At least eight top lawyers in the Justice Department’s solicitor general’s office are departing or have already announced their impending exit from the elite team, which is responsible for arguing on behalf of the Trump administration before the Supreme Court.
Continue reading “Solicitor General’s Office Reportedly Sees Mass Exodus As Wall Between White House, DOJ Disintegrates”History Has Lessons For Universities As They Consider Giving In To Authoritarian Demands
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
Many American universities, widely seen globally as beacons of academic integrity and free speech, are giving in to demands from the Trump administration, which has been targeting academia since it took office.
In one of his first acts, President Donald Trump branded diversity, equity and inclusion programs as discriminatory. His administration also launched federal investigations into more than 50 universities, from smaller regional schools such as Grand Valley State University in Michigan and the New England College of Optometry in Massachusetts to elite private universities such as Harvard and Yale.
Trump ramped up the pressure by threatening university research funding and targeting specific schools. In one example, the Trump administration revoked US$400 million in grants to Columbia University over its alleged failures to curb antisemitic harassment on campus. The school later agreed to most of Trump’s demands, from tightening student protest policies to placing an entire academic department under administrative oversight — though the funding remains frozen.
Cornell, Northwestern, Princeton, Brown and the University of Pennsylvania have also recently had grants frozen. Harvard was sent a list of demands in order to keep $9 billion in federal funding.
Now, across the United States, many universities are trying to avoid being Trump’s next target. Administrators are dismantling DEI initiatives — closing and rebranding offices, eliminating positions, revising training programs and sanitizing diversity statements — while professors are preemptively self-censoring.
Not all institutions are complying. Some schools, such as Wesleyan, have refused to abandon their diversity principles. And organizations including the American Association of University Professors have filed lawsuits challenging Trump’s executive orders, arguing they violate academic freedom and the First Amendment.
But these remain exceptions, as the broader trend leans toward institutional caution and retreat.
As a scholar of comparative and international education, I study how academic institutions respond to authoritarian pressure — across political systems, cultural contexts and historical moments. While some universities may believe that compliance with the administration will protect their funding and independence, a few historical parallels suggest otherwise.
German universities: A lesson
In the 1975 book “The Abuse of Learning: The Failure of German Universities,” historian Frederic Lilge chronicles how German universities, which entered the 20th century in a golden age of global intellectual influence, did not resist the Nazi regime but instead adapted to it.
Even before seizing national power in 1933, the Nazi Party was closely monitoring German universities through nationalist student groups and sympathetic faculty, flagging professors deemed politically unreliable — particularly Jews, Marxists, liberals and pacifists.
After Hitler took office in 1933, his regime moved swiftly to purge academic institutions of Jews and political opponents. The 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service mandated the firing of Jewish and other “non-Aryan” professors and members of the faculty deemed politically suspect.
Soon after, professors were required to swear loyalty to Hitler, curricula were overhauled to emphasize “national defense” and “racial science” — a pseudoscientific framework used to justify antisemitism and Aryan supremacy — and entire departments were restructured to serve Nazi ideology.
Some institutions, such as the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart, even rushed to honor Hitler with an honorary doctorate within weeks of his rise to power. He declined the offer, though the gesture signaled the university’s eagerness to align with the regime. Professional associations, such as the Association of German Universities, stayed silent, ignoring key opportunities to resist before universities lost their autonomy and became subservient to the Nazi state.
As linguist Max Weinreich wrote in his 1999 book “Hitler’s Professors,” many academics didn’t just comply, they enabled the regime by reshaping their research. This legitimized state doctrine, helping build the intellectual framework of the regime.
A few academics resisted and were dismissed, exiled or executed. Most did not.
The transformation of German academia was not a slow drift but a swift and systemic overhaul. But what made Hitler’s orders stick was the eagerness of many academic leaders to comply, justify and normalize the new order. Each decision — each erased name, each revised syllabus, each closed program and department — was framed as necessary, even patriotic. Within a few years, German universities no longer served knowledge — they served power.
It would take more than a decade after the war, through denazification, reinvestment and international reintegration, for West German universities to begin regaining their intellectual standing and academic credibility.
USSR and fascist Italy suffer similar fate
Other countries that have fallen under authoritarian regimes followed similar trajectories.
In fascist Italy, the shift began not with violence but with a signature. In 1931, the Mussolini regime required all university professors to swear an oath of loyalty to the state. Out of more than 1,200, only 12 refused.
