Waco native, Baylor University class of ’03 alumna and Democracy Forward President and CEO Skye Perryman, 44, highlighted in Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People of 2025” and the Washington Post’s 50 Americans most shaping society in 2026, was back in her hometown of Waco on Feb. 28 to accept the Baylor Line Foundation’s “Distinguished Alumni Award” for her leadership in “confronting extremism, challenging anti-democratic movements and building a vibrant democracy for all people.” (Other Baylor alumni receiving honors included Chris Seay, pastor of Ecclesia, a holistic missional Christian community in Houston, and Daniel Vestal, director of the Eula Mae and John Baugh Center for Baptist Leadership at Mercer University and long engaged in Christian ministry.) Perryman returned to Waco on March 24 to speak at Baylor’s Whitten Endowed Lecture Series on the intersection of Christian faith and public policy. Democracy Forward’s forays in recent months offer sterling examples of its work and vigilance: legal inquiry into the $230 million in compensation sought by President Trump from his own Department of Justice for federal charges brought against him and dropped only because he was reelected president; a lawsuit challenging unlawful immigration detention practices that kept detained individuals, some of them U.S. citizens, from accessing legal counsel; and challenging the Trump administration’s freezing of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, threatening food access for more than 42 million people during the autumn 2025 government shutdown. This spring its efforts halted the administration’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate, among others, the president's supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and attacked law enforcement officers. Perryman hailed the district court’s shelving of the program as “a victory for transparency, the rule of law and the American people. No administration has the authority to spend public money through a political rewards program that Congress never authorized.” Last month Democracy Forward efforts prompted a federal judge to reverse a Trump executive order mandating that national parks remove exhibits discussing the history of slavery, civil rights, the treatment of Indigenous peoples, climate science and other core elements of the American experience. Plaintiffs included the National Parks Conservation Association, the American Association for State and Local History and the Association of National Park Rangers. Democracy Forward is also fighting construction of the border wall in the remote, hostile Big Bend region that would “leave the region vulnerable to deadly flash floods capable of destroying infrastructure, homes, farmland and agriculture.”
Upon receiving her law degree with honors from Georgetown
University Law Center, Perryman began her career at Covington & Burling and
WilmerHale, high-profile law firms in Washington, D.C., that, notably, refused
to buckle under punitive actions by President Trump in targeting law firms that
displeased him. She focused her work on health care, financial services,
education and consumer products while maintaining an active pro bono practice.
Before assuming the top post at Democracy Forward in summer 2021, she worked
with its founding legal team and served as a general counsel of the American
College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the largest physician association
in the United States dedicated to the health of women. Democracy Forward, a
nonpartisan legal organization “committed to achieving a nation and a democracy
that enables all people living in America to thrive,” formed in the wake of the
2016 election once it became clear “the number and severity of threats to
democracy, social progress and the rule of law would be unprecedented.”
Democracy Forward has a staff approaching 200 with more than 85 lawyers. “The
lawyers are amazing,” Perryman says, “but their work would not be as impactful
without the rest of our staff.” Married to high school sweetheart and
fellow Baylor alumnus Cole Bucy (with whom she has a son), Perryman lists as
strong influences on her outlook and work former Congressman Chet Edwards of
Waco (who influenced her on the importance of the First Amendment and constitutionally
grounded church-state separation), Baylor philosophy professor emeritus Robert
Baird (the relevance of knowledge and importance of humility when seeking
knowledge) and her parents, including Texas economist and Waco Tribune-Herald
columnist Ray Perryman (the importance of reducing complicated problems to
fundamental components in order to solve them). Her book, “Ordinary People,
Extraordinary Times: How to Reclaim Your Power, Fight for Freedom and Reimagine
Democracy,” is due for release in August.
Q The Atlantic magazine describes
Democracy Forward as “the single largest source of Trump’s legal problems.” In
surveying the breadth of cases filed, I can believe it. I understand Democracy Forward
formed after the 2016 presidential election. Many mistakenly assumed that while
Trump was certainly an off-the-rails presidential candidate, he would settle
down to some conventionality and be guided by wise counsel from Cabinet
secretaries and astute legal advisers and congressional wisdom. The folks at
Democracy Forward knew better. You were a litigator with Democracy Forward in
those early days.
A In the presidential election of
2016, the majority of Americans who were voting voted for Secretary Hillary
Clinton. President Trump wasn’t happy he won the Electoral College but lost the
popular vote [by nearly 3 million votes], so he immediately – right after the
election – began casting doubt on the vote count and started suggesting there
was fraud, and that it wasn’t fraud by people who looked like him, it was fraud
he alleged was committed by people of color, people in communities he didn’t
like. And then he didn’t like the crowd estimates at his 2017 inauguration. He
got into disputes with journalists – at the time the press pool was more
diverse than it is now – over things that are verifiable like crowd size. What
we know about unbridled power is it doesn’t like a check, and the checks in our
system of government include Congress, the courts and public opinion. But
another of those checks is reality – facts and science and evidence,
things that can be verified. Reality is a threat to people who want to deny
truth.
