Real Threats to Religious Freedom

In early February, President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order calling for the creation of a task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias” and “protect the religious freedoms of Americans” by ending “the anti-Christian weaponization of government.” It fits the narrative that religious conservatives, including Christian nationalists, have sought to create about how radical leftists are allegedly trying to take away people’s religious freedom.

Such assertions come with a notable lack of evidence. But, in fact, there are instances where the government wrongfully intrudes on religious freedom, and ordinary citizens must stand up and fight back. Two such cases have recently had pivotal developments.

One concerns an El Paso shelter where a group of people, mostly Christians, are being persecuted by the state of Texas for following their religious mandate to provide aid and comfort to people in need. The other is about an individual in Wisconsin who was repeatedly accosted and twice handcuffed for spreading the good news of Jesus Christ at a public market, as his faith compels him to do.

In both of these cases, law enforcement officials decided that a particular kind of religious expression is actually a violation of law. And, in both, the courts and the Constitution, most particularly the First Amendment, are being invoked to defend the principles of religious freedom against these attacks. Here are the two stories:

Riding Roughshod Over Rights

Annunciation House in El Paso is a nonprofit founded nearly fifty years ago by local Catholics. It provides shelter, food, and clothing to migrants, most of whom are in the country legally, having been processed and released by U.S. immigration officials. It sometimes also shelters immigrants who do not have legal permission to be here.

On February 7, 2024, agents from the office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton showed up at Annunciation House, demanding it turn over documents regarding its work with migrants. When the shelter filed a lawsuit to block this action, Paxton filed a retaliatory counterclaim seeking the revocation of the shelter’s corporate charter and its right to operate as a Texas nonprofit.

Here come the courts, possibly to the rescue. State district court Judge Francisco Dominguez rejected Paxton’s efforts to revoke the shelter’s charter, saying these “run roughshod over Annunciation House, without regard to due process or fair play.” Paxton appealed, and that decision is now under review by the Texas Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in the case in January.

An attorney for Paxton’s office declared that Annunciation House “is not immunized because of its religion.” But the shelter’s attorney, Amy Warr, countered that it has not engaged in any illegal conduct and is not concealing anyone. Some of the undocumented individuals it houses were brought there by federal authorities because they are needed as witnesses in criminal cases. The government knows where they are, and can pick them up with a warrant at any time.

Annunciation House, in its filing with the supreme court, says the shelter and its volunteers “animate biblical teachings centering service to the poor as a fundamental component of religious faith.” Moreover, Texas passed a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, similar to laws on the books in more than two dozen other states. It bars the government from interfering with “a person’s free exercise of religion” unless there is a “compelling governmental interest” addressed using the “least restrictive means.”

Conservative commentator David French argued in a recent column for The New York Times that Texas is “attacking the shelter’s religious rights” in violation of this law. “The very idea that a state official would take it upon himself to judge a faith-based institution’s religiosity and authenticity is deeply problematic,” he wrote, adding that such behavior “raises profound establishment clause concerns.”

Under the law’s “least restrictive” standard, if any part of the shelter’s operation is deemed illegal, the state should be addressing just that part. Instead, Paxton and his supporters—including America First Legal Foundation, a group founded by Trump adviser Stephen Miller—want to shut the whole place down. “Apparently,” mused French, “only the most punitive measures can accomplish MAGA’s goals.”

Finally, French mined the irony of Ken Paxton passing judgment on people of religious bent. While proclaiming to be an evangelical, he’s cheated on his wife, was impeached by the GOP-led Texas House of Representatives (but acquitted by the state senate), and is currently under federal investigation for public corruption (unless Trump makes the charges go away).

It’s not clear which way the Texas Supreme Court will rule. There’s no doubt how it should.

Shout It from the Sidewalk

In 2021, “Bible-believing Christian” and local business owner Doug Schoenwalder began preaching and distributing gospel tracts on public sidewalks at the Saturday Farmers Market in Green Bay, Wisconsin. When the cops asked him to stop, he refused and was issued a citation for disorderly conduct. Schoenwalder defended himself against this charge and was found not guilty.

At the start of its 2022 season, the market instituted a new rule barring “political and religious proclamations or protests” within the event boundaries. On four occasions that summer, Schoenwalder was prevented from preaching by Green Bay police, who twice placed him in handcuffs. One time, instead of religious literature, he handed out $2 bills to passersby, saying this gift was “like the free grace of Jesus.” He was ordered to leave and, when he refused, was handcuffed, “frog-marched” off the premises, and cited for unlawful conduct at a public event. After the fourth occasion, police informed him that if he so much as showed up at the market, he would be arrested.

