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Everything that crosses a president’s desk is valuable intelligence to our adversaries. Why were boxes of such materials in Donald Trump’s home in Florida?

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Liz Cheney, the Republican from the state of reality The right’s new bogeyman It’s not just long COVID. The Basement Crates

It’s been a bad week for nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The Russians are (yet again) imperiling Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, and in Florida, a former president of the United States has apparently been storing some of America’s most important secrets about nuclear weapons in his literal basement with nothing more than a few padlocks on the door.

Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant is run by the Ukrainians and occupied by the Russians. Every day that goes by is another day when an errant artillery shell could cause a global disaster, but until the Russians come to their senses—which is unlikely to be anytime soon—there is not much that we can do. So let’s focus for a moment on what might have been hiding at Mar-a-Lago, a problem the Justice Department has now moved to fix.

Unnamed sources told The Washington Post that the search warrant for Trump’s home included “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons,” but that could mean almost anything. Nuclear issues could, and almost certainly would, sometimes be included in the President’s Daily Brief, a highly classified digest of the most important issues facing American leaders summarized in a single report every morning. Other documents, however, might include almost anything: budgets for modernizing America’s nuclear deterrent, proposals for new weapons, evaluations of enemy nuclear developments, the status of allied nuclear forces, and multiple other sensitive issues.

These nuclear-related materials are classified at stratospherically high levels. Although most people are familiar with categories such as “Secret” or “Top Secret” (TS) certain kinds of documents and reports are even more tightly controlled with additional categories such as SCI, for Sensitive Compartmented Information; CNWDI, for Critical Nuclear Weapons Design Information; and SAP, for Special Access Programs. According to The New York Times, Trump was holding documents marked TS/SCI, among other classifications.

Sitting presidents can see them all; contrary to popular belief, they do not have a security clearance. Instead, their election to the office means that they have the trust and confidence of the American people. Former presidents, however, have no such access, and when the Justice Department demanded that Trump return what he took, (including by subpoena), he failed to do so. This is something of a mystery in itself; Trump had already handed back 15 boxes of documents, but he dug in his heels on returning anything more.

Perhaps the former president is worried about documents mixed in among other materials that could implicate him in various kinds of wrongdoing; this is my working theory, based on the fact that the search warrant cites three criminal laws, two referring to the unlawful removal and retention of records (including information that could harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary) and one regarding the destruction or concealment of documents in order to obstruct government investigations or administrative proceedings. (Interestingly, none of these laws require the information involved to be classified.)

I know it’s been said many times, but this time, Trump could finally be facing real legal trouble. In the meantime, however, we should all remain calm. If any of the materials in Trump’s possession were compromised, they may (by definition) cause exceptionally grave damage to our national security—but so far, we have no evidence that this has happened, and we should be cautious in any further speculation. I am concerned, in particular, by conversations I have seen (and some in which I have participated) on social media that suggest to me that Trump’s critics are letting their imaginations run away with them, including accusations that Trump has, or soon will, sell these secrets to America’s enemies.

Nothing can ever be ruled out where Donald Trump is concerned, and it’s certainly possible that Trump—whose history suggests that he never does anything for reasons other than profit or to service his debilitating narcissism—thought he could use America’s secrets for his own financial or political gain. But there’s no point in trying to pin this kind of intent on the former president, thus setting up impossibly high expectations of prosecution that will likely be dashed in the near future—especially when Trump may have already committed severe violations of a law that he himself signed in 2018 that makes his current actions a potential felony.

The short-term danger that the U.S. government had to avert comes from the possibility that Donald Trump as a citizen is as incompetent and lazy as he was when he was president, and that he could lose control of the materials he was keeping in his house. Foreign agents might not bid on such documents, but they might try to steal them from an estate run by a small circle of loyalists and staff who likely hate Trump as much as anyone else who has ever worked for him. A break-in, arson, a power outage: There are multiple ways in which foreign spies might try to get into Trump’s stash. Another security challenge is that Mar-a-Lago is a busy resort and event space; add to this Trump’s inability to keep his mouth shut about almost anything, unless he’s under oath in New York.

Those documents needed to be returned to safekeeping. Unfortunately, it took a search warrant served on a former president to get them. Trump, whose loyal supporters wanted to jail Hillary Clinton for far less, should be held accountable. In the meantime, the rest of us should hold back on guessing games and let the Justice Department do its work.

Related:

Not even the president can declassify nuclear secrets. A third nuclear age is upon us. Today’s News The author Salman Rushdie was stabbed while onstage in New York. A former Louisville, Kentucky, detective intends to plead guilty to federal charges connected with the shooting of Breonna Taylor, her lawyer said. This would be the first conviction in the case. The House of Representatives passed Democrats’ landmark health-care, energy, and climate bill. Dispatches The Third Rail: There is no MAGA movement without threats and violence, David French writes. The Books Briefing: Elise Hannum recounts the incredible adventures of the ever-changing comic book. Evening Read (Katie Martin / The Atlantic; Grace Robertson / Getty)

The Pain That Is Unlike All Other Pain

By Stephanie H. Murray

Not long after wheeling me into the room where I would eventually give birth to my eldest daughter, the nurse asked me what my plan was for pain management. I didn’t have much of an answer. I had just completed my second semester of graduate school, a feat managed largely by underpreparing for parenthood. My only birth plan was to listen to my doctors and nurses. “What do you think I should do?” I asked. The nurse walked me through my options and then suggested the common approach of at least attempting to give birth without medication. If I felt I needed pain relief, she told me, I could start with less invasive methods, such as nitrous oxide and morphine, before considering an epidural.

Read the full article.

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Finally, as observers wait for more news about Salman Rushdie’s health after the attack on him today (see Today’s News above), we’re revisiting a short story he published in The Atlantic in 1981.

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P.S.

I hate ending the week with doom and gloom about nuclear issues, but if you really want to fall down the rabbit hole of despair, I have just the thing for you. In 1984, the BBC made a movie about nuclear war called Threads. (The ambiguous title refers to the slender and fragile connections, both physical and psychological, that bind human civilization together.)

This was the British version of the American TV movie event The Day After, and although The Day After is a fine movie with Hollywood production values, the BBC and director Mick Jackson made a smaller but more terrifying film that follows a young woman from a few months before a massive nuclear exchange (when she learns she is pregnant) to 13 years after. The script relied on experts (two of them my professors, from back when I was studying such things) for the scenario and its aftermath, including explanatory voice-overs that lend the movie a docudrama feel, and it is so accurate that I assign it as required viewing in my nuclear-weapons class at Harvard Extension School. Be warned, however, that the film contains some deeply disturbing and graphic images. I don’t recommend watching it alone.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Salman Rushdie has had a price on his head for 33 years. He is a writer who has lived with the fear of being killed for his words. Whatever other opinion one might have about Rushdie and his skills as a novelist or his public persona, this much is true: He has understood what it means to be targeted and hated—burned in effigy—forced to hide and, even in recent years, to continue to look over his shoulder. All because he wrote a book.

And so it came as a shock, but maybe not as a surprise, that Rushdie was attacked this morning onstage, in Chautauqua, New York, of all places. He was about to speak to an audience at the Chautauqua Institution, a cottage community that was founded in the late 19th century as a place for religious learning, and that has since become an oasis of education and discussion every summer. That it was here that Rushdie was struck repeatedly with a knife is a terrible irony.

We still don’t know the attacker’s motive, just that eyewitnesses were startled by how fast it happened and grateful for how quickly the attacker was detained. Of course one immediately wonders whether this act of violence was carried out by someone who intended to fulfill the fatwa issued in 1989 after furious reaction to his novel Satanic Verses—a call never truly rescinded—or whether this person had some other twisted explanation for their actions. But we know the results. Rushdie was still in surgery as of this evening, The New York Times reported. And regardless of why the violence took place, one message was unambiguous precisely because the target was a writer: Free expression is worthy of a death sentence. This alone pushes us into dangerous territory, because now it is something that has happened; something once considered a worst-case scenario is now an actuality—one that could happen again.

