I want to share with you a letter from fellow TPM Reader DA. He makes a point I fully agree with but didn’t make clear enough in yesterday’s post. I fully agree there is such a thing as legal expertise. I’ve made that clear in my actions over a couple decades by paying for some of the very best (and priciest) legal counsel — mostly though not exclusively on 1st Amendment and libel law. It of course goes beyond this. Law, in its largest scope, is a complex set of rules and practices that we as a society have agreed on — sometimes explicitly, usually implicitly — to govern ourselves by and through which we resolve the countless range of disputes — civil and criminal — that arise among us. But it is in the nature of any specialized and professionalized craft to cast a penumbra of authority beyond its actual area of expertise.
Continue reading “More on Fancy Lawyers #2”Even the Initially Hesitant Southern States Have Now Joined GOP Race to Eliminate Black Political Representation
Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise!
In the aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling earlier this month that struck down Louisiana’s second Black-majority congressional district in Louisiana v. Callais, red states across the South jumped at the new opportunity to gerrymander away the majority-minority districts in their states, in a blatant scramble to severely cut back Black electoral power. This week the Republican race to redistrict ahead of the midterms continues at a dizzying pace, with some states that initially appeared hesitant now jumping into the fray.
Here’s the latest.
Continue reading “Even the Initially Hesitant Southern States Have Now Joined GOP Race to Eliminate Black Political Representation”Big Round of New Trump Administration Smackdowns From Federal Judges
Judges Rein in the Administration and …
I want to give you the flavor of a handful of new smackdowns of the Trump administration from federal judges across the country in an array of cases, involving violations of the law, defiance of court orders, and assorted shenanigans.
All of these are from the last day or two, so a particularly notable cluster, even if ultimate accountability to the rule of law continues to be slow in coming:
Rhode Island: Anti-Trans Subpoena Quashed
In a sharply worded order that bristled with disdain for what the Justice Department has become under President Trump, U.S. District Judge Mary S. McElroy of Rhode Island blocked an administrative subpoena of Rhode Island Hospital for its records on gender-affirming care for transgender youth.
McElroy lets it rip right from the top:
She concludes: “[T]he discrepancy between the honorable conduct expected of federal prosecutors and DOJ’s tactics in this case is unsettling. The Court cannot help but share the sentiment that ‘[t]he presumption of regularity that has previously been extended to [DOJ] that it could be taken at its word—with
little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes—no longer holds.’”
This is the case that has played out in parallel in Rhode Island and Texas, where DOJ went to Trump-friendly U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor to enforce the subpoena against the hospital. O’Connor granted the administration’s motion the same day it was filed without giving the hospital a chance to respond and then denied the hospital motion to stay while it appealed.
While McElroy stepped in, she made clear she wasn’t purporting to overrule O’Connor, which she doesn’t have the power to do. “What this Court holds is that the subpoena itself lacks a congressionally authorized purpose, was issued for an improper purpose, and demands the production of records that cannot be obtained consistent with the constitutional privacy rights of Rhode Island children.”
For the full backstory on the case, the always-on-it Chris Geidner has you covered.
DC: A New ‘Facilitate’ Case
Citing Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s case, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of a Colombian national it has deported last month to the Democratic Republic of Congo after the DRC refused to accept her because of her serious medical issues.
The DRC government told ICE in a letter it could not accept the 55-year-old woman because it could not provide her with adequate medical care.
“The government sent her to the D.R.C., anyway. …. Sending plaintiff to the D.R.C., therefore, was likely illegal,” Leon wrote.
Colorado: Injunction Violation
U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson of Denver found that ICE has “materially violated” his preliminary injunction barring warrantless arrests without first establishing probable cause they are a flight risk. Jackson imposed a host of new reporting and training requirements on ICE.
DC: First Amendment Violation
In another ruling Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon found that the Trump administration violated the First Amendment when it sanctioned United Nations official Francesca Albanese over her calls for war crimes charges against Israeli officials.
“Albanese has done nothing more than speak!” Leon wrote. “It is undisputed that her recommendations have no binding effect on the ICC’s actions — they are nothing more than her opinion.”
… The Administration Pushes Back
At the same time the administration was taking it on the chin in the case above, it made two aggressive new moves:
DC: Jan 6 Never Ends
In a major escalation of its attack on state bars, the Trump DOJ filed suit to block the DC bar from disciplining Jan. 6 coup plotter Jeffrey Clark as an unconstitutional infringement on federal power. The lawsuit, which was signed by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward but no career attorneys, also comes to the defense of U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin, who faces disciplinary proceedings in DC.
