The Outsider Perspective Issue 488 | The Beltway Outsiders

If you’d like to read this issue on my website, click here! If you’d like to sign-up and receive this in your inbox each week, click here! Read past issues here.

Good Friday Morning! Somewhere in the English countryside this week, the organizers of the Cumbia Nature Festival were setting up folding tables, laying out wildflower-identification guides, and checking their binoculars for the weekend ahead. They are naturalists. A naturalist studies nature — birds, flowers, fossils, the patient pleasures of wildlife observation. The Cumbia organizers are, by all accounts, excellent ones.

Unfortunately for them, naturist is also a word. It differs from naturalist by two letters, and in polite British usage it means a person who would prefer not to wear clothes in public. The binocular set and the nude-hike set do not typically overlap. This week, they collided at the Cumbia box office.

The organizers are mortified. They are issuing earnest, desperate clarifying statements, offering refunds, and very politely explaining to anyone who will listen that this is a festival about biodiversity, not disrobing. They do not want nudists showing up to bird watch, and are spazzing out about it. Meaningly somewhere out there is a man who paid money for a nude hike and is instead going to learn more about the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow (Youtube clip for the uncultured).

Speaking of people who feel naked and confused, Democrats are having a week. I’ll dig into that and more — links to follow.

Quick Hits:

Virginia’s gerrymandering mess is not the start of this fight. It is the middle. A Virginia state judge has halted the Democratic legislature’s mid-decade redistricting push. An appeals court is expected to reverse. A Virginia Supreme Court ruling, if it gets that far, will probably stand — for or against, I genuinely cannot tell yet. The commentary class keeps writing the national mid-decade redistricting war as a story the GOP started. That is not quite right. The round actually started with the 2020 census, and in May 2022, when the Census Bureau’s own Post-Enumeration Survey conceded the 2020 count had overcounted eight states and undercounted six. Hawaii was padded by 6.79 percent. Rhode Island by 5.05. Delaware by 5.45. Minnesota by 3.84. New York by 3.44. Massachusetts by 2.24. On the other side of the ledger, Arkansas was short 5.04 percent, Tennessee 4.78, Mississippi 4.11, Florida roughly 750,000 people, Texas about 560,000. Six of the eight overcounts were reliably blue states. Five of the six undercounts were reliably red. The congressional seats apportioned on those numbers stayed apportioned on those numbers for a full decade. Republicans responded, predictably, by trying to recover seats they believed the count had taken from them. Then came four years of deportations and Americans physically leaving blue states, and the math moved again. Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) admitted recently that she needs migrants to keep her Brooklyn district’s numbers up. New York, California, and Illinois are all poised to lose seats. Democrats are now responding to the responders. None of this is new. Every state in the Union is gerrymandered — there is no such thing as a neutral redistricting decision, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling a reform package or lying. What is new is the severity. The fights are getting harsher because Democrats are in literal electoral decline: their coalition states are shrinking, the GOP’s states are growing, and the only purple terrain where the party is still structurally competitive on a national map is Georgia and North Carolina. The Midwest is slipping. The Sun Belt and Southeast are gaining. And I don’t mean any of these points in the same way as “demographics are destiny” kind of thing. This is literally a raw numbers problem for Democrats: GOP states are gaining population, Dem-run states are losing. It’s a uniform pattern from people to businesses. Democrats do not know how to govern anymore. The Virginia case is a small symptom of a larger fight — this is what a coastal party (the DC suburbs in VA) looks like when it fights to maintain power on a map that is moving away from it.
Subscribe to my daily newsletters: The American Almanac for right-of-center news that does not insult your intelligence, Capital Digest for business and market news with a working-class lens, and Conservative Legal News for the legal and constitutional beat.

Where you can find me this week

Please subscribe, rate, and review The Horse Race on YouTube — the reviews help listeners, and readers like you, find me. Make sure to sign up for the Conservative Institute’s daily newsletter and The American Almanac.

Democrats Learned Nothing From Munich. Walz Is the Proof. – Conservative Institute

The Law That Would Have Stopped the Shreveport Killer Was Already on the Books. Democrats Just Didn’t Use It. – Conservative Institute

An Obama Appointee Just Helped Kill California’s Anti-ICE Law – Conservative Institute

Democrats Built the Weapon. Now It’s Pointed at Them.

