary course of law.” Unfortunately for us, history did not walk that line.
The 1789 Constitution also split sovereign power between federal and state governments. These twin powers then pulled a trick: they successfully argued that the special right of kings had transferred to them. Courts applied this special right to political subdivisions, like counties and municipalities, and to those who act on their behalf, like legislators, judges, clerks, bureaucrats, and police. Tocqueville thought these subdivisions “mitigat[ed] tyranny,” viewing “townships, municipal bodies, and counties” as “concealed break-waters, which check or part the tide of popular excitement.” But by permitting them sovereign immunity, the opposite happened: our myriad government bodies (sometimes four or five to a person) now each hold the right of kings. Instead of ridding ourselves of kingly power, we multiplied it.
Courts continue to expand these special powers. In 2024, the right-wing majority of the US Supreme Court confirmed that presidential immunity insulates the officeholder from criminal responsibility, so long as the alleged acts happened while carrying out official duties. Last March, the Court expanded the immunity available to law enforcement. Now, police officers have immunity from suit for any constitutional violation not explicitly addressed by an appellate or high court. And a federal appeals court recently held that governments have no general duty to compensate a bystander when law enforcement destroys their property in the course of their duties. If police break down your door, in error or not, you must pay for the fix.
We don't need courts to tell us these things. We see government officials acting above the law every day, even in incidents as small as police ignoring parking rules or blaring through stoplights into oncoming traffic, just to then turn their lights off. Rules for thee, but not for me. While we still have the right of kings, we don't have to keep it.
If we’re serious about addressing protections for misconduct and abuses of power, ending these special rights—originally justified as a divine right—should be our top priority. We have the tools to do it. Governments may waive and disclaim their special rights through legislation, and many have done that in limited doses. We should move forward to end the special right altogether, which we can accomplish through legislation at local, state, and federal levels. For a sound first step, Congress could reintroduce and pass the Ending Qualified Immunity Act, which would strip these special rights from law enforcement in civil-rights cases.
And most fundamentally, we should recognize that we have not ended the rule of kings just yet. Abuses of power and protection against accountability under the rule of law aren’t of a bygone era, and the monarchy didn't take its special rights with it when it left. Sadly, the powers of kings and queens were left behind, written into our laws under a different name.
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The Gilded Lie: Trump’s Ballroom, a Ballooning Deficit, and the Reign of Useful Splendor
Trump’s defenders will call the ballroom symbolic. They are right. It symbolizes a state that has abandoned the moral obligations of government and replaced them with architecture.
Aug 03, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump’s $200 million plan to construct a new golden ballroom at the White House is not just a monument to narcissism. It is statecraft by spectacle, financed by national rot. The timing is not subtle. It arrives alongside his “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” a federal budget that slashes Medicaid, food stamps, public housing, and climate programs, all while inflating the national deficit past $40 trillion. In this juxtaposition—architectural self-glorification for the ruling executive, fiscal starvation for the governed—we are not witnessing innovation. We are watching reruns of Versailles.
Louis XVI’s France operated on the principle of dépense utile, or “useful splendor”—the idea that royal extravagance was a form of political investment. Gold leaf and crystal chandeliers weren’t indulgence. They were instruments of authority. Versailles was never merely a residence. It was theater. It showcased the king’s ability to dominate not only his nobles but the metaphysical order of the kingdom itself. Every garden vista, every mirrored hallway, whispered the same thing: Obedience is beautiful, and beauty belongs to the crown.
This logic broke the country.
Calonne, Louis XVI’s finance minister in the 1780s, argued with sincerity that royal pageantry had diplomatic utility. France, he said, could not afford to appear poor. To reduce spending would be to lose face, both at home and abroad. It would risk undermining the delicate myth of royal omnipotence that kept the aristocracy groveling and foreign rivals guessing. So he doubled down. The state borrowed to cover Versailles’ operating costs. The result was a debt spiral so vast that it cracked the ancien régime wide open.
The French monarchy believed it could govern through performance. It fell because people eventually realized they were not guests at the party. They were the bill.
Fast forward to 2025. The United States now faces annual interest payments approaching $2 trillion, nearly one-third of all federal revenue. Unlike France in 1789, America has no tax-exempt aristocracy. Instead, it has tax-exempt billionaires. And instead of court ballet, it has cable news. But the fiscal structure is no less absurd. Trump’s budget performs the same dark magic: redirecting public funds toward elite vanity while accelerating structural collapse
The ballroom is a symptom. A projected $200 million marble-and-gold performance space, modeled loosely on Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors, will sit at the center of Trump’s renovated West Wing. It will host foreign dignitaries, Republican fundraisers, and presidential photo ops. This is how kleptocracy dresses itself—in borrowed grandeur, gilded walls, and florid illusions of permanence.
Meanwhile, Medicaid is being “restructured.” Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program benefits are being “realigned.” These are words chosen to disguise cruelty. The One Big Beautiful Bill is an exercise in anti-governance. It is designed to shrink the public sphere until only the strong, the connected, and the loyal remain. The money isn’t gone. It’s just moved—upwards.
There is bitter historical irony here. The French Revolution did not erupt because peasants lacked bread. Bread shortages had existed for centuries. What changed was the visibility of the farce. The illusion cracked. People saw a monarchy bleeding the treasury dry for glitter and pride, while demanding austerity from everyone else. The palace at Versailles, once a symbol of majesty, began to look grotesque. The line between luxury and insult collapsed.
Today, Americans are watching that same shift in real time. A president calls himself “king” on social media and receives thunderous applause from his base. He designs a ballroom while communities lose clinics. He throws gala dinners while food pantries see record demand. The White House is not a palace, but it is being remade into one.
The parallels to 18th-century France are not metaphorical. They are operational. Royal France justified excess as necessary to preserve order and prestige. Trump’s America justifies it with the language of branding. In both systems, the result is the same: obscene pageantry disguising political decay. The court is televised now. The courtiers wear microphones. And the people foot the bill.