Rhode Island: New Attack on Judge
In a column at the right-wing Federalist, DHS general counsel James Percival launched a new attack on U.S. District Judge Melissa R. DuBose of Rhode Island, accusing her of being a “radical” and “activist” who is “engaged in a political public affairs battle and intimidation campaign against DHS” after she referred a DOJ lawyer for possible discipline. This is the case where the DOJ, at ICE’s request, withheld from the judge the fact that an ICE detainee was wanted on murder charges abroad, and then DHS attacked her for releasing an alleged murderer.
The Great Whitening: An Update
- South Carolina: Despite GOP opposition in the state Senate, Gov. Henry McMaster is expected to call a special session of the legislature to redraw the state’s congressional district map before the midterms and eliminate the sole Democratic seat, held by Rep. James Clyburn (D). The special session could start as soon as tomorrow, after the regular session ends today. McMaster’s move was a reversal from his previous opposition to a special session and came after pressure from President Trump and his allies and just days after the state Senate failed to pass a measure that would have led to a special session.
- Mississippi: Gov. Tate Reeves (R) will no longer call a special session of the legislature to redraw the state’s Supreme Court districts and seemed to take off the table any monkeying with the state’s congressional district map until after the midterms.
- Maryland: Maryland state Senate President Bill Ferguson (D), who blocked a push last year to redraw the state’s congressional district map and eliminate the state’s sole GOP seat, held by Rep. Andy Harris (R), is “talking to allies about a path forward on possible redistricting,” NOTUS reports.
- Georgia: Gov. Brian Kemp (R) called a special session of the legislature to redraw the state’s congressional district map for the 2028 elections, keeping his commitment to leave the map alone for the 2026 election but making sure the map is redrawn before he leaves office in January while Republicans still control the statehouse.
It’s Always Black Women
While Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) isn’t pushing to change the state’s congressional district map before the midterms, he did sign into a law a sneaky GOP bill targeting the Democratic-heavy Atlanta area.
The new law takes party affiliation off the ballot for county elected offices in five metro Atlanta counties, including plurality-Black Fulton County, so that Republicans have a better shot of winning without the “R” by their names; but it retains party affiliation for county elected offices in Republican-heavy rural areas.
“All five counties covered by the law have Black Democratic women serving as district attorney,” the AJC reports. That of course includes GOP target Fani Willis in Fulton County.
This is exactly the kind of nonsense that pre-clearance under the Voting Rights Act was intended to scupper before it disadvantaged minority voters. But Chief Justice John Roberts famously torpedoed pre-clearance in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder decision.
Quote of the Day
Civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill:
[T]he effort by Trump and Republican state leadership to gerrymander Black representation out of Congress must be understood as not only an attack on Black people, but on democracy itself. If the Republican racial gerrymandering effort is successful, the U.S. will lose any claim to democracy for a generation or more.
And the forces that stand today against citizenship and political representation for Black people won’t stop there. They will not tolerate meaningful political representation for any group that opposes their oligarchical Christian nationalist ideology. They seek a one-party political system in a country ruled by authoritarians. The political oppression of Black people is not the end. It is the conduit.
CIA in Mexico: The Plot Thickens
This is the first time I’ve linked from Morning Memo to my own social media post, and I won’t make it a habit, but this thread is an efficient way to catch up on this week’s important developments:
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
Red States and Blue States (But Mostly Blue States) Are Not Safe From Trump’s Retribution, Says Vance
The Trump administration has been using amorphous and sprawling allegations of widespread fraud, and the feverish rumors spread by right-wing influencers online that animate these claims, as a pretext to target blue states and cities for months now.
Continue reading “Red States and Blue States (But Mostly Blue States) Are Not Safe From Trump’s Retribution, Says Vance”More on the Fancy Lawyers (and the Legal Academy)
From an Anonymous TPM Reader …
Continue reading “More on the Fancy Lawyers (and the Legal Academy)”Apologies for the extremely lengthy response, but your post today hit upon a perennial hobby horse of mine!
It strikes me that in addition to their own self-image, law professors (and elite lawyers generally) aren’t able to be honest brokers in discussions about court reform because of the enormous quid pro quo and tight knit social ties created by judicial clerkships. The number of students that obtain clerkships plays a big role in law school rankings. Partly as a result of this, having clerked at least for a circuit clerk is now seen as a de facto requirement to be hired as a law professor, barring a PhD in another field (and even then, most still clerk). Professors who clerk help place students with their judges and so on and so forth. There is an *enormous* professional taboo against quitting a clerkship or criticizing the judge that you worked for no matter how bad the experience. It’s viewed as professional suicide, some law schools will effectively ice you out of their career services as you do it, and certain firms will effectively be closed to you for the entirety of your career. Conversely, stay close with your judge and you can expect them to be a letter of rec and introduction-maker for life. All of this adds up to elite law school faculty and elite lawyers having a sizeable material professional and social stake in revering judges, in addition to their psychological investment in feeling learned.