What the party that expelled George Santos just discovered about Madison, Ford, and the tools it built

In a single week, the accountability apparatus Democrats sharpened against their opponents turned on the coalition’s own members and institutions. James Madison explained the pattern in 1787. Gerald Ford showed what to do about it in 1974. The question is whether the Democratic caucus plans on learning any lessons, that they were warned about.

The weapons one party builds against the other never stay aimed in one direction. The Democratic caucus learned that lesson five separate times in the last week — and the caucus’s chief surrogate spent the same week on camera promising to build more of them.

On Monday, April 20, 2026, the House Judiciary Committee released an interim report on its investigation into ActBlue, the Democratic Party’s fundraising backbone. Employees of the organization invoked the Fifth Amendment 146 times across twelve deposition sessions. The report alleged donation traces running through Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Colombia — which, if proven, is a federal crime. Federal campaign-finance law has barred foreign nationals from giving to American elections, directly or through any intermediary, for the last half-century. A statutory compliance deadline was set for April 28. The same day, a House Ethics Committee panel concluded, on clear and convincing evidence, that Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-FL) had broken federal law or House rules in 25 of 27 charges before it.

On Tuesday, April 21, a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, returned an eleven-count indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center. The indictment alleges that the organization routed roughly $3 million through shell companies named “Fox Photography” and “Rare Books Warehouse” to paid informants embedded inside the Ku Klux Klan, the neo-Nazi National Alliance, and groups descended from Aryan Nations between 2014 and 2023. One informant, the filing states, was paid more than $1 million. The charges get more pointed from there. According to the indictment, an SPLC-paid informant helped coordinate transportation to the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and sat in the rally’s leadership group chat. Other paid SPLC sources were present on Capitol grounds on January 6, 2021 — the days SPLC’s public brand rose on. The institution that built the modern hate-group brand is accused of funding the people inside the hate groups on its own map.

The same day, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) released internal FBI records from “Operation Rampart 12,” a 2021 investigation opened against four sitting House Republicans. Bureau agents, in their own writing, described the evidence for it as nonexistent. Career prosecutors called the underlying allegations “completely incredible.” And thirty minutes before her Ethics Committee sanctions hearing, Cherfilus-McCormick resigned her seat.

On Wednesday, April 22, Axios reported that several House Democrats now regret voting to expel George Santos (R-NY) in December 2023. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) told the outlet: “We ought to be extremely careful about due process.” The same day, a Minnesota state lawmaker chairing the legislature’s fraud-oversight committee issued a formal letter to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) demanding records in the Feeding Our Future prosecution — the Minnesota pandemic-aid scheme that pulled $250 million in federal child-nutrition dollars into shell companies. State Rep. Kristin Robbins said Omar “ghosted us.” A motion by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) to subpoena Omar and her alleged brother in the federal probe had already been blocked — by members of both parties.

Emanuel Cleaver voted to expel George Santos in December 2023. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, in her own resignation statement hours before what was poised to be her own expulsion vote, said this:

“We should be very careful about the precedent we are setting. In this country, we do not punish people before due process is complete. We do not allow allegations alone to override the will of the people.”

Two Democrats. Same sentence. One voted yes in 2023 and has regrets in 2026. The other voted yes in 2023 and then became what the precedent was built to reach. Neither Democrat said the sentence when the Santos expulsion gave the caucus the scalp it wanted. Both said it after the weapon circled back. The Axios story calls that buyer’s remorse. Madison had a different word for it. The regret is real. The disarmament is not.

What Madison saw

The warning is 239 years old, and James Madison wrote it in plain English in Federalist No. 10. The American political class has spent two centuries pretending it was optional.

Madison identified two temptations for governing a republic afflicted by faction. The first is to remove what causes the faction. The second is to accept the faction as permanent and build a structure that controls its effects.

“There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.”

The first method has two paths. Destroy the liberty that gives rise to faction. Or homogenize the people so no faction can form. Madison dispatched both in one sentence:

“Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.”

He concluded:

“The inference to which we are brought is, that the CAUSES of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its EFFECTS.”

Representation. Process. Checks that do not bend to whoever happens to hold the gavel. That is the only move available to a free people. Every tool a majority builds to punish the other side is a tool it will one day be governed by. Madison knew it in 1787. The Democrats of the last fifteen years did not.