Schoenwalder lawyered up and, on October 3, 2022, his attorneys sent a letter to the city of Green Bay stating that the citations against Schoenwalder “lacked any lawful basis” and violated his First Amendment rights. Two days later, City Attorney Joanne Bungert responded on behalf of the city, stating that all charges against Schoenwalder would be dropped. City officials vowed not to further restrict his evangelizing at the market.

Ten months later, on August 2, 2023, Schoenwalder’s lawyers filed a lawsuit against the Green Bay police officers who had allegedly deprived him of his rights. “Though the First Amendment enshrines religious expression as ‘too precious’ to be suppressed,” the complaint states, the police officers “targeted Mr. Schoenwalder with a content-based rule specifically crafted to suppress his speech, and used that rule to repeatedly arrest him, silence him, humiliate him, and prevent him from evangelizing.”

The case was slated to go to jury trial this May, but a settlement was reached last December. The city of Green Bay agreed to pay Schoenwalder $77,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees. Under a consent judgment signed by U.S. District Court Judge William Griesbach, the city was also ordered to provide additional First Amendment training to all of its officers. The claims against the six named officers were dismissed. The city and its police department issued a joint statement saying the officers “acted in good faith and in accordance with” the guidance they received but admitting, essentially, that they were wrong.

So that was that. There was no leftist cabal plotting to end religious freedom, just some people who screwed up and were taken to task for it.

Surprisingly, this case drew little attention, outside of an excellent article by Vivian Barrett of the Green Bay Press-Gazette. Schoenwalder told her he went back to preaching at the market right away and has had mostly positive experiences. Now, he says, if someone complains about his preaching, the cops “have been telling the people that’s their right, to preach the gospel. If you wanted to preach the gospel, you could do the same thing. If you wanted to proclaim something else from the other street corner, that’s your right as well.”

Amen to that.

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The Brain Rot Cabinet

Ken Cedeno/CNP/Zuma Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. Last week, baffling many and delighting a few, HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared during a Trump administration cabinet meeting that he’s engaged in a hunt for what he said were…

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The Supreme Court Is Really “Just Vibes”

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In Donald Trump’s second term, a familiar pattern is emerging: the president does something illegal, someone sues to stop him, and eventually the Supreme Court decides the case. From which agencies Trump can effectively shutter, to which agency heads he can depose, to whether or not he can disappear people into a Salvadoran gulag or deny infants birthright citizenship, the buck stops with the nine justices on the nation’s highest court.

But that court is not acting…normally. The court’s GOP-appointed 6-3 majority is creating a new legal reality for the country as it determines that the Republican Party’s rightwing priorities are also the Constitution’s preferences. Just in the last few years, it has ended the right to abortion, greenlit discrimination against LGBTQ people, eviscerated the separation of church and state, turned back the clock on voting rights, blasted away gun control laws and regulations, let the firehose of billionaire money take over American elections, gut protections for voting rights, and declared open season on federal regulations big business doesn’t like. And that’s not to mention the court’s willingness to personally deliver wins to Trump, including the grant of criminal immunity for official acts—a decision that redefined the presidency just in time for a reelected Trump to take advantage of this new freedom to crime.

In a new book, Leah Litman, a constitutional law professor at the University of Michigan and co-host of the legal podcast “Strict Scrutiny,” lays out how the court has gone awry. Litman believes that the court’s recent jurisprudence is driven not by the law, but by the resentments of its GOP appointees. Hence the book’s title: Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes.

“Political culture imagines that the Supreme Court safeguards the Constitution, when in reality it is chipping away at the constitutional rights of historically marginalized groups,” Litman writes, concluding her chapter on the court’s patriarchy-fueled war on abortion and women’s rights. “The court is allowing feelings and politics to trump the law and sometimes just be the law.”

With humor and a healthy dose of pop culture, Litman’s book is a layman’s guide to the court’s current jurisprudence: a court that is not protecting minority rights, democracy, or workers but rather has sided with rich and reactionary elements of American society. Litman pulls in history as well as the logic of recent opinions to argue that “the Court has steadily descended into no law, and just vibes.”

Litman’s book is an accessible primer on our current moment: How did we get to the court we have, and what happens when a court already dedicated to rolling back the clock on democracy becomes one of the few checks against Trump’s anti-democratic rampage. We spoke about her book, the Court, and how it is responding to the unprecedented challenges of Trump’s second term.

Mother Jones illustration; Larry D. Moore/Wikimedia

My biggest takeaway from the book was that it’s an attempt to take the legal gloss off of the court and show how they’re basically political actors. You make the point in the introduction that it’s not a coincidence that when you get a majority of Republican appointees, then Republican policies become the legally permissible policies. What is the biggest thing that you would have readers take from the book?