[Read: In hindsight, the war on terror began with Salman Rushdie]

Maybe the most jolting immediate reaction was from PEN America: “We can think of no comparable incident of a public violent attack on a literary writer on American soil.” And it’s true: What other societies have given us murdered authors? Stalin’s Soviet Union is the one that comes quickest to my mind. Osip Mandelstam dying in a prison camp. Isaac Babel executed. The Yiddish poets and writers whom the dictator ordered shot in the basement of the Lubyanka prison. Rushdie has not been targeted by his own state, of course—after living in hiding for years in London, he has lived openly in New York for the past two decades. Again, we still don’t know why he was singled out for this brutality. But just as the mind recoils at the sight of a single book burned, the spilled blood of an author inspires revulsion.

Rushdie himself has become something of an absolutist on the freedom of expression. In a speech at Emory University in 2015, he said that “limiting freedom of expression is not just censorship, it’s an assault on human nature.” He rejected the relativistic notion that “freedom of expression is culturally specific” and that certain cultures can simply “reserve the right to reject it.” To him, the right to speak your mind, about anything, is universal, and he warns of the danger that accompanies the fact that it has ceased to be considered as such. In some ways, he never stopped fighting the debate that first ignited around the fatwa, with some defending him unreservedly and others arguing that perhaps his perceived insult of Islam was a mistake and a needless provocation on his part.

This morning’s violence cuts through this debate, silences it—as violence often does. Writers represent the part of our culture that engages with humanity through ideas, whose passion is expressed through sentences and paragraphs and pages. It’s a realm we should not just preserve but defend. May it never be eroded by the brute force of an arm wielding a knife. We should all hope that Rushdie survives. And not just because a writer should never have to give his life for what he has written. But because we need him to keep reminding us of the worst of what can happen—the violence that can happen—to someone who has used nothing more than his words.

The Inflation Reduction Act, passed by the House of Representatives today, is about to become the first comprehensive climate legislation in American history. Compared with Congress’s desultory approach to the issue in the past, the numbers are striking: The legislation will spend roughly $374 billion on decarbonization and climate resilience over the next 10 years, getting us two-thirds of the way to the country’s Paris Agreement goals.

But perhaps the most important number about the package is zero. Zero Republicans in the House. Zero Republicans in the Senate. The IRA was adopted entirely along party lines, with all Democrats and not a single congressional Republican in support of the legislation.

The number drives home an unmistakable reality: Even after years of effort from environmentalists, climate change remains a starkly partisan issue in America. The bill only passed because there were 50 Democrats in the Senate, with a Democratic vice president to cast the tie-breaking vote. Had any of those Democrats lost their elections—had Joe Manchin, for instance, decided against running for reelection in 2018 in his heavily Republican home state, or had Democrats not eked out two Senate wins in Georgia last year—then the bill would not have made it across the finish line.

The “no” votes included every congressional Republican who has publicly committed to some measure of climate action, including all 23 House Republicans who are on the Climate Solutions Caucus. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, who recently wrote in The Atlantic that America was “in denial” about the scale of the climate threat, opposed the bill, as did Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a moderate who has spoken about how climate change is transforming her state.

Granted, the Inflation Reduction Act is not only a climate bill, and Republicans oppose it for reasons beyond its climate policy. During congressional debate over the past week, GOP lawmakers have generally spent more time attacking the bill’s tax and health-care provisions than its energy measures. “Today, Democrats returned to their same tired playbook to raise taxes, spend more money, and expand the size of government,” Romney said in a statement after his vote. “Rather than listening to the American people who are suffering from inflation, Democrats have voted for a liberal wish list.” His statement alluded to the climate provisions only once, in an allegation that the IRA “reduces oil and gas production.”

The GOP’s intransigence comes despite years of efforts aimed at getting Republicans to sign onto climate policy. Since Senators John McCain, a Republican, and Joe Lieberman, a Democrat, first put together a cap-and-trade bill in 2003, environmentalists have held out hope that the parties could come together to address the issue. That never worked out: Even McCain bailed on climate talks during Obama’s presidency.

Republican-led climate efforts have also failed to bear fruit. Since the George H. W. Bush administration, the GOP’s pro-fossil-fuel faction has treated climate policy as an existential threat that must be prevented at any cost. In 2017, a set of GOP graybeards endorsed a revenue-neutral carbon tax as a sufficiently conservative solution to the climate problem. But the party rejected it when rewriting parts of the tax code the following year.

And President Donald Trump went further, arguing that fossil fuels, especially coal, are not natural resources with environmental and economic trade-offs but an unadulterated positive good that should be whole-heartedly embraced.

The GOP hasn’t been totally unwilling to address climate issues. Republicans have supported smaller, more incremental bills that tackle more limited aspects of the climate problem. If you look there, a more hopeful through line comes into view, Carlos Curbelo, a former Republican House member from South Florida who tried to forge a carbon-tax deal while in Congress, told me.

“There’s been an unmistakable trend in Congress favoring bipartisan climate action up until Manchin-Schumer,” Curbelo said. He cited a series of smaller wins—a major 2020 energy law; a ban on hydrofluorocarbons, a category of climate super-pollutant; and the climate provisions in the bipartisan infrastructure deal—that show a gathering momentum on policy. “This was a partisan process from the very beginning;all reconciliation bills are. We shouldn’t read too much into Republicans’ opposition to this legislation,” he added. “And what is more likely is that, once this is behind us, the trend resumes.”

Even if Republicans are making a stink about the bill now, it’s possible that they “can then be constructive in some more behind-the-scenes follow-up,” Kristin Eberhard, the climate-policy director at the Niskanen Center, a moderate think tank with libertarian roots, told me. Last year in Washington State, Republicans voted unanimously against an ambitious cap-and-trade bill, but then helped create a more productive follow-up to the bill, she said.

That may not happen in national politics, which remains significantly more ideological and acrimonious than a West Coast statehouse. But national Republicans will have an opportunity to work with Democrats on the climate if they so choose, she observed. As part of his deal with Senator Joe Manchin over the IRA, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer promised to bring a bill loosening some environmental permitting rules to the Senate floor. Permitting reform was a major plank of the climate policy that House Republicans announced earlier this year.  

But if the GOP sticks to its steadfast opposition to any significant climate policy, that could have complications for the IRA going forward. President Joe Biden is expected to sign the bill into law early next week, but at some point, can Republicans reverse it? In a way, the question is meaningless. Congress can do anything it wants within its constitutional limits. The geography of the Senate is skewed against Democrats’ current demographic coalition, and there’s a good chance the GOP will take over the chamber in November. If Republicans win 60 votes in the Senate, creating a filibuster-proof majority, then no possibility is off-limits. And Biden’s approval rating is near historic lows, opening the door for a Republican to win the White House in two years.

But some parts of the IRA will be much, much harder to reverse than others. By January 2025, when Biden’s first term ends, tens of millions of dollars from the bill will already be spent. “In two years, a lot can get started, and a lot can get planned, and some steel is going to be in the ground,” Nathan Iyer, an associate at RMI, a nonpartisan energy think tank, told me. Any infrastructure that is built by 2025—new solar farms, wind turbines, factories—would have to be torn up or excessively taxed to be taken out of commission once Republicans take power.

But there will be many important policies only starting to be felt by the end of 2024. The new clean-energy electricity tax credits, for instance, which are projected to provide a large share of the bill’s emissions reductions, will not come into effect until 2025. When that policy is fully in effect, then removing it could hike electricity bills, discouraging Republicans from repeal, but a Republican White House might be able to act before the policy goes fully into effect. (A less complete version of the policy, applying only to some zero-carbon technologies, will already be in effect.)

It is possible for Republicans to reverse those provisions, but that seems unlikely unless “a strong ideological call” develops to trash the entire package, Iyer said. During the Trump administration, Republicans did not gut an earlier version of the tax credits, which applied only to renewable energy, although they did reduce their value. And Republicans failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, despite years of insisting that they would try.

