The Trump administration escalated its defiance of constitutional government on Monday as a judge sought details on a case addressing federal authorities’ removal of dozens of people from the country over the weekend without due process.
Continue reading “Trump Admin Ups Defiance Of Court Over Alien Enemies Act Removals”Trump’s Cronies Line Up To Help Him Defy The Judiciary
Donald Trump’s administration has openly crossed a big red line — one we’ve been tracking for some time now, as Trump and his allies openly question the judiciary’s authority to block Trump’s various lawless executive actions. The Trump administration had already slipped out of compliance with some court orders blocking executive actions, but up until this weekend, much of that was chalked up to the chaos of the DOGE rampage through much of the federal government, and of the Trump administration more generally. It was unclear how much was pointed defiance, and how much incompetence.
Continue reading “Trump’s Cronies Line Up To Help Him Defy The Judiciary”The Brave New World of Oligarch Lordships—Apparently They’re AWESOME!
A couple weeks ago, the clarion of digital wrongdoing in the second Trump administration, Wired, published an article entitled ‘Startup Nation’ Groups Say They’re Meeting Trump Officials to Push for Deregulated ‘Freedom Cities’. I wrote about these guys, or one subset of them, in early January. Dryden Brown is chief of a startup called Praxis, which is in the “business” of founding new sovereign “start up societies.” On paper, he claims to have raised half a billion dollars for his company. But, actually, those are commitments contingent on his founding a new sovereign state. So that’s kind of like a lot of richies committing money to your new unicorn farm contingent on your finding two unicorns. In any case, Dryden had been focused on finding a chunk of land to found a new “network state” in the Mediterranean after getting bounced out of Africa. But once Donald Trump started making noises that Greenland might be on the market, he flew to Greenland to meet with officials and see if he could buy it.
In any case, that’s our boy Dryden. This new piece in Wired is about Trey Goff, the “chief of staff” of a thing called “Prospera,” which is a sorta, kinda “network state” recently established in Honduras, which the current government of Honduras is already trying to abolish. Prospera and a few other “network states” in the making are based on laws for “Special Economic Zones” which exist in some countries. The conceptual structure stems from certain duty-free areas that exist in certain countries, free ports of various kinds which have long existed and have often, but not always, been tied up with the history of European colonialism and, of course, the Special Administrative Regions of China, Hong Kong and Macau. U.S. urban policy has a sort of pale version of this in “enterprise zones” where businesses starting up in a certain area get certain tax benefits or expedited regulatory review. If you read about “Prospera,” a decent amount of at least the surface appeal is having these kind of boutique nerdvilles where tech micro-bros can high five each other because, like, if you want to buy a croissant at the coffee shop you have to pay in bitcoin. Stuff like that. The “government,” very much by design, follows the structure of venture investing, with different classes of stock and thus voting power. All that fun stuff.
Continue reading “The Brave New World of Oligarch Lordships—Apparently They’re AWESOME!”Senate And House Dems Condemn Trump’s Destructive Enemies Speech At DOJ
Senate and House Democrats railed against President Donald Trump’s Friday speech at the Department of Justice, calling out Trump’s unreserved politicization of the DOJ and his administration’s ongoing efforts to tear down the department’s independence from the White House.
Continue reading “Senate And House Dems Condemn Trump’s Destructive Enemies Speech At DOJ”Sovereignty Where Ya Can Find It: More Notes on Saving the American Republic
The primary drivers in the creation of the federal Constitution — James Madison and Alexander Hamilton — saw the several states more as problems to be solved or perhaps obstacles to be worked around than critical features of the new American national government they hoped to create. But that’s not how things worked out. The United States does in fact have a federal system, which chief justice of the Supreme Court Salmon P. Chase, just after the Civil War in 1869, described as an “indestructible Union composed of indestructible States.” That is a critical, central fact for anyone thinking about how to defy, delay and undo Donald Trump’s lawless effort to remake the American Republic into an autocracy.
In unitary states, lines of authority go from president or prime minister down to local officials. That’s not true in our federal system. The federal law is superior to state law. But governors don’t work for presidents. Nor do any other officials in state governments, whether they’re governors to state attorneys general or county commissioners or mayors. (The very important exception to this rule are the state National Guards, which in certain circumstances can be federalized and put at the command of the president — a key and potentially ominous detail we’ll return to.) What this means is that there are great stores of legitimate political power and authority in the United States which exist independent of the federal government and the power of the president. Inferior to that power, yes. But independent of it still. And that’s critical.
Continue reading “Sovereignty Where Ya Can Find It: More Notes on Saving the American Republic”Trump’s Open Defiance Of Federal Courts Is Now At Hand
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
We Are Crossing The Rubicon
The major news of the weekend was the rapid-fire series of events following President Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act that culminated with the White House chortling over its defiance of a federal court order blocking deportations under the act and ordering outbound flights to return to the United States.