Many justified their compliance by insisting the oath had no bearing on their teaching or research. But by publicly affirming loyalty and offering no organized resistance, the academic community signaled its willingness to accommodate the regime. This lack of opposition allowed the fascist government to tighten control over universities and use them to advance its ideological agenda.
In the Soviet Union, this control was not limited to symbolic gestures — it reshaped the entire academic system.
After the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks oscillated between wanting to abolish universities as “feudal relics” and repurposing them to serve a socialist state, as historians John Connelly and Michael Grüttner explain in their book “Universities Under Dictatorship.” Ultimately, they chose the latter, remaking universities as instruments of ideological education and technical training, tightly aligned with Marxist-Leninist goals.
Under Josef Stalin, academic survival depended less on scholarly merit than on conformity to official doctrine. Dissenting scholars were purged or exiled, history was rewritten to glorify the Communist Party, and entire disciplines such as genetics were reshaped to fit political orthodoxy.
This model was exported across Eastern and Central Europe during the Cold War. In East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland, ministries dictated curricula, Marxism-Leninism became mandatory across disciplines, and admissions were reengineered to favor students from loyalist backgrounds. In some contexts, adherents to older intellectual traditions pushed back, especially in Poland, where resistance slowed though could not prevent the imposition of ideological control.
By the early 1950s, universities across the region had become what Connelly calls “captive institutions,” stripped of independence and recast to serve the state.
A more recent example is Turkey, where, following the failed 2016 coup, more than 6,000 academics were dismissed, universities were shuttered and research deemed “subversive” was banned.
History’s warning
The Trump administration’s early and direct intervention into higher education governance echoes historical attempts to bring universities under state influence or control.
The administration says it is doing so to eradicate “discrimatory” DEI policies and fight what it sees as antisemitism on college campuses. But by withholding federal funding, the administration is also trying to force universities into ideological conformity — by dictating whose knowledge counts but also whose presence and perspectives are permissible on campus.
Columbia’s reaction to Trump’s demands sent a clear message: Resistance is risky, but compliance may be rewarded — though the $400 million has yet to be restored. The speed and scope of its concessions set a precedent, signaling to other universities that avoiding political fallout now may mean rewriting policies, reshaping departments and retreating from controversy, perhaps before anyone even asks.
The Trump administration has already moved on to other universities, including the University of Pennsylvania over its transgender policies, Princeton for its climate programs and Harvard over alleged antisemitism. The question is which school is next.
The Department of Education has launched investigations into over 50 institutions, accusing them of using “racial preferences and stereotypes in education programs and activities.” How these institutions choose to respond may determine whether higher education remains a space for open inquiry.
The pressure to conform is not just financial — it is also cultural. Faculty at some institutions are being advised not to use “DEI” in emails and public communication, with warnings to not be a target. Academics are removing pronouns from their email signatures and asking their students to comply, too. I’ve been on the receiving end of those warnings, and so have my counterparts at other institutions. And students on visas are being warned not to travel outside the U.S. after several were deported or denied reentry due to alleged involvement in protests.
Meanwhile, people inside and outside academia are combing websites, syllabi, presentations and public writing in search of what they consider ideological infractions. This type of peer surveillance can reward silence, incentivize erasure and turn institutions against their own.
When universities start regulating not just what they say but what they teach, support and stand for — driven by fear rather than principle — they are no longer just reacting to political threats, they are internalizing them. And as history has shown, that may mark the beginning of the end of their academic independence.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Fate Of Independent Agencies Inches Closer To Supreme Court Finale
The Trump administration went to the Supreme Court Wednesday, asking for the justices to intervene in the case that will likely determine whether independent agencies in the executive branch can continue in their current form — or whether they will be brought fully under President Donald Trump’s sway.
Continue reading “Fate Of Independent Agencies Inches Closer To Supreme Court Finale”More Adventurers In the Land of THERE IS NO PLAN
I did a post a few days ago about how there really is no plan to any of this. The people around Trump are people who fall into two categories. One group is people who do have plans, sorta. They’re often pretty dumb plans, but they’re plans. And they’ve congregated around Trump because he is someone who looks like a useful instrument of their plans or someone who wants sorta kinda what they want or wants to get there in the same way. Maybe kinda. Trump’s Treasury Secretary (Bessent) and Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors (Miran) seem to fall into this category. The second group is made up of sycophants, cultists, shysters and hustlers who are just along for the ride and generally working to retcon different explanations or theories of why Trump and the administration are doing what they’re doing. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick epitomizes this category.