By 2025, even if clean-energy facilities have not yet opened, construction on many will be under way, Iyer said. The odds are good that most of those new facilities will be in red states. A recent Bloomberg survey found that the congressional districts with the most planned wind, solar, and battery capacity are overwhelmingly Republican-led; GOP-led states dominate the manufacturing industry too. Repealing the IRA would also take away the expanded carbon-capture and removal subsidies that oil companies are already banking on.

When clean-energy companies break ground or make investments in GOP districts, they should be clear about what policy is making their new facilities possible, Iyer said. By the time that Republicans can undo the IRA, he said, their constituents may be the ones whose jobs are on the line.

The executive branch’s system of classification is among the weirdest aspects of the American government, and sometimes it seems as if those best equipped to understand it are people with a background in obscure religious practices—say, Roman Catholic sacramental theology—rather than journalists or lawyers. Certain officials are consecrated as having “original classification authority” (they can baptize documents as classified without reference to previous classification); others are ordained to classify, too, but derive their authority from others. You can be defrocked for various reasons. But the authority to classify and declassify flows from one person with near-absolute power, and for four years that papal figure was Donald J. Trump. This awesome former power will protect him from prosecution, but only so much.

Attorney General Merrick Garland revealed yesterday that the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago concerned the existence of classified material at Trump’s Florida golf resort. And The Washington Post reported that the material included “documents relating to nuclear weapons,” which would seem to surpass in gravity the pilfering of presidential memorabilia that many speculated was the reason for the raid. If Trump took away a postcard from Kim Jong Un, well, tsk-tsk. Political prudence might dictate that Garland not prosecute the case.

Moreover, so much material is classified that one should expect a slip-up here and there. For decades, the crusade against overclassification has been a cause mostly of the left, in part on the grounds that so much is secret that no one, let alone Trump, could be expected to abide by all classification rules. Secrets are not rare. By some measures there might be more information that is classified by the U.S. government than is unclassified, in any library, anywhere. In 2004, the physicist Peter Galison tallied the amount of classified material produced every year and found that “about five times as many pages are being added to the classified universe than are being brought to the storehouses of human learning, including all the books and journals on any subject in any language collected in the largest repositories on the planet.” The government certainly has more classified data than exists unclassified in the entire Library of Congress. Mistakes will be made, especially by officials who are flagrantly heedless of basic procedure.

[Peter Wehner: Now they’re calling for violence]

But fan letters and snapshots are one matter, and launch codes are another—and here the details of classification might decide just how much trouble Trump is in. First, let’s focus on the absolute portion of near-absolute power. The 1988 Supreme Court case Navy v. Egan confirmed that classification authority flows from the president except in specific instances separated from his powers by law. And here is where things get theological: a president can make most documents classified or declassified simply by willing them so. This peculiar power is so great that the government has an office that exists solely to manage it: the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), which has a strong claim to being the coolest government office you’ve never heard of. (The longest-serving director of this office, Steven Garfinkel, told me that for two decades he had access to pretty much every secret in the executive branch. “If there was a version of the game show Jeopardy! entirely about the federal government,” he deadpanned to me once, “I would be in the Tournament of Champions every single year.” Garfinkel retired to teach high school in 2002 and died in 2018.)

His successor, J. William Leonard, led ISOO under George W. Bush, and he confirmed the lack of general limitation of his boss’s power. While a president is president, Leonard told me, “the rules and procedures governing the classification and declassification of information apply to everyone else.” And that means Trump could have declassified whatever he wished (again, with specific limitations soon to be discussed) before carting it off to Mar-a-Lago. He would not have had to file paperwork—just “utter the magic words,” Leonard told me. He could have waved his hand over the U-Haul trailer as it headed out the White House driveway and down I-95 toward Florida, and there would have been no classified material in there to mishandle.

Leonard noted important caveats, however. First, his power to declassify ends with his presidency. Second, that U-Haul could be re-classified by someone else. (Depending on traffic and the sharpness of the Biden administration, I would imagine it could have been reclassified somewhere around Fredericksburg, Virginia) And third, there are certain materials that presidents cannot classify and declassify at will. One such category of material is the identity of spies.

[David Frum: Stuck with Trump]

Another is nuclear secrets. The Atomic Energy Acts of 1946 and 1954 produced an even stranger category of classified knowledge: anything related to the production or use of nuclear weapons and nuclear power is inherently classified, and Trump could utter whatever words he pleased yet still be in possession of classified material. Where are our nuclear warheads? What tricks have we developed to make sure they work? This information is “born secret” no matter who produces it. The restrictions on documents of this type are incredibly tight. In the unlikely event that Trump came up with a new way to enrich uranium, and scribbled it on a cocktail napkin poolside at Mar-a-Lago early this year, that napkin would instantly have become a classified document subject to various controls and procedures, and possibly illegal for the former president to possess. Of course if he did so, no prosecutor would pursue him. A certain amount of leeway is crucial to the system.

If Trump was keeping nuclear secrets in the storeroom of his country club, without even the benefit of a padlock, and resisted attempts to secure those secrets against infiltrators and spies, a prosecutor might reasonably take more interest. After all, he’s the ex-president, not the pope.

Not long after wheeling me into the room where I would eventually give birth to my eldest daughter, the nurse asked me what my plan was for pain management. I didn’t have much of an answer. I had just completed my second semester of graduate school, a feat managed largely by underpreparing for parenthood. My only birth plan was to listen to my doctors and nurses. “What do you think I should do?” I asked. The nurse walked me through my options and then suggested the common approach of at least attempting to give birth without medication. If I felt I needed pain relief, she told me, I could start with less invasive methods, such as nitrous oxide and morphine, before considering an epidural.

I followed her advice to the letter. The nitrous oxide did little to dull the pain but made me high, which I hated. The morphine, as far as I could tell, did nothing at all. The epidural, when I finally got one 19 hours in, almost immediately erased any trace of pain, and I fell asleep. It was awesome. My only regret is not getting one sooner.

Positive—nay, marvelous—though it was, I felt strangely self-conscious about how things turned out, in part because so many people asked about my experience. Many of those who congratulated me over the next few months wanted to know if I’d managed childbirth unmedicated. I found myself offering explanations and context for why I hadn’t: that the hormone they’d given me to kick-start labor had made the contractions worse, that it was the middle of the night and I was exhausted.

Eventually, I dropped this act, but these conversations made me wonder why society treats labor pains with such reverence. The questions of whether and how to relieve them are subject to deliberation and scrutiny that would seem absurd under any other circumstances. I certainly didn’t consider forgoing anesthesia when I had my wisdom teeth taken out. And no one asked me about it either.

[Read: The enduring mystery of pain measurement]

The use of anesthesia in childbirth has been controversial for as long as doctors have offered it. When the Scottish obstetrician James Young Simpson began to give ether, and later chloroform, to laboring women in 1847, he was met with strong pushback, even as anesthesia was largely embraced for use in surgery. Historians disagree about how common religious objections to obstetric anesthesia were, but some opposition was no doubt laced with moral undertones. “You do not really bless a woman by removing the pains of labour,” one surgeon wrote in 1848. “Her true blessing flows from lifting up her heart to God, and asking for humility and strength to bear them.” Others could not see the use for obstetric anesthesia. The American physician Charles Meigs quipped that “pain of labor had never been great enough to prevent women from having more children.” But physicians were primarily—and rightfully—concerned about safety, worrying that the anesthetic would interfere with labor or harm the child, William Camann, the director emeritus of obstetric anesthesiology at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a co-author of Easy Labor: Every Woman’s Guide to Choosing Less Pain and More Joy During Childbirth, told me.

