Chicago is … where Josh and Kate are headed for the next live show! Chicago was the leading vote-getter in our poll asking you where we should head next, with 23.5% of the vote.
The live show will be Wednesday, May 14th. Tickets will go on sale this Friday, April 4th at 10 a.m. Eastern. If you are a Prime member, you’ll receive an email with discounted tickets.
We hope you’ll came hang out with us for a few hours. In addition to the the live edition of the Josh Marshall Podcast featuring Kate Riga, there will be a Q&A session and a cocktail hour after the show where you can chat with our podcasters and other TPMers as well.
So is Elon really out, as the White House is claiming to beltway news outlets? Don’t bet on it.
First of all, he’s almost certainly not leaving DOGE.
Second of all, it would hardly matter if he did. He’ll keep running DOGE even if he nominally steps aside. Remember that at least in terms of what his minions are telling federal judges he doesn’t even run it now. The entire entity is run by his deputies and powered by the fear of his money and his power. He couldn’t stop running it without dismantling it. And of course neither is going to happen.
I want to circle back to the series of posts I did in the last few days about people with disabilities on SSI whose Social Security portals were showing that they were no longer Social Security recipients. As I noted, the people whose payments seemed like they might be a little late all ended up receiving their payments overnight Monday into Tuesday. That still left the fact that people’s portals showed they were not in fact recipients on top of their payment histories disappearing. Well, around mid-afternoon eastern yesterday those messages disappeared from the portals. In other words, everything went back to how it had always been. There was no language saying recipients were not recipients and people’s payment history reappeared.
The Supreme Court heard South Carolina’s big swing to knock Planned Parenthood off of Medicaid Wednesday — not because the provider is unqualified, but because the state just doesn’t want it to be an option.
Senate Judiciary Committee member Adam Schiff (D- CA) announced on Tuesday his intention to place a hold on the nomination of President Donald Trump’s nominee for D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin.
The speed with which the Trump administration is moving to break laws, erode the powers of the legislative branch, and execute the most aggressive elements of its agenda is outpacing the judicial branch in case after case, effectively mooting efforts to secure due process, judicial review, and remedy the legal wrongs.
In Washington, D.C. yesterday, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell dismissed a motion by remnant elements of the U.S. Institute of Peace that sought to block the transfer of its privately owned headquarters to the federal government. Howell’s reasoning? The property had already been transferred on Saturday. Too bad for you.
In the case of the visa revocation of Rumeysa Ozturk, the pro-Palestinian Turkish national who is a student at Tufts University, a new government filing yesterday revealed that in the first 24 hours after her detention in suburban Boston she’d been moved through New Hampshire and Vermont before being flown to Louisiana. The law requires that a writ of habeas corpus to secure her release must be filed where she is physically held in detention at the time of the filing. Her swift movement through four different judicial districts left her lawyers guessing as to which court to go to try to secure her release and gave the government the chance to pick its preferred jurisdiction, far from where Ozturk lived and studied.
Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Palestinian Columbia University graduate, was subjected to similar jurisdiction-hopping immediately after his detention by the government before landing in Louisiana. It wasn’t quite fast enough. Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz ruled that Khalil’s lawyers moved quickly enough for his case to be heard in New Jersey, not Louisiana, as the Trump administration had sought, but also not New York, where he was picked up. A win of sorts for Khalil.
Even in cases where judges have moved fast, it’s not alway been enough. Perhaps the most dramatic example came with the Alien Enemies Act deportations. Weeks of planning and preparation nearly managed to avoid any judicial review until the deportation flights landed in El Salvador, as TPM’s Josh Kovensky extensively reported. The ACLU nonetheless managed to get wind of what was afoot and filed its case in the middle of the night to try to preempt the deportations. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of DC moved quickly to order the deportations put on hold. The Trump administration completed the flights and the transfer of the deportees to El Salvador anyway. Boasberg holds a hearing tomorrow on whether the administration violated his order.
Surveying the wreckage of the last two months – the mass purges of federal workers, the shuttering of entire agencies and departments, the impoundment of hundreds of millions of dollars of federal funding – the same pattern emerges. Judges are slowly awakening to it. At the margins, they may be able to counteract some it on a piecemeal basis. But for the most part, the courts are left to sift through the rubble after the fact. It’s why the judicial branch alone can’t save us. An independent judiciary is a necessary but insufficient bulwark against an authoritarian like Donald Trump.
Due Process Only Gets You So Far
The mistaken removal of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who was aboard one of the three deportation flights from Texas to El Salvador on March 15, occurred despite a standing 2019 order by an immigration judge blocking his removal. The Trump administration has admitted in court that his removal was an “error,” attributed to “administrative error” and “oversight.”
In Related Immigration News …
Momodou Taal, the pro-Palestinian student activist at Cornell University who had preemptively sued to block his deportation, voluntarily left the country after losing in court.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias, a former president of Costa Rica, says the Trump administration has revoked his visa after his public comments critical of the U.S. president.
The Trump administration is pursuing agreements with several more third-party countries to accept U.S. deportees, the WSJ reports.
Good Read
The NYT’s Charlie Savage reports on the statutory provision that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is using to unilaterally revoke visas and the ways in which Congress had already reined in this power, to little apparent effect.