Continue reading “More Adventurers In the Land of THERE IS NO PLAN”No One Is Safe From Being Rendered To Foreign Prisons
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Halfway Down The Slippery Slope
Occasionally, something emerges from the daily litany of Trump II destruction, corruption, and retribution that helps focus the mind and clarify the stakes.
Over the weekend, President Trump responded favorably to the suggestion from the president of El Salvador that he could house U.S. prisoners in his notorious prisons: “I love that,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One.
But it was the casualness and assuredness with which the White House press secretary confirmed from the briefing room podium that the president has both publicly and privately considered transferring U.S. citizens convicted of crimes to El Salvador that set off alarm bells:
Leavitt’s remarks came just one day after Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that the Trump administration’s position in the Alien Enemies Act case means even a U.S. citizen would have no legal recourse if secretly swept up and rendered to a foreign prison:
The implication of the Government’s position is that not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress if judicial review is denied unlawfully before removal. History is no stranger to such lawless regimes, but this Nation’s system of laws is designed to prevent, not enable, their rise.
It is why two distinguished law professors warned in a NYT op-ed today: “We should all be very, very afraid.”
SCOTUS Still Hasn’t Ruled On Mistaken Deportation
We are still awaiting the Supreme Court’s important decision on whether the Trump administration has to try to retrieve Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the El Salvadoran man it admits it deported to a prison in his home country in error in violation of a immigration judge’s order.
The Trump Justice Department filed a sneering argument with the Supreme Court yesterday, prompting Abrego Garcia’s lawyers to ask for permission to file an additional reply to set the record straight.
Alien Enemies Act Challenges Resume
Advocates for Venezuelan nationals swept up by Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act swiftly went back to court following Monday’s Supreme Court setback. In the most prominent case, two of the original plaintiffs filed a new lawsuit in the Southern District of New York, seeking class action status for all the similarly situated migrants and asylum seekers. In a twist, the two plaintiffs, who had almost been deported on the March 15 flights from Texas, had subsequently been transferred back to New York, which allowed them to file their lawsuit there instead of Texas.
Judge Sets Immediate Deadline In Khalil Case
An immigration judge in Louisiana gave the Trump administration until 5 p.m. today (local time, I believe) to cough up evidence for why Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate, should be deported. DHS can “either can provide sufficient evidence or not,” Judge Jamee Comans said, according to The Guardian. “If he’s not removable, I’m going to terminate this case on Friday.”
Quote Of The Day
“It’s totally silly. There’s no other way to say it, it makes no sense.”–Dani Rodrik, a professor of international political economy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, on President Trump’s use of steep tariffs to combat bilateral trade deficits
SCOTUS Gives Trump A Win On Federal Worker Purges
The Supreme Court blocked a lower court order out of San Francisco that required the Trump administrations to rehire some 16,000 purged probationary federal government workers, ruling that the nonprofit organizations who brought the case lacked standing. A separate order in a Maryland case brought by 19 states and DC reinstating the workers remains still in place.
The Soft Purges
Along with the direct removals of federal workers to make room for loyalists, the Trump administration is acting in parallel to make remaining in government so intolerable that people leave on their own, opening up more opportunities to replace them with toadies:
- IRS: Several top IRS officials – including acting Commissioner Melanie Krause – are leaving the agency in response to an unprecedented agreement to share tax data with immigration officials.
- DOJ: At least half of the front-line lawyers in the DOJ’s office of solicitor general are preparing to leave or have already announced their departures, the WaPo reports.
AP Beats White House In Court
U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, one of the Trumpiest federal judges in DC, nonetheless ruled that Trump White House officials engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination when they denied access to the Associated Press because it didn’t go along with the use of “Gulf of America” in its news stories.
The Very Worst People
On several occasions, Trump administration officials have refused to answer questions from journalists because their email signatures include their pronouns, the NYT reports.
Dripping With Contempt
When a federal judge in DC issued a temporary restraining order blocking President Trump’s executive order targeting the Jenner & Block law firm, he directed the administration to give internal notice of his order. This is the snotty notice that went out:
AG Pam Bondi and OMB Director Russell Vought used a court-ordered memo in the case blocking Trump’s executive order targeting Jenner & Block to throw shade at the “unelected… local district judge” who they claim “invaded the policy-making and free speech prerogatives of the executive branch.”
