Dennis Dahmer was 12 years old in January 1966 when Klansmen stormed his family home and set it on fire, murdering his father, Vernon. He still remembers the shootout; he remembers watching his father die from smoke inhalation. The trauma lingers to this day, 60 years later.
Vernon Dahmer had been a fixture in the African American community near Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He ran a successful local grocery, and, after the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, obtained the right to register voters and collect poll taxes, which were still in effect, at his store. Members of the local White Citizens’ Council started to appear at the family farm, warning his father to stop, Dahmer told TPM, but that didn’t deter him. He recorded a radio announcement in January 1966 offering to cover the cost of poll taxes for African Americans who couldn’t afford to pay. The KKK attacked the next day.
“He would always say to us, ‘do something, dammit,’” Dahmer recalled. “‘Don’t just stand there.’”
With all that in mind, Dennis Dahmer decided late last year to listen in to oral arguments in Callais v. Louisiana, the Supreme Court case that would ultimately gut the remnants of the Voting Rights Act. The law had provided a framework for protecting minority votes in the South for decades.
“It was apparent to me that they had already made up their mind — talking about the MAGA ones for sure,” he said. “They were just laying the groundwork to justify what they were going to do.”
Following up on the points outlined in the immediately previous post, this evening House leadership abruptly canceled a war powers vote because they realized it might pass.
All power is unitary. Every victory or defeat in one area strengthens or weakens you everywhere else.
Choking on the blistering injustice of the Callais decision, even normie Democrats are starting to make noise about drastically remaking the Supreme Court.
It is important to see a few different developments coming together today up on Capitol Hill. As you likely saw there was a mini-revolt today among Senate Republicans over Trump’s slush fund and, to a secondary degree, over the ballroom. Because they wouldn’t agree to back the slush fund, they just left and went on recess. Not exactly a huge profile in courage. But it’s also at least delayed Trump’s new ICE funding bill. The ballroom, the slush fund, the ongoing retribution tour — these are all Trump’s big obsessions right now, as I noted this morning. But in something like a meta-ten-car pile-up, the different self-soothing efforts are bumping into each other. Trump just knee-capped Sen. Cassidy in Louisiana (he lost his primary) and Sen. Cornyn (endorsed primary challenger Ken Paxton). Two careers ended. Two senators who are really embittered. Trump also blindsided other Republican senators when he endorsed Paxton. They had no advance warning. Totally out of the blue. Party discipline is a thing. But you do it wisely. Trump’s made Cassidy, Tillis and perhaps now even Cornyn into chaos agents going into the midterms.
The point is, the retribution tour is colliding with the building spree and the Deserving Fascists Slush Fund. None of them have anything to do with helping the GOP in the midterms. The wheels are coming off.
“We will pick up where we left off,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) told reporters after a lengthy private Republican conference lunch on Thursday, which reportedly ended with Thune telling Senate Republicans that they were being sent home to start their Memorial Day recess early.
The House quickly followed suit, dropping its plans for a Friday vote on the reconciliation package that includes funding for immigration enforcement. As of this morning, the Senate was scheduled to send the legislation to the House after a vote in the upper chamber today.
But President Trump’s vanity and corruption scuttled those plans, according to multiple reports from Capitol Hill this afternoon.
Some Senate Republicans were already wary about including about $1 billion in additional Secret Service and White House funding tied to Trump’s ballroom project in the upcoming reconciliation package that is expected to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as Border Patrol into 2029. A handful had indicated publicly that they wouldn’t vote in favor of the immigration package if it also included the ballroom funding, and more, according to reports, supposedly privately had heartburn about it.
The Senate Parliamentarian ruled that the ballroom proposal could not be included in the package and, as of Wednesday, Senate Republican leadership had decided to remove the provision from the bill in order to pass the immigration funding. (Trump went ballistic, of course, and used his Truth Social platform to call on Republicans to punish the parliamentarian.)
