It seems there’s no end in sight for the government shutdown. The House is on a long paid vacation, and the Senate keeps voting again and again on the House Republican plan.
The government shutdown, which started on October 1, is entering its third week. As Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) explained this morning, the Senate is in session, and it keeps voting on two bills to reopen the government. Majority leader John Thune (R-SD) keeps having the Senate vote on the measure passed by Republicans in the House. That measure funds the government until November 21. It has failed repeatedly to get past the 60 votes necessary to avoid a filibuster. The Democrats have offered an alternative measure, which extends the healthcare premium tax credit—without which health insurance costs on the Affordable Care Act market will skyrocket—and restores nearly $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid. That measure, too, has repeatedly failed to pass.
Murphy notes that normally the two sides would negotiate. But, he says, President Donald J. Trump is telling Republican senators to “BOYCOTT NEGOTIATING,” and they are “following orders.”
The House of Representatives is even more dysfunctional. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) pushed the continuing resolution through the chamber on September 19, the Friday before leaving town for a week. Then Johnson canceled the House sessions on Monday and Tuesday, September 29 and 30, both to jam the Senate into having to accept the House measure and to avoid swearing in Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), who was elected on September 23. Grijalva will provide the 218th signature on a discharge petition to force a vote on the release of the files collected during the federal investigation into the crimes of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump and his officials promised to release those files, but have tried to avoid doing so since news broke that Trump, who was a close friend of Epstein, is named in them.
I really think the Epstein issue is the reason for the Republican resistance to compromise. Trump really really doesn’t want the Epstein files to be released. There must be some terrible stuff about him in those records.
Emily Brooks of The Hill notes that jamming the Senate as Johnson tried to do was a tactic employed by the far-right Freedom Caucus, and they are cheering him on. But Democratic senators refused to vote in favor of the House measure, standing firm on extending the premium tax credits before their loss decimates the healthcare markets. Now, although Democrats are in Washington, D.C., ready to negotiate, Johnson says he will not call House members back to work until the Senate passes the House measure.
Brooks notes that not all Republicans are keen on the optics of staying out of session during a shutdown. Mike Lillis of The Hill reported on Sunday that the cancellation of all House votes since late September has some Republicans warning that the tactic will backfire. In addition to the question of healthcare premiums, there is the issue of military pay stalled by the shutdown, and the fact that, by law, Congress was supposed to deliver its 2026 budget by September 30.
Over the weekend, the administration tried to ratchet up the pressure on Democratic senators to cave when it announced it would fire about 4,200 federal employees. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo notes that the threat seemed at least in part to be designed to follow through on a threat Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought had made to pressure Democrats before the shutdown. When those layoffs didn’t happen, the administration then suggested it would not pay furloughed workers after the shutdown ends. After backlash, they walked that threat back. The new announcement seemed in part an attempt to prove they would do something.
I’m glad the Democrats are standing firm on their insistence that the cuts to health care be restored. Read more from Richardson at the substack link.
Today the Supreme Court is going to hear a case that could allow John Roberts to achieve his lifelong goal of completely destroy the Voting Rights Act.
The conservative-majority Supreme Court on Wednesday will consider whether to eviscerate a key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act in a congressional redistricting case from Louisiana.
The justices, who expanded the scope of the case over the summer, will hear oral arguments on whether states can ever consider race in drawing new districts while seeking to comply with Section 2 of the 1965 law, which was enacted against a backdrop of historic racial discrimination to protect minority voters.
The long-running dispute concerns the congressional map that Louisiana was required to redraw last year after being sued under the Voting Rights Act to ensure that there were two majority-Black districts. The original map only had one such district in a state where a third of the population is Black.
The Supreme Court originally heard the case earlier this year on a narrower set of legal issues but, in a rare move, it asked in June for the parties to reargue it. The court then raised the stakes by asking the lawyers to focus on a larger constitutional issue.
Now, the justices will be deciding whether drawing a map to ensure there are majority-Black districts violates the Constitution’s 14th and 15th amendments, which were both enacted after the Civil War to ensure equal rights for former slaves, including the right to vote.
This is interesting:
Conservatives argue that both constitutional amendments prohibit consideration of race at any time. The Supreme Court has previously embraced this “colorblind” interpretation of the Constitution, most notably in its 2023 ruling that ended the consideration of race in college admissions.
Louisiana, which initially defended its new map, has switched sides and joined a group of self-identified “non-African-American” voters who sued to block it on constitutional grounds. The Trump administration also backs the state’s new position.
The map is being defended by civil rights groups that challenged the original map.
A major redistricting case returning to the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday could not only determine the fate of the federal Voting Rights Act, but also unlock a path for Republicans to pick up a slew of additional congressional seats.
If the high court overturns the act’s Section 2 — a provision that bans racial discrimination in voting — GOP-controlled states could redraw at least 19 more voting districts for the House of Representatives in favor of Republicans, according to a recent report by the voting rights advocacy groups Black Voters Matter Fund and Fair Fight Action.
And depending on when the court rules in the case, known as Louisiana v. Callais, some number of the seats could be redistricted prior to next year’s midterm election.
The analysis comes as President Trump continues to lead a GOP push for new maps in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina and other states that could help Republicans preserve their slim House majority after the 2026 election.
The GOP effort could be bolstered by a Supreme Court ruling that eliminates longstanding Section 2 protections against the dilution of the collective power of racial minority voters.
Many of the landmark law’s supporters fear such an outcome after the conservative-majority court didn’t rule last term on the Louisiana case, and instead scheduled a rare second round of oral arguments, which is expected to focus on the constitutionality of Section 2’s redistricting requirements.
A ruling gutting Section 2 could have a cascading effect on congressional maps in mostly Southern states where Republicans either control both legislative chambers and the governor’s office or have a veto-proof majority in the legislature — and where voting is racially polarized, with Black voters tending to vote Democratic and white voters tending to vote Republican.
On Monday, Dakinikat posted a story about a 13-year-old Massachusetts boy who was arrested and then taken by ICE to a facility in Virginia. After many people reacted in shock, ICE claimed the boy had a knife and a gun when he was arrested. The local police say he had a knife but no gun.
A vigil was held outside City Hall Tuesday night for a 13-year-old boy who is being held in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Virginia after police arrested the armed teen at a bus stop last week while following up on a credible tip about a violent threat against another student.
Officers recovered a 6- to 7-inch, double-sided knife, Everett Mayor Carlo DeMaria said at a news conference earlier Tuesday. He said, however, that the teenager did not have a gun, contradicting a report by a Department of Homeland Security official.
In response to questions about how the teenager was handed over to ICE, the mayor also said the Everett Police Department did not contact ICE about the juvenile’s arrest.
“Everett police does not make arrests based on immigration status,” DeMaria said.
Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security, posted on social media Monday that the juvenile posed a “public safety threat” and was in possession of a firearm and a large knife when arrested. Everett Police Chief Paul Strong said Tuesday that no firearm was recovered….
The juvenile was booked at the police station on Thursday and then was detained by ICE at the station. He is now being held at the Northwestern Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Winchester, Va., according to his family.
A 13-year-old Massachusetts boy is in ICE custody hundreds of miles from home, and trying to figure out how this was allowed to happen has been challenging. A local news story about the ordeal went viral on Sunday, prompting more questions than answers about the conduct of local police, their relationship to federal immigration enforcement and whether the boy’s family even knew he was being taken out of state. While we have some new information, the cloud of confusion remains.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia. (Photo from The Boston Globe)
Here’s what we know at this point: Last Thursday, police in Everett, Massachusetts say the boy made a credible threat of violence against another student in the school district. When officers picked him up at a bus stop outside his school, they allegedly found a knife in his possession. Once the boy was fingerprinted, ICE became aware of the case. According to the Boston Globe, the boy’s mother was called to pick him up after he was arrested, waited for about an hour and a half, and was then told her son was taken by ICE. He was held overnight in a Massachusetts ICE facility and then taken Friday to one in Virginia. We know he came to the US from Brazil and, along with his family, has a pending asylum case.
“I’ve never done a bond or a habeas for a kid this young, ever,” US District Judge Richard G. Stearns said during an emergency habeas corpus hearing Friday filed by a lawyer on behalf of the boy. “This is the youngest.”
Everett is a city of nearly 50,000 people that borders Boston directly to the north. According to the 2010 Census, 33% of residents were born outside of the US. Per the 2020 Census, the city is a little more than 50% white, with a big Hispanic and Latino community, as well as large Italian and Brazilian populations. As people at a city council meeting testified Tuesday night, ICE has had a bombastic presence in the community since the start of the second Trump administration.
Here’s what Kabas was told by a DHS spokesperson:
After I reached out to ICE spokesperson Casey Latimer on Monday regarding the boy taken from Everett, I received a reply from a different spokesperson named James Covington. He wrote “Please see the below from DHS on the 13-year-old alien. Please feel free to direct any questions to them.”
The “below” Covington was referring to was—and bear with me here—a screenshot of an X post from DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin who had quote posted Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a Senior Fellow at the American Immigration Council. Reichlin-Melnick had posted about the story, writing “This makes NO SENSE. A 13-year-old was arrested by local police for unknown reasons, and then turned over to ICE, which is detaining him far away from his mother — who is going through immigration court, has an asylum application on file, and is legally authorized to work.”
Latimer went on to accuse the boy of “an extensive rap sheet” and possessing a gun,” which the local authorities say is not true. So maybe this is a troubled kid, but the local police should be dealing with that, not DHS, especially since his family has an active asylum case.
The Young Republicans are in the news and not in a good way.
Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.
They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.
William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n–ga” and “n–guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”
Giunta was referring to an upcoming vote on whether he should become chair of the Young Republican National Federation, the GOP’s 15,000-member political organization for Republicans between 18 and 40 years old.
