Taking a cue from the Trump administration amid its ongoing efforts to suppress the vote and perpetuate the myth of non-citizen voting, red state lawmakers are introducing restrictive proof of citizenship bills in their state legislatures.
Continue reading “With SAVE Act Stalled in Senate, Red States Carry Water for Trump’s Non-Citizen Voting Myth”In New York Case, Alito May Preview Rough Draft of Coming Blow to Voting Rights Act
For court watchers waiting for the Supreme Court decision that could doom the Voting Rights Act, Monday’s emergency docket ruling out of New York was ominous.
Continue reading “In New York Case, Alito May Preview Rough Draft of Coming Blow to Voting Rights Act”Greg Bovino Under Criminal Investigation in Minneapolis
Transparency and Accountability
CBP commander Gregory Bovino is under criminal investigation in Minneapolis for his conduct during Operation Metro Surge, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced in a Monday press conference.
Specifically, Moriarty is looking into Bovino’s deployment of a chemical irritant in a local park on Jan. 21, which was captured on video:
Bovino’s conduct in Mueller Park is one of 17 incidents that Moriarty says her office is now investigating. The only other incident under investigation that she identified with any specificity was the immigration enforcement operation conducted at Minneapolis Roosevelt High School on Jan. 7, the same day Renee Good was shot to death by a federal agent. Bovino was also present at the high school incident, where chemical irritants were deployed:
The purpose of the Moriarty press conference was to announce the creation of an online portal for members of the public to submit photographic and video evidence of potentially illegal conduct by federal agents. The Transparency and Accountability Project will be staffed by county prosecutors and a civilian investigator, Moriarty said.
At the press conference, Moriarty said that the Trump administration continues to refuse to cooperate with the state investigations into the federal shootings of Good, Alex Pretti, and Julio Sosa-Celis. Moriarty previously sent formal demand letters to federal agencies for evidence in those three shootings. The administration did not respond by last month’s deadline for evidence in the Good shooting. The deadline for it to respond in the other two shootings is today. Moriarty is considering suing the administration if it does not cooperate.
Third Time Is the Charm?
For the third time, U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb of Washington, D.C., swatted back an effort by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to restrict the access of members of Congress to ICE detention facilities. The latest ruling came after Noem tried to implement workarounds to Cobb’s earlier rulings.
Two-Time Losers
The law firms that capitulated to President Trump’s executive orders lost again yesterday when the Trump administration withdrew its appeals in the four cases it lost against targeted law firms who stood up and challenged the authoritarian move. Trump went 0-4 in the law firm cases, and the Trump DOJ finally retreated before another expected setback in the consolidated appeal.
It’s not all good news though: Big Law continues to pull back on pro bono work and shy away from cases likely to antagonize the Trump White House, legal experts say.
Quote of the Day
“This episode will be remembered as demonstrating the difference between institutions that had the ethical courage to uphold the Constitution and fight bullying and then won, and those that compromised their ethics and gained nothing. Let’s hope that media companies, universities, and other organizations pay heed.”—Vanita Gupta, associate attorney general in the Biden administration, on Trump targeting law firms
SCOTUS Besmirches Itself Yet Again
In two emergency dockets rulings released simultaneously last evening, the Supreme Court intervened on the “conservative-coded side” in a New York redistricting case and a California transgender youth case, as Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck put it:
We’re long past the point at which there are neutral legal principles that can be deployed to persuasively reconcile all of the Court’s behavior on emergency applications. The Court is intervening because it (thinks it) can, and because, for whatever reason, it doesn’t want to wait—in these cases, anyway—for the ordinary processes that would bring these issues to the Court in due course. … [I]t makes the Court at least look like what so many regularly accuse it of being: a font of partisan political power, and not much more.
Down the Memory Hole!
Under pressure from Republican state attorneys general, the Federal Judicial Center deleted a chapter on climate science from the online version of its nearly 1,700-page Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence for federal judges, prompting an outcry from scientists involved in preparing the manual.
