Senate Democrats dropped their push for a vote on an amendment to the GOP’s continuing resolution that would keep the government open for another four weeks without major changes, two sources confirmed to TPM.
Continue reading “EXCLUSIVE: Senate Dems Drop Demand For Amendment Vote On Clean, 4-Week CR”Looking Squarely at a Shutdown
It’s hard to write clearly when you’re being flooded with new information. But here goes. I’ve heard people arguing the “‘yes’ on cloture” argument, essentially saying, “don’t assume you can shut DOGE down, undo the damage. It’s not a silver bullet.” I can only speak for myself, but if anyone is thinking, based on the arguments I’ve made, that blocking cloture is a silver bullet and if Democrats just do this we can shut this whole thing down, I haven’t been clear. I will further say that while the things I’ve written over the last week or so make it pretty clear where I stand on this, I have several times had a hard think with myself: are you sure you’re right about this? I’m not sure I’d say this is a close call. But it’s a hard call, for me at least. Both options hold out possibilities of calamity and destruction I’ve never seriously contemplated before. That is simply where we are. I wish we weren’t here. But we are here.
As I’ve written, my ask would be, right out of the gate, “we’ll give you the keys, we’ll give you your bill, if we write down the DOGE plan for each department and agency. And we just do an up or down vote. If you can pass it through Congress, that’s all we ask.” (I’ve explained previously why I think this is a good idea.)
Continue reading “Looking Squarely at a Shutdown”Taking Stock of Friday Morning
I’m trying to bring together the latest information on the funding bill this morning, I have some but not all the morning developments plugged into our cloture tally list. But I wanted to address something closely related but distinct. This has opened up a massive, massive fissure in the Democratic Party, certainly more than anything since the Iraq War vote more than 20 years ago. And I think there’s a good chance it’s bigger, though it’s also true that the overall political situation may evolve and degrade in ways that overshadow it with subsequent events.
Continue reading “Taking Stock of Friday Morning”Trump Targets Higher Ed In Pure Authoritarian Move
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Columbia University Is Ground Zero For Trump Extortion
If you still harbored any doubt that President Trump’s ongoing attack on Columbia University – a private institution – is drawn straight from the authoritarian playbook, then the latest development should be clarifying.
The Trump administration – specifically the Department of Education, HHS, and GSA – sent a letter yesterday to Columbia attempting to extort an array of concessions in how the university is run before it may consider restoring some $400 million in frozen federal funding.
Imposing an arbitrary March 20 deadline, the Trump administration demanded that Columbia complete a laundry list of internal restructurings, policy changes, and submissions to federal authority. Among the most alarming demands: put the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department in what it calls “academic receivership” for at least five years.
If Columbia complies by the deadline, then and only then will the Trump administration “open a conversation about immediate and long-term structural reforms” at the university. If it’s not clear, it sure should be: Even if Columbia submits to this extortion letter, it doesn’t get federal funding restored. It merely sets itself up for a later round of bullying, exorbitant demands, and more extortion.
The extortion letter came the same day DHS agents executed search warrants at the residences of two Columbia students. “According to the sources, it was part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on individuals it has described as espousing the views of Hamas and threatening the safety of Jewish students,” ABC News reported.
This all transpired as Columbia graduate and pro-Palestinian protest leader Mahmoud Khalil remained in federal detention as the Trump administration attempts to deport him even though he’s a legal permanent resident. His lawyers amended their filings as they obtained new information about his detainment. In an interview with NPR, a top DHS official could not articulate what wrongdoing Khalil was being accused of.
Meanwhile, The Atlantic reported that the Trump administration had targeted at least one other person at the same time as Khalil:
It turns out Secretary of State Marco Rubio identified a second individual to be deported, and included that person alongside Khalil in a March 7 letter to the Department of Homeland Security. Both were identified in the letter as legal permanent residents, The Atlantic has learned. …
The officials did not disclose the name of the second green-card holder, and did not know whether the person is a current or former Columbia student, or had been singled out for some other reason. The person has not been arrested yet, the U.S. official said.
The Trump administration’s bullying of a private university is being done under the guise of rooting out antisemitism. But the real authoritarian move here is to bring higher education under the thumb of the president. Columbia’s not the only example, but it’s the most extreme.
“So far, America’s leading universities have remained virtually silent in the face of this authoritarian assault on institutions of higher education,” the Harvard student newspaper editorialized.
Biggest Anti-Purge Developments Yet
Two federal judges on opposite coasts threw up big stop signs Thursday to President Trump’s mass purges of government workers.
In the morning, a clearly irate U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco ordered purged probationary employees to be reinstated. His order covered the Defense, Treasury, Energy, Interior, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs departments.
Later in the day, U.S. District Judge James Bredar of Maryland issued an even broader order to reinstate probationary employees at 18 major agencies, ruling that the government hadn’t followed the proper procedures for layoffs.
The Purges
- Gov’t Wide: Government agencies had a deadline yesterday to submit plans to the White House for a “mass reduction” of the federal workforce but few details on those plans have been made public.
- IRS: DOGE officials instructed the acting IRS commissioner to eliminate 18,141 jobs across the agency by May 15, according to records obtained by the WaPo.
- Collateral Damage: Johns Hopkins University will cut more than 2,000 workers in the United States and abroad funded by federal aid.