Q Yes, President Trump in 2017
formed a commission under Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to find this
widespread voter fraud in the 2016 popular vote count. In closing down a year
later, it acknowledged finding no evidence of such fraud.
A Yes, that commission was disbanded
in the wake of litigation revealing there was no fraud. That was my first case
against the first Trump administration. Part of the work of Democracy Forward
in those early days was to understand the extent to which the Trump
administration was operating in a new way – outside the bounds of what we had
seen with other presidents. There were concerns, for instance, that ended up
verified by reports put out by a U.S. Senate controlled by Republicans
about foreign interference in elections that benefited President Trump.
Q I believe there were several sets of
reports by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee highlighting
Russian interference in the 2016 election. I read some of it back then.
A Exactly. So what is going on is, all of a sudden, you have a president challenging reality on his first day [regarding inauguration crowd size]. Why does he do this? He wants to test the loyalty of those around him. That’s classic anti-democratic autocratic behavior. It’s something we know from other nations and movements. We know it can break down the democratic safeguards in a nation. Remember the story of the emperor who has no clothes? He parades around saying he’s wearing a beautiful gilded suit and the people are afraid to tell him the truth and reality: He wasn’t wearing any clothes. Democracy Forward came on the scene to bring the expertise of litigators to address this new era of American life. Part of the new era was how Trump sought to weaponize the power of government against people whom he does not like. These types of challenges involve areas of law that extend beyond constitutional law and there was new legal expertise needed to be able to defend people and their rights. Democracy Forward understood these threats and saw these trends back in 2017 and built a team of lawyers who had either been in corporate legal practices that have to move fast and litigate complex cases or had been in positions of government and knew better the mechanics of government, an expertise that did not exist at scale in traditional public-interest organizations.
Q I understand the January 6 violence at
the U.S. Capitol was particularly formative on you.
A I think it was a formative event
for many people in our country. It certainly didn’t seem as formative for the
majority of Congress, which never passed comprehensive legislation to prevent
something like that from happening again. But for me, it was significant.
January 6 showed what we know from people who study history. We know that
attacks on democracy aren’t about one election cycle. They’ve been here since
the founding of the nation – the institution of human enslavement, the
suppression of people’s rights – those threats to the reality of democracy were
here. This has always been a country that has had to work toward
achieving true democracy, which we’ve never really had. But there has been,
over the course of decades, a real backlash against the progress the nation realized
in our civil rights movements. We’ve seen that extremism rise here in Central
Texas, of course, and that piece in my background places me on high alert. So
when January 6 unfolded – an attempt to disrupt the peaceful transition of
presidential power – that’s really a five-alarm fire for our democracy and an indication
that our crisis was not going to be solved quickly.
Q Republican block walkers at my
front door have insisted up and down that the January 6 violence was all a false-flag
operation or provoked by the cops. I spent eight solid hours talking to these
people during the March 25, 2023, Trump campaign rally here in Waco. Is there
any hope for these people? I mean, right now some of them argue that, because
Trump got 77 million votes in the 2024 election, he should be able to supersede
the will of Congress whose members garner but a fraction of that, or the
federal courts, whose jurists are appointed, not elected.
A One good question for us to ask: Is there hope for the majority of Americans who in the last election didn’t vote for any candidate? I mean, there’s more people who didn’t vote at all [87 million] than voted for either Donald Trump [77.3 million] or Kamala Harris [75 million]. I think that is a relevant question we need to wrestle with: What is it about the democracy that existed prior to this election that led people not to invest and participate in it? The answer may well be that democracy as we had it wasn’t delivering for people. We have a minimum wage in Texas of $7.25 an hour – working people cannot come close to making ends meet. We have to be realistic about the world we live in and the failures of the system we’ve had, the failures of the leadership – even well-intended leadership.
So the question I’m focused on: Is there hope for those people who didn’t vote? How do we instill hope? Because democracies can’t sustain if people aren’t willing to defend them. Democracy is advanced citizenship. We have in the nation right now people who, perhaps for very good reasons, do not believe that one of the top things to do is become civically engaged. I do have hope that we, the people, can build something that the vast majority of people will invest in. But it will have to be different from what we’ve had.
On the point of our fellow people who are very deep into the MAGA movement, I testified on the fifth anniversary of January 6 alongside Pamela Hemphill who was a MAGA rioter on January 6, 2021, was convicted [and spent two months in prison] and later refused the president’s Jan. 20, 2025, pardon [because she didn’t want to, in her words, “become a part of their narrative”]. She is telling her story and shows us that change is possible. I write about this in my upcoming book.
Q She was a grandmother, wasn’t she?
