What is the resistance governing agenda?
A new focus for Heads Up News
Over the last several months, I’ve grown increasingly interested in what a resistance governing agenda would look like – first in Congress, if Democrats win one or both chambers in November, and then across all three branches, if Trumpism is rejected by the voters in 2028.
So I’m thinking about adding a new focus to this newsletter: examining what those two agendas might look like, by aggregating and analyzing the latest ideas smart people have proposed.
From what I’ve seen so far, there are some emerging themes:
Starting in 2027, a Democratic Congress should open a slew of investigations into a wide range of conduct by this administration that has been essentially criminal, including Trump’s personal corruption, corporate bribery, politically-motivated prosecutions, civil rights violations against immigrants and protesters, and inhumane conditions in immigration detention centers. It should seriously consider impeachment.
Democratic majority leaders should also establish some red-line demands that must be met in order to win their support for necessary legislation. Those could include such things as an end to impoundment, reining in ICE, releasing immigrants on bond, reversing safety-net cuts, honoring congressional subpoenas, firing certain people, and ending the war against Iran.
The 2029 resistance agenda is of course much broader. There are high-level goals such as reconstructing a functional and ethical federal government, establishing new limits on executive power, prosecuting crimes committed by the Trump administration, resuming civil-rights enforcement, passing new restrictions on campaign financing, adopting a humane immigration policy, breaking up the Department of Homeland Security, and abolishing ICE.
There are even higher-level goals, such as restoring the rule of law, ensuring fair elections, working to create a true multiracial democracy, addressing climate change and income inequality, and regulating new technologies like AI and cryptocurrency.
And there is a powerful argument that very little of this is possible without structural congressional reform and dramatic changes to the makeup of the Supreme Court.
Plus, there are hundreds – maybe thousands – of thing Trump broke that must not just be fixed, but reconstructed – and a few that he built or gilded, that must be torn down.
My goal is to explore these ideas and many others in the coming months. (Does that sound good? What have I left out? Let me know.)
I’ll start now.
The Latest Thoughts on De-Trumpification
Under current law, state and local law enforcement officials can (with some difficulty) be sued for constitutional violations. But there is no similar legal authority that applies to federal officers, effectively giving them immunity from civil actions. Democrats have proposed legislation that would allow individuals the right to sue federal law enforcement officers and agencies in civil court for violations of their rights.
Radley Balko, the independent journalist who is my go-to source on all matters related to criminal justice, has called passage of such a law critically important. But as he writes in his must-read newsletter, that’s not enough. He wants Congress to pass a law that would allow individuals “to sue the supervisors and political appointees whose policies, priorities, and personnel decisions are responsible for these violations.”
Expanding on his New York Times opinion piece on the topic, he writes that “there needs to be some deterrent.”
At the very least, Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Markwayne Mullin, Kristi Noem, and the other Trump II officials whose policies have caused unnecessary death should be writing checks to the families of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Joan Sebastian Guerrero, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez — among others — for the rest of their lives.
Of course as long as Trump is president, he would veto such a law. But, Balko writes:
Assuming the Democrats retake Congress, I think it’s important to pass these laws quickly to send a message to Trump officials and federal immigration cops that culpability is coming. They need to know that they do not have carte blanche to continue inflicting pain and violence for the next two years. It would make clear to everyone responsible for the cruelty and deaths we’ve seen that we are one presidential signature away from imposing lifelong financial accountability on whoever’s policies, instructions, and bullets produce the next Alex Pretti or Joan Sebastian Guerrero.
Protect Democracy is out with a new report advocating for states’ U.S. House delegations to be selected through “proportional representation” rather than single-member districts. It’s fairer, and it would end the warped incentives to redistrict and gerrymander before every congressional election.
As Protect Democracy staffers Grant Tudor, Cyrena Kokolis, and Farbod Faraji explain in a blog post:
Single-member districts are uniquely vulnerable to manipulation. Gerrymandering works by exploiting a common feature of them known as “wasted votes.” When a candidate wins with 60% of the vote, the 40% cast for other candidates doesn’t help to elect anyone; those votes are considered “wasted.” So, too, are the 10% the prevailing candidate earned beyond what was needed to win. Gerrymanderers are essentially engineers of this waste, designing districts to maximize the opposition’s wasted votes and minimize their own.
By contrast, they write:
In a five-seat district, a party that wins 40% of the vote receives two seats, and another that wins 60% receives three…
Recall that a party that wins 40% of the vote in a single-member district wins nothing (lots of waste). But in a five-seat district, that same party wins two seats: instead of being wasted, nearly all of the votes contribute to representation.
Simultaneously, more than 500 scholars — including democracy, voting rights, and redistricting experts — released an open letter calling on Congress to adopt proportional representation. They write:
The requirement to use single-member districts was passed by statute in 1967. Congress has the authority to change it, bringing its electoral system into the 21st century. There should be little doubt that the single-member district system is failing to deliver fair and representative outcomes.
Emile Ayoub writes for the Brennan Center, where he is a senior counsel, that Congress must create new safeguards around the collection, integration, and misuse of people’s data. He writes that
[T]he Trump administration has ushered in a sea change in data consolidation, undermining privacy protections in its reported attempt to build a centralized database of government data. Many of these data troves have been funneled into DHS. And DHS is integrating some of that information with the voluminous personal data generated daily from our phones and online interactions, which the government can buy from data brokers. This data reveals some of the most intimate details of our lives, from religious affiliation to political preferences and more.
