We are now almost to $430,000 ($428,583)! The momentum builds! Can we get to $440,000 by the end of the day? Click here!!!!!!!
We really need to pull out all the stops now. Today is the end of the third week of this year’s annual TPM Journalism Fund drive. We need to get to $425,000 by the end of the day to stay on track. We’re currently at $409,743. If you’ve been considering it please make today the day you join us. It’s super quick. Just click right here.
While Texas Republicans threaten elected state Democrats with arrest for trying to resist President Trump’s power grab via their state’s congressional maps, the Trump administration is trying to plant some mid-decade gerrymandering seeds in Indiana, too.
Continue reading “Trump Admin Takes Its Desperate Midcycle Redistricting Scheme to Indiana”I wanted to flag for you what I think is an important shift in the assumptions and behaviors of key institutionalist or middle-of-the-road Democrats. Here I don’t mean ideology so much as behavior, the critical spectrum between fight and norms.
Four days ago, Chuck Schumer or, most likely, someone on his social media team, posted a screen shot of an AP headline that read “Senate heads home with no deal to speed confirmations as irate Trump tells Schumer to ‘go to hell.'”
President Trump’s firing of Commissioner of Labor Statistics Erika McEntarfer last Friday brought into laser focus how willing he is to manipulate federal data in his favor.
McEntarfer’s dismissal came just hours after a monthly jobs report showed the labor market performed more sluggishly than previously reported. The revisions were large, but not without precedent. Trump’s decision to target McEntarfer, however, will undoubtedly make the history books.
Continue reading “In Firing the BLS Chief, Trump Escalates His Administration’s War on Data”A congressional watchdog agency, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), published a post Wednesday morning reaffirming that “pocket rescissions” — a supposed loophole that the Trump White House thinks it can use to seize Congress’ power of the purse — are illegal.
Continue reading “Congressional Watchdog Publishes Aptly Timed Reminder That WH Budget-Slashing Scheme is Illegal”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Some of Trump’s judicial nominees have refused in confirmation hearings to acknowledge that the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, striking down state bans on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional, was correctly decided. According to an analysis by JP Collins at the legal website Balls and Strikes, Eric Tung, who Trump nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, said only, “the Supreme Court granted such a right.” William Mercer, a nominee to the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana, said Obergefell is “binding precedent,” but declined to “grade the Supreme Court.”
As Collins points out, these verbal gymnastics to avoid saying the case was correctly decided mirror those of Trump’s first term Supreme Court nominees who said Roe v. Wade was precedent but would not say it was correctly decided — and then voted to overturn it.
One might say marriage equality is different from abortion. Obergefell is just 10 years old, and Roe was decades old. But the most important feature that both decisions share is the enmity of the Christian right, and its determination to overturn them, no matter how many years or decades it takes.
Even before the court decided Obergefell in 2015, the Christian right was already planning to treat it just like Roe. The Supreme Court’s 1973 decision, they argued, was not the end of the abortion issue but rather the beginning. They used money, media, political might, religion, and relentless organizing to use abortion to drive politics and shape the judiciary. Their plans for Obergefell and LGBTQ rights are no different.
In this New York Times story about the Washington Litigation Group, one of several new law firms formed to challenge hundreds of lawless Trump administration actions and policies, we learn that one of the members of the firm’s steering committee, Peter Keisler, was a founder of the Federalist Society and a former George W. Bush DOJ official. “We’ve just never before seen this kind of systematic effort by a government to use all possible levers of government power against perceived opponents,” Keisler told the Times about the need for the new firm.
Keisler’s background — and his trajectory from Federalist Society founder to Trump critic — is actually even more interesting than the story reveals. Bush had nominated Keisler to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 2006, but he was never confirmed (the filibuster was still in place for judicial nominations, and then Democrats retook the Senate). Democrats resisted putting Keisler on D.C. appellate court, often a steppingstone to the Supreme Court, in part because the Bush administration reportedly saw Keisler, a former clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy and Judge Robert Bork, as potential high court material. Some very intriguing alternative history right there.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has written to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, raising questions about why a three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit has maintained an administrative stay on contempt proceedings initiated by the district court’s chief judge, James Boasberg, in the case challenging the administration’s disappearance of Venezuelan detainees to the CECOT prison in El Salvador. The stay remained in place as Senate Republicans confirmed top Justice Department official Emil Bove, who had, according to a whistleblower report, urged line attorneys to say “fuck you” to district court orders. “If a court of the United States was used to stall contempt proceedings, in order to create a window for Senate confirmation of an individual central to those contempt proceedings…it would be a significant blow to the independence and integrity of the Judicial Branch,” Whitehouse wrote.
At the United Nations, U.S. delegates have repeatedly condemned “gender ideology” or “reinforced the administration’s support for language that ‘recognizes women are biologically female and men are biologically male’” since Trump took office in January, ProPublica reports. It is part of a broader pattern of Trump officials attacking transgender rights internationally, even to the point of objecting to the use of the word “gender.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is seeking to contract with an advertising firm to help it “dominate” social media with a recruitment blitz aimed at Gen Z, with a goal of hiring more than 14,000 people to work for the agency, according to 404 Media.