A Yeah, they called her the “MAGA
Granny.” It’s unclear when you read the public reporting on all the things that
led [to her involvement in Make America Great Again and the J6 riot], but she
concluded, after January 6, that MAGA was really a kind of cult. That’s her
word, not mine. Part of the reason was the people around her were seeking to
belong to something and started believing in the movement as a way to find belonging.
[NOTE: In her Jan. 6, 2026, testimony, Hemphill told lawmakers: “Five years
ago, I traveled from Idaho to D.C. to see Donald Trump speak. I had fallen for
the president’s lies, just like many of his supporters. Local people had
welcomed me into their circle, and when I was around them, I heard them say
things like ‘the Democrats are trying to turn this into a Communist country’ or
‘the Radical Left wants to do away with the Constitution.’ That gaslighting
caused a lot of fear and I was scared.”] Is there hope for people who seem to
be parting with reality? I will always have hope that we can come
together. There’s a chapter in my book dealing with how we do this. You
can set boundaries. You don’t have to spend time with people who want to deny
your very existence or your loved ones’ existence and just aren’t going to be
reasoned with. But we can soften our hearts and at least try to understand them
and be curious about what led them to this place [of parting with reality and
reason]. But, as I said, to me, the much more important question is: What do we
do to engage people who in some way opted out of the system [through not
voting] because it wasn’t delivering for them? What is a democracy if it’s not serving
people? We don’t need to be sanctimonious about the word. What is it? What can
we do in this moment to try to bring people in? That is the larger thing that
keeps me up at night. [NOTE: Excerpt from Perryman’s Jan. 6, 2026,
congressional testimony: “Congress must do its part – to assert its check on
the president’s excesses, to defend the American people from the autocratic
steps we are seeing and to protect the right of the people to vote. The people
must keep showing up too, as we will in courts and communities across the
nation. We must fight and overcome those threats to our democracy that we saw
in all their ugliness five years ago today in this very building.”]
Q The MAGA movement seems fueled by
resentment and grievance more than optimism, consensus and constructive
dialogue. Your organization came out with its State of Democracy report the
same day the president gave his polarizing 2026 State of the Union address.
It’s a great chronology of all we’ve witnessed in the first year of Trump 2.0.
But what impressed me is that, under each category, your report showed ways that
Americans can resist by tapping remaining institutions of democracy. I know
civic-minded Wacoans who write letters to the editor of the local newspaper on grassroots
democracy and constitutional vigilance. In nearby Hillsboro, I met a woman training
to be a volunteer deputy registrar to get more people registered to vote. A few
hundred good-hearted folks in Waco run the Heart of Texas Network for Immigrant
Rights, co-founded by religious scholar Blake Burleson, to help area immigrants
in need. One of your mentors, Chet Edwards, though no longer serving in
Congress, speaks to groups ranging from church assemblies to Baylor Law School
students on everything from the importance of separation of church and state to
daily applications of the idealism and mutual respect imbuing the Declaration
of Independence. Are you confident these levers of democracy are sufficient to
prevent the United States from ending up like, say, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary did
for nearly a generation?
A I think this is the most significant year since 1863 and the Battle of Gettysburg. The answer to that question: It’s entirely up to us as people – not just the lawyers or politicians or media consultants or direct-mail messaging campaigns. It’s going to rely on ordinary people. And it’s going to rely on ordinary people who look at what is happening and say, “This is not where I want to be, this is not what I want my future to be,” and find a way to do what they can in this moment. I do have ultimate faith that people using the levers in our system can make a big dent against this accelerating democratic backsliding and can turn this around. That’s a piece of it. But it is not going to be about the strength of one lever or one institution. It’s going to be about people who become willing to use the things that are available to them.
Q But how do you do that? I run into a
lot of people and talk to a lot of people about these things. Many don’t read
newspapers anymore, they don’t watch the TV news anymore. And, frankly, a lot of
the news media now are no longer what they used to be in terms of watchdog
reporting and robust editorial perspective. Consider the Washington Post and
CBS News. Edward R. Murrow must be spinning in his grave right now.
A Let’s take a step back and remember our history. A lot of people believed, as late as the 1920s and ’30s, that Black people were not human. So this is not the first time people in this nation have dealt with huge systemic, almost insurmountable obstacles. I think the solution is a combination of the humanity that people can find in each other when they are proximate to one another plus a commitment to what this country says its values are – those do mean something. Promises in America’s Declaration of Independence were hollow when they were first made [referring to Jefferson’s aspirational passage “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”]. But we were the first country in the world to be founded on ideas. And yet at the same time, there were enslaved people who were terrorized after independence was declared. They didn’t get their freedom. No woman had the right to vote. Yet even against those odds, they continued to believe and fight for their freedom. So I understand the odds now are very long, but to think that in this moment we’re confronting insurmountable odds that people in this country haven’t confronted before and that people across the globe haven’t had to confront denies our history. I just refuse to believe that this extraordinary time isn’t one that ordinary people can meet. It is an extraordinary time but we have faced insurmountable barriers before. And it has been ordinary people who have been a key to meeting the moment in those times.
