2026-06-30 03:42:19
On Monday, officials in 25 states and Washington, DC sued Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz over the interim final rule for Medicaid work requirements established by President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The new rule, their lawsuit contends, “will create unnecessary bureaucracy and lead people who are either already working or eligible for an exclusion to lose or be denied coverage.”
As I previously reported, the rule released near the beginning of June was even more onerous than many state officials feared. It was a surprise to states that individuals already on Medicaid with serious health conditions would have to jump through further hoops to prove that they were unable to work:
State officials were blindsided by this medical frailty definition outlined in the new federal rule, which was never brought up in discussions between states and the federal government, Jennifer Wagner, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ director of Medicaid eligibility and enrollment, told me. “We have heard that this was driven more by the White House,” Wagner said. “I don’t think it was CMS intentionally misleading states.”
The lawsuit specifically raises the point that CMS “provided no indication
that it intended to place specific limits on States’ ability to rely on self-attestation” rather than requiring health care workers’ certification in all circumstances.
In a press release, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, who helped lead the suit, said that the “abrupt changes in [federal] implementation of the statute leave states insufficient time to adjust…or effectively communicate to members what is required.”
“This eleventh-hour attempt to further narrow protections for medically frail Medicaid recipients seeks to punish those who cannot fend for themselves,” said Rhode Island Attorney General Peter F. Neronha, who is also joining the suit, in a press release.
The lawsuit asks that a federal judge stay the interim final rule and vacate parts of it. The rule would otherwise go into effect in states with Medicaid expansion by January 1.
2026-06-30 03:38:34
The Supreme Court has issued a raft of recent decisions benefiting Donald Trump. But on Monday, the justices rejected his latest effort to avoid paying E. Jean Carroll millions of dollars a jury awarded her after finding Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. Carroll had accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. Carroll successfully sued him in 2023, after he not only denied the allegation—calling it a “hoax” and a “conjob”—but mocked Carroll as “not my type.”
A federal jury found Trump liable for $5 million in damages in May of 2023, after which Trump immediately denied the assault and once again mocked Carroll, leading to a second similar lawsuit, in which a jury quickly found that Trump owed an additional $83.3 million.
Trump appealed both jury decisions, but a federal appellate court ruled against him in 2024. He took the initial case to the Supreme Court last summer. On Monday, the court declined to hear the case, leaving the initial judgment in place.
Theoretically, the much larger second judgment could still be taken up by the Supreme Court. But today’s decision suggests the president is running out of legal avenues to avoid paying Carroll the money the juries said he owes.
Trump posted an angry message on Truth Social following the Court’s decision. He insisted he would keep fighting the case—he didn’t explain how—and tried to reframe Carroll’s lawsuit against him as an attack on America.
“This Case is really against the United States of America, and all it stands for, and should never be allowed to happen to another President, or Candidate to be!” Trump wrote.
Trump specifically cited the fact that Carroll had sued him under New York State’s Adult Survivors Act, a 2022 law that temporarily suspended the statute of limitations on civil lawsuits in which victims allege they were sexually assaulted. Previously, the statute of limitations had been only three years.
In his post on Truth Social, Trump claimed the law had been written specifically to target him, which is not true. The law was modeled on a similar law that temporarily allowed lawsuits by victims of child sexual abuse, who otherwise would have been prevented from suing because of the statute of limitations. Nor was he the only defendant sued under the law—besides Carroll’s lawsuit, the law also enabled lawsuits against Bill Cosby and Sean Combs.
During the 2023 trial, Carroll testified, in sometimes graphic detail, about the incident, her confusion over how to handle it, and her eventual decision to write a book that included the allegation.
Asked on the stand if she regretted going public with her accusation, she said, “I regretted it about 100 times, but in the end”—she paused as she broke down into tears—“being able to get my day in court…I’m crying, but I got to tell my story in court.”
