I’m just back from attending the 2025 Global Summit on Constitutionalism at the University of Texas at Austin. This is an academic conference that assembles 300 scholars from around the world for three days of research presentations, keynote addresses, and discussion.
As always, I learned a lot, some of it relevant to our organizing work with CNY Solidarity and Indivisible Onondaga County.
Courts around the world are faced with a wide range of recurring problems associated with democratic backsliding. When an autocratic leader takes office and sets about dismantling existing checks on his own power (it’s almost always a he), legal disputes inevitably erupt.
In some countries, the autocratic leader takes immediate steps to undermine or capture the Supreme Court or Constitutional Court, to ensure that the apex court (whatever its name) does not stand in the way of his consolidation of power. Where such capture succeeds, an important check is removed.
In other countries, where apex courts have remained at least partly independent, they have sometimes taken innovative actions in pursuit of constitutional justice. At the conference, I heard about multiple recent examples, particularly in Latin America and Eastern Europe.
Here in the U.S., our constitutional checks against autocracy have of course broken down to a substantial degree. I heard two things at the conference that may provide some small reason for hope.
First, Princeton’s Kim Lane Scheppele emphasized that U.S. federalism is still intact, that Democratic state attorneys general (like our own Tish James) have been meeting regularly for more than a year to plan their response to Trump 2.0, and that they’ve been meeting by Zoom almost daily(!) since Trump’s inauguration in January. More than 100 lawsuits have been filed against Trump administration actions since January, and the state attorneys general have taken the lead on many of them. Notably, the AG’s have filed many of these suits within 24 hours of the administration’s announcement of the policy change in question.
Second and related, Ori Aronson of Bar-Ilan University emphasized the continued relevance of the U.S. system of decentralized judicial review. Judicial review is the power of a court to enforce the constitution, including by striking down unconstitutional statutes or executive actions. The power exists in virtually all constitutional democracies, but many of them confine it to a single, specialized apex court (often called the Constitutional Court). One downside of that choice, it is now clear, is that it is easier for an autocratic leader to quickly capture a single court than the judiciary as a whole.
In the U.S., we have more than 600 federal district judges, holding office in 94 U.S. District Courts around the country (including here in Syracuse). Trump appointed more than 170 of them in his first term, but even if all of those appointees were loyal to Trump (which they aren’t), that would still leave hundreds of additional judges who might be open to enforcing constitutional limits on the administration’s power. Many of them have been doing so over the past two months.
Some of these decisions will be reversed on appeal, and others may be successfully evaded by the administration. But some of them will stick, and even those that don’t stick can sometimes throw a wrench in the gears, slowing down the administration’s illegal actions to some degree.
I promised that some of this would be relevant to our ongoing organizing work, so here goes: Professors Scheppele and Aronson both emphasized that courts cannot save a democracy by themselves, and that popular mobilization has an important role to play. The legal work can buy us some time, but if we’re going to reclaim American democracy, it’s going to be the American people who do it.
Over the past two months, I’ve heard and read many observers asking why Americans aren’t protesting in the streets. First of all, as most readers of this website know, we have indeed been protesting in the streets. Here in Syracuse, we’ve had multiple rallies featuring hundreds of protesters, many of them protesting for the first time. Nationally, social scientists have documented more protests so far in 2025 than they did in 2017, so part of the issue may just be misperception. But it is also true that the scale and visibility of key mass protests during Trump 2.0 have been less than they were eight years ago. (I’m thinking in particular of the 2017 Women’s Marches and airport protests, nationally and locally.)
One reason for the smaller scale of protest so far in 2025 may be shellshock, with many of us recoiling at Trump’s second victory and uncertain how to move forward. A second reason, I think, is deliberate and cautious planning, both nationally and locally. For those who haven’t been looking under the hood, so to speak, it may look like quiescence. But if you’ve been to any of our meetings, you know that’s not right. Effective mass mobilization takes tireless organizing, much of it behind the scenes.
Saturday, April 5 is when that organizing will burst into public view. If you’ve read this far, please do me this favor: Sign up for our Hands Off Syracuse event, spread the word among your local networks, and tell everyone you know outside of CNY to find (or organize!) a local event of their own.
Circling back to the focus of my academic conference, one last observation: The proceedings included presentations by a number of high court judges from around the world. Some of these judges described bold and innovative actions taken by their courts in defense of constitutional democracy, a goal they described as central to their institutional missions. I look forward to a time when we can hear U.S. judges sound the same note.
Tom Keck
Indivisible Onondaga County