Q I came up to you at the 2025
Baylor Line Foundation dinner and congratulated you on the work that Democracy
Forward was doing. I said I hoped your organization could sustain it. And you
said, “I think the federal judiciary will rise to the challenge, but they’re
going to need help, that at least one of the two chambers of the legislative
branch must change hands in 2026.” Do you still feel this way?
A The federal judiciary, which is
bigger than just the U.S. Supreme Court, has reminded people what it means to
have courts that protect our rights. We have won a number of court orders in
cases where we were opposing the harmful policies of the Trump-Vance
administration – and we have won before all types of judges, including those
appointed by President Trump. We have seen the judiciary step in, even in the
midst of great threats that have been made to judges and their families. So
far, the judges are not intimidated by those threats and continue to do the
work they need to do. I always firmly believed that if people can get access to
the courts – and we represent all of our clients on a pro bono basis so
they can access the courts – we could meet the “shock and awe” with the
people’s response, which is what we’ve done with our hundreds of cases and
through our Democracy 2025 initiative, which is coordinating hundreds of
organizations in doing this work. [NOTE: The Democracy 2025 initiative,
involving multiple organizations, is “committed to defending our freedoms and
our democracy in the face of the profound threat that is the Trump
administration.”]
To me, the power of the courts is the power of people
because in this country we do have the ability, at this point, to initiate
litigation against our government to say, “We have a constitution, and, if the
government violates our rights – even a government that was elected – we do have
a remedy.” So I stand by what I said last year: the federal judiciary has been
a backstop. We have taken court action to save critical community programs like
Meals on Wheels and programs for survivors of domestic and sexual violence,
through blocking the president’s attempt to freeze all federal funds. There
have been many more grave threats since we saw each other last year. If I’m not
mistaken, that Baylor Line Foundation event was before J.G.G. v. Donald
J. Trump and before the violent ICE surges in Minneapolis. [NOTE: This
explosive March 15, 2025, habeas corpus lawsuit, filed by the ACLU and
Democracy Forward, involved Venezuelan immigrants and the legality of President
Trump’s invocation of a centuries-old wartime act in peacetime to spur mass
deportations.] There have been a lot of sustained threats, and the federal
judges are doing what we need them to do and the people are meeting the moment
too.
Q I tell folks if they really
want to know constitutional law, don’t look to the Supreme Court of the United
States, look to federal district judges laboring away, unknown to the masses. I
mean, the Supreme Court won plaudits on Feb. 20 for striking down President
Trump’s imposition of global tariffs without proper congressional
authorization. Justice Gorsuch gave the president and Republicans a grand
Civics 101 lesson on the Declaration of Independence and kings. Yet a few days
later, the same court wildly misinterpreted a federal law protecting the U.S.
Postal Service from lawsuits over accidentally lost or miscarried mail. It
contorted that law to bar lawsuits over mail that is intentionally misdelivered!
A The Supreme Court, certainly for a few decades last century – say, beginning with Brown v. Board of Education [a landmark 1954 ruling that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional] and continuing with Miranda v. Arizona [the right to be informed of constitutional rights upon arrest and interrogation], Griswold v. Connecticut [the right of married couples to use contraceptives without government restriction], Loving v. Virginia [the right of marriage between whites and African Americans], Roe v. Wade [the right to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction] – was an institution interpreting the Constitution in a way to affirm the rights of the people, to expand rights recognized by courts of the past. Yet, those few decades [the 1950s through 1970s or so] were an exception to the way the court had generally operated and we have seen only a smattering of such wins since this, such as maybe Obergefell v. Hodges and Barnes v. Felix last term. [NOTE: In the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges case, the high court ruled the fundamental right to marry was guaranteed to same-sex couples by the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. McLennan County Justice of the Peace Dianne Hensley has since pressed federal courts to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges on the grounds the high court subordinated state law “to the policy preferences of unelected judges.” The Barnes v. Felix ruling by a unanimous Supreme Court last year held the Fourth Amendment prevented “excessive force” by peace officers.] My point: If you look throughout our history, the U.S. Supreme Court has not been a consistent arbiter of constitutional protection – think of Dred Scott v. Sandford [U.S. citizenship and constitutional rights cannot be extended to people of black African descent], Plessy v. Ferguson [allowing racial segregation laws], Korematsu v. United States [forcible incarceration and internment of Japanese Americans during World War II], Lochner v. New York [striking down laws carving out worker rights]. And so people concerned about the Supreme Court are right to be concerned but we should remember that these concerns are not new. The court as an institution hasn’t found justice on its own. It is up to the people to guide the way.
Q That’s why I find more constitutional gravity and fidelity in most district courts. After the Supreme Court gets done with the law, it can be a pretty misshapen thing alongside tradition, legal precedent and the U.S. Constitution.
