The full 9th Circuit Court of Appeals voted Tuesday night to vacate a panel’s decision allowing the National Guard to deploy to Portland, and will rehear the case.
Continue reading “9th Circuit Vacates Trump Judges’ Ruling Allowing National Guard Troops To Deploy To Portland”Trump Again Promises Greater Retribution Against Dem-Led US Cities on Global Stage
President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to U.S. cities that are led by elected Democrats, under the guise of a crackdown on crime and immigration, has been nothing short of an extremely transparent effort to flex power over his political enemies — both to get revenge on the local Democratic leaders who oppose him and the residents who didn’t vote for him.
Continue reading “Trump Again Promises Greater Retribution Against Dem-Led US Cities on Global Stage”There Is No Democratic Future Without Supreme Court Reform
I’ve made versions of this argument here in the Editors’ Blog and on the podcast many times. But it’s so critical and so beyond dispute I wanted to state it here as clearly as possible. There is no future for civic democracy in this country without reforming the Supreme Court. Putting that more specifically, the only way to recover from Donald Trump’s rapid lunge into an authoritarian American future is a future point at which Democrats regain control of the federal government — a trifecta — and institute a series of laws which cut off the channels Trump has exploited to get us to this point. That doesn’t solve the problem of Trumpism. The core issue is that very large minority of Americans who support his style of autocratic government. But that cuts off many of the paths Trump has used to build a presidential autocracy under the thinnest cover of law. You need, among other things, a federal law to place strict limits on partisan and racial gerrymandering. It’s only one example out of many – you need laws re-instituting true independent agencies, drastically limiting the use of military forces on US territory, barring president’s from claiming budgeting authority, et al. I note this example because it came up today when Kate and I recorded this week’s podcast. But even this comparatively uncontroversial federal statute would certainly be overturned by the Republican justices.
Continue reading “There Is No Democratic Future Without Supreme Court Reform”The Administration’s Ghastly Game Plan for Savaging Abrego Garcia
The Savagery Is the Point
It’s difficult to convey the full scope of the Trump administration’s misdeeds in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, but let’s give it a shot.
You know the broad contours of the story already. The administration illegally removed Abrego Garcia from his home in Maryland to El Salvador, where he was thrown in prison for months. Despite the Supreme Court ordering that the administration facilitate his return, the executive branch dragged its feet for weeks. When the administration did finally return him to the United States (without notice to his lawyers or the judge in the case), it did so only to lock him up again on criminal charges that had been secretly filed in Tennessee.
It’s what’s happened since then that has become more difficult to convey because it’s not been clear what exactly the administration’s end game is here. You might have thought the endgame was the criminal case in Tennessee: Win a conviction then deport him either before or after he served his sentence here. Nope, as it turned out.
It’s become apparent now that the administration is not driven by a desire for any particular outcome, but for whatever outcome among the available choices inflicts maximum pain and suffering on Abrego Garcia.
If that sounds overstated, let me quickly walk you through the administration’s threat to deport Abrego Garcia to a third country because it’s the best example of the bobbing and weaving that’s marked the administration’s ungrounded approach to the case.
At first glance, you might think that the third country removal is the story now. Hasn’t the man suffered enough without being sent to a country on the African continent with which he has no ties, where it’s unclear if he’ll again be incarcerated without being charged, and where the assurances are shaky at best that he won’t simply be forward on to El Salvador? You might be inclined to follow the ins and outs of that story, with the ultimate question being whether the administration succeeds in shipping him off to Africa. But as it turned out you’d have been wrong.
Once the Trump administration had Abrego Garcia in custody again in Maryland in his immigration case (after he’d been ordered released from custody in Tennessee while his trial was pending), it made little effort to find a third country willing to accept him. His lawyers suspected that the administration was content to just hold him indefinitely and so forced the issue by moving to secure a court order to release him. In a hearing earlier this month before U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland, she sussed out that almost nothing had been done by the administration to find a third country and what had been done had been undertaken immediately before the hearing in anticipation of having to answer for its conduct.
So now your inclination might be to track whether Abrego Garcia wins by securing his release rather than being subject to indefinite detention by a foot-dragging Trump administration. Wrong again!