I think that is definitely part, trying to remove some of the veneer that is on the Supreme Court—not only to illustrate how their rulings track the political talking points and larger political movement of the Republican Party over the last half century, but also to illustrate how the court works: how they pick cases, how they decide cases, and the amount of power they have to set their own agenda and decide a huge swath of issues that are super important. 

You have a chapter on the court’s history on voting rights. In the 2019 case Rucho v Common Cause, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote an opinion saying that federal courts can’t decide partisan gerrymandering disputes. You point out that if you can gerrymander in order to protect your political party, then the logical end point is the end of democracy, because we aren’t doing the whole voters-pick-their-representatives thing anymore. It’s a good example of how the court appears hostile to the basic functions of how democracy works. And it really seems simpatico with Donald Trump, who also doesn’t really like how democracy works.

I was actually going to start my answer there, because it’s, in a lot of ways, easiest to see it articulated by Donald Trump, or Republican senators who say we’re a republic, not a democracy, or when Donald Trump says “We’ve all been victimized,” referring to the outcome of a legitimate presidential election. Of course, those are very pointed, clear statements that they’re just not that into democracy when democracy doesn’t get them what they want. 

You can see the same antipathy toward democracy in the rulings of the Republican justices on the Supreme Court, including in Rucho v. Common Cause, where they just think, “Yeah, it’s totally fine for politicians to write a set of rules that give themselves power even when they don’t win a majority of the votes.” That was, in a lot of ways, a natural outgrowth of their antipathy toward enforcing constitutional protections for voting rights, as far as allowing states to adopt voter identification laws or other measures that make it harder to participate in democracy and therefore easier for politicians to, again, pick their voters and disenfranchise some number of people. 

I also saw that thread in the court’s immunity ruling from last summer, where they just did not seem bothered by the prospect that an outgoing president would try to interfere with the peaceful transition of power and attempt to launch an insurrection at the Capitol. To them, the real concern was the prosecution of that president—as if that entire fiasco, the real problem was individuals suffering from Trump derangement syndrome, not the underlying threat to democracy. As to why they think this? I think the common thread across all the chapters [of the book] is this notion of conservative grievance and entitlement. They feel like they are the victims. And they honestly feel like they deserve political power, and they are entitled to it, and no amount of evidence, no number of votes, seems to be enough to persuade them otherwise.

You write that in the 1930s, the court had one of those rare moments when it changed course. It had been striking down New Deal laws to fight the Great Depression, a continuation of its Gilded Era cases in which it continually blocked laws that helped working people. Finally, FDR threatened to add justices to the court. In response, the court started upholding New Deal legislation. I imagine Brown v Board of Education is another such course correction. Are there any more recent ones, or ones that you think might be coming? 

I’m not sure I can point to other examples similar to the 1930s one, at least with respect to this court. One possibility is what the court is going to say about the constitutionality of multi-member commissions, because that’s an instance where it seems like they want to allow the president to fire members of the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board. My guess is some of them will get cold feet about allowing the president to fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and thereby actually cause another Great Depression or recession. So I don’t know exactly what effect that might have on their rulings on presidential power. It remains to be seen.

They haven’t had any chance to really revisit the immunity decision from last summer, Trump v. United States. But I could see them being like, ‘Oops, we gave the president too much power.‘

Implications are staring them in the face. And yet I’m not holding out hope that there is going to be a clear acknowledgement, admission of wrongdoing, or course correction, for two reasons. One is, unlike the 1930s when the court did actually reverse course, now we have such a polarized media ecosystem where you have Republican politicians, Republican commentators and whatnot, basically creating this alternative universe where they’re telling the Republican justices they’re doing awesome, and their rulings are great, and the real problems are everybody else and not them. That does diminish one of the ways to get justices to admit their mistake. 

The second is they have had a few opportunities to acknowledge the administration’s misdeeds, their efforts to evade court orders, their efforts to avoid any prospect of oversight, and kind of tiptoed around the edges, reached some compromise rulings, but not actually acknowledging that this is an administration that’s acting like they are just not subject to the law.

I’m fascinated by this question of power. To jump back into the book, in your final chapter, you talk about the anti-regulation, anti-administrative state agenda of the court today. You write that they’re so busy tearing down regulations but “there’s no attempt to say what the government should look like or why.” I’m curious if you have an idea yourself of what they are going for. Trump is putting forward a very clear agenda of dramatically reducing government. Is that what the court’s GOP-appointees have in mind? 

What the President has in mind seems to be something like: No government efforts to basically regulate in the public interest or for people with less power. So, no helping students get access to education, no helping individuals breathe clean air, no helping individuals get health insurance. None of those regulations of corporate interests that actually reduce the power and money of the already powerful. 

