Newsletter: Bring on the backlash, voters. Democracy depends on it

Good morning. It is Saturday, March 1. Changes are coming to this newsletter; read about them below. But first, let’s look back at the week in Opinion.

Senators, representatives, ex-presidents, billionaires — when you think of the influential political class in America, these people probably come to mind. But right now, the powerful are acting powerless, and it’s up to the least powerful (us, the voters) to scrounge for what little influence we have and put this country back on the democratic path.

Public opinion appears to have moved unusually fast against this president — fast enough to make any normal politician reconsider his errors. But this president and his unelected deputy press ahead with wholesale, probably unconstitutional changes, proudly wreaking havoc on government agencies authorized and funded by Congress and laying waste to institutional checks on their power.

It’s enough to make a citizen wonder if these people think they’ll ever face the voters again.

That last sentence was my own pessimistic editorializing, but the rest of it sums up what Jackie Calmes wrote in her column about the “break glass” moment in Washington. In their prescience and wisdom, the framers of our Constitution larded up the government with enough institutional safeguards to weigh down any would-be autocrat — think judges, impeachment, advice and consent and so forth. But as Calmes notes, the effectiveness of those tools depends on the people wielding them.

And right now, everyone from media owners to elected representatives to judges to ex-presidents is treating this dangerous moment as a passing fad, as if the current commander in chief intends to do nothing with the incredible power he’s amassed only a bit more quickly than lawmakers have ceded it.

Which leaves the task of righting the ship to what Calmes calls the “last class of first-responders: American voters.” And it appears we’re rising to the occasion much sooner than November 2026.

And finally, regarding the changes I mentioned at the top: This is the final Opinion newsletter you’ll see from me. My last day at the Los Angeles Times was Feb. 28, just before this email landed in your inbox. Going forward, you’ll receive a list of Opinion’s most compelling pieces in your inbox Saturday mornings. It has been an immense privilege to spend almost every Saturday morning with you since 2015, to edit The Times’ letters page since 2011, and sometimes to share my personal struggles with you in the hope they might help. It pains me to depart at a time of extreme uncertainty for newspaper opinion journalism in particular and democracy in general. Thank you for reading all these years.

And now, for the rest of the week in Opinion ...

What did I do last week? I took care of your family, friends and fellow citizens. The Office of Personnel Management in Washington asked government workers to justify their employment, so Dr. Venktesh Ramnath took to the op-ed pages of the L.A. Times to share part of what he did as a critical care physician in federal, rural and local hospitals over the last seven days. Spoiler alert: He did a lot, so much that he ended his piece by putting the question to his inquisitor: “What did the Office of Personnel Management do last week? Did it help me take care of these patients, or did it burden a system already buckling under its own weight?”

Whether Russia invaded Ukraine is not a “complicated” question. Why say it is? It’s not just this president’s dishonesty or thuggish style of politics, says Jonah Goldberg: “Social media, partisan polarization and politicization of institutions have fueled an erosion of trust across society. This is an ideal milieu for a president who cares not for facts or truth but only about his own vanity and glory. And that’s how answering the simple question ‘Who started the war?’ got so complicated. Telling the truth requires a degree of courage that is disqualifying in Trump’s circle.”

California relied on growing to pay for its needs. What happens now that it’s not? We still need more housing despite population stagnation to make up for a decades-long lag in construction, says urban planner William Fulton. But it likely won’t be enough to meet demand, and it certainly won’t be enough to pay for the new infrastructure that used to be funded by go-go growth. Fulton says all the changes that might actually do something — tinkering with Proposition 13 or a massive infrastructure bond — face major headwinds in Sacramento, but lawmakers have no choice but to do something.

More from opinion

From our columnists

• Josh Hammer: People like Andrew Tate have no place in the American conservative movement
• Jackie Calmes: Is this the way to win a Nobel Peace Prize?

From guest contributors

• We may all regret dismantling USAID
• We can still save U.S.-Canada relations — and hockey — from the goons
• Two Altadena residents who became homeless in an instant

Letters to the editor

• Trump tried to humiliate a four-star general. Why he failed
• Now Mitch McConnell wants to rein in Trump? Too little, too late
• Not a good look for a mayor to throw her fire chief under the bus