Over the weekend we had a confluence of three stories which together illustrate where the federal government is eight months into the second Trump administration. 1. The U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was either fired or resigned under pressure (probably the latter) for his refusal/inability to prosecute designated Trump enemies like New York Attorney General Letitia James. 2. We learned that last fall, Tom Homan was the subject of an investigation in which he had accepted a literal bag of $50,000 cash for corrupt actions during the second Trump administration should Trump again be elected. Investigators were waiting to see if Homan, who is now Trump’s border czar, would follow through on those promises once in office. (If you stiff the folks who bribed you it’s still a crime but it’s a lesser offense.) However, the Trump DOJ shut down the investigation. 3. Finally, NOTUS reports this morning that Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section has gone from 36 “experienced attorneys assigned full-time to investigate corrupt politicians and police officers” to two. That’s two as in double of one. The departures are a mix of firings, pressured or forced resignations, resignations on principle and reassignments.
Continue reading “State of Play, DOJ Edition”Emil Bove Shut Down Bribery Probe of Trump Border Czar Tom Homan
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Operation Fast Casual Buried by Trump DOJ
In a blockbuster weekend story, MSNBC reported that the Trump Justice Department shut down a bribery investigation of Tom Homan, now the White House border czar, which recorded him allegedly accepting $50,000 of cash during a sting operation in the summer of 2024:
The federal investigation was launched in western Texas in the summer of 2024 after a subject in a separate investigation claimed Homan was soliciting payments in exchange for awarding contracts should Trump win the presidential election, according to an internal Justice Department summary of the probe reviewed by MSNBC and people familiar with the case.
Homan was recorded accepting the $50,000 in bills in a bag from the fast casual chain Cava, Reuters reported.
FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche issued an extraordinary joint statement in which they condemned the investigation as “baseless.” The Trump White House called it a “blatantly political investigation.”
MSNBC and, later, other outlets reported that rather than the investigation being over or it having found no evidence of wrongdoing, investigators were waiting to see if Homan followed through on the quid with a quo once he took office. That would have arguably advanced the seriousness of the case from conspiracy to commit bribery to actual bribery. But the probe was scotched by the new incoming Trump political appointees at DOJ.
Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general and now a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, “told Justice Department officials he did not support the investigation,” MSNBC reported. Bove called it a “deep state” operation, according to Reuters, which reported that Patel ordered the investigation closed over the summer.
The Whole U.S. Attorney Scandal Plays Out in a Weekend
Nearly 20 years ago, TPM cut its chops on the 2006-07 U.S. attorney scandal. The Bush II-era firings of Republican U.S. attorneys for failing to be aggressive enough in pursuing bogus voter fraud charges led to congressional hearings and eventually the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez.
It all seems almost quaint now by the standards of Donald Trump.
In a cascading series of corrupt moves over the weekend, President Trump revealed for all to see that he himself is the prime mover behind targeting his political foes for retribution with criminal investigations and prosecutions.
With Erik Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, having failed to secure an indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James on bogus mortgage fraud charges, the president told reporters that he wanted Siebert out. In response, Siebert — who was also investigating former FBI Director James Comey, another leading Trump foe — told his staff he was resigning, though Trump insisted he’d fired the career prosecutor.
In a mad king series of social media posts — the initial one perhaps intended as a private DM, perhaps not — Trump publicly pressured Attorney General Pam Bondi to get moving on prosecuting a host of Trump foes, including James.
It was Trump himself — not a White House aide, overzealous underling, or misguided political appointee — publicly directing that charges be brought, the evidence be damned. It was Trump himself finding a compliant loyalist — Lindsey Halligan, a former personal lawyer of his with no prosecutorial experience — to replace Siebert in running one of the most important U.S. attorney’s offices in the country. For now Bondi has appointed Mary “Maggie” Cleary, a Republican lawyer in Virginia, as acting U.S. attorney, Politico reports.
Two decades ago, White House interference with U.S. attorneys took weeks to uncover and months to play out. This time, a turbocharged version of the same scandal played out across one weekend, with the president himself the primary conspirator.
“We’ve never seen anything even approaching this level of interference with the day-to-day job of prosecutors,” said Carol Lam, a former U.S. attorney who was among those forced to resign in the Bush-era scandal, told the WaPo.
‘Hands Can Become Dirty’
Conservative Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith speaks directly to political appointees about the perils of continuing to justify remaining at the Trump DOJ: “At some point, it defies [your] oath to serve a president who rejects the rule of law and bends the Department to his abuses.”
The Retribution: Thanks, John Roberts
Mother Jones’ Pema Levy on how the Roberts Court cleared the way for Trump’s lawless and retributive political prosecutions.
Pentagon Goes to War Against Journalists
The Trump Pentagon is trying to impose an unprecedented new condition on reporters who want to hold press credentials. As the NYT reports:
The new pledge asks journalists to acknowledge in writing that acquiring or using unauthorized information would be grounds for “immediate suspension” of Pentagon access. It defined off-limits information to include both classified materials and “controlled unclassified information,” a broadly defined category that includes materials that could pose a risk to national security if released to the public.
