The red-state drive to reverse the rights revolution of the past six decades continues to intensify, triggering confrontations involving every level of government.

In rapid succession, Republican-controlled states are applying unprecedented tactics to shift social policy sharply to the right, not only within their borders but across the nation. Just last Thursday, the GOP-controlled Tennessee House of Representatives voted to expel two young Black Democratic representatives, and Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, on Saturday moved to nullify the verdict of a jury in liberal Travis County. In between, last Friday, a single Republican-appointed federal judge, acting on a case brought by a conservative legal group and 23 Republican state attorneys general, issued a decision that would impose a nationwide ban on mifepristone, the principal drug used in medication abortions.

All of these actions are coming as red states, continuing an upsurge that began in 2021, push forward a torrent of bills restricting abortion, LGBTQ, and voting rights; loosening controls on gun ownership; censoring classroom discussion of race, gender, and sexual orientation; and preempting the authority of their Democratic-leaning metropolitan cities and counties.

This flood of legislation has started to erase the long-term trend of Congress and federal courts steadily nationalizing more rights and reducing the freedom of states to constrict them—what legal scholars have called the “rights revolution.” Now, across all these different arenas and more, the United States is hurtling back toward a pre-1960s world in which citizens’ basic rights and liberties vary much more depending on where they live.

[Read: The Republican axis reversing the rights revolution]

“We are in the middle of an existential crisis for the future of our burgeoning multicultural, multiethnic democracy,” and the extreme events unfolding in Tennessee and other states “are the early manifestations of an abandonment of democratic norms,” Janai Nelson, the president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, wrote to me in an email.

The past week’s events in Tennessee and Texas, and the federal court case on mifepristone, extend strategies that red states have employed since 2020 to influence national policy. But these latest moves show Republicans taking those strategies to new extremes. Together these developments underscore how aggressively red states are maneuvering to block the federal government and their own largest metropolitan areas from resisting their systematic attempt to carve out what I’ve called a “nation within a nation,” operating with its own constraints on civil rights and liberties.

“It shows there really is no limit, no institution that is quote-unquote ‘sacred’ enough not to try to use to their advantage,” Marissa Roy, the legal team lead for the Local Solutions Support Center, a group opposing the broad range of state preemption efforts, told me.

This multipronged offensive from red states seeks to reverse one of the most powerful currents in modern American life. Since the 1960s, on issues including the legalization of abortion and same-sex marriage and the banning of discrimination on grounds of race or gender, the Supreme Court, Congress, and federal agencies have broadened the circle of rights guaranteed nationwide and reduced the ability of states to limit those rights.

Over the past decade, Republican-controlled states have stepped up their efforts to reverse that arrow and restore their freedom to impose their own restrictions on rights and liberties. Nelson sees this red-state drive as continuing the “cycle of progress and retrenchment” on racial equity through American history that stretches back to Reconstruction and the southern resistance that eventually produced Jim Crow segregation. “The current pendulum swing is occurring both in reaction to changing politics and changing demographics, making the arc of that swing that much higher toward extremism,” she told me.

The vote in the Tennessee House of Representatives, for instance, marked a new level in the long-term struggle between red states and blue cities. In most red states, Republicans control the governorship and/or state legislature primarily through their dominance of predominantly white non-urban areas. Over the past decade, those red-state Republicans have grown more aggressive about using that statewide power to preempt the authority of, and override decisions by, their largest cities and counties, which are typically more racially diverse and Democratic-leaning.

These preemption bills have removed authority from local governments over policy areas including minimum wage, COVID masking requirements, environmental rules, and even plastic-bag-recycling mandates. Legislatures have accompanied many of these bills with other measures, such as extreme gerrymanders, meant to dilute the political clout of their state’s population centers and shift influence toward exurban and rural areas where Republicans are strongest. In Tennessee, for example, the legislature voted to arbitrarily cut the size of the Nashville Metropolitan Council in half, a decision that a state court blocked this week. Many of the bills that red states have passed since 2020 making it harder to vote have specifically barred techniques used by large counties to encourage participation, such as drop boxes or mobile voting vans.