The Trump administration’s immediate deportation to El Salvador of Venezuelan nationals claimed to be part of the Tren de Aragua criminal gang is its own saga, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio taunting the federal court, El Salvador’s president releasing grim videos of dehumanizing treatment of the detainees, and the White House trumpeting how it ignored a federal judge to create a fait accompli.
But the big stakes here are not immigration law but the rule of law itself. At the same time the Alien Enemies Act was playing out, the Trump administration apparently deported a professor at Brown University’s medical school in direct contravention of a federal court blocking her expulsion (more below). It’s hard not to see the two cases as related and further evidence that we have arrived – two months to the day after Trump’s second inaugural – at the falling-over-the-cliff’s-edge moment we’ve long thought would mark an irreversible-in-the-short-term descent into authoritarianism.
Now, the analytical part of my brain still wants to wait to see if the judges in the two cases I’ve mentioned conclude that these were instances of willful denial of their orders. We may know their answers today, in a matter of hours. But we can see from the White House’s preening and posturing that it is eager to embark down this slippery slope.
The Timeline
A couple of differently designed timelines matching up the deportation flights under the Alien Enemies Act and the court proceedings in front of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of Washington, D.C.:
- Adam Isacson: Timeline of What Appears to be Defiance of a Judicial Order
- WaPo: Deportation flights landed after judge said planes should turn around
Commentary And Analysis: The Alien Enemies Act
- Steve Vladeck: 5 Big Questions in the Alien Enemies Act Litigation
- Joyce Vance: “If presidents can do whatever they want, including putting people on a plane and sending them to prisons in a foreign country with no due process whatsoever, then really, who are we?”
- Mattathias Schwartz: With Deportations, Trump Steps Closer to Showdown With Judicial Branch
A New Pattern Is Emerging
Two non-citizens with proper paperwork that allows them to be legally in the United States were detained at Boston’s Logan Airport late last week while trying to re-enter the country:
- A professor at Brown University’s medical school who is a Lebanese citizen with a valid U.S. visa was detained and quickly deported despite a court order temporarily blocking her expulsion.
- A New Hampshire electrical engineer who is a German national with a green card remains in federal detention in Rhode Island without official explanation for why he was stopped after returning from a visit to Luxembourg.
Worth Watching
In a speech Friday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche continued to vilify Columbia University, speak publicly about ongoing investigations, and cast vague aspersions about associations with Hamas:
BREAKING: The US Justice Department is examining whether student protests at Columbia University over the genocide in Gaza violated federal terrorism laws, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said today.
— Drop Site (@dropsitenews.com) March 14, 2025 at 3:57 PM
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Trump DOJ Leads The Attack On Federal Judges
As the right-wing backlash against court rulings adverse to President Trump gains steam, top Trump DOJ officials are fanning the flames:
- Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a press release accusing the federal judge who blocked Trump’s deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of supporting terrorists: “Tonight, a DC trial judge supported Tren de Aragua terrorists over the safety of Americans.”
- DOJ chief of staff Chad Mizelle, who has been moonlighting as acting associate attorney general, raged on social media about the court order to reinstate fired federal workers: “We now have an unelected federal judge who has ‘hired’ more executive branch employees than President Trump. This is a judicial power grab. Plain and simple.”
Trump Gives Enemies Speech At DOJ
President Trump said all the quiet parts loudly and proudly in a speech Friday in the Great Hall of the Justice Department, openly and unreservedly politicizing the department that has long prized its independence as a bulwark against political interference.
The backward-looking parts of the speech were a victory lap for having evaded criminal prosecution. The forward-looking parts of the speech painted targets on perceived foes, threats to his own power, and civil society institutions for federal law enforcement to go after.
Trump: "These newspapers are really no different than a highly paid political operative. And it has to stop. It has to be illegal … it just cannot be legal."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 14, 2025 at 4:13 PM
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Breaking New Ground In Lawlessness
President Trump late Sunday night purported to invalidate Joe Biden’s pardons of members of the House Jan. 6 committee.
Trump Targets Yet Another Major Law Firm
On Wednesday, a federal judge blocked as wildly unconstitutional President Trump’s executive order targeting the Perkins Coie law firm. On Saturday, the president issued a similar executive order targeting Paul Weiss, a major NYC-based law firm.
Appeals Court Allows Trump To Enforce DEI EOs
In a case out of Maryland, the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has overturned a lower court ruling that blocked two of President Trump’s executive orders banning DEI while the case was on appeal. Under the ruling, the executive orders will remain in place as the appeal proceeds.