Doge Watch
- The Trump administration sacked the top lawyer at the IRS in a clash over getting access to the agency’s highly sensitive data to use to deport immigrants. William Paul, a career employee, had been serving as the acting chief counsel at the IRS since the end of Biden’s term.
- Elon Musk visited the National Security Agency on Wednesday to meet with its leadership on staff reductions and operations.
- The AP has obtained a list of which government office leases will be canceled this year and when.
Trump II Clown Show
The Trump White House withdrew the nomination of former Rep. Dave Weldon (R-FL) to head the CDC because he was apparently too anti-vax for some senators and not ready for primetime. Weldon learned his nomination was being withdrawn from a WSJ reporter while en route to his Senate confirmation hearing.
Gov’t Shutdown Watch: Senate Expected To Pass CR Today
The GOP-controlled Senate is expected to pass a continuing resolution today before the midnight deadline for a traditional government shutdown. While Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) declined to lead a filibuster, it’s still unclear how many Democratic senators will ultimately vote for the CR itself on a straight up-or-down simple majority vote. TPM’s liveblog yesterday offered a good window into a fluid day on the Hill. Our team is back at it today and you can follow them here. Meanwhile, the nontraditional Trump-Musk government shutdown continues apace.
Raskin Asks DOJ IG To Investigate Ed Martin
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, has sent a nine-page broadside against acting D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin to the Department of Justice’s inspector general requesting that he open an investigation into Martin’s outrageous conduct.
Jan. 6 Never Ends
- As if to demonstrate that he has brought the Justice Department to heel, President Trump is heading to Main Justice today for a triumphant speech in the building’s Great Hall.
- U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee in DC, is the first judge to reject outright the Trump DOJ’s position that the Jan. 6 pardons covered crimes committed after that date.
- Newsmax revealed publicly for the first time that it paid $40 million in the September settlement of Smartmatic’s defamation lawsuit against it arising from the right-wing outlet’s coverage of the 2020 election.
Nothing To See Here
The White House halted the FBI background checks of dozens of top Trump staffers because they deemed them too intrusive and quietly turned the vetting over to the Pentagon, ABC News reports.
IMPORTANT
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is planning a sweeping overhaul of the judge advocate general’s corps “to make the US military less restricted by the laws of armed conflict,” The Guardian reports.
As part of that effort, The Guardian notes: Hegseth “on Friday commissioned his personal lawyer and former naval officer Tim Parlatore as a navy commander to oversee the effort carrying the weight and authority of the defense secretary’s office.”
Parlatore, who was part of the Trump’s personal legal team back in 2023, posted pictures on LinkedIn of his swearing-in last week by Hegseth.
Planning Underway For Trump’s Panama Canal Extortion
U.S. Southern Command is developing potential plans from partnering more closely with Panamanian security forces to the less likely option of U.S. troops’ seizing the Panama Canal by force, the officials said. Whether military force is used, the officials added, depends on how much Panamanian security forces agree to partner with the United States.
Have A Good Weekend
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Black Thursday in the Democratic Senate: An Explainer
I want to share a few thoughts on what happened today in the Senate.
There was a steady drumbeat throughout the day of senators coming out publicly or telling their constituents they not only opposed the House-produced continuing resolution (CR) but would move to block it on the cloture vote. There was an afternoon caucus meeting that was apparently heated and raucous. Sen. Gillibrand led the charge to allow the CR to go through. A shutdown was worse, she insisted. But behind all this Chuck Schumer was really the driver.
24 hours earlier, Schumer went to floor and announced that Republicans didn’t have the votes for cloture. On first glance it appeared his caucus had decided to defy the President and his congressional party. But it was a ploy. He was playing his voters for fools. It soon emerged that Schumer’s plan was to engineer what amounted to a performative stand-down, a choreographed interlude of opposition followed by the passage of the GOP bill. It would go like this: Democrats refused to allow a vote on the GOP bill. They then force a compromise: Dems vote for cloture in exchange for allowing Dems to offer amendments to the House bill. But that was a farce: giving up the Democrats’ one true point of leverage in exchange for votes that were literally certain to fail. (Democrats are in the minority. On a majority vote they lose.) But over the next day Schumer lost control of the situation. Too many people figured out how Schumer’s switcheroo maneuver worked. And too many Senate Democrats didn’t have the stomach for the public opposition to what was happening. That made the initial gambit impossible. So his only choice was to drop the charade and force the matter. Late in the afternoon he went to the Senate floor, not yet 24 hours later, and announced he would vote to give the Republicans their bill.
Continue reading “Black Thursday in the Democratic Senate: An Explainer”Schumer Will Lead Senate Democrats To Pass Poison-Pilled Republican CR
Senate Democrats gave up their sole point of leverage Thursday, as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced that he would help Republicans pass a continuing resolution that slashes domestic spending and specifically targets Washington D.C. with massive, punitive cuts.
While the CR is bad, Schumer said from the Senate floor, a shutdown would be “much, much worse.”
He pledged to keep fighting President Trump and Elon Musk, a fairly empty promise as Republicans won’t need Democratic help to fund the government for at a year, and can pass their reconciliation bills alone.
Catch up on TPM’s coverage from the Hill:
Shutdown Or Not, Trump Admin Is Prepping New Ways To Ignore Separation Of Powers
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”