This Is How Democracy Ends
The kind of authoritarianism I fear is emerging in the United States, which political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism,” doesn’t involve the outright criminalization of the opposition or formal martial law. Instead, it depends on perverting the law, modifying and twisting it with the intent of incrementally undermining the opposition’s ability to compete fairly in elections.
Judge Drop-Kicks Trump’s NYT Lawsuit Out of Court
In a scolding order, U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday of Tampa, Florida, rejected President Trump’s absurd 85-page defamation lawsuit against the NYT as too long and tedious under court rules:
… a complaint remains an improper and impermissible place for the tedious and burdensome aggregation of prospective evidence, for the rehearsal of tendentious arguments, or for the protracted recitation and explanation of legal authority putatively supporting the pleader’s claim for relief. As every lawyer knows (or is presumed to know), a complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective — not a protected platform to rage against an adversary. A complaint is not a megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally or the functional equivalent of the Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner.
The judge gave Trump 28 days to file an amended complaint of no more than 40 pages.
RFK Jr.’s Prescription for America: Pure Chaos
[L]ast week showcased another, equally important side of Kennedy’s management: the way he is eliminating the people and dispensing with the procedures that allow agencies like the CDC to carry out their basic functions in a transparent, scientifically sound way. The effect isn’t so much to realign priorities as it is to unleash chaos. But that can still be corrosive to the government’s credibility—and hazardous to the people who depend on it.
Data Destruction Watch: USDA Edition
The Trump administration is canceling an annual USDA effort to gather data on how many Americans struggle to get enough food, the WSJ reports.
A Good Read
Drew Johnson offers an extended reflection on the long-forgotten Rep. James M. Hinds (R-AR), the first sitting member of Congress to be assassinated, ambushed by a Klansman in October 1868.
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Poor, Conservative School Districts Are Getting Hit Hard By the GOP’s Funding Freeze
This story about public school funding was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
ASHE COUNTY, N.C. — In the time it took to read an email, the federal money vanished before Superintendent Eisa Cox’s eyes: dollars that supported the Ashe County school district’s after-school program, training for its teachers, salaries for some jobs.
The email from the Department of Education arrived June 30, one day before the money — $1.1 million in total — was set to materialize for the rural western North Carolina district. Instead, the dollars had been frozen pending a review to make sure the money was spent “in accordance with the President’s priorities,” the email said.
In a community still recovering from Hurricane Helene, where more than half of students are considered economically disadvantaged, Cox said there was no way they could replace that federal funding. “It is scary to think about it, you’re getting ready to open school and not have a significant pot of funds,” she said.
School leaders across the country were reeling from the same news. The $1.1 million was one small piece of a nearly $7 billion pot of federal funding for thousands of school districts that the Trump administration froze — money approved by Congress and that schools were scheduled to receive on July 1. For weeks, leaders in Ashe County and around the country scrambled to figure out how they could avoid layoffs and fill financial holes — until the money was freed July 25, after an outcry from legislators and a lawsuit joined by two dozen states.
“I had teachers crying, staff members crying. They thought they were going to lose their jobs a week before school,” said Curtis Finch, superintendent of Deer Valley Unified School District in Phoenix.
Now, as educators welcome students back to classrooms, they can no longer count on federal dollars as they once did. They must learn to plan without a playbook under a president intent on cutting education spending. For many districts, federal money is a small but crucial sliver of their budgets, potentially touching every part of a school’s operations, from teacher salaries to textbooks. Nationally, it accounts for about 14 percent of public school funding; in Ashe County, it’s 17 percent. School administrators are examining their resources now and budgeting for losses to funding that was frozen this summer, for English learners, after-school and other programs.
So far, the Trump administration has not proposed cutting the largest pots of federal money for schools, which go to services for students with disabilities and to schools with large numbers of low-income students. But the current budget proposal from the U.S. House of Representatives would do just that.
At the same time, forthcoming cuts to other federal support for low-income families under the Republican “one big, beautiful bill” — including Medicaid and SNAP — will also hammer schools that have many students living in poverty. And some school districts are also grappling with the elimination of Department of Education grants announced earlier this year, such as those designed to address teacher shortages and disability services. In politically conservative communities like this one, there’s an added tension for schools that rely on federal money to operate: how to sound the alarm while staying out of partisan politics.
For Ashe County, the federal spending freeze collided with the district’s attempt at a fresh start after the devastation of Helene, which demolished roads and homes, damaged school buildings and knocked power and cell service out for weeks. Between the storm and snow days, students here missed 47 days of instruction.
Cox worries this school year might bring more missed days: That first week of school, she found herself counting the number of foggy mornings. An old Appalachian wives’ tale says to put a bean in a jar for every morning of fog in August. The number of beans at the end of the month is how many snow days will come in winter.
“We’ve had 21 so far,” Cox said with a nervous laugh on Aug. 21.
Fragrant evergreen trees blanket Ashe County’s hills, a region that bills itself as America’s Christmas Tree Capital because of the millions of Fraser firs grown for sale at the holidays. Yet this picturesque area still shows scars of Hurricane Helene’s destruction: fallen trees, damaged homes and rocky new paths cut through the mountainsides by mudslides. Nearly a year after the storm, the lone grocery store in one of its small towns is still being rebuilt. A sinkhole that formed during the flooding remains, splitting open the ground behind an elementary school.