“Im going to create some of the greatest physiological torture methods known to man. We only want true believers,” he continued.
Two more members of a Young Republican group chat strewn with racist epithets and hateful jokes stepped down from their jobs Tuesday after POLITICO published an exclusive report on the Telegram exchanges.
Bobby Walker and other young Republicans who took part in an epithet-filled Telegram chat are out of jobs after POLITICO began asking questions about their statements.
Peter Giunta’s time working with New York Assemblymember Mike Reilly “has ended,” the Republican lawmaker said. Giunta served as chair of the New York State Young Republicans when the chat took place. Joseph Maligno, who previously identified himself as the general counsel for that group, is no longer an employee of the New York State Unified Court System, a courts spokesperson confirmed.
Another chat member, Vermont state Senator Sam Douglass, faced mounting calls for his resignation as well, including from the state’s Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican, and Douglass’ fellow Republican lawmakers, who called his statements “deeply disturbing.”
POLITICO’s in-depth look into how one group of Young Republicans spoke privately was met Tuesday with widespread condemnation in New York, Washington and beyond. The members of the chat — 2,900 pages of which were leaked and reviewed by POLITICO — called Black people monkeys, repeatedly used slurs for gay, Black, Latino and Asian people, and jokingly celebrated Adolf Hitler.
In a bipartisan outcry, members of Congress and other political leaders from around the country said they were appalled by the contents of the group chat. The board of directors of the National Young Republicans said every member of the chat “must immediately resign” their state organization.
Trump is destroying the White House. The mess in the oval office can be fixed by a new president and the giant flagpoles could be removed, but what about the huge ballroom he’s building and the proposed Nazi-style victory arch? What about the ruined rose garden? He’s turning the people’s house into Mar-a-Lago north.
Donald Trump is obsessing over remodeling the White House like no other president.
— He has gilded the Oval Office, replaced trees, paved the Rose Garden lawn,hung art and mirrors all over, erected flagpoles and begun work on a $250 million ballroom.
— He’s not done: Trump has had models and dioramas built for other projects he’s considering, and even directed how and where new marble-tiled floors are laid….
Long after Trump has exited the presidency, his imprint will be on the executive mansion in an unprecedented scope and scale — even if a successor removes the Oval Office gold leaf.
What’s next: The president’s wandering architectural eye is now gazing southwest from the White House to land around the Memorial Bridge. He wants to erect a giant arch as a grand entrance into Washington from Arlington National Cemetery.
— “Let’s build something like the Arc de Triomphe in that space, it would be beautiful when you drive or fly in,” Trump told a White House visitor a few weeks ago.
— Trump has three differently sized models of the “Arc de Trump” that he’s been positioning on a map of D.C. to determine the right scale.
— On Saturday, Trump posted on Truth Social a rendition of the arch by Washington architect Nicolas Leo Charbonneau.
The models for the arch were 3D printed on Trump’s orders by the architects involved in designing the new ballroom. He says it’d be privately funded, along with some of the other projects. The total cost is unclear.
There’s much more horrifying stuff to read at Axios, if you stomach it.
Look inside the Donald J. Trump Grand Ballroom at Mar-a-Lago in 2005 (from The Palm Beach Post)
Eric Trump is sharing how renovations to the White House are a nod to Mar-a-Lago.
Trump gave a tour to Fox News anchor Steve Doocy of his family’s Florida golf club as he promotes his new book, “Under Siege,” which is out Tuesday. It offers an unfiltered look into the Trump world and criticism against his father, according to the memoir’s synopsis.
Moving throughout the patio and home of the Palm Beach estate, Doocy later admired the “fantastic view” of the beach, while pointing to how the resort displays the same umbrellas from the new Rose Garden.
“Exact same umbrellas as the Rose Garden,” Trump responded on “Fox & Friends.”
He added: “And by the way, that beautiful flag pole right there — the exact same flag pole that we have at the White House. I got a call from my father. He goes, “Honey, I need two great flag poles. I want to donate them to the White House.”
Trump went on to say that “we’re very happy to have the same Mar-a-Lago flagpole on the south and north grounds now.”
The U.S. has lost its last triple-A credit rating.
Moody’s Ratings downgraded the U.S. government on Friday, citing large fiscal deficits and rising interest costs.
Expanding budget deficits mean U.S. government borrowing will rise at an accelerating rate, pushing interest rates up over the long term, Moody’s said. The firm said Friday that it didn’t believe that any current budget proposals under consideration by lawmakers would do anything significant to reduce the persistent gap between government spending and revenues.
The move strips the U.S. of its last remaining triple-A credit rating from a major ratings firm, following similar cuts by Fitch Ratings in 2023 and S&P Global Ratings in 2011. Moody’s downgraded the U.S. to Aa1, a rating also held by Austria and Finland.
“Successive U.S. administrations and Congress have failed to agree on measures to reverse the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and growing interest costs,” Moody’s wrote in a statement….
The Moody’s downgrade comes as Republicans in Congress are trying to fashion a giant tax-and-spending bill that would extend expiring tax cuts, add some new tax cuts, reduce spending on Medicaid and nutrition assistance and boost border enforcement and national defense. It is expected to increase budget deficits by about $3 trillion over the next decade, compared with a scenario where the tax cuts expire as scheduled Dec. 31.
House Republican spending hawks blocked the bill on Friday, trying to accelerate spending cuts and hasten the end of clean-energy tax breaks.
A bit more:
At the margin, the Moody’s downgrade could put pressure on the market for U.S. Treasurys, which has already been hit by expectations for greater borrowing and stubbornly high inflation.
Treasurys, however, rallied after S&P’s 2011 downgrade, in part because the economy was weak, demonstrating that investors still considered the U.S. the world’s safest bet. Few expect the Moody’s downgrade to spur market turmoil this time. The U.S. remains the world’s largest economy and the benchmark against which other countries are measured.
But some investors said the downgrade could exacerbate the damage the recent trade war has done to that exceptional position. And that might compel global investors to lift the premium they demand to buy U.S. debt, which could drive benchmark yields beyond their recent level around 4.5%, likely stressing growth and market sentiment.
“That could generate an even bigger deficit because the cost of servicing our debt would also go up,” said Michael Goosay, global head of fixed income at Principal Asset Management.
Obviously, Trump couldn’t care less about what happens to the U.S. credit rating. He’s just going to bleed the country dry and grab as much has he can while doing it.
Ultra right wing members of the House budget committee voted against Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” yesterday.
The GOP-led House Budget Committee voted to reject a sweeping package for President Donald Trump’s agenda on Friday, dealing an embarrassing setback to Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Republican leaders.
A glass of milk, Nataliya Bagatskaya, (Ucraina, b.1967)
The vote in the Budget Committee was 16-21, with a band of conservative hard-liners who are pushing for steeper spending cuts joining all Democrats in voting against the multitrillion-dollar legislation, leaving its fate uncertain.
The Republicans who voted “no” were Reps. Chip Roy of Texas, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Andrew Clyde of Georgia and Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma. Rep. Lloyd Smucker of Pennsylvania changed his vote from “yes” to “no,” he said, as a procedural move to allow Republicans to call the bill up again.
During the hearing, Roy fired a warning shot at Republican leaders, saying he opposes the bill as written because it will increase the deficit.
“I have to now admonish my colleagues on this side of the aisle. This bill falls profoundly short. It does not do what we say it does with respect to deficits,” Roy said. “That’s the truth. Deficits will go up in the first half of the 10-year budget window and we all know it’s true. And we shouldn’t do that. We shouldn’t say that we’re doing something we’re not doing.”
“This bill has back-loaded savings and has front-loaded spending,” Roy added. “I am a no on this bill unless serious reforms are made today, tomorrow, Sunday. Something needs to change or you’re not gonna get my support.”
After the vote tally was read, Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, the committee chair, adjourned the hearing and told members they would not be meeting again this weekend.
President Donald Trump blasted Walmart on Saturday after the retailer warned this week that it will raise prices because of tariffs.
“Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, “EAT THE TARIFFS,” and not charge valued customers ANYTHING,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!”
Walmart CFO John David Rainey said in an interview on Thursday that “We have not seen price increases at this magnitude, in the speed in which they’re coming at us before, and so it makes for a challenging environment.”
Rainey said he is “pleased with the progress that’s been made by the [Trump] administration on tariffs from the levels that were announced in early April, but they’re still too high.”
He said the company will “try to work with suppliers to keep prices as low as we can.”
Yesterday the Supreme Court dealt a blow to the Trump administration’s deportation plans.
The Supreme Court on Friday blocked President Donald Trump from moving forward with deportations under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act for a group of immigrants in northern Texas, siding with Venezuelans who feared they were poised for imminent removal under the sweeping wartime authority.
The decision is a significant loss for Trump, who wants to use the law to speed deportations – and avoid the kind of review normally required before removing people from the country. But the decision is also temporary and the underlying legal fight over the president’s invocation will continue in multiple federal courts across the country.
By Sandra Batoni
The justices sent the case at issue back to an appeals court to decide the underlying questions in the case, including whether the president’s move is legal and, if it is, how much notice the migrants targeted under the act should receive….
The court’s unsigned opinion was notably pointed about how the government was attempting to handle the removals and also how US District Judge James Hendrix had dealt with the case at an earlier stage.
The court referenced another case that had reached it previously, that of the Maryland man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly removed to El Salvador. The court noted that the Trump administration has represented that it is “unable to provide for the return of an individual deported in error to a prison in El Salvador.”
Given that, the court said, “the detainees’ interests at stake are accordingly particularly weighty.” In other words, the court was saying it is important to get the legal questions correct before people are removed, potentially, forever.
Way back on <checks notes> Wednesday, I wrote a long post updating the state of play in the (many) cases challenging President Trump’s attempt to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to remove from the United States, on a mass, summary basis, individuals the government claims to be Venezuelan members of the Tren de Aragua (TdA)….