Instead, the interventions are directed against either their perceived enemies or against the less powerful. Using the law to basically attack institutions that are trying to protect transgender students, using the law to go after law firms that had the audacity to try to hold Donald Trump accountable under the law previously. It’s a very dual state, where, on one hand, it is completely anemic whenever the general public or someone not in the relevant circle needs something, but they preserve these weapons—in particular, federal funding, federal criminal law enforcement, and federal immigration powers—to police disfavored populations.

As to whether this is the vision that John Roberts and others have in mind, my guess is it probably matches Sam Alito’s vision at a minimum. Neil Gorsuch, he’s more of a libertarian, so I’m not sure it totally tracks his. And the others are probably of the view that presidents just get to decide. They’re so committed to this idea that presidents are the singularly important entity under the Constitution, all of the executive power is vested in them that they just get to decide how to deploy the vast sweeping apparatus of the federal executive branch.

A big upcoming case is birthright citizenship. I was surprised they are taking this case so quickly. And to be clear, they’re not technically taking the constitutional issue of birthright citizenship in a few days. They’re considering whether to allow the government to limit birthright citizenship while the question is litigated. What do you make of this decision to hear this piece of the case now?

The court drew out the initial briefing, scheduled it for argument in May. Honestly, a part of me wonders if they have structured the timing so that they will issue this perceived ruling against the Trump administration at the same time they are probably going to be handing him substantial victories or moving the law in deeply conservative directions in other important areas like voting rights, LGBT equality, religious public schools. Kind of get some cover, to basically give them some favorable press and some offsetting press against the other things they are likely to do this term.

I had that thought as well. And since it’s not even the merits, they could, a year later, limit birthright citizenship on the merits.

You’re writing about the court, but you’re not a full outsider, because you did clerk on the court for Justice Anthony Kennedy. My sense of people that are brought into the institution is that they have a reverence and defense of the institution. Your book is literally called Lawless. Can you share if your experience being part of the court for a year informed this book, or if it is unrelated to that experience.

I don’t think they’re entirely unrelated. I did not emerge from my clerkship with a lot of reverence for the court or a desire to be a Supreme Court practitioner and in those circles. I understand the desire of people who are at the court, within the court, around the court, to see it as a place where legal arguments have a chance; it’s not politicized, they are doing some good. There are some cases in which I think that’s true. But I just think it’s misleading and obscuring more than it should to paint the court in that light and to allow it to give that impression.

You’re writing about a court where you’re at least somewhat critical of their efforts over 200 years to increase their own power. And you explain how this court is issuing opinions based on their own grievances, rather than what the law dictates. Then the book lands in this moment where Trump is threatening the rule of law and it’s incredibly important for the administration to listen to the courts. How do you balance those two things?

I hope my book is needed context for people who are thinking about how to respond to this current moment or what to take away from it. We should call on the courts to enforce the law, and expect, in some ways, that they will do so. If we just give up the game and say “It’s hopeless, they’re going to do whatever they want,” we kind of eliminate the capital or costs of them doing even more bad things. 

Part of me looks back on the first Trump administration and thinks part of the problem, or the flaw, is people on the left took to defending institutions when those institutions were deeply flawed and just were going to be incapable of actually addressing the threat to democracy, the rule of law, that this form of Trumpism and autocracy posed. Defending the Supreme Court during the first Trump administration, defending like the institution of Congress during the first Trump administration—I just think those were deeply misguided on some level. We should be able to recognize the flaws in our institutions that led us to the moment we are in, and not let any of them escape that examination or accountability.

In your book, every chapter focuses on a grievance the justices are working out. And it’s the same stew of grievances that applies to Trump’s movement: a vindictive patriarchy, not liking minorities, against voting rights, floated by wealthy interests. It’s all part of the same thing. It’s just really complicated to think about one of these institutions stopping the other, because they’re marinating in the same stuff.

That’s exactly right. To show the ways in which the court is on board with the ideology that the Trump administration is expressing, even if it’s doing so in more sanitized language.

I love my dog. She’s trained to go to the bathroom outside. But just because she clears that low bar doesn’t mean I think she should be in charge of the United States government. And similarly, if the Republican-controlled court can and does recognize that Donald Trump cannot declare himself king for all eternity, I am unwilling to say then they should be our rulers as well.

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DC’s Sole Congressional Rep Is Too Old to Drive. Can She Defend the City From a Hostile GOP?

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Since she was first elected in 1990 as Washington, DC’s nonvoting delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) has fiercely defended the civil service in Congress. Nearly a quarter of her constituents work for the federal government. So after the second inauguration of President Donald Trump, as Elon Musk’s US DOGE Service targeted agency after agency with layoffs, smears, and all manner of corner-cutting, Norton was a logical person to host a March town hall on this unprecedented attack.