There is no modern equivalent of Calonne’s Assembly of Notables. No gathering of billionaires will be summoned to justify the deficit or explain why America can afford a golden ballroom but not insulin. The rituals of accountability have vanished. The theater remains.
Trump’s defenders will call the ballroom symbolic. They are right. It symbolizes a state that has abandoned the moral obligations of government and replaced them with architecture. It is the spatial embodiment of policy by spectacle. The Roman emperors built circuses. Louis built Versailles. Trump builds ballrooms. The continuity is not ideological. It is psychological.
And it is ending the same way.
History offers no guarantees, but it does offer warnings. The French monarchy believed it could govern through performance. It fell because people eventually realized they were not guests at the party. They were the bill.
The question is not whether America can afford another ballroom. The question is whether it can survive the regime that thinks it should build one.
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We Built the US by Vanquishing a Monarch—But the Kings Are Back
We’ve done this before; we can do it again: It’s going to take a hell of a fight, though, given that we’re up against the richest men on the planet.
Feb 04, 2025
“It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Today we need a nation of Minute Men; citizens who are not only prepared to take up arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as a basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom. The cause of liberty, the cause of America, cannot succeed with any lesser effort.” — President John F. Kennedy
The author of the Declaration of Independence went to great lengths, on numerous occasions (as I detail in What Would Jefferson Do?), to point out that when he and his colleagues started the United States of America they were explicitly rejecting — in favor of democracy — the men (they were all men back then) who drove the “three historic tyrannies”: kings/autocrats, theocrats/popes, and morbidly rich oligarchs.
For two thousand years before Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, Paine, Adams, Revere, and their colleagues created our checks-and-balances system of republican democracy, every country in the world was ruled by one of those three. Today, of the 167 countries on Earth, only 74 are democracies, and only 24 of those are “fully democratic.”
"As long as we have an independent media and a fierce dedication to freedom, it’s not too late."
And now, because of the GOP, America stands on the verge of losing that status.
— Theocrats have seized control of our Supreme Court, gutting the rights of women and religious/racial/gender minorities.
— Members of the House and Senate are so terrified of oligarchs funding primary challenges against them that it’s been over 40 years since any major legislation has passed fulfilling the wishes of the majority of Americans. (And now, many say they are worried about physical violence against themselves and their families if they fight Trump.)
— And our White House is today occupied by a billionaire who believes himself to be a king.
Trump’s attack on our democracy is an old story, played out repeatedly in various countries by every generation during the past two centuries. It follows an absolutely predictable pattern: You could call it a playbook.
In a democracy, there are four main elements involved in governance: Legislative, Executive, Judicial, and the Press (the Fourth Estate).
While Democrats over the past 50 years or so have focused their efforts on winning elections (Legislative and Executive), the billionaires who own the GOP have directed their attention to using massive amounts of cash to seize control of the unelected branches (Judiciary and Press), a job that can be done with money but doesn’t always require winning elections.
This is a pattern that’s been duplicated in multiple nations that have lost their democracies. Trump and Musk are simply following their instruction manual.
When Viktor Orbán took over Hungary in 2010, he first set out to seize control of the judiciary and the media. He lowered the retirement age for judges, immediately forcing out 57 justices who he replaced with loyalists (an echo of Mitch McConnell’s stealing two Supreme Court seats for Trump).
Then, following the strategy announced last week by Trump and FCC Chair Carr, he sued multiple independent media outlets and attacked the funding of Hungary’s public broadcasting system, shifting control over both into the hands of friendly oligarchs.
With dissenting voices silenced in the media and judges willing to overlook his blatant violations of Hungarian election laws (purging voters, gerrymandering, challenging the votes in opposition-friendly districts), Orbán was able to win every election since.
Vladimir Putin followed a similar script a few years earlier; once he had control of the judiciary and Russia’s media, he was able to stomp all over that country’s new and fragile democratic institutions and intimidate the Russian parliament (the Duma).
In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro followed a nearly identical script. As did Aleksandar Vučić in Serbia and Robert Viko in Slovakia.
And now Trump is trying the same, the GOP having seized control of the Supreme Court and much of the nation’s systems of elections.
He’s launched massive lawsuits against most of America’s major legacy media, and his new FCC head has begun investigations of NPR and PBS for accepting “commercials.” Major media outlets are aggressively whitewashing his campaign against American democracy, while NPR and PBS could be brought to heel by Carr’s efforts.
Once these steps are complete and Trump, Musk, and their billionaire and theocratic allies are done gutting our government and cowing our media, it’s likely there will be no turning back.
Which is why Vladimir Putin is so confident that Trump will destroy our traditional alliances and align America with Russia, once he’s fully consolidated his power. He told Russian media over the weekend that it wouldn’t be long before Trump was as powerful as himself:
“And all of them, you will see — it will happen quickly, soon — they will all stand at the feet of the master and will wag their tails a little. Everything will fall into place.”
However, there are two countries of note — and possible examples for America — that tried to go down this path but had it interrupted, throwing them back into democracy: Poland and South Korea.
In Poland, Andrzej Duda’s Law and Justice Party failed to destroy the independent media, even though they’d succeeded in seizing the judiciary and rigged election rules to their favor. Because roughly 70% of Poland’s media stayed in independent hands, his party lost power in the 2023 elections and Poland is now returning to democracy.
Similarly, in South Korea their President Yoon Suk Yeol tried to declare a state of emergency and outlaw his opposition Democratic Party. He’d failed, however, to first seize control of South Korea’s independent media, so people showed up in the streets demanding his arrest; he sits in prison today.
This all highlights the importance of independent media, from old-line publications like The New Republic to new but blossoming upstarts like Substack, along with all of us fighting hard to protect the neutrality of NPR and PBS.
The American Revolution was an all-hands-on-deck affair, bringing together conservatives like Alexander Hamilton, liberals like Thomas Paine, military guys like George Washington, and intellectuals like Jefferson and Adams.
