We’re seeing a phenomenon play out right now that has cropped up repeatedly during both Trump terms.
Continue reading “It’s Time to Govern, and Republicans in Congress Can’t Remember How”Chief Justice John Roberts scrambled around with a verbal broom and dustpan Monday, reflexively jumping into the arguments to downplay the obvious dangers his majority will soon unleash in its seemingly imminent decision to destroy independent agencies.
Continue reading “Roberts on Cleanup Duty as Court Prepares to Kill Independent Government Agencies”Simply extraordinary stuff coming out this morning about the battle over what used to be Time Warner and now goes by the name Warner Bros Discovery (which includes CNN in addition to the more lucrative media stuff). The company had agreed to be acquired by Netflix. So Paramount — now the vehicle of the Ellison family successor and a Trump state media entity-in-the-making — has launched a hostile takeover effort to swoop in and gobble up WBD for itself. In its public pitch, it has openly advertised to shareholders that it is the better acquirer because the Ellisons are tight with Trump, and the White House will never let a Netflix deal go through. Trump, in comments yesterday, as much as agreed. Trump has refashioned antitrust oversight to be little more than a personal veto for the Trump family. Friends can do mergers; foes can’t. Indeed, the indifferent and uncommitted can’t either. You need to get right with the Trump family.
When you ask why so much of corporate America is beholden to Trump now, this is why. A big diversified corporation simply cannot compete and thus, in practice, can’t exist with a determinedly hostile administration.
Continue reading “Team Oligarch Suits Up to Torpedo Netflix/WBD Merger”I’ve written a number of times over the years about the fact that Americans mostly believe that the post-World War II world order is the normal state of things. Of course, it is not. The last 80 years are unparalleled in global history for their general prosperity, lack of great power wars, a fairly predictable system of global rules. One has to say the obligatory caveats about all the ways the United States honored its values and rules in the breach, the slow run of proxy conflicts it participated in or fomented around the world. But these caveats only serve to illustrate the larger point in a paradoxical way. Things can always get worse and getting worse — conflict, instability, mass death — are the normal order of things in world history. Even a thin appraisal of the American ascendency shows its close to uniqueness in this regard.
Continue reading “Rough Seas Abroad Under Trump II”A lot of weekend news to cover this morning, but I want to continue to keep front and center the contempt of court proceedings in the original Alien Enemies Act case.
The Trump DOJ faced a Friday deadline set by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of D.C. to submit sworn declarations by the officials involved in the decision to continue with the AEA deportation flights in mid-March even after Boasberg ordered the deportations stopped and the planes turned around.
The Trump DOJ acknowledged that it was taking a narrow view of what Boasberg meant by “involved in the decision” and submitted declarations from only three senior officials:
Of note, Blanche explicitly mentioned former DOJ official and now appeals court Judge Emil Bove has having been involved in providing what he asserts is “privileged legal advice” to DHS in the matter. It remains to be seen whether Boasberg will demand either a declaration or testimony from a sitting judge whose potential contempt of court occurred prior to taking the bench.
In its filing accompanying the declarations, DOJ pulled back from having earlier identified Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign as involved in the decision and didn’t submit a declaration from him, saying he only relayed Boasberg’s oral and written orders.
In filing the declarations, the Justice Department remained defiant. Among other arguments, it told Boasberg that:
Seizing on the muddled mess that the laggardly D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals made of Boasberg’s contempt inquiry, the Justice Department leaned heavily on the concurring opinion of Appeals Court Judge Gregory Katsas: “[I]f a leading jurist like Judge Katsas concluded that Defendants’ interpretation of the TRO is legally correct, it is impossible to find beyond a reasonable doubt that Defendants’ interpretation is so unreasonable as to make their conduct criminally contumacious.”
Boasberg has moved the criminal contempt inquiry along as fast as the D.C. Circuit has allowed him to, so I would expect we’ll know what he wants to do next in the case as soon as today.
The Trump administration deported a Guatemalan man back to his home country despite an immigration judge order barring his removal to Guatemala because of fears he would face torture there. U.S. District Judge David Guaderrama of El Paso accused the Trump administration of “blatant lawlessness” in the case and ordered it to facilitate the return of Faustino Pablo Pablo to the United States by Dec. 12.
