While administration officials went from side-stepping the question to openly embracing the potential that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers might be being deployed (illegally) to polling places in November, President Trump himself has yet to speak on the topic — whether by design, as ICE’s popularity plummeted earlier this year, or not.
Continue reading “Trump Alludes to Ominous Plans When Asked About ICE At the Polls”South Carolina
“We are the most gerrymandered Republican state in the country already,” said South Carolina Sen. Majority Leader Shane Massey (R), announcing his opposition to a new post-Callais redistricting effort which went down to defeat, for now, a short time later. Massey made both political and moral arguments against the move. We shouldn’t underestimate the political motivation. Democrat Joe Cunningham won the 1st district in the wave election of 2018. Nancy Mace defeated him by less than a single percentage point two years later. Her district then had to be significantly fortified with Republican voters to help her keep her seat. Point being, there are a lot of Democratic voters in Jim Clyburn’s 6th district. Spread them out into neighboring districts and you’ve spread the gerrymander so tight it can just snap. And those snaps happen in wave elections.
With the Corrupt Supreme Court, It’s Calvinball All the Way Down
Some of the most consequential and trust-shattering Supreme Court decisions of late have been ones that could have been predicted decades ago. Certainly that’s the case with the Dobbs decision. Callais doesn’t have quite as long a history, in terms of attempts to overturn the precedent. But certainly it’s been in the cards for at least a decade. Still, it’s some of the smaller decisions that tell us just who and what this corrupt court is. Kate Riga notes one of them here: Conservatives on the Supreme Court have previously invoked the “Purcell principle” to rule that a change couldn’t be made to districts on the “eve” of an election. Now it’s fine to do so in states like Louisiana and Alabama where primary elections are actually already underway and tens of thousands of cast ballots must be invalidated.
The message is simple: there are no rules. Only power. It reminds me of my hand tool woodworking shop. There are a big selection of tools. And it’s just a matter of what helps the GOP and the Court in that particular moment. In a way it’s clarifying. Even helpful.
The Exit of This Trump Administration Official Could Threaten Abortion Access Nationwide
This story was originally reported by Shefali Luthra and Barbara Rodriguez of The 19th. Meet Shefali and Barbara and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
Food and Drug Commissioner Marty Makary’s resignation creates a new opening for anti-abortion activists to push for national restrictions on the procedure — and in particular, limit the availability of a key abortion drug. The move comes as anti-abortion groups became angry over what they viewed as his agency’s failure to curb access to the drug.
Makary’s resignation, which multiple outlets reported Tuesday, followed reports of Trump’s growing dissatisfaction with the commissioner. According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump was frustrated by an FDA decision not to approve multiple flavored vape products, which Makary worried might particularly appeal to children. Trump pressed Makary to approve the products, calling flavored vape availability a key issue for younger supporters. After Trump’s intervention, those products received federal approval.
Continue reading “The Exit of This Trump Administration Official Could Threaten Abortion Access Nationwide”Kevin Warsh Confirmed as Fed Governor as Powell Stays on the Board
After what may go down as the most controversy-laden confirmation process in Federal Reserve Bank history, conservative economist Kevin Warsh was confirmed Tuesday to a 14-year term as a Federal Reserve Governor, clearing the way for his appointment as chair. Democrat Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) joined Republicans in a 51-45 vote. Current Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s term ends on Friday.
Warsh’s arduous journey included a blockade from a member of his own political party, deep skepticism about his own independence from Trump, and ongoing questions about his vast personal wealth and obscured investments. His candidacy was shrouded in distrust, mainly from Democrats, because of Trump’s open attempts to force the U.S. central bank to enact monetary policy based on his desires to lower borrowing costs rather than on economic data and inflation risks.
And some economists and other experts have highlighted what they view as Warsh’s flip-flopping stance on monetary policy as Warsh’s signal to Trump that he’ll be an amenable central bank head.
“He, more than others, has a set of policy views and macroeconomic views that are very correlated to, call it, political, presidential, electoral outcomes,” Skanda Amarnath, who leads an economic policy organization called Employ America, told TPM in February.
Representing an unprecedented threat to Fed independence, Trump has, so far unsuccessfully, tried to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook, and let his Department of Justice launch a sham investigation into Powell for criminal misconduct pertaining to costs of a Federal Reserve building renovation project. Because of that investigation, retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), a member of the Senate Banking Committee, refused to vote to confirm Warsh until the DOJ dropped its investigation. During Warsh’s first Banking Committee hearing, Trump’s words were repeatedly used against him as senators from both parties pressed the nominee on whether he could operate independently from the president. Warsh said he would.