As students walked into classrooms for the first time since spring, Julie Taylor — the district’s director of federal programs — was reworking district budget spreadsheets. When federal funds were frozen, and then unfrozen, her plans and calculations from months prior became meaningless.
Federal and state funding stretches far in this district of 2,700 students and six schools, where administrators do a lot with a little. Even before this summer, they worked hard to supplement that funding in any way possible — applying to state and federal grants, like one last year that provided money for a few mobile hot spots for families who don’t have internet access. Such opportunities are also narrowing: The Federal Communications Commission, for example, recently proposed ending its mobile hot spot grant program for school buses and libraries.
“We’re very fiscally responsible because we have to be — we’re small and rural, we don’t have a large tax base,” Taylor said.
When the money was frozen this summer, administrators’ minds went to the educators and kids who would be most affected. Some of it paid for a program through Appalachian State University that connects the district’s three dozen early-career teachers with a mentor, helps them learn how to schedule their school days and manage classroom behavior.
The program is part of the reason the district’s retention rate for early career teachers is 92 percent, Taylor said, noting the teachers have said how much the mentoring meant to them.
Also frozen: free after-school care the district provides for about 250 children throughout the school year — the only after-school option in the community. Without the money, Cox said, schools would have to cancel their after-school care or start charging families, a significant burden in a county with a median household income of about $50,000.
The salary for Michelle Pelayo, the district’s migrant education program coordinator for nearly two decades, was also tied up in that pot of funding. Because agriculture is the county’s biggest industry, Pelayo’s work in Ashe County extends far beyond the students at the school. Each year, she works with the families of dozens of migrant students who move to the area for seasonal work on farms, which generally involves tagging and bundling Christmas trees and harvesting pumpkins. Pelayo helps the families enroll their students, connects them with supplies for school and home, and serves as a Spanish translator for parent-teacher meetings — “whatever they need,” she said.
Kitty Honeycutt, executive director of the Ashe County Chamber of Commerce, doesn’t know how the county’s agriculture industry would survive without the migrant students Pelayo works with. “The need for guest workers is crucial for the agriculture industry — we have to have them,” she said.
A couple of years ago, Pelayo had the idea to drive to Boone, North Carolina, where Appalachian State University’s campus sits, to gather unwanted appliances and supplies from students moving out of their dorm rooms at the end of the year to donate to migrant families. She’s a “find a way or make a way” type of person, Honeycutt said.
Cox is searching for how to keep Pelayo on if Ashe County loses these federal funds next year. She’s talked with county officials to see if they could pay Pelayo’s salary, and begun calculating how much the district would need to charge families to keep the after-school program running. Ideally, she’d know ahead of time and not the night before the district is set to receive the money.
Districts across the country are grappling with similar questions. In Detroit, school leaders are preparing, at a minimum, to lose Title III money to teach English learners. More than 7,200 Detroit students received services funded by Title III in 2023.
In Wyoming, the small, rural Sheridan County School District 3 is trying to budget without Title II, IV and V money — funding for improving teacher quality, updating technology and resources for rural and low-income schools, among other uses, Superintendent Chase Christensen said.
Schools are trying to budget for cuts to other federal programs, too — such as Medicaid and food stamps. In Harrison School District 2, an urban district in Colorado Springs, Colorado, schools rely on Medicaid to provide students with counseling, nursing and other services.
The district projects that it could lose half the $15 million it receives in Medicaid next school year.
“It’s very, very stressful,” said Wendy Birhanzel, superintendent of Harrison School District 2. “For a while, it was every day, you were hearing something different. And you couldn’t even keep up with, ‘What’s the latest information today?’ That’s another thing we told our staff: If you can, just don’t watch the news about education right now.”
There’s another calculation for school leaders to make in conservative counties like Ashe, where 72 percent of the vote last year went for President Donald Trump: objecting to the cuts without angering voters. When North Carolina’s attorney general, a Democrat, joined the lawsuit against the administration over the frozen funds this summer, some school administrators told state officials they couldn’t publicly sign on, fearing local backlash, said Jack Hoke, executive director of the North Carolina School Superintendents’ Association.
Cox sees the effort to slash federal funds as a chance to show her community how Ashe County Schools uses this money. She believes people are misguided in thinking their schools don’t need it, not malicious.
“I know who our congresspeople are — I know they care about this area,” Cox said, even if they do not fully grasp how the money is used. “It’s an opportunity for me to educate them.”
If the Education Department is shuttered — which Trump said he plans to do in order to give more authority over education to states — she wants to be included in state-level discussions for how federal money flows to schools through North Carolina. And, importantly, she wants to know ahead of time what her schools might lose.
As Cox made her rounds to each of the schools that first week back, she glanced down at her phone and looked up with a smile. “We have hot water,” she said while walking in the hall of Blue Ridge Elementary School. It had lost hot water a few weeks earlier, but to Cox, this crisis was minor — one of many first-of-the-year hiccups she has come to expect.
Still, it’s one worry she can put out of her mind as she looks ahead to a year of uncertainties.