The Retribution: Ed Martin’s Troll-ish Probe Of Biden Pardons
For the last two months, acting D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin has been “investigating” whether President Joe Biden was competent at the time he issued pardons in the final days of his presidency, the NYT reports. Among the overt acts by Martin have been letters of inquiry to former Biden White House chief of staff Jeffrey D. Zients, Biden brother James Biden, and Biden sister-in-law Sara Biden.
Adam Schiff Puts A Hold On Ed Martin Nomination
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) has placed an indefinite hold on the nomination of Ed Martin to be U.S. attorney in DC. Martin is currently the acting U.S. attorney.
Princeton Is The Latest Ivy Targeted By Trump
Princeton University says the Trump administration has suspended its research grant funding from the federal government.
Another Major Law Firm Strikes ‘Deal’ With Trump
The law firm of Willkie Farr & Gallagher – where former Vice President Kamala Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff works – has struck a preemptive deal with President Trump to avoid being targeted by another one of his executive orders. It’s not clear if Willkie was in Trump’s sights because of Emhoff’s presence or for other vindictive reasons.
Cory Booker Breaks Record For Longest Senate Stemwinder
Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) finally yielded the Senate floor Tuesday evening, 25 hours and five minutes after he began his protest speech against the ravages of the Trump II presidency. In doing so, Booker surpassed the filibuster by Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-SC) of the 1957 Civil Rights Act for the longest Senate speech ever.
Musk’s Effort To Buy Wisconsin Supreme Court Falls Short
MADISON, WISCONSIN – APRIL 01: Dane County Circuit Court Judge Susan Crawford (R) greets supporters after her victory in the race for Wisconsin Supreme Court justice during an election night event on April 01, 2025 in Madison, Wisconsin. The former prosecutor ran against Judge Brad Schimel, who was endorsed by President Donald Trump and financially supported by billionaire businessman Elon Musk. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Liberal Judge Susan Crawford scored an easy victory over conservative Judge Brad Schimel in the high-profile Wisconsin Supreme Court race – the most expensive judicial election in U.S. history. The state’s high court will retain a liberal-leaning majority despite – or perhaps because of – the big spending and personal campaigning of Elon Musk.
GOP Holds Two House Seats
Two closely watched House races in Florida stayed in the Republican column, but by substantially narrower margins than Trump won those districts by in 2024:
FL-01: Republican Jimmy Patronis won the seat held by former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R) over Democrat Gay Valimont
FL-06: State Sen. Randy Fine (R) prevailed over Democrat Josh Weil for the seat previously held by Trump national security adviser Mike Waltz.
Tech billionaire and senior Trump adviser Elon Musk appeared to boast of advance knowledge of a planned arrest related to alleged Social Security fraud during an appearance on a live stream Monday night promoted to his more than 200 million social media followers, frustrating top law enforcement officials, multiple sources told ABC News.
The Purges
HHS: Widespread purges across the varied agencies under the umbrella of HHS – including the CDC, FDA, and NIH – were implemented on Tuesday.
NEH: DOGE is demanding cuts of as much as 70 to 80 percent of existing staff at the National Endowment for the Humanities.
U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar of Maryland narrowed his order blocking the Trump administration from firing probationary employees. It now covers only 19 states and DC instead of applying nationwide.
The Trump administration has issued a new “deferred resignation” offer to government workers at at least six federal agencies.
EXCLUSIVE
WaPo: “Members of President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including White House national security adviser Michael Waltz, have conducted government business over personal Gmail accounts, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post and interviews with three U.S. officials.”
The Trump II Clown Show
Former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker was confirmed by the Senate as U.S. ambassador to NATO in a 52-45 vote.
Makes My Head Explode
The Trump White House is preparing a report on the cost of administering Greenland as a U.S. territory, the WaPo reports.
Only two men have spoken on the floor of the U.S. Senate for more than 24 straight hours. One of them fought to keep Black people out of public life, the other was a Black leader who staged a landmark protest.
Florida state Sen. Randy Fine (R) is still expected to win Tuesday’s special election in Florida’s Sixth Congressional District. But as multiple local and national news outlets have noted in recent days, national Republicans never expected it to be this close.
In the first weeks of the administration, I wrote a number of pieces on the shuttering of PRAMS (the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System), a decades-old data collection and analysis program at CDC tracking infant and maternal health from pregnancy through childbirth and postpartum. It’s a critical source of data across time, affluence, demographic groups, etc. It was shuttered, as I eventually learned, because of the President’s “DEI” executive order. Various of the questions didn’t pass muster under the White House’s standards of what counted as DEI. It wasn’t clear if the shuttering was in effect permanent or whether the program might come back after undergoing some kind of DEI cleanse. Then a couple weeks ago I learned that it was in the process of being resurrected. Some questions were stripped out, but not as many as feared. It also seemed like some data from the disruption period might not be recoverable. There was a lot of work in terms of new IRB reviews and things like that. But it seemed on the way to coming back. Today all CDC employees who worked at PRAMS were terminated (RIF’d). So while there hasn’t been any official announcement that the program is permanently shuttered, all the people who ran it are out as of today.