A District
courts are courts that are closer to the experiences of people. And you have
seen the district courts consistently strike down much of what the Trump-Vance
administration has done to violate the rights of people. Local courts are often
more trusted. You can find this in Pew Research and other surveys. Typically
the courts are the most trusted branch of government. And what we’ve seen in
the last few years is that the Supreme Court’s rating is at a historic low.
[NOTE: A Pew Research Center survey found the high court’s favorable rating in
2025 was 22 percentage points lower than in August 2020.] People still
actually trust their local courts relative to other branches of government and
the courts generally are still the most trusted branch of government. But
there’s been a nosedive of support for the Supreme Court and that has to be
addressed.
A court like the U.S. Supreme Court may seem anti-democratic in that its members are not elected. At their best, the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts derive their legitimacy in a democracy when they operate to protect people’s rights and our democratic institutions – that is what the Constitution contemplates. The Constitution understands that the court is necessary to ensure that the rights granted to people in the Constitution are not overridden by the majority or based on political whims. When the court serves that function – as we saw it do in Brown v. Board of Education or as it does when it protects due process rights or birthright citizenship for people when a president tries to erase them – it is fulfilling its role in protecting our rights and ensuring our democracy is not restricted to just benefiting some. That is when the court is at its best.
One reason we have such high expectations of the Supreme Court is because of the generations we grew up in when, in fact, that's what the high court was doing – actually protecting our rights and ensuring democracy was not restricted to just benefiting some. It’s what we saw of the court in what we learned in school, what the court was doing in prior generations. But when the court is not protecting democratic institutions or protecting people who get left out of the political process because of systemic barriers to that process, it faces a massive legitimacy crisis. When the U.S. Supreme Court fails in protecting people’s rights and our democratic institutions, it faces a legitimacy crisis – it becomes just an unelected body that is exerting power. The court also faces a legitimacy crisis when it operates in secret and fails to explain its decisions. The U.S. Supreme Court has been doing that at an increasing rate with the use of its emergency docket or so-called “shadow docket” and this leads to a decline in trust. Your rights may be taken away by the court and the court then fails to explain itself – that’s a real problem in a democracy and needs to be addressed.
Q Are you talking about reforms?
A I
certainly believe the Constitution permits a range of reforms and one thing
that we, the people, must do in the next governing moment is to insist on more
transparency and accountability from the Supreme Court. The court does not have
an enforceable code of ethics. That needs to change, as merely one example.
Q Many of us who follow the courts
are astonished at the flagrant lawlessness manifesting itself in the Trump
administration. We see this in everything from the president’s willy-nilly imposing
global tariffs without congressional approval, to the employment of
“administrative warrants” rather than legitimate judicial warrants to arrest
and detain immigrants legal and illegal as well as U.S. citizens, to federal
judges expressing anger nationwide that their orders are ignored or defied by
the Trump administration, to the president and his attorney general ignoring a
vote by Congress for prompt and proper release of the so-called “Epstein
files.” Is what we now behold since Inauguration Day 2025 worse
than you imagined or right about where you and Democracy Forward colleagues figured
we would be?
A We did believe it was going to be this way and we knew the president would immediately lose support when people saw what he actually was going to do. Indeed, the main reason we’ve been able to get into court so quickly is we started working in late 2023 to understand what would happen if the federal landscape regressed and to be able to make sure people could respond. In 2021, the United States was added to a list of global backsliding democracies [by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, partially due to “the inability of the U.S. Congress to check the executive or investigate the actions” of President Trump]. It’s remained on that list every year since. The crisis in our democracy did not start on Inauguration Day 2025 but the backsliding started rapidly accelerating. And what I know, from growing up in a place that became very influenced by far-right movements, is that when these movements tell you what they are going to do, you need to believe them. And while we hoped the preparations we made then would be unnecessary because the country wouldn’t have actually faced this crisis, we knew there was no other option but to be prepared. Without the cases we prepared and the legal groups with which we coordinated and organized, there wouldn’t have been pushback in the early days [of the second Trump presidency] when the administration from Day One started to take “shock-and-awe” actions that harmed people. The administration was shocked we got into court so quickly. They didn’t anticipate that some of their efforts got blocked.
In the early days of the administration, the president hired
the architects of Project 2025 and the White House issued a memo saying it was
going to cut off funding across the nation. We got into court within hours and
blocked that funding and essential services freeze. The first White House press
conference, you’ll remember, was a complete disaster because the administration
was forced to stand before the American people and explain why [the White House
Office of Management and Budget] would be cutting off essential services across
the country, including rural and red communities which use those services more
– everything from Meals on Wheels to Head Start to small-business credits, all
of it. There had been panic across the country. And our ability to get into
court demonstrated to people that they still had some power. The same thing
happened with the cases state attorneys general and the ACLU brought to defend
birthright citizenship [in the Fourteenth Amendment]. Within hours of the
president issuing an executive order to strike down birthright citizenship,
because lawyers went to court, right out of the gate, a Reagan-appointed judge
[U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour] ruled: “It has become ever more
apparent that, to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his
policy goals. The rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate
around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain.