As I noted then, the Supreme Court had yet to decide the ACLU’s pending emergency application in the case from the Northern District of Texas—with the unhelpful caption “A.A.R.P. v. Trump.” That’s the case in which the Court had temporarily blocked further removals in its after-midnight ruling early on Saturday, April 19 (which I covered here). But a full ruling on the application has been pending ever since.
Well, around 3:45 on Friday afternoon, that ruling came down. And the decision—in “A.A.R.P. II”—is a pretty big deal. So I thought I’d put together this quick post that walks through what happened—and why it matters….
What Did the Court … Hold? There’s a lot of technical stuff in the eight-page, unsigned majority opinion.1 What’s especially important are, by my count, three different holdings: First, that the Fifth Circuit did have jurisdiction to hear the plaintiffs’ appeal of the district court’s refusal to block their removal (it had concluded otherwise). Second, that the plaintiffs were entitled to more notice than they had received as of April 18. And third—and this is the quiet bombshell in the ruling—that “this Court may properly issue temporary injunctive relief to the putative class in order to preserve our jurisdiction pending appeal,” even without resolving whether full class certification is likely….
The post is pretty technical, so if you want the details, read the whole thing at the link. I’ll just quote one more section:
Is It Me, Or is the Majority Opinion … Unusually Pointed? It’s not you. There are at different passages in which the majority openly seems to be expressing … frustration … with the government; the lower courts; and Justice Alito (who wrote a dissenting opinion that was joined by Justice Thomas), respectively.
It appears that at least some of the justices are getting sick and tired of the Trump administration’s dishonesty and refusal to obey the courts.
GREENBELT, Md. — In a contentious court hearing on Friday, Trump administration attorneys argued before a federal judge in Maryland that they should be allowed to withhold information regarding efforts to facilitate the return of a Salvadoran man to the United States.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia remains in the Salvadoran prison system despite orders from a federal judge and the Supreme Court calling for the government to facilitate his return to the United States.
Drawing of old woman with cat, Max Leibermann
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis said the government’s refusal to provide certain information in the case has been “an exercise in utter frustration.” In a back-and-forth that has continued for weeks,Xinis has ordered the administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release and provide documentation on what steps it has taken, if any, to comply with that order.
Government lawyers said the administration has not been able to answer questions about Abrego Garcia’s case because that information would be considered protected under “state secrets” or “deliberative process” privileges that should not be shared with the public.
On Friday, Xinis said the administration has not made a good-faith effort to comply with the court order. She repeatedly called on the administration to show how turning over evidence of actions it has taken or will take to return Abrego Garcia would pose a reasonable danger to foreign affairs.
“There is simply no detail. This is basically, ‘Take my word for it,’” the judge said.
From Garcia’s attorneys:
Abrego Garcia’s team said the discovery they’ve received from the government thus far has been inadequate, and Xinis appeared to agree. The plaintiffs said they received 164 documents, and 132 of them were photocopies of court filings and their own discovery requests. Rossman said that of the remaining 32 new documents, half were related to Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s recent trip to El Salvador to see Abrego Garcia.
Rossman said the government logged 1,140 documents as “privileged,” in “every manner of privilege that I’ve ever heard of.”
“My head is spinning, your honor,” he said.
Rossman also said it was “deeply disturbing” that while the administration has claimed in court that it’s complying with the order to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release, high-ranking officials including Trump himself have contradicted that in public.
The administration’s claims, Xinis says, have been hampering efforts to get to the bottom of whether the government has disobeyed the court order by not facilitating the return of Abrego Garcia to the United States.
When a Guatemalan man sued the Trump administration in March for deporting him to Mexico despite a fear of persecution, immigration officials had a response: The man told them himself he was not afraid to be sent there.
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials now say they have no record of anyone being told by the man, identified only by the initials O.C.G. in court papers, that he was unafraid of going to Mexico. The error, they say, was attributable to a “software tool” known as ICE’s “ENFORCE alien removal module” that tracks individual deportation cases and allows staff to insert comments.
“Upon further investigation … ICE was unable to identify an officer or officers who asked O.C.G. if he feared a return to Mexico,” said Brian Ortega, assistant field office director for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, in a sworn statement to the federal judge overseeing the lawsuit.
The mistake may have been costly: The judge overseeing the lawsuit said last month he did not order the administration to facilitate O.C.G.’s immediate return from Mexico in part because of the dispute. Instead, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy, a Biden appointee based in Massachusetts, ordered expedited fact-finding, which helped unearth the mistake.
ICE’s acknowledgment is the latest in a string of errors that have led judges to fault the administration for attempting to carry out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign at a breakneck pace — often at the expense of due process.
The U.S. DOGE Service arrived at the Social Security Administration this year determined to slash staff and root out what it claimed was widespread fraud and wasteful spending — a mission Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team has pursued across the government.
But as of this week, many of the major changes DOGE pushed at Social Security have been abandoned or are being reversed after proving ineffective, while others are yielding unintended consequences and badly damaging customer service and satisfaction. The problems come as the agency struggles to cope with a record surge of hundreds of thousands of retirement claims in recent months.
DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency but is not a Cabinet-level agency, had to cancela plan to cut phone service for retirement and disability claimsafter drawing outrage from lawmakers, seniors and advocates. Staff reductions and reassignments led by DOGE are slowing the pace of claims processingas field offices lose longtime staff and gain a smaller number of inexperienced replacements. DOGE-driven changes to the agency’s website are causing crashes almost every day, and phone customers complain about dropped calls and long wait times. A DOGE-imposed spending freeze is leading to shortages of basic office supplies, from printer cartridges to the phone headsets staff need to do their jobs.
And on Friday, Social Security leaders told employees that the agency was ending a security check, developed at DOGE’s request, that was meant to root out allegedly fraudulent claims filed over the phone, according to three employees familiar with the situation and an email obtained by The Washington Post. But the measure — which involved placing a three-day hold on all phone claims as other staffers checked into the caller’s background — had only identified a couple of potential fraud cases while causing significant delays in claims processing, two employees said.
Kathleen Romig, a former Social Security official who is now at the left-leaningCenter on Budget and Policy Priorities, said there were already safeguards in place to detect fraud through the agency’s phone service. DOGE’s efforts have only delayed claims processing and, like most of the team’s attempts to reshape Social Security, placed serious stress on the agency, she said.
“So much of this is self-inflicted wounds,” Romig said.
At the National Institutes of Health, six directors — from institutes focused on infectious disease, child health, nursing research and the human genome — are leaving or being forced out.
t the Federal Aviation Administration, nearly a dozen top leaders, including the chief air traffic officer, are retiring early.
Siesta, Irina Orazio Orazi (Italian, 1848-1912)
And at the Treasury Department, more than 200 experienced managers and highly skilled technical experts who help run the government’s financial systems chose to accept the Trump administration’s resignation offer earlier this year, according to a staffer and documents obtained by The Washington Post.
Across the federal government, a push for early retirement and voluntary separation is fueling a voluntary exodus of experienced, knowledgeable staffers unlike anything in living memory, according to interviews with 18 employees across 10 agencies and records reviewed by The Post. Other leaders with decades of service are being dismissed as the administration eliminates full offices or divisions at a time.
The first resignation offer, sent in January, saw 75,000 workers across government agree to quit and keep drawing pay through September, the administration has said. But a second round, rolling out agency by agency through the spring, is seeing a sustained, swelling uptick that will dwarf the first, potentially climbing into the hundreds of thousands, the employees and the records show.
There’s no way I’m trusting anything this government has to say about health and safety.
I’ll wrap this up with a couple of ridiculous stories:
Former FBI Director James Comey was interviewed by US Secret Service agents at their Washington, DC, field office on Friday afternoon, according to law enforcement sources.
Comey was interviewed by agents investigating a social media post he posted Thursdayshowing shells in the sand on a beach spelling out “86 47,” which has become a popular social media code for removing Trump from the presidency.
Comey was not in custody and appeared voluntarily, a source said.
Trump and fellow Republicans have attacked Comey for the post, demanding an investigation.
Comey “knew exactly what that meant,” Trump said in a Fox News interview. “A child knows what that meant. If you’re the FBI director and you don’t know what that meant, that meant assassination.”
In explaining why he removed the post, Comey wrote on Instagram that he had “posted earlier a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message.”
It was expected that Comey will be asked if he intended the message as a threat, or to inspire others who might consider an act of violence against Trump, the source said. Ultimately, a decision on whether the case is chargeable as a threat against the president may lie with the US attorney in Washington.
Funny how no Trumpers were interviewed by the FBI when they posted 86 46 when Biden was president.
Figure with Black Cat, 2020 by Mary Sauer (American, b. 1986)
“I see that Highly Overrated Bruce Springsteen goes to a Foreign Country to speak badly about the President of the United States,” Trump wrote, glossing over the fact that he, too, is currently in a foreign country speaking badly about someone.
Trump also called Springsteen “a pushy, obnoxious JERK” without a hint of self-awareness.
Springsteen opened the first show of his tour with an unambiguous rallying cry for democracy, warning that America “is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration.”
“Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experience to rise with us,” he said. “Raise your voices against the authoritarianism, and let freedom ring.”
That’s it for me today. What’s on your mind?
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I’m trying not to let myself fall into despair over what’s happening in our country and the world, but it isn’t easy. I try to distract myself by reading novels and by watching shows on Netflix and Max. But inevitably I open my phone or turn on cable news and get hit with awful news about what new insane thing Trump is doing or saying.
This morning, as I look around at stories in the news, I find myself sinking into sadness over what we have already lost from our democracy and what more losses could be coming. It’s all so tragic. I honestly despise the people who voted for Trump.