And when U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro kind of dropped the case — adding in a social post that she would not “hesitate to restart a criminal investigation” — Tillis dropped his blockade and Warsh’s path to lead the central bank was clear.
Notably, current Chair Powell has said he will stay on the board as a Fed governor after his term as chair ends. Powell’s governor term lasts until early 2028, and he said he will remain on the board until the investigation into the Fed building renovations are “well and truly over, with transparency and finality.”
How the Trump Admin Tried to Turn Foreign Aid Funds Into Deportation Cash
On the first day of his second-term in office, Donald Trump issued an executive order that caught many off-guard: all foreign aid would be subject to an immediate review.
Continue reading “How the Trump Admin Tried to Turn Foreign Aid Funds Into Deportation Cash”There’s an Easy Way to Tell That Trump’s Judicial Nominees Don’t Belong On the Bench
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
President Donald Trump berated Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett on Sunday, in another social media rant in which he accused the justices of being insufficiently loyal to him. “They were appointed by me,” said Trump, yet they “voted against me” in the tariffs case—and, he predicted, they “will be ruling against us on Birthright Citizenship,” too.
According to Trump, Republican justices on the Supreme Court “often go out of their way” to oppose him in order to show how “independent” they are. He considers this a mistake. “It’s really OK for them to be loyal to the person that appointed them to ‘almost’ the highest position in the land, that is, a Justice of the United States Supreme Court,” he wrote.
Continue reading “There’s an Easy Way to Tell That Trump’s Judicial Nominees Don’t Belong On the Bench”Trump Officials Claim The War That Isn’t Happening Now Costs $29 Billion
Acting Department of Defense Comptroller Jay Hurst on Tuesday said the cost of the Iran war is now closer to a total of $29 billion.
“The joint staff team and the comptroller team are constantly looking at that estimate, and so now we think it’s closer to 29,” Hurst said as he testified in front of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee.
Continue reading “Trump Officials Claim The War That Isn’t Happening Now Costs $29 Billion”Trump Uses Leak Probes to Target Press Freedoms
‘Treason’
Rattled by leaks from within his own administration about the Iran War, President Trump has directed acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to target reporters and news organizations who are the recipients of the leaks, according to new reporting.
“In one meeting, Trump passed a stack of news articles he and other senior officials thought threatened national security to Blanche with a sticky note on it that said ‘treason,'” an administration official told the WSJ, which was itself the recipient of a grand jury subpoena in a leak case.
Rather than abide by longstanding DOJ policy that journalists should only be subpoenaed as a last resort when other investigative tools have come up empty, Blanche has been eager to follow Trump’s direction.
“If it means sending a subpoena to the reporter, that’s exactly what we should do and that’s exactly what we will be doing,” Blanche said in a press conference last month. It came the day after Trump had complained about news reports on the rescue of a U.S. airman downed in Iran: “We’re going to go to the media company that released it, and we’re going to say, ‘national security; give it up or go to jail.'”
The combination of Trump accusing reporters of “treason” for exercising their First Amendment rights and eagerness to see them jailed with Blanche’s willingness to go along strongly suggests that they are using leak probes in part as a pretext for targeting independent media.
More Questions Than Answers
The reporting so far is rather murky on the scope of the Trump assault on press freedoms.
The WSJ revealed for the first time yesterday that it and its reporters received grand jury subpoenas dated March 4 for records related to a Feb. 23 story it published titled “Pentagon Flags Risks of a Major Operation Against Iran.”
But despite its self-reveal, the WSJ story raised as many questions as it answered, among them:
- When did the WSJ receive the subpoenas? If it was back in March, why did it wait more than two months to disclose the existence of the subpoenas?
- Did all three reporters on the byline for Feb. 23 the story — Alexander Ward, Lara Seligman, and Shelby Holliday — receive subpoenas? The story implied they did, but didn’t say so explicitly.
- Is the WSJ seeking to quash the subpoenas? Even that wasn’t clear, with a spokesperson for the WSJ’s parent company Dow Jones saying vaguely: “We will vigorously oppose this effort to stifle and intimidate essential reporting.”
- Did Axios and the WaPo, which each published similar stories on Feb. 23, also receive grand jury subpoenas? When asked, neither outlet would comment to the WSJ.
- Did the New York Times receive a subpoena over its April 7 article that also reportedly angered Trump? When asked, the NYT would not comment to the WSJ.
In a follow-up story that didn’t address whether it had also been subpoenaed, the NYT reported that the WSJ inquiry “is one of multiple leak investigations being conducted by the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia.” The story did not indicate whether other news outlets had been targeted in those leak investigations.