Nevertheless, in this courtroom and under my watch, the rule of law is a bright
beacon which I intend to follow.”
Q I remember President Trump
issued his executive order striking birthright citizenship from the Fourteenth
Amendment to the Constitution on his first day back in office. [NOTE: Famed Yale-based
legal scholar Akhil Reed Amar, arguably the nation’s foremost expert on the
U.S. Constitution and an occasional guest lecturer at Baylor Law School, argued in a Feb. 23 amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court that Trump’s executive order “defies the plain letter and spirit of the Fourteenth
Amendment’s first sentence, one of the crown jewels of our Constitution. In
lieu of the Constitution’s grand guarantee of equal birthright citizenship,
E.O. 14160 substitutes ad hoc rules pulled out of thin air. Constitutional
birthright citizens are citizens because of where they are born,
not to whom they are born. The amendment is geographic,
guaranteeing equal citizenship to those born on American soil and ‘under the
flag,’ as countless Reconstruction Republicans, led by once and future
vice presidents Hannibal Hamlin and Schuyler Colfax, put the point time and
again in the amendment’s drafting and ratification process. These
touchstones – the soil and the flag – cleanly explain both
the scope and the limits of the Constitution’s grand birthright-citizenship
guarantee. When a baby is born in America and an American flag flies above
the cradle, that baby is a birthright citizen. All major Republican
leaders who carried the banner of President Abraham Lincoln during his tenure
and after his death –including Hamlin, Colfax, Edward Bates, Salmon P.
Chase and William Seward – shared this vision.”]
A Yes – and at a time when people are scared and you have a person in the White House and a movement behind him that do not want the nation to believe anyone different from them has any power to stop it. It’s like some of the people you’ve talked with who believe that because the president won the election, that president then gets to run roughshod over your constitutional rights. That’s not how our country works. Our Constitution provides the guarantee of your rights – even when someone elected by the people violates them. We had to be ready and we had to be able to meet the speed at which these things might occur, and we did. But it took over a year of preparation. We were very clear-eyed about what we would see and we’re still working now on things the president hasn’t done yet but said he was going to do that are harmful to people. We’re watching how the president evolves in his long-term strategy.
[NOTE: In something of a shock to even veteran Supreme Court observers, the court on June 30 only narrowly ruled against President Trump's 2025 executive order neutering birthright citizenship – the guarantee of citizenship to almost anyone born in the United States. "Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are 'subject to the jurisdiction' of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority; Justice Samuel Alito, among the dissenters, described the ruling as "a serious mistake." In a June 30 statement, Perryman praised the majority's decision while acknowleding cause for concern in the number of justices dissenting: “The majority of the Supreme Court rightly reaffirmed one of the Constitution’s clearest and most enduring promises: If you are born in the United States, you are a citizen. Congratulations to the ACLU and its legal director Cecillia Wang, who argued this case with grace and determination. For more than 150 years, the Fourteenth Amendment has guaranteed that citizenship is not determined by politics or cannot be stripped away at the whim of those in power. This decision makes clear that no president has the authority to rewrite the Constitution through executive action or deny people rights that the Constitution guarantees. At a time when fundamental freedoms and democratic principles continue to face unprecedented attacks, this ruling reaffirms that the rule of law still governs our nation. Every child born in this country deserves the certainty, dignity and equal protection that citizenship provides, and today’s decision preserves that constitutional promise for generations to come. While birthright citizenship was reaffirmed, four justices ruled that it was not required by the Constitution and three ruled against it altogether. This shows you what the American people are up against – and there are many other rights we are still fighting to safeguard.”]
Q During a Baylor Homecoming
address you gave to Baylor Interdisciplinary Core students on Oct. 31, 2025,
you stressed the importance of embracing Socrates’ much-praised “examined
life.” Yet today in higher education, we witness rancor even over Plato. I
guess you’ve heard about the flap at Texas A&M, which admittedly is more
nuanced than some people grasp. You talked to Baylor students about the
importance of critical thinking. What did you personally get out of the
celebrated Baylor Interdisciplinary Core program as a student?
A Well, there’s so much, especially
given the people who have taught there such as philosophy professors Bob Baird
and Lenore Wright. The curriculum tries to take disciplines and lessons we can
learn in context. How do you read and understand a text such as the Declaration
of Independence without fully understanding its history? How do you understand
a piece of art like Picasso’s “Guernica” if you don’t understand what was
happening in the Spanish Civil War when he painted it? So, for me, it was very
helpful to get a broader view. It’s a view that reinforces our humility as
people. All of the challenges we face now are things that people in the past
have also dealt with and they’re trying to make sense of it with the tools they
have. People here who believe misinformation and disinformation – say, our MAGA
fellow citizens – you can criticize them or you can be curious about what led
to their commitment to that movement. I learned early on that it is much better
to approach people and circumnutates that you don’t understand with a curiosity
and humility and to try to find context than to just make rash assumptions. Those
insights are helpful in my present work.
