Finally Friday Reads: Will no one rid us of this Turbulent Pest?

Posted: May 16, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: "presidential immunity", #FARTUS, #MAGAnomics, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, democracy is threatened, Democratic Backsliding, kakistocracy, Polycrisis | Tags: , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

“True,” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

It’s not often I quote the Daily Mail, but it has that British humor touch that just puts the right tone on what should be a Monty Python Sketch. I used to have an apron that said, “Who invited all these tacky people?” Well, it’s Yam Tits and all those Republican Senators that approved the cast of this freak show. Every headline these days about the Regime of Orange Caligula and his cabinet of crazies is outrageous and depressing. Today, we’ll discover both categories.  And, btw, I send apologies out to Henry II for messing with his lament. We’ve become the worst caricature of ourselves.

“ICE Barbie Kristi Noem is backing insane reality TV show where immigrants compete for fast-tracked citizenship.”  Doesn’t that just have that perfect mixture of cruelty, inhumanity, and pathos that makes the news cringeworthy these days?

She’s been called ‘ICE Barbie’ for treating her Cabinet position like a TV production, but now Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is pushing for an actual reality show pitting immigrants against each other ‘for the honor of fast-tracking their way to U.S. citizenship’.

It may sound like a joke, but the idea is for real and is outlined in a 35-page program pitch put together in coordination with the DHS secretary, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal.

Noem is even offering up officials from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to tally votes for the made-for-TV contest.

The pitch comes from Rob Worsoff, a writer and producer known for Duck Dynasty, the A&E reality show about a Louisiana family and its hunting empire, and Bravo’s Millionaire Matchmaker.

The proposed series is called The American, named after the train that contestants would ride around the country, competing in regionally specific ‘cultural’ contests such as rolling logs in Wisconsin.

It would lead to a grand finale with the winner getting sworn in on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.

‘Along the way, we will be reminded what it means to be American – through the eyes of the people who want it most,’ reads Worsoff’s pitch.

Worsoff – who himself was born in Canada – said: ‘I’m not affiliated with any political ideology. As an immigrant myself, I am merely trying to make a show that celebrates the immigration process, celebrate what it means to be American and have a national conversation about what it means to be American, through the eyes of the people who want it most.’

Tricia McLaughlin, the top spokesperson for DHS, acknowledged that agency staff are reviewing this pitch and had a call with the producer last week. She insisted Noem is yet to be briefed on the initiative.

However, DailyMail.com has confirmed that Noem supports the project and wants to proceed.

And McLaughlin said: ‘I think it’s a good idea.’

Worsoff’s project comes as Noem is wanting to showcase what it means to become an American, amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

She and her agency have been working for weeks to get such a project greenlit from Netflix or another streaming or cable service, sources tell DailyMail.com.

But while past outreach has fallen flat, they’re hoping this one has a real chance.

In his pitch, Worsoff, 49, expresses confidence that The American would be a commercial hit and ‘lends itself to enormous corporate sponsorship opportunities’.

At the same time, there’s concern among some in DHS about the possible optics of turning the plight of immigrants into a reality game show, sources say.

“If you read the speech bubble using RFK Jr’s halting, raspy, tinny voice, it helps get past the grossness.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Isn’t that what brought us here? Illiterate, unhappy people who believe that “reality” shows are real?  Cosplay Barbie isn’t alone for being out of her league, but melodramatic enough to keep the big guy happy. Yesterday, I listened to the most surreal edition of a Supreme Court hearing I’d ever seen. How on earth did this thing make it to the docket, and what’s next?  This is from Slate. “The Supreme Court May Pick the Worst Possible Case to Cede More Power to Trump.”  This analysis is provided by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern.   As usual, the Women on the Bench Rule and the guys drool.

During one of the term’s biggest sets of oral arguments on Thursday, everyone at the Supreme Court seemed to agree that the United States is in the midst of an emergency. But there was far less agreement about what specifically that emergency is. During debate over three nationwide injunctions currently protecting birthright citizenship from President Donald Trump’s attacks, the justices were deeply split over what manner of legal crisis the court—and the country—truly faces. And the growing gender divide emerged once again: The four women seemed concerned that the president is trying to undo the final restraints on his exercise of unconstitutional power, and doing so in ways that include breaking norms and defying courts. The five men, in contrast, sounded irked at allegedly monarchical district court judges who dare issue broad orders blocking the White House’s policies, even when they’re blatantly unconstitutional.

These five men, of course, make up the majority of the Supreme Court. And, as they keep reminding us, they can do anything they want with their authority. But there is reason to believe that one or two of these justices might balk at the mayhem they could unleash by limiting lower courts’ power to constrain the executive branch. And not onejustice even hinted that they think Trump should eventually win on the merits and get the green light to start stripping birthright citizenship from immigrants’ children. What they spent two and a half hours debating, in painstaking detail, is whether nationwide or universal injunctions are the way to stop that from happening.

It’s anybody’s guess how the court will come down on that question. It seems the majority wants to have it both ways, reining in lower courts that are—across all political and ideological lines—battling Trump’s lawlessness, and somehow doing so without itself blessing that lawlessness as the administration would like to deploy it against American children of noncitizens. That may well be an impossible task, and their attempt to pull it off in this case could provoke destabilizing confusion across the judiciary. In trying to resolve one perceived emergency, the majority may end up provoking many more.

During one of the term’s biggest sets of oral arguments on Thursday, everyone at the Supreme Court seemed to agree that the United States is in the midst of an emergency. But there was far less agreement about what specifically that emergency is. During debate over three nationwide injunctions currently protecting birthright citizenship from President Donald Trump’s attacks, the justices were deeply split over what manner of legal crisis the court—and the country—truly faces. And the growing gender divide emerged once again: The four women seemed concerned that the president is trying to undo the final restraints on his exercise of unconstitutional power, and doing so in ways that include breaking norms and defying courts. The five men, in contrast, sounded irked at allegedly monarchical district court judges who dare issue broad orders blocking the White House’s policies, even when they’re blatantly unconstitutional.

These five men, of course, make up the majority of the Supreme Court. And, as they keep reminding us, they can do anything they want with their authority. But there is reason to believe that one or two of these justices might balk at the mayhem they could unleash by limiting lower courts’ power to constrain the executive branch. And not onejustice even hinted that they think Trump should eventually win on the merits and get the green light to start stripping birthright citizenship from immigrants’ children. What they spent two and a half hours debating, in painstaking detail, is whether nationwide or universal injunctions are the way to stop that from happening.

It’s anybody’s guess how the court will come down on that question. It seems the majority wants to have it both ways, reining in lower courts that are—across all political and ideological lines—battling Trump’s lawlessness, and somehow doing so without itself blessing that lawlessness as the administration would like to deploy it against American children of noncitizens. That may well be an impossible task, and their attempt to pull it off in this case could provoke destabilizing confusion across the judiciary. In trying to resolve one perceived emergency, the majority may end up provoking many more.

Thursday’s arguments in Trump v. CASA were a muddle, exacerbated by the Trump Justice Department’s pretzel of a request for emergency resolution of a side issue, and accepted on those narrow terms by the Supreme Court’s own design. The court agreed to consider three different injunctions issued by district courts against Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order abolishing birthright citizenship for thousands of children. These orders would have denied U.S. citizenship to babies born in the United States to immigrants lacking permanent legal status and holders of temporary visas. A small army of plaintiffs—including pregnant women, advocacy groups, and 22 states—promptly sued.

Three district courts, in Maryland, New Jersey, and Washington state, all separately held that Trump’s ban unequivocally violates the 14th Amendment, which expressly grants citizenship to “all persons born” in the U.S., with minor exceptions for the children of diplomats and members of invading armies that are irrelevant here. So each court issued a “universal injunction” prohibiting the Trump administration from implementing the policy nationwide. These courts reasoned that narrower injunctions would fail to fully protect the plaintiffs’ right to complete relief from the unconstitutional policy. As a result, the executive order was paused across the nation. Three federal appeals courts refused to disturb the injunctions.

Trump’s DOJ then asked the Supreme Court to step in, claiming that being thwarted from stripping birthright citizenship from the 14th Amendment represented an emergency that needed to be resolved on the so-called shadow docket. But, perhaps recognizing that it was destined to lose on the constitutional merits, the department did not ask SCOTUS to rule that Trump’s executive order was lawful. Instead, it asked the justices to narrow the injunctions to the named plaintiffs, arguing that it was long past time to crack down on universal injunctions proliferating against the administration, and to resolve the decades-old problems of know-it-all trial court judges and forum-shopping litigants (a problem Republican litigants were far less concerned about when these weapons were wielded aggressively against the Biden administration). The high court agreed to consider whether these sweeping injunctions were appropriate—a question that’s related to, but wholly separate from, the larger and arguably far more pressing issue of whether the underlying executive orders are unconstitutional.

If you squint, you can see the logic of what SCOTUS did here. Maybe the justices thought they could issue a compromise decision that would give Trump a procedural victory by trimming the nationwide injunctions while teeing up a someday defeat for him on the merits in the near future. This was the kind of Solomonic “grand bargain” that some commenters hoped would come with last year’s Jan. 6–related cases, in which the majority ultimately allowed the once and future president to run the table. It became painfully clear during Thursday’s oral arguments that any such vision here was a mirage: There is no clean way to separate the merits of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to everyone born in the United States from the effort to claw back broad injunctions. To allow the states and plaintiffs to lose on the latter is to give away the farm on the former.

“Pretty sure this one’s headed to the trump library too..” John Buss, @repeat1968

Slate’s Mary Ziegler at Slate has another example of the sneaky, backdoor way the Project 2025 Klan has of making things worse for everyone.  “Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ Is a Sneak Attack on Abortion.”