Meanwhile, the anxiety about this school year hasn’t reached the students, who were talking among themselves in the high school’s media center, creating collages in the elementary school’s art class and trekking up to Mount Jefferson — a state park that sits directly behind the district’s two high schools — for an annual trip.
They were just excited to be back.
Marina Villeneuve contributed data analysis to this story. Contact staff writer Ariel Gilreath on Signal at arielgilreath.46 or at gilreath@hechingerreport.org.
Trump Administration Loses Plot During ‘Free Speech’ Struggle Session
Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
To some extent, every new excess by the Trump administration is unsurprising to us, the writers and editors of Talking Points Memo, and, I imagine, to you, our readers. These guys told us what they were going to do, after all. It sounded authoritarian. Trump’s own former military leaders said he was “fascist.” But given that priming, we heavy consumers of news can, I think, sometimes lose track of how far the Trump administration has gone, even by its own standards.
Nicole on Thursday flagged an interview with CNBC during which FCC director Brendan Carr outlined his belief that both his agency and the “media ecosystem” overall are in the midst of a “massive shift” given the “permission structure that President Trump’s election has provided.”
“And I would simply say we’re not done yet with seeing the consequences of that,” Carr said.
“Will you only be pleased when none of these comedians have a show on broadcast television?” CNBC anchor David Faber asked.
“No, it’s not any particular show or any particular person,” Carr replied. “It’s just we’re in the midst of a very disruptive moment right now, and I just, frankly, expect that we’re going to continue to see changes in the media ecosystem.”
Carr and the rest of the Trump administration have tried to get a lot of mileage out of the whole idea that the 2024 election represented a substantiation of an American cultural “vibe shift” post-COVID (though Carr’s talk of a new, Trumpian “permission structure” is a particularly chilling way to articulate that idea).
But setting aside that Trump’s electoral victory was, in the end, not that large, are Trump’s leaders in government still doing what they understood themselves to have won permission to do?
“This was all in Project 2025, btw,” an actor from “Glee” tweeted, and Carr at 11:43 p.m. replied with that GIF of Jack Nicholson nodding with an ecstatic, unhinged look, a seeming affirmation that, yes, this was all the plan.
But was it? Carr, in fact, wrote the FCC chapter of Project 2025. There was nothing about revoking broadcast licenses or using the “Equal Time” rule in creative ways, as he has threatened to do with “The View,” a program that is seemingly his next ABC-broadcast target. “The FCC should promote freedom of speech,” his chapter of Project 2025 began.
That’s an ideal his party is now seemingly somewhat confused about. Early this week, Pam Bondi got in trouble for trying to distinguish anti-Charlie Kirk “hate speech” from “free speech.” “An FCC license, it’s not a right. It really is a privilege,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) told Semafor on Thursday. “Under normal times, in normal circumstances, I tend to think that the First Amendment should always be sort of the ultimate right. And that there should be almost no checks and balances on it. I don’t feel that way anymore,” she added. Other Republicans took the opposite side of the issue, with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) of all people calling Carr’s tactics “right out of Goodfellas.”
It’s in these moments where the Trump administration and its allies lose the plot — when they do an about-face on the same ideas they bear hugged in weeks and months and years prior, casting about for enemies to punish — that the MAGA coalition frays a bit, straining under the weight of cognitive dissonance. We saw the same thing with Trump’s short-lived war on Iran and, much more so, with his aggressive insistence that there was nothing important going on with that Jeffrey Epstein guy. The cause of ending cancel culture launched a thousand MAGA-aligned influencer careers; it is the supposed raison d’être of entire MAGA-friendly publications. Now that the government they serve has turned the page on free speech, what do they do?
It’s not just the MAGA faithful. Booting a late-night host watched by millions from the air over some muddled remarks about your slain political ally is the kind of thing that gets the attention of the “normies” who have decided to tune out from the whole lurid spectacle of American democracy in 2025. (Ditto for revising childhood vaccine recommendations while confessing you’re not even totally clear what you’re voting on.)
Ten years into this, only fools predict we’ve reached the beginning of the end of Donald Trump. And that’s not what I’m saying. But moments like these are not good for Trump’s already limited base of support, and bring us toward the next chapter of America’s authoritarian experiment, whatever that chapter may be.
— John Light
Here’s what else TPM has on tap this weekend:
- A look at Republicans’ careful tinkering with their favorite legislative tool.
- Indiana Republicans appear to be on the cusp of caving to Trump’s demands on redistricting.
- DC officials head to Congress, attempting to push back on the portrayal of their city as a hellscape.
Let’s dig in.
Republicans Prune Parts Of The Filibuster That Don’t Help Them
The legislative filibuster helps Republicans. They can still do nominations and tax cuts with a simple majority, and it prevents them from having to execute on the policy demands of the base, many of which are massively unpopular.
But when they run into tentacles of the filibuster that thwart those goals, they — unlike Democrats — do not hesitate to end them.
On Thursday, Republicans confirmed 48 Trump nominees at once after changing the rules that previously would have required a 60-vote supermajority. Before that, in May, they revoked a California electric vehicle standard with a simple majority, ignoring the parliamentarian’s ruling that the vote was subject to the filibuster.
