In the hours immediately after the government first shut down earlier this month — which happened only after Republicans refused to work with Democrats to extend Obamacare subsidies in order to secure their votes to keep it open — the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress began publicly hand-ringing about the funding that would quickly run out for active duty military pay and for funding WIC, a federal supplemental nutrition program for low income mothers.
Continue reading “The Trump Admin’s Very Telling Decisions About Which Gov’t Programs to Fund”7th Circuit: ‘The Administration Remains Barred From Deploying the National Guard of the United States Within Illinois’
A 7th Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled unanimously Thursday to maintain the district court’s block on National Guard deployment in Chicago.
Continue reading “7th Circuit: ‘The Administration Remains Barred From Deploying the National Guard of the United States Within Illinois’”House Speaker Dismisses Concern About Restraining Order Against Rep. Cory Mills
This story was originally reported by Grace Panetta of The 19th. Meet Grace and read more of her reporting on gender, politics and policy.
A judge has granted an order of protection barring Republican Rep. Cory Mills of Florida from contacting a former girlfriend who said he harassed and threatened her, and so far, Republican House leadership has dismissed concerns about the accusations.
On Tuesday, Judge Fred Koberlein Jr.in Florida granted a protective order against dating violence that Mills’ ex-girlfriend, Lindsey Langston, a Republican state committeewoman in Florida and the reigning Miss United States, filed for in August. Langston claimed that after she ended their relationship, Mills barraged her with harassing communications, including threatening to release intimate photos and videos of her and threatening her with violence.
Koberlein wrote in a 14-page order that Mills caused Langston “substantial emotional distress considering her professional commitments” as Miss USA.
“She described herself as being physically ill, curled in the fetal position, requiring family assistance, suffering hives, seeking professional therapy, and being prescribed Xanax and Lexapro, which she took on multiple occasions due to the Respondent’s actions,” the order said.
The judge found that Langston “does have a reasonable cause to believe that she is in imminent danger of becoming the victim of another act of dating violence without an injunction being entered.”
The order, which bars Mills from contacting Langston or coming within 500 feet of her home, is in effect through January 1.
Mills, elected to the U.S. House in 2022, has been the subject of multiple controversies, including a House Ethics investigation into whether he committed campaign finance violations and entered into government contracts while serving in Congress. Mills was also investigated by police in Washington, D.C., over a domestic dispute involving another woman in February. That woman later walked back her claims, the investigation was closed, and Mills did not face charges.
At a news conference on Wednesday morning, House Speaker Mike Johnson said he didn’t know the details of the allegations against Mills and dismissed the line of questioning.
“You’ll have to ask Representative Mills about that. I know he’s been a faithful colleague here. I know his work on the Hill, I don’t know all the details of all the individual allegations and what he’s doing in his outside life,” Johnson said. “Let’s talk about some things that are really serious.”
The U.S. House is out of session for the third week in a row as the federal government marks the 15th day of a shutdown after congressional leaders reached an impasse on funding the government.
Langston’s lawyer Bobi J. Frank told reporters Wednesday that she hopes Mills will be disciplined and sanctioned by his colleagues in Congress. House members are subject to being stripped of committee chair or leadership posts upon being charged with a felony, and face expulsion from the House if convicted, but Mills has not been charged with a crime.
House Democrats ripped Johnson and House GOP leadership for what they said was dismissiveness about intimate partner violence during Domestic Violence Awareness Month, which is recognized in October.
“Domestic violence is a serious issue in this country for women all throughout America. And the notion that House Republican leaders would dismiss the seriousness of what is clearly emerging as an untenable and frightening situation relative to Representative Mills is irresponsible,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said at a news conference Wednesday.
“Congress should be better than that level of dismissiveness that has been on display among my Republican colleagues,” he added.
House Minority Whip Katherine Clark called the allegations against Mills “disturbing” and connected Johnson’s response to the ongoing shutdown fight, which concerns Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire this year unless Congress acts.
“It is the same way he has approached this entire health care issue,” she said. “And it is a crisis that will be felt by every single hard-working American in this country, but it is going to be felt first and hardest by women in this country.”
Under President Donald Trump’s administration, several federal agencies and programs dedicated to combating domestic violence and sex trafficking have also faced funding cuts and layoffs.
“And that message to American women, and just writing off these serious allegations against a sitting member of Congress as something frivolous and a ridiculous question speaks volumes of where they value their constituents and especially women, in this month,” Clark said.
Will SCOTUS Rig the House?
