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Jason Witmer, Policy Strategist, ACLU of Nebraska
Jason Witmer: Shaping Statewide Civil Rights Policy
Jan 29, 2026
Jason Witmer is a policy strategist whose lived experience, legislative expertise, and community‑rooted advocacy have made him one of Nebraska’s most compelling voices on civil rights, criminal legal reform, and voting access.
Witmer's work as a Policy Strategist at the ACLU of Nebraska reflects the organization’s broader mission to defend civil liberties and expand democratic participation statewide.
The Fulcrum spoke with Witmer on a recent episode of The Fulcrum Democracy Forum.
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At the ACLU of Nebraska, Witmer has become a respected presence in the state legislature, frequently testifying before the Judiciary Committee on issues ranging from restrictive housing to voting rights. His testimony on solitary confinement draws from both research and personal experience, offering lawmakers a rare combination of policy analysis and lived insight.
Witmer's contributions to civic life were highlighted in The 50: Voices of a Nation, where he discussed the landscape of voting rights and civic engagement in Nebraska and the importance of ensuring that every community has a meaningful voice in the democratic process.
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Before entering policy work, Witmer earned an associate degree in human services from Southeast Community College and spent years supporting Nebraskans in crisis as a peer specialist and later as a program coordinator at a peer respite house. That work, along with his public education efforts on the impacts of the criminal legal system, gave him a close view of how state policies shape people’s lives long before they reach a courtroom or a cell.
His leadership in democracy work has also been recognized beyond the Capitol. In 2025, Civic Nebraska honored him with the Jan Gradwohl Defender of Democracy Award for his efforts to restore voting rights and strengthen civic participation among justice‑impacted Nebraskans.
Witmer’s work reflects the mission of the ACLU of Nebraska, a statewide organization dedicated to defending and advancing civil liberties through litigation, policy advocacy, and community engagement. The organization focuses on protecting voting rights, challenging discriminatory practices in the criminal legal system, defending LGBTQ+ equality, safeguarding reproductive freedom, and ensuring due process for immigrant communities. Across these issue areas, the ACLU of Nebraska works to uphold constitutional protections for all Nebraskans, especially those whose rights are most vulnerable to erosion.
Within that mission, Witmer plays a key role in connecting policy debates to the people most affected by them. Whether he is analyzing legislation, meeting with community members, or testifying before lawmakers, his work underscores the idea that civil liberties are not abstract principles but daily realities that determine who gets to participate fully in society.
Witmer's trajectory—from peer support to statewide policy strategist—illustrates how lived experience can inform and strengthen civil rights advocacy, and why Nebraska’s civic landscape is richer for the voices he helps elevate.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of The Fulcrum and the publisher of the Latino News Network, and twice president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
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In Donald Trump's interview with Reuters on Jan. 24, he portrayed himself as an "I don't care" president, an attitude that is not compatible with leadership in a constitutional democracy.
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Donald Trump’s “I Don’t Care” Philosophy Undermines Democracy
Jan 29, 2026
On January 14, President Trump sat down for a thirty-minute interview with Reuters, the latest in a series of interviews with major news outlets. The interview covered a wide range of subjects, from Ukraine and Iran to inflation at home and dissent within his own party.
As is often the case with the president, he didn’t hold back. He offered many opinions without substantiating any of them and, talking about the 2026 congressional elections, said, “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
However, what caught my attention was something else. It was not so much about Trump’s policy positions as his attitude and conception of his role.
To put it simply, Trump portrayed himself as an “I don’t care” president. No other American president has ever embraced that view as their governing philosophy, and no one has ever been so ready to let everyone know.
That attitude is not compatible with leadership in a constitutional democracy. The Founders made clear that “the president, as the only official elected by the people as a whole, had not only the constitutional but the moral responsibility to act on their behalf—in the interest of the salus populi.”
In addition, someone who does not care is unreachable. Indifference is itself a kind of power, but it is hard to reconcile such a disposition with the requirements of leadership in a constitutional democracy.
Any president’s disposition or conception of leadership is consequential because, as the political scientist James David Barber explains, “The presidency is a peculiar office. The founding fathers left it extraordinarily loose in definition, partly because they trusted George Washington to invent a tradition as he went along.”
“It is,” Barber says, “an institution made a piece at a time by successive men in the White House….(E)very President’s mind and demeanor has left its mark on a heritage still in lively development.” Their mind and demeanor “interact… with the power situation he faces and the national ‘climate of expectations’ dominant at the time he serves. The tuning, the resonance—or lack of it—between these external factors and his personality sets in motion the dynamics of his presidency.”
Another word, Barber argues, that describes a president’s mind and demeanor is “character.” Character is the way “the president orients himself toward life – not for the moment, but enduringly. Character is the person’s stance as he confronts experience.“
The president’s character and his “I don’t care” attitude were made clear throughout his Reuters interview. For example, when he was asked about a poll showing that the American public opposes taking over Greenland, he dismissed the results as “fake.”