Republicans who control the Tennessee House took this attack on urban political power to a new peak with their vote to expel the two Black Democratic representatives, Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, who represent Memphis and Nashville, respectively. Though local officials in each city quickly moved this week to reappoint the two men, the GOP majority sent an ominous signal in its initial vote to remove them. The expulsions went beyond making structural changes to diminish the power of big-city residents, to entirely erasing those voters’ decision on whom they wanted to represent them in the legislature. Conservative legislatures and governors “have become so emboldened [in believing] that they can tread on local democracy,” Roy said, “that they are going all out and perhaps destroying the institution altogether.”

One of the most aggressive areas of red-state preemption this year has been in moves to seize control of policing and prosecutorial powers in Democratic-leaning cities and counties, which typically have large minority populations. In Georgia, for instance, both chambers of the GOP-controlled state legislature have passed bills creating a new oversight board that would be directed by state officials and have the power to recommend removal of county prosecutors. In Mississippi, both GOP-controlled chambers have approved legislation to expand state authority over policing and the courts in Jackson, the state capital, a city more than 80 percent Black. The Republican governor in each state is expected to sign the bills.

Tennessee legislators passed a bill in their last session increasing state authority to override local prosecutors. This week they went further. Although it didn’t attract nearly the attention of the expulsion vote, the Tennessee House Criminal Justice Committee on Tuesday approved a bill to eradicate an independent board to investigate police misconduct that Nashville residents had voted to create in a 2018 referendum.

In 2019, the GOP legislature had already stripped the Nashville Community Oversight Board of the subpoena power that was included in the local referendum establishing it. The new legislation approved this week, which is also advancing in the State Senate, would replace the board and instead require that citizen complaints about police behavior in Nashville and other cities be directed to the internal-affairs offices of their police departments. The legislation is moving forward just weeks after five former police officers were indicted in Memphis for beating a Black man named Tyre Nichols to death. “You would think that while the Tyre Nichols case is going on … that we would be really wanting more oversight, not less,” Jill Fitcheard, the executive director of the Nashville oversight board, told me. Coming so soon after the vote to expel the two Black members, the attempt to eradicate the oversight board, she said, represents “another attack on democracy in Nashville.”

Texas has joined this procession with bills backed by Governor Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick advancing in both legislative chambers to make it easier for state officials to remove local prosecutors who resist bringing cases on priorities for the GOP majority, such as the measures banning abortion or gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

But Abbott last Saturday introduced an explosive new element into the red-state push to preempt local law-enforcement authority. In a statement, Abbott directed the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole to fast-track consideration of a pardon for a U.S. Army sergeant convicted just one day earlier of killing a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020. Abbott, who had faced criticism from conservative media for not intervening in the case, promised to approve the pardon, and criticized the Democratic district attorney who brought the case and the jury that decided it in Travis County, an overwhelmingly blue county centered on Austin.

Although many Republicans are seeking ways to constrain law-enforcement officials in blue counties, Abbott’s move would invalidate a decision by a jury in such a Democratic-leaning area. And whereas the preemption legislation in Texas and elsewhere targets prosecutors because of the cases they won’t prosecute, Abbott is looking to override a local prosecutor because of a case he did prosecute.

[Read: America is growing apart, possibly for good]

Gerry Morris, a former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers now practicing in Austin, told me that Abbott’s move was especially chilling because it came before any of the normal legal appeals to a conviction had begun. Morris said he can think of no precedent for a Texas governor intervening so peremptorily to effectively overturn a jury verdict. “I guess it means if you are going to kill somebody in Texas,” Morris said, “you need to make sure it’s somebody Governor Abbott thinks ought to be killed; because if that’s the case, then he’ll pardon you.”

The past week’s third dramatic escalation came from District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of former President Donald Trump with ties to the social-conservative movement. Kacsmaryk’s ruling overturning the FDA’s approval in 2000 of mifepristone was in one sense unprecedented. “Never has a court actually overturned an FDA scientific decision in approving a drug on the grounds that [the] FDA got it wrong,” William Schultz, a former deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said on a press call Monday.

But in another sense, the case merely extended what’s become a routine strategy in the red states’ drive to set their own rules. Nearly two dozen Republican state attorneys general joined the lawsuit in support of the effort to ban mifepristone. That continued a steady procession of cases brought by Republican-controlled states to hobble the exercise of federal authority, or to erase rights that had previously been guaranteed nationwide.