The Lincoln Project and other never-Trump movements show the commitment of true conservatives to democracy. Increasingly, liberals, military and law enforcement people, and intellectuals across the spectrum are joining the effort to salvage and then revive our republic. We are this generation’s Minute Men.
We’ve done this before; we can do it again: It’s going to take a hell of a fight, though, given that we’re up against the richest men on the planet. But as long as we have an independent media and a fierce dedication to freedom, it’s not too late.
Pass it on.
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An American King? Fear the Immunity of President Trump
The growing power of the presidency has been taking place in plain view, as unilateral powers have accumulated decade after decade in the Oval Office, while the recent choice of president has also become a grim choice about the nature and powers of the presidency itself.
Nov 07, 2024
As the dust settles over election day, it’s worth reflecting that it’s not only the election results that have been at stake, but the future of the presidency and its powers. Over the course of the first quarter of this century, the American presidency has accumulated ever more power, rendering the office increasingly less constrained by either Congress or the courts. With Donald Trump’s reelection, the slide toward a dangerously empowered president has reached a moment of reckoning, particularly when it comes to foreign affairs and warfare.
Presidential Powers
Throughout American history, presidents have repeatedly sought to increase their powers, nowhere more so than in the context of war. As historian James Patterson has pointed out, “War and the threat of war were major sources of presidential power from the beginning.” Whether it was George Washington’s insistence that he was the one to formulate foreign policy when it came to diplomacy, treaties, and more; Thomas Jefferson’s assertion of complete control over whether or not to attack the Barbary Pirates; James Polk’s decision to take actions which risked war with Mexico; or Abraham Lincoln’s “sweeping assertions of authority” in the Civil War era, executive claims to authority when it comes to matters of foreign relations and warfare have been a persistent feature of American history.
The Trump administration took unchecked presidential authority to a new level...
The twentieth century saw a continued rise in the powers of the presidency. As historian Jeremi Suri noted in his book The Impossible Presidency, the four terms of Franklin D. Roosevelt were a transformative moment, essentially multiplying the responsibilities of the president with the ultimate goal of “mak[ing] the national executive the dominant actor in all parts of American life.” The presidents who followed Roosevelt continued to display such enhanced powers, especially when it came to foreign affairs.
As legal scholar Matt Waxman has reminded us, FDR’s successor, Harry Truman, went to war in Korea without congressional authorization. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who did consult with Congress over the need to protect U.S.-allied Pacific coastal islands from possible Chinese aggression and, in his farewell address, warned against “the military-industrial complex,” still believed “that the president had broad powers to engage in covert warfare without specific congressional approval.” In fact, his successor, John F. Kennedy, exercised those powers in a major way in the Bay of Pigs incident. Richard Nixon unilaterally and secretly launched the invasion of Cambodia in 1970, and Ronald Reagan created a secret Central American foreign policy, while arranging the unauthorized transfer of funds and weaponry to the Nicaraguan rebels, the Contras, from the sale of U.S. arms to Iran, despite the fact that such funding was prohibited by an act of Congress, the Boland Amendment.
The Twenty-First Century
Even within the context of repeated presidential acts taken without congressional assent (or often even knowledge) and in defiance of the constitutional checks on the powers of the presidency, the twenty-first century witnessed a major uptick in claims of executive power. In the name of war, this century has seen an astonishing erosion of constraints on that very power, as Yale law professor Harold Hongju Koh details in his illuminating new book, The National Security Constitution in the Twenty-First Century.
At the dawn of this century, the attacks of September 11, 2001, led to an instant escalation of presidential power and executive unilateralism. In the name of national security, President George W. Bush issued an order that authorized the indefinite detention of prisoners in what quickly came to be known as the Global War on Terror. He also set up an offshore prison of injustice at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and authorized military commissions instead of federal court trials for terrorism suspects captured abroad.
Meanwhile, Congress and the courts consistently deferred to the will of the president when it came to actions taken in the name of that war on terror. One week after the attacks of 9/11, Congress passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which undermined its own power in Article I of the Constitution to declare war and weakened its powers of restraint on presidential actions carefully articulated in the 1973 War Powers Resolution (WPR), passed to guard against the very kind of secretive engagement in war that Nixon had unilaterally authorized in the Vietnam era.
Buy the BookNow, turning their backs on the power given them by the Constitution and the WPR, Congress, with that AUMF, acceded to the expansion of presidential powers and opened the door to the disastrous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere early in this century. The president, it stated, was “authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations, or persons.”
In October 2001, Congress also passed the USA Patriot Act. It included an expansion of presidential power at home in the name of protecting the nation in the war on terror, including authorizing greatly expanded surveillance policies that would come to include, among other things, secret surveillance and searches that took place without evidence of wrongdoing, notably in Muslim communities in this country that were considered inherently suspect in the name of the war on terror.
As a result, when, in January 2009, Barack Obama entered the White House, his administration found itself with a strikingly expanded definition of the powers of the presidency on the table.
Obama’s Presidency
A former constitutional law professor, Barack Obama pledged to overturn some of the Bush administration’s most egregious, extralegal breaches, including the very existence of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility and the use of torture (or what the Bush administration had politely termed “enhanced interrogation techniques”) authorized by executive unilateralism as part of the war on terror. In what became known as “trust me” government, Obama also pledged to reform the excessive surveillance policies implemented in the war on terror. In 2013, David Cole, a civil rights attorney and currently the National Legal Director of the ACLU, credited Obama with making substantial “shifts” toward restraint by formally declaring an end to many of the Bush administration’s “most aggressive assertions of executive power.”