An incredible part of the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core are
the professors who teach in the program. The professors actually sign up to
teach things they have some expertise in but are not their primary areas of
focus. In doing this, they are modeling curiosity, saying, “I can learn
something, too. I can teach alongside another professor who might have a
completely different expertise than me and we can be on this journey together.”
So the method was important and, of course, the ideas and the text. I talked in
that Oct. 31 speech about Socrates but also Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the
civil rights movement and what that meant. What did King mean in his 1963
“Letter from Birmingham Jail” [about what citizens can do to test unjust laws]
and what are those references that he’s drawing upon as he tries to describe
not just the fight for freedom – that’s how people like to view it – but also
the apathy of white Christian people who said they knew and in theory affirmed
the value of all people but thought he was a little extreme in his marches and
his demands? So those types of pieces have really shown how people have
persisted and overcome. Many of these were core texts in the Baylor
Interdisciplinary Core.
Q I was impressed but
challenged by Lenore Wright’s introduction before your address on how students
in the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core “would struggle with Aeneas on his
journey, weep with Rama in exile, laugh with the irrepressible Monkey King as
he marked the farthest Column of the Universe and learn to embrace ‘the other’
across the boundaries of time and culture.” OK. Just how do these particular
works help you understand what we face at this perilous moment in America?
A I’ll just
talk about Aeneas and the story of the founding of Rome with its references to
the democratic tradition. We could put it alongside Dr. King’s Birmingham
letter and Plato’s “Apology” about Socrates [and the latter’s dialogue with his
accusers in an Athenian court], which we read at Baylor. These stories are
about insurmountable barriers that people or gods or whoever is in the telling
– and in “The Aeneid,” it’s humans and gods, Juno in that work famously
says, “If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell” – to me, these texts are
about what you do when things seem insurmountable. One of the lessons in the
story [of Aeneas] is you don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but the way you
achieve the work you’re here to do as a human and, in a way, achieve immortality
is to strive and have courage even against long odds. There are two passages
from “The Aeneid” I have from a list of reflections I generally review each
day. One: “But to lengthen out one’s fame with action, that’s the work of
courage.” Note the word “fame” in the translation means immortality, not fame
as we know it. The other: “Blessings on your young courage, boy; that’s the way
to the stars.”
I gave a speech [Feb. 26 in Arlington, Texas] to a group of Baptists at the T.B. Maston Foundation. They asked me to speak about my faith journey and how it has impacted my work. And one of the things that has recently occurred to me is how the stories of my faith tradition [Christian, Baptist] exemplify what courage means. Think about the story of David and Goliath, which we read in the Baylor program as well. In that story, we’re reminded that when God wants to make David a king, he doesn’t send him a crown, he instead sends a challenge in the form of Goliath. This demonstrates that when we face our threats head-on with what we have – in David’s case, a mere sling shot – and when we have the courage to stare our challenges in the face without blinking, we can prevail, no matter the odds. Wherever these stories appear, whether in the Hebrew text, whether in Greek and Roman text, whether in Western text, you see that struggle for courage. The Baylor Interdisciplinary Core does a good job of linking these pieces of literature today. What does Aeneas’ journey have to do with Dr. King in the basement of the Birmingham city jail? They face seemingly insurmountable obstacles and don’t know how matters are going to turn out. But they do what they need to do anyway. The outcome wasn’t necessarily going to be controlled by them, but they still found some way to persist and they found courage.
Q There was some humor in the fact that legal scholar Ben Johnson, the person tapped to personally introduce you during the Feb. 28, 2026, Baylor Line Foundation banquet honoring you, while a longtime friend from your Baylor undergraduate days, nonetheless has very different political sentiments than you. Was he the best person to introduce you in receiving the Distinguished Alumni Award?
A What is
life if we don't have friends who are different than us? Ben, who is a law
professor in Florida, has been a friend of mine since we were in preschool
together in Waco. I was in his wedding and he and my husband have an ongoing
banter about Baylor football. The fact that he and I have always had
differing political views doesn't change our friendship. Ben's support for my
work defending people, the Constitution and the rule of law has been especially
meaningful given his political leanings. It shows us that this is a time that
transcends politics; it is about whether you support our nation's 250-year-old
democratic experiment and basic constitutional rights or you don't. And
friendships are also beyond politics. Frankly, I encourage everyone to have
friendships with people who hold differing viewpoints.
