Hello, and welcome back to another bleak edition of The Franchise! (How’s that for an opening line?)
As the midterm primary season heats up, so do the attacks on election administration, which we will get into more below.
But first …
The distressing red state scramble to completely gut congressional district maps and gerrymander away Black electoral power in the South continues in the aftermath of Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court ruling that struck down Louisiana’s second Black-majority congressional district and has set off a depressing race to redraw majority-minority districts across the Old Confederacy.
This has been implicit in various points I’ve made in recent Editors’ Blog posts. I want to make it more explicit. What’s occupying Donald Trump’s time right now? The big items are the Ballroom, the Deserving Fascists Slush Fund, the revenge tour against merely 95% loyal members of Congress. We could add Trump’s Iran War which is keeping gas prices sky high and creating other shortages. But that’s kind of baked in from a decision Trump made more than two months ago. It’s damaging him but it’s a tar pit he’s already stuck in. The things he’s most focused on, the obsessions are things that are either irrelevant to the midterm elections or are playing central roles driving down his public support. The plane is losing altitude fast but he’s in the cockpit grabbing the controls and trying to steepen the descent.
The most important thing to know about the DNC “autopsy” report on the 2024 election is, who cares? Most of the commentary on this document gives the impression that this is some meaningful disclosure of the inside dope, what really happened, etc. But it’s not. It just the take of the guys they chose to write a report. No more significant or revealing than the million other takes on the 2024 election we’ve all read.
Todd Blanche is basically just making 30-second ads, whether he knows it or not. When asked whether he’s okay with cash bonanzas for people convicted of attacking police officers was his reply, the acting attorney general replied, “Just to be clear, people who hurt police get money all the time …”
Semafor and Punchbowl both have items today reporting that the Senate is about to buck President Trump on both his ballroom and his deserving fascists slush fund (DFSF). They want to cut funding for the ballroom and at least greatly restrict the DFSF. You can see the details here. As the authors point out, there’s the standard pattern that the senators willing to speak freely are the ones who’s severed heads are already on pikes: Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Thom Tillis (R-NC), perhaps John Cornyn (R-TX) in the near future. But the silent ones, according to these reports, are going to vote the same way. Or at least enough of them.
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Even normally temperate legal experts and political observers are aghast at the ways in which the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” deal — and its broad release of claims against Trump, his family, and his businesses — crosses into new territory of venality, graft, and abuse of power (even for Trump).
Former DOJer Jennifer Ricketts: “I have never heard of the department ever being willing to grant blanket immunity. That seems blatantly corrupt. It’s a shocking gift to the president.”
Barbara A. Perry, a presidential scholar at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center: “Presidents have had corrupt, even criminal, family members. But none of them succeeded to the extent of the Trump family in the level of graft achieved. … They have won the presidency twice, emasculated Congress, created a supportive high court, and reshaped the law and institutions to absolve them of any wrongdoing, while making billions of ill-gotten dollars.”
Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck: “I am, by training and disposition, a person who writes about doctrine. I try (sometimes, to significant criticism) to avoid emotional pleas. But I am asking you, today, to care about this story in a way that may well be disproportionate to the volume of media coverage it is going to get.”
Why Challenging It in Court Is So Hard
Police officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 filed a lawsuit in federal court in D.C. yesterday to challenge the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” and the case was assigned to iconoclastic senior U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon. But the path for legal recourse remains obscure and difficult, most legal experts agree:
University of Michigan law professor Samuel R. Bagenstos: “It is really difficult to think about how to frame a judicial challenge to what the president has done here. That doesn’t mean people aren’t trying, and that doesn’t mean something might not succeed.”
Lawfare: “What makes this particular episode so unsettling is that it’s not clear how it would be stopped. The legal avenues to challenge it are untested and the standing hurdles are formidable. Meanwhile, the legislative appetite to act—at least in this Congress—is not yet apparent. By the time a future Congress might try, nearly $2 billion in taxpayer funds may be largely gone, dispersed to recipients whose identities may never be publicly known.”
Don’t Hold Your Breath
There are some rumblings on Capitol Hill that Senate Republicans increasingly concerned about the GOP’s prospects in the midterm elections may impose some restrictions on the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” Punchbowl reports:
But it’s unclear how Republicans plan to impose eligibility restrictions on the ‘weaponization’ fund. They’re especially concerned about potential taxpayer-funded payouts to Jan. 6 rioters convicted of violence against cops, as well as the overall political optics of the fund. This was a big discussion point at the Republicans’ lunch meeting on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, in the GOP-controlled House, Judiciary Committee Republicans rejected Democratic efforts to subpoena Trump administration officials involved in creating the “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”
Like Pigs to the Trough
Among the various charlatans, ne’er-do-wells, pardoned criminals, and others eyeing the $1.776 billion in the “Anti-Weaponization Fund”:
Former Trump I official Michael Caputo became the first person to attempt to file a claim, for a cool $2.7 million.
