The man who spearheaded the administration’s effort to remake the Department of Justice into Trump’s ideal is up for a hearing Tuesday morning before the Senate Judiciary Committee over his nomination to be a federal appeals court judge.
Emil Bove is a former Manhattan federal prosecutor who, until January, was a personal lawyer to President Trump in his criminal cases. He has served in various senior roles in the first months of the Trump DOJ, including associate deputy attorney general. Trump nominated Bove to a position on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
We expect much about his DOJ tenure to come up at the hearing. Follow along below.
I’m still trying to find out more about this. But as I do, I just wanted to put it on your radar because it’s completely crazy and epitomizes the Trump presidency. The National Science Foundation is already in the process of being gutted — in perhaps a not quite as drastic way as its peer biomedical agencies such as NIH and elsewhere. But out of the blue yesterday, word emerged that the Department of Housing and Urban Development is taking over the NSF’s building, evicting all of its more than 1,800 employees. Multiple NSF employees leaked word of this yesterday to journalist Dan Garisto. After Garisto reported the information on Bluesky I independently got word of this from NSF employees and now it’s been officially announced at a press conference by HUD Secretary Scott Turner, Gov. Glenn Youngkin and GSA Commissioner Michael Peters.
Adding to the wildness, the top floors of the building are, according to the AFGE Local 3403, going to be retrofitted into a kind of executive mansion for HUD Secretary Turner, including an executive suite, executive dining room, reserved parking for the Secretary’s five cars, exclusive use of an entire elevator, special space for his various assistants and a planned gym for the Secretary and his family. Turner wouldn’t be the only Secretary with nice office space. But this does sound like it’s on the extreme end of the spectrum. Equally eye-catching, there appears to be no plan for where the NSF staff will go.
With the President’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” there’s been a general assumption. It’s super, super unpopular. And, also, it doesn’t matter. It’s going to pass anyway. That assumption is very likely true. Perhaps they’ll hit some speed bumps that prevent the bill from passing in time for July 4th, as Trump wants and has demanded. But these kinds of bills tend to be “failure is not an option” type affairs. You have obstacles but they get crumpled like things that go under a steam roller or mashed up in an industrial trash compactor. That’s particularly the case in Trump’s second term, where hints of the old ungovernable GOP caucus get flattened when word comes from Trump that it’s over. But here we see again the central tension point of the Trump presidency: he owns, dominates and controls everything but public opinion.
That much of it is almost conventional wisdom at this point. The bill thing is really, really unpopular. Even the inside-DC sheets say as much. So Republicans are starting to do something we’re used to seeing Democrats do with some of their more aspirational policies. Which is basically this: You think it’s unpopular. But that’s just because you’re not polling it right.
This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
The Trump administration has launched a major reorganization of the U.S. fight against drug traffickers and other transnational criminal groups, setting out a strategy that would give new authority to the Department of Homeland Security and deepen the influence of the White House.
The administration’s plans, described in internal documents and by government officials, would reduce federal prosecutors’ control over investigations, shifting key decisions to a network of task forces jointly led by the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations, the primary investigative arm of DHS.
Officials said the plan to bring law enforcement agencies together in the new Homeland Security Task Forces has been driven primarily by President Donald Trump’s homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, who is closely overseeing the project’s implementation.
Current and former officials said the proposed reorganization would make it easier for senior officials like Miller to disregard norms that have long walled off the White House from active criminal investigations.
“To the administration’s credit, they are trying to break down barriers that are hard to break down,” said Adam W. Cohen, a career Justice Department attorney who was fired in March as head of the office that coordinates organized crime investigations involving often-competing federal agencies. “But you won’t have neutral prosecutors weighing the facts and making decisions about who to investigate,” he added of the task force plan. “The White House will be able to decide.”
The proposed reorganization would elevate the stature and influence of Homeland Security Investigations and Immigration and Customs Enforcement among law enforcement agencies, while continuing to push other agencies to pursue immigration-related crimes.
The task forces would at least formally subordinate the Drug Enforcement Administration to HSI and the FBI after half a century in which the DEA has been the government’s lead agency for narcotics enforcement.