Latest from the Middle East …
- The death toll in Iran rose to more than 780 people, according to the Iranian Red Crescent
- The first six U.S. troop deaths were concentrated in a poorly fortified triple-wide trailer in Kuwait being used as a tactical operations center when it was hit by a kamikaze Iranian drone, officials tell CBS News. This account seems to contradict the claim by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who called the drone a “squirter,” that the facility was fortified.
- The United States closed its embassies in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the latter of which was struck in an Iranian counterattack.
- The State Department recommended that Americans evacuate from the following Middle Eastern countries:
A Two-Front War?
Israel is seizing on the U.S. attack on Iran to advance deeper into southern Lebanon.
Christian Nationalism in the Armed Forces
Since the start of the Iran campaign, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has been inundated with complaints from service members about commanders casting the mission in the stark and bloody imagery of a Christian evangelical Armageddon hastening the End Times, Jonathan Larsen reports.
Patel Ousted Agents Specializing in Iran
MSNow’s Carol Leonnig: “When FBI Director Kash Patel fired a dozen FBI agents and staff last week for their role in the classified documents investigation of Donald Trump, he targeted an elite counter espionage unit that investigates threats from foreign adversaries and specializes in Iran, according to more than a half dozen sources with knowledge of the firings.”
Pardoned Capital Rioter Charged Again
A pardoned Jan. 6 rioter has been charged with making threatening statements to one of the officers he faced off with at the U.S. Capitol … during a fifth-anniversary event earlier this year where the charged threats were caught on video.
Whitewashing History
There’s nothing quite as Orwellian as middle managers at the U.S. Park Service trying to appease President Trump by finding every possible display, exhibit, and sign that contains language the White House might find objectionable. And yet … some of it is hilarious?
The WaPo, which reviewed the internal government database containing the submissions by park managers, caught the humor, some of it surely intended:
The tone and content of the materials described and submitted to Interior by park managers vary widely, reflecting a mix of careful attempts to obey administration orders, confusion about what might violate them and, at times, apparent skepticism about the entire endeavor.
Staff members identified a brochure at Cape Hatteras National Seashore, in North Carolina, for “possible disparaging of a prominent American” because it mentions that aviator and onetime Smithsonian Institution secretary Samuel Langley failed to achieve flight. A park staffer at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Arizona asks for clarification about whether displays on California condors’ return from the brink of extinction disparage hunters “or tell a success ??”
Bravo ??
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Meet the Gun-Toting Influencer Who—Thanks to the Tony Gonzales Scandal—May Soon Be in Congress
Back in 2024, Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) complained about his colleague, then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL). Gaetz was embroiled in a lurid scandal involving a Florida tax collector, an associate of the congressman who was charged with sex trafficking; federal investigators were reportedly also looking into allegations Gaetz had moved underage women across state lines for sex. The DOJ declined to prosecute Gaetz, who maintains his innocence, but in 2024, Gonzales reminded everyone of it, remarking, “I serve with some real scumbags like Matt Gaetz. He paid minors to have sex with them at drunk parties.” That Gonzales said it on CNN — enemy territory for the House Freedom Caucus — didn’t help. The congressman had made enemies to his right.
Continue reading “Meet the Gun-Toting Influencer Who—Thanks to the Tony Gonzales Scandal—May Soon Be in Congress”Republicans Are Laying the Groundwork to Blame Democrats for Iran’s Retaliatory Strikes
GOP Lays Groundwork to Blame Dems
It’s dangerous for President Trump to start a war that most of his constituents don’t want.
It’s politically dangerous; only the youngest Americans haven’t seen up close how an unpopular Middle Eastern war can drag down a presidency.
And it’s physically dangerous. Six American servicemembers have already been killed in Iranian strikes — more than the four Americans who were killed in the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya. Republicans got political mileage out of those deaths for years, making the Benghazi killings synonymous with Hillary Clinton’s supposed unfitness for any sort of office.