The most consequential example of this trend is the case involving a Mississippi abortion law that the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority used to overturn Roe v. Wade last summer. But shifting coalitions of GOP state attorneys general have also sued to block environmental regulations proposed by President Joe Biden, and to prevent him from changing Trump-administration immigration-enforcement policies or acting to protect LGBTQ people under federal antidiscrimination laws. Red states “have been very interested in opposing virtually every rule or guidance that would provide nondiscrimination protection to LGBTQ people,” says Sarah Warbelow, the legal director for the Human Rights Campaign.

All of these legal and political struggles raise the same underlying question: Can Democrats and their allies defend the national baseline of civil rights and liberties America has built since the 1960s?

Democrats have found themselves stymied in efforts to restore those rights through legislation: While Democrats held unified control of Congress during Biden’s first years, the House passed bills that would largely override the red-state moves and restore a set of national rules on abortion, voting, and LGBTQ rights. But in each case, they could not overcome a Republican-led Senate filibuster.

The Biden administration and civil-rights groups are pursuing lawsuits against many of the red-state rights rollbacks. But numerous legal experts remain skeptical that the conservative U.S. Supreme Court majority will reverse many of the red-state actions. The third tool available to Democrats is federal executive-branch action, such as the Title IX regulations the Education Department proposed last week that would invalidate the blanket bans against transgender girls participating in school sports that virtually all the red states have now approved. Yet federal regulations that attempt to counter the red-state actions may prompt resistance from that conservative Supreme Court majority.

And even as Democrats search for strategies to preserve a common baseline of rights, they face the prospect that Republicans may seek to nationalize the restrictive red-state social regime. Congressional Republicans have introduced bills to write into federal law almost all of the red-state moves, such as abortion bans and prohibitions on classroom discussion of sexual orientation or participation in school sports by transgender girls. Several 2024 GOP presidential candidates are starting to offer similar proposals.

The past week has seen Republicans reach a new extreme in their effort to build a nation within a nation across the red states. But the next time the GOP achieves unified control of Congress and the White House, even this may seem like the beginning of an attempt to impose on blue states the rollback of rights and liberties that continues to burn unabated through red America.

With Donald Trump under indictment in Manhattan while at the same time the current front-runner for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, an obvious question is top of mind: Can he continue to run, and perhaps even serve a second term, if convicted?

The short answer is that no law exists to stop either possibility—at least not for the crimes he is currently accused of in New York. The same is not exactly true for the crimes he may yet be indicted for relating to his role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol. One criminal statute that Special Counsel Jack Smith may use to charge Trump specifically bars offenders from holding future office. But even if he were convicted of that insurrection-related charge, accountability under the law would likely fall at the feet of Republican lawmakers—and, barring a profound conversion, they are not going to keep him from the nation’s highest office.

[David A. Graham: A guide to the cases against Trump]

The original Constitution contains only three criteria for president: citizenship (natural-born U.S. citizen, meaning a citizen at the time of birth), age (at least 35 years old), and residency (at least 14 years in the U.S., not necessarily consecutively and not necessarily immediately preceding ascension to office). That’s it. Beyond that, after declaring one’s candidacy and designating a political action committee with the Federal Election Commission, running for president requires getting on the primary ballot in as many states as possible, which means complying with a huge range of state-specific ballot-access requirements and deadlines. If Trump were to then secure his party’s nomination via the processes the Republican Party has designed for itself, no federal law would intervene. As The New York Times recently reported, a slew of political candidates have run under similar circumstances, including former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who was under indictment for two felonies when he announced his candidacy for president in 2015. Eugene V. Debs famously ran as the Socialist Party nominee in 1920 from a federal penitentiary in Atlanta. (The winner of that race, President Warren Harding, arranged for Debs’s release the next year.)

Ratified in 1868, Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment added to the original text that “no person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States … who, having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” This post–Civil War provision was designed to prevent former Confederates from interfering with the reconstructed federal government. The Constitution contains no definition of what it means to “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion,” however, and there is no clear enforcement mechanism—no federal law on the books, for example, that authorizes a lawsuit to enable competing candidates to keep constitutionally disqualified individuals from running for federal office. The Civil Rights Act of 1870 allowed federal prosecutors to use a writ of quo warranto—a civil demand that challenged a person’s right to hold public office—but Congress repealed that provision in 1948.  

