House and Senate Democrats on their chambers’ appropriations committees have been saying for weeks that they want to negotiate bipartisan spending bills to keep the government open for the remainder of the fiscal year. The only thing they’ve requested in return — for their cooperation in helping to pass a short-term spending bill to keep the government open and/or as part of the typical top-line spending amount negotiations — is some sort of guarantee that constitutionally protected separation of powers will be restored. They want Republicans to commit to a return to the world in which Congress, and not the White House or a random billionaire, makes spending decisions.
Continue reading “Shutdown Or Not, Trump Admin Is Prepping New Ways To Ignore Separation Of Powers”Rep. Grijalva Dead
Rep. Raul Grijalva (D), a 12-term member of Congress from Arizona’s Seventh District, has died, aged 77, from complications from ongoing cancer treatment. He was diagnosed with lung cancer last year.
My Best Understanding of the Current Senate State of Play
Here’s my best read of where things stand right now up in the Senate.
There does seem to have been some real movement overnight. A lot of senators held virtual town halls or other meetings where they interacted with voters last night. A number moved over into explicitly saying that they will vote against cloture. That’s a reminder to get straight on terminology.
Continue reading “My Best Understanding of the Current Senate State of Play”Listen To This: Democrats’ Big Test
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss Senate Democrats’ tactics on House Republicans’ continuing resolution, as well as the tanking stock market and potentially looming recession.
Continue reading “Listen To This: Democrats’ Big Test”Federal Judge Slams Trump Executive Order Targeting Perkins Coie
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
‘It Sends Little Chills Down My Spine’
In a closely watched emergency hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell quickly recognized the threat to the rule of law posed by President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting Seattle-based law firm Perkins Coie – and moved immediately to issue an order blocking key portions of it.
“I am sure that many in the legal profession are watching in horror at what Perkins Coie is going through here,” Howell said. “The order casts a chilling harm of blizzard proportions across the legal profession.”
Howell is not alone. Duke law professor Samuel W. Buell, a former prosecutor, told the NYT: “This is certainly the biggest affront to the legal profession in my lifetime.”
The executive order, among other things, sought to terminate government contracts with Perkins Coie or “with entities that do business with Perkins Coie”; denied Perkins Coie employees access to federal buildings and officials; and stripped them of security clearances.
In an unusual twist and a possible sign that career DOJ lawyers want nothing to do with the case, the executive order was defended in court by Chad Mizelle, the Justice Department’s chief of staff who is also serving as the DOJ’s acting No. 3.
Mizelle struggled to allay Howell’s concerns about the constitutionality of the executive order.
“This may be amusing in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ where the Queen of Hearts yells, ‘Off with their heads!’ at annoying subjects … and announces a sentence before a verdict,” Howell said, “but this cannot be the reality we are living under.”
Meanwhile, the NYT reported that other big law firms were hesitant to defend Perkins Coie, which was “rebuffed” by at least one firm before Williams & Connolly rose to the occasion.
“I have enormous respect for Williams & Connolly,” Howell said in court, “and enormous respect for them taking this case when not every law firm would.”
What We Don’t Know About Ed Martin’s Shenanigans
Acting D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin has been up to far more mischief than has been publicly revealed so far, the WaPo suggests (emphasis added):
The letter is the latest among an estimated 20 inquiries that people close to Martin estimate he has sent since taking office Jan. 20 as the top federal prosecutor in the nation’s largest U.S. attorney office. Among those that have become public, Martin has demanded information from figures such as Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York), Rep. Robert Garcia (D-California), the legal disciplinary counsel’s office over the D.C. Bar and the dean of Georgetown University’s law school.
Chutkan Slams Gov’t Conduct In Crazy EPA Case
The Trump administration’s over-the-top effort to claw back Biden-era EPA grants was tested in open court for the first time, and U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan was having none of it.
To orient you a bit, this case is a civil lawsuit brought by one of the grant recipients seeking to unfreeze monies it was due, so the case doesn’t directly touch on the Trump DOJ’s baseless effort to use the criminal process to freeze the funds and intimidate the bank holding them and the grant recipients. Those corrupt efforts by acting D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, you’ll recall, led to the forced resignation of a senior prosecutor who refused to go along with it.
But even in the confines of the civil case, Chutkan said the government needed to provide some basis for freezing the funds: “Can you proffer any evidence that [the grant] was illegal, or evidence of abuse or fraud or bribery — that any of that was improperly or unlawfully done, other than the fact that Mr. Zeldin doesn’t like it?” Chutkan asked the DOJ lawyer, referring to EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, who purported to terminate the entire $20 billion program the day before the hearing, the timing of which also chagrined Chutkan.
Quote Of The Day
“My ethical duty as a Department of Justice employee — and now a former one — is to the laws of the United States and the people that I was entrusted to serve. It is not to the bullies who are currently running the Department of Justice.”–Elizabeth Oyer, the U.S. pardon attorney fired by the Trump DOJ after not agreeing to restore Mel Gibson’s gun rights
The Pattern Isn’t Hard To Detect
President Trump has pardoned a Republican former Tennessee state senator in prison for his conviction in a campaign finance scheme. Brian Kelsey, who at one point was represented by Trump White House Counsel David Warrington, was released from prison after serving two weeks of a 21-month sentence.