— Ryan J. Reilly “paints a vivid and urgent portrait of… disarray” (@ryanjreilly.com) April 8, 2025 at 9:25 PM
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New Round Of Trump Attacks On Higher Ed
Here’s the latest:
- Cornell: Trump administration freezes more than $1 billion in federal funding.
- Northwestern: Trump administration freezes $790 million in federal funding.
- Princeton: The Commerce Department announced that it was ending nearly $4 million in funding for climate change research because it”promotes exaggerated and implausible climate threats.”
A Brutal Final Twist Of The Knife
The Trump DOJ is taking the position that the federal government should return the restitution that the pardoned Jan. 6 rioters paid for the damage to the Capitol.
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Trump’s DOJ Now Also Justifying Admin’s Efforts To Defy The Judiciary
Some of President Trump’s more influential cronies (namely, Elon Musk, Stephen Miller) have been pushing the envelope since the beginning of his second administration, goading the President as he openly brainstorms ways to punish judges who rule against his executive actions and encouraging him to ignore court orders he doesn’t agree with.
Continue reading “Trump’s DOJ Now Also Justifying Admin’s Efforts To Defy The Judiciary”DOGE to Shutter DOJ Tax Division
I didn’t know this until this morning. And I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten more press attention. We know that DOGE is in the process of gutting the IRS. According to internal IRS estimates reviewed by The Washington Post, this internal sabotage is already estimated to have cost the U.S. Treasury more than $500 billion in revenues that otherwise would have been raised by April 15th. But it doesn’t stop at the IRS. DOGE is also in the process of essentially closing down the Tax Division at the Department of Justice.
Continue reading “DOGE to Shutter DOJ Tax Division”No, President Trump, The Income Tax Wasn’t A Mistake. But It Was An Accident.
This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
In his Rose Garden speech launching a global trade war by announcing the most sweeping tariffs in modern history, President Donald Trump bestowed a history lesson on his audience that diverged from the factual record:
“Then in 1913, for reasons unknown to mankind, they established the income tax so that citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying the money necessary to run our government. Then in 1929, it all came to a very abrupt end with the Great Depression, and it would have never happened if they had stayed with the tariff policy; it would have been a much different story.”
So why did we institute an income tax? Were there any humans who knew what the reasoning was? And did the actions of 1913 lead to the Great Depression in 1929?
There is a clear consensus among historians on these points. No, the income tax was not a mistake.
But it was something stranger: both a 40-year struggle and an accident.
In 1913, the states ratified the 16th Amendment, which gave the federal government the power to “collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived.”
This was not the first income tax effort, however.
For a few short years during and after the Civil War, the United States imposed its first tax on income to help fund the massive costs of the war. Placed on relatively high incomes but only collecting a modest percentage, it was cast as both a way to generate needed revenue and a way to maintain fairness.
Yes, that’s right, one of the chief selling points of taxing income was that it was a way of achieving “equity” in the burdens of the war. Responding to allegations that only poor men were fighting and dying, President Abraham Lincoln and his Republican Party made sure the law required that the taxes people paid would be publicly disclosed. Unsurprisingly, the wealthy men of the dawning Gilded Age did not like seeing their tax information in the pages of The New York Times. Wealthy interests forced a repeal of the income tax in 1871, and the federal government returned to funding itself with proceeds from user fees and tariffs.
Efforts to rein in the rich persisted, however. Congress moved in 1894 to reintroduce an income tax. The populist Kansan politician William Jennings Bryan gave a famous speech on the floor of Congress. Responding to the argument that the wealthy would leave America if they had to pay such a tax, then proposed as 2% on the top incomes, he said:
“Of all the mean men I have ever known, I have never known one so mean that I would be willing to say of him that his patriotism was less than 2 per cent deep. … If ‘some of our best people’ prefer to leave the country rather than pay a tax of 2 per cent, God pity the worst.”
Congress passed the law. One year later, however, the Supreme Court controversially rejected it, 5-4, in the case of Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company. The party of Lincoln, now dominated by wealthy Northeastern interests, celebrated. Its 1894 platform had declared that an income tax “will bring odium on any party blind enough to support it” and predicted that party’s “funeral.”
Populists like Bryan didn’t give up. A young Democratic congressman from Tennessee named Cordell Hull said in his maiden speech on the floor in 1908, in which he proposed passing another income tax, that he was willing to risk the “odium and the funeral.”