“With Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” of tax and Medicaid cuts up for consideration, abortion might be the last thing on anyone’s mind. But a provision buried in the bill is Republicans’ latest attempt to stop losing on reproductive rights. The current version of the GOP budget reconciliation bill includes language denying Medicaid funding to any “large provider of abortion services.” This marks a big change in the GOP’s recent approach to abortion policy. Through the early months of the Trump administration, Republicans in Congress have been remarkably reluctant to do anything big on abortion. But now they are using the president’s signature legislation to wade back into the fight.

What made this bill different? The idea seems to be that Republicans can reframe unpopular attacks on reproductive rights as more acceptable government cost-cutting measures by relying on the Department of Government Efficiency to do their dirty work. If Americans like saving money, and are prepared to believe Elon Musk’s arguments about fraud and waste, the theory goes, maybe Republicans can deliver for their socially conservative constituents without the plan backfiring. But the GOP’s latest gambit is a reminder that there’s still no magic bullet for conservatives when it comes to reproductive rights.

It’s no surprise that anti-abortion leaders themselves have seized on this strategy. Trump has made some moves to placate abortion opponents, like announcing that no one will be prosecuted for violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which protects access to clinics and places of worship, and pardoning several defendants convicted of violating it. But for the most part, he has frozen out the anti-abortion movement. The Department of Justice hasn’t started enforcing the Comstock Act as an abortion ban. When conservative state attorneys general sued to force a shift, the Trump administration just last week asked the court to dismiss the suit for procedural reasons.

That doesn’t mean Trump won’t give anti-abortion leaders what they want later. Just Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the Food and Drug Administration would investigate the safety of mifepristone and potentially impose new restrictions on it. But the anti-abortion movement will have to cajole Trump and hope for the best. He is the one holding all the cards.

For that reason, dressing up an abortion restriction as a DOGE priority makes sense. The administration has cut everything from funding for cancer research to military aid to Ukraine. Republicans in Congress, who seem primarily concerned about pleasing Trump, are also banking on the fact that the president will approve of abortion restrictions as long as they can be sold as something Elon Musk would love. And defunding providers could be consequential. Local clinics have struggled in recent years, as have state Planned Parenthood affiliates. Cutting these providers out of Medicaid will make it harder for them to remain open.

But the new strategy has risks, as the few Republicans who won districts Trump lost recognize. Cutting Medicaid is deeply unpopular. Most Americans see the program positively. One poll found that under 20 percent of Americans want Congress to cut Medicaid funding. So, cutting Medicaid in any way will likely be a political loser.

And “political loser” is a good way to discuss the GOP’s conventional position on abortion. Most Americans want abortion to be legal. The go-to move for Republicans—to argue that Democrats are the true extremists on the issue—is harder when Republican-controlled states are considering ever more sweeping bans, many of them targeting people in states where reproductive rights are protected, or punishing people for donations or speech about abortion.

Still, the GOP may be emboldened because Trump won in 2024, even when Kamala Harris went all in on reproductive rights. Since then, Democrats seem less focused on the issue.

At the same time, if voters actually are paying less attention, it’s probably because less seems to be happening. Republicans in Congress have sat on their hands. Trump has yet to make a big move. The truth is that plenty is still going on, with cases moving through state and federal courts, states poised to pass stringent new bills, and Trump’s future moves still shrouded in uncertainty. The minute one of these events makes news, there’s no reason to believe voters will be any happier with Republicans’ position than they ever were.

I don’t know about you, but I feel like running for the Canadian border.  Why would anyone want to come here under these circumstances?  I’m also very afraid of this year’s hurricane season. This is from ABC News. “FEMA ‘not ready’ for hurricane season, internal review finds. The acting agency head told staff that planning is about 80-85% complete.” The season starts on June 1st.  There have already been disturbances reported.  This administration seems hellbent on killing people.  This might make Heckuva Job Brownie look like an efficiency expert.

The acting head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency told staff members on Thursday that he believes President Donald Trump is a bold man with a bold vision for the agency — but that FEMA doesn’t yet have a full plan to tackle hurricane season.

“I would say we’re about 80 or 85% there,” Acting FEMA Administrator David Richardson told staff on a conference call, parts of which were obtained by ABC. “The next week, we will close that gap and get to probably 97-98% of a plan. We’ll never have 100% of a plan. Even if we did have 100% of a plan, a plan never survives first contact. However, we will do our best to make sure that the plan is all-encompassing.”

The conference call came after an internal document prepared for Richardson as he takes the helm of the agency responsible for managing federal disasters indicated the agency was ill-prepared for the upcoming hurricane season, which starts on June 1.

“As FEMA transforms to a smaller footprint, the intent for this hurricane season is not well understood, thus FEMA is not ready,” according to the document, which was obtained by ABC News.

In the conference call, Richardson said he and staff sat down for “about 90 minutes” and started to come up with a plan for this year’s disaster season.

He said the plan would be ready soon.

“Listen closely: The intent for disaster season 2025 (is to) safeguard the American people, return primacy to the states, strengthen their capability to respond and recover, and coordinate federal assistance when deemed necessary, while transforming to the future of FEMA,” Richardson said.

Richardson was placed at FEMA by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem after former acting Administrator Cam Hamilton was fired last week because of his testimony in front of a House panel, according to a source familiar with the matter, which went against the shuttering of the agency.

The acting administrator said this version of FEMA will look different than the agency of the past.

Meanwhile, the Tariff turbulence is coming to fruition. This is from CNBC. “Walmart CFO says price hikes from tariffs could start later this month, as retailer beats on earnings.”  Melissa Repko has the story.

Walmart on Thursday fell just short of quarterly sales estimates, as even the world’s largest retailer said it would feel the pinch of higher tariffs.

Even so, the Arkansas-based discounter beat quarterly earnings expectations and stuck by its full-year forecast, which calls for sales to grow 3% to 4% and adjusted earnings of $2.50 to $2.60 per share for the fiscal year. That cautious profit outlook had disappointed Wall Street in February. Wall Street was also underwhelmed by the results Thursday, as shares closed slightly lower.

Walmart also marked a milestone: It posted its first profitable quarterfor its e-commerce business both in the U.S. and globally. The business has benefited from the growth of higher-margin moneymakers, including online advertising and Walmart’s third-party marketplace.

In an interview with CNBC, Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey said tariffs are “still too high” – even with the recently announced agreement to lower duties on imports from China to 30% for 90 days.

“We’re wired for everyday low prices, but the magnitude of these increases is more than any retailer can absorb,” he said. “It’s more than any supplier can absorb. And so I’m concerned that consumer is going to start seeing higher prices. You’ll begin to see that, likely towards the tail end of this month, and then certainly much more in June.”

Reuters reports the bottom line here.  There’s only so long you can eliminate loss leaders, lower earnings, and try to slow things down.  We will feel it everywhere, and it will be next month. Jennifer Saba has this headline: “Walmart can discount tariffs only so much.”   So this is your friendly economist speaking, stock up and hunker down. It’s going to get real real soon.

Walmart (WMT.N), opens new tab wheeled its trolley cart right into President Donald Trump’s ankles. The largest U.S. retailer and a bellwether for consumers said on Thursday that tariffs would force it to raise prices, just a month after it expressed confidence that it would keep them low. Boss Doug McMillon may be able to do both at once, on a relative basis, but it also sends a clear signal to the White House that shelves are stocked with only so many ways to shield shoppers.

Flagship U.S. Walmart locations open for at least a year generated 4.5% sales growth for the three months ending April 30 from the same stretch in 2024, a second consecutive quarterly slowdown. McMillon warned that import levies are starting to take a toll. Supply-chain pressure began in late April and accelerated in May. The $750 billion company is trying to hold the line on food even as the cost of bananas, coffee, avocados and flowers increases, but it is unwilling to eat them everywhere.

McMillon and his deputies took a markedly different tone a few weeks ago. The CEO told investors that U.S. duties, which at the time were 145% on Chinese goods, remained a question mark, but that Walmart would focus on “managing our inventory and our expenses well.” Following news that those levies would be slashed to 30%, at least temporarily, McMillon cautioned of a challenging environment, implying that he can squeeze suppliers only so much.

He’s not alone either. JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon warned, opens new tab on Thursday that recession remains a threat despite Trump’s trade truce. Taiwanese contract manufacturing giant Foxconn, which assembles iPhones and makes Nvidia servers, also slashed its full-year outlook this week, blaming the stronger Taiwan dollar and “rapid changes” in U.S. tariff policy.
Equity investors took comfort from the lower duty rates, pushing the S&P 500 Index up 5% this week, to higher than where it started the year. Business leaders are clearly less impressed. Sustained gloom from industry titans like Walmart will keep pressure on the president to reconsider his own pricing power.

Every day I read the headlines, all I can think is that we shouldn’t be in this position.  But, here it is.  Don’t even get me started on Drunk and rapey Pete Hegseth.  (Must Read. VF: “VF editors are joined by special correspondent Gabriel Sherman to discuss Pete Hegseth’s tumultuous tenure atop the Department of Defense, and why the president is reluctant to break with his friend from Fox.)

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Mostly Monday Reads: Which Century are we in?

Posted: May 5, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: American Fascists, kakistocracy, religious extremists, Republicans against democracy, SCOTUS, tariffs, Threats to Democracy, Treason and Sedition Republican Style, Unitary Executive Authority | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments

“Size matters.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Every time I get the grocery list together these days, I think about what I need to bulk order. It’s really hard to look at a finished consumer good and find all the value-added producers along with their various locations. I wonder how the distributors are going to sort this all out. I noticed prices creeping up in the usual items. I’m pretty sure my sister has hit Costco by now and filled up the pantry. I also watched the last of the Jazz Festers leave with relief.  I bet this was their last jaunt of the year.  You can see it in the numbers.