I read a group email from Capitol Hill yesterday essentially predicting the extinction of the Democratic Party after what is predicted to be a decision from the Supreme Court overturning what remains of the Voting Rights Act. A less apocalyptic but still daunting version of this argument appeared in an evening piece published by Nate Cohn in the Times. Before getting to the partisan and vote count implications, let’s first discuss what this means, which is essentially ending African-American political representation in the states of the old Confederacy. Most if not all majority-minority districts disappear and Republican state legislatures are free to draw up districts which spread/dilute African-American voters into safely Republican districts. Cohn thinks it’s plausible that Democrats could permanently lose (as much as anything can ever be permanent) 12 House seats. And this is on top of the strong-arm restricting happening in a number of states across the country. The overall scenario is one in which the House becomes an even bigger electoral challenge than the Senate, one that is possible to win but only in a generational wave style election.
Is this plausible? Is this true?
Continue reading “Will SCOTUS Rig the House?”What Made Blogging Different?
Whether I like it or not, the first line of my obituary will probably be that I was the founding editor of Gawker.com, the flagship site of Gawker Media, a sprawling blog network that was put out of business by Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan in 2016. Nick Denton and I started Gawker in 2002 and I left in late 2003 to go to New York Magazine, so I missed some of Gawker’s greatest hits and biggest misses, but the early ‘00s were what I now think of as the heyday of blogging. (Talking Points Memo was started in 2000.)
Continue reading “What Made Blogging Different?”The Original Sin of Digital Media Was the Belief That Digital Journalists Were Part of the Tech Business
I want to begin this introduction to our 25th anniversary essay series by telling you what an exciting and must-read collection it is. Our team has commissioned 25 essays on the history of digital media, which more or less overlaps with the 25 years we’re celebrating here at TPM this year. We solicited contributions from a wide range of contributors — people who first made their mark at different points in the history of digital media, people who’ve worked in different parts of the digital beast, people from very different political persuasions. We have Semafor’s Dave Weigel on Elon Musk and X; Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara on the rise of Substack; Gawker founder Elizabeth Spiers on blogging; Marisa Kabas of the Handbasket on journalists as personal brands; Marcy Wheeler (Emptywheel) on troll culture and the rise of Trumpism. That only scratches the surface on the series we’re kicking off today, and running through our two-day anniversary event in New York City on Nov. 6 and 7.
Continue reading “The Original Sin of Digital Media Was the Belief That Digital Journalists Were Part of the Tech Business”In Oval Office Screed, Trump Shows Who’s Really Running DOJ
DOJ Officials ‘Smiled, Nodded and Shuffled’
One of the many challenges of the current moment is that the depravities and depredations become so routinized and regular that they cease to be new in the news sense.
At this point, I’ve written dozens of Morning Memos that headline President Trump’s politicization and weaponization of the Justice Department. It remains the linchpin of all of Trump’s rule of law violations because without a functioning, professional, independent Justice Department, no federal laws will be reliably enforced. To anyone paying attention, this is no longer news but an established fact, a premise from which to proceed.
And yet … each week brings some new extreme — in either intensity, extent, or brazenness —that warrants documenting again the descent into authoritarianism.
Yesterday in an Oval Office event ostensibly focused on combatting violent crime, President Trump’s lawless abuse of the Justice Department was on full display in the immediate presence of the attorney general, deputy attorney general, and FBI director.
In response to a question, Trump lashed out at former DOJers who, much to his chagrin. have not yet been criminally charged as part of his campaign of retribution. Clearly annoyed by former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s most extensive public remarks to date, Trump zeroed in on the interview Smith gave to former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann last week in London:
“Deranged Jack Smith, in my opinion, is a criminal. His interviewer was Weissmann. I hope they’re going to look into Weissmann too. Weissmann’s a bad guy. And he had somebody, Lisa, who was his puppet, worked in the office really as the top person — and I think she should be looked at very strongly. There was tremendous criminal activity…They have committed massive political crime. I hope they’re looking at Shifty Schiff. I hope they’re looking at all these people. And I’m allowed to find out — I’m, in theory, the chief law enforcement officer.”
Lisa is a reference to former deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, the No. 2 during the Biden administration. Trump has already demanded that Microsoft fire her from a senior position with the company. The video of Trump’s screed:
Trump has said these things before, but the setting and the presence of the three most significant DOJ officials is the clearest, most unmistakeable sign we have yet that the Justice Department is being run out of the White House. “They smiled, nodded and shuffled in place as he spoke,” the NYT reports.
Even if Trump veils his remarks ever so slightly by couching them in terms of what he “hopes” the three officials standing next to him will do, we know better that to treat that as any more than window-dressing.
Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, and Kash Patel may be fools but they’re not foolish. They know their marching orders, whether they’re given with a sly wink in public, or in private direct messages mistakenly posted publicly, or barked directly in closed Oval Office meetings. Their muted acquiescence in Trump’s Oval Office set-piece shows the center of gravity in their world is no longer Main Justice but the White House.
The retribution campaign is in full swing with the indictments of Jim Comey and Letitia James. No one is safe from a weaponized Justice Department or, as it turns out, a weaponized IRS.
Trump Moves to Weaponize the IRS
Anyone who endured the many months of manufactured Republican outrage over the IRS supposedly (but not actually) targeting conservative groups during the Obama administration can be forgiven for pulling their hair out as the Trump administration moves to make it easier for the IRS to target liberal groups.
Senior IRS official Gary Shapley is already compiling a list of “potential targets that includes major Democratic donors,” the WSJ reports:
The undertaking aims to install allies of President Trump at the IRS criminal-investigative division, or IRS-CI, to exert firmer control over the unit and weaken the involvement of IRS lawyers in criminal investigations, officials said. The proposed changes could open the door to politically motivated probes and are being driven by Gary Shapley, an adviser to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Shapley was the longtime IRS criminal investigator who became a darling of the MAGA right for purportedly blowing the whistle on what he claimed was the slow-rolling of the Hunter Biden investigation. In the Trump II presidency, Shapley has been promoted to a more senior role.
Shapley also wants to make changes to the IRS’ criminal investigative processes that would reduce the role of the IRS chief counsel’s office, the WSJ reports.
Quote of the Day
“Charlie’s death is like a domestic 9/11. Just as after 9/11, and Osama bin Laden, the ultimate culprit, was captured, we are operationalizing the Treasury, and we are going to track down who is responsible for this.”–Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, invoking the assassination of Charlie Kirk to launch a War on Terror-style campaign against progressive nonprofit groups
It Was Good Knowing Ya, Voting Right Act
A grim day at the Supreme Court where the Roberts majority is poised to further weaken — though maybe not outright scuttle — what remains of the Voting Rights Act, a seminal piece of Civil Rights-era legislations.
Thread of the Day
Trump’s Caribbean Jingoism Takes a Darker Turn
Major new developments in Trump’s brewing Latin American misadventure:
- CNN: At least one of the five U.S. military strikes in the Caribbean targeted Colombian nationals on a boat that had left from Colombia.
- NYT: Trump has issued a presidential finding authorizing the CIA to conduct covert action in Venezuela, including lethal operations, and in the Caribbean.
- WaPo: Trump confirms that he authorized covert CIA action in Venezuela.
Pentagon Reporters Walk Out En Masse
Journalists covering the Pentagon surrendered their credentials and walked out as a group yesterday rather than sign a new restrictive Pentagon media policy.
Swastika Spotted on GOP Hill Aide’s Zoom Call
An aide to Rep. Dave Taylor (R-OH) appeared on a Zoom call with a small American flag altered to show a swastika pinned up behind him:
It’s not clear what or why Capitol Police are investigating, but a spokesperson for Taylor (who denounced the swastika ) called the incident “vile vandalism.”
Stay tuned …
The Corruption: Ballroom Edition
President Trump last night hosted a dinner at the White House for donors to his gaudy White House ballroom project. The WSJ published the list of expected attendees.
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
Charlie Kirk’s Show Is Now the Trump Admin’s Forum for Detailing How It Wants To Target the Left
Since right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was murdered at a Turning Point USA event in Utah last month, the vice president has filled in some on Kirk’s podcast — a production that Kirk’s friends and allies have kept up and running.
Continue reading “Charlie Kirk’s Show Is Now the Trump Admin’s Forum for Detailing How It Wants To Target the Left”The Age of Monsters, Part 2
I titled a recent Editors’ Blog post The Age of Monsters. I’ve been thinking about that post and theme again because I keep seeing more confirmation, more evidence of this dimension of the world we are currently living in. I stress again that the idea here is not that these “monsters” are bad people, though I would say that most of them are in varying degrees. The issue is their gigantism. They are so much more powerful than ordinary people, mostly but not in every case because of wealth, that they distort the whole fabric of society and politics. They are like big, clumsy and lumbering oafs who nonetheless have power that make if not the whole game than all the center of gravity be about them.
Continue reading “The Age of Monsters, Part 2”In Supreme Court Land, Fixing Discrimination Against Black Voters Is The Real Racism
A central grievance motivating today’s conservative legal movement — and the Republican Party more broadly — holds that any measure rectifying the country’s habitual discrimination against minorities actually discriminates against the in-group.
Continue reading “In Supreme Court Land, Fixing Discrimination Against Black Voters Is The Real Racism”