Reilly is the outreach and communications coordinator for RepresentWomen, a nonpartisan organization advocating for policies that would result in more women holding office.
Last week, Kristen Clarke, following a protracted confirmation process, made history as the first woman and first Black woman to lead the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. This historic moment comes 28 years, almost to the day, after the withdrawal of Lani Guinier's nomination for the same position by President Bill Clinton.
In 1993, Clinton nominated Guinier, a tenured law professor and former NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund attorney, to head up the Civil Rights Division. A former classmate of Clinton's at Yale Law School, Guinier had worked in the division during the Carter administration before helping earn an extension of the Voting Rights Act in 1982 and becoming head of the NAACP LDF's voting rights project.
Following her nomination in April 1993, Guinier faced increasing scrutiny and opposition over her academic writings exploring concepts of quotas in nominations, equitable power within legislative bodies and proportional representation electoral systems. In direct contrast to their content, these writings earned her the labels of "quota queen," "anti-democratic," "Looney Lani," "a reverse racist," "a madwoman" and "breathtakingly radical" from her political opponents.
Media and public critiques of Guinier's writing often cherry-picked lines and ideas to cast her as radical and anti-democratic, while in reality her work is widely accepted by the electoral reform community and many of the electoral alternatives she explored are already in practice in numerous countries around the world. Her academic work focused on ways in which the U.S. electoral and political system could be race-conscious, fair and equitable for Black Americans who continue to face systemic racism and structural barriers in politics that white Americans simply do not.
In "Keeping the Faith: Black Voters in the Post-Reagan Era," one of the top works cited by her critics in the 1993 nomination fight, Guinier advocated for "affirmative recruitment" for political and judicial appointments. She wrote: "For example, the Senate Judiciary Committee should begin evaluating federal judicial nominations with reference to specific goals for increasing non-white nominees. The Committee should decline to consider any nominee until a sufficient number of nominations ... were made so as to enable the Committee to consider not only the individual qualifications for each, but the impact of these twenty or thirty nominations as a totality on the composition of the federal bench."
While dismissed at the time as an unfair quota, holding leaders with appointment powers to account for diverse nomination and appointments has become a common practice, especially within the Democratic Party over the past few months. Following President Biden's election in November 2020, many individuals and organizations came out in favor of a gender-balanced and diverse Cabinet leading to many historic firsts for women and communities of color. Despite gains in diversity in Biden's Cabinet, the lack of an AAPI appointment was met with fallout from groups like APAICS and Democratic Sens. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, resulting in the creation of a White House liaison to the Asian American and Pacific Islander community. Erika Moritsugu now holds that position.
In Guinier's Michigan Law Review article, "The Triumph of Tokenism: The Voting Rights Act and the Theory of Black Electoral Success," she criticized the U.S. reliance on racially gerrymandered single-member districts and the resulting tokenistic political representation for the Black community, and she spotlighted proportional voting systems to enable all voters to be able to elect representatives of their choice. Guinier wrote, "A fair system of political representation would ensure that disadvantaged and stigmatized minority groups also provide mechanisms to have a fair chance to have their policy preferences satisfied" especially if the number of racial majority representatives continues to dwarf the minority. Additionally, Guinier criticized excessive reliance on race-conscious single-member districts that gave incentive for "residential racial separatism" and failed to accurately represent the multi-racial characteristic of many districts.
Rather than being "breathtakingly radical," "looney," or "anti-democratic," Guinier's writings simply illustrate the widely recognizable pitfalls of the single-member, winner-take-all electoral system used in the United States that continues to overrepresent cis, white men. Although Clinton withdrew her nomination in June 1993, Guinier did not go quietly. She spoke out in her own defense and earned national acclaim, saying, "I am a democratic idealist who believes that politics need not be forever seen as 'I win, you lose,' a dynamic in which some people are permanent monopoly winners and others are permanently excluded losers."
While losing a chance to lead the Civil Rights Division, Guinier's ideas have gained traction in the United States. More than 100 localities have resolved voting rights cases with proportional voting systems, including cases brought by the Department of Justice in New York, where Port Chester adopted cumulative voting, and in Michigan, where Eastpointe adopted the proportional form of ranked-choice voting. Rashad Robinon, president of Color of Change, affirmed the increasing relevance of Guinier's ideas in awarding her with FairVote's Champion of Democracy award in 2017.
Kristen Clarke's confirmation process often mirrored that of Lani Guinier. Many of Clarke's critics again cast her as too "radical" to hold the position, in response to Clarke suggesting more money be spent on social programs like emotional health treatment and other often overlooked and underfunded areas. Despite historic strides in recent years for women, women of color continue to be scapegoated and dismissed for common-sense and practical solutions to structural issues. But as with Guinier, Clarke may get the final word: She now runs the Civil Rights Division at a historic time, when basic issues of fair access and fair representation are at play, and where a strong protector of the Voting Rights Act is more important than ever
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.