Policy / January 9, 2026
In this week Elijah v. UNITED STATES, The Nation’s Judicial Correspondent makes the case for eliminating ICE, explores George Conway’s congressional campaign, and shares his New Year’s resolution.
Demonstrators in Minneapolis protest the killing of Renée Good.
(Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images) Throughout history, all authoritarian regimes have employed a roving band of armed thugs who operate outside the law to enforce the will of their strongman. Caesar had his Praetorian Guard, Francios Duvalier had his Tontons Macoutes, Hitler had his Gestapo.
Donald Trump has ICE. ICE is functionally a paramilitary organization, armed and empowered to harass citizens, brutalize opposition, and assassinate people who get in its way. Like any paramilitary apparatus, its main objective is to sow fear among the population. He does this not only through acts of violence, kidnappings and kidnappings, but also by repeatedly showing us that he cannot be held responsible for his actions. ICE agents can apparently do whatever they want, and no one is allowed to stop them: they know it and want us to know it.
When we look at the historical record, the horrible reality of these rogue paramilitaries is that they do not disappear naturally when the strongman is finally deposed. They stay. They align themselves with the next strongman, or the strongman who wants to overthrow the Republican government that deposed the previous strongman. The next man in power tends to want to keep them anyway, because having a terrorist apparatus capable of operating outside the law is something that leaders of nations find all the time. useful.
These paramilitaries can be dismantled, but only when the population demands it, again and again, and refuses to support the politicians or regimes that would like to keep them in place. ICE can be stopped, but we don’t elect people to office who actually want to stop ICE; instead we tend to elect people who want to “fund” ICE, control it, and use it for their own purposes. And that’s why we fail.
ICE must be abolished, root and stem, by the next Democratic administration. As a stopgap measure, funding for the project must be cut by the current group of Democrats, if the party takes power in the next election. ICE is the only real litmus test for a new post-Trump administration. Democrats are unlikely to be inclined to do so. Again, paramilitary thugs have their uses with world leaders, and Democrats are traditionally afraid of appearing “weak” on immigration or dismantling the enemy’s tools. Democrats, if they want to do this, must be forced to do so by the people whose support they seek.
Current number
I liked to think of myself as a one-issue voter, that being the expansion of the Supreme Court. But not anymore. Abolish ICE, or GTFO from my primary.
The bully and the ugly
The arraignment of kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was one of the most pathetic days I’ve witnessed in an American court — and I don’t even speak Spanish, so I couldn’t fully understand how illegal the whole proceeding was. Cristian Farias speaks Spanish. Emboldened by Venezuela invasion, Trump leader ghoul Stephen Miller set its sights on Greenland. If you had bet in 1949 that Greenland would be the issue that broke NATO, you’d be about to have more money than Elon Musk. War Crimes Secretary Pete Hegseth is try to backslide former Navy captain and astronaut – and current senator – Mark Kelly because Kelly keeps telling members of the military not to commit war crimes. Judge Hannah Dugan, who was convicted in December of hindering an ICE arrest in her courthouse, resigned from his position. She’s a heroine. This belief makes her more of a hero, in my eyes. Most years, I write an article about Chief Justice John Roberts’ year-end report on the judiciary. The report is generally insubstantial, but nonetheless an interesting insight into the state of Roberts’ mind. This year it is very clear that his spirit is buried deep in the sand. It’s basically Kevin Bacon at the end of Animal House shouting “Everything’s okay” as chaos erupts around him. Inspired Takes
Harvard received a lot of good press for standing up to Trump. But this should not obscure the fact that he has absolutely failed to defend the academic freedom of those who oppose the genocide in Gaza. Gregg Gonsalves explains how the university works last capitulation In The Nation. Whenever people praise someone’s “work ethic,” I reflexively turn up my nose. I’ve never really been able to explain why I have such disdain for this expression, and I suspected it was just because I’m lazy, but no! In The Nation, Nick Juravich explains the “dark history of the American work ethic.” My laziness is now a conscious decision. 🙂 One of this country’s truly indispensable journalists, Radley Balko, questioned a fired immigration judge George Pappas. Pappas said “the law has failed us” and “the courts are dead.” The worst argument of the week
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I’m not going to bother telling you, as some probably will, that George Conway is not a “real” Democrat. Of course, Conway is a lifelong Republican and essentially a founding member of the Federalist Society. Sure, he switched parties and left Bethesda, Maryland to run in the Democratic primary to replace Jerry Nadler in New York’s 12th Congressional District, but… whatever.
