My thoughts on movement strategy, politics, and the fight ahead.
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My new book, From Presence to Power: How to Take On the Fights That Matter—and Win, will be released July 28th. Pre-order it here!
The NBA Finals start this week, so basketball is on my mind. Like any good real New Yorker (or simple country boy from Long Island like me), I’m watching the Knicks, my hometown team, play in the finals for the first time in decades. We’re at that stage where the joy of victory feels within reach. There’s hope.
And yet...the crushing disappointment of a loss is still possible. Any Knicks fan can tell you that, even after a Game 1 win. In fact, sometimes it feels easier to pre-resign ourselves to the inevitability of defeat than to let our hope get out of hand. We’ve been close before and watched it slip out of our hands. Charles Smith under the basket in 1993, stopped again and again by Jordan, Pippen and Horace Grant. Ewing’s finger roll in 1995, hanging on the rim for what felt like forever before it fell away. John Starks (definitely an early crush) going cold in Game 7 in Houston. Reggie Miller’s eight points in 8.9 seconds. Many of us remember that feeling of hope followed by the heartbreak.
In other words, making it to the big stage and winning on it are two very different things.
As you can probably guess, this newsletter is not just about the Knicks. Over the past few days, I’ve been thinking about this lesson in connection to the upcoming Congressional elections. There’s a lot of talk about the possibility of the Democrats winning back the House, as if that win will inevitably lead to the kind of accountability for the Trump administration that many are hoping for.
Of course, I understand that the idea of a House win is exciting to folks. It’s important, and we need people full of excitement to make it happen. But taking back the House is making the Finals. It isn’t winning them. The championship win is what would come next—real accountability, and real progress, too.
But the House can’t deliver that. An impeachment isn’t a conviction. An investigation isn’t restitution. The presence of accountability rhetoric will not be the same as the power to reverse what’s been done, restore what’s been stolen or prevent the next loss.
The tools at their disposal are not what most people picture. They picture an administration actually being made to answer for their harms by another set of people in power—people who can over-power the administration. A House majority alone simply can’t ensure that. And that’s especially true for this administration, which has governed through executive action (the cabinet, the agencies, a steady stream of executive orders). And given that the checks on executive power mostly run through other doors (e.g. it’s the Senate, not the House, that can stop a cabinet nominee, and it’s the courts that can try to stop illegal acts in motion), the House is rendered even more ineffective. It’s corporations and businesses that can make the decision not to comply with out of hand orders, rules, demands, and rhetoric.
Between now and November many promises will be made. People will volunteer, donate, show up to vote. And if the only thing we’ve pointed them toward is Congress, what they get is the political version of your team taking the floor in the jersey and looking like they’re not ready for prime time. In some ways, that’s more disappointing than not getting to the finals at all. People want to see something delivered.
None of this means we should expect less of our own side. We should want every hearing, every subpoena, every ounce of oppositional fight they can summon. But asking a House majority to deliver the kind of accountability people are hungry for is a little like expecting your star center to start draining threes in the Finals when he hasn’t hit them all season. It isn’t the part of the game he’s built for. You can hope he sinks the shot and still know deep down how it’s likely to end.
Now, there are offices where that kind of accountability already lives. District attorneys and state attorneys general have real power to investigate and charge, and to make the people who exploited a community answer for it. (A fully developed corporate accountability strategy focused on leverage points with enablers, which we still haven’t mustered, is another channel that could leap far beyond what the House alone can do.)
This isn’t theoretical, and it isn’t new. For years, our movement has put real capacity behind electing reform-minded prosecutors, and the return has run deeper than most people realize. Yes, they’ve made the criminal justice system less corrupt. But that was never the whole of it.
These are some of the few offices with both the mandate and the muscle to go after corruption and corporate abuse, including the kind that lives in boardrooms and statehouses. There’s a sort of double bottom line of the investment. It delivers accountability where people actually feel it, and it shows that when our side is handed real power, our team can deliver.
That work was always about something bigger than any single race. It was also about changing what the public expects from these offices in the first place. About building a new set of incentives, and changing what the people running for them, and sitting in them, understand the job to be. When voters start to expect a prosecutor to go after the powerful and not only the powerless, the office itself begins to change. (This is a core strategy of power-building that I discuss a lot in my book coming out next month.)
Consider a few of the things these offices can actually do:
I also get into a lot of this with Kim Foxx and Aramis Ayala—two former prosecutors who have actually done this work—on a recent episode of Freedom Table. Please check it out.
So the question I keep coming back to is what we’re doing right now to point people toward the kind of accountability that’s actually real, as well as the offices that can make it real. We have to tell this story before November, not after the disappointment sets in. We have to direct energy and attention and money toward the offices that can actually deliver accountability, getting behind the people willing to use that power, and standing by them after they win and the attacks begin. We have to build the infrastructure so the hunger people feel has somewhere real to go.
But if we rely exclusively on a House win, the outcome will be much worse than temporary disappointment. It’ll be something deeper that drains the energy out of the 2028 fight. And it plays into a brand problem our hometown political team already has: folks not wanting to buy and wear the jersey, not feeling proud of what is being delivered—and perhaps believing their participation matters even less.
I’d love to watch my team finish as the winner this year. But hope is not going to cut it, in basketball or our work. The win comes from the work you do beforehand, so that when the moment comes, nobody’s standing under the rim hoping the ball goes in.
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