Despite all of this, Simpson predicted that obstetric anesthesia would eventually become the norm, as “certainly our patients themselves will force use of it upon the profession.” Although he was right that pain management would become more commonplace, he was wrong that patients would be of one mind about it. Prevailing feminist opinion on the practice has flip-flopped over the years, arguing at different times that pain relief liberates women from the cruelty of nature and alienates them from its beauty. And although the downsides of obstetric anesthesia have largely fallen away in the 175 years since its first use, the desire among some women to experience labor in all its brutality has yet to fully peter out, and perhaps never will.

At first, Simpson appeared to be correct: Objections notwithstanding, some women in American and British high society—Fanny Appleton Longfellow in 1847, Queen Victoria a few years later—received pain relief while in labor. High-profile births quelled concerns and galvanized support for expanding access to modern anesthesia beyond the wealthy few. By the early 1900s, feminists were pressuring physicians to administer “twilight sleep,” an injectable combination of morphine and scopolamine popular in Europe that kept women from remembering childbirth at all. The journalists Marguerite Tracy and Constance Leupp, who traveled to Germany to observe the method, wrote that making obstetric anesthesia accessible would “relieve one-half of humanity from its antique burden of suffering which the other half of humanity has never understood.”

Unfortunately, these early methods carried serious risks. Anesthetics occasionally caused smooth muscles to relax, which led some women to bleed out after giving birth. Morphine, when used in large doses or in combination with other drugs, caused some infants to suffocate. And even when mothers and babies survived, it’s not clear that anesthesia always improved women’s experiences at the time. In the late 19th century and well into the 20th, pain relief was often administered only after the mother’s cervix had fully dilated. “This makes no sense,” the medical historian Jacqueline Wolf, the author of Deliver Me From Pain: Anesthesia and Birth in America, told me. “Women had been through all the hard stuff.” At times, twilight sleep did more to dull women’s inhibitions than their pain, causing them to thrash so wildly in the resulting delirium that hospitals sometimes restrained and/or blindfolded them during labor. Twilight sleep fell out of favor after one of its leading advocates died in childbirth in 1915, but other drugs became routine, and by mid-century, many women were heavily medicated during hospital births and even unconscious for delivery. Again, Wolf suspects this had less to do with the mothers’ well-being than the fact that hospitals were inundated at the height of the Baby Boom. “What was an easy way to manage them? Drug them to the max,” Wolf said.

The heavy medicalization of the 1950s was met with fierce opposition. Nonmedical approaches to managing pain in labor championed by obstetricians like Grantly Dick-Read and Fernand Lamaze grew more popular. A new generation of feminists pushed for the right to give birth free from interventions, claiming that the largely male medical field had commandeered what was rightfully women’s domain. In doing so, they embraced the argument put forth by wary physicians a century earlier: Obstetric anesthesia unnecessarily stunted an otherwise transcendent experience.

The controversy has fizzled somewhat in the decades since, largely because anesthetic methods have improved. The fact that epidurals allowed women to remain awake during labor allayed some women’s concerns about them, and they grew significantly more commonplace in the 1980s. Further tweaks to the procedure have permitted women to receive an epidural without their legs being entirely paralyzed. The tension between those in the natural- and medical-pain-management camps has eased as a result. Earlier in his career, Camman told me, doulas often left after an epidural was administered, perhaps feeling they had failed at their job. Now, he says, they usually stay, recognizing that even those who undergo anesthesia need support.

Obstetric anesthesia is far more common and less controversial today than it was in the 1850s, but it remains a last resort for many and totally unwanted by a nontrivial minority. Wolf thinks that hesitation to accept pain relief is in part a reasonable response to its fraught history. “The truth is, it was very, very medically threatening for most of those years,” she said. And even today’s epidurals come with trade-offs. Anesthesia can cause low blood pressure, which can lead to fetal distress, so women getting an epidural typically also get IV fluids and have their blood pressure continuously monitored. Recent research has cast doubt on long-standing concerns that epidurals increase the likelihood of Cesarean delivery, but some studies suggest that they can slow second-stage labor and make it harder to push, both of which can increase the need for forceps or a vacuum to assist the delivery. Some women are understandably keen to avoid this possible “cascade of interventions,” Diane DiTomasso, an associate professor in the College of Nursing at the University of Rhode Island, told me.

But some experts I spoke with suspect that even as the trade-offs and risks of anesthesia continue to lessen, there will always be some women who want to experience labor without it. When I mentioned how befuddling I find that desire to Donald Caton, an anesthesiologist and the author of What a Blessing She Had Chloroform, he pointed out that humankind has long been ambivalent about pain, relentlessly seeking to rid ourselves of it while suspecting that it must “serve some purpose,” as he put it in one paper. Caton mentioned Ernest Hemingway, who once wrote to his fellow novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald that “you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously.” When I wondered aloud whether Hemingway would have had his wisdom teeth removed without medication, Caton conceded that he presumes not. Humans derive meaning from all sorts of suffering, but we tend to avoid intense physical pain when we can.

[Read: Why is giving birth so hard?]

Then again, labor is no ordinary kind of pain. Typically, pain is an indication that something has gone wrong, serving to alert us to a bodily threat. “You touch the hot stove. It hurts. You pull your hand away,” Laura Whitburn, a senior lecturer at La Trobe University who studies labor pain, told me. But labor is a natural physiological process that hurts even when nothing is going wrong. The accompanying pain seems to serve an entirely different evolutionary purpose; one theory is that it prompts the mother to stop whatever she’s doing, seek help, and ready herself for the child’s arrival. It is a productive pain, and according to Whitburn’s research, conceptualizing it that way can help women cope with it.

In fact, not all women experience labor in the excruciating way it is portrayed in movies or on television. Various studies have investigated perceptions of labor pain, and although women broadly describe it as “intense, demanding and difficult,” the language they use to describe the pain varies wildly. One woman called it the “pain of death”; another, “the sweetest pain in the world.” For some, it seems, labor pain can take on a satisfying element, less like the sting of an open wound and more like the burn of running a marathon.

Even having gotten an epidural, caring for my daughter during the first few weeks of her life felt like running a marathon directly after being hit by a train. There is enough suffering in early parenthood for me to feel at peace with letting the blessing of labor pain go. But having run a couple of marathons, I admit that I understand the appeal. That labor is difficult, even painful, is part of what makes the experience rewarding. This is perhaps what Simpson failed to understand so many years ago: Anesthesia is a triumph over nature, yes, but so is giving birth without it. Childbirth, then, sits at a strange place in the human experience, straddling a boundary between misery and meaning, between the kind of pain that damages a life and the kind that makes one.

LARAMIE, Wyo.—Liz Cheney will probably lose her job on Tuesday, in large part due to her crusade against Donald Trump. Trump will surely taunt her as a big RINO loser, but Cheney has no plans to end her fight against him. She is already looking past her anticipated defeat here and into a future that could include—I suspect—a primary challenge to the former president in 2024.

“It’s clear that our party is really sick right now,” Cheney told me when I spoke with her last week. “The Trump forces that are trying to pull us into the abyss are really strong and really fighting.” Punching back has not been a winning formula for Cheney’s reelection bid in America’s reddest state. Her Trump-certified challenger, the election-denying Harriet Hageman, is well ahead in the polls.

At the very least, though, Cheney won herself another big celebrity endorsement the other day: Kevin Costner! She tweeted a photo of the cowboy-hatted actor wearing an I’m For Liz Cheney T-shirt on what appears to be the set of the hit Paramount series Yellowstone. “Real men put country over party,” she captioned her photo of  Costner, who is in many ways a typical Cheney supporter circa 2022: a liberal-leaning recent convert who does not live in Wyoming.

Cheney has raised more than $13 million in this election cycle, nearly all of it from out of state. Strangers keep running up to her, sometimes in tears, to thank her for her onslaught against Trump. They tell Cheney that she is the paragon of American courage at a time when the country so desperately needs it. “I haven’t always agreed with you,” they inevitably begin, and the reverence flows from there.

