I’ve gotten some rather heated responses to today’s Backchannel. The one point which I think merits a response is people saying that I’m not proposing any alternative. I saw that as implicit. But fair enough. Some say I’m just saying shut things down permanently. That latter claim isn’t true. But the first point is fair so let me address it.
Donald Trump is currently governing far outside the constitutional order. We’re operating in a constitutional interregnum. The constitutional order may and I think will come back into force. But right now we’re operating far, far outside of it. The president has seized the power of the purse from Congress. He is depriving states of their sovereignty and liberties by invading them with the U.S. military. He is threatening budgetary cutoffs to assert policy control over areas of governance the president has zero authority over. I could list 10 other forms of extra-constitutional rule and I would still leave many out.
I agonized for a bit about the point I’m about to discuss. But I didn’t agonize for long because I decided there was not much to agonize about. The topic is the September federal budget showdown, essentially a replay of the March “continuing resolution” drama in which Democrats had their first shot at real leverage against Donald Trump. As you’ll remember, Democrats under Chuck Schumer’s leadership decided to hold out for nothing. This was not only a missed opportunity. It’s fair to say it drove a catastrophic collapse of confidence in the Democratic Party’s elected leadership in Washington, DC., an impact that has been reverberating through national and opposition politics ever since.
Now we have a literal replay of that moment. The White House again needs Democrats’ vote in the Senate for a continuing resolution to keep the government open. Democratic leaders have been insisting they won’t make the same mistake again, and recent reports suggest President Trump’s increasingly aggressive attempts to seize budget authority from Congress all but assure a government shutdown at the end of the month. But a closer look suggests that Senate Democrats will insist on no meaningful brakes on Trump’s lawless actions and may, perversely, help him hold Congress next year.
The Texas Senate passed new bounty hunter-style abortion legislation Wednesday night to quash mailed abortion pills, targeting a method that has slipped through the cracks of abortion bans and contributed to the slight rise in the total number of abortions since the Supreme Court decided Dobbs.
Trump administration attorneys asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday night to overturn Friday’s appeals court decision finding that most of Trump’s tariffs are unconstitutional. The filing came after Trump at a Tuesday press conference — ostensibly about moving Space Command from Colorado to Alabama — said his administration would swiftly seek a SCOTUS ruling.
The startling U.S. attack on an alleged drug-running boat in international waters off Venezuela is precisely the kind of no-holds-barred combat that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was clearing the way for when he began firing military lawyers as soon as he settled into his E-ring office.
As bad as some of the U.S. infractions were during the Global War on Terror — and I can scarcely believe I’m writing this — there still remained an understanding among the Dick Cheneys of the world that they needed to come up with at least a thread of an argument for what legal authority they were relying on, however pretextual, unpersuasive, and unavailing it might have been.
This astonishing sentence from the NYT suggests that President Trump — fully immunized for his official acts by the Roberts Court — has dispensed with even putting on a show of legally justifying this week’s attack: “Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.”
Shoot first, figure out the legal cover later.
The Trump administration couldn’t even get its facts straight on the story it was telling publicly, with Trump claiming the boat was headed to the United States and Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially claiming it was headed to Trinidad. Rubio later brought his public statements in line with Trump’s.
At this point, it would be credulous to accept without further proof the administration’s claims that this was a drug-running vessel — proof will be hard to provide since the boat was blown up and its 11 occupants were killed.
Of particular note is Trump’s unsupported claim those targeted in the killing were Tren de Aragua gang members. Trump has designated TdA as a terrorist organization and used that justification to invoke the Alien Enemies Act for the notorious removals of Venezuelan nationals, many of whom it’s now clear were not TdA members. In an ironic twist, the attack on the boat came the same week that the conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that TdA was not invading the United States for Alien Enemies Act purposes, making Trump’s invocation of the wartime statute unlawful.
Assuming it was a drug boat, former State Department lawyer Brian Finucane surveys the legal landscape for a lethal attack on alleged drug traffickers on the high seas. “The use of lethal force in this attack appears gratuitous and the administration has not explained why law enforcement tools were inadequate to address the situation,” he writes.
Another difference from the GWOT is that when the line was crossed — Abu Ghraib comes to mind — there was an official effort to minimize, dismiss, and distance the administration from the incident. While that avoided real accountability, it suggested at the barest minimum a recognition that a situation was problematic, if not wrong. Not now. The president himself, along with his secretaries of defense and state, are celebrating this attack.
