Shredding Your Constitution in a New York Minute
I write letters to politicians and they usually retaliate by putting me on their mailing list. Sometimes I stay subscribed, just to see how they present themselves to the public without the filter of the press. This is likely how I ended up on Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s “Kirsten’s New York Minute” newsletter.
Gillibrand, who was first appointed to her seat to fill Clinton’s vacancy, won re-election just last year, running unopposed in the primary. She therefore occupies a position that is about as safe as it gets in this age of reversals and shifting political fortunes, not needing to face voters until 2030. She ran for president in 2020, dropping out fairly early after failing to gain much traction. Still, you gotta have some gumption to run for president, right? Put this all together and you’d expect someone both ambitious and in a position to take some risks.
If Gillibrand is taking risks these days, she’s being very modest about it. For as long as I’ve been subscribed to it, her newsletter has described activities and interests more suitable for an obscure congressperson with a work-to-rule attitude than a senator from New York. Her response to the Trump administration’s first few weeks continues in the same comotose spirit, which is remarkable considering the stakes.
Last week’s newsletter (January 31st) devoted one of six items to Trump. The item titled “Combating chaos” complains that Trump “caused complete chaos” for New Yorkers. Her response was to call on the Trump administration to reverse the spending freeze. That was all the comment she felt necessary to offer on Trump’s first week and a half in power. Yesterday’s newsletter (February 8th) devoted two of seven items to Trump: First, she complains that the hiring freeze “is playing games with Americans’ retirements benefits” on the grounds that staffing shortages are likely to disrupt the provision of benefits. Her response? A press conference “urging” Trump to reverse his decision. The second item is another complaint about the funding freeze, culminating in this hilariously anti-climatic passage: “That’s why Kirsten is fighting back. This week, she held a press conference to sound the alarm about the disastrous impact that a funding freeze would have on New Yorkers and called on the president to immediately reverse course.”
Fighting back indeed. Gillibrand seems to assume that Trump’s moves since taking power a second time are basically conventional, if aggressive, moves on a familiar political board, to be countered by conventional moves on her part. If she really thinks this, she must have thought Biden and Harris were full of shit when they warned that Trump’s intentions were closer to upturning the board itself.
I take a more pessimistic view of what Trump is up to. I’m with the people who think we’re entering the critical phase of a full-blown constitutional crisis. The Trump administration has made clear that it will not be respecting the jurisdiction of the courts when things don’t go its way. It has announced its intention to ignore Congress. It’s clear that the Democratic strategy depends heavily on the courts, and that their main reservation about this strategy is the glacial speed they work at. But even if they worked quickly we’d be fucked. Whether this has sunk in yet for Democratic politicians, they have so far decided to be pretty quiet about it in public.
What to do? I don’t know. I pretty clearly have terrible political instincts, but it seems to me that the first thing Gillibrand could do with her platform is to tell the truth about what is happening. The woefully incomplete descriptions she offers of the current moment in her newsletter could have been written by Republican operatives, in framing her disagreement with Trump as politics as usual. Trump’s pardons of insurrectionists together with the withdrawal of security details for enemies is a prospective threat of political violence, and profoundly destabilizing to the political order. It’s not politics as usual. Call it what it is. The sudden cuts to congressionally created and funded agencies violate the separation of powers and are unspeakably cruel not just to New Yorkers but to vulnerable foreigners. Have the courage to say it. (And to avoid any mention of foreigners in these contexts supports Trump’s cynical assumption that people are unable to see any value, prudential or moral, in saving lives overseas, however cheaply.)
Besides telling the truth, it’s also time to withhold all cooperation from an administration clearly committed in advance to breaking the law when it suits it, to resist it at every turn and in every way. Gillibrand has not mentioned Musk or his DOGE specifically. This may be because she voted to confirm Scott Bessent for Secretary of the Treasury, and Bessent promptly turned around and gave Musk access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, and so creating a good deal of the “chaos” Gillibrand then complained vaguely and ineffectively about. She should have known better. Bessent, a competent Yalie who got his start in politics fundraising for Al Gore may be better than average for a Trump cabinet pick, but he’s still someone willing to serve Trump, and as his conduct immediately showed, that one fact ought to have dominated Gillibrand’s assessment of him.