The invented right-wing legal theory that birthright citizenship is not guaranteed by the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause is going to get decided by the Supreme Court in its current term.
Last year, before she became attorney general, Pam Bondi wrote a Supreme Court brief for the America First Policy Institute in which she argued: “Military officers are required not to carry out unlawful orders.”
Among the new developments:
The DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel has ratified keeping Lindsey Halligan in place as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia despite a judge’s ruling that she was invalidly appointed to the position, the NYT reports:
The office has told department officials that because Judge Currie’s order did not require a specific measure to be taken, like removing Ms. Halligan, she could stay even though the judge declared her appointment invalid, the people said.
In other words, the administration’s position was that since the court order did not explicitly remove Ms. Halligan from the job, she could keep it.
Under Judge Currie’s ruling, only the judges in that district may now appoint an interim U.S. attorney — but they have not publicly moved to do so.
Over the weekend, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of D.C. issued a temporary restraining order barring prosecutors from accessing material seized years ago that belong to Columbia University law professor Daniel Richman, a close friend of and attorney for James Comey. Because the materials at issue largely formed the basis for the now-dismissed indictment of Comey, the ruling may delay any effort by the Trump DOJ to re-indict him.
Mother Jones: “Over the last six months, [the Trump DOJ] has demanded full, unredacted voter rolls from dozens of states in an effort to create the federal government’s first-ever national database of registered voters, accompanied by their private information: party affiliation, voting history, Social Security numbers, driver’s license information, even physical characteristics.”
Ahead of Supreme Court oral arguments today over whether President Trump can unilaterally fire a FTC commissioner, a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel with two Trump appointees ruled that Trump lawfully fired — without cause — Cathy Harris, a Democratic member of the Merit Systems Protection Board, and Gwynne Wilcox, a Democratic member of the National Labor Relations Board.
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention panel stacked with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. allies has dramatically altered the recommendation for infants to immediately receive the hepatitis B vaccine, upending 30 years of wildly successfully public health policy.
With the Indiana House having passed a new GOP friendly mid-decade congressional district map, all attention turns to the Republican-controlled state Senate, where its fate is not as cut and dry as you might expect.
At the 0:42-second mark, Trump’s mask comes off for a moment and the insatiable neediness of an unloved child emerges:
Under a new Trump administration policy, Americans will no longer have free access to national parks on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day or Juneteenth, but will now have free access on June 14 — President Trump’s birthday, which coincides with Flag Day.
Over the weekend, the 38th episode in the eruption sequence that began at Kilauea volcano last December was particularly vigorous, with a laterally-jetting lava fountain knocking a remote camera on the crater rim out of commission:
In case you ever wondered what it would be liked to be engulfed in a lava fountain…
— USGS Volcanoes🌋 (@USGSVolcanoes) December 6, 2025
This video was recorded by the V3 camera, located on the south rim of Halema‘uma‘u crater at the summit of Kīlauea volcano on the Island of Hawai‘i. The camera, located in a hazardous closed… pic.twitter.com/7coXye39AK
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet focused on education.
Brown University, one of the most selective institutions in America, attracted nearly 50,000 applicants who vied for just 1,700 freshman seats last year.
The university accepted nearly equal numbers of male and female prospects, even though, like some other schools, it got nearly twice as many female applicants. That math meant it was easier for male students to get in — 7 percent of male applicants were admitted, compared to 4.4 percent of female applicants, university data show.
The Trump administration’s policies may soon end that advantage that has been enjoyed by men, admissions and higher education experts say.
While much of the president’s recent scrutiny of college admissions practices has focused on race, these experts say his ban on diversity, equity and inclusion is likely to hit another underrepresented group of applicants: men, and particularly white men — the largest subset of male college applicants.
“This drips with irony,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, or ACE, the nation’s largest association of universities and colleges, who said he expects that colleges and universities are ending consideration of gender in admission. “The idea of males, including white males, being at the short end of the stick all of a sudden would be a truly ironic outcome.”
Related: Interested in more news about colleges and universities? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.
For years universities and colleges have beentryingto keep the number of men and women on campuses evened out at a time when growing numbers ofmen have been choosing not to go to college. Some schools have tried to attract more men by adding football and other sports, promoting forestry and hunting programs and launching entrepreneurship competitions.