There’s one person who never fails to lift my spirits, if only temporarily: MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell. Recently, he has had a great time making fun of Trump’s seeming obsession with American girls’ dolls and how they need to make do with just 2 or 3 or 4 instead of 35 because of his tariffs.
Last night Lawrence made an interesting point about Trump’s cognitive decline. He pointed out that Trump saying “I don’t know,” when asked if people in the U.S. have a right to due process and when asked if he has a duty to defend the Constitution is something new for him. Normally, Trump never admits to not knowing something. He would rather bumble around talking complete nonsense than admit to not knowing.
Lawrence argues that Trump is a pathetic husk of his former self, exhausted and befuddled by his responsibilities. Not that any of this is going to drive Trump from office, but it’s an interesting thought. The danger, of course is that other people like Elon Musk and Stephen Miller could be in control of the presidency.
Lawrence also discussed Trump’s embarrassing appearance yesterday in the Oval Office with newly elected Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.
“The Canadian prime minister both humbled and humiliated Donald Trump at the same time without Donald Trump having the slightest idea it was happening,” he said on Tuesday night.
Later in the segment, O’Donnell slammed Trump’s “utterly demented attempt” to turn Canada into a state. Carney, he noted, responded by saying “absolutely no to Donald Trump to his face.”
But Trump, he said, barely noticed.
“Donald Trump had no fight in him today when the very polite Canadian beside him talked rings around Donald Trump like a ring master in a circus with a trained animal, threw in some magic words that sounded flattering enough to Donald Trump so that Donald Trump actually ― and you’ll see this ― ends up nodding and agreeing with the man who is humiliating him and defeating him right there in the room on TV,” O’Donnell said. “No president has ever lost more in one conversation in the Oval Office than Donald Trump lost in these 90 seconds.”
O’Donnell rolled the footage of the meeting, where Carney told him Canada would never be for sale and would not be a U.S. state.
So, on to today’s news.
India and Pakistan–both nuclear powers–appear to be on the verge of war.
India launched military strikes on targets in Pakistan, both countries said on Wednesday and Pakistan claimed it had shot down five Indian Air Force jets, in an escalationthat has pushed the two nations to the brink of wider conflict.
India’s missile strikes early Wednesday morning targeted “terrorist infrastructure” across nine sites in Pakistan’s densely populated Punjab province and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, it said. They came in response to a massacreby militantsof tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir two weeks ago, that New Delhi blamed on its neighbor.
India Pakistan map
Pakistan said at least 26 people were killed in Wednesday’s strikes – including women and a three-year-old girl – and 46 wounded. The country’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif describedthe strikes as “an act of war” and Islamabad has vowed to retaliate.
From early Wednesday the two sides have exchanged shelling across their border, with locals on both sides telling CNN they weretakingshelter. A CNN journalist in Pakistan-administered Kashmir heard multiple loud explosions.
“A shell landed at a house close to the mosque in which two people were injured. Shells also hit other houses in our area and we fled from our area to a safer place,” said Shakeel Butt, a resident of Muzaffarabad, in Pakistani-administered Kashmir. A senior Indian defense source said at least eight people had been killed on the Indian side of the border.
Pakistani military sources later said they shot down five Indian Air Force jets and one drone in “self-defense,” claiming three Rafale jets – sophisticated multi-role fighters made in France – were among those downed as well as a MiG-29 and an SU-30 fighter.
A local resident and government official told CNN that an unidentified fighter aircraft had crashed on a school building in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Tensions between India and Pakistan intensified Wednesday after India’s military launched strikes against the neighboring country in response to a militant attack in Indian-administered Kashmir last month, heightening fears of war between the nuclear-armed rivals….
The strikes have set the region on edge and shattered the fragile ceasefire that has largelyheld since 2021, with analysts warning of escalation in the decades-long conflict that has riven the South Asian subcontinent over the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir, parts of which are controlled by India and Pakistan, though the area is claimed in full by both countries.
Wednesday’s aerial assault is on a far bigger scale than in 2019, when India struck a single, remote Pakistani site in response to a suicide bombing that killed more than 40 Indian soldiersin Kashmir….
The sharp rise in tensions follows a deadly April 22 attack on tourists near the town of Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Gunmen armed with rifles killed 25 Indians and one Nepalese citizen. More than a dozen others were injured. The attack was the deadliest against civilians since the 2008 Mumbai attacks by the Pakistani-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba that killed 166 people.
Indian-administered Kashmir is a heavily militarized zone. An armed insurgency — either seeking independence or favoring accession to Pakistan — has continued against Indian rule for more than three decades.
India has long accused Pakistan of fomenting separatist violence in Kashmir. Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said Wednesday that India had found evidence linking themilitants in the Pahalgam attack to Pakistan.
The Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi revoked Kashmir’s semiautonomous status in August 2019 and instituted a crackdown, including imposing the world’s longest internet shutdown in a democracy. Promising development and investment, New Delhi had touted a return to relative peace, citing the surge of tourists to the region, a narrative upended by the deadly attack last month.
Read more at the WaPo.
Joe Biden gave his first major interview since he left the White House.
Former US President Joe Biden has given his first in-depth interview since he left the White House in January, speaking to the BBC about his legacy, foreign policy and his view of President Donald Trump’s first 100 days.
He said that he had few regrets, but he offered grave warnings about global affairs as Europe marks 80 years since the end of World War Two on the continent….
The former president also reflected on his decision to drop out of the 2024 election race – but he had less to say about any mistakes he and the Democrats may have made along the way….
On leaving the 2024 presidential race:
Democratic strategists have lamented that the last-minute handover left their campaign flat-footed, ultimately aiding Trump’s path to the White House, even as Democrats held a financial advantage in the 2024 race.
Biden boasted of being “so successful on our agenda” – a reference to the major legislation enacted in his first two years in office on the environment, infrastructure and social spending, as well as the better-than-expected Democratic performance in the 2022 midterm elections.
“It was hard to say now I’m going to stop,” he said. “Things moved so quickly that it made it difficult to walk away.”
Ultimately, quitting was “the right decision”, he said, but it was “just a difficult decision”.
On Trump and Ukraine:
Biden described the Trump administration’s suggestion that Ukraine give up territory as part of a peace deal with Russia as “modern-day appeasement” – a reference to European allies that allowed Adolf Hitler to annex Czechoslovakia in the 1930s in an ill-fated attempt to prevent a continent-wide conflict.
Joe Biden at BBC interview
“I just don’t understand how people think that if we allow a dictator, a thug, to decide he’s going to take significant portions of land that aren’t his, that that’s going to satisfy him. I don’t quite understand,” Biden said of Russian President Vladimir Putin….
Though Biden’s repeated assertion that Russian tanks would be rolling through central Europe if America and its allies didn’t support Ukraine is impossible to prove, he views the threat posed by Putin as serious and worthy of the comparison.
Biden also said that if the US allowed a peace deal that favoured Russia, Putin’s neighbours would be under economic, military and political pressure to accommodate Moscow’s will in other ways. In his view, the promise of American support to European allies becomes less believable and less of a deterrent.
Until this week, President Biden himself (former presidents keep their titles after they leave office) has largely observed the convention that former presidents do not criticise their successors at the start of their time in office. But from the moment we shake hands it is clear that he is determined to have his say too.
In a dark blue suit, the former president arrives smiling and relaxed but with the determined air of a man on a mission. It’s his first interview since leaving the White House, and he seems most angry about Donald Trump’s treatment of America’s allies – in particular Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky….
“I found it beneath America, the way that took place,” he says of the explosive Oval Office row between Trump and Zelensky in February. “And the way we talk about now that, ‘it’s the Gulf of America’, ‘maybe we’re going to have to take back Panama’, ‘maybe we need to acquire Greenland, ‘maybe Canada should be a [51st state].’ What the hell’s going on here?
“What President ever talks like that? That’s not who we are. We’re about freedom, democracy, opportunity – not about confiscation.”
The U.S. is stepping up its intelligence-gathering efforts regarding Greenland, drawing America’s spying apparatus into President Trump’s campaign to take over the island, according to two people familiar with the effort.
Several high-ranking officials under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard issued a “collection emphasis message” to intelligence-agency heads last week. They were directed to learn more about Greenland’s independence movement and attitudes on American resource extraction on the island.
The classified message asked agencies, whose tools include surveillance satellites, communications intercepts and spies on the ground, to identify people in Greenland and Denmark who support U.S. objectives for the island.
The directive is one of the first concrete steps Trump’s administration has taken toward fulfilling the president’s often-stated desire to acquire Greenland.
A collection-emphasis message helps set intelligence-agency priorities, directing resources and attention to high-interest targets. The Greenland order, which went to agencies including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, underscores the administration’s apparent commitment to seeking control of the self-governing island. It forms part of the Kingdom of Denmark, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization member and a decadeslong ally.
James Hewitt, a National Security Council spokesman, said the White House doesn’t comment on intelligence matters, but added: “The president has been very clear that the U.S. is concerned about the security of Greenland and the Arctic.”
In a statement, Gabbard said: “The Wall Street Journal should be ashamed of aiding deep state actors who seek to undermine the President by politicizing and leaking classified information. They are breaking the law and undermining our nation’s security and democracy.”
More at the WSJ. I got past the paywall by clicking the link on Memeorandum.
A Navy fighter jet failed to land on an aircraft carrier and plummeted into the Red Sea on Tuesday, marking the fourth major mishap involving the vessel and the third loss of a fighter jet deployed with it since the warship left home last year.
The F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet, worth about $67 million, went overboard after an unsuccessful attempt to slow it down upon landing on the USS Harry S. Truman, the Navy said in a statement. Both aviators aboard the jet safely ejected and were rescued at sea by helicopter with minor injuries, and no one aboard the warship’s flight deck was harmed, the service said.