USA Today had this analysis by Betty Lin-Fisher. “How will Trump’s tariffs affect grocery store prices? We explain.”

While higher tariffs could still be coming after a 90-day-pause, the baseline 10% tariff on all goods, plus higher duties on Chinese products already in effect are a big increase in food costs for American’s budgets, said Thomas Gremillion, director of food policy at The Consumer Federation of America.

“The 10% ‘default’ tariffs alone represent a truly historic federal tax increase, maybe the largest in my lifetime, with a highly regressive impact,” Gremillion said.

The tariff only applies to the value of the product at the border, Ortega said. Then there are additional costs to the product, which are accrued domestically, like transporting the goods to the store, distribution, wholesale costs and retail markups. Those things are not subject to the tariff, Ortega said.

So that doesn’t mean that the price of a particular product will go up by 10% or whatever the tariff is, Ortega said.

Overall, 15% of the U.S. food supply is imported, including 32% of fresh vegetables, 55% of fresh fruit, and 94% of seafood, according to the Consumer Federation of America, citing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Some products, like coffee and bananas, are almost exclusively grown abroad.

Tariffs are causing uncertainty from families checking off their grocery lists to companies importing food, he said.

“For consumers, this can mean added difficulties in managing a food budget. For food companies, this means havoc on supply chains that could lead to more food waste and more food safety risk,” Gremillion said.

Yup. And the FDA will not be looking around for that food safety risk now. It’s also upending Health Care, but we can rest knowing that all those generic names for medicine and things will be gender neutral now.  I know I can’t even properly pronounce most of them, let alone identify their sexual preferences.  MEDTECHDIVE has this headline: Trump policies are upending healthcare technology. “Track the effect on the medtech industry here. Policies and actions reshaping the healthcare industry began pouring out of President Donald Trump’s White House nearly from day one. Follow the changes affecting the medical device industry.”

Did I mention the youngest son-in-law is a biomedical engineer who is in charge of designing medical, surgical, and prosthetic devices?  Plus, the oldest daughter and son-in-law are doctors.  It’s just me and my youngest daughter out here trying to figure out what the economy and financial markets are experiencing. The others are just trying to deal with that, and the usual helpful regulations are being replaced with crazy ones.

Since Trump took office in late January, multiple Food and Drug Administration webpages were removed (and then restored); employees were fired from the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (and some were asked back); and the Department of Health and Human Services unveiled a plan to lay off approximately 10,000 employees, including about 3,500 at the FDA.

Meanwhile, the economy has whipsawed due to an unpredictable and aggressive tariff strategy. Later, however, pieces were delayed or walked back.

The Trump administration has reshaped the medtech industry in significant ways, and potentially long-term, in just a few months. Now that Trump has settled into power, new questions have arisen about what the many changes will mean for companies and patients, and what’s coming next.

Tom Toles Editorial Cartoon

Also, lucky us, Medicare and Medicaid modernization with be the goal of TV snake oil salesman Dr. Mehmet Oz as he takes over both. This is also from the MEDTECHDIVE.

Dr. Mehmet Oz was sworn in as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator on April 18, cementing his role as head of the agency that provides insurance coverage to millions of Americans.

During a ceremony at the Oval Office, Oz, a physician and former TV personality, said he wanted to “save” the nation’s public health programs and focus on reducing chronic disease, “modernizing” Medicare and Medicaid, and targeting fraud, waste and abuse in government insurance offerings.

President Donald Trump reiterated that Republicans wouldn’t cut Medicare or Medicaid. “Just as I promised, there will be no cuts. We’re not going to have any cuts. We’re going to have only help,” he said during the ceremony.

As I’ve spent most of this year being poked, prodded, pricked, shocked, MRI’d, Ultrasound’d, and EMG’d, I sure don’t feel good about any of this. I fret about someone disappearing all of that, plus my Social Security.

Speaking of crazy policy, I happened on this last night. This is from NBC News. “Trump says he will reopen ‘enlarged and rebuilt’ Alcatraz prison. Alcatraz Island hasn’t been used as a federal penitentiary since 1963. It had a capacity of roughly 300 people.”  I’m actually thinking this is another one of his threats to Judges since it’s way too small to hold many prisoners.  I suppose that’s one way to destroy a national park and the US Constitution in one sweep.

Alcatraz Island, a former military fortress and prison in San Francisco Bay, was turned into a federal penitentiary in 1934 and over the course of 29 years housed more than 1,500 people “deemed difficult to incarcerate elsewhere in the federal prison system,” according to the National Park Service.

According to aNational Park Service study, it was initially deemed unfit to serve as a federal institution because of its small size, isolated location and lack of fresh water. However, Sanford Bates, the director of the Bureau of Prisons in 1933,later found it “an ideal place of confinement for about 200 of the most desperate or irredeemable types.” It was formally opened as a federal penitentiary the next year.

Trump suggested in his post that he’d like to restore the facility to that purpose.

This is from Ed Mazza writing for HuffPo. This sounds a lot like his real estate deals to me. “‘Clearly Unhinged’: Critics Sink Trump’s ‘Asinine’ Plan To Reopen Alcatraz Prison. The president wants to turn the site back into a penitentiary despite the fact that it would cost a fortune.”

Alcatraz is currently part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area and has about 1.2 million visitors per year. Those who tour the island in San Francisco Bay see facilities in various states of decay. The prison was crumbling even as it was still in operation, and the high cost of maintaining it was a key reason it was shuttered in 1963.

Given those realities, restoring Alcatraz and then expanding it, as Trump called for on his Truth Social platform, would likely cost a fortune ― and then another pile of cash would be needed to maintain it.

Reopening it as a prison would also mean the loss of the tourism revenue the island currently generates as well as a loss of habitat for its thriving bird population.

The president, however, said Alcatraz’s return to use as a prison would “serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE.”

His critics fired back that the idea would be an expensive boondoggle:

This just really sounds like how he’d run his business.  Also, he now wants tariffs on all incoming films.  This is about as insane as it gets.  “Trump threatens a 100% tariff on foreign-made films, saying the movie industry in the US is dying.”

 President Donald Trump is opening a new salvo in his tariff war, targeting films made outside the U.S.

In a post Sunday night on his Truth Social platform, Trump said he has authorized the Department of Commerce and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to slap a 100% tariff “on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”

“The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,” he wrote, complaining that other countries “are offering all sorts of incentives to draw” filmmakers and studios away from the U.S. “This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!”

The White House said Monday that it was figuring out how to comply with the president’s wishes.

“Although no final decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made, the Administration is exploring all options to deliver on President Trump’s directive to safeguard our country’s national and economic security while Making Hollywood Great Again,” said spokesperson Kush Desai.

It’s common for both large and small films to include production in the U.S. and in other countries. Big-budget movies like the upcoming “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” for instance, are shot around the world.

Philip Bump–writing at WAPO–has an interesting Op-Ed up today. “America’s least American president. Donald Trump isn’t making America great again. He’s making it into something else entirely.”

On Sunday, NBC News aired an interview with Trump in which he expressed ignorance of the black-letter standards of justice established in the country’s founding document.

“The Constitution says every person, citizens and noncitizens, deserve due process,” “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker pointed out. So why not bring Abrego García back to the U.S. and use legal avenues to potentially remove him?

“Well,” Trump replied, “I’ll leave that to the lawyers, and I’ll leave that to the attorney general of the United States.”

Welker noted that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had admitted that even immigrants had due process rights. Trump again downplayed the idea, saying that holding hearings would mean “we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials.” This isn’t as big a hurdle as it may sound. In fiscal 2024, there were more than 900,000 immigration hearings completed. So far in fiscal 2025, there have been more than 460,000. More could be cleared if Trump hadn’t moved to fire a number of immigration judges.

Finally, Welker noted that Trump didn’t really have a choice.

“Even given those numbers that you’re talking about,” she asked, “don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?”

“I don’t know,” Trump replied. “I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”

You may recall that, in January, Trump put his hand on a Bible and affirmed to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. that he would “faithfully execute” his role as president and to the best of his “ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” But this has never been an oath he has appeared to actually take to heart.

Trump’s dismissiveness of the Constitution has manifested itself in a lot of ways. You may recall his lack of interest in leaving office when he lost the 2020 presidential election. You may be aware that he has readily, if not giddily, accepted personal income from foreign governments while serving as president. He views the law as a cudgel, not a constraint, issuing pardons for various political allies ensnared in criminal activity while directing federal law enforcement to fish for potential criminal charges against those who work against his political power.

At its heart, Trump’s approach to his role is rooted in his parochial sense of patriotism. He didn’t come to the White House after having worked his way up through lower offices, building consensus and working to appeal to a broad range of constituents. He had no appreciation for how legislation is crafted or for the hard work of reaching compromise. Perhaps most importantly, he has never indicated any robust understanding of American history or of the debates and agreements that led to the country’s creation.

In 2011, for example, Trump was asked by Stephen Colbert if he knew what the 13 stripes on the American flag represent. He said he didn’t.

More recently, Trump was asked by ABC News journalist Terry Moran what the Declaration of Independence (a copy of which the president recently had installed in the Oval Office) means to him personally.

“It means exactly what it says. It’s a declaration,” Trump replied. “A declaration of unity and love and respect, and it means a lot. And it’s something very special to our country.”

It is special to the country, of course, but not because it is a declaration of “love,” much less “unity.” As the name would suggest, it is precisely the opposite.

Trump doesn’t have the Declaration of Independence in the Oval Office because he wants its message to serve as a guidepost for his administration. He doesn’t even appear to know its message. He has it there because it is A Famous American Thing, another decoration in the newly gilded room meant to send a message about his power, not the nation’s.

Dan Froomkin–writing for Press Watch–suggests we need to keep track of all Trump’s oddities. “We need a way to aggregate what Donald Trump is doing to this country.”

