This month Juan Cartagena marks nine years as president and general counsel of LatinoJustice PRLDEF. It advocates for Hispanic civil and voting rights, and his interests include the effects on those rights of mass imprisonment, language barriers and gerrymandering. After Columbia Law School he spent seven years in the 1980s as a junior attorney for the same organization, then called the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. He later worked for the government of Puerto Rico, as a municipal judge in Hoboken, N.J., as general counsel of the Hispanic Bar Association of New Jersey and as a top official at the Community Service Society, which litigates on behalf of the poor. He also lectures at Rutgers. His answers have been edited for clarity and length.
What's democracy's biggest challenge, in 10 words or less?
Easing the way for the unregistered to vote.
Describe your very first civic engagement.
Supporting the candidacy of Julian Robinson, the first African American to run for mayor in Jersey City in 1969 — before I was of age to vote. The power of electoral politics was forged for me, and the fact it was a local election made the connection between that power and my neighborhood more direct. The buzz created by this historic campaign was palpable and reflected the expansive mood of the country with the ascendance of the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, justice for Latino farmworkers and the protests against the Vietnam War. Everything seemed possible, and the ballot was one of many accessible tools for change.
What was your biggest professional triumph?
Decades later there was a mayoral election in Jersey City when the incumbent conspired to win by "slowing down" the vote in black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, which can only happen if that vote is suppressed. After nine years of litigation under the Voting Rights Act, we secured a million-dollar fund to compensate the voters discriminated against. The suit also led to a change in the state election code preventing the targeting of voter challenges by neighborhood or because of residence in public housing. Early on, over beers after a long day of depositions, my co-counsel and I made a pact never to withdraw from the case no matter where we worked. Nine years later, we toasted again.
And your most disappointing setback?
Removing the right to vote for someone simply because they are incarcerated, or on parole, is an affront to an inclusive democracy. In Canada, Puerto Rico, South Africa and Israel, you can vote from your prison cell, as you can in Vermont and Maine. But 48 states still prohibit it. That's the background for one of my biggest disappointments in court — losing a challenge to New York's restrictions in this regard. But years later, I celebrated in Florida with LatinoJustice staff and community leaders who themselves were previously incarcerated when voters in 2018 restored the vote after someone finishes their prison terms and parole. Over a million citizens became eligible to vote but the battle, for me, is not over until everyone, regardless of incarceration, can have a voice in our democracy.
How does your identity influence the way you go about your work?
I am a Puerto Rican man raised in a working-class home by a single head of household, my mother, in urban America. You cannot escape learning about the injustices and exploitation that surround you in such an environment. Nor could I ignore the fact that there was amazing talent all around me in public schools whose lives were never nurtured. I cannot accept injustice. Never could and never will.
What's the best advice you've ever been given?
From my family: Never forget who you are. From my professional circle: The law is easy. Facts are hard.
Create a new flavor for Ben & Jerry's.
CafeBuca. Coffee ice cream laced with a syrup made from Sambuca.
What's your favorite political movie or TV show?
"The Wire."
What's the last thing you do on your phone at night?
Set the alarm.
What is your deepest, darkest secret.
I want to whistle a solo on a recording of Afro-Blue.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.