But while Obama did indeed trim some of the most striking excesses of the Bush era, his record of presidential reform fell significantly short. Jameel Jaffer, the founding director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, for instance, disputed Cole’s claims, citing the Obama administration’s continued reliance on illegal and extralegal policies that Bush’s aggressive actions had already put in play — among them, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, and the military commissions to try prisoners at Guantánamo. In addition, as Jaffer pointed out, the Obama administration frequently relied on the powers granted the presidency in that 2001 AUMF to authorize targeted lethal drone strikes globally, as in the case of the drone-killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, without further congressional authorization, by expanding the definition of “imminence” in order to appear to be complying with the international rule of law.
When it came to such targeted killings — a military tactic introduced under President Bush but greatly expanded during the Obama years for strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen — the president reserved for himself the right to have the final say in authorizing such strikes. As the New York Times reported at the time, “Nothing else in Mr. Obama’s first term has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record. His actions have often remained inscrutable, obscured by awkward secrecy rules, polarized political commentary, and the president’s own deep reserve.”
Although he served as legal adviser to the Department of State in the Obama administration, in his warnings about the perils posed by the slide towards unilateral presidential powers, Harold Hongju Kou concedes that the president could have done more to curtail the Bush era enhancement of the powers of the president. “[T]he cautious Obama administration,” he writes, “succeeded in swinging the national security pendulum only part of the way back” to restraint on executive power via the courts and Congress. While the “cascade of illegality” that defined the Bush era’s war on terror was indeed somewhat addressed by Obama, it remained, Koh reminds us, “undercorrected” — including not seeking “stronger accountability for past acts of CIA torture, and the stubborn continuation of a Guantanamo detention policy.”
While President Obama adhered more closely to restraints on presidential power than his predecessor, his administration did not make the kinds of structural and procedural changes necessary to deter future presidents from following in the footsteps of the Bush administration, as we were soon to learn, since, as Koh points out, enhanced unilateral presidential and executive powers would be “sharply re-intensified” under Donald Trump.
The Trump Years
Indeed, the first Trump presidency vastly accelerated the claims of expanded presidential power. Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer, lawyers who worked in the Bush and Obama administrations, respectively, served, as they put it, “very different presidents” and hold “different political outlooks.” Yet they agree that the Trump administration took unchecked presidential authority to a new level. In their 2020 book, After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, they contended that “Donald Trump operated the presidency in ways that reveal its vulnerability to dangerous excesses of authority and dangerous weaknesses in accountability.”
And as they make all too clear, the stakes were (and remain) high. “The often-feckless Trump,” they wrote, “also revealed deeper fissures in the structure of the presidency that, we worry, a future president might choose to exploit in a fashion similar to Trump — but much more skillfully, and to even greater effect.” And with the Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding the immunity of Donald Trump for acts taken while in the Oval Office, the shackles that once tied presidential acts in wartime to Congressional authorization are arguably now fully off the table, should a president be determined to act on his or her own say-so. (As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, the ruling “will have disastrous consequences for the presidency and for our democracy,” arguing that it will, in essence, “let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends.”)
The Biden Years
When it comes to recognizing limits on presidential powers, President Biden has had a distinctly mixed record. He immediately withdrew Trump’s executive order known as “the Muslim ban,” set out to close Guantánamo (but has not yet succeeded in doing so), rejoined the Paris climate accord, and revived international ties around the world that had been disrupted by Trump. And yet, that quintessential institutionalist, who prided himself on his ability to work with Congress, nonetheless veered in the direction of presidential unilateralism in the conduct of foreign affairs.
As Professor Koh put it: “In foreign affairs, even the longtime senator Joe Biden — who widely proclaims his love of the Senate — now operates almost entirely by executive fiat,” including a reliance on “classified policy memoranda, with minimal congressional oversight.” Overall, in fact, Biden issued more executive orders than any president since Richard Nixon. Though Biden wisely relied upon an interagency group of lawyers to advise him on national security decisions, following their advice, he issued “nonbinding political agreements, memoranda of understanding, joint communiques, and occasionally ‘executive agreements plus,’” just as Obama had done on the Paris climate accords and the Iran nuclear deal, relying on “preexisting legislative frameworks” rather than new Congressional authorizations. When it came to the war in Ukraine, Biden leaned heavily on “the coordinated use of sanctions, enhanced almost weekly post-invasion.” Most of those sanctions were set, as Koh also points out, “by executive orders and regulatory decrees,” rather than in consultation with Congress.
Our Future
A second Trump presidency will undoubtedly take unilateral presidential powers to a new level. After all, he already indicated that he might withdraw the U.S. from NATO and end support for Ukraine. Nor is Trump likely to be deterred by Congress. Reporting on Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s nearly 1,000-page prescription for a second Trump presidency, written primarily by former office holders in the first Trump administration, New York Times reporters Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman reported that Trump “and his associates” plan to “increase the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.”
In particular, Project 2025’s stance on nuclear weapons is a reminder of just how dangerous a president who refused to be restrained by law or precedent will be. After all, in his first term in office, Trump unilaterally pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions on that country, leading its leaders to increase its nuclear capacity. Meanwhile, the march toward nuclear confrontation has accelerated worldwide. In response, Project 2025 argues for ramping up America’s nuclear arsenal yet more. “[T]he United States manifestly needs to modernize, adapt, and expand its nuclear arsenal,” the treatise declared, in order to “deter Russia and China simultaneously,” adding that the U.S. needs to “develop a nuclear arsenal with the size, sophistication, and tailoring — including new capabilities at the theater level — to ensure that there is no circumstance in which America is exposed to serious nuclear coercion.”
Consider all of that a frightening vision of our now all-too-imminent future: a president freed from the restraints of the constitution, unchecked by Congress or the courts — or by his cabinet advisors. In the words of MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, Project 2025 has set the stage for Donald Trump to be the very opposite of what this country’s founders intended, “a king,” surrounded not by “groups of qualified experts” but by “unblinking yes-men.”