The event, promotional materials said, would “give Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton the chance to speak directly with the District of Columbia federal workforce and provide resources.” The promise of a real dialogue with the congresswoman, however, proved to be a bit of hype.

Conducted over the phone, the event had plenty of town, but no hall. As the host, Norton was spectral at best. She read some opening remarks, but when participants directed questions at her, union reps or a democracy activist provided most of the answers. “Congresswoman, I’d be happy to jump in” was a typical intervention during her many unexplained silences.

A caller identifying herself as a fourth-generation Washingtonian thanked “Lady Eleanor Holmes” for “fighting for us” and said, “We’re just so blessed to have her.” After describing some of the indignities of living as a disenfranchised DC voter, she asked Norton how people could help her fight for DC statehood.

“Congresswoman? Are you still with us?” the moderator asked after fifteen seconds had passed. Then an additional ten seconds went by before Norton reappeared with a 59-word response, of which 13 were “uh.”

“I always love to make sure DC is treated the same as states,” she said, stumbling through a word salad. “I do have a constituent service office to help constituents. They are here to help. Thank you for your support of statehood.”

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Norton’s uncertain performance did not escape notice. “It turns out Rep. Norton defers all responses to her constituents’ questions, to someone else,” a YouTube commenter complained. “Not what I expected.”

Perhaps unwittingly, the commenter was speaking for many of the 700,000 residents of the District of Columbia. Norton, who will be 88 in June, is the oldest member of the House of Representatives, and as the town hall illustrated, it shows. “With all due respect to Del. Norton,” says Wendy Hamilton, a DC minister who unsuccessfully challenged Norton in the 2022 Democratic primary, “I am just not certain that she is the best positioned generationally to meet the moment.”

Norton, however, insists that she remains one of the most effective members of the House. “Throughout my career in Congress I’ve passionately defended home rule and DC’s right to govern itself,” she said in an email. “I’m fully able to continue doing so effectively—including against attacks from President Trump.”

Broaching the subject of the advanced age of a member of Congress is still considered unseemly. But the issue has become unavoidable over the past year, especially after Democrats’ unprecedented efforts to pressure then 81-year-old President Joe Biden to drop out as the party’s presidential nominee, after he appeared bewildered during his June debate with Trump. In March this year, a local news outlet discovered Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas), now 82, living in a memory care facility, having slipped away from Congress without much notice. And of course, until her death in 2023, the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) descended into dementia in full view of the country.

“There’s no question that somewhere between six and a dozen of my colleagues are at a point where they’re … I think they don’t have the faculties to do their job,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) recently told Politico.

The gerontocracy is spurring some younger activists to action. California Democrats will consider a resolution, introduced by a 36-year-old party member, to explore setting a mandatory retirement age for state candidates at the party’s convention later this month. David Hogg, a 25-year-old vice chair at the Democratic National Committee, recently announced plans to raise $20 million through an outside group to fund primary challenges against some of the party’s oldest members.

Those efforts, however, may be too late to save the District of Columbia. Thanks to a constitutional anomaly, residents of the Nation’s Capital pay federal taxes but have no voting representation in Congress. In 1970, District residents won the right to elect a nonvoting delegate to Congress. And, in 1973, the passage of the Home Rule Act allowed city residents to elect a mayor and a 13-member city council. But Congress still must approve DC’s budget and all its legislation.

As a result, the District of Columbia is frequently subject to the whims of members of Congress hoping to score points with folks back home. For instance, Congress forced charter schools on the city in the 1990s. A longstanding budget rider prevents the city from spending its own funds on abortion services. Over the past two years, members of Congress have even tried to ban the use of automated traffic enforcement like red-light cameras in DC, a strictly local concern if there ever was one.

But DC residents have never needed a forceful advocate in Congress more than they do right now. Republicans in both houses have introduced legislation to repeal the DC Home Rule Act and return the District’s management to Congress. Trump also has threatened to seize control of the city. He said in February that local officials are “not doing the job—too much crime, too much graffiti, too many tents on the lawns…we can’t have that in Washington, DC.” At the end of March, he issued an executive order creating a federal task force to oversee District affairs.

Now, there’s a much more immediate crisis. As Congress scrambled to pass a continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown in March, it failed to include a few sentences to allow the District to keep spending a previously approved budget, most of which consists of the city’s own funds. For the past two decades, Congress has included such language in continuing resolutions. But this year, the resolution treated DC like a federal agency and cut its spending levels to that of the previous fiscal year. If not corrected, the District will be forced to slash $1 billion from its current budget, a draconian measure that will require immediate, large cuts to public schools, police, and the Metro system.  