Every one of the receipts filed between April 20 and April 22 is a story about one faction trying to solve a problem by removing the other party’s people — and then discovering that the door swings both ways.

The Santos extension

The 2023 vote on George Santos moved a line the House had held since the Confederacy. It took twenty-nine months for the line to move a second time.

Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution gives each chamber of Congress the power to expel one of its own members, but only with a two-thirds supermajority. The framers set that threshold on purpose. Removing an elected representative overrides the voters who sent him.

For 140 years — from the last Civil War expulsion in 1862 until December 1, 2023 — the House never removed a member except for one of two reasons. The member had been convicted of a crime, as Michael Myers (D-PA) was after the Abscam bribery sting in 1980 and James Traficant (D-OH) was after a ten-count racketeering conviction in 2002. Or the member had joined an armed rebellion against the United States, as three House Democrats did when they signed up with the Confederacy in 1861. That was the boundary. Conviction or rebellion.

The December 2023 vote on Santos moved it. He had been indicted by a federal grand jury seven months earlier. He had not stood trial. The House Ethics Committee had issued a report. The vote was 311 to 114. Most Democrats voted yes. A substantial block of Republicans voted against expelling their own. The tool had been narrow. After that vote, it was wider.

The defenders called it a one-time response to a uniquely bad actor. Santos’s conduct was indefensible by any standard. But the rule, once written, was available to the next case that met the new threshold.

The next case came in April 2026. Reps. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) and Teresa Leger Fernández (D-NM) brokered matched expulsion resolutions against Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX), each facing separate sexual-misconduct allegations. The logic of the pact was clean — one Democrat and one Republican, both caucuses absorbing a loss, no change to the House majority, no charge of selective enforcement on either side. Both men resigned on April 14 within hours of each other, before either resolution reached the floor. The Santos precedent had not been used again. It had been pointed. Pointing was enough.

Seven days later, the House pointed it a third time. Cherfilus-McCormick was the third sitting member in eight days to end a career ahead of a vote that would have forced her out. She made the point plainly in her resignation statement:

“But let me say this plainly: we should be very careful about the precedent we are setting. In this country, we do not punish people before due process is complete. We do not allow allegations alone to override the will of the people. That is a dangerous path, and one that should concern every American, regardless of party.”

She is not wrong about the doctrine, whatever the federal indictment and the Ethics findings eventually determine about her own case. The threshold the Democratic caucus helped write in 2023 is now the threshold the Democratic caucus lives under. She is the first Democrat to meet it in its full form. She will not be the last.

The Senate version

The Senate wrote the textbook case for this pattern before the House did, and the textbook produced a 6–3 conservative Supreme Court a Democratic majority had planned to reshape.

In July 2007, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) stood at the American Constitution Society convention and committed, on the record, that no nominee put forward by George W. Bush in the final eighteen months of his term would be confirmed to the Court. Schumer’s cited authority was Joe Biden, who in June 1992 had argued from the chair of Senate Judiciary that no Bush 41 nominee should be confirmed before the November election that year. The Biden Rule. The Schumer Doctrine. The Democratic position on the Court in the final year of a Republican presidency.

Six years later, in November 2013, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) pulled the trigger on what everyone called the nuclear option. The Senate voted 52 to 48 to strip the sixty-vote threshold that had, for generations, let a Senate minority block a president’s nominees. The new rule applied to executive-branch officials and federal judges below the Supreme Court. Three Democrats broke with their own leader. The party’s stated reason was the Republican minority had blocked too many Obama nominees. The unstated bet was that the rule would never reach the Supreme Court, because Democrats would always hold the Senate.

In February 2016, Antonin Scalia died. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), that same day, declared that no Obama nominee would be heard. Merrick Garland was formally nominated on March 16. His nomination sat for 293 days. McConnell’s cited authority: Biden, 1992. Schumer, 2007. The rule Democrats had written for their own majority was now governing the minority.

In April 2017, McConnell extended the nuclear option to Supreme Court nominees. The vote was 52 to 48 — the same margin as Reid’s. Neil Gorsuch was confirmed the next day, 54 to 45. Brett Kavanaugh followed in 2018 at 50 to 48. Amy Coney Barrett in October 2020 at 52 to 48, eight days before the election — inside the same eighteen-month window Schumer had once declared off-limits. Three Trump-appointed justices sit on the Court because the sixty-vote threshold was removed by the party that then lost the Court.