News organizations, along with good-government groups and other interested parties, are doing a commendable job of chronicling the damage the Trump regime is doing to the government, the country, and the world.

But none of them, individually, is in a position to give the public the full picture. It’s just too much.

This is a feature of Trump’s strategy of “flooding the zone.” No one entity can possibly keep up.

And as we go forward, how can any one organization keep tabs on all the fallout? It’s not possible.

What we need is a central repository of information so that the full extent of the damage can be found in one place and assessed by the public — and so that there’s a comprehensive record of what needs to be fixed and restored when the time comes to do so. (Sort of like a truth commission, but in real time.)

To aggregate all the existing information, organize it, and collect new data, we need a place, a process, and people.

It makes sense to me since Trump seems to want to undocument more than just people.  Who knows how many things Doge has destroyed in the wake of having all-access to every government database and more.  He’s disappearing people, children, scientific research, due process, and entire agencies and programs.

This is a site that I was just sent to by a Blue Sky Link. This  DNYUZ  link has an article by the NYT’s by Jack Goldsmith of Lawfare fame and Harvard Law School.  This has been an issue for many people in modern times, with both parties playing the role of enablers. “It’s Not Just Trump. The Presidency Has Become Too Powerful.”  So, I need to put this example of both siderisms into perspective. “Mr. Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general under George W. Bush, is an author, with Bob Bauer, of a newsletter about presidential and executive power.”

Donald Trump’s wrecking-ball second term has revealed the full latent power of the presidency. His administration has done this most clearly in its comprehensive elimination of legal and norm-based checks inside the executive branch, its systematic disrespect of judicial process, its extortionate abuse of government power to crush foes and its destructive rhetoric and nastiness.

Yet it is important to recognize that many of Mr. Trump’s efforts to expand the powers of the office build substantially on the excesses of recent presidencies. The overall pattern of presidential action over the past few decades reveals an escalation of power grabs that put the country on a terrible course even before Mr. Trump took office again.

The presidency needs reform, and Americans must consider ways — however implausible they may seem in the context of today’s politics — to get there.

Expansionist presidential acts go all the way back to George Washington, who invited charges of monarchism with his use of the Constitution’s broad yet undefined “executive Power.” From there the presidency, with its loose design, grew and grew, with major surges during the Civil War and New Deal era. That trend continued through the 20th century, aided by the rise of mass communication, substantial delegations of power from Congress and an approving Supreme Court.

Mr. Trump’s radical second presidency is, to an underappreciated extent, operating from a playbook devised by his modern predecessors.

His use of emergency powers to impose broad tariffs is similar to a move made in 1971 by President Richard Nixon. His claims of untouchable national security authority echo arguments made after the Sept. 11 attacks by the George W. Bush administration, in which I served.

Presidents for decades have issued pardons as political or personal favors or to avoid personal legal jeopardy. Mr. Trump took this practice to new extremes in his first term, and then President Joe Biden pre-emptively pardoned his son and family as well as members of his administration and Congress, in a similar pattern. Mr. Trump in his second term has already issued many self-serving pardons.

Mr. Trump’s executive-order program is an heir of the strategy used by President Barack Obama for large-scale and sometimes legally dubious policy initiatives, including some (involving immigration) where Mr. Obama had earlier admitted he lacked authority to act. Mr. Biden also confessed a lack of power but then acted unilaterally in seeking to forgive student loans.

Mr. Trump has disregarded statutory restrictions to fire officials in independent agencies including the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board. But in 2021, Mr. Biden extended the Supreme Court’s unitary executive case law to fire the statutorily protected commissioner of the Social Security Administration. Mr. Biden was “the first unitary executive,” noted the legal writer Mark Joseph Stern in 2021.

Mr. Biden also purged the executive branch of Trump holdover officials who were not protected by statute, including members of arts and honorary institutions, the Administrative Conference of the United States and the Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council. The Biden administration’s defense of these firings resulted in judicial precedents that Mr. Trump is now wielding to clean house on a broader scale.

The Trump administration has also built on past presidencies in not enforcing federal law — for example, in letting TikTok live on despite a congressional ban. This practice finds its modern roots in the Obama administration, which asserted broad nonenforcement discretion in high-profile cases involving immigration, marijuana and Obamacare, in effect changing the meaning of those laws.

Something similar has happened with spending. As one recent paper noted, “The past several presidents have all taken significant unilateral actions intruding on Congress’s control over federal spending.” The Trump 2.0 version greatly enlarges this unilateralist pattern.

There are a lot of examples here, and it’s worth thinking about.  The Unitary Executive Theory has been around for a while, and since the Reagan years, it has picked up steam in the Supreme Court. Here is a recent article from Democracy Docket explaining the theory and relating to it to Yam Tits. The analysis is written by Jacob Knutsen.  “What Is Unitary Executive Theory? How is Trump Using It to Push His Agenda?”

Since taking office, President Donald Trump has executed a whirlwind of dismissals across the federal government that violated federal statutes and decreed numerous executive orders, including one that blatantly defied the plain language of the Constitution.

Behind the seemingly scatter-shot opening acts of his second administration, legal analysts see a common goal: to test a once-fringe legal theory which asserts that the president has unlimited power to control the actions of the four million people who make up the executive branch.

If courts — specifically the Republican-appointed majority of the Supreme Court — uphold arguments based on the so-called “unitary executive theory,” it would give Trump and subsequent presidents unprecedented power to remove and replace any federal employee and impose their will on every decision in every agency.

Rulings in favor of the Trump administration would also further jeopardize the independence of key regulatory agencies that are susceptible to conflicts of interest and political interference, like the Federal Election Commission, which oversees federal elections and campaign finance laws.

Trump and his administration have furthered the theory by repeatedly invoking Article II of the Constitution, which vests executive power in the president, to justify the recent dismissals of federal officials. They have framed the article as allowing the president to use the whole of the executive branch for his political ends.

For example, the White House Feb. 18 invoked the article to rationalize an executive order signed that same day that asserted the president’s authority over almost all regulatory agencies that were created by Congress to act independently, or semi-independently, from the president.

Frank Bowman, a scholar of constitutional and criminal law at the University of Missouri School of Law, told Democracy Docket he believes the executive order is a step toward “an open declaration of dictatorship.”

“In essence, what he’s saying is, ‘I am the law. My will is the law. My view of what the law is the only view that can ever be expressed,’” Bowman said.

I think this take on executive power is one we should get more familiar with since it’s really taken a powerful rise. The Center for American Progress features an analysis in its series on Project 2025.  This one was written back in October.”Project 2025 Would Destroy the U.S. System of Checks and Balances and Create an Imperial Presidency. Far-right extremists have a plan to shatter democracy’s guardrails, giving presidents almost unlimited power to implement policies that will hurt everyday Americans and strip them of fundamental rights.”  It is an imperative read.  Trump knows that he can be both pope and king.

Project 2025 takes an absolutist view of presidential authority

To wholly reshape government in ways that most Americans would think is impossible, the Project 2025 blueprint anchors itself in the “unitary executive theory.” This radical governing philosophy, which contravenes the traditional separation of powers, vests presidents with almost complete control over the federal bureaucracy, including congressionally designated independent agencies or the DOJ and the FBI. The unitary executive theory is designed to sharply diminish Congress’ imperative role to act as a check and balance on the executive branch with tools such as setting up independent agencies to make expert decisions and by limiting presidents’ ability to fire career civil servants for purely political purposes.

The road map to autocracy presented in Project 2025 extends far beyond the unitary executive theory first promoted by President Ronald Reagan, and later espoused by Vice President Dick Cheney, largely designed to implement a deregulatory, corporatist agenda. Instead, as discussed further below, Project 2025 presents a maximalist version that does not nibble around the edges but aims to thoroughly demolish the traditional guardrails that allow Congress an equal say in how democracy functions or what policies are implemented. One noted expert at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, Philip Wallach, said, “Some of these visions … start to just bleed into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so he’s in charge, so everyone has to do what he says—and that’s just not the system the [sic] government we live under.”

If Congress is robbed of its imperative role as a check and balance on a president’s power, and the judicial branch is willing to bestow a president with almost unlimited authority, autocracy results. And presidents become strongman rulers—free to choose which laws to enforce, which long-standing norms to jettison, and how to impose their will on every executive branch department and agency.

Well, all these pithy reads should keep you busy for the day.  I hope your week goes well. I’ve got 2 doctors’ appointments, but gladly no more procedures.  And I’d like just to add if they come for professors, that I’d rather be in the gulag that holds the country’s political cartoonists.  To think, I used to just use wonderful paintings.

Happy Cinco de Mayo to all the wonderful folks of Mexican descent and to those of us who just enjoy the holiday!

What’s on your Reading and Blogging list today?

 

Funereal Friday Reads: Life as a Dank Meme

Posted: April 26, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , , , | 9 Comments

The Supreme Court hears arguments on Trump’s immunity claim, John Buss, @repeat1968.

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I got the cutest picture of the granddaughters today. The girls were smiling and looking at each other with adoration. Both were pretty in pink. All I can think of is what kind of country they may inherit.

I watched and listened to trials and hearings that were so surreal that I was pretty sure we’d entered the Evil Spock Timeline. I remember when the Supreme Court protected everyone’s rights. Now, rights are confined to those who brought the men there and paid for their holidays. It was like watching a Skeleton Dance. Not one TV Lawyer could find anything constitutional about the show they put on yesterday. We all laughed at him when he said,‘ I Could … Shoot Somebody, And I Wouldn’t Lose Any Voters’ Evidently, he can do worse than that, and the Supreme Court would make up something to cover his farty, diapered ass.

This is a must-read from Slate: “The Last Thing This Supreme Court Could Do to Shock Us  There will be no more self-soothing after this.” This is written by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern. 