DC Mayor Muriel Bowser has already imposed a government hiring freeze and limits on overtime and is making plans to furlough city employees. The cuts could affect police coverage for major events this summer, including a military parade for Trump’s 79th birthday on June 14, which happens to coincide with the US Army’s 250th anniversary. “After this week,” Bowser wrote in an angry post on X in late April, “if the House has still not passed the POTUS-approved DC budget fix for FY25, we will be forced to finalize plans and make real cuts to deal with a fake budget crisis.”

One of the grim realities of addressing this “fake” crisis is that the city’s only elected representative in Congress is Norton. The DC delegate, like those from Guam and Puerto Rico, can introduce legislation and vote in committee, but not on final bills. Nonetheless, as Norton herself has proven during her 35 years on the job, the role is not without power.  

A legendary civil rights icon, she had worked for Bayard Rustin on the staff of the 1963 March on Washington. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed the Yale law school graduate as the first woman to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. When the first DC delegate, Rep. Walter Fauntroy stepped down after twenty years on the job, Norton left her post as a Georgetown law professor and succeeded him.

Since then, she has used her sheer force of will to advance DC statehood and fend off attacks on the District’s self-governance. She has won some victories, too, such as the creation of the 1999 Tuition Assistance Grant that provides up to $10,000 to help DC college students attend public universities or HBCUs outside the city.  

A video that went viral 17 years ago shows why Norton is so revered in DC. While she was speaking on the House floor about a DC voting rights bill, a colleague interrupted and asked her to yield her time. “I will not yield, sir!” she thundered back. “The District of Columbia has spent 206 years yielding to people who would deny them the vote! I yield you no ground.”

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Today, however, that forceful voice has been greatly diminished just when the city needs it the most. Many critics—mostly off the record— have blamed Norton for contributing to DC’s current budget crisis. “She was conspicuously absent when all this was going down,” says Stephen Jackson, a former head of the DC Ward 6 Republicans. He notes that Norton has been able to “slide under the radar until something big like this happens, and now it’s like, oh.”

In early March, Norton introduced an amendment to fix the budget issue. But inexplicably, she failed to testify in its favor before the House Rules Committee, the rare forum where she could have made her case directly to Republican colleagues, many of whom didn’t seem to understand the gravity of the city’s situation. “Even the guy from Guam testified about an amendment that he had,” Jackson notes. But to be effective in this venue, he continues, “You have to be sharp. You have to stick up for what you want to say.” The amendment failed.

Jackson observes that the Democrats’ aging problem probably contributed to the DC budget crisis in the first place. Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), 77, and Rep. Sylvester Turner (D-Texas), both died within a week of each other in March, right before the close vote on the continuing resolution. Turner, a 70-year-old freshman, had replaced Rep. Shelia Jackson Lee, who died in office in July at the age of 74.

After lobbying by senators from surrounding jurisdictions, notably former Norton intern Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.), the Senate passed a corrective bill to fix the DC budget on March 14. Trump supported its passage. “The House should take up the DC funding ‘fix’ that the Senate has passed, and get it done IMMEDIATELY,” he wrote on Truth Social. “We need to clean up our once beautiful Capital City and make it beautiful again.”

The House, however, left for its Easter recess without scheduling a vote, and there’s no sign Republican leadership plans to bring it up any time soon. Some GOP members have seized on the budget crisis to meddle even more in DC affairs. “We should use this opportunity to make certain that DC isn’t wasting money on ideas like DEI or reparations,” House Freedom Caucus chairman Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) said in an April statement. He suggested using Congress’ oversight authority “to make sure that DC is spending its money to Make DC Great Again, instead of on their usual woke agenda.”

Norton declined my request for an in-person interview. Her office also did not answer a long list of questions about her job performance, and whether she had met personally with any of her GOP colleagues to push the DC budget fix. Instead, a spokeswoman emailed a statement from Norton. “I have one response to people with doubts about my ability to serve,” she wrote. “Watch me.”

As with so many elderly people, the first public signs of Norton’s decline started with a fender-bender. In 2015, as she tried to park her car on Capitol Hill, she pulled straight into an angled space, hitting a neighboring car in the process. Failing to properly navigate the space, Norton just walked away. A couple of wags in a nearby office building captured the episode on video. “If she parks like that,” one can be heard saying, “she should not be a member of Congress anymore.”

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After the video went viral, Norton promised to take remedial driving classes. Her driving did not improve. In September 2018, according to a police report, she pulled an illegal U-turn in a Capitol Hill neighborhood one night and hit a DC police cruiser, a previously unreported accident that caused more than $1,000 in damage. Norton’s office told me she no longer drives.

