Congress needs as many never-Trump legal warriors as it can get

Nothing good will last if we don’t deep-clean and rebuild for a post-Trump future, starting ASAP.

Screen grab from George Conway’s launch video in New York’s 12 Congressional District.

The Democratic primary this month in New York City’s 12^th Congressional District is a circus — just as one would expect in a race to succeed Rep. Jerry Nadler, who is retiring from one of the nation’s bluest seats after over three decades in the House.

But this is no normal circus. It’s potentially pivotal, for the nation as well as the district.

The most famous of the nine names on the ballot is JFK grandson Jack Schlossberg — a 33-year-old internet influencer with a thin resumé, who lived off four trust funds last year and is running a campaign the New York Times has called erratic and chaotic. The two leading candidates, in polls and endorsements, are state legislators Alex Bores and Micah Lasher, who have extensive websites with long lists of policy goals they hope to achieve.

Completing the top four is former Republican George Conway, formerly and notoriously Mr. Kellyanne Conway, whose self-described “singular focus” is removing Donald Trump and never letting anything like him happen again. “Whatever your specific policy priorities and preferences may be, wherever you think the public interest should take us — we can’t and won’t get there unless and until we have an executive branch that obeys the law,” Conway said last month in a Substack post called “Impeach. Them. All.”

My sentiments exactly. I’m obsessed with the fragility of our system, and haunted by a sentence I wrote more than a decade ago. I quoted then-President Barack Obama saying he was “very interested” in making sure his successor was a Democrat, and added my own take: “Considering the chasm between the parties and the extent to which he has relied on executive action, much of his legacy depends on it.”

Thus concluded my contribution to a March 2015 book called The Surge: 2014’s Big GOP Win and What It Means for the Next Presidential Election. Exactly three months later, Donald Trump rode down a golden escalator and announced he was running for president. When he won, he immediately started razing and reversing Obama’s legacies. Now he’s doing it all over again to Joe Biden, this time steeped in corruption and vengeance.

Should Conway happen?

The constant law-breaking, grift and disruption are breathtaking, and we need legal mobilization at the same scale. Why elect a policy wonk or a dynastic millennial whose top credential is his wild and crazy social media persona, when you could send Congress a longtime Manhattan litigator and onetime Republican, plenty familiar with GOP hardball, who’s now playing for Team Democracy and the Democrats?

The House is losing Democratic lawyers, including some who know how to get attention, just when they’re most needed. Rep. Jasmine Crockett lost the Texas Senate primary. California’s Eric Swalwell resigned in April amid allegations of sexual misconduct and assault, including rape. Civil and human rights champion Eleanor Holmes Norton will retire in January after 36 years as DC’s non-voting delegate, and while there is a former Justice Department counsel in the race, endorsed by former attorney general Eric Holder, her prospects are uncertain.

Adam Schiff of California, the lead House manager for Trump’s first impeachment, is now a senator. Rep. Dan Goldman, who was lead counsel for that impeachment, argues like Conway that his legal skills are crucial in this moment. But in the Democratic primary in New York’s 10^th district, which covers parts of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, he’s struggling against progressive challenger Brad Lander, the former city comptroller allied with Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

In the NY-12 race to succeed Nadler, nearly a third of voters were undecided in mid-May, and 21% of voters 50 and older were still undecided just before the start of early voting Saturday, ten days before the June 23 primary. Anything could happen between now and then. Should George Conway happen?

His trajectory is not the usual for a Democrat, that’s for sure. For a start, he helped Paula Jones in her 1994 harassment suit against Bill Clinton. And when Trump won in 2016, Conway recently told Katie Couric, he was happy for his wife — Trump’s campaign manager — and “I wanted to believe the best.” But he withdrew from consideration for a Justice Department job in June 2017 and later, in 2018, he said he just couldn’t do it — that the administration was “a shitshow in a dumpster fire.” That was also the year he left the GOP and became an independent.

A party, not a cult

In 2019, Conway co-founded the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, called Trump unfit for office, wrote an op-ed encouraging E. Jean Carroll to sue Trump, and then helped her do it. In 2023, the Conways announced they were in the “final stages of an amicable divorce.” Throughout 2024 and 2025, George co-starred with Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell in a legal podcast called “George Conway Explains It All.” In December 2025, he filed to run for the House as a Democrat. It’s the only party, he says, that cares about people and isn’t “a political cult.”

Conway’s oft-stated reason for running is to make America normal again. Over one to two terms, all he says he will serve, he aims to impeach and remove Trump and his team, and to safeguard the nation against future abuses and abusers. “You would have thought that January 6th would have been the height of his criminality,” Conway, 62, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “But it’s worse now. He is running the United States government like a mob operation.”