Ayoub writes that this kind of data integration makes it much easier for the Trump administration to monitor and target protesters, ramp up mass deportation, and target non-U.S. citizens based on their viewpoints.
He urges Congress to “close the data broker loophole, which government agencies exploit to obtain personal information from commercial entities without a court order,” and strengthen federal privacy laws including the Privacy Act.
Former CIA analyst Julia Curlee writes for Lawfare about “How the White House Broke the NSC and How to Fix It.” In 2025, Trump purged the National Security Council of most of its staff, breaking “the interagency coordination system that has managed U.S. national security since 1947,” and resulting in “serious miscalculations, from ill-conceived tariffs to the catastrophic planning failures in the run-up to the war with Iran.” Her proposal:
Post-Trump, she writes:
Staffing must return to the historical range of 100-200 policy professionals. Beyond headcount, the new NSC leadership will need to set clear expectations: broad policy options, objective analysis, and protection against retaliation for dissent….
Whatever the final mix of reforms, Congress and a new administration will need to ensure that a functional NSC is helping the president make good decisions, not shielding him from hard truths. Far from being the “enemies within,” career detailees are the institutional memory that tells a senior director which agencies need to be in the room, which classified programs can contribute, and which allied governments will need to be consulted for a policy to succeed.
Cerin Lindgrensavage, a counsel at Protect Democracy, and David A. Supe, a law professors at Georgetown University, write in The Hill that Congress needs to take action to stop Trump and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought from cutting the budget of federal programs that Congress has funded. They write:
Members of Congress concerned about preserving the constitutional Separation of Powers should warn Vought and agency officials to reverse these lawless actions or else face consequences. If that fails, criminal referrals to the Department of Justice are possible — if not now then during the first years of the next presidential administration, within the five-year statute of limitations.
Former federal prosecutor Nathan Reilly, writing for Just Security, has some fascinating thoughts about ways to reform the grand jury process to hold the government accountable. As he notes, and I’ve documented here:
Recently, scrutiny of the grand jury and renewed calls to strengthen it as a bulwark against government overreach have grown more intense as courts have determined that federal prosecutors have engaged in misconduct in seeking indictments.
Reilly suggests three changes to Rules 5, 6 and 16 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure:
These proposed reforms would require disclosure of the complete grand jury transcript to the court in every indicted case, give defendants access to the legal instructions delivered to the grand jury, and require prosecutors to confirm on the record that the legal instructions they provided to the grand jurors were legally accurate.
A Big Win for the Resistance
It worked! Months of intense pressure on Citizens Bank from protesters and city governments led the bank to stop financing major private prison operators GEO Group and CoreCivic on Friday.
As the Boston Globe reports: “After enduring months of anti-ICE protests at its bank offices, Citizens Financial Group is parting ways with two for-profit prison operators that oversee detention facilities for the federal immigration enforcement agency.”
The De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition, in a statement, called the move “an important victory for the people who refused to let a major bank finance human suffering brought on by ICE detention activities of the current federal administration.”
The bank, in its announcement, called the move “a business decision based on changed commercial circumstances” that “does not reflect any change in our view regarding these companies’ business models or operations.” The federal government is purchasing several facilities from the two companies, it said, which “has the effect of reducing the required capital of the companies going forward.”
But the De-ICE group didn’t buy it, saying “the reality is clear: public conscience and community resistance matter and have paid off.”
Vigils for ICE Victims
There will be vigils across the country on Saturday to mourn and demand justice for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastian Guerrero, the two men shot dead by ICE officers earlier this month in Texas and Maine. Find one near you.
The Week in the Courts
A federal judge in California ordered the government to overhaul conditions at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in the Mojave Desert. U.S. District Judge Sunshine Suzanne Sykes laid out more than two dozen requirements for ICE to meet immediately, including 24-hour access to clean drinking water, “Nutritious and sanitary meals that contain a sufficient number of calories;” access to medical care, and at least four hours of access to the yard. A lawsuit on behalf of detainees had alleged inhumane conditions.
A federal judge in Minnesota rejected the administration’s effort to force Minnesota to abandon its sanctuary laws. Judge Eric C. Tostrud wrote that the government’s attempts to preempt the state’s laws “violate the anticommandeering doctrine.”
The Justice Department is now 0 for 16 in its attempts to obtain unredacted state voter rolls. A federal judge in Connecticut, Kari A. Dooley, noted that she had “the benefit of numerous (though non-binding) decisions by sister courts as to many of the issues presented.”
A federal judge in Boston ruled that the Trump administration’s attempt to justify billions of dollars in funding cuts was based on a misreading of an obscure clause. Judge Indira Talwani sided with the 23 states that argued that the clause in question did not allow agencies to terminate grants based on shifts in priorities made after the grants were awarded.
A federal judge in Texas barred the deportation of a witness in the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Araujo Salgado by ICE agents on July 7.
A new legal brief alleges that DHS is violating an agreement it made almost 30 years ago that children may not be held in immigrant prison for more than 20 days unless the facility is nonsecure and licensed. The brief says thousands of immigrant children have been imprisoned at the Dilley detention facility in Texas for as many as 323 days under terrible conditions.
End Notes
From the Huffington Post: “‘Free Them All!’: Inside The Fight To Close Delaney Hall.”
From Colorado Public Radio: “GEO employee arrested in shooting of protester outside Aurora ICE facility.”
From Seacoast Online: “Morning Resistance: Why a York [Maine] group protests Trump policies daily.”