The 2018 car accident took place during an election year. By then already 81 years old, she also drew her first serious primary challenge in almost a decade. Former Obama administration official Kim Ford, then 37, won the support of the city’s popular attorney general and raised more than $100,000 for the race. (Ford did not respond to requests for an interview.) She won nearly a quarter of the vote, more than any recent challenger, but Norton’s lock on the seat has remained secure. She’s been reelected three times since then without a serious challenger, garnering nearly 90 percent of the vote. That record says a great deal about city voters but should also be viewed as an epic failure of local media.

I’m a longtime District resident who used to report on the city government. I pay attention to DC politics. Even so, I hadn’t fully appreciated just how much Norton had declined until 2021 when she spoke at my son’s high school graduation. She had trouble pronouncing the school’s name and told incoherent tales of working in the federal bureaucracy. The charter school administration clearly had expected better. And why wouldn’t they? Until very recently, local media have all but ignored Norton’s decline. After the speech, I discovered that her growing frailty and emerging cognitive issues were something of an open secret among local politicos and journalists, but no one wanted to broach the subject publicly. One explained that her status as a civil rights legend made her untouchable.

Periodically, red flags about Norton’s condition have broken through. For instance, in September 2021, a group of zebras escaped from a Maryland farm and captured local attention. While authorities were trying to round up the liberated animals, Norton’s office issued a truly bizarre press release: “Local news has reported that the zebras were let loose on Saturday or Sunday of last weekend, a period of time during which I was enjoying quiet time at home with family,” Norton’s release said. “My alibi is solid but given my career of fighting for statehood for the District, which includes years of explaining the importance of having consent of the governed, and given my recent opposition to fences, I can understand why the charge was made. I hope the owners find the zebras and that all involved live long, full lives.”

Was this some odd lapse? Was it an attempt at humor? Her spokesperson said the release was obviously a joke. Many DC residents, however, were left scratching their heads.

Former DC councilmember Mary Cheh told me that the last time Norton ran for reelection, “there were conversations. Should we really be voting for her again? Frankly, if you see her get up to a podium, you can see that she’s suffering from physical difficulties. She’s getting up there.” DC pols, she said, have hoped that Norton would “see the writing on the wall” and step down, while helping to identify a good replacement. But, Cheh said, “she doesn’t seem to be moving in that direction.”

What’s notable about Norton’s recent tenure though, aren’t the car crashes or the weird zebra press releases, but just how absent she has been from public life. Last year, she raised more than $200,000 for a virtually nonexistent reelection campaign. She skipped the DC Pride parade, a command performance for local officials, and her usual meeting with the Ward 8 Democrats. She barely put up any campaign signs.

Kelly Mikel Williams, a local advisory neighborhood commissioner who’d worked in the Clinton administration, ran against Norton in 2022  and 2024. He said some DC residents were upset with him for raising Norton’s age in the campaign. “You can’t make that issue with Joe Biden at 81 and not make it with her at 87,” he told me. “They would say she’s gonna die in that office.” And yet, he said, no one wanted to be responsible for pushing her out.

During the recent election, Norton’s opponents say she refused to participate in any debates. One of her few media appearances made it clear why. In May 2024, Team Rayceen, the production company of local LGBTQ personality Rayceen Pendarvis, featured Norton in a series of online candidate interviews. Norton got the softball questions in advance. Even so, she appeared to read the answers from a script.

“I am Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton,” she said when asked to describe her background. “I have been the congresswoman for the District of Columbia since ’91. I am running for reelection again this term. I am a native Washingtonian, and I guess that’s the long and short of it.” She repeated the questions the way a middle school student follows a writing rubric. Question: “Tell us about the importance of the position you are running for.” Answer: “The importance of the position is that I would represent the people of the District of Columbia.”

Erin Palmer, a former DC advisory neighborhood commissioner who ran for the DC council in 2022, was involved in the producing interviews. She says Norton’s performance left Team Rayceen stunned. In the end, they managed to coax about three minutes of talk out of the congresswoman. “The collective consensus was like, ‘What just happened?’” Palmer told me. “I was surprised by the lack of engagement on substance. There were a number of one-word responses. In one interview, you can hear somebody whispering things to her.”

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Palmer even half-expected Norton’s staff to call and ask them not to air the interview. But Norton returned for another one in August and her performance was similarly lackluster.

The videos weren’t widely viewed. If they had been, the Jewish magazine Moment might have reconsidered the optics of giving Norton an award in November named after the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Norton is the same age Ginsburg was when she died in 2020. The trailblazing justice had famously refused to retire during the Obama administration, and her legacy was badly tarnished when her death allowed Trump to secure the court’s conservative majority with the appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

This year, Norton has served on the DOGE subcommittee, a grandstanding platform stocked with some of the House’s loudest firebrands from both parties. She can’t compete. Consider her recent appearance at a March hearing called “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the heads of NPR and PBS Accountable.”