The new task forces will seek “to end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States,” the order states. They will also aim to “end the scourge of human smuggling and trafficking, with a particular focus on such offenses involving children.”
Since that order was issued, the administration has proceeded with considerable secrecy. Some Justice Department officials who work on organized crime have been excluded from planning meetings, as have leaders of the DEA, people familiar with the process said.
A White House spokesperson, Abigail Jackson, did not comment on Miller’s role in directing the task force project or the secrecy of the process. “While the Biden Administration opened the border and looked the other way while Americans were put at risk,” she said, “the Trump Administration is taking action to dismantle cross-border human smuggling and trafficking and ensure the use of all available law enforcement tools to faithfully execute immigration laws and to Make America Safe Again.”
The task force project was described in interviews with current and former officials who have been briefed on it. ProPublica also reviewed documents about the implementation of the task forces, including a briefing paper prepared for Cabinet-level officials on the president’s Homeland Security Council.
The Homeland Security Task Forces will take a “coordinated, whole-of-government approach” to combatting transnational criminal groups, the paper states. They will also draw support from state and local police forces and U.S. intelligence agencies.
Until now, the government has coordinated that same work through a Justice Department program established by President Ronald Reagan, the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces — which the Trump administration is shutting down.
Known by the ungainly acronym OCDETF (pronounced “oh-suh-def”), the $550-million program is above all an incentive system: To receive funding, different agencies (including the DEA, the FBI and HSI) must come together to propose investigations, which are then vetted and approved by prosecutor-led OCDETF teams.
The agents are required to include a financial investigation of the criminal activity, typically with help from the Treasury Department, and they often recruit support from state and local police. The OCDETF intelligence center, located in the northern Virginia suburbs, manages the only federal database in which different law-enforcement agencies share their raw investigative files.
While officials describe OCDETF as an imperfect structure, they also say it has become a crucial means of law enforcement cooperation. Its mandate was expanded under the Biden and first Trump administrations to encompass all types of organized crime, not just drug trafficking.
As recently as a few months ago, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, declared that OCDETF would play a central role in stopping illegal immigration, drug trafficking and street gangs. He even suggested that it investigate the governments of so-called sanctuary cities for obstructing immigration enforcement.
But just weeks after Blanche’s announcement, the administration informed OCDETF officials their operations would be shut down by the end of the fiscal year in September. In a letter to Democratic senators on June 23, the Justice Department confirmed that the Homeland Security Task Forces would absorb OCDETF’s “mission and resources” but did not explain how the new structure would take charge of the roughly 5,000 investigations OCDETF now oversees.
“These were not broken programs,” said a former Homeland Security official who, like others, would only discuss the administration’s plans on condition of anonymity. “If you wanted to build them out and make sure that the immigration side of things got more importance, you could have done that. You did not have to build a new wheel.”
Officials also cited other concerns about the administration’s plan, including whether the new task force system will incorporate some version of the elaborate safeguards OCDETF has used to persuade law enforcement agencies to share their case files in its intelligence database. Under those rules, OCDETF analysts must obtain permission from the agency that provided the records before sharing them with others.
Many officials said they worried that the new task forces seem to be abandoning OCDETF’s incentive structure. OCDETF funds are conditioned on multiple agencies working together on important cases; officials said the monies will now be distributed to law enforcement agencies directly and without the requirement that they collaborate.
“They are taking away a lot of the organization that the government uses to attack organized crime,” a Justice Department official said. “If you want to improve something, great, but they don’t even seem to have a vision for how this is going to work. There are no specifics.”
The Homeland Security Task Forces will try to enforce interagency cooperation by a “supremacy clause,” that gives task force leaders the right to pursue the cases they want and shut down others that might overlap.
The clause will require “that any new or existing investigative and/or intelligence initiatives” targeting transnational criminal organizations “must be presented to the HSTF with a right of first refusal,” according to the briefing paper reviewed by ProPublica.
“Further,” it adds, “the supremacy clause prohibits parallel or competitive activities by member agencies, effectively eliminating duplicative structures such as stand-alone task forces or specialized units, to include narcotics, financial, or others.”
Several senior law enforcement officials said that approach would curtail the independence that investigators need to follow good leads when they see them; newer and less-visible criminal organizations would be more likely to escape scrutiny.