They also reduced the hours required for post-cloture debate to two down from 30, and followed Democrats’ lead on most nominees, lowering the threshold to a simple majority for Supreme Court ones as well.
The GOP has long painted itself as the protectors of the filibuster, and painted it as a measure of old-school rationality and tea-cooling. In reality, the party only has such reverence for the parts of the blockade that are politically beneficial. If the legislative filibuster truly hurt them, their professed veneration for Senate operations would evaporate in an instant.
— Kate Riga
Indiana Gov. Mike Braun Says a Redistricting Special Session ‘Probably Will Happen’
In the latest in the Trump administration’s redistricting pressure campaign to strong arm red states into engaging in the extremely uncommon practice of mid-cycle redistricting so Trump can rig the midterms, Indiana Gov. Mike Braun announced this week that a redistricting special session will likely be held in the next couple of months. Braun, along with other GOP members of the state legislature, had not previously indicated that he would agree to Trump’s redistricting plans, which are transparently aimed at flipping the only two Democratic seats that Indiana has in the House.
But, earlier this week, per the Indy Star, Braun told reporters a special session “probably will happen.”
“We’re going to poll our legislators, and if it’s there, we’re going to do it,” Braun said. “My feeling is it probably will happen.”
Despite the indication from Braun that a redistricting special session will likely occur, there remain a number of Indiana GOP State House members who oppose the administration’s continued efforts to pressure GOP officials into redrawing their congressional district maps. The Trump administration is trying to decrease Republicans’ chances of losing the House in 2026, a change that would not only mean the end of a Republican trifecta in D.C. but also would hand investigative and subpoena power back to Democrats.
Braun’s comments also come against the backdrop of the death of Trump ally and CEO of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk, who, before his killing, said on X that his organization would “support primary opponents for Republicans in the Indiana State Legislature who refuse to support the team and redraw the maps.”
Republicans are using Kirk’s death as a way to push forward the administration’s redistricting plans, with one Indiana Republican suggesting Kirk’s death gives the effort renewed urgency.
“They killed Charlie Kirk — the least that we can do is go through a legal process and redistrict Indiana into a nine to zero map,” U.S. Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) said. “And I sense it in this crowd, in a big way. And I sense it from supporters all over the state; that now’s not the time to back off. Now’s not the time to be nice. Now’s the time to engage in a peaceful and political way.”
— Khaya Himmelman
House GOP Continues Its Crackdown on DC Supposed Crime Problem
Three top elected officials from Washington D.C. — Mayor Muriel Bowser, Council Chair Phil Mendelson and Attorney General Brian Schwalb — were at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on Thursday testifying about their oversight of the district.
Throughout the hearing, D.C. officials pushed back on House Republicans’ consistent characterization of the nation’s capital as crime-ridden (it is not) — a sentiment President Donald Trump also built his entire justification for the occupation of the district with armed federal law enforcement around.
House Republicans have also passed several of a series of bills this week attempting to overhaul D.C.’s criminal justice system and roll back home rule, without any input from the district itself or its constituents.
“We are a city under siege,” Mendelson said during Thursday’s hearing. “It is frustrating to watch this committee debate and vote on 14 bills regarding the district without a single public hearing, with no input from District officials or the public, without regard for community impact nor a shred of analysis, including legal sufficiency or fiscal impact.”
Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-VA), a member of the House Oversight Committee, told reporters outside of the hearing room that the committee should be having hearings about the crimes happening under the Trump administration instead.
“They are flagrantly violating the law at every corner,” Subramanyam said of the Trump administration. “Instead, they’re picking on homeless people, they’re picking on people who are not committing crimes or picking on people who they disagree with and violating their constitutional rights. … We should be having a hearing on things that are a little bit more pressing with this administration because we’re an oversight committee.”
— Emine Yücel
The Age of Monsters
We live in an age of monsters: Elon Musk, Donald Trump, the Ellison family, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, the sundry billionaires who don’t own apps. This may sound like a caustic and dramatic comment coming from me. Some of them are genuine monsters: Musk, Trump, probably Thiel. In other cases, like with Zuckerberg, they are probably more or less normal and might even be okay to have lunch with. But functionally, in the role they play and power they wield in our society, they are monsters. And the function of the Trump era has been to wind them all together into a single formation, first by allurement and then by force.
This realization first started to dawn on me in the years after Citizens United, the court decision that essentially ended meaningful campaign finance law in the United States. It came in the first reactions to Citizens United or more specifically the spending it made possible. Billionaires and centi-millionaires started gaining publicity and critical reactions to the scale of their spending and the impact it had on elections. Political giving at scale by the extremely wealthy wasn’t new. It had just taken a half-century hiatus. Perhaps the difference was the internet. Whatever it was, the years after 2010 spawned the idea that the very wealthy and the extremely powerful needed to be afforded more protections, more privacy for their giving then ordinary people who might donate $50 or even $5,000 up near the candidate donation limit.
Continue reading “The Age of Monsters”Nancy Mace Can Thank John Roberts for Keeping Her Congressional Seat Safe
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
On Wednesday, the South Carolina Supreme Court decided that it has no power to protect Black voters from partisan gerrymandering, dismissing a challenge to the state’s congressional district map as a “nonjusticiable political question” in a 5-0 opinion. The only people with the legal power to un-gerrymander the state, it seems, are the Republican lawmakers who gerrymandered it in the first place.