Nationwide, the number of women on campuses has surpassed the number of men for more than four decades, with nearly 40 percent more women than men enrolled in higher education, federal data show.
Efforts to admit applicants at higher rates based on gender are legal under a loophole in federal anti-discrimination law, one that’s used to keep the genders balanced on campuses.
But the Trump administration has consistently included gender among the characteristics it says it does not want schools to consider for admissions or hiring, along with race, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity or religious associations. The White House has so far largely not succeeded in its campaign to press a handful of elite schools to agree to the terms and sign a wide-ranging Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education in exchange for priority consideration for federal funding.
“The racial parts have gotten a lot more attention, but I know from having spoken with practitioners who work in college admissions, they have read very clearly that it says ‘race and gender,’” in the administration’s pronouncements about ending preferences in admission, said Shaun Harper, founder and chief research scientist at the University of Southern California Race and Equity Center.
“What I think they don’t understand is that taking away the ability of colleges and universities to balance the gender composition of their incoming classes will ultimately have an impact on the college enrollment rates of white males,” Harper said. “It is likely to impact them the most, as a matter of fact.”
| School | % of males admitted | % of females admitted |
| Brown University | 7.0 | 4.4 |
| University of Chicago | 5.6 | 3.7 |
| Yale University | 4.6 | 3.4 |
| University of Miami | 22.5 | 16.5 |
| Middlebury College | 12.2 | 9.6 |
| Baylor University | 56.8 | 47.9 |
| Pomona College | 7.6 | 6.7 |
| Tulane University | 14.9 | 13.4 |
| Vassar College | 20.4 | 17.6 |
SOURCE: Hechinger Report calculations from universities’ Common Data Sets
Agreements that the administration has reached with Brown, Columbia and Northwestern universities to settle allegations of antisemitism discrimination also include language about gender.
In a statement announcing the Brown deal in July, Education Secretary Linda McMahon promised that “aspiring students will be judged solely on their merits, not their race or sex.”
Asked if that meant male applicants would no longer be admitted at higher rates than female applicants — which has helped Brown keep its undergraduate enrollment at almost exactly 50-50, even with twice as many female applicants — spokesman Brian Clark said, “We have made no changes to our admissions practices in this regard.”
The Trump administration has also vowed to make all higher education institutions submit details about the students they admit, including their gender, to find out whether they’re “discriminating against hard working American” prospective students, McMahon said in another statement.
Spokespeople for the Department of Education did not respond to questions about whether advantages in admission based on gender will be scrutinized in the same way as purported advantages based on race.
Related: Inaccurate, impossible: Experts knock new Trump plan to collect college admissions data
Universities are looking at the administration’s edicts “and they’re saying, ‘Well, we’d rather be cautious than stick our neck out’” by continuing to give advantages to male applicants, said ACE’s Mitchell, who was undersecretary of education under President Barack Obama. “I think we will see people dropping gender preferences, even though it is still within the law.”
Colleges that have been accepting men at higher rates are trying to avoid a marketing problem they fear will happen if their campuses become too female,said Madeleine Rhyneer, who headed admissions offices at four private universities and colleges and is now vice president of consulting services and dean of enrollment management for the education consulting firm EAB. Colleges worry, “Will men look at that and think, ‘That’s essentially a women’s college, and I don’t want to go there’?”
Related: Universities and colleges search for ways to reverse the decline in the ranks of male students
“For the Browns and Columbias and highly selective and very competitive institutions, it is a problem,” Rhyneer said. “They want to create what feels like a balanced climate.”
The results of ending this practice could be dramatic, experts predict. In 2023, the most recent year for which the figure is available, 817,035 more women than men applied to universities and colleges, federal data show. Boys also have lower mean scores on the SAT in reading and writing, score lower overall on the ACT and have lower grade point averages in high school.
“If we were going to eliminate preferences for men, the undergraduate population would skew to 65 percent female overnight,” Mitchell said.
Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the right-leaning think-tank the American Enterprise Institute, pointed out that similar predictions were made after the 2023 Supreme Court decision effectively ending affirmative action based on race.