2026-06-30 01:29:46
The Supreme Court on Monday gave the president the authority to remove the leadership of most agencies that Congress had set up to act independently of presidential control. The ruling in Trump v. Slaughter may seem technical, but it represents a radical change in how our American government has functioned since the 1930s and, in some cases, since the founding, by creating agencies that operate with independence from presidential control and the expediency of presidential politics. Rather than allow Congress to decide how much control the president can exercise over an agency that Congress creates, the Supreme Court has seized that power for itself. Starting today, nine justices will decide which agency heads can be fired by the president and which cannot.
Today’s decision overturns a 91-year-old precedent, called Humphrey’s Executor, in which a unanimous Supreme Court upheld Congress’ authority to give independent commissioners protection from presidential removal. In his majority decision, Chief Justice Roberts derides this critical precedent while downplaying the gravity of overturning it. “If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it,” Roberts stated in his 6-3 opinion joined by other GOP appointees. “Humphrey’s has for decades been a result in search of a rationale.”
“The one thing that does appear to be clear going forward is that chaos will follow.”
The decision stems from President Donald Trump’s illegal firing of Rebecca Slaughter, a President Joe Biden appointee to the Federal Trade Commission. At the onset of his second term, Trump began firing Democratic appointees to independent agencies in violation of federal law, which protected their removal except for sufficient cause. He removed Biden appointees at the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit System Protection Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, among others. These agencies are designed to be insulated from immediate presidential control. They are run by a bipartisan board of commissioners who serve staggered terms. And unlike appointees to cabinet departments, the president cannot remove them over policy differences. The power to remove is the power to control. An impending firing can sway the decision-making of commissioners—and if it doesn’t, they can get the boot.
In a blistering dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that chaos will ensue. “Today, the majority reshapes our Government,” she wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Dozens of independent commissions are now likely to become purely executive agencies, shifting tremendous power over broad swaths of American life into the President’s hands.” It does this, she wrote, in the service of the majority’s “half-baked theory of executive power that is simultaneously all encompassing yet also subject to necessary but undefined exceptions. The one thing that does appear to be clear going forward is that chaos will follow.”
The Roberts Court had already chipped away at Humphrey’s Executor, and it was clear that in their quest to realize a so-called unitary executive with dangerous amounts of power and vanishing guardrails around him, it would use this case to knock down the precedent. Roberts does this with gusto. His opinion is a sweeping recitation of all the history he has mustered in his march toward a unitary executive, and relies on his own prior opinions inching toward this very moment—treating his decision as inevitable and right, rather than the result of his own political crusade. Legal historians have long complained that Roberts’ history is a house of cards. This opinion is “embarrassingly thin, full of historical errors and cherry-picked sources,” posted Boston University law professor Jed Schugerman, “reverse engineered from unitary ideology.”
The tricky task for the Republican-appointed majority, however, was how to exempt the Federal Reserve Board, an independent agency upon which rests the stability of the entire economy and which, under presidential control, could tank the markets and plunge the country into even more economic chaos. Indeed, the court in deciding this case while also deliberating whether the president can invent a bogus “cause” to remove a member of the Fed whom he doesn’t like in a blatant attempt to seize control of the agency. Roberts issued that opinion Monday as well, arguing that the Fed is different because of its allegedly unique history and therefore Trump cannot fire targeted governor Lisa Cook without following proper procedures. Roberts left to another day whether the charges against Cook are sufficient, but did reinforce his decision that the Fed’s independence should be maintained.
The solution to this problem—the desire to hand Trump almost unlimited firing power but not when it would cause brutal economic fallout—is to strip Congress of its power to decide when an agency it creates is independent and instead hand that policy determination to themselves. The decision sets up a new regime whereby the justices themselves decide when firing protections are constitutional based on whether an agency’s work falls “within the President’s ‘general administrative control'”—an amorphous standard that surely can be manipulated as the justices see fit. That allows the 6-3 majority today to allow Trump to fire commissioners at the FTC, but preserve Fed independence.
There are other agencies whose independent status and the removability of their commissioners are now uncertain. Congress could try to weigh in, but its decisions are now relegated to suggestions. Roberts’ decision oozes disdain for Congress and alleges that its attempt to insulate agencies from presidential control was an unconstitutional power grab. He cloaks the unitary executive theory as a democratic approach, making all government administration accountable to one man and, ultimately, the people who elect him, even though the Founders intended Congress to be the most democratic branch. The chief justice disagrees. “Placing the power to administer laws in officers who enjoy ‘freedom from Presidential oversight (and protection),'” Roberts writes, “often results only in an ‘increased subservience to congressional direction.'” He continued to accuse Congress of using Humphrey’s Executor to take “more power for itself.”