Continue reading “Republicans Are Laying the Groundwork to Blame Democrats for Iran’s Retaliatory Strikes “The Public Opposes But Mostly Doesn’t See the Point of This War
We’re used to Americans, at least as judged by polls, going into wars generally supportive and then trailing off quickly as the complications and fatalities mount. Some of that is a rally-’round-the-flag effect. In some cases there’s been a precipitating event which the public wants vengeance for. Here we are seeing none of that. The public was very skeptical going in. And the attack itself seems to have done nothing to change that. A new CNN poll has the familiar 59% of Americans disapprove of the attacks and expect things to get worse. What is most interesting to me, however, is not so much public opposition but the disconnect between elite and popular opinion.
Continue reading “The Public Opposes But Mostly Doesn’t See the Point of This War”A Congress That Has Made Itself Irrelevant Plays Catch-Up as Trump Unilaterally Pushes US Into War
Congress’ hemorrhaging of power was stark Saturday morning, as many Americans woke up to the news that President Trump had initiated war with Iran without bothering to preemptively justify the violence, much less seek congressional authorization.
Continue reading “A Congress That Has Made Itself Irrelevant Plays Catch-Up as Trump Unilaterally Pushes US Into War”A Mad King Who Enjoys Watching Things Go Boom
Going … Going … Almost Gone
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Dumb and Illegal
The scale of damage that President Trump could wreak in a second term was always greatest in foreign affairs, where the president’s powers are, generally, most robust and least subject to judicial oversight.
The misadventures on the high seas of the Western Hemisphere, in Venezuela, and now in Iran are just the beginning of what is likely to be more cowboying abroad, as his lame duck status becomes increasingly obvious and his political power at home begins to wane.
The conundrum for Americans opposed to Trump is that while foreign affairs may be the realm in which he sows the most long-term chaos, the best way to rein him in remains in the domestic arena: defending democracy at home in order to preserve the capacity for legitimate regime change here via free and fair elections; defending the rule of the law and the independence of the judiciary; and protecting blue states and marginalized peoples from a weaponized federal government.
With docile GOP majorities controlling both chambers, Congress is willingly surrendering its constitutional and political powers in foreign affairs to a mad king who enjoys pressing buttons and watching things go boom.
Trump’s ever-shifting rationales for the attack neither establish a legal predicate for the U.S.-Israel strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei nor suggest a coherent strategic vision for relations with Iran, the U.S. role in the region, or the projection of U.S. power in the world. To the extent there was a Trump strategy for regime change, it appears to have overshot its objectives, as it were:
Despite the administration’s effort to construct an ex post facto rationale that a preemptive strike from Iran was imminent, officials told congressional staff that U.S. intelligence did not corroborate that claim and the Pentagon was slow to offer evidence to back up the claim.
The Latest on Iran …
- Kuwait shot down three U.S. fighter jets in a friendly fire incident. All six crew members survived the incident.
- The known death toll among U.S. service members rose to four. While the Pentagon hasn’t confirmed the circumstances, all four deaths appear to have come from an Iranian missile attack on a U.S. facility in Kuwait.
- The death toll in Iran as the U.S. air assault entered its third day reached 555, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society. The worst single incident appeared to be a strike on a girl’s elementary school in the southern Iran town of Minab that killed at least 175 people.
- The WSJ charts the effect of the decapitation strike on senior figures in the Iranian government.
The Regional Conflagration
The NYT and WaPo have scrambled their respective visual teams to map Iran’s retaliatory strikes in the region.
Pentagon IG Freezes Boat Strikes Review
Faced with a proposed review of military targeting used in the U.S. campaign against suspected drug-smuggling boats on the high seas, Platte B. Moring III, the new Trump-appointed Pentagon inspector general, told staff in a Feb. 11 meeting that he was concerned about the political implications of the review and wanted to consult with Defense Department leadership first, the NYT reports. Since then, Moring hasn’t rejected or approved the proposal, leaving it in limbo.
Pentagon Cuts Ties with Top-Tier Schools
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is cutting academic ties between the Pentagon and 13 leading universities in a performative campaign against “wokeness” and alleged anti-Americanism. The disfavored schools, according to a Feb. 27 memo from Hegseth’s office, currently educating are:
- Harvard University
- Saint Louis University
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Tufts University
- Georgetown University
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Brown University
- Columbia University
- Yale University
- Middlebury College
- Princeton University
- The George Washington University
- College of William and Mary
The memo also includes a list of favored schools, which it describes as follows: “These institutions meet the following criteria: intellectual freedom, minimal relationships with adversaries, minimal public expressions in opposition of the Department, and Graduate-level National Security, International Affairs, and/or Public Policy Programs.”