At the time, he said, colleges spoke “in apocalyptic terms of the implications for the racial composition of student bodies.” But the number of Black and Hispanic students enrolled at universities and colleges the next year rose, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Then, said Hess, “there was a lot of, ‘Never mind.’”
The country’s top 50 private colleges and universities have 2 percentage points more male undergraduates than the top 50 flagship public universities, which do not consider gender in admission, according to research by Princeton economist Zachary Bleemer. He said this suggests that at least some are putting a thumb on the scale for male applicants.
Columbia took 3 percent of women applicants last year and 4 percent of men. At the University of Chicago, 5.6 percent of male applicants were accepted last year, compared to 3.7 percent of female applicants. The ratio at the University of Miami was 22.5 percent to 16.5 percent; and at Vassar College, 20.4 percent to 17.6 percent.
Besides Brown, none of these universities would respond when asked if they will continue to accept higher percentages of men than women, Neither would others that do it, including Yale, Baylor and Tulane universities and Pomona College.
Private institutions are allowed to consider gender in admission under Title IX, the federal law otherwise banning discrimination by universities and colleges that get federal funding. That’s due to a loophole dating from when the law was passed, in 1971.
At the time, the gender ratio was exactly reversed, and men outnumbered women on campuses by nearly three to two. One of the universities’ congressional allies, Rep. John Erlenborn, R-Illinois, successfully amended the measure to let private colleges and universities continue to consider gender in admission.
Erlenborn said at the time that forcing colleges to stop considering gender would be “one more giant step toward involvement by the federal government in the internal affairs of institutions of higher education.”
There’s little ambiguity for admissions offices now, said USC’s Harper.
“It says here, in writing, ‘no discrimination on the basis of race and gender,’” he noted. “It says that explicitly.”
This story about men in college was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast. This article first appeared on The Hechinger Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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For months, the Trump administration has been accusing its political enemies of mortgage fraud for claiming more than one primary residence.
Continue reading “Trump’s Own Mortgages Match His Description of Mortgage Fraud, Records Reveal”I’ve become something of a broken record on this. But repetition sometimes serves a critical purpose. Supreme Court reform is now the sine qua non of any reformist program in the United States, any program to re-implant/re-secure civic democracy in the United States. Filibuster reform, abolition of the filibuster, is comparably important. In fact, the two are interwoven with each other in such a way as to be almost indistinguishably joined together.
But a lot of people know the filibuster has to go. Reforming the Supreme Court, which involves one of several ways of breaking the power of the six corrupt Republican appointees, is a much harder lift. It’s not a harder lift in voting terms. It can be done by passing an ordinary law (once you’ve done away with the filibuster) and having a president to sign it. But for many in the political class, for many elected officials, it remains unthinkable. On the plus side, Democratic voters and opinion leaders have some time to lay the groundwork. The soonest anything can happen is January 2029. (You need Congress and the White House.) But there’s a huge amount of work to do. Because my sense is that Democratic officeholders, party elites, aren’t even close to being there. And there’s really no future without it.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Texas does not have to redraw its maximal gerrymander, finding that the map is not illegally race-based, and that it’s too close to the election (in 11 months) to require a redraw.
The decision, from an unsigned majority plus a concurrence written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, comes as no surprise to those who have watched the Roberts Court steadily hack away at anti-gerrymandering protections.
After the 2019 death knell of Rucho v. Common Cause, when the majority ruled that partisan gerrymandering claims can’t be litigated in federal court, it became even harder to demonstrate the existence of a theoretically still-illegal racial gerrymanders, as race and partisan allegiance are often intertwined (for what it’s worth, the district court in the Texas case, in a nearly 200-page ruling, found bountiful evidence that the new maps were predicated on race). And on top of that, the right-wing justices have been messing with the Purcell principle for years, selectively ruling that changes to voting procedures impermissibly encroach on coming elections to uphold Republican-friendly maps.
Now the question lingers: Will the Supreme Court’s open arms policy to maps that let candidates choose their voters extend to the party they oppose? California, the poster child for blue state reactivity to the Trump-ordered Republican gerrymanders, is mentioned twice in the brief ruling.
Once, from the unsigned majority: “Texas adopted the first new map, then California responded with its own map for the stated purpose of counteracting what Texas had done.”