“The Court takes one of the oldest debates in American history and decides that the six Justices in the majority, alone, ought to be the ones to settle it for all time.”
But in Monday’s opinion, it is the court that hijacks Congress’ power for itself. Now, the justices will decide the fate of each agency’s independent status on a case-by-case basis. This is undoubtedly a question for Congress to decide, but the six justices seize that policy-making authority for themselves. As Sotomayor stated in her dissent, “The Court takes one of the oldest debates in American history and decides that the six Justices in the majority, alone, ought to be the ones to settle it for all time.”
Trump v. Slaughter follows the clear modus operandi of the Roberts Court: disempower Congress, give more power to the president to buck the laws, and leave the nine justices as the only people who can shut down the president’s actions. The most infamous example is the court’s grant of criminal immunity to the president. Just as presidential immunity breeds corruption and political weaponization, this one will likewise turbocharge Trump’s ability to reward allies and donors and punish political enemies at the expense of good governance.
From approving mergers and regulating Wall Street and Crypto to determining which toys are safe for babies, independent agencies play a critical role in regulating the economy, the environment, our jobs, and the objects we rely on every day. Handing these decisions to donors or weaponizing them for political gain will line some pockets but almost certainly harm the public.
The Roberts Court claims to be an originalist court, basing its constitutional rulings on the document’s original public meaning. But ever since the Roberts Court’s hard turn toward unitary executive theory—the idea that the president has unrestricted authority over the entire executive branch—and its movements against independent agencies, scholars have gone back to the archives to investigate the originalist bona fides of these related judicial trends. It turns out that there is little historical evidence for a unitary executive (and mountains of evidence against) and that there are many instances of independent agencies in the founding era and the 19th century. They are not an invention of the New Deal, even though that is the time in which they grew in number and significance—and is indeed the era this court seeks to erase from the law books.
In her dissent, Sotomayor recounts the history that the majority eschews, demonstrating how Roberts’ opinion relies more on discredited fictions than sound history. “From the start, the majority’s theory rested on shaky ground,” she wrote. “Over time, its arguments have grown weaker still, as historical evidence has undermined key pillars of its theory. Today, the Court faced a choice: plow ahead… Unfortunately, the Court repeats and expands upon several prior errors that require correction.”
The historical anomaly is not independent agencies or presidents with limited authority, as Roberts asserts. It’s this court and the Trump actions it blesses.
2026-06-30 00:49:47
The Supreme Court on Monday ruled against President Donald Trump’s attempt to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, dealing a setback to Trump’s campaign to take control of monetary policy. The court’s 5-4 decision preserves Cook’s job as she continues to fight her removal, but it is not the final word on Trump’s bid to fire her. The narrow decision almost guarantees that this same dispute will return to the high court soon.
The majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts expresses explicit support for Fed independence. As an independent bank regulator, the Fed is run by a board of presidentially appointed governors who serve 14 year terms and are only removable for cause. The Trump administration argued that it had cause and that the Supreme Court could not review its removal decision. But the majority found the government’s arguments at odds with an independent Fed.
“To accept any one of those arguments would in effect transform the Federal Reserve’s for-cause protection into at-will employment—an interpretive leap out of step with the statute Congress enacted and our Nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference,” Roberts wrote.
The decision comes at a time when the future of Fed independence is in doubt. Trump’s pick for Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, is awaiting confirmation by the Senate. Keeping Cook in her seat steadies the ship, if only a little. The majority’s decision, however, is explicitly “narrow.” It requires that Cook be given proper notice of the cause of her removal and an opportunity to contest those charges. The decision does not lay out what that process looks like. And it saves for another day—which will almost certainly come soon—a court decision on whether Trump’s obviously pretextual allegations will be enough to remove Cook.