Boeing F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet
The latest incident, reported earlier by CNN, followed the loss of another jet, an F/A-18E, in an accident aboard the Truman last week in which the aircraft tumbled overboard after sailors aboard lost control of it while towing it in the ship’s hangar bay. A third fighter jet from the Truman was shot down accidentally over the Red Sea in December by another Navy warship, the USS Gettysburg, in an incident that triggered concerns about communication among warships and fighter jets in the region.
The Truman also was involved in a collision in the Mediterranean Sea in February, prompting the service to fire its commanding officer, Navy Capt. Dave Snowden. He was replaced by Navy Capt. Christopher Hill, who had just completed the deployment of another carrier, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower.
While the incidents have not killed any service members, they have raised questions about the strain placed on the aircraft carrier’s crew and its ability to carry out a grueling deployment in which troops have clashed for months with Houthi militants in Yemen, who have repeatedly launched drone and missile attacks against vessels in the region. The mishaps have the attention of senior U.S. military leaders, a defense official familiar with the discussion said Tuesday night, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has twice extended the aircraft carrier’s deployment since it left its home in Virginia last September, most recently last week, to ensure that the Navy had two aircraft carriers on hand to battle the Houthis. Since March, the carrier has been on the front lines of a full-scale assault that President Donald Trump ordered against the Yemen-based militant group in response to its attacks on commercial and military vessels dating to late 2023.
Pete Hegseth isn’t the only cabinet member who doesn’t seem to care about protecting the nation’s secrets.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, used the same easily cracked password for different online accounts over a period of years, according to leaked records reviewed by WIRED. Following her participation in a Signal group chat in which sensitive details of a military operation were unwittingly shared with a journalist, the revelation raises further questions about the security practices of the US spy chief.
WIRED reviewed Gabbard’s passwords using databases of material leaked online created by the open-source intelligence firms District 4 Labs and Constella Intelligence. Gabbard served in Congress from 2013 to 2021, during which time she sat on the Armed Services Committee, its Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations, and the Foreign Affairs Committee, giving her access to sensitive information. Material from breaches shows that during a portion of this period, she used the same password across multiple email addresses and online accounts, in contravention of well-established best practices for online security. (There is no indication that she used the password on government accounts.)
Tulsi Gabbard
Two collections of breached records published in 2017 (but breached at some previous unknown date), known as “combolists,” reveal a password that was used for an email account associated with her personal website; that same password, according to a combolist published in 2019, was used with her Gmail account. That same password was used, according to records dating to 2012, for Dropbox and LinkedIn accounts associated with the email address tied to her personal website. According to records dating to 2018 breaches, she also used it on a MyFitnessPal account associated with a me.com email address and an account at HauteLook, a now-defunct ecommerce site then owned by Nordstrom.
Records of these breaches have been available online for years and are accessible in commercial databases.
Gabbard’s spokesperson downplayed this story, saying the information is a decade old and passwords have been changed many times since then. But check out this info on Gabbard:
The password associated with all of the accounts in question includes the word “shraddha,” which appears to have personal significance to Gabbard: Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported that she had been initiated into the Science of Identity Foundation, an offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement into which she was reportedly born and which former members have accused of being a cult. Several former adherents told The Journal that they believe Gabbard received the name “Shraddha Dasi” when she was allegedly received into the group. Gabbard’s deputy chief of staff, Alexa Henning, responded to questions from The Journal at the time by posting them on X and accusing the news media of publicizing “Hinduphobic smears and other lies.”
The U.S. DOGE Service is racing to build a single centralized database with vast troves of personal information about millions of U.S. citizens and residents, a campaign that often violates or disregards core privacy and security protections meant to keep such information safe, government workers say.
The team overseen by Elon Musk is collecting data from across the government, sometimes at the urging of low-level aides, according to multiple federal employees and a former DOGE staffer, who all spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. The intensifying effort to unify systems into one central hub aims to advance multiple Trump administration priorities, including finding and deporting undocumented immigrants and rooting out fraud in government payments. And it follows a March executive order to eliminate “information silos” as DOGE tries to streamline operations and cut spending.
At several agencies, DOGE officials have sought to merge databases that had long been kept separate, federal workers said. For example, longtime Musk lieutenant Steve Davis told staffers at the Social Security Administration that they would soon start linking various sources of Social Security data for access and analysis, according to a person briefed on the conversations, with a goal of “joining all data across government.” Davis did not respond to a request for comment.
But DOGE has also sometimes removed protections aroundsensitive information — on Social Security numbers, birth dates, employment history, disability records, medical documentation and more. In one instance, a website for a new visa program wasn’t set up behind a protective virtual private network as would be customary, according to a Department of Homeland Security employee and records obtained by The Washington Post.
The administration’s moves ramp up the risk of exposing data to hackers and other adversaries, according to security analysts, and experts worry that any breaches could erode public confidence in government. Civil rights advocates and some federal employees also worry that the data assembled under DOGE could be used against political foes or for targeted decisions about funding or basic government services.
“Separation and segmentation is one of the core principles in sound cybersecurity,” said Charles Henderson of security company Coalfire. “Putting all your eggs in one basket means I don’t need to go hunting for them — I can just steal the basket.”
The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the Trump administration may start enforcing a ban on transgender troops serving in the military that had been blocked by lower courts.
The ruling was brief, unsigned and gave no reasons, which is typical when the justices act on emergency applications. It will remain in place while challenges to the ban move forward.
The court’s three liberal members — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — noted dissents but provided no reasoning.
Commander Emily Shilling
The case concerns an executive order issued on the first day of President Trump’s second term. It revoked an order from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. that had let transgender service members serve openly.
A week later, Mr. Trump issued a second order saying that “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle.”
The Defense Department implemented Mr. Trump’s order in February, issuing a new policy requiring transgender troops to be forced out of the military. According to officials there, about 4,200 current service members, or about 0.2 percent of the military, are transgender.
The context:
The Supreme Court’s order came against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s broad attacks on transgender rights. The administration has sought to bar transgender athletes from sports competitions. It has tried to force transgender people to use bathrooms designated for their sex assigned at birth. And it has objected to letting people choose their pronouns.
The justices will soon decide the fate of a Tennessee law that bans transition care for transgender youths, challenged in a case brought by the Biden administration. The Trump administration flipped the government’s position in that case in February, after an executive order directed agencies to take steps to curtail surgeries, hormone therapy and other gender transition care for people under 19 years old.
In the case decided on Tuesday, seven active service members, as well as a person who sought to join and an advocacy group, sued to block the policy, saying, among other things, that it ran afoul of the Constitution’s equal protection clause.
One of the plaintiffs, Cmdr. Emily Shilling, who began transitioning in 2021 while serving in the Navy, has been a naval aviator for 19 years, flying more than 60 combat missions, including in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Her lawyers said the Navy had spent $20 million on her training.
In March, Judge Benjamin H. Settle of the Federal District Court in Tacoma, Wash., issued a nationwide injunction blocking the ban, using Commander Shilling as an example of the policy’s flaws.
Faced with the highly secretive and complex ritual of choosing a new pope, Catholic cardinals have turned to Hollywood to learn how it could all play out.
As crazy as it might sound, some of the 133 high-ranking clerics set to enter the Sistine Chapel when the conclave starts on Wednesday have looked to the Ralph Fiennes movie ― handily titled just “Conclave” ― for pointers.
“Some have watched it in the cinema,” a cleric involved in the real thing admitted to POLITICO.
The movie, directed by Edward Berger, features English actor Fiennes as Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, the dean of the College of Cardinals. As the pope-appointed steward of the conclave, he has to deal with fractious clerics, the emergence of scandalous dossiers targeting papal favorites and the appearance of an unknown candidate from an obscure diocese.
It all might sound painfully relevant. The film is seen as remarkably accurate even by cardinals, said the cleric, making it a helpful research tool, especially at a time when so many of the conclave participants have little experience of Vatican politics and protocol.
A majority of the cardinals who flocked to Rome in the weeks since the death of Pope Francis were appointed by the late pontiff, and have never experienced a conclave. Mirroring the Fiennes film, many also come from small, previously overlooked dioceses across the globe.
This has gotten way too long, so I’d better wrap it up. What’s on your mind today?
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Before I get to the news, I want to call attention to the fact that today April 19, 2025 is the 250th anniversary of the first shots fired in the American revolutionary war–commemorated in the Concord Hymn, by Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Concord Hymn
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument, July 4, 1837
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set today a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.
It’s a big deal here in the Boston area, although I haven’t seen much about it in the news. If you watch Rachel Maddow’s show, she has been talking about this anniversary for the past few days. Towns around where I live have lots of celebrations going on. I think this anniversary is really significant right now, because of Trump’s and Musk’s efforts to destroy our government an install a Russian-style dictatorship.
Now on to today’s momentous news:
The Trump administration’s war on immigrants is running into some serious pushback. Early this morning, the Supreme Court ordered the Trump gang to halt their planned deportment of Venezualan men from a Texas detention camp. Trump must be enraged.
The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration early Saturday to temporarily halt the deportations of dozens of alleged Venezuelan gang members who immigration advocates say were at imminent risk of being removed from the country.
“The Government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this Court,” the order reads.
The court did not explain its reasoning in its brief unsigned emergency order. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented, with Alito saying he would file a more fulsome statement on his disagreement with the ruling later.
The Trump administration was preparing to deport the Venezuelan men under the Alien Enemies Act, the American Civil Liberties Union said Friday as it scrambled to find a court it could persuade to step in and block the removals before it was too late.
In a statement early Saturday, the ACLU’s lead counsel in the case, Lee Gelernt, said the organization was “relieved that the Supreme Court has not permitted the administration to whisk them away the way others were just last month.”