Well before he announced his candidacy (on January 6^th, of course), Conway was talking about the need for a reconstruction period to do things like limit how a president interacts with the attorney general and create an advisory body to judge whether the president is unfit, instead of relying on the Cabinet for that. He told the New Republic’s Greg Sargent that he’d consider criminal sanctions for “people who refuse to spend the money in accordance with Congress’s will,” and is “absolutely for” restricting presidential pardon and war powers, and completely replacing ICE.

Conway says he aspires to be wingman to Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, in line to lead the House Judiciary Committee — and impeachment — next year if Democrats take the majority. He’s made his priorities clear. But he is running to represent Manhattan liberals, so how would he vote on their priorities? He may be more of a fit than many of them may realize. He lived in the city and practiced law there for decades, and all four of his children were born at hospitals in the district or just outside it.

A 2028 preview in Manhattan

As for issues, the New York Times summed up a recent NY-12 debate by saying there was “little daylight” between the four onstage, suggesting they’d “likely vote similarly” if elected. In a striking example from December, Conway endorsed a Schlossberg gun control post calling for universal background checks, red flag laws, a mandatory waiting period, an assault weapons ban, a ghost gun ban, and closing the loophole for bump stocks that turn semiautomatic weapons into rapid-fire machine guns. “Couldn’t agree more. All these proposals are constitutional, reasonable, and vital,” Conway wrote.

On his media tour this year, Conway has said that he’d protect the 2010 Affordable Care Act that’s now a pillar of the U.S. health system; that he backs abortion rights “full stop,” including the Women’s Health Protection Act ensuring abortion access nationwide; and that he would have opposed a bill blocking weapons sales to Israel. If there are differences, “persuade the Israeli government what is in their interest and how we should work together with them,” he said last month. “But I don’t believe in cutting off Israel and letting it stand there alone.”

Yet Conway would be the first to ask, what good is any achievement, by any Congress or president, if the next president can unilaterally blow it all up?

First-term Trump killed U.S. participation in the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (a Bush-Obama project intended to strengthen U.S. trade with Pacific Rim partners and ensure America’s leading role in the world economy). He weakened the Affordable Care Act and health insurance enrollment fell. He withdrew America from the multi-nation 2015 Iran nuclear deal that was keeping Iran’s nuclear program in check.

Second-term Trump halted and blocked Biden-era investments in America’s burgeoning renewable energy sector. After enabling Iran’s nuclear resurgence by exiting Obama’s deal, he launched an impulsive war on Iran that has left America exposed, trapped, and responsible for disrupting the global oil market. His war, tariffs and draconian immigration policies have quickly eroded a Biden economy that was, as The Economist put it in October 2024, “the envy of the world.”

The 2028 presidential race will be the main showcase for Democratic debate about how to balance the fight for Trump accountability and democracy guardrails with the fight to repair Trump’s damage to public health, the cost of living, personal freedom, and much else. But it is already playing out on the smaller stage of the NY-12 House Democratic primary, and it’s clarifying: You may care deeply about climate or foreign or social policy, but nothing you win will last if presidents like Trump become America’s new normal.

In case you missed it:

May 27: An Inventory of Trump’s Second-Term Wreckage

SAY YOU WANTED TO CREATE a record of all the damage Donald Trump inflicted on America in the first year of his return to the Oval Office. And then, as abominations large and small continued to spew from the firehose, you kept going. Thirteen months, fourteen months, fifteen, sixteen.

That’s what happened to a bipartisan group of former government officials, former military officers, experts, academics, and scholars determined to document the “American carnage” they say has evolved from a Trump warning in 2017 to “a threat fulfilled” in his second term.

May 20: How to Fix America’s Geriatric Politician Problem

Still, employers and employees in the private sector have flexibility—to assess, hire and fire, quit and retire, renew contracts or not. These are not options after voters have made their choices. When it comes to America and decisions on the future we leave behind, it seems clear that we need to set a retirement age for federal officeholders and the judges and justices they install.

Running a country of 340 million should not hinge on people in their 80s and 90s playing the odds that they can complete their service at full capacity or at all, whether their term is two years in the House, four years as president or governor, six years in the Senate, or a lifetime on the bench.

May 8: Virginia’s Redistricting Ruling Is Peak Darwin-Era Politics

Scruples are for sissies.

That’s the message that’s been blaring for ten years straight, like a fire alarm that will never turn off, no matter how many fire fighters rush into battle to extinguish the inferno. It rages on and on, and those of us nostalgic for a more innocent, honorable political age need to get over it.

May 7: Which Democrat could repair the damage Trump did?

Democrats have a huge opportunity to make a huge difference. But whether they’ll grab it is a huge question.

In 2020, I wrote that voters were “weary, anxious and looking for salve” after President Trump’s first term. I said then that the experienced, reassuring Joe Biden fit the moment. Now I fear that if Democrats nominate a similar presidential candidate in 2028, one who wins yet doesn’t act with alacrity on democracy preservation and helping Americans live better lives, a fed-up electorate will once again turn them out as ineffectual.

Who can or should lead the party at a time like this?