In recent years, those officials noted, both Democratic and Republican administrations have tried at times to short-circuit competition for big cases among law enforcement agencies and judicial districts. But that has often led to as many problems as it has solved, they said.
One notable example, several officials said, was a move by the Biden administration’s DEA administrator, Anne Milgram, to limit her agency’s cooperation with FBI and HSI investigations into fentanyl smuggling by Los Chapitos, the mafia led by sons of the Mexican drug boss Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as “El Chapo.”
Although the DEA eventually indicted the Chapitos’ leaders in New York, officials from other agencies complained that Milgram’s approach wasted months of work and delayed the indictments of some traffickers. Later, when the FBI secretly arranged the surrender of one of the sons, Joaquín Guzmán López, DEA officials were not told about the operation until it was underway, officials said. (Guzmán López initially pleaded not guilty but is believed to be negotiating with the government. Milgram did not respond to messages asking for comment.)
As to the benefits of competition, prosecutors and agents cite the case of El Chapo himself. Before he was extradited to the United States in January 2017, Guzmán Loera had been indicted by seven U.S. attorneys’ offices, reflecting yearslong investigations by the DEA, the FBI and HSI, among others. In the agreement that the Obama Justice Department brokered, three offices led the prosecution, which used the best evidence gathered by the others.
Under the new structure of the Homeland Security Task Forces, several officials said, federal prosecutors will still generally decide whether to bring charges against criminal groups, but they will have less of a role in determining which criminals to investigate.
Regional and national task forces will be overseen by “executive committees” that are expected to include political appointees, officials said. The committees will guide broader decisions about which criminal groups to target, they said.
“The HSTF model unleashes the full might of our federal law enforcement agencies and federal prosecutors to deliver justice for the American people, whose plight Biden and Garland ignored for four years,” a Justice Department spokesperson said, referring to former Attorney General Merrick Garland. “Any suggestion that the Department is abandoning its mission of cracking down on violent organized crime is unequivocally false.”
During Trump’s first term, veteran officials of the FBI, DEA and HSI all complained that the administration’s overarching focus on immigration diverted agents from more urgent national security threats, including the fentanyl epidemic. Now, as hundreds more agents have been dispatched to immigration enforcement, those officials worry that the new task forces will focus on rounding up undocumented immigrants who have any sort of criminal record at the cost of more significant organized crime investigations.
The first task forces to begin operating under the new model have not assuaged such concerns. In late May, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced that the Virginia Homeland Security Task Force had arrested more than 1,000 “criminal illegal aliens” in just two months, but the authorities have provided almost no details connecting those suspects to transnational criminal organizations.
On June 16, the Gulf of America Homeland Security Task Force, a new unit based in Alabama and Georgia, announced the arrests of 60 people, nearly all of them undocumented immigrants, at a cockfighting event in northern Alabama. Although cockfighting is typically subject to a maximum fine of $50 in the state, a senior HSI official claimed the suspects were “tied to a broader network of serious crimes, including illegal gambling, drug trafficking and violent offenses.” Once again, however, no details were provided.
It is unclear how widely the new task force rules might be applied. While OCDETF funds the salaries of more than a thousand federal agents and hundreds of prosecutors, thousands more DEA, FBI and HSI agents work on other narcotics and organized crime cases.
In early June, five Democratic senators wrote to Bondi questioning the decision to dismantle OCDETF. That decision was first reported by Bloomberg News.
“As the Department’s website notes, OCDETF ‘is the centerpiece of the Attorney General’s strategy to combat transnational-organized crime and to reduce the availability of illicit narcotics in the nation,’” the senators wrote.
In a June 23 response, a Justice Department official, Daniel Boatright, wrote that OCDETF’s operations would be taken over by the new task forces and managed by the office of the Deputy Attorney General. But Boatright did not clarify what role federal prosecutors would play in the new system.
“A lot of good, smart people are trying to make this work,” said one former senior official. “But without having prosecutors drive the process, it is going to completely fracture how we do things.”
Veteran officials at the DEA — who appear to have had almost no say in the creation of the new task forces— are said to be even more concerned. Already the DEA has been fighting pressure to provide access to investigative files without assurances that the safeguards of the OCDETF intelligence center will remain in place, officials said.