But the fate of the detainees targeted for this latest round of removals remains unresolved. Attorneys for the migrants had also pressed federal judges in Texas and Washington as well as the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit to intervene, arguing that the government had not provided those targeted a meaningful opportunity to challenge the reasons for their removals.
In its order early Saturday, the Supreme Court said it would take further action after the 5th Circuit had weighed in. Around that same time, a three-judge panel from that appellate court denied the ACLU’s emergency request to block the deportations and chided its lawyers for coming to them before a lower court had ruled on the issue.
Just before 1:00 a.m. (ET) last night/very early this morning, the Supreme Court handed down a truly remarkable order in the latest litigation challenging the Trump administration’s attempts to use the Alien Enemy Act (AEA) to summarily remove large numbers of non-citizens to third countries, including El Salvador:
I wanted to write a short1 post to try to put the order into at least a little bit of context—and to sketch out just how big a deal I think this (aggressive but tentative) intervention really is.
I. The J.G.G. Ruling
As I wrote at the time, although I disagreed with the majority’s “habeas-only” analysis, the broader ruling made would’ve made at least a modicum of sense if the Court was dealing with any other administration, but it raised at least the possibility that the Trump administration, specifically, would try to play games to make habeas review effectively inadequate. And all of those games would unfold while no court has ruled, one way or the other, on either the facial legal question (does the AEA apply at all to Tren de Aragua); or case-specific factual/legal questions about whether individual detainees really are “members” of TdA. Lo and behold, that’s what happened.
II. The J.A.V. Ruling
As folks may recall, just 12 days ago, the Court issued a short per curiam opinion in Trump v. J.G.G., in which it held two things: First, a 5-4 majority held that challenges to removal under the AEA must be brought through habeas petitions where detainees are being held, not through Administrative Procedure Act claims in the D.C. district court (like J.G.G.). Second, the Court unanimously held that “AEA detainees must receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal under the Act. The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.”
In the immediate aftermath of the Court’s April 7 ruling in J.G.G., litigants successfully obtained TROs against AEA removals in three different district courts—the Southern District of New York; the District of Colorado; and, as most relevant here, the Southern District of Texas. In the S.D. Tex. case (J.A.V. v. Trump), Judge Fernando Rodriguez (not that it should matter, but a Trump appointee) barred the government from removing the named plaintiffs or anyone else “that Respondents claim are subject to removal under the [AEA] Proclamation, from the El Valle Detention Center.” (The other rulings were also geographically specific.)
III. The A.A.R.P. Case
Then things got messy. According to media reports, starting on Thursday, a number of non-citizens being held at the Bluebonnet detention facility in Anson, Texas (in the Northern District of Texas) were given notices of their imminent removal under the AEA (in English only), with no guidance as to how they could challenge their removal in advance. Not only did this appear to be in direct contravention of the Supreme Court’s ruling in J.G.G., but it also raised the question of whether the government was moving detainees to Bluebonnet, specifically, to get around the district court orders barring removals of individuals being held at El Valle and other facilities.
The ACLU had already filed a habeas petition on Wednesday in the Northern District of Texas on behalf of two specific (anonymous) plaintiffs and a putative class of all Bluebonnet detainees—captioned A.A.R.P. v. Trump. Judge Hendrix had already denied the ACLU’s initial motion for a TRO—based on government representations that the named plaintiffs were not in imminent threat of removal (he reserved ruling on the request for class-wide relief).
Thus, once the news of the potentially imminent AEA removals started leaking out, the ACLU did two things at once: It sought renewed emergency relief from Judge Hendrix in the A.A.R.P. case, and it went back to Chief Judge Boasberg in the J.G.G. case—which has not yet been dismissed—since that case at least for the moment includes a nationwide class of individuals subject to possible removal under the AEA. And while it waited for both district judges to rule, the ACLU sought emergency relief in A.A.R.P. from both the Fifth Circuit and the Supreme Court.
You’ll need to head over to One First to read the details, but here some of Vladek’s conclusions. He argues that this is “massively important,” because the court acted very quickly, without waiting for the 5th Circuit to rule, they “didn’t hide behind any technicalities” as they have previously, and “perhaps most significantly, the Court seemed to not be content with relying upon representations by the government’s lawyers.”
Maybe the Court is finally beginning to understand that Trump really wants to make the U.S. a dictatorship.
Yesterday Dakinikat wrote Senator Chris Van Hollen’s meeting in El Salvador with wrongly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Last night, Van Hollen returned to the U.S. and held a remarkable press conference to report on his experience.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen took aim at President Donald Trump and the El Salvador government over their treatment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the migrant who the government said in court was erroneously deported to El Salvador, and for trying to deflect from the notion that the U.S. government is flouting court orders to “facilitate” his return to the U.S.
The Maryland Democrat joined Abrego Garcia’s wife and mother and other supporters at Washington Dulles International Airport on Friday and spoke about his three-day visit, providing more details about the one-hour conversation he had with Abrego Garcia.
Van Hollen said the Trump administration is lying about the case in attempt to distract from questions about whether Abrego Garcia’s rights were violated by bringing up gang violence.
“This case is not about just one man. It’s about protecting the constitutional rights of everyone who resides in the United States of America,” he said….
Van Hollen revealed during the press conference that Abrego Garcia told him during their meeting that he has been moved out of CECOT to another facility that was further away.
“We all thought he was at CECOT, which I didn’t know until I met him,” he said.
Abrego Garcia described being handcuffed, shackled and put on planes with other migrants, noting that they could not see where they were going, according to the senator. Van Hollen added that Abrego Garcia was held in a cell with 25 other people and fearful of other prisoners who taunted him.
The senator said Abrego Garcia told him he was transported to his current facility nine days ago.
“He said the conditions are better, but he said despite the better conditions, he still has no access to news from the outside world and no ability to communicate with the outside world,” Van Hollen said.
I wonder if they moved him to make sure nothing happened to him. Could Trump and Bukele be getting anxious about all the attention? Read more details at the link.
President Donald Trump accused Sen. Chris Van Hollen of political grandstanding after the Maryland Democrat managed to meet this week with an immigrant who had made a life in his state before being wrongfully deported to El Salvador last month.
The case sparked fresh fears that the Trump administration is not particularly interested in respecting the rule of law in the United States.
The president wrote on his social media platform that the senator “looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention from the Fake News Media, or anyone.”
He threw in an insult: “GRANDSTANDER!!!”
Trump also lashed out at the immigrant, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, saying he was “not a very innocent guy” on Friday while speaking to reporters….
The White House also mocked Van Hollen’s trip on X, formerly Twitter, marking up a New York Times headline to label Abrego Garcia an “MS-13 illegal alien” who is “never coming back.”
Operatives from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are building a master database at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that could track and surveil undocumented immigrants, two sources with direct knowledge tell WIRED.
DOGE is knitting together immigration databases from across DHS and uploading data from outside agencies including the Social Security Administration (SSA), as well as voting records, sources say. This, experts tell WIRED, could create a system that could later be searched to identify and surveil immigrants.
The scale at which DOGE is seeking to interconnect data, including sensitive biometric data, has never been done before, raising alarms with experts who fear it may lead to disastrous privacy violations for citizens, certified foreign workers, and undocumented immigrants.
A United States Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS) data lake, or centralized repository, existed at DHS prior to DOGE that included data related to immigration cases, like requests for benefits, supporting evidence in immigration cases, and whether an application has been received and is pending, approved, or denied. Since at least mid-March, however, DOGE has been uploading mass amounts of data to this preexisting USCIS data lake, including data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), SSA, and voting data from Pennsylvania and Florida, two DHS sources with direct knowledge tell WIRED.
“They are trying to amass a huge amount of data,” a senior DHS official tells WIRED. “It has nothing to do with finding fraud or wasteful spending … They are already cross-referencing immigration with SSA and IRS as well as voter data.”
Since president Donald Trump’s return to the White House earlier this year, WIRED and other outlets have reported extensively on DOGE’s attempts to gain unprecedented access to government data, but until recently little has been publicly known about the purpose of such requests or how they would be processed. Reporting from The New York Times and The Washington Post has made clear that one aim is to cross-reference datasets and leverage access to sensitive SSA systems to effectively cut immigrants off from participating in the economy, which the administration hopes would force them to leave the county. The scope of DOGE’s efforts to support the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown appear to be far broader than this, though. Among other things, it seems to involve centralizing immigrant-related data from across the government to surveil, geolocate, and track targeted immigrants in near real time.
That is seriously frightening.
On a lighter note, this is hilarious. The Trump folks claim their attack on Harvard was all a silly mistake.
Harvard University received an emailed letter from the Trump administration last Friday that included a series of demands about hiring, admissions and curriculum so onerous that school officials decided they had no choice but to take on the White House.
The university announced its intentions on Monday, setting off a tectonic battle between one of the country’s most prestigious universities and a U.S. president. Then, almost immediately, came a frantic call from a Trump official.
The April 11 letter from the White House’s task force on antisemitism, this official told Harvard, should not have been sent and was “unauthorized,” two people familiar with the matter said.
The letter was sent by the acting general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services, Sean Keveney, according to three other people, who were briefed on the matter. Mr. Keveney is a member of the antisemitism task force.
It is unclear what prompted the letter to be sent last Friday. Its content was authentic, the three people said, but there were differing accounts inside the administration of how it had been mishandled. Some people at the White House believed it had been sent prematurely, according to the three people, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about internal discussions. Others in the administration thought it had been meant to be circulated among the task force members rather than sent to Harvard.
But its timing was consequential. The letter arrived when Harvard officials believed they could still avert a confrontation with President Trump. Over the previous two weeks, Harvard and the task force had engaged in a dialogue. But the letter’s demands were so extreme that Harvard concluded that a deal would ultimately be impossible.