Facing the prospect of a potentially adverse ruling from Xinis, the administration declared on Friday that it had found a third country for Abrego Garcia. Liberia, take a bow. Xinis summoned the parties for another hearing yesterday, where the administration said it’s preparing to remove him to Liberia by as soon as Oct. 31. I should mention here that Abrego Garcia’s attorneys have told Xinis he is willing to accept removal to Costa Rica. To Xinis’ puzzlement, the administration has not accepted that option.
The administration’s shifting priorities reflect not some grand plan or strategy, but at each juncture choosing the option before it that most torments Abrego Garcia. It’s really the only explanation that accounts for the meandering series of positions by the administration. But there’s one other wild card in the mix.
Abrego Garcia still faces criminal trial in Tennessee on the human smuggling charges the administration whipped up. So far, he’s convinced a judge — not that hard on the facts I’ve already laid out here — that he’s established a prima facie case of vindictive prosecution by the Trump DOJ. That shifts the burden to the administration to establish that it undertook the prosecution on a legitimate basis. Importantly, it also opened the door for Abrego Garcia to conduct discovery on how the administration handled his case.
The administration is fighting like hell to head off that discovery, which includes a subpoena of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and other high-ranking DOJ officials. The judge in the criminal case has set two days of hearings on Nov. 4-5 for all the pretrial motions, including the vindictive prosecution claim. Witness testimony is expected. The Trump DOJ moved yesterday to quash the subpoena in the hopes of preventing testimony from Blanche and others. Meanwhile, the judge in the criminal case smacked the administration yesterday for its “exaggerated if not simply inaccurate” out-of-court statements about Abrego Garcia
So you can see now the added advantage to the administration of resuming the third country removal plan, whether it’s Liberia or somewhere else (it’s likely the Abrego Garcia will formally express in a hearing today a fear of being sent to Liberia which will trigger additional delays). They’ll be happy to avoid further scrutiny of their conduct in the criminal case even it means effectively dropping the case by deporting him.
The criminal case, third country removal, and prolonged detention are all just tools the Trump administration is using to savage Abrego Garcia. The savagery is the point.
Coverup?
A Homeland Security Investigations officer accompanying local police fired his gun into a car during a traffic stop in DC earlier this month, but the police report of the incident contained no mention of shots being fired. All charges against the unarmed Black man who was stopped were dismissed after a judge concluded there was insufficient evidence that he tried to flee, his lawyers told the WaPo. The man was uninjured in the incident but spent three nights in jail before the charges were dismissed.
Former DOJers Side With Comey
In an amicus brief, more than 100 former DOJ officials urged a federal judge to dismiss the criminal case against former FBI Director James Comey, arguing that it is vindictive.
Ball Now in Trump DOJ’s Court
Former Special Counsel Jack Smith sent a letter to the Trump Justice Department asking for access to his old files and seeking guidance as to what he can say in testimony that Hill Republicans are demanding that he provide.
Mass Preemptive Pardons Alert
Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, a former DOJ official under Bush II, anticipates that President Trump will issue mass preemptive pardons toward the end of his term, especially if a Democrat were to succeed him:
[O]ne can be absolutely certain that Trump will issue preemptive pardons at or near the end of his second term, probably on an enormous scale—especially since … he will anticipate that a Democratic administration may have little reason to respect Trump OLC opinions in deciding whether to prosecute Trump officials. Pardons blunt this possibility. I expect Trump to issue hundreds and possibly thousands of preemptive pardons to everyone in his administration who may conceivably be subject to future investigation or prosecution, especially if a Democrat wins the presidential election in November 2028.
Trump Appeals Hush Money Conviction
President Trump filed an appeal of his conviction in the Stormy Daniels hush money case, in which he was sentenced to no punishment, in hopes of having the convicted felon tag removed from his biography.
Paul Manafort Is Still at it
Kenneth Vogel traces Paul Manafort’s “unlikely full-circle journey from high-flying global fixer to federal inmate and back.”
A Race to Beat Midterms Clock
Red states are salivating over the prospect of the Roberts Court eviscerating what’s left of the Voting Rights Act, and some of them are beginning to plan for redrawing their congressional districts maps if the Supreme Court rules in time for the 2026 midterms, Politico reports.