For three long years, Supreme Court watchers mollified themselves (and others) with vague promises that when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put democracy before party whenever they were finally confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6. There were promising signs: They had, after all, refused to wade into the Trumpian efforts to set aside the election results in 2020. They had, after all, hewed to a kind of sanity in batting away Trumpist claims about presidential records (with the lone exception of Clarence Thomas, too long marinated in the Ginni-scented Kool-Aid to be capable of surprising us, but he was just one vote). We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end. We kept thinking that at least for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts, the voice of reasoned never-Trumpers might still penetrate the Fox News fog. We told ourselves that at least six justices, and maybe even seven, of the most MAGA-friendly court in history would still want to ensure that this November’s elections would not be the last in history. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones.

For three long years, Supreme Court watchers mollified themselves (and others) with vague promises that when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put democracy before party whenever they were finally confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6. There were promising signs: They had, after all, refused to wade into the Trumpian efforts to set aside the election results in 2020. They had, after all, hewed to a kind of sanity in batting away Trumpist claims about presidential records (with the lone exception of Clarence Thomas, too long marinated in the Ginni-scented Kool-Aid to be capable of surprising us, but he was just one vote). We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end. We kept thinking that at least for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts, the voice of reasoned never-Trumpers might still penetrate the Fox News fog. We told ourselves that at least six justices, and maybe even seven, of the most MAGA-friendly court in history would still want to ensure that this November’s elections would not be the last in history. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones.

 On Thursday, during oral arguments in Trump v. United States, the Republican-appointed justices shattered those illusions. This was the case we had been waiting for, and all was made clear—brutally so. These justices donned the attitude of cynical partisans, repeatedly lending legitimacy to the former president’s outrageous claims of immunity from criminal prosecution. To at least five of the conservatives, the real threat to democracy wasn’t Trump’s attempt to overturn the election—but the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute him for the act. These justices fear that it is Trump’s prosecution for election subversion that will “destabilize” democracy, requiring them to read a brand-new principle of presidential immunity into a Constitution that guarantees nothing of the sort. They evinced virtually no concern for our ability to continue holding free and fair elections that culminate in a peaceful transfer of power. They instead offered endless solicitude for the former president who fought that transfer of power.

However the court disposes of Trump v. U.S., the result will almost certainly be precisely what the former president craves: more delays, more hearings, more appeals—more of everything but justice. This was not a legitimate claim from the start, but a wild attempt by Trump’s attorneys to use his former role as chief executive of the United States to shield himself from the consequences of trying to turn the presidency into a dictatorship. After so much speculation that these reasonable, rational jurists would surely dispose of this ridiculous case quickly and easily, Thursday delivered a morass of bad-faith hand-wringing on the right about the apparently unbearable possibility that a president might no longer be allowed to wield his powers of office in pursuit of illegal ends. Just as bad, we heard a constant minimization of Jan. 6, for the second week in a row, as if the insurrection were ancient history, and history that has since been dramatically overblown, presumably for Democrats’ partisan aims.

All this with the husband of an insurrectionist sitting on the bench.   I heard Nicole Wallace give the best explanation of anything I’ve heard on why these men act out their grievances in court decisions last night.  Two of the guys that sit on the bench are sex pests and were publicly shown to be so.  Alito is just perpetually mad at everything but mostly at being branded a bigot because he has issues with women and gay people.  His hateful take on religion basically focuses on controlling the objects of his hatred.  Protecting his religious practice means he should get away with whatever. Nicole Wallace argued that they love Trump because they are all angry and aggrieved.  They identify with Trump because they feel they’re in a similar situation.  Civil rights are all about not letting white boys be white boys.  They all want absolute immunity. We have to rely on Amy and John to be reasonable.  Amy’s line of questions actually gave me a bit of hope.

It’s a weird timeline for me to quote Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger. This is from the Bulwark. “ Trump Melts Institutions, SCOTUS Edition. The Supreme Court’s no-win situation and the healthy liberalism we need.”

… reading the tea leaves of oral arguments is always an exercise in guesswork. Hopefully SCOTUS won’t be long in unveiling their opinion on the matter.

But one other thing is worth saying: It’s completely understandable that so many people’s first instinct was to roll their eyes at the Court’s apparent interest in using this case to trace out the complex contours of any newly explicit presidential right to official-act immunity—given the remarkable hubris of Trump’s bringing those arguments in the first place.

After all, here’s a guy who, during his second impeachment, explicitly arguedthat prosecuting an ex-president was the role of the criminal courts: “a president who left office is not in any way above the law,” his lawyers argued, “as the Constitution states he or she is like any other citizen and can be tried in a court of law.”

Now Trump articulates just the opposite position: No act that is “official” in form—which, his lawyers have had to admit during arguments, would include such acts as ordering the military to carry out a coup—can be criminally prosecuted after he leaves office unless he was first convicted in an impeachment trial for that conduct. How any president enjoying such expansive power could ever be impeached by a Congress he could apparently order murdered without consequence remains unclear.

It’s a ridiculous exercise, a transparent stalling tactic. For Team Trump, just getting the argument in front of SCOTUS was a victory in and of itself, further diminishing the odds of a jury getting to rule on Trump’s stolen-election charges before the November election. “Literally popping champagne right now,” one lawyer close to Trump told Rolling Stonewhen the court announced it would consider the immunity claim in February. This week, RS quoted another Trump source that it hardly matters what the court does now: “We already pulled off the heist.”

At the same time, no matter how transparent Trump’s run-out-the-clock motivations in bringing the petition to the Court, it’s true that the claims of presidential immunity at hand have never been litigated. The justices are highly unlikely to endorse Trump’s theory that every presidential act that is official “in form” is exempt from prosecution—but are some presidential acts immune? What is the line between a president acting in his capacity as president and acting in his capacity as a candidate or private citizen? And could it be true—as Trump’s lawyers have argued—that opening up too broad a swath of presidential actions to post-presidency prosecution could hamper a president’s ability to run the country effectively?

Evidently, Kavanaugh’s love of beer causes him to be delusional and totally out of it.

One last SCOTUS send-up and I’m changing the topic.   This is from Adam Sewer, who is writing for The New Republic. ” The Trumpification of the Supreme Court. The conservative justices have shown they are ready to sacrifice any law or principle to save the former president.”

The notion that Donald Trump’s supporters believe that he should be able to overthrow the government and get away with it sounds like hyperbole, an absurd and uncharitable caricature of conservative thought. Except that is exactly what Trump’s attorney D. John Sauer argued before the Supreme Court yesterday, taking the position that former presidents have “absolute immunity” for so-called official acts they take in office.

“How about if a president orders the military to stage a coup?” Justice Elena Kagan asked Sauer. “I think it would depend on the circumstances whether it was an official act,” Sauer said after a brief exchange. “If it were an official act … he would have to be impeached and convicted.”

“That sure sounds bad, doesn’t it?” Kagan replied later.

The Democratic appointees on the bench sought to illustrate the inherent absurdity of this argument with other scenarios as well—Kagan got Sauer to admit that the president could share nuclear secrets, while Justice Sonia Sotomayor presented a scenario in which a president orders the military to assassinate a political rival. Sauer said that might qualify as an official act too. It was the only way to maintain the logic of his argument, which is that Trump is above the law

This Mike Luchovich cartoon is brutal and true.   I am shifting to the other SCOTUS shit show this week.  CNN has “Takeaways from the Supreme Court’s oral arguments over emergency abortions.” Again, thank goodness my youngest daughter is in Denver. Who knows what her outcome may have been? Dr. Daughter is getting more colleagues in Washington State because of Idaho.  Pregnant women are gestational containers there. This analysis was provided by Tierney Sneed and John Fritze.

In a Supreme Court hearing on the Biden administration’s challenge to aspects of Idaho’s strict abortion ban, US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar sought to appeal to conservative justices who just two years ago ruled that states should have the ability to prohibit the procedure.

The dispute, stemming from the Justice Department’s marquee response to the high court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, turns on whether federal mandates for hospital emergency room care override abortion bans that do not exempt situations where a woman’s health is in danger but her life is not yet threatened.

To prevail, the Biden administration will need the votes of two members of the court’s conservative bloc, and with Justice Brett Kavanaugh signaling sympathies toward Idaho, the case will likely come down to the votes of Chief Justice John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett. The two justices had tough questions for both sides of the case.

The court’s far-right wing, perhaps in an attempt to keep those two justices on their side, framed the case as a federal overreach into state power. The court’s liberals, meanwhile, focused on the grisly details of medical emergencies faced by pregnant woman that were not covered by the limited life-of-the-woman exemption in Idaho’s ban.

Follow the link to the list of take-aways.  While that craziness was going on in the District, we continued to be treated to the life and times of Tabloid targets and publishers.  Every time I tune into anything dealing with Trump, I feel like someone slipped me the brown acid.
How can one malevolent man be so universally dangerous and disruptive? Especially one so incredibly stupid!  Can we have a debate on who is more genuinely evil?  A to or Trump? Thomas is a stooge. Kavanaugh is a wingman. Gorsuch certainly is in the running for evil, but not the way Alito does it. Robarts is out of his league and likely to go down in shame as history judges him the least effective Chief Justice ever

So, back to Pecker and the man who has to pay for sex coming and going. There’s been a whole of objecting accompanied by “sustained.”

More will be coming once the print journalists get their stories in.  I wish I could be Pollyanna and play the glad game, but I can only come up with the bad news. We get to see this continually, which is also the thing I’m glad about.  I m  feel like a total masochist every time I turn the TV on or read a magazine article, but just think how awful it would be if we didn’t know about this. I’m not sure what will become of Donald, but I’m certain that we still have time to make certain he doesn’t get back into the White House.  We have time to stop the MAGAdons that want to clone that agenda into every state and the U.S. Congress. We’ll see and read nothing else but propaganda if we don’t stop them now.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Guess who John Prine wrote this about?