Black People Worse Off in Trump’s Economy Than Every Other Group, Per the Fed
Black people in America did worse economically in 2025 than at any time since the Federal Reserve began its financial wellbeing survey in 2013, according to some measures published Wednesday.
More notable than the depressed financial situation of Black respondents is the gap between Black people and, in some cases, every other racial and ethnic group recorded. The Federal Reserve’s report, Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2025, is the latest data set revealing the ways and extent Black Americans suffered tangible economic harm under the first year of President Donald Trump’s second presidential term, wherein the president took myriad steps to hack away at racial progress at the federal level as soon as returning to office. And as the U.S. residents are generally experiencing actual wage declines, the sharp jump in inflation fueled by the war in Iran, and a sluggish job market which saw the unemployment rate climb before flattening more recently, Wednesday’s Fed report exposes how some groups are bearing the brunt of Trump’s economic policy choices, while others are thriving.
The Fed’s economic well-being findings draw on a survey of nearly 13,000 U.S. adults taken in the fourth quarter of 2025. It asks questions about job loss and employment situation, emergency savings, and concerns about price increases, as well as more general survey questions about one’s perceived financial stability. Black people recorded the largest decline in financial stability measures in nearly every category compared to Asian, Hispanic and white respondents.
Black adults were the only racial group who reported a notable jump in concerns about price increases, the Fed wrote in its report, up 6% year over year.
The percentage of Black people “doing okay” or “living comfortably” declined by 5% from 65% in 2024 to 60% in 2025, the largest drop recorded since the Fed began collecting this data, including in 2020 during the COVID-era recession. The percentage of Hispanic respondents “doing okay” or “living comfortably” declined 1% from 63% to 62%, while Asian people’s situations stayed flat with 82% feeling comfortable. White people reported an increase in financial comfort, up from 77% in 2024 to 79% in 2025.
While a larger share of Hispanic people reported doing worse off year over year, Black people netted the largest jump in this category, up 7% to 28% of respondents. White people were the only racial group who felt their economic situations’ improved, with 26% reporting doing worse off year over year, down from 30% in 2024.
Black people saw the biggest drop in the share of respondents with three months worth of savings, and a smaller share than last year have even $400 to cover an emergency. A declining number of Hispanic respondents could foot an emergency $400 bill, but white and Asian people, who are more likely to have this cash on hand, improved in this category, both by 2%.
The Fed’s figures further outline what months of federal and independent economic data has shown: Trump’s economy is bad for Black people. Because Black people usually bear the brunt of economic downturns first, the data could also signal something ominous for everyone else, including people who may feel they’re well-off under this regime.
“I think it’s going to be just a matter of time,” Gbenga Ajilore, chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told TPM in September after a jobs report showed Black unemployment spiking.
“It’s going to hit everybody at some point. It just hits Black people earlier.”
Black unemployment earlier this year reached rates not seen (outside of the COVID-era recession shock in 2020 and 2021) since 2016, during the first Trump administration, when Black unemployment was equalizing from the global financial crisis, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report. Unemployment for white, Asian and Hispanic workers remained comparatively flat, though employment information for Hispanic people is likely skewed because of the disproportionate impact of the administration’s mass immigrant removal campaign.
Trump’s gutting of more than 300,000 federal jobs likely had a disproportionate impact on Black people, who were overrepresented in the federal workforce. Trump’s dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives included the abolition of federal programs and decrees pressuring private business to follow suit. An analysis from the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance found more than half of the companies listed on the S&P 100 made material changes to their DEI policies to avoid legal risk. Fewer companies reported workforce demographics at all, the study found. Taken together, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies declared in January Black people were facing a recession. This was even before a series of unimaginable Supreme Court decisions and subsequent state actions that have laid the foundation for the decimation of Black political power across the south and nationally.
Yes, the Fancy Lawyers Are the Problem — Across the Board
If you’re not a regular listener to our podcast, I hope you’ll listen to the episode that will come out later this afternoon. It was, I think, a particularly good episode, in large part because we had such critical issues to discuss: Callais, the wave of emergency redistrictings across the southern tier of the old Confederacy and what seems to be a sea-change moment on Supreme Court reform among establishment Democrats. I want to expand today on some points about Supreme Court reform, offering some of the historical background for this present moment.