The WSJ article leaves the impression that it’s not alone in being targeted: “In recent months, prosecutors have sent subpoenas to media organizations as well as to email and phone providers seeking information in leak inquiries, according to people familiar with the requests.” (The other high-profile leak case involving journalists is that of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, which went further than a subpoena to include a search of her home, car, and phone.)
The WSJ did not say whether its email and phone providers had been subpoenaed, though might not know if they had been.
Trump DOJ Watch
- John A. Sarcone III, the top federal prosecutor in the Northern District of New York, has been found to have engaged in professional misconduct by a committee of the state appeals court. Neither the details of his misconduct nor the sanction against him were made public, but the disciplinary action came in response to a complaint by a watchdog group. Sarcone was at one point last year the acting U.S. attorney in Albany until the district judges declined to extended his term. In one of the Trump DOJ’s clashes with the judiciary over U.S. attorneys, Sarcone has been running the office as first assistant without a U.S. attorney in place.
- Former FBI Director James Comey took the relatively unusual step of doing a national TV interview while under indictment, ostensibly to promote his new crime novel. He didn’t comment at length about his new indictment, but provided extensive commentary on the weaponization of the Trump DOJ, including the concocted investigation in Florida of a “grand conspiracy” against Trump: “They found an 81-year-old guy, Joe diGenova, to come back to government for the first time since Duran Duran was on the charts and lead an investigation.”
- Alabama Republican Attorney General Steve Marshall has seized on the Trump DOJ’s politicized indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center to launch his own investigation of the civil rights group. He sounds very measured and sober about it: “Thanks to the U.S. Justice Department’s action to deal with the S.P.L.C., the state’s efforts have now received a shot in the arm,” Marshall said in a statement. “We look forward to learning more about the inner workings of an organization that we have long believed was rotten, but until recently, has been impervious.”
SCOTUS Goes From Bad to Worse
The Roberts Courts’ hypocritical, inconsistent, politicized, and unexplained decision yesterday to effectively allow Alabama to eliminate at least one of its majority-Black congressional districts and run House elections on a new map was the cherry on top of the shit sundae of Louisiana v. Callais.
The timing, just a week before the scheduled primary, was especially egregious considering the court’s erratic history of applying the Purcell principle — its own oft-cited maxim that federal courts shouldn’t intervene too close to elections — but there’s lots here that further delegitimizes the court:
- Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck (writing yesterday before the Supreme Court acted in the Alabama cases): “[G]ranting emergency relief in the Alabama cases, in particular, would bespeak blinding hypocrisy on the Court’s part—not only because it was this same Court that agreed with the district courts three years ago that Alabama had violated both the VRA and the Equal Protection Clause (in a majority opinion by Chief Justice Roberts), but because Justice Alito’s majority opinion in Callais labored mightily to distinguish that ruling—not to overrule it.”
- Reporter Ari Berman: “This is absolutely outrageous. SCOTUS reinstated Texas gerrymander 15 weeks before primary because they claimed it was too close to election to block it but now allowing Alabama to gerrymander one week before primary after trial court found map was intentionally discriminatory against Black voters.”
- Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, on how the court’s decision doesn’t just turn the Purcell principle on its head, it turns it on its head in this case: “Despite Black Voters’ win three years ago, which meant the Court found that the maps the state legislature had drawn illegally discriminated against them, the state went through an additional election cycle using those maps. Alabama had argued that any changes, sought in February ahead of a June primary, came too close to the election and violated the Purcell principle. … Meanwhile, the Supreme Court just made the mother of all changes in Alabama one week before the primary.”
Another Problem With Louisiana v. Callais
At the core of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion eviscerating the Voting Rights act is a statistical error that “would get your paper sent back to you with lots of red ink in statistics 101,” G. Elliott Morris writes:
The six Republican-appointed justices on the United States Supreme Court have found a magical solution to political polarization. All you have to do is take a partisan election result and subtract out the effects of party loyalty on the result.
…The problem is that in modern America, party isn’t a variable that operates independently of race. Rather, political party is largely downstream of one’s race. If you subtract the effects of political party from the analysis of polarization, you are subtracting away the very evidence of polarization you are trying to study!
The Shadow Docket for Dummies
Only the Best People: Kari Lake Edition
President Trump is nominating election-denier and VOA-destroyer Kari Lake as ambassador to Jamaica.
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
Supreme Court Unblocks Alabama’s Racially Discriminatory Map, Showing That Alito Was Lying
The Supreme Court on Monday lifted a stay on an old Alabama map that had been found to intentionally dilute Black voters, likely setting the state up to eliminate at least one Democratic district.
Continue reading “Supreme Court Unblocks Alabama’s Racially Discriminatory Map, Showing That Alito Was Lying”