A backroom deal for redrawing Michigan's state legislative districts has been rejected by a panel of federal judges, who will instead hear the case as a trial starting Tuesday.
The judges said the Democratic secretary of state had no authority to make the pact with fellow Democrats in the Legislature, who argue the current maps were an unconstitutionally partisan gerrymander at the hand of the majority Republicans in the state House. The Democratic plaintiffs say that about a dozen of the 110 districts ought to be redrawn to give them a fair shot.
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Happy 230th birthday, Bill of Rights
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The Enduring Illusion of Article the first
Aug 03, 2026
This is the first of three parts exploring “Article the First,” the forgotten proposal in the original Bill of Rights. For 237 years, a single, inverted word has created a “semantic illusion,” leading historians and policymakers to misread the founders' intended guarantee of a growing House as a ceiling. This series uncovers the error, tracks its consequences, and explores why reclaiming the founders’ original vision is the path to meaningful representation reform.
Part 1 — The Inverted Word
Rep. Darrell Issa recently introduced a resolution to sunset, by the end of 2026, the only proposal in the original Bill of Rights that was never ratified. He fears that its ratification would swell the House of Representatives to thousands of members. He is right that the amendment is about the size of the House — but, like nearly everyone for 237 years, completely wrong about what it says.
We are taught that the Bill of Rights opens with the First Amendment with its protection of speech and worship. In fact, when Congress sent the Bill of Rights to the states in 1789, it consisted of twelve proposed amendments, and the one we now call the “First Amendment” was actually listed third. The true first — labeled simply Article the first — was never ratified. It wasn’t about liberty or religion at all; it was about arithmetic: How many citizens each member of the House should represent. It was placed first, ahead of speech and worship, because the founders treated the size and closeness of the people’s House as the most basic structural guarantee of all.
Hidden in that amendment is a single word, altered during the waning days of the hectic first session, that turns its whole purpose on its head, and which almost no one notices. And significantly, that unnoticed alteration is the very thing that doomed the amendment’s ratification.
As the House wrote it, the amendment was a guarantee of small districts, and it worked by completing a design the Constitution had left half-finished. The Constitution already set the ceiling: no more than one representative for every thirty thousand. The first Article was intended to supply the matching floor: No fewer than one representative for every fifty thousand, so that a district could never grow too large. Together, the two would have ensured that the House grew with the nation, after each census, so that no representative would ever speak for too many people.
But the enrolled version sent to the states reads “nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.” When less became more, the floor became a ceiling — a single, inexplicable inversion converted the guarantee of a growing House into a ceiling no one had sought. This left two ceilings, thereby defaulting the minimum House size to what was intended to be a transitional minimum of 200. And for a range of the populations the nation was about to reach, the enrolled text would have imposed a formula so self-contradictory that no apportionment solution would have been mathematically possible — which is why we call it the “defective” version. Yet nearly everyone misreads that defective ceiling as a floor — the very floor the founders intended, the one that would have forced the House to keep growing.
Read literally, the defective clause would let Congress seat anywhere from 200 representatives to roughly 6,600 at today’s population — while requiring nothing beyond the 200. Yet for two centuries, readers have seen its opposite: a floor compelling the House to grow. And not careless readers — the careful ones.
When the National Archives marked the Bill of Rights anniversary in a 2010 press release, it declared that had this amendment passed, there would be “far more than 435 members of Congress — nearly 6,000” — reading the bill’s ceiling as a floor, despite the defective text being reprinted directly above its own words. In 2021, four distinguished scholars, under the imprimatur of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, made the case for a larger House and cited the amendment as a formula for steady expansion — quoting its “nor more than” language accurately in a footnote while interpreting it as though it read “nor less than.” The constitutional historian they leaned on had read it the same way. So does Rep. Issa’s office today.
What makes the persistence striking is that the correction has never been hidden. Thirty-Thousand.org has been pointing to the inverted word for more than two decades, in pages indexed by every major search engine; the Archives’ statement, the Academy’s report, and Issa’s resolution all came afterward. The illusion survives the correction sitting one click away. It is now so woven into the written record that today’s leading AI models, trained on that record, reproduce the error on request — until the arithmetic is spelled out for them.
This isn’t a failure of intelligence; it’s a quirk of how we read. The amendment builds a drumbeat of floors — “not less than one hundred… nor less than one for every forty thousand… not less than two hundred” — training the eye to expect one more. The final clause arrives in the same cadence, the next ratio in the sequence, with a single four-letter word swapped for another. By the time you reach it, expectation has taken the wheel, and the mind quietly restores “more” to “less.” Psychologists have a name for this — the semantic illusion — but the plain fact is that the sentence reads just as we expect it to, so we never see the word that is actually there.