The favored schools include:
- Liberty University
- George Mason University
- Pepperdine University
- The University of Tennessee
- University of Michigan
- University of Nebraska
- Iowa State University
- University of North Carolina
- Clemson University
- Arizona State University
- Baylor University
- University of Florida
- Regent University
- Auburn University
- Hillsdale College
The two-tiered higher-ed system was unveiled the same day Hegseth claimed he’d pressured Scouting America into banning transgender children from participating, a claim the group denied.
Mass Deportation Watch
- Babson College freshman Any Lucia López Belloza — detained en route home to Texas for Thanksgiving and deported to Honduras, where she hadn’t lived since she was a young child — declined to board a government flight to the United States on Friday after ICE threatened in a court filing to deport her again if she returned.
- Four federal judges in the Southern District of West Virginia have suddenly become a firewall against President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda, Kyle Cheney reports.
- The Trump DOJ is charging 30 more people in connection with the Jan. 18 protest at a St. Paul church that already led to charges against CNN anchor Don Lemon, who was covering the protest.
The Retribution: ICYMI Edition
The mother of all investigations of the investigators — Miami U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones’ wide-ranging probe of a supposed “grand conspiracy” against Trump — has broadened to include investigating the FBI’s investigation into ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, the NYT reports.
Elections Are Existential Threat To Trump
Former Obama White House Counsel Bob Bauer, on “the serious possibility that, when the courts are called on—and they will be—to remedy administration actions to interfere with the election, the Trump administration may respond with defiance.”
Judges Under Siege
60 Minutes interviewed 26 federal judges — nine Democratic appointees, 17 Republican, both sitting and retired — about the unprecedented barrage of threats they’ve faced under Trump II:
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Come Inside the War Room Prepping for SCOTUS to Upend Democracy
For over a decade, no enemy has loomed larger to the Roberts Court than voting protections, especially those for minority groups who have historically been kept away from the polls with laws and violence.
The Court in recent years has raised tests for discrimination to unreachable heights, required voters to employ their own mapmakers, put the responsibility for fixes in the hands of a Congress it knows won’t act, claimed that racism has all but ended anyway.
The groups that fight voter suppression have, under duress, become agile and creative, digging up old statutes under which to challenge voting restrictions when the Court defangs old ones. But that dance became more frantic last June, when the Court ordered that a garden variety case about racial discrimination in Louisiana’s maps be held over to the next term, and posed its own question, one that the litigants were not asking it to decide: Does Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, one of the only potent remaining parts of the law the Court hasn’t yet hobbled, violate the 14th or 15th Amendments?
The question is almost offensive, that the crown jewel of the Civil Rights movement could violate the Reconstruction Amendments, all bent towards undergirding the embattled rights of Black Americans. But for voting rights advocates, it suggested that the long accumulating storm clouds are set to burst — that the Court is finally ready to fatally weaken or eliminate Section 2, the part of the law used to challenge racially discriminatory gerrymanders. A decision is expected in the coming months.
As they prepare for the blow, groups have mapped out every avenue the Court may go, all knowing that the right-wing majority is unlikely to preserve Section 2 as it is. Section 2, among other things, forbids voting practices which result “in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” Advocates have used it routinely when states “crack and pack” minority voters to lessen their vote share by cramming them all into one district or diluting them over many majority-white districts.
The decision could take many forms. A more positive outcome could look like a ruling against the remedies — forbidding judges to order the drawing of additional districts where minority voters compose a majority. Such a decision would leave room for other fixes that could still give minority voters more power in picking the candidate of their choice.
It’d be harder to get around a ruling requiring a new test to prove minority vote dilution. Advocates pointed to Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, in which Justice Samuel Alito wrote a majority opinion severely narrowing how Section 2 can be used against voter restrictions. One voting rights lawyer told TPM that no one has won a Section 2 vote denial case since Brnovich, and that the Court could hand down a similarly impossible test for racial discrimination in redistricting that makes Section 2 “dead letter.”
