THE OWLS' NEST - Mostly U.S. Politics
Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's Substack diary entry for May 22, 2026. On that date in 1964, Johnson gave a graduation speech at the University of Michigan, and spoke of how his administration would “enrich and elevate our national life.” That Great Society would demand an end to poverty and racial injustice.
Interesting reading. Its idealism is a far cry from the cynicism and corruption of the Trump administration.
Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's Substack entry in her diary, Letters from an American, for May 16.
Seventy-two years ago tomorrow, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That landmark decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional because segregated schools denied Black children “the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.”
She goes on to talk about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957; the murder of the three voting rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in "Freedom Summer," 1964, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery and the violence when state troopers attacked the marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge (fracturing the skull of John Lewis). The vote in the Senate was 77-19; in the House, 333-85.
Recalling “the outrage of Selma,” Johnson said: “This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.”
She concludes:
And yet, on April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court gutted the protections for the Black-majority districts Congress provided for in the Voting Rights Act after years of weakening the law in other ways. In its wake, Republican-dominated southern state legislatures are rushing to redraw their district lines to dilute the votes of Black Democrats.
Today, thousands of Americans, including eighteen members of Congress, traveled to Selma and Mongomery to call Americans to action to protect voting rights. Pastor Kenneth Sharpton Glasgow told Joseph D. Bryant of Alabama news site AL, “This moment is bigger than Democrats or Republicans. This is about democracy itself. This is about whether Black communities, poor communities, rural communities, formerly incarcerated people, and marginalized voices will continue to have representation and political power in America.”
Speakers united around the theme that those trying to gerrymander their way into control of Congress in defiance of voters had reawakened a movement. “They think they can draw us out of power,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told an audience in Montgomery.
“They do not know the sleeping giant that they just awakened. Because it is not a coincidence, and our whole country must understand, that it was not until voting rights were ratified in this country that we got the Great Society. Because when Black Americans have the right to vote and that vote is protected, our schools get funded. When voting rights are protected, healthcare gets expanded. When voted rights are protected, our country moves forward. And Montgomery, that’s what they’re actually afraid of. They’re afraid of us coming together. They’re afraid of us protecting one another.”
Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's diary entry for May 13, 2026, which describes how Southern Republicans are reacting to Louisian v. Callais: "We are watching, in real time, the creation of a one-party state in the American South."
Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's diary entry on Substack for May 11, 2026.
The Trump Mobile scam, launched last June; Trumps fake dominance throughout his career, shielded from his own incompetence in his first term by "Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who filtered the options Trump received; chief of staff General John Kelly, who made a pact with Mattis that one of them would always stay in the country to stand in the way of Trump’s impulses; and National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, who stopped Trump from signing disastrous executive orders, sometimes going so far as to steal them off his desk"; his out-of-control rants on Truth Social, including raking criticism of his own Supreme Court appointments and threatening them over the birthright citizenship case; "a long screed about the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 agreement between Iran and the U.S., United Kingdom, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the European Union to limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for relief from sanctions. Trump pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and this weekend Trump rehashed false right-wing talking points about the deal to claim that former president Barack Obama was “a weak and stupid American President” who worked for Iran"; and much more.