DOGE Watch
- U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan became the first judge to order Elon Musk to produce documents in a court challenge to DOGE’s slash-and-burn attack on the federal government.
- DOGE is making its latest errors harder to find.
- Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), the chair of the House DOGE subcommittee, called for the Trump DOJ to investigate recent attacks on Tesla properties.
The New Spoils System
Don Moynihan: “Trump and Musk are engaged in a broad-based downsizing of government, using that downsizing to selectively target their enemies, while expanding their political power by trading exceptions to the downsizing.”
Social Security Is Suffering Under Trump
- ProPublica: Recording Reveals Head Of Social Security’s Thoughts On DOGE And Trump
- WaPo: Social Security scraps far-reaching cuts to phone services after Post report
The Purges
- FLRA: In a new ruling, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ordered the reinstatement of Susan Grundmann to her post on the Federal Labor Relations Authority.
- DoE: The Trump administration is gutting the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights.
- HHS: The workforce at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration could be slashed by as much as half as soon as this week.
Corporate America Avoids Standing Up To Trump
The WSJ has a very good anecdote on the gap between the private dismay corporate CEOs express over President Trump’s economic policies, particularly tariffs, and what they’re willing to say publicly to his face.
Senate Dems Getting Squeezed
The House-passed continuing resolution has put Senate Democrats in a tough spot. Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is trying to massage his way out of it with procedural and messaging maneuvering, TPM’s Emine Emine Yücel reports:
The short-term CR and the push for a bipartisan spending bill are believed to be part of a messaging effort by Democrats who want to be able to say they did not roll over and accept the MAGA funding bill that House Republicans and President Donald Trump are shoving down their throats.
Punchbowl runs through the most likely scenarios.
Khalil Still Detained In Louisiana
In a brief hearing Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman of Manhattan did not immediately order the return of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil from detention in Louisiana but did allow his lawyers to have access to him by telephone.
In the jurisdictional fight over whether Furman can hear the case, the government said for the first time that Khalil was already in New Jersey by the time his lawyers filed court papers in New York to secure his release. No ruling yet from Furman on jurisdiction.
The government still hasn’t provided in open court its legal basis for detaining Khalil, but the WaPo obtained the Notice to Appear given to Khalil and it cites only a unilateral decision by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Khalil’s presence in the United States could have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”
Meanwhile, the journalism school at Columbia, where Khalil led protests, warned its international students not to publish anything on Gaza, Ukraine, or the Khalil case. “Nobody can protect you,” Dean Jelani Cobb said. “These are dangerous times.”
Trump EPA Rolls Back Environmental Regs
EPA administrator Lee Zeldin declared that his agency’s new mission is to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business,” making no mention of protecting the environment or public health, the NYT reports.
RIP Mark Klein
Mark Klein, the AT&T whistleblower who revealed the National Security Agency’s bulk electronic surveillance during the presidency of George W. Bush, has reportedly died.
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Biggest Federal Employee Unions Says Shutdown is Preferable to Elon/Trump CR
Federal workers obviously don’t like government shutdowns. Most of them are furloughed. Others are forced to continue working without pay. But in a letter addressed to members of the Senate, which I obtained, Everett B. Kelley, head of what I believe is the country’s biggest federal government employee union — the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) — asks senators to vote “no” on the House-produced continuing resolution, and says that a shutdown is actually preferable to passing the bill.
“AFGE is particularly struck that even as the Senate prepares to debate and vote on [the continuing resolution], the Trump administration has announced its intention to effectively destroy the Department of Education regardless of whether Congress approves or disapproves of that decision,” it reads. It also says they categorically reject the idea that voting against the CR means voting for a shutdown. They then go on to discuss that the administration just unilaterally canceled the collective bargaining agreement with TSA workers and declared the agency “union-free.”
Continue reading “Biggest Federal Employee Unions Says Shutdown is Preferable to Elon/Trump CR”This Was My Idea Pre-Kabuki
In the half-hour or so that I thought Dems were actually going to go to the mat over the continuing resolution, it occurred to me that, if it were up to me, my opening offer would be this: We’ll actually vote for a clean continuing resolution. We’ll even let you have all your DOGE cuts … with one condition. Write up exactly what the end state for each department and agency is. And then we’ll hold a vote for each department. Each department or agency individually. But it’s a bill. And it’s binding. We’ll even give up the right to filibuster. Straight majority votes in both houses. You’re the majority. How can you refuse that? Just put each one to a vote.
The Kabuki Cave
As you could see from my comments here and some occasional comments on Bluesky, I felt pretty confident for most of the day that Senate Dems were in the process of caving. Then I had to go offline for a couple hours in the late afternoon. I was a bit stunned and more than pleasantly surprised when I saw clips of Chuck Schumer’s floor speech saying that Senate Dems had the votes to block cloture. Wow, I thought: things were turning out better than I realized. I mean, if you have the votes to block cloture, you block cloture, right? Pretty quickly I heard from multiple sources what was actually happening. This was a deal between Schumer and Thune to allow a brief performative episode to throw Democratic voters off the scent while the Democratic caucus allowed the bill to pass. The deal is this: Democrats agree to give up the 60-vote threshold in exchange for being allowed to offer amendments to the House bill. The “amendment” or “amendments” will likely be some version of Sen. Murray’s 30-day CR. It doesn’t even matter what they are. But this is all for show. Once you give up the 60-vote threshold the whole thing is over.