In a post on Truth Social Monday, Trump called the Cook ruling “strictly procedural” and pledged to “take appropriate action immediately to make sure that someone who has committed wrongdoing will not be making vital decisions concerning the Welfare of the United States of America!”
In short, this is a loss for Trump at this stage—but it may not be a permanent one.
In its ruling, the court declined to define what for-cause protection requires in order for a firing to be valid. Indeed, it hints that rather than leave it up to the president, it may ultimately be the final arbiter of what constitutes cause on a case-by-case basis. “Only after Cook has had the opportunity to respond to the charges made against her…may a final decision be made…And only then can the courts assess the validity and sufficiency of such charges,” Roberts wrote.
“To be clear, the ultimate question of whether the President can remove Cook for cause will depend in part on the underlying facts,” the chief justice added. “In this opinion, we have not addressed the facts.”
Here are those facts, as we know them.
Last August, the president posted a criminal referral against Cook on Truth Social, his social media platform, and demanded she resign. The accusation—created by Bill Pulte, Trump’s Federal Housing Finance Agency director—is that Cook claimed primary residency on two different mortgage applications. If this charge sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same one Pulte cooked up against two other Democrats—and it has yet to win the day against any of the president’s targets because, at most, Pulte appears to have discovered clerical errors. Five days after Trump’s social media post, the president announced in another post that he was firing Cook.
Trump claimed that the mortgage document discrepancy dug up by a political lackey was sufficient cause to fire Cook, and that the courts couldn’t review his decision to boot her, anyway. In other words, Trump’s argument is that he can state any cause for removal he likes, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. It’s an obviously absurd argument because it renders the “for cause” removal restriction meaningless. Cook sued, and a district court judge blocked her removal, as did the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. Trump turned to the Supreme Court, which agreed to decide whether Trump could temporarily remove Cook while her legal challenge to her firing moves forward.
The Supreme Court handed down its ruling Monday in conjunction with a related case—Trump v. Slaughter—in which the court gave Trump the power to remove the commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission and other formerly independent agencies. That decision follows a string of cases in which the court’s this conservative majority found that the president’s power over the executive branch trumped Congress’ attempt to insulate agencies from political pressure. During Trump’s second term, the court had already waved through firings of Democratic commissioners on the National Labor Relations Board, Merit Systems Protection Board, and Consumer Product Safety Commission on its shadow docket.
Logically, it’s hard to reconcile the court’s Cook decision with its rulings in Slaughter and other cases allowing Trump to fire independent agency commissioners. But the Federal Reserve Board’s independence is a pillar of the United States’ economy, and the US’s dominant global position makes that independence critical to the world economy, as well. Allowing Trump to turn interest rates, loans, bailouts, and access to the US banking system into political weapons would fundamentally reshape the economy and our democratic order. The Fed, in other words, is too important for one man to control.
To get out of this bind, Roberts—who wrote both the Cook and Slaughter decisions—insists that the Fed is simply different. Roberts’ opinion cites a history of independent bank regulators going back to the country’s founding and finds this history is relevant in determining whether it should uphold Congress’ legislative choice to make the Fed independent. “We see no reason to leave the public in limbo, or to sow doubt as to the status of one of our Nation’s (and the world’s) most important financial institutions,” Roberts wrote. “We would not so quickly unsettle this ‘special arrangement sanctioned by history.’”
This entire adventure stems from the Roberts Court’s own crusade to empower the president and hinder regulations disliked by big industry. The GOP-appointed majority has pushed forward its view of a “unitary executive” who controls all aspects of the executive branch, creating a roadmap for Trump to turn federal agencies into political weapons. Today, the court blesses Trump’s attempts to take control of most of the regulatory work that Congress deemed should be independent. But, at least to an extent, the Fed will be insulated from the consequences of that crusade.
2026-06-29 22:49:08
In a surprise victory for voting rights, the Supreme Court on Monday upheld a Mississippi law allowing mail-in ballots to be counted up to five days after Election Day, as long as they had been postmarked by the day of the election.