(Dis)Trust in the Presidency
The growing power of the presidency has been taking place in plain view, as unilateral powers have accumulated decade after decade in the Oval Office, while the recent choice of president has also become a grim choice about the nature and powers of the presidency itself. Notably, the rise in executive powers has coincided with a creeping distrust of government in this country. Since the early 1960s, when nearly 80% of Americans said they trusted government “most of the time,” the public’s faith in this country’s federal government hovers at just over 20%, according to the Pew Research Center. And no wonder. When the office of the president refuses to accept the checks and balances that underlie the democratic system, the country’s trust in negotiated, reasonable, and restrained outcomes understandably falls away.
Sadly, in this era, the benefits of restoring the very notion of checks and balances that birthed the nation have come to seem ever more like a quaint dream.
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The Return Of The King
The nation’s Founders would be astonished and furious at what the Supreme Court majority did this week.
Jul 04, 2024
This week, Chief Justice John Roberts and his band of five other Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justices restored the king to the top of our government.
Our nation’s Founders fought a revolution to help ensure our nation would be forever free from the clutches of an unrestrained monarch.
The Founders would be astonished and furious at what the Supreme Court majority did his week.
Three foundational principles of our country – principles established by our nation’s Founders nearly 250 years ago – are that we shall have no king, that the rule of law governs our country, and that NO person is above the law.
The Supreme Court’s opinion issued Monday in United States v. Trump has shattered these principles.
Six Republican-appointed Justices signed on to the opinion, written by Chief Justice Roberts, that disingenuously stated, “The President is not above the law.”
However, the opinion starkly contradicts that claim. The opinion, in reality, elevates the President to the equivalent of a king – a President free of legal accountability.
Perhaps, the Court majority should have labeled its opinion, “The President Is Now Above The Law.”
The opinion has given a President the ability to commit crimes while in office and then broad immunity from prosecution after leaving office. If Donald Trump is elected in November, he will, with the blessings of the Court majority, be free to be a dictator “on day one,” just as he promised.
The Declaration of Independence warned of the dangers of a king:
“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”
Our Founders further warned us about kings.
Thomas Paine wrote: “[I]n America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”
And, Alexander Hamilton wrote: “The person of the king of Great Britain is sacred and inviolable; there is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable; no punishment to which he can be subjected without involving the crisis of a national revolution.”
The Roberts-led Justices have ignored the warnings of our nation’s Founders.
The majority invented a series of immunities – absolute immunity for a President’s core constitutional acts (whatever that means), and “a presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for a President’s acts within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility,” (whatever that means). The opinion makes the presumption hard to overcome.
The potential for criminal prosecution after a President leaves office is a powerful deterrent to stop a President from committing crimes while in office. The Supreme Court majority has done great damage to this essential deterrent.
Just where do “originalist” Justices find the basis for immunity in the Constitution at its adoption?
Just where do the “textualist” Justices find immunities in the text of the Constitution?
Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, once wrote, “The most sacred of the duties of a government [is] to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens.”
Jefferson was clear when he wrote, “all its citizens.” All must include a former President like Donald Trump, despite what the six Justices said this week.
The absolute immunity conferred on a President by this week’s Supreme Court opinion for any discussion they have with Justice Department officials reads like it was written by the Court majority to protect former President Trump from prosecution for his alleged criminal acts in the discussions he had with his Justice Department. These discussions included pressuring officials to investigate false claims of voting fraud in the 2020 election.
How could the Supreme Court possibly give absolute immunity to a President – allowing a President to do anything they want, including criminal acts, to manipulate, misuse, and abuse the nation’s law enforcement agencies with no legal accountability?
It is a senseless, extremely dangerous position reached by the six Justices.
Former President Trump, who may be our next President, already has a track record that demonstrates the abuses he is prepared to inflict on the country. This includes his alleged criminal attempt at the first presidential coup in American history and his role in inciting the violent Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Just recently, Trump called for a military tribunal for former Rep. Liz Cheney, no doubt because of her key role as vice chair of the House’s January 6 Committee investigation.
If elected, it seems like Trump will be free and clear of any potential criminal accountability for abusing his office to do this, under the immunity provided by the Roberts opinion.
On July 4, 1776, our Founders declared our nation free from a king. Today, 248 years later, the Supreme Court has invited the king back.
The US Supreme Court Has Opened the Door for a Fascist American King
The Court has exposed itself as a nakedly political—and reactionary—institution, and the existential dangers it poses must be met by mass mobilization and fierce resistance.
Jul 03, 2024
"The president is not above the law,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts before ruling that President Trump is above the law.
In a Monday decision both shocking and unsurprising, the Supreme Court’s reactionary six-member majority ruled that the president of the United States has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for acts relating to “core constitutional duties.” An elementary school civics student taught that ours, supposedly, is a “government of laws and not of men,” would recognize the dangers of this ruling.
Theft, plunder, embezzlement, extortion, abduction, assassination, or, to state the obvious—attempted election interference or a coup: presidents could now be shielded from criminal prosecution for these acts and, for the first time in history, may feel empowered to commit them without fear of legal consequences, confident they can claim they are “core” duties and even basic “official” acts.
At every turn, this Court defers to power, Trumpian or corporate, at the expense of pluralism, individual freedom, and democracy.
The dangers are not hypothetical. This ruling ensures that President Trump will not stand trial for his involvement in the January 6 attack on the Capitol before the election. And if he wins election in November, acting on his pledge to become a “dictator for one day,” he will have at his disposal this authoritarian decision by the authoritarian court majority he created. With this ruling, we can see how the mechanisms of dictatorship merge into something realistic and profoundly dangerous.
The rise of presidential impunity, however, predates Trump. After 9/11, when the Bush administration launched an illegal invasion of Iraq and systematically committed war crimes, including torture, the courts barely pushed back, and, later, President Obama chose to “look forward, not backward,” further cementing that impunity.
When Center for Constitutional Rights, the organization I lead, sought to impose civil liability against high level executive branch officials, days from Trump’s inauguration, the Court gave officials carte blanche to violate the Constitution as long as they claimed their violations were undertaken pursuant to a policy. An expanded, overly powerful, unaccountable presidency was waiting for Trump in 2016—and now a cravenly political Supreme Court has affirmed it.