What is a “real” democrat these days? A party that routinely welcomes aspiring Republicans like Joe Manchin and Elissa Slotkin, that regularly allows itself to be discouraged by outright liars like Kyrsten Sinema and John Fettermen, and that operates under the irresponsible and complicit leadership of Charles Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries can hardly rely on intellectual or political purity. Conway is as much of a “democrat” as most of them these days. This is a guy who would rather make TV appearances with strong words than take drastic action. He wants to reassemble the institutions that Trump destroyed instead of destroying the institutions that make Trump possible. He wants to go back, to a time before Trump, instead of boldly moving forward. Oh, he’s definitely a Democrat.
And not just any Democrat. Conway represents the worst of what today’s Democrats have to offer. His signature issue is “not Trump.” His fame rests on the fact that he was a Republican opposed to Trump while married to a Republican working for Trump. His positions would be banal if not for the family melodrama and the fact that so few Republicans had the basic human decency to stand up to the moron taking over their party. He exists as a TV personality because TV executives are desperate for Republicans who can maintain some semblance of respectability — or, at least, they were before they gave up and put Bari Weiss in charge.
Democrats who offer nothing other than “evil orange man” are the lowest common denominator politicians these days. Conway pushes the calculation to its irreducible conclusion. Everyone knows he opposes Trump, but do we know what he stands for?
I do. Conway is essentially one of the founding members of the Federalist Society. He first joined one of their boards in 1984. His name is not Leonard Leo, but he worked closely with Republican Judge Svengali over the decades. There is not a single Republican on the bench that Conway opposed: not sexual predator Clarence Thomas or alleged rapist Brett Kavanaugh, not anti-abortion stalwarts John Roberts and Sam Alito, not stolen seat installations Neil Gorsuch or Amy Coney Barrett. Conway was there for them all, as well as most of the Republican judges appointed to the lower courts.
Conway is no longer an active member of the Federalist Society (although I don’t know if he still goes to their fundraising parties and dinners; it’s not like I’m invited to see). His 2018 FedSoc splinter group, “Checks and Balances,” apparently went nowhere. But despite this apparent rift, Conway is one of those “Never Trumpers” – like Nicole Wallace or the entire staff of The rampart— who focus their criticism more on Trump than the Supreme Court they helped create. While he recently said that the Supreme Court has become “intoxicated with its power,” Conway is, in my opinion, one of the candidates who can be least trusted to take power away from a court he spent his life helping to create.
Conway is good on TV. It should stay there. Being wrong about everything for your entire life until yesterday is a good benchmark for television. This is a terrible benchmark for leadership. I have no problem accepting Conway as a Democrat, but I have a huge problem accepting that Conway is the best Democrats can offer.
What I wrote
I first wrote about the kidnapping of Nicolas Madurobecause I was pretty sure that kidnapping a foreign leader at gunpoint was the most illegal thing the Trump administration would do this week. But then I saw ICE execute a woman in her car as she tried to flee, so i wrote about that too. In news unrelated to the current chaos
During the holidays, I rewatched all the Lord of the Rings movies. I was struck, once again, by one of the most famous scenes in all three films – the one where Frodo says, “I wish none of this had happened,” and Gandalf responds, “So do all who live to see such moments. But that’s not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time we have.”
I generally find this scene stimulating. This time I thought it was full of shit. As I consider what to do with the terrible time I have, my intrusive thoughts tend toward, “What is the best way to die fighting this regime?” But the reality is that most of us will have no choice in how or when the Trump regime martyrs us.
Renee Good didn’t wake up one morning and decide she was prepared to die opposing Trump. E She simply reacted as an honest person would when bad people came to do bad things in her neighborhood.
On this most recent Lord of the Rings upon rewatching, I identified most with Meriadoc Brandybuck (one of the three hobbits who join Frodo on his quest). Merry did not set out, like Gandalf, to organize a change of regime. He was not charged like Frodo with destroying evil power. He just…tried to help his friends and realized that if he didn’t try, his entire community would be destroyed. When Merry is at the Entmoot (the gathering of powerful but long-dormant tree creatures), literally shouting at the trees to do somethingI felt like he was me talking to Democrats in Washington.
“I’m a hobbit and I know I can’t save Middle Earth. I just want to help my friends” turns out to be my New Year’s resolution.
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Elie Mystal Elie Mystal is The Nationjustice correspondent and columnist. He is also an Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author of two books: New York Times bestseller Let me respond: A Guide to the Constitution for Black Men And Bad Laws: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining Americaboth published by The New Press. You can subscribe to his Nation “Lying Against the United States” newsletter here.