Why didn’t the Trump people speak up sooner then? Why did they wait until all the back and forth we’ve been watching?
After Harvard publicly repudiated the demands, the Trump administration raised the pressure, freezing billions in federal funding to the school and warning that its tax-exempt status was in jeopardy.
A senior White House official said the administration stood by the letter, calling the university’s decision to publicly rebuff the administration overblown and blaming Harvard for not continuing discussions.
“It was malpractice on the side of Harvard’s lawyers not to pick up the phone and call the members of the antisemitism task force who they had been talking to for weeks,” said May Mailman, the White House senior policy strategist. “Instead, Harvard went on a victimhood campaign.”
So the “misunderstanding” is Harvard’s fault? Anyway the remaining Trump demands are still outrageous.
Still, Ms. Mailman said, there is a potential pathway to resume discussions if the university, among other measures, follows through on what Mr. Trump wants and apologizes to its students for fostering a campus where there was antisemitism.
Mr. Keveney could not be reached for comment. In a statement, a spokesman for the antisemitism task force said, “The task force, and the entire Trump administration, is in lock step on ensuring that entities who receive taxpayer dollars are following all civil rights laws.”
Harvard pushed back on the White House’s claim that it should have checked with the administration lawyers after receiving the letter.
The letter “was signed by three federal officials, placed on official letterhead, was sent from the email inbox of a senior federal official and was sent on April 11 as promised,” Harvard said in a statement on Friday. “Recipients of such correspondence from the U.S. government — even when it contains sweeping demands that are astonishing in their overreach — do not question its authenticity or seriousness.”
The statement added: “It remains unclear to us exactly what, among the government’s recent words and deeds, were mistakes or what the government actually meant to do and say. But even if the letter was a mistake, the actions the government took this week have real-life consequences” on students and employees and “the standing of American higher education in the world.
Just more evidence that the Trump administration is full of stupid, incompetent assholes.
The recent goings on at the Department of Defense are more evidence of that.
Joe Kasper, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s chief of staff will leave his role in the coming days for a new position at the agency, according to a senior administration official, amid a week of turmoil for the Pentagon.
Senior adviser Dan Caldwell, Hegseth deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll, the chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, were placed on leave this week in an ongoing leak probe. All three were terminated on Friday, according to three people familiar with the matter, who, like others, were granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.
The latest incidents add to the Pentagon’s broader upheaval in recent months, including fallout from Hegseth’s release of sensitive information in a Signal chat with other national security leaders and a controversial department visit by Elon Musk.
Caldwell, Carroll, Selnick and Kasper declined to comment. Two of the people said Carroll and Selnick plan to sue for wrongful termination. The Pentagon did not respond to a request of comment.
Kasper had requested an investigation into Pentagon leaks in March,which included military operational plans for the Panama Canal, a second carrier headed to the Red Sea, Musk’s visit and a pause in the collection of intelligence for Ukraine.
But some at the Pentagon also started to notice a rivalry between Kasper and the fired advisers.
“Joe didn’t like those guys,” said one defense official. “They all have different styles. They just didn’t get along. It was a personality clash.”
The changes will leave Hegseth without a chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, or senior adviser in his front office.
“There is a complete meltdown in the building, and this is really reflecting on the secretary’s leadership,” said a senior defense official. “Pete Hegseth has surrounded himself with some people who don’t have his interests at heart.”
And of course Hegseth has no fucking clue what he’s doing.
And get this: Trump appointees are trying to censor professional journals.
A federal prosecutor has sent letters to at least three medical journals accusing them of political bias and asking a series of probing questions suggesting that the journals mislead readers, suppress opposing viewpoints and are inappropriately swayed by their funders.
The letters were signed by Edward Martin Jr., a Republican activist serving as interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C. He has been criticized for using his office to target opponents of President Trump.
Some scientists and doctors said they viewed the letters as a threat from the Trump administration that could have a chilling effect on what journals publish. The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has said he wants to prosecute medical journals, accusing them of lying to the public and colluding with pharmaceutical companies.
One of the letters was sent to the journal Chest, published by the American College of Chest Physicians. The New York Times obtained a copy of the letter.
The Times confirmed that at least two other publishers had received nearly identically worded letters, but those publishers would not speak publicly because they feared retribution from the Trump administration.
In the letter to Chest, dated Monday, Mr. Martin wrote, “It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST Journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates.”
He demanded that the journal’s publishers answer a series of questions by May 2. Do they accept submissions from “competing viewpoints?” What do they do if the authors they published “may have misled their readers?” Are they transparent about influence from “supporters, funders, advertisers and others?”
And he specifically singled out the National Institutes of Health, which funds some of the research the journals publish, asking about the agency’s role “in the development of submitted articles.”
The prosecutor’s inquiry amounts to “blatant political intimidation of our medical journals,” Dr. Adam Gaffney, a pulmonologist and researcher in Massachusetts whose articles have been published in Chest, wrote on X.
Unreal.
That’s all I have for you today. I wish you all a nice weekend, and Happy Easter, if you celebrate it.
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I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last 9 years worrying myself sick about what Trump has done, is doing, and might do in the future to our country and our lives. I’ve spent many sleepless nights lying awake because of anxiety. But now Trump has decided to reassure us women. He says he’s doing what’s best for us, even though we don’t realize it. I know you’ve probably seen the message he sent to women on Truth Social, but I’m going to post it again here:
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
WOMEN ARE POORER THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE LESS HEALTHY THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE LESS SAFE ON THE STREETS THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE MORE DEPRESSED AND UNHAPPY THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, AND ARE LESS OPTIMISTIC AND CONFIDENT IN THE FUTURE THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO! I WILL FIX ALL OF THAT, AND FAST, AND AT LONG LAST THIS NATIONAL NIGHTMARE WILL BE OVER. WOMEN WILL BE HAPPY, HEALTHY, CONFIDENT AND FREE! YOU WILL NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION, BECAUSE IT IS NOW WHERE IT ALWAYS HAD TO BE, WITH THE STATES, AND A VOTE OF THE PEOPLE – AND WITH POWERFUL EXCEPTIONS, LIKE THOSE THAT RONALD REAGAN INSISTED ON, FOR RAPE, INCEST, AND THE LIFE OF THE MOTHER – BUT NOT ALLOWING FOR DEMOCRAT DEMANDED LATE TERM ABORTION IN THE 7TH, 8TH, OR 9TH MONTH, OR EVEN EXECUTION OF A BABY AFTER BIRTH. I WILL PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE. THEY WILL FINALLY BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE, AND SECURE. THEIR LIVES WILL BE HAPPY, BEAUTIFUL, AND GREAT AGAIN!
When Trump takes charge, everything will be wonderful and we will no longer think about abortion. Because Donald knows what’s best for us and that is that we should accept that we aren’t really people like men are. We can relax and just be vessels for men’s offspring if we are young enough or child care workers if we are too old to have our own babies. Finally this man is giving us the truth. We don’t own our bodies or our minds. We should just relax and follow the dictates of men like Trump.
It is so much nicer being a woman, now that Donald Trump is in charge!
You barely remember the Biden times at all, except in nightmares. In the dreams, regular eggs cost as much as Fabergé eggs. All the food at the grocery store is too expensive — if you made it to the store at all without being killed, sometimes twice. Also you were always thinking about abortion.
But then you wake up all the way and Donald Trump is protecting you and you are not thinking about abortion.
Mostly you feel wonderful all the time, happy and confident and not depressed because all that has been fixed. Every single problem the country had! Poof! And all you had to do was stop thinking about abortion.
Now, Donald Trump is back and you are not thinking about anything. All your anxieties are gone, now that men are handling all the country’s problems. It would have been a mistake to put a woman in charge! Fortunately, that did not happen. Fortunately, Donald Trump is guarding you. You are guarded! You are not worrying your pretty little head. Donald Trump is protecting you, just like the Bible said should happen. It did not mention him by name, but that was implied.
It was so tough in the before times, when you had to act as though you were a person. It was exhausting, like a dog standing on its hind legs all day. Of course, you weren’t a person, not really, and it is so much nicer to get to stop pretending. Much more restful this way. You are not thinking about abortion. Abortion is back in the hands of those who know best. The choice was the exhausting part; now, you get to be a blessed vessel and raise up as many children as they have decided is best. It is much nicer now….
Thank God the national nightmare of forcing you to make choices — as though your thoughts and desires mattered — is at an end. You wake up and smile at the picture of your patron saint, Donald Trump. You go to the market (JD Vance is in charge of eggs now; he has been lecturing the hens about the need to fertilize more of them) and buy one dozen. They cost exactly the right amount. You are not thinking about abortion.
It’s so much easier, now that I understand I’m not actually a person.
Former President Donald Trump is trying a new approach to winning over women voters by telling them that they are depressed, poor, anxious, unsafe and thinking about abortion ― but as their “protector,” he will change all that.
Alice Duer Miller
“I always thought women liked me,” Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday. “I never thought I had a problem, but the fake news keeps saying women don’t like me. I don’t believe it.” [….]
Trump read an extended version of an all-caps rant he posted last week on his Truth Social website as he insisted that women are in dire need of his protection.
“Because I am your protector,” Trump said. “I want to be your protector. As president, I have to be your protector, I hope you don’t make too much of it. I hope the fake news doesn’t go, ‘Oh, he wants to be their protector.’ Well I am. As president, I have to be your protector.”
“You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger, you’re not gonna be in danger any longer. You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected and I will be your protector,” he added. “Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.”
Read a number of Twitter reactions to this message at the HuffPost link.
Donald Trump has always been wildly sexist. Generally, his sexism takes the form of reducing women to their looks, either praising their sex appeal or denigrating them as ugly. In private, of course, Trump behaves like a sex pest.
But his new campaign riff to women voters is something altogether more disturbing. He sounds like a domestic abuser….