“DEA has not even been invited to any of the task force meetings,” one former senior official said. “It is mind-boggling. They’re just getting orders saying, ‘This is what Stephen Miller wants and you’ve got to give it to us.’”
Public support for the One Big Beautiful Bill is remarkably underwater by double digits in multiple polls, NBC reports. Similarly, bombing Iran is not popular, Greg Sargent explains at The New Republic. An analysis last week by the Pew Research Center found respondents had “mixed to negative views” on Trump’s immigration policies. The least popular actions, with the public disapproving by nine or more percentage points, were ICE raids at workplaces (-9%), building more detention facilities (-12%), ending Temporary Protected Status (-20%), suspending asylum applications (-21%), and deporting people to the CECOT prison in El Salvador (-24%).
DHS v. D.V.D. Fallout: Wildly Unconstitutional Chutzpah
Another clash between the Trump administration and the courts is coming to a head in a case involving a group of migrants that the Trump administration wants to deport to South Sudan. Government lawyers on Tuesday accused federal district judge Brian Murphy of defying the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing third-country removals to proceed.
Murphy had asserted that the court’s decision, which stayed a lower court’s preliminary injunction, did not affect a separate “order of remedy” applicable specifically to the men slated for removal to South Sudan. It was a reasonable conclusion because, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor made clear in her dissent—uncontested by the majority—the government had appealed the preliminary injunction, but not that other order. Nonetheless, government lawyers promptly accused Murphy of “unprecedented defiance” of the Supreme Court’s decision, insisting that it applied to all the orders Murphy has issued. The government then filed a motion at the high court, seeking clarification.
Lawfare’s Roger Parloff points out that in addition to asking the high court to clarify its Monday order (which arguably does not need any clarification), government lawyers also asked the justices to prevent Judge Murphy from issuing any further injunctions, or to remove him from the case. The government clearly sees Monday’s order as an open invitation not only to flout lower court orders, but also to recruit the right-wing justices in a campaign of retribution against the judges who enter them.
Meanwhile the risks to people caught up in the administration’s third-country disappearances are not remote or hypothetical. Nick Turse reports at the Intercept that the administration has been using “strong-arm tactics,” including threats of travel bans, in attempts to browbeat (aka “make deals with”) 53 different nations, “including many that are beset by conflict or terrorist violence or that the State Department has excoriated for human rights abuses.”
Secret Police Alert
The Los Angeles Times has a chilling report on the terror being waged on immigrant communities by unidentified people, purportedly federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, in ways that have kept even local elected officials and law enforcement in the dark as to their identity.
While the piece offers little hope for legally challenging these crackdowns, it does describe how public backlash to them can go viral, provoking officers to back down:
In a video posted to Instagram from Pasadena, a suspected federal agent is seen exiting a Dodge Charger at an intersection and pointing his gun at members of the public.
In the video, a person walks up to the back of the Dodge Charger and appears to take a photo of the license plate. That’s when the driver gets out of the vehicle and points a gun at the person who was behind the vehicle, then toward another person outside of the video frame. The word “Police” is visible on the driver’s vest, along with a badge on his hip. After a few seconds, the man puts the gun away and gets back into the car as bystanders shout at him. The man then activates the vehicle’s red and blue lights common to law enforcement vehicles and drives away.
The car, the Times reports, had a “cold” license plate, a tactic typically used by undercover cops to make the plate untraceable.
When Local Police Help ICE
In Jackson, Mississippi earlier this month, local police arrested Kerlin Moreno-Orellana for alleged illegal dumping when he was at work, performing tasks as directed by his boss. Now he’s in ICE detention.
What followed Moreno-Orellana’s arrest is a testament to the vast system behind U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s many detentions and deportations, both in the second Trump era and before. An automated message arrived at the office of the Pacific Enforcement Response Center, or PERC, in Laguna Niguel, California. ICE agents flagged Moreno-Orellana and forwarded it to the nearest ICE field office, likely one in Pearl, Mississippi.
