TEACHING STUDENTS WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AN AMERICAN

Today, America is facing four profound and interrelated challenges:

• Social cohesion is eroding on both sides of the political spectrum. Right-wing white nationalists see some citizens as more American than others and have poisoned the discourse by labeling opponents as enemies, while left-wing race essentialists undermine what we have in common as Americans.
• Historically, our civic creed has provided the glue that unifies Americans of diverse backgrounds, yet today, young Americans report much less faith in America and in democracy than older Americans.
• America’s founders believed education was the safeguard of democracy. Yet our schools have fallen short, as many Americans have demonstrated a troubling tolerance for political leaders who defy long-standing liberal democratic norms.
• Paradoxically, figures who show autocratic tendencies are sometimes seen by Americans as particularly patriotic, underlining the need for those who stand firmly for democracy to embrace a proud American identity.

As America grapples with these difficulties, schools and universities offer a crucial opportunity for a better path forward. To counter rising illiberalism, foundations and researchers have pushed for sensible reforms such as enhanced civics instruction and accountability. The more profound challenge, however, lies in shaping a shared American identity.

In his biography of teacher union leader Albert Shanker (1928-1997), Richard Kahlenberg highlights a story told by former Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander. A group of education leaders was stymied when asked a basic question about why America has public schools. Shanker provided a provocative answer: “to teach children what it means to be an American.” Shanker believed that beyond literacy and job skills, public schools must instill shared democratic values to ensure the survival of America’s unique experiment in self-governance. Without this common foundation, Shanker warned, the nation risked fracturing into isolated factions. Because American national identity does not derive from a particular ethnic heritage, he said, the nation’s civic creed is the only thing holding us together. Today, almost three decades after Shanker’s death, America is increasingly divided, and its commitment to common democratic principles has grown weaker.

To address these challenges, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) has launched the American Identity Project, directed by Kahlenberg and guided by a stellar advisory group of prominent Americans, that asks: “As our nation celebrates its 250th birthday, what does it mean to be an American today?” In a highly polarized country, what precisely are the best ideas and aspirational values that bind together what author Heather McGee calls a nation of “ancestral strangers”? In addition, once those American values are identified, what are the best ways to instill them in school children? What exactly should the public schools and colleges be doing to teach a common American identity that inculcates a deep and healthy sense of what Alexis de Tocqueville called “reflective patriotism” that encourages debate about how to live up to the country’s lofty ideals rather than blind loyalty to the nation?

Continue reading about the American Identity Project.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Donald Trump has used his second term in office to launch a series of revenge prosecutions against political enemies unparalleled in U.S. history. His high‑profile targets, ranging from former FBI Director James Comey to a group of sitting Democratic lawmakers, have dominated the headlines. But the president’s assaults on impartial justice reveal threats to everyday Americans, too, whose constitutional rights are jeopardized by a system that lacks sufficient institutional guardrails against abusive investigations and indictments.

I spent over 30 years at the Department of Justice as a prosecutor and as a policy lawyer. I worked with countless attorneys who were committed, first and foremost, to justice, integrity, fairness, and equality under the law. Many of them now rightly express sorrow that the values of impartiality and political neutrality that animated the DOJ’s ethos for decades have broken down. Some suggest there is little that can be done to restore them in the face of a Supreme Court devoted to the “unitary executive” theory, which gives the president effectively unfettered control over his branch of government. Nonetheless, I believe there are concrete steps a new administration could take to strengthen the guardrails against a rogue president, and propose them in this report.

They stem from a simple premise: Federal criminal law and the procedures in place to administer it must not be so broad, vague, or easily manipulated that they can be readily turned into tools of political or personal payback. That is precisely what has occurred over the first 15 months of the second Trump term. Cases transparently animated by presidential grievance or political messaging have been packaged as ordinary law enforcement. At every stage of the criminal process — from the drafting of criminal statutes, to the decision to open an investigation, to the use of subpoenas and other grand jury process, to the independence (or lack thereof) of the Justice Department — the system has proven more fragile and susceptible to political manipulation than we who worked at the department ever thought possible.

In 2016, many of us assumed Trump’s calls to lock up Hillary Clinton were just a crude performance designed to thrill his base rather than a literal promise of future criminal prosecutions. The stump speech punchline has turned into a governing strategy of domination via legal warfare that goes far beyond just criminal law, encompassing punitive state action against universities, law firms, those who investigated the president in the past, and many others. Many of those actions have been thwarted by the courts or by grand juries. Nonetheless, the damage the Trump Administration is doing to the integrity of the nation’s justice system is deep and pervasive.