Working in the voting rights space means preparing for the worst: that the Court invalidates Section 2 entirely, finding it unconstitutional. Should the Court invalidate Section 2 in full, it would all but end the fight against racial discrimination in redistricting on the federal level.
Litigants have tried in the past to challenge maps under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection clause as an alternative to Section 2, but it requires proving that legislators intentionally discriminated when they drew their maps, which is extremely difficult to do. The challenge of proving that a map is contorted on racial grounds, and not merely partisan ones, is due to a) etiquette reasons — judges aren’t fond of labeling legislators racists — b) logistical ones — courts have made it increasingly difficult for plaintiffs to overcome lawmaker immunity to obtain emails and records — and c) American ones — in many parts of the country, race and partisan lean are intertwined, making proving just one without the other very difficult.
In fact, these hurdles are why Congress amended Section 2 in 1982 so that plaintiffs only had to prove that a map had discriminatory effects, not intent. (John Roberts, then working for the Reagan administration, spearheaded the effort to prevent the ‘82 amendments from passing.)
“It’s going to be a challenge to bring federal claims,” Caren Short, director of legal and research for the League of Women Voters, admitted. “Not impossible, but a challenge.”
The Battle Shifts to the States
With federal courts all but shuttered following some of the worse-case-scenario Supreme Court rulings, the fight would shift to the states. Voting rights groups have been a step ahead there, leading the movement to get the states to pass their own Voting Rights Acts. So far, nine states (all blue) have passed them.
These laws are new, and being tested in court for the first time.
They’re not a surefire solution — if the Supreme Court invalidates Section 2 on constitutional grounds, it’s hard to see how the state versions won’t run afoul of the same supposed problem. And the Republican forces that have been attacking the federal Voting Rights Act for decades are likely to come after the state versions with equal verve.
Some states are also attempting other avenues, including using clauses of their constitutions that protect voting to go after gerrymanders. A case challenging a district on those grounds in New York has already reached the Supreme Court.
The Long Game
It’s a sign of how bleak the landscape is for voting rights that every major litigator TPM interviewed pointed to the distant future: 2028, and a possible Democratic trifecta, as the best hope for salvaging the United States’ multiracial democracy.
“We are still working on and moving towards legislation, continuing to perfect and change it based on the realities,” Virginia Kase Solomón, president and CEO of Common Cause, told TPM. “When the time comes, that legislation is ready to go on day one — both the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and For the People Act will be HR1 and HR2,” she added, referring to two pieces of voting rights legislation that did not become law under the last Democratic trifecta due to former Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) upholding the Senate filibuster.
Even that legislation may have to be overhauled, depending on where the Court comes down on Callais.
The only lasting solution could push Democrats to a place they’re currently afraid to go: Supreme Court reform itself. Rather than waiting a generation until enough pieces of the right-wing supermajority retire or die, securing voting rights for all Americans might demand Court expansion, enough justices to reverse a maximalist Callais decision, to end the Roberts Court’s crusade.
Prerogative Powers and Presidential Self Care
Another observation on Trump’s attack on Iran. Each of these regime attacks clearly emboldens him. To him, the Venezuelan adventure went great. Where was the blowback — in terms he recognizes? So why not do it again? Sure he hasn’t actually seized Greenland, yet. Beneath the headlines the intensity of European resistance clearly mattered a lot. But this Iran attack almost certainly doesn’t happen without the Venezuela one.
But remember to see this whole escalating series of military adventures in the proper light. Trump is very unpopular and growing more so every day. He now faces what seems close to the certainty of losing at least one House of Congress. As his public support ebbs his power and the power to dominate ebb as well. For Trump that is akin to a psychic death. So, as a matter of psychological balancing and self-care more than strategy, he is leaning heavily into the presidential prerogative powers where his power is most untrammeled, where the loss of political power doesn’t really matter. Almost no presidential power is more clearly in that character as the president’s control over the military. Put simply, he’s leaning into those powers as a matter of psychological compensation.