That office then put a detainer on Moreno-Orellana, a controversial practice that immigrant activists argue conscripts local police officers into the already enormous apparatus of ICE enforcement. The Hinds County Sheriff’s Department complied with that detainer, turning Moreno-Orellana over to ICE Thursday morning.
Then, Moreno-Orellana boarded the same long ride to Jena, Louisiana, that so many other Mississippi immigrants have experienced, often while bound and shackled, to be deposited in the crowded cells of the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center. For now, nothing in his life is certain, least of all the day when his children will see him again.
Corruption Watch: Is Stephen Miller Profiting from Juiced-Up ICE Enforcement?
The Project on Government Oversight digs into fresh disclosures of Stephen Miller’s and other administration officials’ investments in the Peter Thiel-founded Silicon Valley giant Palantir Technologies, whose data systems ICE has described as “mission critical.”
Russell Vought’s Path to Christian Nationalist
Religion News Service’s Jack Jenkins has a deep dive into the religious ideology of Russell Vought, Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget and a key architect of Project 2025, the far-right blueprint for Trump’s second term. Jenkins details “how Christian nationalism provides the ideological foundation for Vought’s plan to gut federal government and curtail immigration through the expansion of executive power.”
Come for Vought’s fake John Quincy Adams quotes and stay for how he believes the Bible contains “principles for thoughtful, limited immigration and emphasizing assimilation.” America, Vought has said, needs “Christians insistent on being responsible stewards of a blessing that has been God-given: to live in this land, this particular land.”
Lie of the Day
House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed yesterday, “We are not cutting Medicaid. The president has said that and I have said that. We’re all said that. We’re strengthening the program.” Johnson has said this before. And it’s still not true.
No, Wait, There’s Stiff Competition
During a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. claimed that he had never promised Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) that, if confirmed, he would keep the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices intact. Cassidy has said that pledge was key to his decision to vote for his confirmation, but Kennedy purged the committee two weeks ago. Cassidy has called for a delay in convening the newly constituted panel of anti-vaxxers.
The Muskian Dystopia
In the Atlantic, Charlie Warzel and Hana Kiros assess Elon Musk’s assault on the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in the context of the billionaire’s racist, eugenicist, natalist views on the virtues of “Western civilization.” It’s a portrait of an unhinged narcissist beyond the imaginings of the most dystopian science fiction:
Cutting global aid frees up resources that can be used to help Americans, who, in turn, can work toward advancing Western civilization, in part by pursuing a MAGA political agenda and funding pronatalist programs that allow for privileged people (ideally white and “high IQ”) to have more children. The thinking seems to go like this: Who cares if people in South Sudan and Somalia die? Western civilization will thrive and propagate itself across the cosmos.
In other DOGE news, Wired reports that Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, the 19-year-old ground floor DOGE staffer deployed to multiple government agencies, including USAID, no longer works for the government.
Do Not Forget
Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, killed in a political assassination targeting Democrats at her home earlier this month, will lie in state with her husband Mark and their golden retriever Gilbert at the Minnesota Capitol Friday. Their surviving children, Sophie and Colin, have asked that people honor their parents’ memory by doing “something, whether big or small, to make our community just a little better for someone else.”
A Mayoral Upset in NYC
In a remarkable upset, disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has conceded to democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor. The result could well mark a party shift away from a fossilized old guard towards younger, progressive candidates determined to address income inequality and other quality of life concerns of Democratic voters.
As you may have seen, since I wrote today’s BackChannel, CNN has reported the first initial U.S. intelligence assessment of the bombardment of the Iranian nuclear facilities. These results seem even more limited than the skeptical take I assumed in that post, putting the program back only months and dealing generally limited damage. I want to stress that these initial assessments are initial for a reason. The Iranians themselves probably haven’t fully assessed the damage yet. But if we assume this assessment is directionally correct, it changes the small picture but not the big one. You shouldn’t do this by tweet storm.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
In the past week, the Senate Parliamentarian was allowed to — and did — get rid of quite a number of noisome provisions in the big budget bill. But as we anticipate the bill’s movement toward the floor shortly, Republicans may not allow the Parliamentarian to get rid of one of the biggest, most procedurally invalid, and substantively worst provisions of the bill: the provision making the Trump tax cuts permanent.