He seemed resigned to the fact that, as he put it, “A lot of times, you can't convince a voter….” The president said. “You have to just do what's right. And then a lot of the things I did were not really politically popular. They turned out to be when it worked out so well.”
The famous English political philosopher, Edmund Burke, identified two conceptions of representation in democratic systems. In one, the representative simply channels the views of the people.
The other kind of representation involves acting as a “trustee.” A trustee exercises his own judgment and does not worry about how their constituents feel about each particular issue.
As Burke put it, “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” And over the course of American history, some presidents have acted as “delegates,” others as “trustees.”
But Burke did not anticipate someone like Trump, who is so dismissive of others' views.
That dismissiveness was evident throughout the Reuters interview. When he was asked about concerns expressed by Republicans in the Senate about the Justice Department’s investigation of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, the president said, “I don't care. There's nothing to say. They should be loyal.”
After being told what JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said about the potentially catastrophic impact of that investigation, Trump responded, "I don't care what he says."
A week before the Reuters interview, Trump again showed his “I don’t care” attitude in an interview with four New York Times reporters. This time, in the context of a discussion of his role on the world stage.
The Times reporters asked him if “there were any limits on his global powers.” The president’s response was shocking.
“Yeah,” he told them, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
This “I don’t care about anything but me” response is a symptom of what the journalist and historian John MacArthur says is the president’s “only point of reference… himself.” That is why, MacArthur explains, “he makes no attempt even at faking interest in other people, since he can’t really see them from his self-centered position.”
That is why Trump is unembarrassed to put his "I don’t care" attitude on display and to cast aside unfavorable poll results or what other members of his political party say. Nothing matters to Trump but Trump.
As he explained in the Times interview, “I don’t need international law,” and whether international law could ever constrain him, “depends on what your definition of international law is.” At a later point, when he was pressed to explain why he wanted to take over Greenland, he again made clear that his needs and desires define his approach to the world.
Taking over Greenland was important, the president suggested: “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”
Trump’s “I don’t care” approach to governance fits a presidential style that Professor Barber called “Active-negative.” Such a style is marked by constant “power-seeking,” and life is defined as a “hard struggle to achieve and hold power.”
Such a president, Barber suggests, as if describing Trump, “has a persistent problem in managing his aggressive feelings.”
And Barber argues, an active/negative type president “is, in the first place, much taken up with self-concern. His attention keeps returning to himself, his problems, how is he doing, as if he were forever watching himself. The character of that attention is primarily evaluative with respect to power. Am I winning or losing, gaining or falling?”
Again, that seems to fit Trump to a tee.
This president or any president can’t do their job well if they don’t care about anything but themselves. And in the case of President Trump, the American people seem to be noticing.
Only 37% of Americans today say that the phrase “cares about the needs of ordinary people” describes Trump well. Sadly, Donald Trump likely doesn’t care about that either.
Democracy is not endangered by disagreements about policy, but it cannot survive if its leaders do not put the public’s health and well-being first.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
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Nazi troops arrest civilians in Warsaw, Poland, 1943.
The Danger Isn’t History Repeating—It’s Us Ignoring the Echoes
Jan 29, 2026
The instinct to look away is one of the most enduring patterns in democratic backsliding. History rarely announces itself with a single rupture; it accumulates through a series of choices—some deliberate, many passive—that allow state power to harden against the people it is meant to serve.
As federal immigration enforcement escalates across American cities today, historians are warning that the public reactions we are witnessing bear uncomfortable similarities to the way many Germans responded to Adolf Hitler’s early rise in the 1930s. The comparison is not about equating leaders or eras. It is about recognizing how societies normalize state violence when it is directed at those deemed “other.”
In Germany, the pattern is well documented. Adolf Hitler’s ascent was not inevitable; it was enabled by political elites who believed they could contain him and by a public conditioned to overlook the early targeting of Jews and other minorities. Historian Timothy Ryback, who has written extensively about Hitler’s early political development, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Hitler’s rise was facilitated by rivals and allies who “underestimated him or thought they could ‘tame’ him once in power.” Ryback is explicit that “Trump is not Hitler, by any means,” but he adds that “there are modalities that are very similar,” particularly in how institutions and the public respond to escalating abuses. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that Hitler’s worldview took shape in an environment where “antisemitism and ethnic nationalism flourished,” creating a social climate in which discriminatory policies could be introduced with little resistance. Facing History & Ourselves, an organization that studies the period, puts it more bluntly: “Choices made by individuals and groups contributed to the rise of the Nazi Party,” including the choice to ignore or excuse early acts of state violence.