This is Madison. Written in the most pristine form American politics has ever produced. The rule does not care who wrote it. The rule moves with the majority.

The accountability apparatus

The same Justice Department that ran the most aggressive prosecutorial posture against a former president in American history is under new management, and the posture has not changed.

Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith in November 2022. Two federal indictments of Donald Trump followed in 2023 — the Mar-a-Lago documents case in June, the January 6 case in August. Two state indictments, from the Democratic district attorneys Alvin Bragg in Manhattan and Fani Willis in Atlanta, brought the total to four. “No one is above the law” became the governing sentence of a movement.

This week that sentence came home. The five receipts from Monday through Wednesday do not need to be restated. They need to be placed. The ActBlue interim report is a House committee using federal-style oversight tools to drive 146 Fifth Amendment invocations from the employees of the Democratic Party’s fundraising backbone. The SPLC indictment is a federal grand jury running wire-fraud, false-statement, and money-laundering charges at the institution that built the modern hate-group brand — the same kind of charging posture a Biden Justice Department had perfected. The Grassley release is a Republican senator holding up the paper trail of a Biden-era FBI investigation that career prosecutors called incredible. The Cherfilus-McCormick indictment is a federal grand jury reaching a sitting Democratic congresswoman through the same special-counsel-style apparatus the previous administration built to reach a former president. And the Minnesota committee’s demand to Rep. Omar is the state-level version of the same posture, waived on by a bipartisan House vote to kill Rep. Nancy Mace’s subpoena. None of this week’s cases invented a new apparatus. Each ran the one the last administration hardened.

When Pam Bondi, then serving as Trump’s Attorney General, announced the Cherfilus-McCormick indictment, she said:

“No one is above the law, least of all powerful people who rob taxpayers for personal gain.”

That is the sentence the Biden Justice Department used about a former president for two years. It is now the sentence the Trump Justice Department is using about a Democratic congresswoman, a left-coalition nonprofit, and a fundraising platform. The rhetoric crossed the aisle because the apparatus did. The Special Counsel office, the aggressive charging cadence, the willingness to reach for a federal grand jury instead of a political forum — that is the machinery one party sharpened. The other party has now inherited it.

But the machinery reaches only where pardons have not. On his final day in office, Joe Biden pardoned his brothers James and Francis, his sister Valerie, their spouses, Anthony Fauci, Mark Milley, and every member of the House January 6 Select Committee. Hunter Biden had been pardoned six weeks before. The most exposed targets of the posture the Biden DOJ pioneered were walled off before the next administration took the oath of office. The apparatus remained. Its original targets did not. So the apparatus reaches the coalition around them — Cherfilus-McCormick, who was not pardoned; the Southern Poverty Law Center, which was not pardoned; ActBlue’s depositions; the Minnesota fraud network. The Biden White House closed the circle. The Trump Justice Department is working the perimeter.

What Ford showed was possible

Gerald Ford used the pardon power to do the opposite of what Madison feared, and it cost him his presidency.

On September 8, 1974, President Gerald Ford issued Proclamation 4311, a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974. In his address to the nation that day, Ford did not defend Nixon. He called it “an American tragedy in which we all have played a part.” He said he could not “prolong the bad dreams that continue to reopen a chapter that is closed.” And he closed the chapter.

The public hated it. Ford’s approval dropped twenty-one points in the first Gallup poll after the pardon, from 71 percent to 50. Two years later, in the 1976 election, Jimmy Carter took 50.1 percent of the popular vote to Ford’s 48.0. Every serious post-mortem cited the pardon as a decisive factor in Ford’s defeat. Ford knew it was coming. He absorbed the cost.

Twenty-seven years later, in May 2001, Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) — who had publicly condemned the pardon in 1974 — stood in the John F. Kennedy Library and presented Ford with the Profile in Courage Award. Kennedy said:

“At a time of national turmoil, America was fortunate that it was Gerald Ford who took the helm of the storm-tossed ship of state.”

And later:

“But time has a way of clarifying past events, and now we see that President Ford was right. His courage and dedication to our country made it possible for us to begin the process of healing and put the tragedy of Watergate behind us.”