In 2021, South Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature adopted maps that moved over 30,000 Black residents out of the state’s first congressional district, reducing its Black population to 17 percent—the precise amount necessary, per GOP analyses of partisan voting patterns, to keep Black voters from threatening Republican dominance in District 1, which is currently represented by Republican Nancy Mace. This little maneuver is likely enough to prevent the state’s Democrats from competing to oust her, and to pick up a seat in Congress.
In 2023, a three-judge panel of South Carolina’s federal district court unanimously struck down this ambitiously racist map as unconstitutional. But in 2024, the Supreme Court reversed that judgment, concluding that the state didn’t discriminate against the voters because they were Black, but because they were Democrats. As a practical matter, this distinction doesn’t mean much—either way, lawmakers are discriminating against Black people, who overwhelmingly vote for Democrats. Still, under the Supreme Court’s precedent, the map presented a political question for state legislatures and state courts to solve, not a constitutional question for federal courts to solve.
So, a couple months later, South Carolina voters filed a new lawsuit in state court, challenging the map as an “extreme partisan gerrymander” that violates several provisions of the state constitution. But on Wednesday, the South Carolina Supreme Court batted away that challenge, too, as an unanswerable political question. As a result, South Carolina legislators are free to continue picking their voters, and South Carolina voters have no real shot at picking their legislators.
Much of the South Carolina court’s opinion is spent recounting the rationale of the U.S. Supreme Court in Rucho v. Common Cause, the 2019 case in which the Court decided that there is no constitutional problem with politicians manipulating district lines to keep themselves in power. Justice George James wrote that Rucho held that “federal law does not furnish judicially discernible and manageable standards for reviewing claims of partisan gerrymandering (as opposed to racial gerrymandering),” thus rendering such claims “nonjusticiable under the United States Constitution.” James wrote that the same is true at the state level: “There are no constitutional provisions or statutes that pertain to, prohibit, or limit partisan gerrymandering in the congressional redistricting process in South Carolina,” he said.
So, the South Carolina Supreme Court reached the same conclusion the U.S. Supreme Court did: “Partisan gerrymandering claims present a nonjusticiable political question.”
When the U.S. Supreme Court decided Rucho, Chief Justice John Roberts argued for the majority that he was not dooming the public to rule by unrepresentative government. “Our conclusion does not condone excessive partisan gerrymandering. Nor does our conclusion condemn complaints about districting to echo into a void,” said Roberts. As consolation, Roberts pointed to the state supreme court in Florida, which struck down an electoral map in 2015 as violating the Fair Districts Amendment of the state constitution. “Provisions in state statutes and state constitutions can provide standards and guidance for state courts to apply,” Roberts said.
In light of the South Carolina Supreme Court decision, Roberts’s gesture looks even emptier. Today, at least 13 states explicitly address partisan gerrymandering in their constitutions or statutes, but South Carolina is now the fourth state since Rucho to decide that partisan gerrymandering is nonjusticiable, following New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Kansas.
At the same time, Rucho has encouraged Republican legislatures to swing for the antidemocratic fences. South Carolina’s Senate Majority Leader, Republican Shane Massey, outright told reporters that they “knew” their gerrymandered map was “something that we could do” because of “the rules that the Supreme Court set out.” After the state court’s decision, the South Carolina’s Republican Senate Caucus boasted on Twitter: “While numerous red states hurry to undergo mid-decade redistricting, South Carolina rests easy knowing Republican Senators finished the job following the 2020 census.”
In a brief concurring opinion in the South Carolina case, Chief Justice John Kittredge lamented the widespread undemocratic impact of Roberts’s opinion. “Following Rucho‘s elimination of any possibility of a federal constitutional violation, state legislatures became emboldened,” he said. And since state laws are often insufficient to deter gerrymandering, he continued, district maps that “may, indeed, be in line with each respective state’s constitution and laws” could still “collectively have the effect of diminishing our constitutional republic as a whole.”
The ongoing race to wipe out minority political parties, Kittredge concluded, is “a troubling prospect for those who adhere to our nation’s founding principle that the People are sovereign.”
Fundamental rights like voting in free and fair elections should not depend on what state one happens to live in. But that is the current legal landscape the Supreme Court created. And South Carolina voters are now suffering the consequences.
State Lawmakers Are Getting Arrested at Detention Centers and Yelling at Masked ICE Agents. Good.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
This week, two moments revealed the front lines of America’s immigration fight. In New York, 11 state legislators were among more than a dozen elected officials arrested after demanding entry to overcrowded Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention cells at 26 Federal Plaza. In Illinois, a viral video showed State Senator Karina Villa racing down a suburban street, shouting in English and Spanish for families to stay inside as she confronted masked ICE agents.
These scenes capture something too often overlooked: while the federal government carries out a deeply unpopular agenda, state lawmakers are fighting back visibly and boldly. A hopeful story is unfolding as legislators defend communities with their voices and their bodies, uphold the rule of law, and embody a vision of government that protects rather than persecutes.The next step is to knit these efforts together so the energy in Illinois, New York, and beyond becomes a coordinated front.