Every current member of the Supreme Court comes out of what we might call the elite academic-judicial nexus, which is to say they’ve been law professors at elite universities and judges in the federal judiciary. I believe this applies to all the current justices. It didn’t used to be this way. It used to be relatively common to have justices who had never served as judges before and had never been law professors. Frequently they were ex-politicians. Famously, William Howard Taft was an ex-president when he became chief justice. Earl Warren was a popular Republican governor of California who had never served as a judge until president Eisenhower nominated him as chief justice. If you go further back, many justices never even went to law school, though this was more a matter of the evolution of legal education. The last non-law school justice was James F. Byrnes. (In earlier history, you generally learned the law as a kind of apprentice and then passed the bar to practice.) There was a brief boomlet of chatter when Bill Clinton was elected that he should or would try to re-inject this “politician on the Court” tradition back into the system. Of course that didn’t happen. The idea has scarcely been entertained since.
Continue reading “Yes, the Fancy Lawyers Are the Problem — Across the Board”‘Gamesmanship’
In the Southeast right now, we are seeing a no-holds-barred push to obliterate Black electoral power following the decimation of a law for which generations of activists marched and sometimes died. In service of this goal, state officials are going so far as to cancel elections in which voters have already cast ballots.
Yet many news outlets are talking about what’s happening using terms like “political gamesmanship,” noting white Republicans “looking for every advantage.” These terms were already a stretch for describing the mid-decade gerrymandering blitz pre-Callais. They are wildly inapplicable now.
There’s a frog-in-boiling-water quality to it. Its a mode of coverage unmoored from national and global history, which we ignore at our peril.
A Noncitizen Says She Was Told She Could Vote. Then Customs Detained Her at the Airport and Threatened to Deport Her.
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Estelle, who’s long held permanent resident status in the U.S., is a veteran at navigating the reentry process when she returns from visiting relatives in her native France.
But on her most recent trip through customs in mid-March, officers detained the 57-year-old Lawrence, Kansas, resident for 30 hours, forced her to spend the night in a holding cell on a concrete slab and threatened her with deportation.
Why? Because she acknowledged under questioning by customs officers that she’d once voted in a local election, despite not being a U.S. citizen. A small number of cities in the U.S. allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, but Lawrence is not one of them. Kansas and federal law both require U.S. citizenship to register to vote.
Continue reading “A Noncitizen Says She Was Told She Could Vote. Then Customs Detained Her at the Airport and Threatened to Deport Her.”Abrego Garcia Judge Upbraids Trump DOJ
Welcome!
Hello to the 300+ new Morning Memo readers who have signed up after seeing Josh Marshall and Kate Riga interviewed by Heather Cox Richardson.
A quick word on what to expect: a rundown of the day’s essential political news in your inbox midmorning on weekdays. Over the past year, that’s meant mostly chronicling the worst depredations of the Trump II presidency. No fluff or bullshit, but some occasional whimsy to leaven the serious times in which we live.
The current moment can be hard to face, but if you’re feeling a civic duty to stay informed, I try to make Morning Memo sufficient for you to check off that box. I hope you find it useful.
Liberia or Bust
I was in the federal courthouse in suburban Maryland for a hearing yesterday in the civil case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The case is deep in the procedural weeds at this point, but it continues to produce moments I’ve never seen in court.
The context is that the Trump administration is still trying to deport Abrego Garcia to Liberia, and U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis has blocked his removal, which the Trump DOJ is currently appealing to the 4th Circuit.
Nothing was resolved in yesterday’s hearing, but Xinis took the opportunity to upbraid DOJ lawyers for misrepresentations it made about the case to the appeals court.
To take one example, Xinis said it was “sticking in my craw” that the Trump DOJ told the appeals court she had not made the requisite findings before issuing an injunction in the case. She demanded to know who wrote the filing that was submitted to the appeals court (it was a more junior attorney at the government table), at which point she read in open court from the transcript of the earlier hearing showing that she did make the required findings as she issued the injunction.
“It’s important to read,” she chided.
Then she turned to the more senior DOJ attorney: “It is not accurate to tell the 4th Circuit that I did not make findings. Do you disagree?”
“Based on what you just read,” he said, “you have made findings.”
Then why did you tell the 4th Circuit otherwise? she asked.
“I’m sure it was a mistake regarding where the appropriate responses were being looked for in the docket,” he said, in weak defense of his colleague. “It may be that that … was not looked at.”