Trump casts himself as a kind of husband to America’s women. “I am your protector,” he declares repeatedly. He presents himself as the solution to all the problems he imagines they are having in their personal lives:
You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger. You’re not gonna be in danger any longer. You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector. Women will be happy, healthy, confident, and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.
“You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger. You’re not gonna be in danger any longer. You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector. Women will be happy, healthy, confident, and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.”
Trump’s message to women is notably infantilizing.
What makes it so creepy is that he implicitly acknowledges that women are reluctant to support him and that their disagreement over abortion is the reason. But rather than claim that his abortion stance is more reasonable than they assume or that they should vote on the basis of other issues — that is, the way you would try to win over a voter who has rational concerns — he presumes women are crazy.
Trump addresses what he believes is the underlying distress that is causing women to think they don’t want Trump to serve another term as president. Women “are more stressed, and depressed, and unhappy than they were four years ago,” he says. This is because they are “lonely and abandoned.”
Their “anxiety” is being misdirected into the belief that they want abortion to be legal. But their actual problem, he insists, is loneliness and abandonment, which will be resolved by giving themselves over to Trump….
That is not an argument you’d make to free citizens. It is quasi-authoritarian appeal, Trump as national father figure, with an unmistakable undertone of menace. Women of America, you may think you don’t want to be with Trump. But you are wrong, and you are crazy, and if you return to Trump, you’ll realize he was right, and you will leave the worrying to him.
Honestly, this is worse than anything I heard about women’s place in the world back in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s difficult to believe it is really happening.
One night in March of 2023, Amari Marsh went to the bathroom and suffered a miscarriage. “I screamed because I was scared, because I didn’t know what was going on,” she recently recalled. An at-home pregnancy test in late 2022 had come back positive. But the South Carolina college studentsaid she continued to have her period—at least that’s how she interpreted the bleeding—so didn’t seek out prenatal care, figuring the test result must have been wrong.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Then, a few months later, Marsh told a reporter from KFF Health News, she began to experience severe cramping, “way worse” than regular menstrual pain. Two emergency room visits later, the 22-year-old biology major learnedshe was pregnant after all. Back at home that night, the contractions returned. Marsh woke up, rushed to the toilet, “and when I did, the child came.”
Miscarriages are extremely common in the US; among confirmed pregnancies, 10 to 20 percent will end in a loss. What happened to Marsh next is also becoming horrifically frequent in the post-Roe v. Wade era, according to a new report by the legal advocacy group Pregnancy Justice. Instead of treating her miscarriage as the health crisis and personal tragedy it was, prosecutors eventually charged her with murder/homicide by child abuse—punishable by 20 years to life in prison. Marsh spent three weeks behind bars, followed by another 13 months on house arrest, tracked by an ankle bracelet. She was finally cleared by a grand jury this past August, KFF said.
The Supreme Court’s landmark 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization “open[ed] the door to government intrusion into pregnancy in unprecedented ways,” Pregnancy Justice says, “throwing suspicion on pregnancy loss, particularly outside medical settings.” In the first year after Dobbs, at least 22 women around the US faced criminal prosecution after suffering miscarriages, stillbirths, or the death of babies born prematurely, the organization reports.
The Dobbs decision didn’t just unleash a raft of laws restricting and banning abortion—it also seems to have made authorities more skeptical of women whose pregnancies end prematurely for reasons that have nothing to do with abortion. “Most of the time, we don’t know why a pregnancy or infant demise happened,” says Wendy Bach, a law professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, who co-authored the report. “But in this post-Dobbs era, pregnancy loss is extremely suspicious. It can lead to criminal investigation, criminal charges, incarceration, and family separation.”
Pregnancy-loss cases represented just a fraction of the prosecutions tallied by Pregnancy Justice over 12 months. In total, Bach and her team found at least 210 cases in which authorities initiated charges against pregnant people for crimes related to pregnancy or birth. That’s a record number of pregnancy-related prosecutions in a single year—and, the researchers say, it’s almost certainly an undercount.
George Conway, the ex-husband of former Donald Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, is helping bring attention to the sexual assault claims against the former president as he seeks a second term in the White House.
On Wednesday, Sept. 25, the attorney’s political action committee launched ads featuring two of the Republican presidential nominee’s sexual assault accusers.
“At one point, Melania went upstairs to change her clothes for the next photo shoot, and Trump said to me, ‘I want to show you this beautiful painting, this beautiful room.’ He leads me to this room, pushes me against the wall, and starts kissing me forcefully,” she says. “I tried to push him. He kept coming back at me.”
“I was in shock and smothered, and he had his hands here against my shoulders. I felt sick inside. I felt horrified, and thank goodness the butler charges into the room,” she continues. “Like many women, I blamed myself. So Trump turned to me and said, ‘You know we’re going have an affair, don’t you?’ and Melania was approaching. I was horrified.”
Leeds said she encountered the former president at a charity event just two years after their alleged plane interaction, where he insulted her with a “crude remark.”
While Trump denied the claims in the Times article, Leeds vividly recalled the alleged encounter in the new ad, saying, “The airplane took off, and all of a sudden Donald Trump started groping me. He was trying to kiss me and I’m trying to push him away, he was basically overpowering me.”
“When he started putting his hand up my skirt I got out of the seat, grabbed my purse, and went back to my original seat and I certainly was shook up by the whole thing,” she adds.
Abuse of women isn’t the only negative result to come out of the radical right wing Supreme Court. Last night the Court allowed the state of Missouri to murder an innocent man.
Marcellus Williams was executed on Tuesday night in the US state of Missouri after spending more than two decades on death row.
Williams, who had two previous executions stayed, maintained he was innocent in the 1998 fatal stabbing of Felicia Gayle in a St Louis suburb, and a wide swath of people had opposed his death sentence.
An attorney representing Williams argued there was racial discrimination in selecting jurors and that DNA evidence in the case was mishandled.
Williams was denied a last-minute reprieve from the US Supreme Court, after Missouri’s top court and governor rejected his clemency requests early this week.
In a rare move, the three liberal justices on the US Supreme Court – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson – said on Tuesday they disagreed with the conservative majority and would have granted a stay. They did not give a reason.
There were problems with the case against Williams:
Lawyers for Williams had said there were concerns over the handling of his case, arguing black jurors were wrongly excluded from his trial.
They also said there was no forensic evidence linking Williams to the crime scene and that the murder weapon had been mishandled, raising questions over DNA evidence.
Marcellus Williams
The trial prosecutor has said he followed procedure at the time by touching the murder weapon without gloves after it was tested in a crime lab….
The victim’s family had supported a life sentence instead of the death penalty, while local prosecutors had pressed to have the conviction overturned.
His execution had been stayed twice – once in 2017 and once in 2015 – due to the discovery of male DNA on the murder weapon that did not match Williams.
The state’s then-governor, Eric Greitens, a Republican, formed a panel to examine the case after granting the second stay, but he then left office amid a scandal and the panel never formed a conclusion.
Also concerned about the DNA, the local prosecuting attorney, Wesley Bell, requested a hearing.
But at that point it was discovered that the DNA evidence was spoiled from someone in the prosecutor’s office touching the knife without gloves, and the hearing was cancelled.
“This outcome did not serve the interests of justice,” Mr Bell said in a statement on Tuesday.
Donald Trump was meeting privately in mid-September with one of his oldest friends, Steve Wynn, when the casino mogul and Republican mega-donor delivered the former president a blunt warning: You’re off message, and it isn’t helping.
Trump had been distracted, in Wynn’s view. The former president at the time was promoting a conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s cats and dogs in Ohio, among other things. To drive home his point, Wynn showed Trump polling and suggested the former president would be better off focusing on policy issues where Republicans see his opponent, Kamala Harris, as vulnerable, according to two people briefed on the meeting and granted anonymity to describe it.
The meeting underscored a key point of tension inside the Trump campaign. While polls show the race is incredibly close, some of Trump’s allies are concerned that his impulses and coarse approach to campaigning are undermining him against Harris, a rival who has proved far stronger than his previous opponent, Joe Biden.
In interviews, more than a dozen Trump allies described the former president as reaching a crossroads — faced with the choice of continuing with the missteps that have overtaken the past several weeks of his campaign or embracing a more calculated approach aimed at appealing to a small subset of undecided voters who are likely to sway the outcome of the election. In recent weeks, he has brought into his fold destabilizing forces like social media provocateur Laura Loomer and his controversial former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, plugged commemorative Trump coins, and asserted that if he loses, Jews would be partly to blame.
“It’s not that he’s going backwards,” said one Trump ally granted anonymity to speak freely. “But he should be doing better.”
Kamala Harris is planning a network interview, but I doubt if it will shut the media critics up.
Vice President Kamala Harris will be interviewed by Stephanie Ruhle in Pittsburgh Wednesday night, in what will be her first one-on-one network interview since becoming the Democratic nominee.
The interview will air on MSNBC at 7 p.m. ET and coincides with Harris’ fourth visit to the area since launching her campaign, according to a news release from the Harris campaign. Pennsylvania is a key battleground state; no Democrat has won the White House without the Keystone State since 1948.
MSNBC’s announcement follows criticism over the lack of media interviews the vice president has done. Reporting from Axios and The Telegraph earlier in September revealed that the Harris-Walz campaign were giving fewer interviews.
Oh, boo hoo.
That’s all I have for you today. Take care everyone, and if you’re a women, assert your personhood!
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I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last 9 years worrying myself sick about what Trump has done, is doing, and might do in the future to our country and our lives. I’ve spent many sleepless nights lying awake because of anxiety. But now Trump has decided to reassure us women. He says he’s doing what’s best for us, even though we don’t realize it. I know you’ve probably seen the message he sent to women on Truth Social, but I’m going to 
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