This is the story of the moment: as federal power is abused, states are showing what democracy looks like in practice. Legislators are flexing their authority to protect families, confront masked agents, and make the fight visible. And they’re using these tools with ingenuity in every state, regardless of its color on a map.
Pursuing laws that flip the script
States are flexing fiscal power. In New York, lawmakers introduced the so-called Avelo Airlines bill, which would block public contracts and fuel tax exemptions for companies profiting from deportation flights. Maryland, New York and Wisconsin have introduced bills empowering state officials to withhold payments or slap liens on federal buildings if Washington defaults on funding. The message is blunt: if the federal government won’t honor its commitments, states shouldn’t bankroll its abuses.
But it’s not only about resistance. Pennsylvania legislators formed a Welcoming Caucus to advance bills creating an Office of New Pennsylvanians. Colorado and New York already have offices and run programs offering English classes, legal clinics, and hotlines for newcomers. These efforts send the signal that immigrants are valued neighbors and contributors.
Lawmakers are protecting people at work. Washington enacted SB 5104 to shield immigrant employees who file labor complaints. Last year, Washington followed in the footsteps of states like California by opening professional licensing to residents using taxpayer ID numbers instead of Social Security. Indiana and Oklahoma recently reduced barriers for foreign-trained medical professionals, filling critical shortages.
Privacy is another battleground. Washington’s 2019 Keep Washington Working Act restricts data sharing with ICE unless tied to an active criminal case. California and Colorado are advancing similar restrictions. These laws aim to keep school, health, and employment records from becoming tools of surveillance.
Then there is the rule of law. Delaware recently became the seventh state to ban 287(g) agreements that deputize local police as ICE agents, joining California, Connecticut, Illinois, Oregon, Washington, and Maryland. Bills in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Michigan, and New York would ban masked or unidentified law enforcement officers. Together, these laws flip the script, using state power not to target, but to protect.
Showing up and demanding answers
When ICE hides its operations behind closed doors, state legislators are fighting to pry them open. In Florida, lawmakers sued their governor after being denied entry to the Everglades Detention Facility, and subsequently gained access. In Washington, legislators passed HB 1470, mandating health inspections of private detention centers, over objections from GEO Group, the massive private prison contractor. Massachusetts legislators staged unofficial hearings to document raids and their toll. By using their oversight powers to walk into detention centers, convene hearings, and sue for access, state lawmakers are shining light where federal actors prefer darkness.
Dragging the fight into courtrooms
Some battles must be fought in court. Florida Rep. Anna Eskamani testified in litigation over the conditions inside the Everglades facility, adding her firsthand account to the record. Legislators elsewhere have signed on as amici, offered declarations, and supplied evidence that lawyers need to press their cases. Judges can compel accountability, and legislators are helping build the record to get there.
Making resistance visible
If authoritarianism thrives in the shadows, lawmakers are countering with cameras, microphones, and crowds. In New York, legislators stood outside the Metropolitan Detention Center for a press conference after ICE blocked access to detainees. Pennsylvania lawmakers staged a joint event to reintroduce the Office of New Pennsylvanians bill, flanked by immigrant families. In California, the Latino Legislative Caucus rallied with community partners to denounce ICE raids and back protective bills. Through speeches, press releases, social media livestreams, and joint statements across states, lawmakers are shifting the narrative from fear to solidarity.
These actions share a common purpose: to protect communities and uphold the rule of law. But too often they occur in silos, treated as isolated skirmishes rather than parts of a coordinated campaign. That’s a mistake. Conservatives already know that power accrues to those who exercise it. Just as the right has pooled resources for decades, progressive states and legislators must link arms now —- synchronizing bills, sharing data, holding joint hearings and press conferences. Coordination multiples power.
The lesson is clear. The judiciary will not reliably check authoritarian excess, and this administration is not deterred by public opinion. That leaves the states. Used together, their powers, including budgets, contracts, data, oversight, litigation, communications, can create not just defensive shields but affirmative models of governance.
House Passes Funding Plan With No Concessions to Dems, Leaving Senate in Deadlock
House Republicans passed their “clean” seven-week continuing resolution (CR) Friday morning on a largely party line 217-212 vote, setting up the Senate for a stalemate over government funding similar to what happened in March.
Continue reading “House Passes Funding Plan With No Concessions to Dems, Leaving Senate in Deadlock”Trump Poised to Fire US Attorney for Not Indicting Letitia James
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Peak Retribution Alert
It’s all coming together in President Trump’s push to find a way to bring criminal charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James: the retribution, the denigration of the rule of law, the evisceration of the Justice Department, and the ultimate unbridled unitary executive.
In another important story, ABC News reported overnight that Trump is poised to fire U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert of the Eastern District of Virginia for not seeking an indictment of James on the bogus mortgage fraud claims the administration has drummed up.
The latest news comes after a deeply reported ABC News piece earlier in the week that prosecutors had turned up considerable exculpatory evidence in the case. So even though the investigation had begun on a pretextual predicate, it had done more to exonerate James than to implicate her in the supposed mortgage fraud. For that reason, Siebert wasn’t going to seek a grand jury indictment in the Virginia mortgage fraud case.
