What Civic Reasoning Looks Like.

I’ve been listening to The Bulwark’s Focus Group Podcast, specifically the episode where they talked to swing voters about Renee Good and the video of her shooting. I’ve been trying to suss out my reaction to their reaction and I’m trying to do more of that here rather than in scattershot emails to the hosts themselves. So here I am.

In general, I’d collapse the voters’ perspective down to this:

• Some acceptance of the narrative that Good ran into, or was going to run into, the ICE officer.

• But also reticence to accept the stories as provided by either “side”.

• A general concern that the information they’re getting has been doctored or filtered.

My initial instinct was that this was contrary to my take and manifestly, obviously wrong. I'll get to why. But first, I want to say something about how I think about the people in that focus group, because it shapes everything that follows.

One thing I didn’t fully appreciate until law school is just how much of our legal system comes down to people. Not experts, forensic evidence, judges in robes, or credentialed elites — just normal, everyday people. We can quibble with the wisdom of this setup, but it’s ultimately what we have, and it’s frankly not a bad one. Most juries take their oaths and their duties pretty seriously even if we don’t like outcomes.

I went with juries because they are the obvious example, but it runs deeper than that. Judges make judgment calls about the law. Prosecutors decide what to charge based on what they think a jury will believe. The whole system is built on the assumption that ordinary citizens, given enough information, can figure out who’s telling the truth and what’s fair. It’s lowercase “d” democratic in a way that I think most people don’t realize, and it means I take the reactions of those swing voters seriously, not as things to be corrected, but as exactly the kind of civic reasoning the system depends on.

Let me be direct about what my take is: I think Jonathan Ross approached this situation looking for a confrontation. I think he exhibited poor trigger discipline1. I think he operated from the assumption that the government has carte blanche authority to make demands of people, which is an inversion of how our relationship to the federal government is supposed to work. I think the administration is gunning for escalation, because they want the content for recruitment and because they want to use civil unrest as pretext for more federal encroachment on states. Trump has already threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act over Minneapolis. Federal agents have been caught on camera invoking Good’s death to threaten protesters: “Have y’all not learned from the past couple of days?”

My dudes, this isn’t subtext. They’re just saying it.

But here’s the thing: the swing voters are still right about something important. A lot of what I just said are inferences I’ve drawn from evidence available to me. Evidence that is incomplete, contested, and deliberately obscured. I think I’m right. I think a full factual record would support the picture I’m painting. But I am, like the swing voters, working with incomplete information.

So here's what I can offer: a framework for thinking about what questions matter here, and why it should matter to ordinary citizens that no one is being allowed to ask them.2

I’m not a criminal lawyer and have no aspiration to be. Everything I’m about to say is about as close to me playing the straight man as possible, with a dash of enough knowledge about constitutional criminal procedure to be dangerous and, maybe, a little obnoxious. But here’s what I remember about self-defense:3

• It requires a reasonable belief that you’re in imminent threat of serious or life-threatening harm;

• The defense must be proportional: you can’t shoot someone who looks like they’re going to punch you;

• There are both subjective and objective prongs to this analysis.

I want to focus on that last point, because it’s one of the more fact-intensive and personal aspects of the equation.

The subjective prong is about what was actually going on in the person’s head when they were defending themselves. If you took the swing voters’ concerns seriously (and I do), this is what you’d want to ask Mr. Ross:

• Walk me through what you observed in the seconds before you fired.

• At what point did you draw your weapon?

• What specifically made you believe you were in danger?

• What did you think would happen if you didn’t fire?

• How much time passed between when you perceived the threat and when you pulled the trigger?

• Did you consider moving out of the path of the vehicle? Why or why not?

• What does your training say about the use of force in this kind of situation?

• Did you follow that training?

The point is that Mr. Ross would have the opportunity, in his own words, to tell his side of the story. To show, not just assert, his fear through specific, granular testimony. This would be true even if it was in private to an agent and then later distilled through public reporting. That’s normal.

Then there’s the objective component: is this a fear that society is willing to recognize as reasonable?

If we changed the facts to say that Ms. Good was dressed like a clown and the ICE agent was just very afraid of clowns, we probably wouldn’t consider that an objectively reasonable fear deserving flexibility and potential justification. In contrast, if we change the facts so that Ms. Good pulls out a gun, points it at him, and says “I’m going to shoot you,” that’s almost comically within the bounds of a fear society would recognize. Most cases fall somewhere in between, which is precisely why we ask questions and weigh evidence.