Hull’s effort didn’t gather much momentum that time, but he didn’t give up. He obsessively talked with anyone and everyone about an income tax, so much so that when leaders of his own party saw him approaching, they “would turn and walk in another direction,” he later recalled.
Soon he would succeed, but only thanks to the help of the party that was against the income tax — the Republicans.
In 1909, the country was facing a severe drop in federal revenue and a widening deficit after the financial panic of 1907, which had ended only thanks to a bailout led by J.P. Morgan, the most powerful banker of the age. At the same time, with new responsibilities like trying to keep food and medicines safe and maintaining a growing empire abroad, the federal government’s needs were exploding. A few years earlier, Congress had allocated $1 billion in spending for the first time ever (about $30 billion in today’s dollars).
To address these issues, the Republican party turned to tariffs. Tariffs not only remained the cornerstone of Republican economic policy, they were also the key to the party’s political power. Each time a new tariff bill came up for consideration was like “throwing bananas in a cage of monkeys,” economist Henry George said. Lobbyists from every corner of American industry descended on the capital to push for lower imposts on their companies and, if possible, to have them raised on someone else.
Tariffs and levies on things like tobacco and alcohol were deeply unpopular with the public. They were regressive, costing working people a far greater percentage of their income than the rich. In one of his speeches, Hull attacked the new dominant class of oligarchs: “The world has never seen such colossal fortunes as we behold in the present age … the Carnegies, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, and the Rockefellers, with their aggregated billions of hoarded wealth.”
Hull said, “It would seem that this class of people consider themselves almost immune from any kind of taxation.” He closed a speech with a warning to his congressional colleagues: “Public sentiment is becoming aroused.”
In Washington, lawmakers had a bounty of novel ideas for raising funds. Some members of Congress suggested an inheritance tax, others a corporate profits tax, and still others wanted some version of a stamp tax on commercial documents. As president, Theodore Roosevelt supported an income tax, though he didn’t do much to push it legislatively. Most Republican senators, many of whom were millionaires themselves, had mild aversions to some of the proposals and a particular loathing for the income tax.
Nelson Aldrich, the Senate majority leader from Rhode Island, a millionaire and the father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller Jr., was arguably the most powerful politician in the country at the time. Teddy Roosevelt nicknamed him the “King Pin.” In 1909, Aldrich was trying to pass a new tariff bill. Hull’s Democrats posed a problem for him, but not the only one. He also faced a rebellious faction within his own party, the progressive Republicans. These were largely Midwestern and Western leaders who argued for what they described as working people’s interests, as well as reforms to improve public safety and the strengthening of labor unions. They also supported an income tax.
Aldrich tried a series of legislative maneuvers to delay votes on anything about the income tax. The proponents were undeterred, and, as a next step, he and then-President William Taft put their weight behind a corporate income tax, contending that it would be a lesser evil than a personal income tax. The wealthy did not like it, but it passed surprisingly easily, leaving Republicans hopeful the income tax was dead. In a private letter to a friend, the president explained, “A good many people who are attacking [the corporate income tax] now will be glad to use it as a means of preventing the income tax later on.”
Taft proved to be overly optimistic. Supporters of the income tax kept pushing, seeking to raise money directly from the wealthy. A debate ensued about whether Congress could simply pass an income tax law or, since the Supreme Court had struck one down recently, whether a constitutional amendment was needed. Hull pointed out that the makeup of the court had changed and argued that a law could now pass muster with the justices.
Then, one progressive Republican proposed an income tax amendment.
Aldrich pounced on what he perceived as his opponents’ misstep. He threw his support to the measure as a means of placating the advocates for a national income tax. In exchange, enough lawmakers agreed to back Aldrich’s tariff bill.
Aldrich, of course, did not support the income tax amendment, but he believed it was too radical to be ratified by three-fourths of the states, the minimum required by the Constitution. Leading politicians assumed that the defeat of the amendment would likely kill the income tax for years, if not a generation.
Hull agreed with that analysis and was despondent. “It has long been understood that the Republicans never support a worthy cause until forced by public sentiment. Too stupid to devise and enact wholesome laws and to formulate and execute sound administrative policies, this piratical organization is wont to wait until Democrats point the way,” he said in a speech on the floor.
And so Nelson Aldrich, the senator who had done more than almost any other American politician in history to protect the wealthy, introduced what would turn out to be an historic measure to amend the Constitution and explicitly allow income taxes on the rich. A few days later, with little fanfare, the amendment passed the Senate by a unanimous vote of 77-0.