The refusal to bring a case against James apparently enraged Bill Pulte, the Trump-appointed head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, who pushed Trump to fire Siebert, ABC News previously reported. It appears now that Trump is expected to follow through on Pulte’s demand.
Siebert, a career prosecutor, became interim U.S. attorney earlier this year, and his tenure was extended by the judges of the Eastern District. He is Trump’s own nominee for the permanent position, with approval from both of Virginia’s Democratic senators.
If Trump cans Siebert as expected, it sets up a situation where Trump is likely to name someone to the role who has indicated, directly or indirectly, that they will proceed with a criminal prosecution against James. That would be an intolerable position for any fair-minded, ethical legal professional, so it all but guarantees that a political hack will take over the office.
The Eastern District of Virginia is one of the most politically and legally significant districts in the country. The case involving James originates in Hampton Roads, but the district sprawls from the southeastern Virginia metro area through Richmond into the northern Virginia suburbs, which include the Pentagon and CIA headquarters. Significant national security cases are often handled by this U.S. attorney’s office.
This U.S. attorney’s office in particular is not one you want run by a political hack eager to do the bidding of the Trump White House.
Trump Judge Lambastes Admin in Guatemala Kids Case
U.S. District Judge Tim Kelly of Washington, D.C., issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration from deporting unaccompanied minor Guatemalan children, an operation that began in the dead of night over the Labor Day weekend.
In a surprisingly direct opinion, Kelly, a Trump appointee, was deeply skeptical of the administration’s claims about the removal operation and in particular of the representations made by Justice Department attorney Drew Ensign during an emergency hearing Labor Day weekend in front of a different judge:
Lawyers got wind of this hasty operation while it was unfolding and filed this lawsuit seeking emergency relief that Sunday at 1:00 a.m. The judge on emergency duty entered a temporary restraining order barring the agencies and their officials from removing or otherwise transporting the children from the United States. At a hearing later that day, counsel for Defendants explained why it was “fairly outrageous” for Plaintiffs to have sued: all Defendants wanted to do was reunify children with parents who had requested their return. But that explanation crumbled like a house of cards about a week later. There is no evidence before the Court that the parents of these children sought their return.
The case has echoes of the rushed weekend deportation under the Alien Enemies Act in March, which put federal judges on alert that the Trump administration is not acting in good faith and the Justice Department can no longer be given the benefit of the doubt.
Kirk Killing Fallout: No Criticism of Trump Allowed
- President Trump directly threatened to revoke the licenses of broadcasters who air criticisms of him.
- Anna Gomez, the lone Democratic commissioner on the FCC, tells Greg Sargent: “What the administration is doing violates the First Amendment and the Communications Act.”
- “Pentagon leaders are considering a new recruiting campaign that would encourage young people to honor the legacy of assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk by joining the military,” NBC News reported.
How the Late Night Shows Responded to Kimmel’s Suspension
Quote of the Day
If you were writing a hackneyed novel or film about an authoritarian America, it would go exactly like this: a figure close to the regime is assassinated, a massive shrill and sanctimonious hue and cry rises over the martyred dead, hysteria is whipped up about terrorism and public disorder, leaders in the regime and movement promise vengeance, private citizens are mobbed and lose their jobs for expressing anti-regime sentiments at the encouragement of regime officials and regime-aligned demagogues, and, then, the power of the state is brought to bear against public figures who oppose and criticize the regime.
Can Trump Actually Designate Antifa a Terrorist Group?
No.
RFK Jr. Reaps Anti-Vax Results He Sowed
The CDC vaccine panel that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. stacked with anti-vaxxers began revising the immunization schedule for kids in a meeting that continues today and is expected to yield even bigger rollbacks in childhood shots.
Trump’s Burgeoning Latin American Intervention
Draft legislation is circulating at the White House and on Capitol Hill that would give President Trump sweeping powers to wage war against drug cartels he deems to be “terrorists” and any nation he claims has harbored or aided them, the NYT is reporting.
The substance of the NYT report is significant in its own right — a dramatic expansion of presidential powers and previous U.S. law on the use of the force — but it also suggests that there is a realization within some corners of the administration that Trump’s unilateral attacks on alleged drug-smuggling boats in recent days has insufficient legal authorization under current law.
In related news: The DEA went too far even for the Trump White House when earlier this year it urged military strikes in Mexico, the WaPo exclusively reports.
WTF?
Trump wants Bagram Air Base back and to re-establish a U.S. presence in Afghanistan.
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Republicans Kill Attempt to Subpoena FCC Chair After Jimmy Kimmel Suspension
The House Oversight Committee voted Thursday to table a motion to subpoena Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr to testify about ABC’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel due to the host’s comments on Charlie Kirk’s killing.
The vote came down on party lines.
Ranking member Robert Garcia (D-CA), though, said that he and committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) had been talking during the hearing and are “gonna try to work together on an effort to bring in Mr. Carr in front of the Oversight Committee.”
Continue reading “Republicans Kill Attempt to Subpoena FCC Chair After Jimmy Kimmel Suspension”