In what may have been the most explicitly racist rant out of the Republican Party this campaign season, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday broadly disparaged Arabs and Muslims, saying, “There’s 500 million Arabs in the world, and yet they don’t produce — they don’t win the Nobel Prize, they don’t win the Field prize, they don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature.”

Kennedy was arguing against the candidacy of Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate. After Kennedy was rightly criticized for his rhetoric, he doubled down Friday with a nearly 4,000-word post on X that contained even more anti-Muslim hatred and offensively pitted Jewish people’s accomplishments against what he says are Muslims’ lack of accomplishments.

“It’s going to be a hate election,” one Republican operative told Axios in July. “Voters have to hate the Dems more than they hate us. And we have material to work with.”

As they fear a historic defeat in the midterm elections, Republicans all over the country are making a desperate wager. Like a gambler whose pockets are almost empty, they’re putting their last chips on the square marked “bigotry.”

“It’s going to be a hate election,” one Republican operative told Axios in July. “Voters have to hate the Dems more than they hate us. And we have material to work with.”

This campaign of hate targets El-Sayed, but it’s not only directed at him, and the implications are broad and wide. Republicans are also unabashed with disparaging Latinos, Somalis (who are generally Muslim) and transgender people.

If he wins, El-Sayed will be the first Muslim elected to the Senate. And in the campaign’s closing weeks, Republican rhetoric about him — which has always been full of dark innuendo clearly meant to play to anti-Muslim bigotry — has shifted into an uglier register.

“I’m here to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator,” President Donald Trump said at a rally in Michigan. He likes to call El-Sayed “Mohammed,” in case anyone missed the point. Vice President JD Vance accused El-Sayed of “engag[ing] in explicitly anti-white racial hatred,” not bothering to cite anything “anti-white” El-Sayed has ever said.

Every American Muslim is well familiar with the charge that simply by virtue of their identity, they must be terrorists, or at least sympathize with terrorists.

“If you are going to go to the United States Senate, we need to know, are you for America or are you for these terrorist groups overseas,” said El-Sayed’s opponent, Mike Rogers, in a debate.

With the governor’s race surprisingly close, Gov. Greg Abbott is charging that his opponent, Gina Hinojosa, who is Catholic, “supports Sharia law, she supports Sharia communities.”

“His family, they don’t just flirt with terrorism, they helped fund Osama Bin Laden,” said Sen. Tim Scott, offering one of the most outrageous claims.

Other senators have joined the chorus. Appearing at a rally in Ohio — not Michigan — Sen. Bernie Moreno called El-Sayed “just an affront to me as an American.” Not something El-Sayed said or did, but his very existence. “Do you think he understands that concept that our rights come from God Almighty? That Jesus came here for our salvation?” Moreno asked. In keeping with what El-Sayed told a man with Christian nationalist views in a viral moment two weeks ago, it seems that it’s Moreno, not El-Sayed, who is unclear about religious freedom and the Constitution.

Never one to miss an opportunity for demagoguery, Sen. Ted Cruz called El-Sayed a “jihadist,” said he could wind up on the Senate Intelligence Committee and then offered this prediction: “If I am correct that he is a passionate supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, there is a very real risk that Americans will die as a result.” And if I am correct that Cruz is a cannibal serial killer, he might eat half his Senate colleagues, preventing the chamber from having a quorum for floor votes. I can’t be any less correct than Cruz is.

If there’s another epicenter of anti-Muslim bigotry outside Michigan, then it would have to be Texas, where the GOP primaries were a festival of hate-mongering as candidates competed with one another to see who could spew the most venom at their Muslim neighbors. And now with the governor’s race surprisingly close, Gov. Greg Abbott is charging that his opponent, Gina Hinojosa, who is Catholic, “supports Sharia law, she supports Sharia communities.” But worry not, good Christians of Texas. Abbot said, “What I’m focused on doing is making sure that we ban Sharia law, Sharia cities, Sharia compounds.”

Be racist but subtle about it used to be the Republican strategy, as legendary strategist Lee Atwater explained in a 1981 interview: Talk about “forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff,” and you expect the public to understand you’re being racist but you maintain plausible deniability.

No more. In the last election, Trump and Vance propagated one of the most repulsive lies in modern political history, saying that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating their neighbors’ pets. Trump regularly goes on racist rants against Americans of Somali descent: “You know, 98% of the people that we have here [from] Somalia don’t work — they don’t really have to work because they steal so much … Can you believe [it], low IQ and they live better than you do.”