The 5-4 decision by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, which was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberal justices, averts a major election disaster that would have injected chaos into the midterms. Fourteen states have mail-in ballot grace periods on the books, and 30 states accept ballots from overseas and military voters sent before or on Election Day but only received after. The New York Times found that during the 2024 election “at least 725,000 ballots were postmarked by Election Day and arrived within the legally accepted post-election window.” Changing mail-in ballot deadlines months before the general election could have disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of voters who could have been unaware of the stricter rules, or have their ballots thrown out because of postal delays, or because they live in remote, rural locations in states like Alaska.
Overruling the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Barrett affirmed that such laws are constitutional. “In sum, the election-day statutes require the electorate’s choice to be made on election day,” she wrote. “That occurs so long as election day is the deadline for individuals to vote—as it is in Mississippi. But the election-day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt, so they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked before election day yet received afterward.”
“But the election-day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt, so they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked before election day yet received afterward.”
Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh. “The acceptance of these late-arriving ballots effectively postpones the date on which the electorate’s choice is made, and federal law precludes that postponement,” Alito claimed, even though late-arriving ballots do nothing to change a voter’s choice on Election Day, since ballots are still required to be submitted by then.
President Trump has long spread conspiracies about mail voting and most recently attacked California’s protracted vote count as a “rigged election.” The administration’s latest plan to undercut mail voting would require states to hand over their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security for the Postal Service to deliver mail-in ballots—a form of extortion that has generated furious pushback from election officials. The head of the Postal Service told the Senate they were following Trump’s directive, claiming that he wanted to ensure “the right ballots are going to the right people.” (A federal judge last week blocked key parts of a Trump executive order that authorized such a scheme.)
Alito’s dissent amplifies Trump’s conspiracies. “Today’s decision leaves open opportunities for voter fraud that may further undermine Americans’ faith in the integrity of this country’s elections,” he wrote. “Diverse sources have recognized that mail-in ballots increase the potential for fraud.”
In fact, every major study has shown that mail-in voting is safe and secure, but the fact that four justices signed on to Trump’s crusade to get rid of mail-in ballots is highly disturbing and could embolden the president to attempt to take even more drastic steps to make it harder to vote.
Today’s ruling should also not distract from the damage the Roberts Court has already done to voting rights. Its decision in late April, effectively destroying the Voting Rights Act, gave Republicans just enough time to dismantle majority-Black seats held by Democrats in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama. That was followed by a series of orders by the Republican-appointed justices on the shadow docket that expedited the GOP’s efforts to erase Black representation and give their party additional seats before the midterms.
2026-06-29 21:00:00
Pick any Trump-imposed crisis over the last year, and you’ll find prominent Democrats decrying the president’s actions with an all-too-familiar word. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Trump’s “hypocrisy knows no bounds” after he pardoned fraudsters while throwing “baseless allegations” of “massive fraud” at the Golden State. It was “beyond hypocritical,” California Sen. Alex Padilla said, for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act in Los Angeles after provoking an actual insurrection in DC. The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart responded to the president’s attack on a judge who blocked the deportation of Venezuelans—after previously saying it should be illegal to criticize judges he appointed—by straining his voice like a demon doused with holy water: “The hypocrisy! It burns!”
“Hypocrisy,” like democracy, was passed down to us from the ancient Greeks. Hypokrites was a word for stage actors—different people entirely, beneath their masks. But allegations of two-faced dealing are endemic to American politics. Benjamin Franklin took over his brother’s newspaper after he was sanctioned for printing an “Essay against Hypocrites” about the Puritan minister Cotton Mather. (“It is far worſe dealing with ſuch religious Hypocrites, than with the moſt arrant Knave in the World.”) Thomas Jefferson later lamented, in Notes on the State of Virginia, that the spread of Christianity and other religions imposed upon people through violence had made “one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.” Abraham Lincoln, in 1854, asserted that the existence of slavery “enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.”
Then, as now, allegations of “hypocrisy” are often infused with a note of spiritual censure. Jesus, after all, condemns the Pharisees as “hypocrites” in the Gospel of Matthew. In recent decades, the term has become a favored pejorative for the grifting preachers and fallen “family values” politicians of the religious right. There’s something both powerful and irresistible about that critique. It highlights the danger and the fallacy of puritanism: How can you demand that a society conform to a standard that its advocates do not even maintain?