Xinis remains particularly irritated that the Trump DOJ took it upon itself to decide she hadn’t ruled fast enough on one of its motions and therefore deemed it denied and appealed that denial. She walked through the many points in the case when DOJ either asked for more time, including to brief her on its motion, consented to delays, and voluntarily agreed not to remove Abrego Garcia, and she pressed the DOJ lawyers why they had not shared that context with the appeals court.
Then things got more awkward.
“On what authority can you dictate a court’s schedule on a motion like this?” Xinis asked.
After some hemming and hawing from the lead DOJ attorney, Xinis asked for a specific case that would allow the DOJ to deem its own motion denied. “Cite your best case,” she urged.
The DOJ attorney had nothing, at which point Xinis deftly distinguished the cases DOJ had cited in its notice of appeal.
Both DOJ lawyers in court yesterday were career employees, not the political appointees who previously took the lead in the case, and the kind of errors and omissions that Xinis focused on were different in kind and degree from the brazen defiance that the Trump administration exhibited in this case for most of the past 14 months.
But in a sign that the Trump DOJ is still playing fast and loose in the notorious case, it refused to say whether it would dismiss the criminal case against Abrego Garcia in order to remove him to Liberia. “It’s a fair question to ask what about the criminal indictment,” Xinis said, but the lead DOJ lawyer would not engage.
Whether intended or not, the hearing ended up being a chance for Xinis to preview for Abrego Garcia’s attorneys the arguments she would make to the appeals court, where briefing isn’t due until this summer.
Despite Court Order, Patel Disparages Abrego Garcia
In the kind of performative verbal combat that has become de rigueur for Trump officials in congressional hearings, Kash Patel disparaged Abrego Garcia as a “convicted gang-banging rapist” and a “felon” in possible violation of a court order in his criminal case.
Back in October, a district judge found that Trump administration officials had already “made extrajudicial statements that are troubling” and directed prosecutors to provide all DOJ and DHS employees with a copy of his court order reiterating the local rule against statements about “the prior criminal record … or the character or reputation of the accused.”
The judge warned at the time: “With knowledge of the Local Rule, any future statements that pose a clear and present danger to Abrego’s fair trial rights may subject the speaker to sanctions.”
Mass Deportation Watch
- The DHS inspector general has launched a probe into the $38 billion warehouse-to-detention program championed by former Secretary Kristi Noem, the Wall Street Journal reports.
- David Venturella, a former career ICE employee and private prison company executive, will be tapped as the new acting director of ICE.
- An exhaustive analysis by Politico shows that federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration’s unprecedented mandatory detention policy more than 10,000 times, which represents 90% of the habeas cases challenging the no-bond detentions.
- The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday became the latest appeals court to reject the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy, mirroring similar decisions by the 11th and 2nd circuits. The 5th and 8th circuits have upheld the policy, and the 7th Circuit deadlocked on it. The Supreme Court will ultimately have to resolve the circuit split.
The Corruption: IRS Edition
Trump DOJ officials are having internal discussions about settling President Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS for leaking his tax information, which might include dropping any audits of him, his family, or his businesses.
What caught my eye is the suggestion in the the NYT story that they’re trying to settle the case before a federal judge weighs in on whether there’s a sufficient adversarial relationship between the parties to make it a legitimate lawsuit. The judge has ordered briefing on the matter by May 20. “White House and Justice Department officials have in recent days been exploring ways to potentially settle the suit before that deadline, according to the people,” the NYT reports.
Trump DOJ Watch
- The FBI has begun interviewing current and former CIA officers as part of the Trump-driven investigation into ex-CIA Director John Brennan’s role in an intelligence assessment that found Russia sought to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, NBC News reports.
- A team of FBI agents specifically put together to handle Trump’s retributive cases is being referred to internally as the “payback squad,” NOTUS reports.
- Former acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll, who is suing over his wrongful termination, recounts to Anderson Cooper some of the more bizarre moments of his brief tenure in the early days of Trump II:
Quote of the Day
“I’m unaware of anything like this, with this involvement of senior government officials, on this scale, trying to paint this false picture of the United States as a quote unquote Christian nation. Trump’s rhetoric in the past 18 months is how he’s ‘going to make America Christian again,’ that it’s his job to push religion. This is all part of that piece.”—Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, on the nine-hour-long prayer festival planned Sunday for the National Mall using some public funds for the America’s 250th birthday and expected to feature Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA)
Thank You!
With a big boost at the end from Heather Cox Richardson, we blew the doors off our goal of adding 1,000 new members during TPM’s annual membership drive. As of this morning, we’re at 1,600+ new members. Thanks to everyone who became TPM members, especially Morning Memo readers who took the plunge. You can join TPM at any time, of course, but I’ll be laying off the membership pitches for now. Again, many thanks for your support.
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