Merely extending the cuts to 2030 — a move priced at $2.4 trillion — would be bad enough, especially given that Republicans hope to pay for it with steep cuts to Medicaid and food benefits. Yet the temporary extension of cuts is regular order in a budget reconciliation bill, as we’ve seen under presidents Reagan, Bush junior and Trump.
This time, however, Trump has made it clear that he not only wants his expiring tax cuts extended a decade to the 2030s, but he wants them made permanent. In other words, tax rates for the well-off will be lowered not just into the 2030s but for the foreseeable future.
A permanent extension puts us on a far more disastrous fiscal course. It means the national debt will soar. It makes the United States Treasury a perpetual sinking ship. Yet Thune and Senate Republicans want Trump to get his way.
Watch what is happening to this provision, which should not, but likely will, threaten to drench the bill in trillions of long-term red ink paid from the national debt to those in the top income brackets for many years to come.
What has the Parliamentarian determined so far?
Trump’s so-called “big beautiful” bill has unique procedural privilege. Ordinary Senate bills can be filibustered, so Senate Republicans can’t pass them without 60 votes for cloture, which would not be available for partisan measures. For example, Senate Republicans might want to take off the books what is left of the Voting Rights Act, but lack the needed 60 and cannot even try. But the Budget Act of 1974, as amended, has green-lighted reconciliation bills in the interests of getting past stalemate with a relatively narrowly defined group of tax and spending measures. So this “reconciliation” bill needs only a simple majority, 51 votes, to pass.
The catch is that the 50 vote privilege only applies to provisions which stay within Budget Act rules applied by the neutral Senate Parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough.
Not unexpectedly, Senate Republican committees assembling the pieces of the “beautiful” reconciliation bill tried to fold their favorite partisan measures into it — to slide them through with the rest of the bill so they could be passed by a simple majority vote. A notable example: the Senate Budget Committee tried to get through a provision eliminating the Consumer Financial Protection Board (CFPB), a Republican bête noire. Another provision was slipped in that would make it prohibitively expensive for people to sue the federal government for breaking laws.
But, as is always supposed to occur, the Senate Parliamentarian reviewed the big bill for violations of, principally, the “Byrd Rule,” named for historic Sen. Robert P. Byrd, which is supposed to ensure that all elements of a reconciliation package directly impact federal spending or revenues. As part of the quaintly named“Byrd-bath” review, MacDonough nixed both the CFPB-killing provision and the provision related to emergency court orders.
This was obviously not to the liking of the Senate Banking Republicans and their Chair, Rick Scott (R-FL). But Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD.) did nothing to interfere with the Byrd Bath, and Scott took his licks. Thune made clear since taking over as Senate Majority Leader at the start of this Congress that, by and large, he would follow what is known in the Senate as “regular order.” His position was that he would not just crudely do rule-breaking, Parliamentarian-flouting favors.
There is good reason to believe that if Senate Republicans let the Parliamentarian rule on their permanent tax cut, it would go down under the Byrd Rule. The rule forbids provisions that produce red ink beyond the budget’s period. The Byrd Rule was adopted on a bipartisan basis in 1985 in a Senate reaction against the chaos of the Reagan budget bills, which were stuffed with all kinds of miscellaneous items . This permanent tax cut is simply not the kind of provision that is appropriate for a reconciliation bill intended as a near-term fiscal package. The reconciliation bill is supposed to deal with matters that cost money — tax cuts or spending — during, and only during, the 10-year budget window. The budget window is inviolate. After 10 years, more tax cuts, like Cinderella’s carriage after midnight, turn into pumpkins.
Look at some of the other provisions the Parliamentarian ruled against in the past week. MacDonough opposed requiring states to pay more for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, better known as food stamps), a barrier to immigrants getting SNAP, rebuilding a Texas coast guard station, a transfer of the space shuttle from the Smithsonian to Texas, an extension of farm price support authority, penalties for new civil servants if they don’t agree to become at-will employees, and a section to allow reorganizing or eliminating whole agencies without congressional oversight. She is keeping the bill relatively clean. But it does raise the question: if the Senate Majority Leader is letting her lower the boom on so many favorites of his committee chairs, how will he suppress the Parliamentarian as to the permanent tax cut provision? Because you know he wants to. The Republican Party defines itself as the party of cutting taxes for the rich far more than it cares about all the other provisions kicked off the bill, put together.