A Kennedy stood in the Kennedy Library and said Ford had been right. That is what the political system absorbing the cost of institutional restraint looks like, a generation later. Ford used a power the Constitution had vested in him — and he used it to narrow the political use of federal prosecution, not to broaden it. He paid for the choice with his presidency. The country kept its republic.

What Biden showed instead

Joe Biden used the same pardon power in the opposite direction, and the beneficiaries were all on his side of the aisle.

On December 1, 2024, President Biden issued a full pardon to his son Hunter covering January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024. For months, the president and his press secretary had promised the pardon would not happen. In a June 2024 ABC News interview, David Muir asked the president directly whether he had ruled out pardoning Hunter. Biden’s answer: “Yes.” Karine Jean-Pierre repeated the denial from the podium at least six times through the summer and into November. The pardon landed six weeks after the election the president had not run in.

On January 19 and 20, 2025, in the hours before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Biden issued preemptive pardons to his brothers James and Francis Biden, his sister Valerie Biden Owens and their spouses, to Anthony Fauci, to General Mark Milley, and to every member of the House January 6 Select Committee — Bennie Thompson, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Jamie Raskin, Adam Schiff, and the rest.

Ford pardoned his own party’s disgraced predecessor and accepted an electoral defeat he did not need to take. Biden pardoned his own family, his own appointees, and his own political allies in the last hours he held the power to do so. One absorbed the cost so the institution could recover. The other used the institutional tool one last time to keep the cost off.

Same power. Same office. Two different answers to the same Madison question.

Reap the whirlwind

The Democratic caucus spent last week telling Axios about its buyer’s remorse. The Democratic caucus’s most-quoted strategist spent earlier this month on camera promising that the next Democratic majority would go after Donald Trump’s “stupid jacka— kids and their spouses” and seize their assets. James Carville’s exact framing: the Democrats “are going to investigate you to no end.” Regret in one mouth. The next use of the weapon being sharpened in the other.

Three sentences said in the same week capture where the caucus actually sits:

Emanuel Cleaver, April 21, 2026: “We ought to be extremely careful about due process.”

Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, the same day, in the statement that closed her House career: “We should be very careful about the precedent we are setting.”

James Madison, November 22, 1787: “The CAUSES of faction cannot be removed, and… relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its EFFECTS.”

The Democratic caucus spent fifteen years testing the opposite proposition. The nuclear option in 2013 was supposed to fix confirmations. The Garland block was its echo. The Santos expulsion in 2023 was supposed to address a unique case. The Smith appointments were supposed to address a unique defendant. Each move was defended as narrow. Each move was not. Each move expanded a tool, and each tool has now reached members of the party that built it.

The buyer’s remorse is real. It is also not enough. Regret is not disarmament. The test for whether a republic recovers is not whether one faction feels bad about the weapon it wielded. The test is whether the next vote to expel a member of the other side fails its two-thirds threshold because someone remembered what this week felt like. The test is whether the next Special Counsel appointment reaches for a grand jury only when a grand jury is the structural answer, not the partisan one.

Carville’s rant makes the harder question unavoidable. How many Democratic officials does the party actually want to see indicted? How many Republicans? And if the answer is fewer than both sides have already aimed at, what does the party intend to do at the end of the next term Democrats hold — pardon everyone on its own side the way Biden did in January 2025, on the assumption that the next Republican administration will pardon everyone on its side in turn? That is not Madison’s republic. That is a cycle of prosecutions and pardons in which the only remaining function of the executive branch is absorbing and deflecting faction in its rawest form.

There is a second thing Carville’s rant does not account for. The pardon power is available to whichever president holds the office, and the man Carville wants to prosecute has watched Joe Biden demonstrate exactly how to use it. Trump will do what Biden did. He will pardon his family. He will pardon his allies. Why would a sitting president deny himself the shield the last sitting president handed to his own? Carville is announcing what he wants, without having noticed yet that he will not be allowed to have it.

Gerald Ford took the loss to narrow the political use of federal power. Someone, in one of the two parties, eventually has to do it again. The person who does will almost certainly come from the side that wielded the tool most aggressively, because that is the side with the largest blast radius to absorb. And that person, like Ford, will probably lose an election for it.

The prophet Hosea, writing about a different faction in a different century, had a line for this moment. They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. The Democratic caucus sowed. The harvest is this week. And Carville wants to plant again.