Under this Court's cruel and retrograde jurisprudence, a president cannot regulate carbon emissions or forgive student loans but might face no consequences for politically motivated killings or mass murder.
Yet this Court limits executive power when it suits its political ends, as it just did when it undercut the ability of federal agencies to enact environmental regulations, or earlier, to forgive student loans. The common baseline of these decisions is hostility to democracy and its aspiration for the collective good.
Under this Court's cruel and retrograde jurisprudence, a president cannot regulate carbon emissions or forgive student loans but might face no consequences for politically motivated killings or mass murder. The president is free to commit crimes to protect his craven self-interest, but women cannot protect their own bodies; indeed the president has immunity for bona fide crimes against the republic, while women can be criminalized for their personal choices. It is a jurisprudence that elevates wanton machine gun killings as a legal right over voting, equality, and public health.
At every turn, this Court defers to power, Trumpian or corporate, at the expense of pluralism, individual freedom, and democracy. It has exposed itself as a nakedly political—and reactionary—institution, and the existential dangers it poses must be met by political limitations on its recklessness and continued mass mobilization that resists fascism in every corridor of power.
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'Incredibly Alarming': Peaceful Protests Not Fit For a King
'We're now living in a dystopian nightmare'
May 06, 2023
Thousands of King Charles III's subjects protested against the monarchy Saturday in London — and heavy-handed police detained many of them for "suspicion of breaching the peace."
Earlier this week, the Metropolitan Police tweeted that they would have an “extremely low tolerance” of those seeking to “undermine” King Charles III's coronation day.
“A significant police operation is underway in central London,” the Metropolitan Police said in a statement Saturday. “The individuals have been held on suspicion of breaching the peace.”
At around 7 a.m. police stopped six of the anti-monarchy group Republic’s organizers and told them they were detaining and searching them, Republic director Harry Stratton told CNN at the protest. The group had been walking behind a rental van containing hundreds of placards. “They didn’t say why they were arresting them. They didn’t tell them or us where they were taking them. It really is like something out of a police state,” Stratton said.
Among those arrested ahead of a protest in London’s Trafalgar Square was Graham Smith, chief executive of Republic.
“This morning, Graham Smith and five members of our team were arrested. Hundreds of placards were seized,” Republic tweeted. “Is this democracy?”
Protesters say police warned them not to chant ‘anything that may be deemed offensive.’
The Metropolitan Police said those arrested were being “held on suspicion of conspiracy to cause public nuisance.”
Just Stop Oil reported that around 20 of its climate demonstrators had been arrested, with photos showing a man wearing a T-shirt with the group’s name being detained in Whitehall. “He was arrested along with 20 others,” Just Stop Oil tweeted. “Free speech is a core British value – and we have just lost it. No supporters of Just Stop Oil arrested in the crowd had glue, paint or any plans to disrupt the coronation. We are living in a dystopian nightmare.”
Human Rights Watch's UK director Yasmine Ahmed said in a statement: "The reports of people being arrested for peacefully protesting the coronation are incredibly alarming. This is something you would expect to see in Moscow not London.
"Peaceful protests allow individuals to hold those in power to account, something the UK government seems increasingly averse to.”
Sacha Deshmukh, Amnesty International UK’s chief executive, said: “We need to see what details emerge around these incidents but merely being in possession of a megaphone or carrying placards should never be grounds for a police arrest.
“Peaceful protest is clearly protected under international human rights law and it’s been worrying to see the police this week making numerous statements about their ‘low tolerance’ for disruption at the coronation. The coronation shouldn’t become yet another excuse for undermining people’s basic human rights in this country and we’re awaiting more details over these concerning reports of arrests.”
“We’ve recently had the introduction of extremely draconian legislation outlawing ‘disruptive’ or ‘noisy’ protests, which has given the police excessive – and highly subjective – powers and seriously damaged people’s right of free speech and public assembly.
“The coronation shouldn’t become yet another excuse for undermining people’s basic human rights in this country.”
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Prince Harry's PR Firestorm Creates Opportunity to Rethink Militarism
The criticism Harry has faced about his comments on Afghanistan is an opportunity to dig deeper and take on the dominant narratives in our society about war more broadly.
Jan 19, 2023
In the wake of Prince Harry’s new book Spare, leaked excerpts that he had killed 25 people in the war in Afghanistan shocked readers. He reflected on what it’s like to take a life in war: “You can't kill people if you think of them as people. You can't really harm people if you think of them as people. They were chess pieces removed from the board. Bads taken away before they could kill Goods. I'd been trained to ‘other-ize’ them, trained well. On some level I recognized this learned detachment as problematic. But I also saw it as an unavoidable part of soldiering.”
There was deep anger over Prince Harry’s admission. One British Army colonel told The Independent, “That’s not how you behave in the army.” But we shouldn’t be angry that he told the truth about the dehumanization inherent in warfare. We should be angry that the truth isn’t told more often.
On the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Prince Harry said he revealed these details about his time in Afghanistan to address the very real crisis of high veteran suicides. "I made a choice to share it because having spent nearly two decades working with veterans all around the world, I think the most important thing is to be honest and be able to give space to others to be able to share their experiences without any shame," he told Colbert.
The Costs of War Project, an organization with which we consult, found that at least four times as many active-duty personnel and war veterans of post-9/11 conflicts have died of suicide (30,177) than in combat (7,057). It’s laudable that Prince Harry is seeking to support other veterans. And the criticism he’s facing about his comments on Afghanistan is an opportunity to dig deeper and take on the dominant narratives in our society about war more broadly.
As Americans, we are often warned against critiquing or opposing war in the name of our patriotic duty. We watch movies that glorify war, and are taught at a young age that the causes of U.S. wars are always just or well-intentioned, and that any damage done is simply the price of protecting our freedoms.