But then Trump’s comedically corrupt settlement agreement between his own IRS, which he sued, and his Justice Department came to light. The settlement purported to establish a $1.7 billion slush fund — dubbed the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” by the DOJ — to be used to compensate people who feel they’ve been wronged by the judicial system, aka Trump’s allies and supporters who were charged as part of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and the broader effort to overturn the election, as well as people who assisted with Trump’s various other misdeeds. Some Senate Republicans, during a hearing with acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, vocalized concerns about who might be eligible for compensation. Specifically, they had concerns about whether those who attacked police officers on Jan. 6 would qualify. Blanche would not say for sure. Politico reported on Wednesday that there might even be enough GOP support for a planned Democratic amendment targeting the slush fund to be attached to the reconciliation package.
During a private briefing between GOP senators, Blanche and other DOJ officials on Thursday, Blanche reportedly faced a grilling from Senate Republicans about the slush fund of taxpayer dollars, which will have to be approved by Congress. Per NBC News:
The Justice Department has said it plans to make $1.776 billion in taxpayer money available for the fund. Given Democratic opposition, the only method of passing that through Congress would be to add it to the immigration “reconciliation” package, which can pass with only Republican votes.
Republicans were apparently specifically trying to nail Blanche down on potential guardrails for the fund’s disbursement. Blanche reportedly committed behind closed doors that settlement funds would not be given to those who assaulted police officers on Jan. 6 — something he was not willing to do publicly. Senate Republicans also received a one-page fact sheet from the White House that outlined details like where the money would come from, who would be in charge of pay outs and who might be eligible. (The memo reportedly did not mention that people who assaulted law enforcement would be ineligible.) Per NBC News:
“This is about seeking accountability for all Americans who were victims of lawfare and weaponization: millions of Americans whose online speech was censored at the behest of the government, parents silenced at schoolboards, Senators whose records were secretly subpoenaed, churchgoers targeted by the FBI, and so on,” the fact sheet said.
“There is no partisan restriction: Democrats can submit claims, too,” according to DOJ.
As he exited the meeting Thursday, Thune was candid with reporters about the lack of progress that was made during the meeting and the roadblock the slush fund has created for the passage of the immigration reconciliation package.
“They need to help with this issue, because we have a lot of members who are concerned obviously about the timing but also about the substance,” Thune said, referencing the slush fund and the help he needs from the administration to organize his conference around it. Per Politico:
Asked about the internal furor over the settlement fund, Thune told reporters that “it makes everything way harder than it should be” and that it “would have been nice if they had consulted” senators.
— Nicole LaFond
Blanche Clearly Struggling With the Assaulting Police Question
REID: You're the nation's top law enforcement official. Would you be okay with people who were convicted of hurting police getting taxpayer money?BLANCHE: Just to be clear, people who hurt police get money all the timeREID: 🤨
Semafor's @burgessev.bsky.social reporting the White House is privately threatening to Senate Republicans that he will veto Republicans' party-line reconciliation bill that funds ICE and CBP if they block funding for his ballroom or his slush fund
First of Many Ex-Trump Officials Running for Office Wins Dem Primary
An ex-federal prosecutor who said he resigned from the Justice Department after Trump began weaponizing it against his perceived political enemies, Zach Dembo, won the Democratic primary in the race to represent Kentucky’s 6th House District and replace Rep. Andy Barr (R-KY), who’s running for Senate.
Dembo is part of a slate of ex-DOJ attorneys and other former Trump administration officials who launched Democratic bids for office this year after leaving or being kicked out of the administration. Fired-FBI official David Sundberg is running for Congress in Maryland. An ex-Capitol police officer who fought off rioters during the January 6 insurrection is also running for a Maryland congressional seat. And former DOJ deputy to prosecutor Jack Smith is running for Congress in Virginia.
Dembo worked as a U.S. Navy JAG before heading to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. He worked in policy for Kentucky’s Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear before returning to the DOJ as a prosecutor in Lexington.