Trump Purports To Shutter VOA
NPR’s David Folkenflik on the carnage at Voice of America and other government broadcasters as President Trump’s Friday night executive order began to take effect.
The Destruction
- President Trump’s executive order targeting VOA also purported to dismantle six other federal agencies:
- Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service
- Woodrow Wilson Center
- Institute of Museum and Library Services
- United States Interagency Council on Homelessness
- Community Development Financial Institutions Fund
- Minority Business Development Agency
- WaPo: “Arlington National Cemetery has scrubbed information about prominent Black, Hispanic and female service members and topics such as the Civil War from its website, part of a broader effort across the Defense Department to remove all references to diversity, equity and inclusion from its online presence.”
- KFF Health News: “National Institutes of Health officials have urged scientists to remove all references to mRNA vaccine technology from their grant applications, two researchers said, in a move that signaled the agency might abandon a promising field of medical research.”
- NIH has taken down a portrait of Anthony Fauci.
The Purges
- NNSA: DOGE cuts hit nuclear scientists, bomb engineers and safety experts
- Bureau of Reclamation: Nearly 400 agency workers have been cut by the Trump administration.
Doge Watch
- ProPublica: Who’s Running the DOGE Wrecking Machine: The World’s Richest Man or a Little-Known Bureaucrat?
- Wired: Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’
- NYT: Antonio Gracias, a private equity investor who is one of Elon Musk’s closest confidants, has taken a new role in the Social Security Administration.
Trump II Abroad: The March Of Folly
- Ukraine: U.S. withdraws from multinational group investigating responsibility for Russia’s invasion.
- South Africa: Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared Ebrahim Rasool, South Africa’s ambassador to the United States, persona non grata, forcing him to be recalled the day after Breitbart reported comments the envoy had made about Trump, MAGA, and white supremacism.
- Gaza: The U.S. and Israel have contacted officials from Sudan, Somalia and the breakaway region of Somaliland to discuss using their territories as potential destinations for Palestinians forcibly expelled from Gaza under a possible Trump administration plan.
Quote Of The Day
Lee Bollinger, former longtime president of Columbia University, in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
We’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. It’s been coming and coming, and not everybody is prepared to read it that way. The characters regarded as people to emulate, like Orban and Putin and so on, all indicate that the strategy is to create an illiberal democracy or an authoritarian democracy or a strongman democracy. That’s what we’re experiencing. Our problem in part is a failure of imagination. We cannot get ourselves to see how this is going to unfold in its most frightening versions. You neutralize the branches of government; you neutralize the media; you neutralize universities, and you’re on your way.
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Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act: Notes on Preserving the American Republic
A short time ago, former U.S. Attorney Barb McQuade posted this passage from a Chronicle of Higher Education interview with Lee Bollinger, First Amendment scholar, former law school dean and former president of the University of Michigan and of Columbia. I note the thumbnail biography because Bollinger, apart from subject qualities, has ascended to the the peaks of two of the foundational nodes of power in American civil society: the legal profession and the university system.
Continue reading “Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act: Notes on Preserving the American Republic”Senate Democrats Cave, Giving Up Only Real Point Of Leverage Until The Fall
Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
Much to the base’s chagrin, a handful of Senate Democrats voted to advance the House Republican continuing resolution to passage Friday — which Republicans could not have done without Democratic support.
Continue reading “Senate Democrats Cave, Giving Up Only Real Point Of Leverage Until The Fall “A Missed Opportunity
I said like a week ago that I’m pretty confident the GOP is going to get wrecked in the 2026 midterms. You have to imagine a lot of very improbable things happening to imagine anything else. I’m hearing from many readers questioning whether Democrats will show up after this performance. I think they will, though I think there’s a good chance a number of senators will draw primary challengers, and it would be a good thing if they lose so long as they’re in solidly blue states. But we greatly overestimate the impact of enthusiasm and disappointment measured in these terms. Midterm backlashes come from responses far more organic in the population at large. And they’re often as much against their own party’s leadership as against the incumbent party. I see this not only as a misfire and failure to at least take a chance on preserving some of the machinery of the embattled republic. It was also a missed political opportunity. And here I mean politics not simply through the prism of the 2026 election.
Continue reading “A Missed Opportunity”They Know the Score
This speaks for itself. From NBC News …
WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance acknowledged Friday that Elon Musk has made “mistakes” while executing mass firings of federal employees and emphasized that he believes there are “a lot of good people who work in the government.”
“Elon himself has said that sometimes you do something, you make a mistake, and then you undo the mistake. I’m accepting of mistakes,” Vance said in an interview with NBC News.
“I also think you have to quickly correct those mistakes. But I’m also very aware of the fact that there are a lot of good people who work in the government — a lot of people who are doing a very good job. And we want to try to preserve as much of what works in government as possible, while eliminating what doesn’t work.”