Finally, Friday Reads: Justice Delayed is Justice Denied

Posted: March 1, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

It’s been a week! At least New York State is going after #DeadbeatDon and his millions of dollars owed. However, the Trump Syndicate’s stall tactics are making it more unlikely we will see any kind of federal trial before the election season in the stolen documents or insurrection trials. The weirdest news on all the Trump trials is today’s headline about the Georgia Courts having a hacker ransom on the Election Interference Case. This headline is from Business Insider. “Hackers threaten to release Trump documents from Georgia case if they don’t get a ransom by Thursday.” This looks like there is likely more interference from Russia with Trump Chaos Love. Jacob Shamsian reports on what details we have at the moment.

The hacking group responsible for taking down Fulton County’s websites in Georgia is threatening to publish documents from the state’s court system — including ones related to the criminal case against Donald Trump — unless it gets paid a ransom.

In a message posted online Saturday, in both English and Russian, the hacking group called LockBit said the stolen documents “contain a lot of interesting things and Donald Trump’s court cases that could affect the upcoming US election.”

Initially, LockBit set a Saturday, March 2, deadline for the payment, according to the cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs.

It has since moved up that deadline to 8:49 a.m. ET on Thursday, February 29, LockBit’s restored website shows.

It’s not clear how much money the group is demanding. The hacking group’s demands are often negotiated in private, Dan Schiappa, the chief product officer at the cybersecurity firm Arctic Wolf, said.

The group — led by a hacker using the pseudonym LockBitSupp — appeared to become operational again over the weekend after a February 20 law-enforcement raid. A group of agencies, including the FBI and the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency, took down 34 of its servers and changed its website to a series of messages bragging about the law-enforcement operation. The same day, the US Department of Justice unsealed an indictment accusing two Russian nationals of being involved in the group’s hacking operations.

By Saturday, LockBit was back.

On a new website, the group posted a message claiming it had backup copies of documents taken from the Fulton County government’s website. It also renewed its ransom demands.

The post claimed that the FBI acted quickly because the leak of documents in Trump’s criminal case could affect the 2024 presidential election — although court documents show that the FBI’s investigation into LockBit and coordination with international law-enforcement agencies has been ongoing for years. It characterized LockBit’s relationship with the FBI as a sort of romantic rivalry and promised that the group would hack more government websites in the future.

“Personally I will vote for Trump because the situation on the border with Mexico is some kind of nightmare, Biden should retire, he is a puppet,” the message said.

Joyce Vance provided this depressing analysis on her Substack Civil Discourse. “We’re Going To Need More Coffee.”

The legal landscape in three of the four criminal cases against Trump continues to shift in his favor this week, following the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the presidential immunity appeal in the D.C. election interference case, creating at least a two-month delay for Trump. Today, requests for trial dates emerged in the Mar-a-Lago case, giving rise to concerns that the scheduling Trump requested, if adopted by Judge Aileen Cannon, would effectively block the D.C. case from going to trial before the election, even if the Supreme Court rules against Trump.

That’s only one of the important things that happened today. E. Jean Carroll filed a stinging response to Donald Trump’s efforts to get out of filing an appeal bond, pointing out that his appeal to the court to trust him was worth about as much as a promise to pay up written on a paper napkin. A transcript released of Hunter Biden’s testimony on the Hill yesterday shows him sparring with Matt Gaetz, suggesting that Gaetz wasn’t the right person to lay into Biden about drug use. A federal judge in Texas halted enforcement of a new state law that would allow Texas police to arrest people suspected of illegally crossing the border because immigration enforcement is the job of the federal government under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. In other words, it wasn’t exactly a slow news day. But we’ll focus tonight on the scheduling issues in the Mar-a-Lago case.

Today, Donald Trump, “on behalf of all of the defendants,” filed a proposed schedule for the Mar-a-Lago case. He led with the claim that, “As the leading candidate in the 2024 election, President Trump strongly asserts that a fair trial cannot be conducted this year in a manner consistent with the Constitution, which affords President Trump a Sixth Amendment right to be present and to participate in these proceedings as well as, inter alia, a First Amendment right that he shares with the American people to engage in campaign speech.”

But his lawyers note that since the Judge wants them to propose a trial schedule, they will, although it’s clear that their real request is for a trial after the election. Trump and his co-defendant Carlos De Oliveira propose an August 12 trial date, which means jury selection will start that day, and trial commences after the jury has been seated. Interestingly, their co-defendant Walt Nauta doesn’t want the trial to start until September 9. This is likely because his trial counsel is unavailable between August 5 and August 23, 2024, for “personal reasons.” It’s not unheard of for a judge to direct lawyers to change their vacation plans, if that’s what’s going on here. But if the government wants to try all defendants together and the Judge doesn’t intervene, then this is really a request for trial to start September 9 at best but really, never.

The government’s counterproposal, also filed today, was for a July 8 start. That seems to suggest that Jack Smith believes the Supreme Court won’t be sending the D.C. case back to Judge Chutkan in time for a trial in July or perhaps even in August.

Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was interviewed Thursday afternoon by MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on her first week back from 3 months of maternity leave. This wasn’t the only interview she had that shows the world and the nation’s lawyers are worried about Trump’s return to the White House. Some scariest thoughts came from Conservative Judge J. Michael Luttig, a former Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

 

Former Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney had this to say at The New Republic. As reported by Greg Sargent. “Liz Cheney Nukes the Supreme Court Over Trump Delay—and Hands Dems a Weapon. What percentage of voters know that Trump can cancel prosecutions of himself if he wins back the White House?”

In the wake of the Supreme Court agreeing to hear Donald Trump’s demand for absolute immunity from prosecution—potentially delaying his insurrection-related trial until after the election—Democrats should take careful note of Liz Cheney’s response to the decision:

The court’s decision is terrible news, to be sure, but it gives Democrats an opportunity to clarify a few crucial points, and they should seize it.

First, Democrats should stress that voters need to know before the election whether Trump committed crimes—and this is due to them as a matter of right. Second, Trump is seeking these delays to end all prosecutions of himself if he regains the White House—to corruptly place himself above the law by pardoning himself or having his handpicked lickspittle attorney general do it. Democrats must say clearly that if the court helps delay the trial until after the election, it will be enabling him to do that.

As many have noted, the Supreme Court didn’t have to agree to review an appeals court ruling against Trump, who is demanding immunity from prosecution for conspiring to obstruct the official electoral count and defraud the United States, among other charges. The high court could have simply let the lower court ruling stand, given that Republican-appointed and Democratic-appointed judges unanimously ruled that Trump’s efforts to overturn the election don’t constitute official acts—and thus don’t get immunity—a clear-cut legal case.

“This is not a difficult legal question,” Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, a constitutional law professor, told me. “All the Supreme Court has done is to introduce several months of gratuitous delay right before the presidential election.”

Speculation is rampant about that “gratuitous delay.” I don’t care much for Nikki Haley and her endless head fakes, but I agree. This is from NBC News. “Nikki Haley calls for all Trump legal cases to be ‘dealt with’ before November. The Republican presidential candidate’s comments came in an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker in Virginia. I’m not a big fan of Kristen Welker, but at least there was a discussion.

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said that all of former President Donald Trump‘s legal cases should be “dealt with” before the presidential election.

“I think all of the cases should be dealt with before November,” she said Thursday in an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker in Falls Church, Virginia, where voters will cast their primary ballots Tuesday.

“We need to know what’s going to happen before it, before the presidency happens, because after that, should he become president, I don’t think any of it’s going to get heard,” she continued.

Haley spoke a day after the Supreme Court agreed to decide whether Trump could claim presidential immunity in response to criminal charges. It could take months for the high court to reach a decision, pushing back the potential timeline for his election interference trial.

“I just think a president has to live according to the laws, too. You don’t get complete immunity,” she said, addressing the Supreme Court’s decision to take the case. She added that presidents should not get “free rein to do whatever they want to do.”

This headline from The Rolling Stone says it all. “Trump’s Team’ Literally Popping Champagne’ Over Supreme Court Taking Up Immunity Claim. The former president is unlikely to stand trial in the Justice Department’s election interference case before November.”

Various Trump advisers and sources close to the former president and 2024 GOP frontrunner were jubilant about the Supreme Court’s decision, with all of them now viewing it as highly unlikely that a federal election interference trial will happen before Election Day. Though a Trump criminal trial in New York is expected to begin next month, the former president’s team had long viewed a Jan. 6-related trial as more politically damaging. For months, Trump’s lawyers expected the federal trial to start this summer, and they have actively prepared for that scenario. Now, they likely don’t have to worry about that timeline.

The Trump 2024 campaign was fundraising off the court’s latest move hours after it happened. “BREAKING FROM TRUMP: My case is going to the SUPREME COURT!” the campaign texted supporters. “Presidents NEED IMMUNITY.” (This is, however, a position that Trump doesn’t actually hold when it comes to President Joe Biden, who he wants prosecuted.)

Trump has long been campaigning on the idea that presidents, particularly himself, should have free rein to commit crimes while in office — including crimes that “cross the line,” as he wrote on Truth Social in January.

Yes, Trump is doing his usual KKK rally speech wherever he goes. This time, it was at the US/Mexico border. This is from Raw Story. “‘Visible cringe’: Serviceman scowls amid Trump rant on ‘people who don’t speak languages.'” We all know the answer to the question: does Trump have no decency. Nope! None at all! This is reported by Kathleen Culliton.

Trump’s visit to Eagle Pass, Texas, was capped with a press conference to discuss U.S. border patrol policies likely to be at the heart of the 2024 presidential campaign.