Here’s what we’re not told: Nearly a million people have died in the post-9/11 wars, an overwhelming number of whom were civilians. The disproportionate impacts of these wars have been born by Muslims and people of color; nearly all of the 85 countries in which U.S. counterterrorism operations have occurred are in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. The dehumanization that Prince Harry describes stems in part from the systemic racism that undergirds militarism.
"Working to chip away at the dominant narrative that sanitizes war could be Harry's most powerful legacy of all."
What’s more, the New York Times reported that there are more militant groups operating now than when we embarked on these wars 20 years ago. The post-9/11 wars have actually been a main driver of conflict and recruitment in places such as Burkina Faso and Somalia.
We also aren’t told that War is big business, subsidized by taxpayers.
As the U.S. military budget tops $850 billion, other countries spend a fraction of what we do on their militaries. In fact, the U.S. spends more on war than the next nine countries combined. Spending on affordable housing, education, and healthcare in the U.S. are deprioritized by congressional leaders in favor of funding war.
But who actually gets the money we allot to the Pentagon? Costs of War has noted that nearly half of the Pentagon’s spending goes to military contractors, and a large portion of these contracts have gone to just five major corporations: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman.
It should be no surprise then that weapons makers have spent $2.5 billion on lobbying since 9/11, employing, on average, over 700 lobbyists per year—more than one for every member of Congress.
It’s not just K Street where the industry shines. National security pundits on TV news too often have undisclosed ties to the weapons industry, ensuring that the media narrative serves the interest of militarism, not true peace and security.
As Prince Harry told Stephen Colbert, context is everything. We must acknowledge not only the full toll that our wars take, but also, the systemic motivations behind them.
Although a prince, Harry was a young man when he served in Afghanistan as an army officer. Now, he’s older than his mother was when she died, and has built a platform to “drive systemic cultural change,” according to the website of the Archewell Foundation, which he and Megan Markle founded.
He can take this PR firestorm and create real cultural change when it comes to understanding the full impact of and systemic reasons for militarism. Working to chip away at the dominant narrative that sanitizes war could be Harry's most powerful legacy of all.
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The Death of a Queen and the Whitewashing of Empire
The queen will be mourned by the millions who loved her, but as Charles becomes king, a reckoning must be made with the monarchy's role in the world.
Sep 13, 2022
ollowing the death of Queen Elizabeth, no one in the established media is taking any chances with the public mood. Public affection for the late queen is not in doubt, and yet BBC journalists are whipping up paroxysms of grief that wouldn't be out of place in North Korea.
The BBC's Johnny Diamond and Nicholas Witchell have wrung out every possible emotive line about the queen's selfless devotion to service and the nation's unending sorrow. Yet an objective view of her reign must separate her personal qualities from the role the monarchy has played in the service of Britain's imperial interests, machinations and crimes over the last 70 years.
The examples are too numerous to list, but in every major crisis since the queen was crowned, amid a period of troubled decolonisation, the monarchy played its part.
Britain's close ties to the shah of Iran prior to and following a British and US-backed coup in 1953 is a perfect illustration of the way the monarch functioned to legitimise neocolonial policies through direct relations with pro-western dictators. Shah Pahlavi ruled with a brutal secret police and was put into power because his elected prime minister had nationalised Iran's oil industry - a highly strategic part of Britain's Middle East imperial possessions.
Once safely installed, the oil profits flowed once more. The queen received the shah as an official guest in 1959 and made a state visit to Iran as the shah's guest in 1961. Further mutual visits followed, and relations were extremely cordial.
Of course the queen did not author the 1953 coup - that was Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Eisenhower - but she helped strengthen relations with Iran over the decades by forming a personal relationship with the shah and his wife, until he was overthrown in the revolution of 1979.
Backing autocracy
Britain attempted to continue its imperial influence across the Middle East through the support for the royal regimes that it put in place and supported in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Libya and the Gulf emirates. In the post-war period of anti-colonial revolt, several of these monarchs were overthrown to the great chagrin of Britain.
In the case of Libya, King Idris, formerly the leader of the Sanussi tribe and emir of Cyrenaica, was awarded the Grand Cross of the British Empire for his support in the defeat of German and Italian forces in North Africa during World War II.
The queen's cousin Earl Mountbatten (who oversaw the precipitous and disastrous partition of India in 1947) was a close friend of Idris and used to visit him in Libya and stay at his royal palace. In return Idris supported the UK and France during the attack on Egypt in 1956, and provided the US with a major airbase near Tripoli, home to 4,600 Americans. All of this was lost in Muammar Gaddafi's coup of 1969.
The British policy of installing and supporting monarchies across the Middle East sits oddly with the UK's proclaimed support for democracy, when no democratic or constitutional reform has taken place in most of these UK-backed regimes. The British royal family plays an essential role in maintaining an autocratic model of diplomacy and personal relations with regimes including Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Oman.
These regimes support western economic interests across the Middle East, while also pouring billions into the British economy, pumping up invisible earnings and buying up luxury property and Premier League football clubs.
The queen's love of horses was shared with her good friend Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the emir of Dubai, who notoriously kidnapped two of his daughters, one in the middle of the English countryside in 2000, the other in the Indian Ocean in 2018. It was reported that the queen would no longer be seen in public with the emir following the recent court case confirming the kidnappings.
Commander in chief
Much is made of the non-political nature of the monarch and the way the queen stayed out of politics and kept her views to herself. But no matter her discretion, her role was hardly non-political. The queen was the head of state and the commander-in-chief of the British Armed Forces. All soldiers had to swear an oath of loyalty to her before deployment to Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. These wars have left devastation and hundreds of thousands dead.
As the queen said in her broadcast to the armed forces in 2009 as Britain's iniquitous role in the Iraq war came to an end: "Wherever you are deployed in the world, you should be assured that I and the whole nation are deeply thankful for the part you play in helping to maintain peace around the globe."
Her grandson Prince Harry is only the latest royal who served during a war where British forces have been accused of war crimes; the deaths of scores of civilians in night raids, executed in a macabre game of body counts that was covered up at the highest levels of the army, according to a recent BBC investigation.