“Hypocrisy” has been a useful framework for deconstructing an insidious strain of American life. But it can also be a bit of a trap. “Hypocrisy” assumes that the imposition of values is really about the values. Sometimes it’s as much about the imposition.
Trump’s conduct has helped dispel these illusions—or at least it should have. His “hypocrisies,” sketched out in late-night Truth Social rants and meandering answers to misunderstood questions, reflect a worldview that is as disturbing as it is coherent. He and his acolytes are telling you who can wield power, and against whom power can be wielded. You have not caught the president and his supporters off their line by noting that they attack others for conduct they themselves engage in; you have captured their essence—a desire for dominance and impunity, and an avowed illiberalism that has been incubating in the conservative movement for generations. Hierarchies of citizenship are the rule. Exulting in “justice for me and pain for thee” does not necessarily make someone a hypocrite; it might just make them a fascist.
Show me a case of Trumpian hypocrisy and I will show you a president living his values, with the unpleasant but predictable belligerence of a mob boss protecting his turf. Take the weaponization of the federal bureaucracy against broadcasters and the targeting of ordinary citizens for protected speech. His administration has threatened to suspend the licenses of broadcasters whose coverage of the Iran war is insufficiently flattering, leaned on Disney to fire Jimmy Kimmel for comments about the Charlie Kirk assassination, and attempted to deport a Turkish grad student for expressing support for Palestine in a student newspaper—after previously condemning “federal censorship,” and declaring that liberals were “driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees.” It is a reminder that the earlier backlash to purported liberal censoriousness—like the corresponding demand to replace “DEI” with “meritocracy”—was always about which voices were sacrosanct and which were an affront. It is the uncensored frustration of having to share space with the kinds of views (and the kinds of people) they considered illegitimate. Free speech, as the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer has written, means “they can say what they want and you can say what they want.”
Republicans are not roiled by contradictions when they spread conspiracies about mail-in voting by Democrats while casting mail-in ballots themselves. They are manifesting a deep-seated belief about who America is for and who it is not. It’s all right there in the racist Department of Homeland Security memes and the appeals from Vice President JD Vance for a “homeland” free of neighbors who aren’t like you. Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism—it’s an ethos.
It is not even hypocrisy to complain about election fraud and then attempt to commit election fraud by, say, telling an official in Georgia to “find 11,780 votes,” as Trump did in 2021. They are both attacks on democratic systems by someone who never truly subscribed to them—that’s the important part. Hypocrisy is a distraction that reduces core questions of power and ideology to a meta-commentary.
There is something overly familiar about seeing a Republican politician accused of hypocrisy. “It’s so blatant, the hypocrisy,” The Daily Show’s Stewart said during an episode covering Trump’s censorship of free speech. “It’s so old-school Daily Show gotcha.” For a late-night host, it’s an easy punch line. But as a broader criticism, it flattens the exceptional and discourages you from thinking deeper about the structures of power. It’s precisely because “hypocrisy” is a tag that you could lob at so many political figures over the last quarter century that it feels so insufficient to describe our current leaders. In a weird way, it’s almost not cynical enough.
I confess: I’m a hypocrite, when it comes to hypocrisy. I’ve written plenty of these stories in the past. I’ll write them again. There is still value in laying out the ways in which public figures deviate from their professed identity—to establish, for the record, that someone is full of it. Sometimes it just feels cathartic to fire up an old C-SPAN clip and say: Can you believe this guy?
But I often find “hypocrisy” stories limiting because they substitute the deep for the superficial. It feels less like a critique of a particular set of values than a way to talk about politics without having to talk about what politics is about—a language for discussing matters of consequence in inconsequential ways. “Hypocrisy” functions as a kind of political scrip, a facsimile of conflict that can be traded back and forth in perpetuity without ever being exchanged for the real thing. Shouting about it is an impulse in place of an analysis. It blurs the anodyne and the profound. Everyone is a hypocrite, but not everyone is cruel.
