There's only one way out of this mess

We’re now at the point where five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have harmed us so severely that our nation is facing an oligarchic takeover, aka a constitutional crisis. Lincoln then embarked on a series of progressive reforms including the 13th Amendment, the Homestead Act, the National Banking Act, the Pacific Railway Acts, creation of the Department of Agriculture, and the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act that gave federal land for the creation of more than fifty colleges that would provide free educations to America’s young people. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.” The response was the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1891, which progressive presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Taft enforced ruthlessly, breaking up giant corporations and monopolistic conspiracies including Standard Oil. It explicitly said: “No corporation doing business in this state shall pay or contribute, or offer, consent or agree to pay or contribute, directly or indirectly, any money, property, free service of its officers or employees or thing of value to any political party, organization, committee or individual for any political purpose whatsoever, or for the purpose of influencing legislation of any kind, or to promote or defeat the candidacy of any person for nomination, appointment or election to any political office.” The penalty included a substantial fine, years in prison for individual executives, and the political death sentence of the corporation itself being forbidden from doing business in Wisconsin: “Any officer, employee, agent or attorney or other representative of any corporation, acting for and in behalf of such corporation, who shall violate this act, shall be punished upon conviction by a fine … or by imprisonment in the state prison for a period of not less than one nor more than five years, … and … its right to do business in this state may be declared forfeited.” Two years later, efforts to control bad behavior by rich people and corporations went federal with the Tillman Act of 1907. Democrats in Congress came damn close three years ago to rebooting us into a new progressive era with the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act of 2022.