Soon after, Congress passed the Payne-Aldrich Tariff bill, giving Aldrich his victory.
But Aldrich had miscalculated and Hull had been too gloomy. After a slow start for the ratification movement, political winds shifted and enough states came around. The amendment was ratified four years later. Then it fell to Hull to almost singlehandedly write what became the 1913 income tax law.
Hull’s plan proved prescient. He had foreseen that if the United States ever became entangled in a war that involved attacks on shipping, imports would dry up and tariff revenue would plummet. When the United States joined the war against Germany in 1917, Congress had to raise income tax rates to generate the money needed to pay for the expense of sending soldiers to Europe.
So no, President Trump, the origins of the income tax are not lost to history.
But did the tax cause the Great Depression 16 years after its enactment, as Trump has argued? No serious economist thinks so. Here’s one data point: In the 1920s, Republicans regained the presidency. Andrew Mellon, one of the richest men in the country, became Treasury secretary. One of the main causes he worked for was lowering income taxes, and the lead-up to the worst economic calamity of the 20th century was actually marked by a decline in those tax rates.
The evidence is similarly clear on Trump’s argument that continued reliance on tariffs to fund the government would have averted the Great Depression. In June of 1930, President Herbert Hoover signed into law the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, significantly raising taxes on imported goods in hopes of boosting American industries and increasing domestic employment. Hoover brushed aside the arguments of his own economists who warned that other nations would respond with their own tariffs, touching off a trade war in which every country would lose.
Economists now agree that Hoover’s tariffs deepened the economic downturn that had begun with the 1929 stockmarket crash. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gradually reduced the tariffs during his presidency, and his Democratic and Republican successors continued that pattern well into the 21st century.
Today’s situation has similarities to the pre-income-tax years. The American economy is again marked by wealth inequality, with the largest gap between rich and poor we’ve seen since the Gilded Age. We are having debates about how to reduce the federal deficit, about how to fairly and adequately tax the rich and about what the appropriate size of government would be. Last week, Trump reached back in history to restore U.S. tariffs to the Smoot-Hawley levels, triggering a global selloff in stock markets around the world.
Fired DOJ Pardon Attorney: Office Was Never Consulted On Trump’s Jan 6 Pardons
During a “shadow hearing” before congressional Democrats Monday evening, former U.S. pardon attorney Liz Oyer — who was fired last month in retaliation for her refusal to comply with a Trump-backed order to restore Mel Gibson’s gun rights — testified that her office was never consulted on Trump’s sweeping January 6 pardons.
Continue reading “Fired DOJ Pardon Attorney: Office Was Never Consulted On Trump’s Jan 6 Pardons”SCOTUS Launches Itself Into The Worst Of The Trump Cases
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Where Does This Leave Us?
A rapid-fire series of Supreme Court interventions in two of the most pressing early Trump II cases has slowed down for now the prospect of a direct confrontation between President Trump and the judicial branch.
In the most urgent case, Chief Justice John Roberts issued an administrative stay that lifted the deadline of midnight last night for the Trump administration to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man mistakenly deported to an El Salvadoran prison despite a court order explicitly barring his removal. Roberts’ move came as the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Abrego Garcia and set the Trump administration on a collision course with the judiciary. Still, Roberts set a tight briefing schedule (Abrego Garcia’s lawyers immediately filed their response), and the Supreme Court could rule at any moment.
Later in the day, the Supreme Court issued a very muddled and confusing decision in the adjacent Alien Enemies Act case – the other case that seems most likely to provoke Trump into an extra-constitutional showdown with the courts. By a 5-4 margin, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the three liberal justices, the court threw U.S. District Judge James Boasberg under the bus with a hasty, procedurally irregular decision that brought withering retorts from the dissenters.
The particulars gets weedy pretty quick, but the high court said no one should be removed under the Aliens Enemies Act without notice and the opportunity for a hearing. Judging the justices on a curve, it’s hard not to feel some relief that the Supreme Court still finds value in notice and hearing as the bedrock of due process. That was the big takeaway from the decision, even if it carried all sorts of caveats and practical limitations.
Left undecided: the fate of the Venezuelan nationals already deported to the El Salvadoran prisons, whether the Alien Enemies Act properly applies to a criminal gang in peacetime, and whether those swept up in the deportations actually meet the requirements for removal. Those decisions will be left to individual judges to decide case by case, in Texas (in the most conservative federal circuit), where most of the habeas cases will have to be brought.