“Nobody can explain to me how allowing millions of people from places unknown, from countries unknown, who don’t speak languages,” Trump said in a fragment sentence. “They’re truly foreign languages — nobody speaks them.”

Meanwhile, Chris Hayes had this to say on Threads.

I feel like I’m losing my mind, but it’s…pretty wild for SCOTUS to just not have issued an opinion on the Colorado ballot case with the actual voting happening on Tuesday. I know the Colorado Supreme Court decision is stayed and he’s on the ballot. And we all know they’re gonna find a way to over rule the CO SC but still seems like you should issue the opinion before the voting in question actually happens.

Colorado votes on March 5th.   I really feel that we’ve already lost our democracy in so many ways that something significant needs to be done NOW. At least the Democratic Majority in the Senate is trying to legislate. Today,  Senators Durbin, Warnock, Schumer, Booker, Blumenthal, and Butler reintroduce the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This bill would update and restore critical safeguards of the original Voting Rights Act. Another necessary action to Stop the Runaway Supreme Court. Don’t even get me started on all this hoopla on the border when Ayatollah Mike is blocking a bi-partisan bill led by a Conservative Republican Senator that would pass. This is from the Brookings Institute. William A Galston writes, “The collapse of bipartisan immigration reform: A guide for the perplexed.

Last October, Senate Republicans made it clear that they would not back additional aid for Ukraine without a bill that would help secure the southern border of the United States. With the blessing of both Senator Chuck Schumer, the Majority Leader, and Senator Mitch McConnell, the Minority Leader, a bipartisan team of senators began negotiations to produce a bill that enough members of both parties could accept to overwhelm objections from progressive Democrats and America First Republicans.

The team negotiated for four months to produce this bill. It took less than four days for its support among Republicans to collapse. Why?

The easiest explanation is that Republicans in both the House and Senate yielded to objections from their all-but-certain presidential nominee, former president Donald Trump. Once the House Speaker stated publicly that he would not allow the Senate bill to reach the House floor for a vote, Republican senators were unwilling to run the political risk of supporting a measure that would not become law.

However, there are deeper reasons for the deadlock over immigration. The last comprehensive immigration reform was enacted almost four decades ago, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. This bill represented a grand bargain between elected officials who sought to extend legal protection to millions of migrants who had entered the U.S. illegally and officials who were most concerned about stemming the flow of such migrants. The bill accomplished the former but had no discernible impact on the latter, leading many conservatives to denounce it as an “amnesty” bill.

This failure to launch legislation, along with the complete inability to pass a budget for a fiscal year about half-gone, is misgovernance on the part of the MAGA cult.

So, this has been a rough week. I hope we can relax some this weekend. It just kills me that so many of our institutions have given Trump impunity. That’s more appropriate than this entire fakery of presidential immunity. The Constitution says no one is above the law. You don’t need a fancy schmancy law degree to know that. You should learn it in Civics class sometime in your secondary education. No one should be able to walk away from the rule of law in this country.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

 

 

 

 

 

Finally Friday Reads: Rest in Power Senator Feinstein

Posted: September 29, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: U.S. Politics | Tags: , , | 6 Comments

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Today’s top headline is about a woman who was central in the fight for human rights.  “Senator Dianne Feinstein, an ‘icon for women in politics,’ dies at 90. Her career was filled with firsts: first woman mayor of SF and one of the first women elected to the U.S. Senate from California.”  This is from the San Francisco ABC affiliate.  As you can read anywhere, her legacy of legislation and activity for civil rights for all is legendary.

Feinstein’s first foray into politics came in 1960 when then-Gov. Pat Brown appointed her to the California Women’s Parole Board. But it was in 1969, at the age of 35, that Feinstein first held public office, winning a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown was in the state Senate at the time. He recalled meeting Feinstein during those years.

“I remember that I was trying to get a house here in San Francisco, when they wouldn’t allow Black people easily to get houses,” he said. “And there was a demonstration and this angular tall, great looking white woman pushing a baby stroller with a little kid in it, who nobody knew anything about, came out to participate in the protest. That was Dianne Feinstein! And it was that long ago, and so I am a great admirer.”

In the 1970s, while serving as the first female president of the Board of Supervisors, Feinstein ran twice for mayor, but lost. She had decided to not run again, when tragedy struck the city.

The tragic assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone by Supervisor Dan White in 1978 put Feinstein in the job. In 1979, Feinstein won her first full term as mayor and began reshaping the city.

During the decade she served, she survived a recall attempt, lead mostly by detractors of her proposal to ban handguns in San Francisco. She oversaw the remaking of the city’s skyline, which some decried as the Manhattan-ization of San Francisco, also oversaw a raucous 1984 Democratic National Convention and saved the city’s cable car system.

“The cable cars still running!” Brown exclaimed. “Cause of Dianne.”

Feinstein rose to power as a crisis gripped the city’s gay community. A disease that would later be called AIDS, killed thousands of gay men. Hoping to save lives, Feinstein ordered the city’s bathhouses closed. A risky move, considering the political power of the gay community at the time.

Under her watch, the city’s health department created the global standard for AIDS healthcare at San Francisco General Hospital. In 1990, Feinstein set her sights on a higher office, running for California governor. She lost to Republican Pete Wilson, but still made history again as the first woman in the state to win a major party’s gubernatorial nomination. Then, in 1992, there was a turning point.

During what was dubbed the “Year of the Woman,” Feinstein was elected to the U.S. Senate, alongside Bay Area Congresswoman Barbara Boxer.

In Congress, Feinstein served as the first woman to chair the Senate Rules Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee. She authored the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban, leading to a 10 year restriction on certain semi-automatic weapons. The legislation was prompted by the 101 California Street shooting, when a gunman opened fire at a law firm in San Francisco’s financial district, killing eight people.

“I worked with Republican and Democrats alike,” said Feinstein in an interview with CSPAN. “Ten Republicans along with 46 Democrats voted in favor of the amendment.”

Brown adds, “Dianne Feinstein is the only member of Congress either on the Congressional side or on the Senate side who’s ever been able to get a controlled weapons ban signed into law. Dianne got that.”

In 2014, Feinstein released a report revealing how the CIA was detaining and interrogating potential terrorists, sometimes torturing the suspects. The release of the report, led to anti-torture legislation.

“This program was morally, legally and administratively misguided,” she said in an interview with CSPAN. “This nation should never again engage in these tactics.”

Feinstein’s legislative legacy also includes:

  • Creating federal coordination of Amber Alerts, the national child abduction warning system
  • Passing the California Desert Protection Act, which protected millions of acres of California desert and created the Death Valley and Joshua Tree national parks
  • Reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, to protect women from domestic violence and sexual assault
  • Authoring the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act, to enshrine marriage equality into federal law

In an interview with CSPAN she said, “Simply put, Americans should be free to marry the person they love regardless of sexual orientation or race.”

At times, Sen. Feinstein faced criticism from some in her own party.

She will be missed on many levels.  The immediate impact is that Biden’s judicial appointments will be stalled.  This is from Politico. “Feinstein’s death throws Senate judicial confirmations into new limbo. Filling the open seat on the Judiciary Committee requires at least 60 votes in the Senate, meaning it would require GOP support.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s death at 90 creates a vacancy on the powerful Judiciary Committee. Democrats could need 60 votes to replace her, leaving controversial judicial nominees in limbo until then.

Senate Republicans are signaling they won’t try and block Feinstein’s committee seats from being filled. Back in April, Republicans blocked Democrats from appointing a temporary replacement for Feinstein as she was ailing with shingles and unable to return to Washington for months.

“Under the circumstances, it’s kind of follow whatever the precedent is,” Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said Friday.

Typically when a seat is vacant there is no fight about allowing vacant committee seats to be filled. Committee appointments are often done by unanimous consent.

Rules of replacement: If any Republicans were to object to a UC request, Democrats would need 60 votes to appoint a senator to fill Feinstein’s role on the Judiciary panel, meaning at least 10 Republicans would need to vote in favor of filling Democrats’ majority on the panel, assuming they move to do so before someone is appointed to the California Senate seat.

Senators are typically assigned to committees by unanimous consent, but such orders are subject to debate and can be filibustered. Republican senators could slow, or stop, Democrats from filling the Judiciary roster.

The panel, under Democratic control, has been advancing scores of judicial nominations that Republicans object to. Leaving the panel short one Democratic vote would hamper the majority’s steady confirmation of President Joe Biden’s nominees.

In April, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had chosen Maryland Democrat Ben Cardin, who has since announced his plans to retire at the end of this Congress and has been named Senate Foreign Relations chair. It’s unclear if Schumer would still pursue that resolution.

It also puts focus on the race for her replacement.  “Feinstein’s Death Intensifies Fight for a Coveted California Senate Seat. Gov. Gavin Newsom has pledged to pick a Black woman to fill the seat, but has also said he would not choose any of the current Democrats running for Senate.”  This is from the New York Times.

The death of Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat, immediately turns the spotlight to an intense, ongoing three-way battle to replace her, fraught with racial, political and generational tensions over one of the most coveted positions in California and national politics.

It also puts new pressure on Gov. Gavin Newsom, who will chose someone to fill her seat. Mr. Newsom, whose profile has risen in national Democratic politics in recent weeks as he has traveled the country on behalf of President Biden’s re-election campaign, had come under fire for announcing he would not pick any of the declared candidates in filling any vacancy, so as not to elevate them and give them an advantage.

Mr. Newsom had originally promised to pick a Black woman to fill the position if it opened up, and many Democrats thought he would turn to Representative Barbara Lee, a progressive. But Mr. Newsom said he would pick a caretaker senator instead. “I don’t want to get involved in the primary,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Ms. Lee denounced Mr. Newsom for that decision, calling it insulting.