And then there are the death threats. They mostly come from people who have typically agreed with her. Cheney has, let’s just say, fallen out of favor in the state and party where she, until recently, was royalty. Most Republicans have zero use for her these days, which is just as well, because the feeling is mutual.

But Cheney is playing a longer game, she says. She has spent many hours working on her address for Tuesday night. It will almost certainly be a concession speech, but Cheney seems to view her primary more as a speed bump—and her address as a prime-time launching pad into a political future far more consequential than anything she could have achieved in Congress. Whatever Wyoming Republicans decide will be secondary to Cheney’s pursuit of her real opponent, Donald Trump. Will Harriet Whatshername even rate a mention?

I joined Cheney in the college town of Laramie, at a house party hosted by one of her supporters. As usual, people were coming up to her—very young people and very old people and liberals who probably used to deride her father, Dick Cheney, as Darth Vader and a war criminal. Now they were praising Darth Daughter, reminding her that she is playing for history and on a stage much bigger than Wyoming. They tell her not to be deterred—by the abuse or the Ditch Liz signs or whatever ugly results come in after the voting’s done.

“I consider you an absolute hero,” an 89-year-old local Democrat named Jim LaFleiche told Cheney. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.” Cheney thanked LaFleiche and assured him that she would not give up. “This is about preserving the Constitution and the rule of law and the basic seriousness of politics,” she said. “And it is about”—wait for it, as it’s become Cheney’s mantra—“making sure that Donald Trump does not get near the Oval Office again.”

Cheney also called the former president the greatest threat to our republic in the country’s 246-year history—words that her father echoed almost precisely in an ad that her campaign released the next day. No office is worth having if it means signing on to a big lie, she told me.

At nearly that same moment, Hageman was in Casper, Wyoming, declaring the exact opposite. “Absolutely the election was rigged,” she said about Joe Biden’s defeat of Trump nearly two years ago—an assertion she had not made explicitly until that point. Hageman probably does not believe this, but uttering the line has become the price of admission into Trump’s party. It is, in many cases, the cost of viability for Republicans running in states like Wyoming, where Trump won 70 percent of the vote—his largest share—in 2020.

A day later: Hungary’s ultra-right-wing prime minister, Viktor Orbán, was in Dallas kicking off the Conservative Political Action Conference. The annual CPAC gathering has become a kind of MAGA jamboree celebrating all the flavors of Republican denial (the election, January 6, COVID, etc.). Trump hosted Orbán, the European Union’s only autocrat, at his New Jersey resort last week, and both men enjoyed wildly enthusiastic receptions at CPAC. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Sarah Palin, the My Pillow guy, and Papa John also spoke. Cheney was nowhere to be found, though her name was hurled about as a slur.

I reminisced with Cheney a few months ago about a CPAC I had covered in 2010. She had been greeted at the event, held that year in Washington, as a bright light of the Republican Party’s future. Her remarks culminated in her introduction of a special guest, Dick Cheney, whom she called the man who “taught me what it means to have the courage of your convictions.” The former vice president walked out to Beatles-worthy shrieks from the young crowd and a few scattered “Run, Dick, run!”s When he said, “I think Barack Obama is a one-term president,” the audience jumped to its feet and whooped. The line was considered red meat by the base back then, though Cheney wasn’t even calling for Obama to be locked up or, for that matter, hanged. Those were innocent times.

Being a lonely exemplar of courage in a party otherwise bloated with cranks and cowards has made Liz Cheney one of the most admired political leaders in America—at least among Democrats. “The world is upside down,” Cheney has been saying. Indeed, the marvel of Dick Cheney’s daughter now having a 59 percent approval rating among Democrats, and only 14 percent among Republicans, has not been lost on anyone.

Cheney voted in line with Trump’s positions 93 percent of the time when he was president. But after he lost the election and lied about it, Cheney turned hard against him and almost immediately became a pariah in her party. Now 66 percent of Republicans view her unfavorably. The vitriol that Republicans direct toward her is typically reserved for their go-to Democratic villains—often female ones: Hillary, Pelosi, AOC. Because of threats to her safety, Cheney’s campaign events are never publicized, and reporters are only selectively alerted. Security is heavy and paranoia runs deep in Cheney World, probably for good reason.

Back at the Laramie house party, a young woman—a recent University of Wyoming graduate, voice hushed and earnest—was urging Cheney to keep fighting. She implored her not to be deterred by what keeps happening to her fellow Republican Trump-resisters in other states. The night before, Representative Peter Meijer, one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach the defeated president, had lost his primary in Michigan, as had Rusty Bowers, the Republican House speaker in Arizona, who gave some of the most damning testimony against Trump before the January 6 committee. I asked Cheney how dispiriting it was for her to see them go down in defeat. “It just makes me more determined,” Cheney said. “We have a lot of work to do. It’s not just this election cycle.”

Alan Simpson, the 92-year-old former Republican senator from Wyoming and a longtime friend of the Cheneys, placed her congressional race in the context of American heroes doing unpopular things—routed, perhaps, in the short term, but vindicated by history. “Look, she’s going to go on into eternity, or as long as is necessary” to stop Trump, Simpson told me. “She’s going to keep doing everything she can to bring down this oafish man, who’s filled with revenge and hatred and total disregard for the laws of the United States.”

As a preamble to brief remarks Cheney made, another local supporter, Laura Lewis, shared a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln that she said applied to the trailing candidate. “A statesman is he who thinks in the future generations,” read Lewis. “And a politician is he who thinks in the upcoming elections.”

These are the kinds of rationalizations that are often trotted out about candidates who are about to lose. But in the context of Cheney’s campaign—and the bravery she has exhibited—it feels wholly appropriate. Of all the elements of cowardice that have afflicted the Republican Party, a particularly pathetic one is the terror so many of Cheney’s colleagues appear to have about losing their jobs. Maybe they can’t bear the thought of forfeiting their congressional parking spaces or fancy pins, or maybe they simply lack the stomach to get called bad names by Donald Trump. So they do whatever it takes to pass their tribal loyalty tests and survive their next election. They’re so afraid of being called a “former member of Congress” that they’ll never know what it feels like to be called “courageous.”

If Cheney takes any consolation from her likely ouster from Congress, it is that she will no longer be part of a caucus that she’s lost all regard for. “I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible,” Cheney said in what may be remembered as her signature line in the January 6 hearings. “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

A mere mention of colleagues such as Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, Republican leaders with whom Cheney once worked closely, elicits from her a kind of visceral contempt. “It makes me really sad and it makes me really angry,” Cheney told me in Laramie in a slow, measured tone. She said she has watched in disgust as so many people she once admired have stood by and not only ignored the obvious threat of Trump, but embraced him. “It makes me realize: We have too many people in our party who don’t understand our history, who don’t understand why we take the oath, who don’t understand what our obligation is,” Cheney told me.

The colleagues she speaks of most favorably these days tend to be Democrats, many of them female. In Laramie, she singled out Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania as “serious people who do their homework and love their country.”

Cheney identifies her work on the January 6 committee—made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans—as the most important thing she’s done in her professional life. The hearings, she said, have served as an antidote to the many derelictions that so many of her party’s putative “leaders” have been guilty of. “People don’t realize how fragile our system is,” Cheney told me. “We just get accustomed to thinking, you know, we’ll survive anything.”

Whatever happens Tuesday, whatever remains of the January 6 committee, Liz Cheney’s work will continue. She says it’s too early for her to discuss the prospect of a presidential run. But not for me. I’m guessing Cheney will run, and I believe that she absolutely should, especially if Trump does. It would almost certainly be another losing primary for her. Yet it would nonetheless be a fascinating matchup, much more compelling than any challenge a Trump-derivative character such as Ron DeSantis or Mike Pence could ever pose. It’s hard to imagine DeSantis or Pence seriously mocking Trump for losing to Brandon in 2020, or challenging his election lies, or slamming him for his complicity and desertion on January 6, or mentioning the FBI’s search of his residence or his need to plead the Fifth.