The high agitation of the dissenters suggests, however, that the way the majority got there had the effect of throwing open the barn door to further Trump depredations even as it overlooked the government’s egregious conduct in the case to this point.
I couldn’t help but wonder if the dissenting justices had already gotten a taste of what the majority has in store for the wrongfully deported Abrego Garcia. The two cases aren’t directly related, but they each overshadow the other in ways that put a finer point on the underlying legal and moral issues.
For more analysis:
- Steve Vladeck: “But the more I read the Court’s Monday night ruling in Trump v. J.G.G., in which a 5-4 majority vacated a pair of temporary restraining orders entered by Chief Judge Boasberg in the Alien Enemy Act case, the more I think that this ruling really is a harbinger, and a profoundly alarming one, at that.”
- Lee Kovarsky: “THE SUPREME COURT’S TdA OPINION IS TERRIFYING. Not because it’s wrong, although it is, but because of how comfortable the Court seems in abusing authority to get to what it must see as an institutionally desirable outcome.”
What About Boasberg’s Contempt Proceeding?
The Justice Department filed a snotty notice of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Alien Enemies Act to Judge Boasberg and asked him to end his inquiry into whether the Trump administration violated his order blocking the deportations and should be held in contempt. Boasberg’s initial response did not tip his hand on the contempt proceedings. The Supreme Court did Boasberg no favors in depriving him of jurisdiction, but that alone should not be enough – in theory – to end the contempt proceeding.
DOJ Is Now Trump’s Personal Law Firm
The NYT has a pretty good rundown on how President Trump via Attorney General Pam Bondi is grinding down Justice Department attorneys. It’s written from the point of view of DOJ lawyers caught in the squeeze between their ethical obligations and threats to their careers.
‘I Will Not Be Bullied’
Fired U.S. pardon attorney Liz Oyer testified Monday at a shadow hearing held by congressional Democrats – but only after DOJ warned her not to testify and dispatched armed U.S. special marshals to her home to deliver the message.
Photo Of The Day
In case you missed it, acting D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin gave the keynote address last month at an event attended by some of Jan. 6 seditionists who are appealing their convictions, Mother Jones reports:
Here is a photo from the event, to help give you a visual.
— amanda moore 🐢 (@noturtlesoup17.bsky.social) April 7, 2025 at 1:05 PM
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ONGOING: Trump’s Attack On Big Law
NYT: “One of Mr. Trump’s advisers has been in touch with [Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft] to suggest that it sign a deal in which it would offer tens of millions of dollars in pro bono legal services to causes that the Trump administration supports.
DC Circuit: We Can’t Overturn SCOTUS Precedent
More on yesterday’s big decision by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate the fired members of two independent agencies: Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board.
Maine Is On The Frontline Of Trump’s Blue State Jihad
In the Trump administration’s ongoing bullying of Maine over trans athletes, the state is now suing the federal government over the Department of Agriculture’s move to freeze funding for the state, threatening the provision of school lunches.
The Destruction: Refugees And Fluoride Edition
- Citing “drastic” government funding cuts, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services, the largest refugee resettlement agency in the world, is ending its century-old program of resettling refugees fleeing war or persecution, the WaPo reports.
- RFK Jr. is directing the CDC to change its recommendation supporting fluoride in drinking water.
- REVERSAL: The National Park Service restored its original webpage on the Underground Railroad that included a previously deleted photo of Harriet Tubman.
DOGE Watch
DOGE will be able to access personal information of millions of union workers at the Education Department and OPM under a new order from the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.
N.C. Supreme Court Intervenes In Election Case
The North Carolina Supreme Court paused a lower court order that would has the potential to reverse the outcome of the closely-watched and still unresolved 2024 election to the high court. Justice Allison Riggs and the State Election Board had filed an appeal seeking the stay.
Couldn’t Happen To A Nicer Guy
Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman has agreed to give up his law license for three years over his repeated misconduct during his Big Lie-adjacent review of the state’s 2020 election for GOP lawmakers eager to find election fraud.
In Defense of Temporary Obsessions
From a delightful little essay by Ankita Shah: “In a world that wants mastery or monetisation as the outcome of every fleeting interest, temporary obsessions are little rebellions. Their purpose is to restore order in the playground that is your life.”
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