And once, in Alito’s concurrence: “First, the dissent does not dispute — because it is indisputable — that the impetus for the adoption of the concurring map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple.”
Both of these crumbs seem to lead to the same place: The nameless conservatives (the three liberals all signed onto a dissent) and Alito/Gorsuch/Thomas use constructions that equalize the actions of Texas and California. Texas acted out of partisan interest (legal), so California did the same.
It’s a cold comfort, as states free of pesky redistricting reforms race to erase voter choice from the process of selecting U.S. representatives. And you can bet that the California Republican Pparty (joined by the Trump Justice Department) will try to find some race-based idiosyncrasy to set that stateit apart from Texas’ process.
The Court has shown itself to be staunchly anti-democratic. The only remaining question is whether it’ll be consistently so.
— Kate Riga
President Trump has stamped his name on the distinct building that once housed the U.S. Institute of Peace, which DOGE commandeered and hollowed out in the early days of his term.
Trump hanging his shingle on the headquarters of an effort to globally spread diplomacy and charitable works would be ironic enough without the backstory of how his people took it over.
Back in March, DOGE stormed the building with a panoply of armed officers. FBI agents arrived unannounced at the home of the Institute’s security chief, as DOGE tried to force its way into the building. DOGE members threatened the federal contracts of all of the Institute’s ex-security contractors to get them to fork over the key.
“This conduct of using law enforcement, threatening criminal investigations, using armed law enforcement from three different agencies — the Metropolitan Police Department, Department of State security police, the FBI — to carry out Executive Order 14217 — all of that targeting, probably terrorizing, the employees and the staff at the Institute when there are so many other lawful ways to accomplish the goals,” a federal judge said in a hearing over the Institute’s seizure. “Why?”
The case is still pending at the appellate level, though the government has been granted access to the Institute in the meantime.
The building, steps away from the Lincoln Memorial and topped by sweeping, white, dove-like wings, sits as a monument to Trump’s destruction both at home and abroad — his own Ministry of Peace.
— Kate Riga
Last weekend, President Donald Trump was branding himself “THE AFFORDABILITY PRESIDENT” and suggesting this message should be the center of Republicans’ midterm election strategy. By Tuesday, Trump had changed his tune.
“Affordability is a hoax that was started by Democrats,” Trump said in a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday.
The flip-flop messaging has come amid increasing dissatisfaction over the economy and rising prices. Democrats and, notably, New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani, have homed in on the issue, and swept the November elections. Trump quickly moved to embrace the issue.
Trump indicated the area was one where he and Mamdani had common ground when they met in the Oval Office last month. However, on Monday, when TPM asked Mamdani about Trump’s efforts to take the mantle of “affordability,” the mayor-elect offered a decidedly diplomatic and non-committal response.
For his part, Trump clearly seems finished with his brief romance with the concept
“They just say the word,” Trump said of Democrats. “It doesn’t mean anything to anybody. They just say it — ‘affordability.’ I inherited the worst inflation in history. There was no affordability. Nobody could afford anything.”
And what about now that he’s president? Well, even as he rejected the notion that people are worried about prices, Trump conceded, “There is still more to do.”
— Hunter Walker
The MyPillow Founder and energetic public face of the “Stop the Steal” movement filed paperwork this week to run for governor of Minnesota.
Although he has not yet formally announced his gubernatorial run, in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio on Wednesday, Mike Lindell said that he was “98 percent sure” that he will run for governor.
For years following the 2020 election, the close Trump ally and conspiracy theorist has been spreading elaborate and nonsensical lies about the integrity of the 2020 election, claiming, without a shred of evidence, that a foreign entity had systematically flipped votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden, and that Trump is in fact the true winner of that election.
Most recently, in September, a federal judge ruled that Lindell had defamed the voting technology company Smartmatic by spreading lies about the company and its supposed role in stealing the 2020 election.
— Khaya Himmelman
Lawsuits have been percolating over President Trump’s unprecedented attempt to undermine birthright citizenship since the beginning of his second term, but it took until Friday for the Supreme Court to announce that it will hear the case on the merits.
Continue reading “Supreme Court Will Hear Birthright Citizenship Case, for Real This Time”