Meanwhile the White House promotes anti-Latino racism, and in this campaign, Republicans have spent hundreds of millions of dollars fomenting hatred against transgender people, perhaps the most vulnerable and powerless minority group in the country.

The people who planned and executed this campaign of hate should never be forgiven. But in the end, the question we have to answer isn’t about them; their moral depravity is obvious. The question is about us.

Will we turn our backs on the idea of an America in which everyone can practice their faith, everyone has an equal right to participate in politics and everyone has an equal claim on our nation’s promise? Will we reward the politicians who want us to be our worst selves?

This election will give us one answer. But the question will come up again, because there will always be those who see bigotry as a tool they can use to achieve power. We just have to keep beating them.

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Hillary Clinton may no longer be the most influential voice in the Democratic Party, but she remains a member in good standing of the party establishment. So when she expresses support for expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court, it tells us that what was once a radical idea has gone mainstream.

“We should seriously look at expanding the court while the Democrats are in power,” Clinton said on a recent podcast. “You know, it used to be that you’d have one justice for each circuit. We now have 13 circuits, we should have 13 justices.”

Adding four justices to the court is just one of the potential reforms that have been suggested as a way of curbing the court’s abuses. Others include 18-year term limits for justices, ethics rules with actual teeth (no more billionaire-funded junkets for you, Justice Thomas) and limits on the court’s ability to strike down any law they don’t like. Whichever particular reforms one prefers, it is no longer acceptable for a Democrat to simply decry the latest awful ruling. They have to be willing to entertain fundamental change to the institution.

This shift in Democrats’ thinking is as remarkable as it is recent. Five years ago, Sen. Ed Markey introduced a bill to do just what Clinton and others now favor, adding four justices to the court; it got only two co-sponsors, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tina Smith. Joe Biden responded to demands for court reform with Washington’s favorite way of burying an issue: He appointed a commission to study it. They produced a lengthy white paper, but it wasn’t until July 2024 — after he pulled out of the presidential race — that Biden finally endorsed term limits and an enforceable ethics code.

The situation today is far different. Supreme Court reform will almost certainly be part of the 2028 Democratic platform, and just about every politician considering a presidential bid has already come out for at least some version of reform.

The list of potential contenders who have endorsed court expansion — perhaps the most radical of the proposed reforms — is long and getting longer. It includes Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Rep. Ro Khanna and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Term limits have been endorsed by Sens. Chris Murphy, Cory Booker and Elissa Slotkin, along with Gov. Andy Beshear. Other potential candidates, including Sen. Raphael Warnock and Govs. Josh Shapiro and JB Pritzker, are taking the “everything should be on the table” approach, not saying specifically what they’re for — which suggests they’re waiting to see what the voters demand. Pressure will only keep building.

What changed? The most important factor is the court’s own behavior. There are the monumental decisions: overturning Roe v. Wade, gutting the Voting Rights Act, eliminating any meaningful restrictions on billionaires pouring money into campaigns, outlawing affirmative action in education and giving the president immunity from prosecution for crimes, among other things. Taken together, the court’s conservative majority is so obviously pursuing its own partisan political project: to remake the law and the structure of the federal government in line with their personal preferences. Yet the justices pretend that they and only they are truly committed to the framers’ intentions and the text of the Constitution.

“We are not part of any political movement, and we are not attempting to further any political agenda,” said Samuel Alito, the most partisan justice on the court. “People think we’re making policy decisions,” lamented Chief Justice Roberts earlier this year, when nothing could be further from the truth. So says the man who has steered the court’s stampede to the right, including achieving his lifelong goal of destroying the Voting Rights Act.

Even Elena Kagan, the most conciliatory of the liberal justices, said in a recent speech that the court’s decisions rubber-stamping partisan gerrymandering showed “a lack of the appropriate concern or understanding of the consequences ​of their decisions.” With all due respect, Kagan was mistaken: They know exactly what the consequences of their decisions are. That’s why they rule the way they do.

So thanks to the conservative justices, Democrats are moving toward a consensus on court reform. There is no left versus center division within the party on whether the court’s decisions have or haven’t created a crisis. The only question is what should be done about that crisis. Anyone wanting to lead the party is going to have to be willing to take on this court and rebalance the scales. If they don’t, their constituents won’t stand for it.

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