Republicans may try these maneuvers to skirt the rules
Likely, there are two aspects that will enable Senate Republicans to protect the provision from the Parliamentarian. First, Senate Republicans rigged the budget resolution with a novelty: it sets the baseline — the line from which the costs of things like tax cuts are measured — as a “current policy baseline.” Trump’s temporary tax cuts are currently in effect, so extending them is deemed “free” because it just extends current policy.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, said that “‘Current policy baseline’ is a budget gimmick that is nothing more than smoke and mirrors instead of honest accounting. This bill will add trillions upon trillions of dollars to the national debt to fund tax breaks for billionaires — while Republicans want everyone to think it adds zero.” But the current policy baseline is being implemented by the Joint Committee on Taxation, which scores tax bill costs. So the score is a ridiculously undercounted $441.5 billion added to the deficit over the next decade, instead of the true $4 trillion — ten times as much — counted honestly under the regular “current law baseline.”
It is to be expected that Senate Democrats will protest fiercely on the Senate floor when the permanent provision is pushed. They will demand a ruling of the Chair — which means a pronouncement of the Parliamentarian. If they do not get what they ask, they will proclaim that this is a use of the “nuclear option” with lasting undermining of the filibuster rule. That means we should no longer regard the filibuster rule as inviolate when, someday, Democrats are in the majority and Republicans beg for their 60 vote requirements.
Although it is conceivable the Parliamentarian would sanction the Republicans’ permanent tax cut via the “current policy baseline” nonsense, the Senate Republicans likely have a second aspect in mind to prevent the Parliamentarian from ruling at all, and, at the same time, to blunt the protests of the Senate Democrats.
Thune can resort to the obscure practice of having the Senate Chair say that a certain procedural question is a “new one” and therefore will be put to the Senate for a vote, rather than being something the Chair itself (speaking for the Parliamentarian) will pronounce. The beauty of this practice is that such a “new one” needs only 50 votes, and generally gets 50 majority votes. Of course, if the doctrine were overused and the Senate Parliamentarian often sidelined, and were used for questions for which the precedents are quite clear, it would be an abuse. But Thune tries not to fit the profile of an abusive majority leader. He did not try to salvage in this way any of the other provisions the Parliamentarian knocked off via the Byrd Bath. That gave him cover to now say, as a fresh pronouncement for a special occasion, that the permanent tax cut is something new.
This is where the “current policy baseline” may come in. Republicans are true believers in it; they find it rooted in Budget Act language about baselines; they got it passed by the Senate and House in this year’s budget resolution; they put it in the scoring by the Joint Committee on Taxation, which operates under the Budget Act. Senate Republicans would say that unlike the attempted cute drafting of all those provisions that went down in Parliamentarian rulings, this matter is soaked in budget act legitimacy. But for Thune’s purposes, it does not matter whether all those budget trimmings are so convincing they would sway MacDonough. He only needs that there are enough such aspects to let him take the stance that this is a new question, that can go to the senators for a majority vote expected to follow party lines.
As daunting as this all may seem for Senate Democrats, this is a vote they could win if they could peel off four Republicans. It’s not impossible. It would take Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Susan Collins (R-ME), Rand Paul (R-TX.) and one other. After all, the bill will already extend the tax cuts for a decade, at enormous cost. Senators would just have to stand against trillions more in debt down the road.
Donald Trump’s latest meltdown in response to “ceasefire” violations by both Iran and Israel but especially Israel brings out the uncanny quality of everything that has happened over the last week — the simultaneous existence of a very real hot war with what amounts to a social media campaign. They’re both happening. They’re clearly interacting with each other. But the dynamics of the two are so separate, distinct, operating according to totally different rules that watching the two together looks deeply unreal.