Why should a 237-year-old wording error matter now? Because the proposal is being read to mean the opposite of what it plainly says — a ceiling mistaken for a floor — and almost no one realizes it. That misreading has hardened into a damaging piece of conventional wisdom: Since the states declined to ratify Article the first, and everyone assumes it mandated a vastly larger House, the larger House itself must be the thing they rejected. It wasn’t. What the states declined was its broken formulation — and mistaking the one for the other has quietly turned an inexplicable defect into an argument against enlarging the House. Yet that long overdue reform is more within reach than two centuries of neglect would suggest.
Investigating the first Article’s defect reveals a real mystery. The amendment twice came within a single state of ratification — and then was abandoned, fading from American memory for two centuries. An amendment that came that close, twice, doesn’t simply vanish. This one did. In Part 2, we’ll follow that defective clause into the state legislatures that had to reckon with it: the hidden arithmetic that made the amendment impossible to implement, the debate in which a little-known state legislator caught what one of the era’s finest minds had missed, and why a reform the country actually wanted was allowed to fail.
First of three parts, condensed from a fuller treatment, “The Enduring Textual Illusion of ‘Article the First,’” at Thirty-Thousand.org.
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We the People billboard
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Lawyers Must Defend the Rule of Law, as the Founders Intended
Aug 02, 2026
The Declaration of Independence is an explanation for why the colonists wanted their own country, but it's mostly an indictment: a 27-count charging document against King George III for running a lawless government. “He has obstructed the Administration of Justice.” “He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone.” “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people.”
It shouldn't be a surprise that so many of the 56 signers of the Declaration were lawyers. Lawyers swear an oath to the truth, to good faith, and to ethical conduct. In this year of the Declaration's 250th anniversary, it's important to remind lawyers of their oaths and their duty to defend against lawless, unethical behavior. At a time when it seems that more lawyers than ever are breaking faith with their oaths, the Declaration provides a model for how lawyers should respond.
It sounds easy, but it’s not. In the face of repeated acts of dishonesty and bad faith from government lawyers and lawyers representing government officials, too many bar associations, law school deans, law firm leaders, and individual lawyers have avoided calling out this conduct. The common excuse is a desire to avoid being seen as taking sides in a political dispute. But these are not political disputes. These are lawyers, in public and in court, lying and misleading, often in service of illegal and unconstitutional ends.
For example, Rudy Giuliani, once a hero for his actions as mayor of New York City after 9/11, decided in 2021 to mislead a court, lie to the public, and participate in an illegal and unconstitutional scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Other attorneys, including John Eastman and Kenneth Chesebro, promoted a false legal basis to overturn the election, and pressured the Vice President to exercise powers they knew he did not have. Lawyers Defending American Democracy (LDAD), where I am a board member, enlisted the nation's leading ethics lawyers to file complaints against each of these individuals for their conduct. Each has been disciplined: Giuliani and Chesebro disbarred in New York, Eastman disbarred in California.
LDAD has filed more than a dozen complaints, signed by thousands of lawyers and non-lawyers. Nearly all of these complaints have led to an investigation or discipline. But there are exceptions. In Florida, LDAD filed a complaint against then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, detailing a series of unethical and dishonest actions by Ms. Bondi. The complaint was supported by a team of renowned ethics attorneys and other professionals, including an LDAD board member who is a former Chief Justice of the Florida Supreme Court. Despite all this, the Florida Bar refused to even open an investigation because the AG was a federal constitutional office-holder, a position that lacked legal authority. The people who signed the Declaration would undoubtedly find this to be an absurd betrayal.
Lawyers have a special responsibility to act. An increasing number of lawyers are doing just that, at least judging by the thousands of attorneys who have signed onto LDAD's ethics complaints. Federal judges are acting, too. This year in Rhode Island, a Trump-appointed judge ruled that the government's traditional presumption of good faith “no longer holds” and referred the Justice Department lawyers before her to the court's disciplinary committee.
Ensuring that the bedrock principles of our system of government, including good faith, the truth, and the rule of law, are upheld requires constant vigilance, a clear-eyed view of right and wrong, and a dedication to holding those who breach these principles accountable. The signers of the Declaration envisioned a country founded on the rule of law, not the law of the ruler. They signed their names to it. All of us, especially lawyers, have a responsibility – and an opportunity – to do the same.
Evan Falchuk is a member of the board of Lawyers Defending American Democracy.