The Duke of Sussex served in the British Army for 10 years and was deployed to Afghanistan twice during Nato's 20-year intervention in the country, first in 2007 on the frontline as a forward air controller, and then again as a copilot gunner with the 662 Squadron, part of the army's Attack Helicopter Force.
His father, King Charles, has visited the Gulf region many times, enabling the continued sale of British weapons to the Saudi regime in its bloody war in Yemen that has seen thousands killed in air strikes. This aspect of the royal family's function within the British state is currently being airbrushed.
Many have praised the role of the queen in transitioning the UK to a post-colonial power through her role as head of the Commonwealth. But more critical voices have raised the question of the way in which Britain withdrew from its colonies and dealt with the legacy of empire during the queen's reign.
The sense of criminals fleeing a crime scene is hard to avoid: mass burning of colonial files began in India and, from the early 1960s, the British government engaged in Operation Legacy, destroying countless records of the British colonial regimes. As a commentator wrote on Twitter: "Now is the time to discuss this kind of detail because [the queen's] death is being used to push a sanitised history of her reign."
For the duration of the period of mourning that is now being enforced nationwide, criticism of the monarchy by the 22 percent who support a republic is being treated as a form of dissidence, with protests against the royal family shut down by the police. The truth is support for the monarchy has declined significantly in recent years, and the debate about its role domestically as the pinnacle of a semi-feudal system of land ownership and class hierarchy will not go away.
The queen will be mourned by the millions who loved her, but as Charles becomes king, a reckoning must be made with the monarchy's role in preserving a corrupt authoritarian system across swathes of the Middle East.
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Rights Advocates Condemn UK's Crackdown on Anti-Monarchy Protesters
"Whoever you are, whatever your cause, it is vital you are able to stand up for what you believe in without facing the risk of criminalization," said one civil liberties campaigner.
Sep 13, 2022
Free expression advocates in the United Kingdom are warning that law enforcement agents in the country appear ready to eliminate Britons' right to free speech as several arrests have been reported at events taking place during the 10-day nationwide mourning period following Queen Elizabeth II's death.
"As precious, if not more precious than the monarchy, is the real beautiful web of freedoms and civil liberties that we've built up here over centuries, and we'd be very wrong to begin to sacrifice those in this kind of moment."
Critics of the monarchy have been arrested, detained, forced to leave public areas, and intimidated by police officers in Scotland and London as Queen Elizabeth's coffin has traveled across the U.K., along with members of the royal family including King Charles III.
The first arrest was reportedly made in Oxford, where Symon Hill asked, "Who elected him?" as a proclamation officially naming Charles as his mother's successor was read. Hill reported that police officers placed him in handcuffs and eventually told him he'd been arrested under the "Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts Act 2022," which has been condemned by rights advocates.
Hill wrote that he was never "given a clear answer as to why I had been arrested," but was told his comments in Oxford could have led to "harassment or distress."
Ruth Smeeth of the Index on Censorship called arrests like Hill's "deeply concerning" and warned that the queen's death may be "used, by accident or design, to erode in any way the freedom of expression that citizens of this country enjoy."
"The fundamental right to freedom of expression, including the right to protest, is something to be protected regardless of circumstance," Smeeth told Bloomberg.
A demonstrator holding a handmade sign reading, "Not My King" was also filmed being led away by police from the Palace of Westminster in London on Monday, and climate campaigner and lawyer Paul Powlesland reported that he attracted negative attention from a police officer when he held up a blank sheet of paper in Parliament Square.
The officer warned Powlesland that if he wrote "Not My King" on the paper, he would be arrested under the Public Order Act "because someone might be offended."
"I believe actually as precious, if not more precious than the monarchy, is the real beautiful web of freedoms and civil liberties that we've built up here over centuries, and we'd be very wrong to begin to sacrifice those in this kind of moment," Powlesland told "Good Morning Britain" on Tuesday, adding that he protested only to make a statement about freedom of speech, but the police response to critics of the monarchy this week has pushed him to adopt an anti-monarchist view.
Member of Parliament and former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn called the arrest of anti-monarchy protesters "wrong, anti-democratic and an abuse of the law," while Zarah Sultana, another Labour MP, expressed shock that Britons' right to speak out against the monarchy is being debated.
In Edinburgh, a 22-year-old student named Mariangela was arrested after holding up a sign that read, "Fuck imperialism. Abolish monarchy" outside St. Giles Cathedral, where the queen's coffin lay before being taken to London.
Mariangela told openDemocracy that she was detained in a cell for nine hours and that the officers who were arrested later expressed "doubts over whether the arrest was lawful." She was nevertheless charged with "behavior likely to cause a reasonable person to suffer fear or alarm" under Scotland's Criminal Justice and Licensing Act 2010 and ordered to appear in court on September 30.
Police Scotland's actions were "clearly a violation of freedom of speech, which is supposed to be enshrined in the laws of the United Kingdom," she told openDemocracy. "If I'm not allowed to express my opinion, I don't see how that law is being observed."
Also in Edinburgh, videos posted on social media appeared to show a protester being removed from a crowd by officers and arrested after shouting, "You're a sick old man" at Prince Andrew. The prince has been accused of raping Virginia Giuffre, a woman who was allegedly sex-trafficked by financier Jeffrey Epstein. He has denied the accusation but paid a settlement to Giuffre earlier this year.
"Protest is not a gift from the state, it is a fundamental right," Jodie Beck, policy and campaigns officer at civil liberties group Liberty, told Bloomberg. "Being able to choose what, how, and when we protest is a vital part of a healthy and functioning democracy."
"Whoever you are, whatever your cause, it is vital you are able to stand up for what you believe in without facing the risk of criminalization," Beck added. "It is very worrying to see the police enforcing their broad powers in such a heavy-handed and punitive way to clamp down on free speech and expression."
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