Even in defeat, Cheney could emerge from Wyoming tough and unencumbered enough to serve as a one-woman wrecking ball against Trump and as a reckoning for a party that’s been terrified to speak honestly about him for years now. I imagine Trump and the RNC will do whatever is necessary to avoid such a reckoning and to keep Trump as far away as possible from a debate stage with Liz Cheney: Republican from reality.

Starting in 2008, a widely circulated conspiracy theory was that Barack Obama was not actually born in America. Strivers on the political right scrounged around to try to produce a Kenyan birth certificate for him; they filed state and federal legal complaints alleging that Obama was not eligible to be president. But proof of this theory was never a requirement for subscribing to it; you could simply choose to believe that a Black liberal with a Muslim-sounding middle name was not one of us. And at several points during Obama’s presidency, almost a quarter of Americans did.

The country has not changed much. Theda Skocpol, a Harvard sociologist and political scientist who has studied the Tea Party movement and right-wing grievances of the Obama years, draws a straight line from that era to today’s “Stop the Steal” efforts. I talked with Skocpol on Wednesday morning about that connection, and the roots of resentment in America.

Now, as then, you can take the right’s scramble for evidence of fraud with a grain of salt, she told me. The election deniers who say they are perturbed by late-night ballot dumps or dead people voting are actually concerned with something else.

“‘Stop the Steal’ is a metaphor,” Skocpol said, “for the country being taken away from the people who think they should rightfully be setting the tone.” More than a decade later, evidence remains secondary when what you’re really doing is questioning whose vote counts—and who counts as an American.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Elaine Godfrey: Tell me what connection you see between the Tea Party movement that you studied and the Trump-inspired Stop the Steal effort.

Theda Skocpol: There’s a definite line. Opinion polls tell us that people who participated in or sympathized with the Tea Party—some groups are still meeting—were disproportionately angry about immigration and the loss of America as they know it. They became core supporters of Trump. I’m quite certain that some organizations that were Tea Party–labeled helped organize Stop the Steal stuff.

Trump has expanded the appeal of an angry, resentful ethno-nationalist politics to younger whites. But it’s the same outlook.

[Read: Why the Tea Party isn’t going anywhere]

Godfrey: So how do you interpret the broader Stop the Steal movement?

Skocpol: I don’t think Stop the Steal is about ballots at all. I don’t believe a lot of people really think that the votes weren’t counted correctly in 2020. They believe that urban people, metropolitan people—disproportionately young and minorities, to be sure, but frankly liberal whites—are an illegitimate brew that’s changing America in unrecognizable ways and taking it away from them. Stop the Steal is a way of saying that. Stop the Steal is a metaphor. And remember, they declared voting fraud before the election.

Godfrey: A metaphor?

Skocpol: It’s a metaphor for the country being taken away from the people who think they should rightfully be setting the tone. Doug Mastriano said it in so many words: It’s a Christian country. That doesn’t mean we’ll throw out everybody else, but they’ve got to accept that we’re the ones setting the tone. That’s what Hungary has in mind. Viktor Orbán has been going a little further. They’re a more muscular and violence-prone version of the same thing.

People in 2016 who were otherwise quite normal would say, There’s something wrong with those votes from Milwaukee and Madison. I’d push back ever so gently and say, Those are big places; it takes a while to count the votes. I’d get a glassy-eyed stare at that point: No, something fishy is going on.

They feel disconnected from and dominated by people who have done something horrible to the country. And Trump gave voice to that. He’s a perfect resonant instrument for that—because he’s a bundle of narcissistic resentments. But he’s no longer necessary.

[Read: The Bannon strategy]

Godfrey: Elaborate on that for me.

Skocpol: He’s not necessary for an authoritarian movement to use the GOP to lock in minority rule. The movement to manipulate election access and counting is so far along. I think it’s too late, and we’re vulnerable to it because of how we administer local elections.

What’s happened involves an interlocking set of things. It depends not just on candidates like Trump running for president and nationalizing popular fears and resentments, but also on state legislatures, which have been captured, and the Supreme Court. The Court is a keystone in all of this because it’s going to validate perfectly legal manipulations that really are about locking in minority rule. In that sense, the turning point in American history may have happened in November 2016.

Godfrey: The turning point toward what?

Skocpol: Toward a locking-in of minority rule along ethno-nationalist lines. The objective is to disenfranchise metro people, period. I see a real chance of a long-term federal takeover by forces that are determined to maintain a fiction of a white, Christian, Trumpist version of America.

That can’t work over the long run, because the fastest-growing parts of the country are demonized in that scheme of things. But a lot of things liberals do play into it: Democrats are the party of strong government, and they’re almost as fixated on the presidency as Trumpists are. People on the left started bashing Joe Biden less than a year into his presidency. Why won’t the president just exert his will? Well, that doesn’t work.

The hour is late. This election this fall is critical.

Godfrey: Why so?

Skocpol: We’ve got about five pivotal states where election deniers—the culmination of the Tea Party–Trumpist strand of the GOP—are close to gaining control of the levers of voting access and counting the results. If that happens, in even two of those places, it could well be enough. The way courts are operating now, they will not place limits on much of anything that happens in the states.

[Read: The radical fringe that just went mainstream in Arizona]

Godfrey: So what would you say is on the ballot in 2022?

Skocpol: The locking-in of minority authoritarian rule.

People talk about it in racial terms, and of course the racial side is very powerful. We had racial change from the 1960s on, and conservative people are angry about Black political power. But I wouldn’t underestimate the gender anger that’s channeled here: Relations between men and women have changed in ways that are very unsettling to them. And conservatives are angry about family change.

This is directed at liberal whites, too. Tea Partiers talked about white people in college towns who voted Democratic the way the rulers of Iran would speak of Muslims that are liberal—as the near-devil.

Godfrey: What are the roots of that resentment?

Skocpol: The suspicion of cities and metro areas is a deep strand in America. In this period, it’s been deliberately stoked and exploited by people trying to limit the power of the federal government. They can build on the fears that conservatives have—about how their children leave for college and come back thinking differently. As soon as you get away from the places where upper-middle-class professionals are concentrated, what you see is decay. People see that. They’re resentful of it.

Anti-immigrant politics is very much at the core of this. Every time in the history of the U.S., when you reach the end of a period of immigration, you get a nativist reaction. When the newcomers come, they’re going to destroy the country. That’s an old theme in this country.

Godfrey: The 2016 election was surrounded by a lot of discussion about whether Trump’s supporters were motivated by racism or economic anxiety. What’s your view on that?

Skocpol: That whole debate tends to be conducted with opinion polls. I’m in a minority, but I don’t find them very helpful for understanding American politics. Even when well conducted, polls treat the American political system as a bunch of potatoes in a sack—so you can pull out What women think, for instance, but not which women and where. And in American politics, everything is about the where.

If you drive into a place in Iowa or Nebraska where immigration is happening, it’s changed the shops downtown, it’s changed the language, it’s changed the churches, it’s changed the schools. And people’s jobs have changed—so it’s also about economics. In our 2011 interviews, Tea Party members were angry about immigrants. I’m not saying everybody in those communities is angry at newcomers, but it creates tensions that rabble-rousing politicians can take advantage of.

We know that Trump supporters, Stop the Steal supporters, are much more likely than other Republicans and conservatives to resent immigrants and fear them. In my 2017–2019 period of research, I visited eight pro-Trump counties. Tea Party types were just furious about immigrants. Trump’s emphasis on immigration interjected the idea that the debate is about what the nature of America is.

Trumpism is nativism. It’s also profoundly resentful of independent women, and it’s resentful of Black people whom it considers out of place politically. Trump channeled that and fused it into one big, angry brew.

[Read: The deep story of Trumpism]

Godfrey: How organic have these movements been? At a certain point, we heard a lot about how the Tea Party movement became a Koch-funded operation, not a true grassroots movement.