Looming over all of this are the larger geopolitical tensions that Trump is actively stoking. On his orders, a massive naval deployment to the region was already underway, escalating tensions with Venezuela. Trump’s saber-rattling off its coast while putting a $50 million bounty on the head of President Nicolás Maduro is the kind of flex that echoes decades of past U.S. intervention in Latin America.
As chilling as the attack was, we may come to see it as a Tonkin Gulf-style precursor to a larger effort to destabilize Venezuela with unpredictable and even more dire consequences.
Comment of the Day
From a MM reader:
Murdering people in a boat. Was thinking about that this am. We spent WEEKS in a course in law school taught by Jack Goldsmith on whether you could even place prisoners at Guantanamo and give them military trials. This guy is just out here letting some violent hopped-up-on-testosterone idiots murder people in broad daylight like it’s a fucking video game. It makes me ill.
Notorious Louisiana Prison Now Housing Migrant Detainees
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem (R) tours “Camp 57,” a facility to house immigration detainees at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana, with Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (2nd R) and Attorney General Pam Bondi (2nd L) on September 3, 2025. (Photo by Gerald Herbert / POOL / AFP) (Photo by GERALD HERBERT/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Angola, the former Louisiana plantation that became one of the most brutal penitentiaries in the country, is now housing migrant detainees as part of President Trump’s mass deportation scheme. Attorney General Pam Bondi and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem personally visited the new facility, which officials are already turning into a meme: “Louisiana Lockup.”
The 2020 Election Rolls on and Jan. 6 Never Ends
In the background, the creation of a revisionist history of the 2020 election that can be used for further retaliation continues unabated. Just this week:
House Republicans established a new subcommittee helmed by Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) to reinvestigate the Jan. 6 attack.
The Trump DOJ has been seeking access to voting machines in Missouri that were used during the 2020 election. At least two county clerks have been contacted by DOJ official Andrew McCoy “Mac” Warner, a former West Virginia secretary of state, according to a memo shared with election officials and first obtained by the Missouri Independent via a public records request.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) is headlining a “gun rights” event with a high-profile Jan. 6 rioter, TPM’s Hunter Walker reports.
Footnote of the Day
In her ruling that the Trump administration’s attack on Harvard is unconstitutional, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs returned fire from the Supreme Court on behalf of all federal judges:
Quote of the Day
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo on ending all vaccine mandates: "Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery."
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) signaled on Wednesday that he would oppose any effort to have the Senate consider a new nominee to replace Lisa Cook, whom President Trump fired from the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors last month a few days after MAGA influencer-turned-Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte announced he had referred supposed allegations of mortgage fraud against Cook to the Justice Department. Cook is just one of three of Trump’s political (or, in Cook’s case, apolitical) enemies whom Pulte has claimed to have found evidence of “mortgage fraud” against in recent months.
Texas’ top law enforcement official is set to appear alongside a man known as the “Lectern Guy” who served prison time for being among the crowds that broke into the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 to protest President Donald Trump’s election loss.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The 19th.
For months, President Donald Trump’s base and congressional Republicans have fought over the release of files and documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, the late disgraced financier and convicted sex offender.
But Wednesday, Epstein’s survivors took the floor.
Over a dozen survivors of Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell gathered at the U.S. Capitol, first for a nonpartisan rally hosted by the organization World Without Exploitation and then at a news conference hosted by a trio of lawmakers uniting across the political spectrum to push for more transparency.
“What once kept us silent now fuels that fire and the power of our voice,” said Epstein survivor Jess Michaels. “We are not the footnotes in some infamous predator’s tabloid article. We are the experts and the subjects of this story. We are the proof that fear did not break us.”
Survivors, their lawyers and advocates came to the Capitol asking for three main things: a full release of the Epstein files, justice for survivors and no presidential pardons or concessions for Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year federal prison sentence after pleading guilty to sex trafficking charges.
One big threat that looms over free and fair elections for president is that a tie in the Electoral College or a disputed race gets thrown to the House. That could be a real dispute or, far more likely, a manufactured dispute as part of stealing the presidency. Critically, in this situation, the House does not vote as a majority. It votes by state delegation and the assumption is that the GOP holds the majority of state delegations because of their advantage in low-population Republican states. That’s all true and it leads to lots of bad scenarios. But it’s worth focusing on because it’s not a total done deal. This 2023 piece from the Kyle Kondik at the Center for Politics at UVA goes through the different delegations and the possibilities in each one. A bit of luck and focus could close off this path to a stolen presidency.
