Habeas corpus is what prevents—or should prevent—the government from doing exactly what the Trump administration has been doing: abducting people off the street and holding them in detention without due process. So you can see why the people of Trumpworld might be interested in pretending that this provision does not exist.

Section 9 has a bunch of other important bits, including the prohibition against Bills of Attainder (which are laws against specific persons, such as “Nobody named Barack Obama is allowed to be in the country.”) and ex–post facto laws, which is applying new laws to old actions. But another thing that the administration might want you to forget is that Section 9 prevents US officeholders from holding titles of nobility granted by other nations, a constitutional provision “Sir Samuel Alito” has been specifically in violation of since 2024.

My friends at Above the Law are the people who first pointed this issue out to me. They anticipated that once enough people noticed and complained, the Library of Congress would claim that it was a harmless error or oversight or hack. And indeed, that’s what happened: After Above the Law’s story went up, the Library of Congress said that a “coding error” had led to the inadvertent deletion. Section 9 has since been restored.

If you believe that an innocent coding error led to the removal of this key provision of Article I, yet magically left everything correct about Article II (where the president draws his powers), then there is a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.

This seems like a good time to point out that in May, Trump replaced the head of the Library of Congress, Carla Hayden, with his personal lawyer, Todd Blanche. Blanche is famous for, among other things, losing habeas corpus petitions in court.

Removing a provision from an online copy of the Constitution does not, of course, change the Constitution. But that’s not really the point. Most people don’t know what’s in the Constitution. The Trump administration has a vested interest keeping it that way. Ignorance is their greatest weapon.

• Speaking of things Trump would like to delete from the Constitution, the administration revealed its full plan to revoke birthright citizenship. It’s somehow even worse than what I expected.
• Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that “virtually all” of the Supreme Court justices are committed to the ethics code they all signed onto back in 2023. That’s an interesting word choice, isn’t it? Sotomayor is essentially saying that at least some of the justices who signed the thing aren’t actually on board with it. Not that it actually matters; as Sotomayor also pointed out, the code isn’t enforceable, since it relies on the “good faith” of the justices to uphold it. She said all this in a speech she delivered in Zurich. I’ll bet all the money in my pocket that if you linked up her blinking and put it into Morse Code it would spell out “Please send help.”
• P. Diddy is asking for a P. Pardon. I hate that joke and living in this timeline.
• A federal judge revoked a California law designed to make social media companies remove false or misleading statements made about elected officials. From a First Amendment perspective, this is the right call—but from a “creating a sustainable political society” perspective, this is bad. The First Amendment cannot be a suicide pact with reasonable political discourse.
• A family is suing Roblox and Discord for aiding in the kidnapping of their 10-year-old daughter. The family alleges that the companies’ unmoderated chats have created an environment that facilitates the grooming and abduction of children. I have said repeatedly that the one game I do not let my children touch is Roblox. There just isn’t a good way for parents to control who their kids are talking to on that platform. That’s not the case with other platforms. I got my kids the Switch 2, and in order for them to be able to chat with one friend, I and the parents of the other kid had to get on the phone together to exchange information. It took us almost an hour. And my kid can’t chat with the other kid’s friends unless I go through the whole process with another family as well. This is a good thing. Roblox provides none of this. Do not let your kids on Roblox, please.

• The Nation’s Chris Lehmann explains that Trump’s push to make the Confederacy great again is really part of the white wing’s gambit to control the future.
• Also for The Nation, Sasha Abramsky takes a deep dive into the “Kafkaesque” policies of Trump’s immigration system.
• A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned in this newsletter a Fox poll that showed public support for the Supreme Court ticking up. I mentioned that we should be skeptical of the poll, considering the source. Now the most recent Gallup poll shows support for the Supreme Court dipping below 40 percent for the first time ever. Ian Millhiser explains why.

The issue in the case is whether the state of Louisiana is required under the Voting Rights Act to draw a second majority-minority congressional district. Louisiana is only 56 percent white, and has six congressional districts. Traditionally, legislators have shoved a majority of the Black people living in Louisiana into one majority-Black congressional district, leaving white folks to have their choice of five of the state’s six congresspeople. Various lawsuits and court orders compelled Louisiana to do better, resulting in the creation of a second majority-minority district to more accurately reflect the state’s population.

You can imagine how white people reacted to the idea of equal representation. Counter-lawsuits followed and appeals were made to the Supreme Court. The six Republican justices did not strike down Louisiana’s second majority-majority district last term, when they had a chance to, because the second district was protected under a different, recent Supreme Court ruling (a surprise decision in Allen v. Milligan which I wrote about here).

Instead, the justices asked to rehear the Louisiana case, this time with a new focus. Instead of asking whether the second district was constitutional under the court’s own precedents (which it clearly is), the justices now want to know if the creation of any majority-minority district, as is sometimes required by the Voting Rights Act, violates the 14th and 15th Amendments of the Constitution. The argument, from white folks, is that the 14th and 15th Amendments (passed after the Civil War) protect white folks from being forced to share power.

The mere act of asking this question suggests the answer Republican justices are likely to receive. The Voting Rights Act is always on life support with this court; now it’s about to be murdered.

For those who are blessedly unaware, Sweeney is an actress and model who is also, apparently, a Republican who’s game to be a poster girl for eugenics. In a new American Eagle ad campaign, she breathlessly explains that “genes/jeans” are handed down from parent to child, and then says that her “genes/jeans” are blue. “The tagline for the campaign is: Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”

Get it? The blue-eyed, blonde lady has “good genes” and you too can have “good genes” if you buy her “jeans” and also engineer yourself to be white, or something.

Predictiably, people on the left pointed out that running a eugenics campaign is not the highest, best use of consumer advertising, while people on the right pointed out that being skinny, buxom, and white is the greatest thing ever and people who do not and cannot look like Sydney Sweeney are probably ugly.

At some level, the ad didn’t offend me as much as it might have, because it was still fundamentally made for me, a cis hetero male who would be mostly interested in how those jeans would look on my bedroom floor. Sweeney doesn’t fit my idealized version of feminine beauty, but the ad was still designed to appeal to the male gaze.

That said, the kind of bony, blonde Aryan “lewk” idealized by Sweeney and American Eagle is also the body type of some of the ads’ loudest defenders: women like Megyn Kelly and Laura Ingraham. The outpouring of white-wing support for the ad isn’t just because it’s a celebration of white eugenics; it’s also because it’s the epitome of a marketing style made by men, for men, where only a certain type of white woman is thought to be worthy of male attention. It’s not an accident Kelly said that the ad shows that body-positive marketing “failed to reprogram the population into thinking ugly is beautiful.” Without being able to distinguish herself from so-called “ugly” people, Kelly wouldn’t even have a career.

I’ve watched enough Mad Men to know not to take my social cues from marketing campaigns. They’re all going for the least common denominator, and “horny dudes” are almost always the least. But it is telling that the male marketers think that, in modern America, outright eugenics will sell just as well as attractive women. The genes I hope I am passing down to my sons is the ability to recognize when people are ugly on the inside, no matter what they’re wearing.

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