Skocpol: The Tea Party was not created by the Koch brothers; it was taken advantage of by the Kochs. But the Kochs were not anti-immigrant. The Tea Partiers really were. The Kochs didn’t control the results. The Kochs didn’t select Donald Trump. They didn’t even like him. Marco Rubio was their guy. The Chamber of Commerce crowd wanted a Bush. Both were easily dispatched by Trump.

Republican leaders could have done something—and they still could. The real story is about Republican Party elites and their willingness to go along with what they’ve always known was over the top. That’s a mystery that’s a little hard to completely solve. A lot of the opportunists think they can ride that tiger without it devouring them, even though sometimes it does. But nobody seems to learn.

At this point, what does resistance in the party consist of? Mitch McConnell taking a day to start denouncing the FBI. That’s it. Just discernibly different from Kevin McCarthy.

In September 1953, with the Supreme Court only months away from rehearing oral argument in Brown v. Board of Education, Justice Felix Frankfurter received word while vacationing in Massachusetts that Chief Justice Fred Vinson had died suddenly of a heart attack. Returning to Washington so that he could attend Vinson’s funeral, Frankfurter bumped into his former law clerk Philip Elman in Union Station. Frankfurter did not exactly appear staggered by grief. To the contrary, Elman observed the 5-foot-5 Frankfurter walking with a particular spring in his diminutive step. Vinson’s unexpected departure might enable the Court to issue an effective decision outlawing racial segregation in public schools, an outcome that was, Frankfurter believed, well beyond the late chief justice’s meager intellectual and leadership capabilities. Frankfurter gripped Elman by the arm, stared at him intently, and uncorked the following line: “Phil, this is the first solid piece of evidence I’ve ever had that there really is a God.”

This yarn encapsulates vintage Frankfurter in at least two distinct senses. First, he was a lively, often dazzling conversationalist. Despite his never having heard a word of English before he immigrated to Manhattan from Vienna at age 11, elite Americans widely celebrated his silver tongue. As The New York Times would memorialize Frankfurter in 1965, “He was … bursting with joy and wit and sarcasm, eager to exchange gossip or debate eternal verities—but at any rate, to talk. He was by all odds the greatest talker of his time.” This encomium was not one that Frankfurter received only posthumously. A 1960 book titled Felix Frankfurter Reminisces, which consisted merely of transcribed interviews, became an improbable best seller and a finalist for the National Book Award. That volume forthrightly conceded that it was not a full-scale autobiography—indeed, it did not even broach Frankfurter’s years as a justice—but rather was “just talk.” Still, the response was rapturous.

Second, the vignette illuminates Frankfurter’s preternatural penchant for spotting, cultivating, and advancing talented young men. Elman was not just a former law clerk; he was then working in the solicitor general’s office at the Department of Justice, where he’d assumed primary responsibility for drafting the government’s briefs regarding school segregation. Frankfurter communicated with Elman about Brown constantly, helping shape the government’s arguments. Elman noted, without any hint of rancor, that Frankfurter treated him “not as a lawyer in the SG’s Office, but as his law clerk for life.”

Elman was only one of many Frankfurter clerks who went on to assume influential positions in national life. Others included the Washington Post publisher Philip Graham, Attorney General Elliot Richardson, and Secretary of Transportation William T. Coleman, whom Frankfurter had hired as the Court’s first Black law clerk in the 1940s. (Frankfurter’s egalitarianism did not, alas, extend to gender; he pointedly refused to hire a young attorney named Ruth Bader Ginsburg even though she received glowing endorsements from several of Frankfurter’s usual sources.) And before becoming Justice Frankfurter, Professor Frankfurter had helped supply the federal government with brainpower by dispatching his sharpest Harvard Law School students to Washington. Frankfurter, who had no children of his own, hazed and doted on these protégés in equal measure, and in the process inspired a lifetime of fealty.

In one conspicuous sense, though, the bon mot—or perhaps mal mot—elicited by Vinson’s death clashes with the dominant perception of Frankfurter. Recall that Frankfurter’s jubilation was driven by hope that the Supreme Court would exercise its authority to invalidate school segregation. Yet Frankfurter was, throughout his time as a justice, the nation’s preeminent advocate of judicial restraint. The mighty power to deem laws unconstitutional in a democratic society, he believed, should be exercised only in the most glaring, egregious circumstances. When a group of nine lawyers possessing lifelong appointments vetoes actions taken by elected officials, democracy itself is typically the loser.

Concerns about the judiciary abusing its review authority were not mere abstractions for Frankfurter. During his second year as a law student at Harvard, the Supreme Court used the Fourteenth Amendment’s due-process clause to invalidate legislation designed to protect employees in an infamous case called Lochner v. New York. This decision from 1905 became Frankfurter’s “Rosebud” moment. During the next few decades, the Supreme Court continually wielded the Constitution to strike down progressive economic policies, most saliently during the New Deal. Frankfurter, like many other legal liberals, defined himself against these Lochner-era usurpations, vowing that if he ever ascended to the bench, he would delineate a modest role for the judicial branch. “The real battles of liberalism are not won in the Supreme Court,” Frankfurter wrote in a New Republic article in 1925. After being confirmed as an associate justice in 1939, Frankfurter honored his vow, self-consciously positioning himself as the inheritor of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s legacy of judicial restraint. Holmes had been his friend, mentor, and hero, and Frankfurter seldom tired of invoking the great jurist.

Few Supreme Court justices have ever experienced steeper declines in reputation than Frankfurter. Peter Edelman, an exceptionally bright Harvard Law student in the late 1950s, recollected that in Cambridge during that era, “Felix Frankfurter was God.” By 2005, however, one legal scholar spoke for many in labeling Frankfurter “an overrated judge who left a very limited judicial legacy.”

Much of this reputational free fall is explained by Frankfurter over time becoming a man with no country. For liberals, he offered an emaciated conception of the judiciary’s responsibility for providing protections to marginalized groups. His dissents from progressive constitutional victories of the mid-20th century began to mark him as a jurist from a bygone age, one still feverishly waging the wars of yesteryear. For conservatives, Frankfurter’s commitment to advancing the causes of liberalism before he took his seat on the bench—including helping found the ACLU, staff New Deal agencies, launch the New Republic, and defend Sacco and Vanzetti—identified him as a deeply suspect political figure. In the legal sphere, too, more and more conservatives have in recent decades abandoned even the veneer of judicial restraint. Judicial engagement has become the operative term, as the right has successfully demanded that the Supreme Court exert its authority to invalidate laws involving firearms, campaign finance, and voting rights.

[From the March 1927 issue: Felix Frankfurter on the case of Sacco and Vanzetti]

Brad Snyder’s comprehensive, compelling, and generally admiring biography—Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment—arrives at a moment when the justice’s stock may, in some quarters, seem poised for a rebound. Thanks in no small part to Senator Mitch McConnell and President Donald Trump, six Republican-appointed justices now sit alongside three Democratic-appointed justices on the high court. Today, in the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, many liberals fear that the Roberts Court could even someday strike down laws in blue states permitting women to obtain abortions. On the horizon, the Court seems poised to invalidate affirmative-action plans and other policies esteemed on the left. It is no wonder, then, that several prominent left-leaning academics have recently begun advocating for a dramatically diminished role for jurists. The judicial strides toward equality that occurred during the mid-20th century were historical anomalies, these scholars insist, and they have come to assert—echoing Frankfurter—that liberalism’s real battles cannot and should not be fought in the Supreme Court. Might Felix Frankfurter, acolyte of judicial restraint, serve as the intellectual poster boy for this renewed age of judicial skepticism?

Snyder challenges conventional assessments of Frankfurter by skillfully placing him into the rich, changing context of American liberalism during the first six decades of the 20th century. It is misguided, Snyder suggests, to view Frankfurter as a wild-eyed leftist during his pre-Court career who suddenly transformed into a raging reactionary upon confirmation. This wrongheaded perception overlooks that Frankfurter—inspired by the foundational scholarship of Harvard Law School’s James Bradley Thayer—consistently cautioned against permitting the judiciary to occupy an outsize role in American life. What judges give with one hand, they can just as readily take with the other.