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Responses on Mamdani and Those Rabbis #2
From TPM Reader AF …
Continue reading “Responses on Mamdani and Those Rabbis #2”From my perch as a rabbi’s kid, a decently religious Jew, not an anti-Zionist, and someone who spends many hours a week (a day?) occupied by these issues of Jewish community politics, I want to say: “What the fuck are we talking about” is exactly right.
I would add two things. First:
Responses on Mamdani and Those Rabbis #1
Publishing two very different responses, first from TPM Reader JS …
Continue reading “Responses on Mamdani and Those Rabbis #1”I bet you’re not surprised that I disagree about this. The #1 threat faced by Jews right now in the US is stochastic terrorism from both the left and right and Islamic terrorists, whether it’s more like the Tree of Life shooting (right wing), the attack on the Boulder group (left wing) or the very recent shooting in Manchester (Islamic), or, in my community an actual bomb attempt on local synagogues (right wing). This is the heart attack; fascism—or whatever you want to call what Trump is doing—is like cancer. At this point, just living until the cancer kills you is lucky. It doesn’t mean you don’t try to cure the cancer, but first things first.
The Cabinet in My Apartment That Explains How Journalism Broke During COVID
There’s a cabinet in my apartment that tells the story of how journalism broke during the pandemic. Vitamins, supplements, mushroom coffee from the Midwest, superfood powders from the Amazon, prebiotic syrup from Japan, bone marrow protein from England, liver detox from a lab — each bottle represents a different “expert” I encountered online, a fragment of information that promised to reveal what mainstream media wouldn’t tell me. About 90% of these purchases were triggered by social media ads that positioned themselves as news sources, alternative journalism, citizen reporting.
This cabinet is a physical manifestation of the COVID-19 infodemic — the first time in human history that a global crisis unfolded entirely within social media platforms, where the line between news, advertising, and conspiracy theory dissolved completely. Traditional journalism competed directly with wellness influencers, political provocateurs, and foreign disinformation campaigns. The World Health Organization adopted the term, warning that we were fighting not just a pandemic, but an “infodemic” — a parallel epidemic of misinformation that spread faster than the virus itself.
I had become both victim to and perpetrator of this information chaos, an unlicensed curator of alternative facts, dispensing health advice to friends based on Instagram stories and Facebook ads that masqueraded as investigative journalism.
Continue reading “The Cabinet in My Apartment That Explains How Journalism Broke During COVID”Random Thought
Does any of this make sense? If you follow equities markets you’d think we’re on the brink of a period of historic or at least very robust growth. And yet at the same time the global economy is in a period of growing dislocation and uncertainty creating what can only be called a high-fear, high-risk economic climate. It’s hard to see how these two things can both be true.
Trump Admin’s Laziness Is Messing Up Its Effort to Deploy the National Guard to Portland
A Baffling Legal Blunder
For some inscrutable reason, the Trump Justice Department appealed only one of two temporary restraining orders blocking it from sending National Guard troops into Oregon.
Continue reading “Trump Admin’s Laziness Is Messing Up Its Effort to Deploy the National Guard to Portland”What To Make of Those Anti-Mamdani Rabbis
In the last couple of weeks, the questions about Jews, Israel and Zohran Mamdani have rushed back into the news. It began with a dramatic speech from the pulpit from the rabbi of a prominent New York City synagogue, Elliot Cosgrove, and its been kept in the news by a public letter signed by 600 or so rabbis and cantors. I don’t know how much this has broken through into the mainstream press but it’s been on a loud speaker in Jewish communal publications. Cosgrove began his speech (you can call it a sermon if you want) saying he believes “Zohran Mamdani poses a danger to the security of the New York Jewish community” and a “danger to the Jewish body politic of New York City.” The public letter hit similar points and is generally the same message.
I don’t have anything unique or new to add but since I’ve written here and there over the last two years about Israel and Jews and Gaza, as well as once or twice about Mamdani, I thought I should share my opinion. More specifically, a growing number of TPM Readers have asked me to address these accusations, either from the perspective of agreeing with them or wanting me to denounce them.
So with that introduction out of the way, these claims not only strike me as wrong but as borderline absurd. Like absurd as in, What the fuck are we talking about? absurd. And I say this notwithstanding the fact that I disagree with Mamdani on numerous points tied to Zionism and Israel.
Continue reading “What To Make of Those Anti-Mamdani Rabbis”