The other leading Democratic candidates in the race for Ms. Feinstein’s seat are Representative Adam Schiff, a high-profile member of the congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol; Representative Katie Porter, a third-term California member of the House; and Ms. Ms. Lee.

There are no black women currently serving in the Senate. Many disturbing things are happening, including a First Amendment case heading to the Supreme Court. It used to be a relief to hear that some crazy law would be tossed out when it hit SCOTUS.   It’s not the crazy laws that get tossed out by the current court, so each significant case brings new fears.  This is from the Washington Post. “Landmark Texas, Florida social media cases added to Supreme Court term.  The justices on Friday announced which cases they will add to their calendar for the term that begins on Monday.” We can only wonder how much billionaire bribes will influence this outcome.

The justices’ decision to take the landmark social media cases came in an order that alsoadded 10other cases to the calendar for the Supreme Court term that begins Monday. The additional cases concern the FBI’s “no-fly” list, individual property rights and the ability of criminal defendants to confront witnesses against them.

Earlier this year, the high court had said it would tackle controversial issues in the coming term involving gun regulations, voting rights and the power of federal agencies. Those cases will be heard as the justices face intense pressure from Democratic lawmakers to address ethics issues confronting some of their colleagues, including potential conflicts in some of the cases.

Tech industry groups, whose members include Facebook and Google’s YouTube, asked the court to block Texas and Florida laws passed in 2021 that regulate companies’content-moderation policies. The companies say the measures are unconstitutional and conflict with the First Amendment by stripping private companies of the right to choose what to publish on their platforms.

The court’s review of those laws will be the highest-profile examination to date of allegations that Silicon Valley companies are illegally censoring conservative viewpoints. Those accusations reached a fever pitch when Facebook, Twitter and other companies suspended President Donald Trump’s accounts in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The justices’ ruling could have significant implications for the future of democracy and elections, as Americans increasingly rely on social media to read and discuss political news. It could also have wide-ranging effects for policymakers in Congress and statehouses around the country as they attempt to craft new laws governing social media and misinformation.

Tech industry groups, whose members include Facebook and Google’s YouTube, asked the court to block Texas and Florida laws passed in 2021 that regulate companies’content-moderation policies. The companies say the measures are unconstitutional and conflict with the First Amendment by stripping private companies of the right to choose what to publish on their platforms.

The court’s review of those laws will be the highest-profile examination to date of allegations that Silicon Valley companies are illegally censoring conservative viewpoints. Those accusations reached a fever pitch when Facebook, Twitter and other companies suspended President Donald Trump’s accounts in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The justices’ ruling could have significant implications for the future of democracy and elections, as Americans increasingly rely on social media to read and discuss political news. It could also have wide-ranging effects for policymakers in Congress and statehouses around the country as they attempt to craft new laws governing social media and misinformation.

I’m not sure anyone can predict what the nation’s highest court will do with important decisions like this. One of the most serious things the Supreme Court will decide is whether laws that bar gun ownership to Domestic Violence perpetrators will be overturned in the vein of the gun lobby’s idea of the Second Amendment.  This is from August and was published in Roll Call. “Lawmakers urge Supreme Court to keep domestic violence gun law. A lower court ruling jeopardizes decades of bipartisan efforts to protect some of the most vulnerable citizens, a brief argues.”

The Supreme Court could undermine decades of congressional efforts to prevent gun violence if they agree with a lower court decision that struck down a nearly 30-year-old gun control law, two groups of lawmakers told the justices.

The members of Congress filed briefs Monday in a case now at the high court that is seen as a test on the limits of a 2022 decision, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, that expanded Second Amendment rights.

That decision kicked off a flood of litigation over firearms restrictions, changed the way federal judges evaluate the constitutionality of gun control laws. In some cases judges have struck them down. That includes a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit that tossed a federal restriction on firearm possession for people subject to domestic violence restraining orders.

The three-judge 5th Circuit panel wrote that the Bruen decision meant the court had to find specific historical laws to justify modern firearm restrictions — and no colonial-era law dealt with firearms of domestic abusers.

A brief from Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., and Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., told the justices that upholding the 5th Circuit decision wipes out an effective tool to prevent domestic violence and “jeopardizes decades of bipartisan efforts to protect some of our country’s most vulnerable citizens.”

“The Court must not stymie further work by Congress in this crucial area of law and policy. It should reverse,” that brief states.

Congress has gathered evidence that shows survivors of domestic violence “are safer when abusers subject to restraining orders do not have unfettered access to deadly weapons,” the brief states. “This is, frankly, common sense. And nothing in the text or history of the Second Amendment says or requires otherwise.”

Another brief from Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, California Rep. Mike Thompson and 169 other Democrats in Congress argued that the 5th Circuit’s approach to evaluating gun laws would “unduly shackle Congress to the past, rendering it unable to develop innovative solutions for the benefit of the public.” The Democrats also argued that the 5th Circuit approach would let judges toss any gun law they thought didn’t have a specific enough analogue from the founding era and “allow courts to substitute their policy judgments for those of Congress.”

This term could have profound implications for public policy regarding public health.  This includes easy access to guns and what kinds of misinformation on public health issues can be presented on social media outlets.  It would be nice if we could get some campaign finance reform, too, but I doubt it would make it past Alito and Thomas, who love themselves some Dark Money.  This should also be illegal. “Trump’s campaign machine is bleeding cash for legal expenses.” Why is it legal for campaigns to cover Trump’s lawers for his dalliances with fascism? Reuters is reporting this as breaking news.

Donald Trump’s political operation has helped pay the legal expenses of more than a dozen people contacted by prosecutors investigating the former president, tying up millions of dollars that otherwise could be used for his 2024 White House bid.

Reuters has identified 13 potential witnesses or co-defendants who were represented by law firms that received payments from a political group run by Trump, based on interviews and a review of court records and campaign finance disclosures. The payments were disclosed in campaign finance reports as general payments to law firms rather than specific payments to individuals.

Those law firms, which include Brand Woodward, Dhillon Law Group and Greenberg Traurig, received more than $2.1 million in the first six months of this year from Save America, a Trump group that is separate from his campaign but played a major role raising money to support him as the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination.

The funds represent a significant chunk of the more than $21 million that Save America’s disclosures to the Federal Election Commission show it spent on legal expenses during that period, a sum that could grow substantially if the group keeps paying legal expenses that are expected to balloon in the coming year.

Some legal experts say campaign finance rules appear to allow Save America’s spending on legal bills involving Trump because the group is registered as a “leadership committee,” which faces few restrictions on spending. Others say, however, that prosecutors may scrutinize the payments for signs of any effort to influence witness testimony.

Four lawyers and legal experts consulted by Reuters said Trump’s defense in four criminal prosecutions could cost over $50 million, more than all the money raised in the first half of this year by Trump’s campaign and its top allied super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc, known as MAGA Inc

WASHINGTON, DC – DECEMBER 6: Ranking member Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) arrives for a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing concerning firearm accessory regulation and enforcing federal and state reporting to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) on Capitol Hill, December 6, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

The world is still watching the chaos in the US House of Representatives.  There’s a lot of political gossip on this topic today. But I’ll stick with this from the New York Times. “With a Shutdown in View, McCarthy Plays a Weak Hand.  The G.O.P. speaker, whose style is to placate his detractors, does not have the Republican votes to keep the government open. He is calling the vote anyway.”  This report is by Annie Karni.

When Representative Kevin McCarthy was short the votes he needed to become speaker in January, he didn’t browbeat his far-right Republican detractors or threaten retribution. Instead, he granted them major concessions, subjecting himself to a long, humiliating slog to win them over.

Mr. McCarthy is now facing a near-certain government shutdown and a possible move by the same faction to oust him from his post if he moves to head off the crisis. And he is turning to the same people-pleasing script, seeking to mollify a faction of his conference he privately scorns.

He has once again caved to the demands of far-right lawmakers, opening an impeachment inquiry into President Biden and then agreeing to slash government spending to levels they clamored for. When that was not enough, Mr. McCarthy pushed aside a stopgap spending bill to avert a government shutdown. Instead, he bowed to the right flank’s insistence on first bringing up a series of individual yearlong spending bills loaded up with arch-conservative policy dictates — even though none had a chance of enactment.

Democrats have criticized him as the weakest speaker in history. Hard-right members continue to demand more. But members of Mr. McCarthy’s inner circle — a coterie of mostly traditional Republicans who are deeply conservative but share little in common with the hard right — argue that the speaker’s malleability is actually his strength. They say it is the only way to deal with what they regard as a nearly ungovernable majority.

“He is in the driver’s seat, but he’s also willing to ask members in the car to help him navigate,” said Representative Dusty Johnson, a South Dakota Republican and McCarthy loyalist. “That is not — with all due respect to other speakers — they have mostly been interested in taking everyone in the car where they wanted to go.”

Yet with a four-vote voting margin and a far right that appears bent on forcing a shutdown, Mr. McCarthy’s car is spinning out of his control.

Now, he has decided to bring up a temporary spending bill he knows lacks the Republican support necessary to pass simply to show the public that he tried to keep the government open — a step that would likely have been deemed unthinkable by many of his predecessors.

I cannot dwell on the past for many reasons, including how difficult it was to live your own life if you did not want the stereotypical life Republicans love so much.  However, it would be nice if we could go back to a functioning federal government, a Supreme Court that isn’t so topped up with corrupt and backward-looking theocratic judges, and the defeat of this craziness that Donald Trump has brought out from under the rocks of neo confederacy.  Hell, I’d just settle for some common-sense governance and basic politeness.

However, this will be a battle royal, and we must do some deep breathing and conscious checking to get through it.  At least we’re here for each other’s sanity and peace of mind. This will be a hell of an election season. Vote right down to the dog catcher, please! In a world of the Donald’s, let us be Diannes.  Hang in there, Sky Dancers!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

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