Mark McCloskey, the gun-toting pro-Trump lawyer who comically defended his St. Louis home during the George Floyd protests, is considering applying.
Expelled Rep. George Santos (R-NY), whose sentence was commuted by Trump, doesn’t want compensation, just an apology.
Pardoned Jan. 6 defendant Yvonne St Cyr: “I hope I get $10 million but the dollar collapses like it should.”
That’s just beginning.
Polis Censured for Freeing Tina Peters
By an overwhelming vote, the Colorado Democratic Party censured Gov. Jared Polis (D) for commuting the prison sentence of Big Lie purveyor Tina Peters.
‘Bundt_Cake_Recipe.pdf’
The Trump DOJ obtained an indictment of a former federal prosecutor in Florida for allegedly stealing an electronic copy of the still-sealed Volume II of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on the Mar-a-Lago investigation.
The four-count indictment of Carmen Mercedes Lineberger was handed down May 19 and unsealed on May 20 in the Fort Pierce Division of the Southern District of Florida, where U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon is the only judge. It is Cannon who has corruptly sealed the report and kept it from public view since before the 2024 election. Her decision to do so is currently on appeal.
Lineberger allegedly emailed DOJ files, including the sealed report, from her work account to her personal account last year, using file names like “Chocolate_Cake-Recipe.pdf.” The file name for the sealed report was allegedly “Bundt_Cake_Recipe.pdf.”
The case against Lineberger, who pleaded not guilty yesterday, was brought by attorneys from outside the Souther District, where Lineberger had previously worked.
Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart, who was originally assigned the case, recused himself in an order this morning. He did not give a reason, but he approved the search warrants for Mar-a-Lago.
Judge Orders Compliance With PRA
U.S. District Judge John Bates of D.C. ordered White House aides to continue to abide by the Presidential Records Act despite a DOJ memo that declared the law unconstitutional. Bates, not known to be a show horse, started his opinion with an Orwell quote: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”
Trump’s Obsession With Colossalism
WASHINGTON, DC – MAY 19: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the media alongside posters of his proposed White House ballroom amid construction at the White House on May 19, 2026 in Washington, DC. The Senate parliamentarian ruled this week that taxpayer funds in the budget reconciliation package cannot be used for a $1 billion provision intended to fund security for Trump’s White House ballroom. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Good news and bad news on Trump’s effort to remake the nation’s capital in his gaudy image:
The Good: Senate Republicans are running away from Trump’s vanity ballroom project and are on the verge of killing off funding for it. The funding was included in the reconciliation bill, but the Senate’s parliamentarian ruled over the weekend that it violated reconciliation rules. Rather than rework the language, the provision is going to be dropped, largely because of a lack of GOP support, even to get to a bare 50 votes.
The Bad: The Trump administration plans to proceed with constructing the president’s monumental 250-foot arch commemorating the nation’s 250th birthday without approval from Congress. In a sign of some desperation, the administration is citing a century-old law authorizing a D.C. project that was never built as already giving it congressional authority to build the arch.
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Thanks for publishing so much back and forth. Apparently we’re all elite lawyers who read TPM! I’m not sure where I fall in that – practiced at an “elite” DC firm in my younger years, then stopped practicing for a bit working in government, and then have been a GC or in-house at a handful of small-ish tech firms in the bay area.
Anyway – this stood out to me in one of the replies you posted: “A category difference in simply manufacturing new constitutional law in cases where the constitution is simply as clear as it can be.”
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) took a break from throwing out tens of thousands of his constituents’ votes this week to take a little foray to Greenland, the off-and-on target of President Donald Trump’s imperialistic whims.
Predictably, the locals did not take kindly to the special envoy’s visit.
I’m not a legal academic, but I was a pretty fancy pants lawyer – Harvard Law magna cum laude, federal clerkship, DOJ Civil Rights Division, AUSA for a decade doing public corruption cases, litigation partner, university general counsel’s office, etc.
I’m not sure I can describe the level of despair among many of my contemporaries.
I was discussing this last night with a retired ACLU lawyer and a retired big firm litigation leader.