Senator Kaine put it with great clarity: “Democrats had nothing to do with this bill. And we want an opportunity to get an amendment vote or two. So that’s what we are insisting on to vote for cloture.” Again you’re giving up “cloture,” the 60-vote threshold, in exchange for the ability to offer amendments that will certainly fail.
Continue reading “The Kabuki Cave”Marjorie Taylor Greene’s ‘DOGE’ Subcommittee Rushed To Defend Elon Musk’s Car Company
Tech billionaire Elon Musk’’s electric car company, Tesla, has faced a recent wave of protests, vandalism, and stock price drama related to anger over his “DOGE” efforts to reshape government agencies. But MAGA is coming to the company’s aid. President Trump on Tuesday delivered a sales pitch from the White House lawn. And, now, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), the chairwoman of the House DOGE subcommittee, has rushed to help by demanding a federal investigation from top Justice Department officials.
Greene’s letter, which was addressed to Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, was also signed by the other seven Republican members of the subcommittee. It was, however, written in the first person, as though it came from an individual.
“I am writing in regard to the recent wave of organized attacks targeting Elon Musk and Tesla car dealerships, charging stations, and vehicles across the country. These attacks, which seem to involve coordinated acts of vandalism, arson, and other acts of violence, seriously threaten public safety,” the letter said.
Along with the letter, the eight DOGE Republicans also issued a statement calling for an investigation into the matter.
“We are urging the Department of Justice and the FBI to prioritize a thorough investigation of these attacks,” the members said.
In the less than two months since Trump took office earlier this year, Musk has become one of the most visible and controversial parts of his administration, thanks both to his Inauguration-Day “seig heil” salute and the massive cuts, purges, and questionably legal access to Americans’ data undertaken by DOGE. Musk is apparently overseeing the DOGE effort, despite not officially filling the role of administrator. The initiative, which took over the U.S. Digital Service, is nominally focused on “efficiency,” but it has fallen far short of advertised savings while targeting diversity programs that represent a fraction of the federal budget.
The House DOGE subcommittee launched last month. Greene began the first hearing by declaring, “This committee will be laser-focused on bringing full transparency to the waste, fraud, and abuse within the federal government and presenting the plans to fix the tremendous problems we expose.”
TPM reached out to Greene’s office to ask how pressing for an investigation into “attacks” on Tesla, which is a private company, fits with that mission.
“The attacks are directly in response to DOGE, so of course it falls under the committee,” Nick Dyer, who is Greene’s deputy chief of staff, wrote in an email. “This is political violence meant to deter us from that mission.”
A spokesperson for Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM), the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Musk also did not immediately respond to a request for comment from TPM.
Acts of vandalism have hit Tesla vehicles and facilities across the United States and overseas. Tesla has also been the focus of peaceful protests.
The letter from the DOGE subcommittee attempted to tie liberal and left-wing organizations to the anti-Tesla wave. It also cited “Antifa,” a frequent right wing bogeyman. While individuals who identify as “Antifa,” which is short for antifascist, have been a consistent presence at protests in recent years, there is no single, clear organization behind the phenomenon.
“Reports suggest that groups like Antifa, known for their history of domestic terrorism, including throughout the summer of 2020 following the death of George Floyd, may be involved in the recent Tesla attacks,” Greene’s letter said. “I urge the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to prioritize a thorough investigation into these matters.”
Dyer, Greene’s deputy chief of staff, did not respond to questions asking which reports were cited in the letter. Greene, who has previously peddled blatant conspiracy theories related to “antifa,” also pointed to Musk, who has an extensive history of amplifying questionable information, as a source for the idea that liberal and left-wing organizations might be linked to the violence.
“There have been several attacks of this kind in recent days, with reports, including from Elon Musk himself, linking various Democrat-affiliated non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to them,” the letter said.
Greene’s letter concluded by asking the DOJ to identify “the individuals and groups responsible” and to answer whether there is “a link between NGOs and the organizers of these attacks.”
Trump himself has launched threats at anyone who might be linked to the anti-Tesla activity. The president, whose administration has already detained at least one political activist without evidence of criminality, has vowed harsh retribution against anyone who crosses his ally’s car company. As he touted the car company from the White House on Tuesday, Trump issued a stark warning.
“You do it to Tesla and you do it to any company, we’re going to catch you and you’re going to go through hell,” Trump said.
Judge Temporarily Blocks Trump’s Vendetta Against Law Firm
A federal judge blocked parts of Donald Trump’s executive order targeting the law firm Perkins Coie from the bench Wednesday, saying that aspects of it sent “little chills” down her spine.
Continue reading “Judge Temporarily Blocks Trump’s Vendetta Against Law Firm”