This series from Lawyers Defending American Democracy connects the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to current events that threaten democracy and the justice system. Each piece highlights the unique responsibility lawyers carry—through their oath, professional obligations, and roles in their communities—to help the public understand what’s at risk and to speak out when democratic principles are under threat. LDAD’s call to action is straightforward: as the Founders once did, we must recognize threats to constitutional values, demand accountability, and act to defend them.
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circa 1770: The English-born American revolutionary philosopher Thomas Paine, (1737 - 1809), who wrote and published 'The Rights of Man', (1791 - 1792), in England. In it he expressed his support for the French Revolution and called for the overthrow of the British monarchy.
(Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
50501 Movement – Thomas Paine’s Political Philosophy in the 21st Century
Aug 02, 2026
The 50501 Movement can be viewed as a 21st-century manifestation of the anti-authoritarian, pro-egalitarian framework that Thomas Paine championed in Common Sense. Both movements share a core belief in challenging entrenched power and mobilizing the collective voice of everyday people to defend democracy. By utilizing decentralized, nationwide grassroots mobilization to challenge executive overreach and billionaire consolidation, the 50501 movement directly echoes Paine’s anti-authoritarianism, his belief in collective civic power, and his demand that power remains in the hands of the people.
The 50501 Movement mirrors the spirit of Paine’s Common Sense through three primary parallels:
From "No Taxation Without Representation" to "No Plutocracy Without Resistance"
In 1776, Paine argued that monarchical rule was inherently tyrannical and rigged against the common colonist. He challenged the status quo, pushing ordinary citizens to realize their collective strength. Similarly, the 50501 Movement confronts what it identifies as a modern crisis of concentrated wealth and political overreach. Just as Paine urged colonists to dismantle hereditary privilege, 50501 calls on working-class Americans to push back against billionaire consolidation and defend their civil liberties.
Paine's Aspiration: Paine’s core thesis was a blistering attack on divine-right monarchy and unchecked executive power. He asserted that the laws and the people are sovereign, not the king. In Common Sense, Paine argued that regular working people—shopkeepers, farmers, and everyday citizens—had both the capacity and the right to govern themselves, famously declaring that "one honest man is of more worth to society than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived".
21st-Century Reality: The 50501 Movement operates as a decentralized, volunteer-led force fighting against plutocracy, the influence of billionaire donors, and an economy rigged to favor the wealthy. It champions the dignity of everyday workers against modern-day "crowned ruffians". The 50501 movement actively resists the consolidation of executive power and the advancement of authoritarian policies. Like Paine, participants argue that no leader is above the law and that democratic institutions must be protected.
Decentralized, Rapid Organizing, Grassroots Action
Paine’s pamphlet bypassed the elite political class, distributing his message directly to the public in plain language. This shift in thought allowed colonists to transform their individual grievances into a unified revolution. The 50501 Movement operates on a similar decentralized model. Organized organically through the internet and rapid-response networks, 50501 mobilizes everyday people across local communities. The strategy of holding decentralized rallies in all 50 states on a single day bypasses traditional, centralized power structures and directly mirrors Paine's democratic rallying cries.
Paine's Aspiration: Paine championed mass communication. His pamphlet spread rapidly through taverns, town meetings, and coffeehouses, read aloud to those who couldn’t read themselves. It bypassed traditional, elite gatekeepers to unite ordinary colonists behind a singular democratic idea.
21st-Century Reality: Born on social media, the 50501 campaign (originally meaning "50 protests in 50 states on 1 day") uses digital connectivity to bypass centralized institutional control. It enables millions of Americans to voice rapid, coordinated dissent.
Preserving an "Asylum for Mankind"
Paine famously envisioned the United States as a sanctuary for freedom, equality, and popular self-government—an example to the world. The 50501 Movement invokes this same aspiration. By protesting executive overreach, attacks on democratic institutions, and the erosion of due process, the movement seeks to protect those same foundational rights. Participants argue that to sit idly by while rights are undermined is to abandon the republican promise that Paine helped forge.
Paine's Aspiration: Paine viewed the American struggle not as an isolated colonial grievance, but as a global experiment. He believed America could serve as an "asylum for mankind".
21st-Century Reality: The 50501 coalition is deeply inclusive, protecting civil liberties for all. It works to safeguard the rights of immigrants, LGBTQ+ individuals, and marginalized communities against state-level assaults.
As Americans reflect on the nation's ideals, the 50501 Movement can be seen as a modern continuation of what Paine called "the cause of all mankind": the ongoing struggle to ensure that "We the People" remains the ultimate check on executive overreach and inequality.
Hugh J. Campbell, Jr., CPA, is a Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) professional and a student of W. Edwards Deming, the American statistician often credited as the catalyst for the Japanese economic miracle after WWII.
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Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.