The problem is also not abating: This month, the Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center based on the fanciful theory that it had defrauded donors by paying undercover informants within hate groups it had sought to disrupt, such as the Ku Klux Klan. The highly politicized case appears to be an audition of sorts by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s pliant former personal lawyer, in his bid to permanently succeed former Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was fired from her position in part because the president believed she failed to prosecute the president’s foes aggressively enough. Unless Republican Senators take a stand and reject a nominee who threatens to act as a political hatchet, we may well see more politicized indictments.

This report focuses on the most prominent case studies of revenge prosecutions so far and the reforms they suggest. The prosecution of New York Attorney General Letitia James, for example, spotlights the dangerous combination of an overbroad federal criminal code and highly discretionary charging authority. James’s indictment rested on an elastic interpretation of fraud statutes — interpretations that could be, and were, stretched to fit a political vendetta. Although those charges, along with those against James Comey, were ultimately dismissed because the acting U.S. Attorney lacked constitutional authority under the Appointments Clause, this legal defect could not erase all the fear, anxiety, pressure, and financial costs imposed on the targets and their families. Nor did it resolve the underlying problem: a federal criminal code so expansive and ill‑structured that it invites selective and abusive enforcement.

Congress and the next administration must repair today’s politicized federal criminal justice system. There is already bipartisan support to address overcriminalization and code reform. We urge lawmakers to build on the existing concerns by developing a process to review the criminal code and amend it where necessary to embody core criminal law principles, including clearly codified criminal laws, coherently graded, distinguishing crimes that are more serious from those that are less. Statutory definitions must be sharpened, limiting vague terms that invite prosecutors to “find a crime” once they have chosen a target. Such an architecture would more faithfully embody constitutional values and make it harder for any administration to use loosely worded laws against disfavored individuals.

The case of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell illustrates the use of investigative subpoenas as instruments of pressure and humiliation. In Powell’s case, Chief Judge Jeb Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found that subpoena power, designed as a neutral mechanism of information‑gathering, was being deployed by President Trump’s subordinates to send a clear political message to the Chair: fall in line with the president’s demands to reduce interest rates or face intrusive, public, and costly criminal scrutiny. Subpoena reform, including tighter judicial oversight, clearer relevance standards, and safeguards against the use of subpoenas to chill lawful policy disagreement or public criticism, is needed.

The case of the “Seditious Six” — Democratic lawmakers who drew Trump’s ire by urging troops on video to resist illegal orders — illustrates both how the grand jury can be a shield for citizens against an abusive executive but also a vehicle for prosecutorial abuse. The report reviews this episode and recommends reforms to the grand jury process to ensure its proper role as an investigative body and a buffer between citizen and state, and not an opaque instrument of intimidation and political revenge.

Overlaying these case‑specific reforms is the need for greater independence at the Department of Justice from the whims of an unscrupulous president. The Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States limits what Congress can do to ensure Justice Department independence. But internal DOJ policies, including the Principles of Federal Prosecution developed by Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti in 1980 to rebuild public confidence in the integrity and independence of the Justice Department and designed precisely to prevent politicized charging decisions like what we’ve seen this last 15 months, need to be reembraced and reinforced. President Trump won’t be the last president tempted to politicize criminal law. But codifying and strengthening the norms of impartial justice will illuminate when pressure from the White House — sometimes public but sometimes conveyed through back channels or social media messages — distorts prosecutorial judgment and blurs the line between appropriate and political criminal law decision‑making. Future administrations should codify regulations that protect the DOJ from direct presidential or political interference in individual cases, increase transparency around contacts between the White House and the Department, and empower career officials and inspectors general to report and resist improper directives.

Finally, this report examines the question of accountability for President Trump’s accomplices in suborning justice. To deter future abuses, blatant misconduct must be punished. We outline a menu of accountability mechanisms: a congressional inquiry into these cases; potential disciplinary action, including termination, against Department officials who violated professional norms or legal obligations; and, where warranted, referrals to state bar authorities or inspectors general. Accountability is not about vengeance against individuals but about fully recognizing and signaling that using criminal power as a political weapon is incompatible with the rule of law.

Taken together, the five recommendations advanced here — criminal code reform, subpoena and grand jury reform, stronger DOJ independence, and meaningful accountability — are not a cure‑all. No statute or regulation or set of actions can fully prevent a determined president from trying to exploit the system. But they can raise the costs of doing so, narrow the opportunities for abuse, and equip future institutions with clearer tools to push back. The revenge prosecutions should be understood as a stress test that the current justice system partially passed and partially failed. The task now is to learn from the failures and fortify the guardrails before the next test arrives.

Read the full report.