Q While I haven't
always agreed with some of its past statements and actions, I've
long viewed the Baylor Line Foundation – the old Baylor Alumni Association – as
more properly representing Jefferson's famous New Year's Day 1802 letter to the
Danbury Baptists stressing the absolute importance in a democracy of "a
wall of separation between church and state" and praising the old-time
Baptist religion as "a matter which lies solely between man and his
God." A few weeks ago, we saw another example of faith leaders, including
a noted Baptist pastor in Waco who once served on the Baylor University board
of regents, laying hands in prayer on President Trump in the Oval Office and
investing God's blessing and wisdom upon him. Does this violate Jefferson's
insights from 1802 or is this all fine and good in the American tradition? Shortly after
this, I received an email from President Trump claiming "Democrats
hate America" which, as an old-time Republican, I know is an absolute
falsehood.
A The president
and the political movement that led to his rise to power have weakened the
wall between church and state – but erosions of that wall have occurred for
some time, especially here in Texas. We see this play out in a number of
respects and our team at Democracy Forward is challenging the president's
so-called Religious Liberty Commission, which is not about religious liberty
but fails to include a diversity of faiths. We have also won court orders on
behalf of houses of worship, including the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and
the Alliance of Baptists, that sued to protect them from ICE conducting surge
operations in ways that threaten communal worship. The separation of
church and state – the fact the U.S. Constitution prohibits the
establishment of a national religion – is critical to our freedom and our
democracy. Using religion to subvert people's freedom is concerning and
represents a slippery slope that every American should be concerned about.
Currently, this is playing out in the government's efforts to impose a version
of Christianity on people in the nation. As a practicing Christian and
Baptist, I believe it is incumbent upon people like myself to oppose efforts to
misuse religion and weaken the wall between church and state. This is one of
the things that former Congressman Chet Edwards taught me early in my career. I
am really proud of the team at Democracy Forward for pursuing cases that affirm
true religious liberty and oppose the misuse of religion by those in power. I
am grateful for organizations like the Interfaith Alliance, where I serve as an
executive committee member of their board, and the BJC, formerly the Baptist
Joint Committee on Religious Liberty, who advocate for these values every day.
[NOTE: Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who chairs the Religious
Liberty Commission, mostly drawn from the ranks of President Trump’s right-wing
Christian supporters, declared in April the U.S. Constitution does not
mandate separation between church and state. Earlier this year, Democracy
Forward and Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed a lawsuit
on behalf of Interfaith Alliance, Muslims for Progressive Values, the Sikh
American Legal Defense and Education Fund and Hindus for Human Rights
challenging the commission’s creation, highlighting alleged violations of the
Federal Advisory Committee Act and the “unbalanced and biased viewpoints
assembled” on the panel. “The government has no right to pick and choose which
religious beliefs to promote and which to marginalize,” said Rev. Paul Brandeis
Raushenbush, President and CEO of Interfaith Alliance. “We won’t let them get
away with secret witch-hunts hidden from the public eye – or with claiming to
champion religious liberty while in truth they undermine it at every turn.”
Perryman’s observation on Feb. 9: “Since the nation’s founding, the values of
religious liberty and pluralism have been central to the American identity.
These values are now under accelerated attack. The Trump-Vance administration’s
Religious Liberty Commission is not about religious liberty, it is about
pursuing a culture of Christian Nationalism that seeks to divide and isolate
people across our nation.”]
Q Part of
Democracy Forward's success in promptly and smartly filing lawsuits against the
administration's excesses involves strategically anticipating what the Trump
administration is planning next. Do you foresee the Trump administration
seeking to cite some emergency and then nationally hijacking and federalizing state-run midterm elections this year?
A The president
has already tried to federalize elections through early executive orders that
have largely been struck down by courts. He also sought to deploy the National
Guard in many states citing emergencies and the Supreme Court upheld a lower
court's decision that found what he had done unlawful. The National Guard still
is occupying Washington, D.C., where my husband and I live and raise our son.
The Constitution does not allow the president to have control or influence in
the way elections are run. That is left to the states and Congress. We are
preparing to confront these threats in court should the president continue
to try to federalize elections and it will be important that people engage too.
One of the reasons that I wrote my book is to
provide ways people can engage to protect their rights and help advance our
democracy in their local communities.
[NOTE: Of the Supreme Court’s April 29 decision arguably gutting
the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and setting off a wave of redistricting efforts
across the South, Perryman observed in an official statement: “This decision
will open the door to anti-democratic suppression of the right to vote, making
it easier for a revival of Jim Crow tactics and diluting the power of voters of
color. While this is a sad day for our democracy and fair representation in
America, the path forward is clear: We must recommit to protecting and
exercising our right to vote and to using our voices to oppose extreme power
grabs of state and federal governments that seek to subvert the voices and
votes of the people. We must hold those in power who have – for too long – opposed or delayed progress toward more comprehensive voting protections to
account.”]
Interview
conducted, condensed and edited for clarity by retired Waco
Tribune-Herald opinion editor Bill Whitaker. A more concise version of this Q&A was published July 2 in the Waco Tribune-Herald.
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