“When Donald Trump started using your Justice Department to go after his political enemies, I resigned,” Dembo said in a campaign ad released earlier this month.
Dembo’s chance at beating his GOP opponent in November looks like a long shot right now, according to the Cook Political Report, which rates Kentucky’s 6th District as “solidly Republican.” According to state data, registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats in the district by just over 1,000 voters.
— Layla A. Jones
Tariff Watch: Court Denies Admin’s Request for Stay After Blocking New Levies
The Trump administration has to stop collecting its newest set of tariffs, refund the importers who sued the government, and carry out a court’s orders blocking the tariffs even as it appeals the decision.
After the administration scrambled to replace Trump’s widespread tariffs, which were blocked by the Supreme Court, with some new levies under a different statute, a couple of small businesses and two dozen states sued the government afresh. In early May, the Court of International Trade struck down those new import taxes. The court ordered the administration to repay the harmed plaintiffs, which were the small businesses and the state of Oregon. As expected, the administration immediately appealed and asked for a stay of judgement in the meantime. Wednesday evening, the court denied the administration’s request for a stay while it appeals the ruling, dealing another blow to Trump’s unceasing attempt at reordering global trade.
Here’s a story you should pay close attention to. You may have heard of the “Broadview Six” (later reduced to “Four”). It was a case focused on prominent local Democrats protesting at a Chicago-area ICE facility. (One was congressional candidate and influencer Kat Abughazaleh, who lost her primary this spring.) It was a classic over-charging case: A brief chaotic moment around the vehicle of an ICE employee ratcheted up to be a federal felony conspiracy charge. The case has been moving toward trial for like eight months and it was scheduled to go to trial next week.
For the last month, however, questions about the underlying grand jury proceeding have been roiling the case. First that prompted the government to drop the felony conspiracy charge rather than show the judge the grand jury testimony. (It thus went from a felony trial to a federal trial on one misdemeanor charge.) The judge finally saw those transcripts Tuesday night. That led to a closed-door emergency hearing this morning. In rapid succession today, the remaining charges were dropped and Chicago U.S. Attorney Andrew S. Boutros appeared in court personally to apologize to the judge and deny all knowledge of what had happened.
Hello, and welcome back to another bleak edition of The Franchise! (How’s that for an opening line?)
As the midterm primary season heats up, so do the attacks on election administration, which we will get into more below.
But first …
The distressing red state scramble to completely gut congressional district maps and gerrymander away Black electoral power in the South continues in the aftermath of Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court ruling that struck down Louisiana’s second Black-majority congressional district and has set off a depressing race to redraw majority-minority districts across the Old Confederacy.
This has been implicit in various points I’ve made in recent Editors’ Blog posts. I want to make it more explicit. What’s occupying Donald Trump’s time right now? The big items are the Ballroom, the Deserving Fascists Slush Fund, the revenge tour against merely 95% loyal members of Congress. We could add Trump’s Iran War which is keeping gas prices sky high and creating other shortages. But that’s kind of baked in from a decision Trump made more than two months ago. It’s damaging him but it’s a tar pit he’s already stuck in. The things he’s most focused on, the obsessions are things that are either irrelevant to the midterm elections or are playing central roles driving down his public support. The plane is losing altitude fast but he’s in the cockpit grabbing the controls and trying to steepen the descent.
The most important thing to know about the DNC “autopsy” report on the 2024 election is, who cares? Most of the commentary on this document gives the impression that this is some meaningful disclosure of the inside dope, what really happened, etc. But it’s not. It just the take of the guys they chose to write a report. No more significant or revealing than the million other takes on the 2024 election we’ve all read.
Todd Blanche is basically just making 30-second ads, whether he knows it or not. When asked whether he’s okay with cash bonanzas for people convicted of attacking police officers was his reply, the acting attorney general replied, “Just to be clear, people who hurt police get money all the time …”