States could instead rush to amend their ballot requirements to exclude insurrectionists or to challenge Trump’s candidacy citing the Fourteenth Amendment—as happened when the House Republican Madison Cawthorn sought reelection in 2022. After a group of voters filed such a challenge with the North Carolina Board of Elections, Cawthorn sued in federal court, citing First Amendment and due-process violations and claiming that the 1872 Amnesty Act, which removed “all political disabilities” that had been imposed by Section 3 on Confederates, covered him as well. A federal appeals court rejected his argument under the Amnesty Act, but expressed “no opinion about whether Representative Cawthorn in fact engaged in ‘insurrection or rebellion’ or is otherwise qualified to serve in Congress.”

In theory, if enough states were to require presidential candidates to affirm that they had not engaged in insurrection or rebellion within the meaning of Section 3 as a precondition to getting on a ballot, other contenders could challenge Trump’s qualifications through whatever mechanisms are provided under each state’s law. But that process would be piecemeal and complicated, with uncertain outcomes, because the scope and meaning of Section 3 has never been definitively litigated.

None of this would keep Trump out of office if he is convicted of any of the state-level crimes for which he has been accused, which have little to do with insurrection or rebellion. But at least one federal crime is different. Smith’s grand jury could indict Donald Trump under 28 U.S.C. § 2383, a federal criminal law that prohibits participation in insurrection. It provides: “Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto … shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”

If Trump were charged and convicted under this law, he could no longer legally hold office—that much is plain. But who would enforce that outcome? Certainly, if he were convicted by next July, when the Republican National Committee will host its convention, the party could refuse to nominate him based on the language of § 2383. That seems unlikely. The alternative would be to ignore the law’s express penalty, an easier political path. Once nominated, if Trump were to legitimately win 270 Electoral College votes in November 2024, Republicans in Congress could simply insist that they all be counted on January 6, 2025. Changes to the Electoral Count Act passed in December of last year raised the threshold for objecting to a state’s slate of electors from a single member from the House and the Senate to 20 percent of the members of each chamber. The law also established that the vice president’s role in the process is purely ministerial. All of this would make it harder to object to Trump’s victory. Additionally, the Fourteenth Amendment says that “Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability” if a candidate was disqualified from holding office for having engaged in an insurrection, as happened with the 1872 Amnesty Act. Arguably, that constitutional language could bolster the argument for setting aside the consequences of a conviction under § 2383.

[David Frum: Don’t indict Trump with this]

The Republicans will almost certainly not blink at putting a convicted insurrectionist into the highest executive office, should it come to that. Bear in mind that Republicans in the Senate already rejected the clearest opportunity to keep Trump out of the Oval Office definitively for his role on January 6. The House of Representatives charged him in a single article of impeachment with “incitement of insurrection” against the U.S. government and “lawless action at the Capitol.” Article I, Section 3, Clause 7 of the Constitution includes “disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States” as a penalty for conviction. But 57 Republican senators voted “not guilty,” acquitting Trump on February 13, 2021. At the time, former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell argued in a floor speech that “President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office, as an ordinary citizen … We have a criminal-justice system in this country. We have civil litigation, and former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one.” McConnell’s answer to the impeachment acquittal was shortsighted, as is now obvious.

If Trump is convicted, his reascension to the nation’s top office would be only the start of the practical and legal difficulties his situation now poses for the country. As it stands, a conviction by a Manhattan jury on any of the 34 felony counts in the indictment secured by the office of District Attorney Alvin Bragg carries a four-year prison term; the sentences for each count would run concurrently. Trial is expected sometime in the spring of 2024, although the former president’s lawyers could likely file enough procedural and evidentiary motions to successfully extend the trial date beyond the election. If Trump were to win the White House and nonetheless be convicted by a jury in Manhattan—or Georgia, for that matter—a self-pardon would not be an option, because the crimes he is charged with are not federal. That would leave the New York State judge Juan Merchan (or whoever winds up with the Georgia case, if that were to proceed) to decide whether to impose prison time on a former—and potentially future—president, which some legal experts believe is unlikely in New York, given that the matter entails nonviolent, white-collar offenses and that Trump has no prior criminal record. Merchan might also do well to consider the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel memos forbidding indictments of sitting presidents in deciding whether to confine Trump to a prison cell. They reason that a criminal sentence “would make it physically impossible for the President to carry out his duties,” while “the public stigma and opprobrium … could compromise the President’s ability to fulfill his constitutionally contemplated leadership role.”

If Trump is convicted and elected, there are no good outcomes for the country. There is only one safe path: that voters in November 2024 make these scenarios irrelevant.