Snyder’s portrait of Frankfurter certainly cannot be accused of concealing the justice’s rather substantial warts. Snyder does, however, cast him in a flattering light, depicting the justice largely as he depicted himself—as a champion of democracy, and therefore an opponent of juristocracy. “In contrast to many of his [judicial] colleagues, Frankfurter insisted that the best way to protect people’s rights was through the democratic political process,” Snyder writes in his spirited epilogue. “He understood that nothing was more damaging to our democracy than to expect the Supreme Court to solve our problems … We the People needed Felix Frankfurter to steer generations of elite lawyers into public service, to shape the liberal establishment, and to oppose government-by-judiciary.” Frankfurter would not only approve of Snyder’s concluding message; he would cherish it.

[From the November 1930 issue: Felix Frankfurter’s ‘Democracy and the Expert’]

As Snyder notes, moreover, Frankfurter’s invocation of judicial restraint was not an unyielding absolute. Frankfurter evinced particular concern about states’ efforts to subordinate Black citizens, and he sometimes supported using the Reconstruction Amendments to set aside such schemes. Regarding Brown v. Board of Education, Frankfurter is in legal circles widely known—and widely reviled—for persuading Chief Justice Earl Warren to insert four notorious words during the remedy stage of the decision. Desegregation should unfold “with all deliberate speed,” Warren wrote at Frankfurter’s behest, and that phrase would eventually be viewed as having blessed the South’s massive resistance. Yet even if this terminology was unwise and infelicitous, it should not bear a disproportionately large share of the blame for southern recalcitrance. The phrase also should not be permitted, Snyder contends, to obscure Frankfurter’s indispensable role in helping Warren achieve unanimity in the momentous school decision.

Still, even amid a resurgence of judicial skepticism, more than a few roadblocks obstruct the path to any potential Frankfurter revival. Consider only some of the many available instances when reliance on judicial restraint curdled into judicial abdication, as he refused to check repugnant governmental actions. In the 1930s, a public school board in Minersville, Pennsylvania, expelled students who were Jehovah’s Witnesses for refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance on account of their religious commitments. Although Frankfurter harbored reservations regarding the wisdom of such expulsions, he nevertheless wrote an opinion for the Court in 1940 deeming it permissible for educators to punish the pupils. “The wisdom of training children in patriotic impulses … is not for our independent judgment,” he intoned.

This misbegotten decision provoked violent attacks against Jehovah’s Witnesses across the nation and elicited scorn from journalists and academics alike. After the outcry, some justices changed their mind about the constitutionality of laws requiring the pledge, and the Court in 1943 reversed course to ban these mandates in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. Frankfurter, however, remained resolute, publishing a vehement, lengthy dissent contending that the judiciary had overstepped its bounds. Despite the dissent’s passion and prolixity, he offered no effective response to Justice Robert Jackson’s magisterial majority opinion in Barnette, which took dead aim at Frankfurter’s unduly broad conception of judicial restraint. “The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts,” Jackson explained. “One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.”

In 1944, one year after Barnette, Frankfurter issued an even uglier concurring opinion in Korematsu v. United States. That case evaluated the government’s decision to consign all persons of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast—including many U.S. citizens—to internment camps, which the government branded “Assembly Centers.” Although this policy evicted citizens from both their homes and their lives despite no evidence of impropriety, Frankfurter refused to deem it unconstitutional, because he wished to avoid intruding into the affairs of Congress and the president. “That is their business, not ours,” he claimed. It may be tempting to believe that—during the height of World War II, not long after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor—no judge would have condemned what is, by modern lights, an obviously bigoted policy. Yet in his dissent, Justice Frank Murphy correctly attacked the very governmental actions that Frankfurter refused to disavow, calling them a decline into “the ugly abyss of racism,” and disparaging Korematsu as a “legalization of racism.”

Barnette and Korematsu arose early in Frankfurter’s tenure, but judicial restraint remained his guiding light up through his final opinion, a dissent, in 1962. In Baker v. Carr, the Supreme Court issued a decision that paved the way for the one-person, one-vote principle, finding that Tennessee’s refusal to reapportion its wildly unequal districts presented a problem that the Constitution could in fact resolve. Frankfurter, singing one last time from the restraint songbook, excoriated his colleagues for blithely strolling into a political morass. “In a democratic society like ours,” Frankfurter stated, “relief must come through an aroused popular conscience that sears the conscience of the people’s representatives.” Although Frankfurter fancied himself the ultimate democrat, many scholars have persuasively argued that Baker v. Carr and its progeny can be understood as buttressing our democratic order. Democracy is a famously protean term, and Frankfurter too often failed to appreciate that the judiciary’s invalidation of laws can support democratic values rather than subvert them.

Apart from such discomfiting votes, his frailties regarding judicial collegiality and judicial writing seem likely to dim the prospect of a Frankfurter renaissance. He habitually treated his intimates as either demigods to be worshipped or disciples to be tutored—which made him a wonderful surrogate son to powerful men and an engaged father figure to legal whiz kids. But he struggled profoundly to maintain close relationships with his brethren. Frankfurter often viewed his fellow jurists not as peers, but as dull-witted first-year law students. In an effort to rally Justice Stanley Reed to his position in one case, he noted: “It is the lot of professors to be often misunderstood by pupils … So let me begin again.” Legend held that if Frankfurter felt strongly about the disposition of a case, he would lecture his colleagues for 50 minutes, the standard length of a Harvard class. No matter how bravura the substance of his disquisitions, this act, predictably, grew tiresome. “All Frankfurter does is talk, talk, talk,” Chief Justice Warren grumbled. “He drives you crazy.”

On no subject did Frankfurter expend greater energy than reminding anyone within earshot of his closeness to and affection for Justice Holmes. As Justice William Brennan noted, “We would have been inclined to agree with Felix more often in conference if he quoted Holmes less frequently to us.” Frankfurter confided in a letter that he knew some of his fellow justices “get sick and tired of hearing about Holmes and his genius … but it’s a state of mind I can’t understand. I belong to the Ecclesiastes school. ‘Let us praise famous men.’ ” Frankfurter simply could not stop himself from engaging in Holmes idolatry. Indeed, it seems difficult to escape the conclusion that Felix Frankfurter, the crown prince of judicial restraint, possessed far too little self-restraint.

In the end, Frankfurter was unwilling to dedicate the time required to produce vital, enduring written opinions, the most significant measure of any justice. One journalist’s early assessment of Frankfurter’s writings was telling: “Press excitement over the first opinions handed down by Justice Frankfurter cooled noticeably when the reporters began to read them. They were tough going.” The going did not get much easier over time, as Frankfurter made preciously few distinctive contributions to the canon of American constitutional law. Frankfurter’s opinions, even at their best, sound like nothing so much as an Oliver Wendell Holmes cover band.

In one of Snyder’s more revealing asides, he notes that Frankfurter organized his chambers in an idiosyncratic fashion. Unlike his fellow justices, he did not claim for himself the grandest room in the office suite accorded each member of the Court—the one featuring a fireplace, a bathroom, and, most important, some solitude. Instead, Frankfurter, his law clerks, and his secretary all worked together cheek by jowl in a center office. One former law clerk noted that the justice

was interested in everything. By eight in the morning, he had read five newspapers. He’d already discussed foreign affairs … and taken a stroll with Dean Acheson. By the time we law clerks arrived at the office at nine, he’d be ready to give us a seminar on government until ten or eleven.

The office arrangement suggested, though, that Frankfurter was patently uninterested in at least one thing: devoting long, lonely hours to crafting first-rate opinions that would shape the law for future generations. He preferred to admire the tenor of his own voice. But casual talk, even when performed by a virtuoso, is ultimately ephemeral.

This article appears in the September 2022 print edition with the headline “‘The Greatest Talker of His Time.’”

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