This is also why Vice President Vance’s comments are so galling.

In an initial briefing, Vance said he doesn’t know “what is in a person’s heart or in a person’s head.” Fine. But in the same briefing, he called Renee Good a domestic terrorist. He said she’d been “brainwashed.” He accused her of being part of a network using “domestic terror techniques.”

Terrorism isn’t jaywalking. It requires intent, a specific mental state. You can’t claim you don’t know what’s in someone’s head and then, in the same breath, accuse them of a crime that is defined by what’s in their head. What Vance is doing is demanding we accept the officer’s subjective fear as valid while making sweeping claims about Good’s intent. And when anyone pushes back, he retreats to “Well, we can’t really know.” Vance is a Yale-trained lawyer. He knows exactly what he's doing. That's not intellectual humility; it's contradiction masquerading as humility.

It’s also the same move as refusing an investigation. If the government’s story is right, we accept it. If there’s doubt, well, we can never really know, so why look into it? Either way, no accountability.

I want to note one other thing. After Ross shot Good, after she was already dying, he muttered “fucking bitch.” The New York Times confirmed via voice analysis that it was him.

There are a few ways to interpret this. One is that it’s an expression of contempt for Good specifically, and for women generally. That it tells us something about how Ross saw her. I find this plausible, and if it’s true, it’s hard to separate from the broader hostility toward women this administration has displayed since January 20, 2025.

But there’s another interpretation. It could be an adrenaline dump, the verbal equivalent of “holy shit.” It could be Ross processing that he just killed someone, or that he believed he almost died. People say strange things under extreme stress, and not all of it is legible as literal meaning. Under this interpretation, the utterance tells us Ross is crude, maybe even a jerk, but not necessarily that misogyny drove his actions.

I don’t know which interpretation is right. That’s a question you’d want to ask him. What did you mean when you said that? What were you feeling in that moment? Was that directed at her, or was it just something that came out? His answer might be self-serving. It might be revealing. It might be both. But it’s a question, and right now, no one is allowed to ask it.

To people in my cohort who think I’m bending over backwards to accommodate an unreasonable point of view: I think those of us who agree on a particular story of events are right. That’s my bias, but that bias is borne of my ability to see events, listen to interviews, and use a couple of brain cells to reason what I find credible and what I find incredible. The swing voters don’t have that same confidence, and their skepticism is the appropriate response to an information vacuum.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: an investigation doesn’t necessarily lead to a jury trial, but let’s reason by analogy for a moment. We put juries together for a reason. We trust ordinary citizens, pulled from their lives with no particular expertise, to weigh evidence, assess credibility, and render judgment in life-and-death situations. We ask them to evaluate exactly the kinds of subjective questions I outlined above: Was the defendant actually afraid? Was that fear reasonable? Did he act proportionally?

The people in that focus group are those jurors. They’re the same people we’d trust to sit in a courtroom and decide whether a killing was justified. And right now, they’re telling us:

• We don’t have enough information to decide.

• We’re worried we’re being manipulated.

• We want to see the evidence.

And as much as I kind of hate to admit it: that’s not a failure of civic reasoning. That’s what civic reasoning looks like when it’s working! But it’s not being taken to it's logical conclusion, which is to insist on getting that information. I’m not sure why, but we, as a people, have become so coy in demanding information — and thus accountability — from the government, especially when the government comes in the form of law enforcement.

The government’s response to that — to citizens doing exactly what citizens are supposed to do — is to deny them the information they’d need to reach a conclusion. That’s not just obstruction; it’s contempt — contempt for the American people, disregard for our need to be informed, and distrust of our judgment. Underneath all of it, I think it is a fear of what accountability and candor might reveal.

This gets the relationship between citizen and government exactly backwards. The government reports to us. That’s the whole point. Every structure we have, from elections to juries to the First Amendment, is built around the idea that citizens need information to govern themselves, and that the government’s job is to provide it. The right to demand answers from your government isn’t some fringe procedural nicety. It’s the foundation!

What’s happening here is a usurpation of that relationship. And when I say contempt, I mean it in both senses: the emotional disdain, yes, but also the legal one. The government is in contempt of the public it serves.