The United States is not Weimar Germany, but the dynamics of public response deserve scrutiny. Nationwide, residents have documented aggressive ICE operations that include warrantless home entries, detentions of U.S. citizens, chemical agents deployed near schools, and masked federal agents questioning people in parking lots and outside gas stations. Local officials have raised alarms about the scale of the federal presence and the absence of oversight. Amnesty International USA recently warned of “rising authoritarian practices and erosion of human rights in the United States,” with Executive Director Paul O’Brien stating, “We are witnessing a dangerous trajectory under President Trump that has already led to a human rights emergency.” DHS maintains that operations target “the worst criminals,” yet federal data shows that 73 percent of people detained nationally have no criminal convictions, and only 5 percent have violent convictions. The gap between rhetoric and reality is widening, and the public response is following a familiar pattern: some protest, many look away, and others rationalize the abuses as necessary for security.
What historians find most striking is not the presence of state power—that exists in every nation—but the willingness of ordinary people to normalize its excesses. In early‑1930s Germany, many citizens viewed the targeting of Jews as a distant issue, something that affected “others.” Today, civil rights groups report a similar distancing in the United States, where many Americans see ICE actions as justified or irrelevant to their own lives, even when U.S. citizens are detained or when local governments warn of legal violations. Political incentives reinforce this passivity. During the Weimar Republic’s collapse, parties across the spectrum tolerated Hitler for short‑term gain. In the U.S., some lawmakers have expressed concern about ICE operations but stopped short of challenging the administration directly, citing political risk.
Historians caution that democratic erosion rarely begins with dramatic gestures. It begins with the public learning to tolerate the intolerable. Frank McDonough, a leading historian of Nazi Germany, has said that dictators often rise because “people didn’t take them seriously enough.” Ryback echoes this point, noting that “there are lessons learned—and ignored—from Hitler’s rise to power.” The lesson is not that history repeats itself in identical form. It is that democracies falter when citizens and institutions decide that the suffering of targeted groups is an acceptable cost of political order.
The question facing the United States today is not whether it is 1933. It is whether we recognize the warning signs that historians have spent decades documenting. When federal agents operate with minimal oversight, when marginalized communities are treated as expendable, and when the public grows accustomed to scenes that would once have been unthinkable, the issue is not only the actions of the state. It is the silence that meets them.
Democracies are not only defended at the ballot box or in the courts. They are defended in the everyday choices people make about what they are willing to see, to question, and to refuse. The danger is not that America will repeat Germany’s past. The danger is that we will ignore the echoes long enough to discover that the guardrails we assumed would hold have already been worn down by our own indifference.
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The current continuing resolution, which keeps the government funded, ends this Friday, January 30.
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Probably Another Shutdown
Jan 29, 2026
The current continuing resolution, which keeps the government funded, ends this Friday, January 30.
It passed in November and ended the last shutdown. In addition to passage of the continuing resolution, some regular appropriations were also passed at the same time. It included funding for the remainder of the fiscal year for the food assistance program SNAP, the Department of Agriculture, the FDA, military construction, Veterans Affairs, and Congress itself (that is, through Sept. 30, 2026).
As of Friday, January 23, the House had passed the remaining appropriations for fiscal year 2026. It appeared that the Senate would then pass those bills this week and government operations would go uninterrupted.
Then, this past weekend, Department of Homeland Security agents killed yet another legal observer of their activities in Minneapolis. Alex Pretti's death brings the number of DHS shootings since September to 12. Four of those shootings have been fatal.
Pretti's death seems to have been the last straw for Senate Democrats. Since Saturday, enough of them have said that they will not vote for more funding for the Department of Homeland Security as currently proposed that, unless Republicans find a way to compromise, the government will again be shut down, albeit only partially this time.
At the moment, Senate Republicans say they are unwilling to make any changes to the existing appropriations bills.
Even if Republicans do compromise in some way, perhaps by rearranging the existing legislation to separate DHS funding from all the other agencies, there would still be a short partial shut down at the very least because the House will not return to session before January 30.
So, assuming for now that a shutdown occurs, what would that mean? Well, first of all, this time, no food support would be endangered and the VA would keep running because those agencies were among the ones whose full year appropriations were passed last November.
It might mean interruption in agencies like the Department of State, Transportation, Health and Human Services, Housing and Labor. It might mean some interruptions in the Department of Defense, but like last time, the administration would be looking for ways to shuffle existing funds to continue paying military personnel.
It almost certainly will have little or no effect on the operations of DHS even though that's the agency at the center of the dispute. Why not? Because, like last the last time around, the White House will likely designate DHS as essential and look for workaround funding without regard to the legality of that funding.
The Senate is, officially, in session from the end of the day today through the week. However, due to the big winter storm this past weekend, no votes are scheduled until tomorrow at least. There are 20 committee meetings this week, including one on Wednesday where Secretary of State Marco Rubio is expected to testify about Venezuela.
It is unclear right now where things will go right now. Our colleagues at The First Branch Forecast explain the political considerations that Democrats are mulling right now. They also provide a fascinating summary of why the Government Publishing Office was established: in short, private enterprise isn't always better or cheaper than public agencies.
See you all on Friday.
Probably Another Shutdown was originally published on GovTrack.us and is republished with permission.
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