The El Paso Times has aerial photographs of the non-public construction of a new 5,000-bed ICE immigrant detention facility under construction at Fort Bliss in Texas. Acquisition Logistics LLC, a Virginia company, was awarded a $231,878,229 firm-fixed-price contract “to establish and operate” the facility, the newspaper reports. In other (lack of) transparency news, in Florida, TPM’s Hunter Walker finds that contract and other public documents relating to the Alligator Alcatraz prison have vanished, possibly illegally. And in other grotesque ICE prison camp news, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem yesterday announced an Alligator Alcatraz look-alike in Indiana — the “Speedway Slammer.”
The Health and Human Services Secretary has taken direct aim at health and humans by cancelling $500 million in federal contracts to develop vaccines using mRNA technology — like the vaccines against COVID-19 and vaccines in development to combat bird flu and other respiratory viruses.
Former Bureau of Prisons officials are angry about the transfer of convicted Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell to a minimum security camp in Texas. “To relocate a sex offender serving 20 years to a country club setting is offensive to victims and others serving similar crimes,” Robert Hood, a former Bureau of Prisons chief of internal affairs, told NBC News.
As expected, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) has issued subpoenas in the Epstein saga, notably to Hillary and Bill Clinton, and former FBI directors James Comey and Robert Mueller — part of the MAGA effort to deflect attention from Trump’s connections to Epstein and to blame Democrats for, well, everything. Notably, Axios notes, Alex Acosta, the former federal prosecutor who negotiated the 2008 “sweetheart” plea deal for Epstein in Florida and later became Labor Secretary in Trump’s first administration, is not on the subpoena list. He is, however, on Newsmax’s board of directors.
The Office of Personnel Management has authorized the rehiring of 450 meteorologists, hydrologists, and radar technicians who were axed from the National Weather Service by the Department of Government Efficiency.
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
If you’re lucky enough to have missed it, here’s the skinny on the Sydney Sweeney news cycle from hell: American Eagle put out an ad starring the actress that features a jeans/genes double entendre (“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring,” she says in the ad. “My jeans are blue.”). Cue an online freakout from people arguing that the ad is a Nazi/white supremacist/eugenicist dogwhistle.
Continue reading “The Sydney Sweeney News Cycle Proves That Democrats Simply Can’t Win”The White House has been making noises about President Trump being concerned or unhappy about starvation in Gaza. After his comments over the weekend, Axios reported today that the U.S. is mulling a “take over” of aid provision in Gaza because Israel isn’t up to the task. But there are no specifics and no timeline. VP JD Vance also made some generic comments that Israel should increase the pace of aid. But the issue really has nothing to do with increasing the pace of aid or getting more money from donor countries in the region. The issue is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a U.S.-based non-profit created back in the February to take over food aid from the United Nations and the various NGOs that work with the UN. It wasn’t in addition. The UN and the existing NGOs were booted out and the GHF took over. It’s executive chairman is Johnnie Moore, a U.S. evangelical leader and businessman who started his career as the campus minister and senior VP at Liberty University.
Continue reading “To Feed Gaza, the UN and the NGOs Have to Be Allowed Back in”Public records related to Florida’s so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” migrant detention camp have essentially disappeared into what one expert called a “black hole.” Over 90 pages of contracts reviewed by TPM were removed from an online transparency database operated by the state; in other cases, public records requests have been met with what an academic called “ghosting” and outright denials. Multiple experts told TPM the handling of documents related to the project is “disturbing” and may be a violation of state law.
Continue reading “There Is an Information Blackout at Florida’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Migrant Detention Camp “This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The 19th.
Texas Democrats fled the state over the weekend to stop a Republican proposal redrawing the state’s congressional maps. But their exit has also temporarily halted other conservative priorities for the special session — including new abortion restrictions and a “bathroom bill” that would ban transgender people from using public restrooms that match their gender.
When Democratic members of the Texas House of Representatives left the state this weekend, it denied lawmakers the two-thirds quorum needed to proceed with legislative work. That move came after a House committee voted to approve the new congressional maps, a plan — crafted on President Donald Trump’s request — that would likely flip five Democratic seats to favor Republicans. The redistricting effort has set off a national arms race as Democratic governors, including in New York and California, discuss changing their states’ congressional maps heading into the 2026 midterms.
Gov. Greg Abbott has threatened state Democrats with removal from office if they don’t return to Austin. But it’s not clear if or how he could enforce that threat. Breaking quorum is not a crime, and whether those lawmakers could be forced out of their seats is a question likely to be settled in the courts.
Although the redistricting effort has taken center stage in the ongoing special legislative session, Abbott tasked lawmakers with a host of other priorities. Time may be running out: The special session began July 21, and ends after no more than 30 days. Already, some are considering the possibility of lawmakers returning to the capital for a second special session to tackle now derailed items like further abortion restrictions and the anti-trans bill.
Continue reading “How Anti-Abortion and Anti-Trans Bills Are Impacted by Texas Democrats Fleeing the State”