Reading from a script, Norton plodded through her remarks, mangled the names of witnesses, and chuckled as she described a DC student participating on a local public radio quiz show as if she’d never heard the story before. Her comments dragged on so long that committee chair Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) let a witness answer Norton’s last question with a surprisingly gentle reminder that the congresswoman’s time was up.

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While I was reporting this story, everyone from reporters to political activists to ordinary voters told me that Norton’s condition didn’t matter because she can’t vote in the House anyway. But as the recent budget crisis has proven, having a functioning DC delegate is more critical than many city residents seem to realize.

As lobbyist and former Rep. Tom Downey (D-NY) explains, “A really good member of Congress, regardless of whether they’re voting on the floor, still has committee responsibilities and assignments. It is much more a relationship job than how many bills you’ve gotten passed.”

Downey worked with Norton in the House and now is one of her constituents. He says that while she may not have the same powers as other members, she could still be networking and building coalitions to advance her agenda. But it’s not clear that Norton is doing much glad-handing these days, even when she appears in person. (Witness this video she made with WMATA General Manager Randy Clarke last year to talk about transit infrastructure.)

Transit service in the nation’s capital is thriving thanks to @wmata and investments from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. To celebrate #InfrastructureDecade, @wmataGM Randy Clarke joined Ranking Member @EleanorNorton to discuss how the BIL is keeping the momentum going. pic.twitter.com/rzXkNcdS0U— Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure (@TransportDems) May 24, 2024

In contrast, the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, 52, has been relentlessly working a charm campaign both in Congress and at the White House to protect DC. When Trump was elected last year, Bowser made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago in an effort to shield the District from some of the president’s baser instincts. Observers credit her with helping temper Trump’s DC executive order, which they suspect could have been much worse. Norton’s office did not respond to questions about whether she has asked for a meeting with the president.

The congresswoman has shown little public recognition of her limitations. In late April, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), announced that his cancer had returned and that he was stepping down as ranking Democrat on the powerful House Oversight Committee. An Axios reporter caught Norton on Capitol Hill and asked if, as the committee’s next most senior Democrat, she was considering running to replace him. “I may,” she replied. Her office quickly backtracked. “After consideration and discussion with House leadership,” Norton said in a written statement to Axios that evening, “I have decided not to pursue the ranking member position on the House Oversight Committee.”

Norton may not have the national profile of, say, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the 85-year-old former House Speaker. But her role in the current DC budget crisis is yet another stark example of the hazards of congressional gerontocracy, where succession plans seem to be anathema, particularly among Democrats. A few people involved in District politics told me Norton has long rebuffed their efforts to persuade her to retire with grace.

But Norton still has her defenders. Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, who served as Norton’s chief of staff for a decade and remains close to her, told me, “This is her decision and I trust her to make it.” (In DC political circles, Brazile was long seen as a likely candidate to succeed Norton, but Brazile, now 65, says she has no interest in the job.)

“She may not be able to do the electric slide the way that she used to,” says Phillip Pannell, a longtime DC activist. “But in terms of her being able to speak out about what’s going on on Capitol Hill, she’s about just as into the fight as the Democratic Party is right now.”

E. Gail Anderson Holness, chair of the DC Ward 1 Democrats, is one of many people who have unsuccessfully urged Norton to mentor potential successors. But she also doesn’t believe this is the time for a new delegate. “We can’t afford to send somebody in there cold because of the disrespect we’re already receiving,” she told me. “She’s the one for now, however long now is.”

Norton’s supporters say it’s not her age but the current hostile Republican Congress and White House that makes defending DC an impossible job. “I don’t believe anyone is up to this task alone, including Eleanor,” says Brazile, “and Eleanor is tough.”

Her office, at least, is productive. In the 118th Congress, Norton introduced more than 100 bills. Late last year, she co-sponsored a bill with Rep. James Comer (R-KY) that would give DC control of 174 acres of federal land that once housed RFK stadium. Ever since the Washington football team decamped to Maryland in 1996, city officials have been trying to wrest the run-down stadium campus from the feds for redevelopment and a new stadium.

Congress finally agreed, and President Joe Biden signed the transfer bill on January 7. Standing triumphantly in the Oval Office for the signing ceremony were the owners of the Washington Commanders and Bowser. Notably absent was the woman who co-sponsored the measure that made it all happen.

“She is not the same warrior on the Hill that she once was even four years ago,” laments Troy Prestwood, president of the DC Ward 8 Democrats. “We adore her, we admire her. But is she the one to take us to the next level? The answer is no. I don’t think that Eleanor is equipped today in 2025 to battle the type of Goliath that is facing the District.”

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