Subsequent reporting by The New York Times and other publications seems to confirm my initial assumption, which was that the entire U.S. involvement in this conflict was driven by especially Fox News’s reporting of Israel’s onslaught against Iran’s military infrastructure and nuclear program. Israel was “winning” and Trump wanted in on that winning. And that was really the entirety of it. But Trump’s decision to escalate the crisis to a level of destruction of underground facilities that only the U.S. is capable of had a very real result. And it’s not just whatever level of destruction those bunker buster bombs created — which appears substantial but not total.
As Josh Kovensky reported yesterday, the Supreme Court’s order pausing a preliminary injunction against Trump’s policy of third-country removals without due process will undoubtedly fire up his brutal deportation machine, and embolden administration officials to continue to flout court orders restraining it.
The case, Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D., involves a challenge to the Trump administration policy directing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to round up noncitizens the government previously was unable to deport to their home country, and then remove them to a third country without warning, due process, or consideration of the conditions they might face there. The preliminary injunction in the case, which the administration evaded and defied on several occasions, required the government to provide plaintiffs with notice and time to challenge their removal.
Shockingly, the Supreme Court stayed that injunction pending final resolution of the case, offering the administration carte blanche to continue third-country removals in the meantime. Worse, it gave the administration a very big cookie by pausing a court order that the administration already had defied.
Lawfare’s Quinta Jurecic has a detailed, maddening account of each step of the government’s “legalistic noncompliance” with court orders in this and similar immigration cases, which involves “delaying implementation of court orders, adopting hyper-technical interpretations of judicial rulings in order to engineer loopholes, and asserting ignorance and confusion whenever something goes wrong.” D.V.D., she notes, “stands out as a chronicle of noncompliance from the very beginning—a cascade of sloppiness and calculated misunderstandings on the government’s part that has resulted in potentially serious danger for a gay Guatemalan man removed from the United States, along with the continued detention of eight men at a U.S. military base in Djibouti.”
The ruling is “disastrous,” according to legal scholar Steve Vladek. “For the Court to not only grant emergency relief in this case, but to offer nary a word of explanation either in criticism of the government’s behavior, or in defense of why it granted relief notwithstanding that behavior, is to invite—if not affirmatively enable—comparable defiance of future district court orders by the government.”
Contempt Watch: Judge in VOA Case Holds Show Case Hearing
After the Trump administration attempted to fire remaining Voice of America (VOA) staffers en masse on Friday, the judge in the pending case challenging the evisceration of the agency, Royce Lamberth, ordered the parties to appear in court yesterday. Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee, had issued a preliminary injunction against the U.S. Agency for Global Media, and VOA’s parent agency, in April, finding “defendants are likely in violation of numerous federal laws” in their quest to slash the news service, mostly by terminating virtually all of its journalists.
When Lamberth asked the government’s counsel, Brenda Gonzalez Horowitz, why he had not been notified of Friday’s layoff letters, she protested that they had been complying “in good faith” with his April order. “I don’t think so,” was his reply, before ordering the government to file an update on how it is complying with the injunction by Friday.
On Dobbs Anniversary, Christian Right Takes Aim at Mifepristone
To commemorate today’s anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, the Christian right is pressing the Trump administration to restrict use of the abortion pill mifepristone. As part of a “day of fasting and prayer for life” hosted by the Family Research Council, the organization urges followers to “Pray for the Food and Drug Administration [FDA] to revoke the dangerous policy of the Biden administration regarding mifepristone and chemical abortion regulations, and to reinstate safety standards that prioritize the health and safety of mothers and their unborn children.” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has asked the FDA to review mifepristone’s safety, following the unscientific claims of Christian right organizations opposed to abortion.
“A Whiff of Fascism” in the Washington Post
Yesterday the Washington Post published an op-ed by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, giving her space to expound on her ongoing commitment to barring foreign students from Harvard. Her opening paragraph baselessly charged that “school leadership has not complied with the Department of Homeland Security’s lawful oversight duties, has fostered antisemitic extremism and used taxpayer money to collaborate with an American adversary.” Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky, co-author of “How Democracies Die,” called the piece “extraordinarily authoritarian” and a “whiff of fascism.” Noem’s concluding sentence proves Levitsky’s point. “Harvard must decide whether it wishes to be a partner to the United States,” Noem wrote, “or an adversary to American values.”
Last night, a federal judge in Boston, Allison Burroughs, blocked Trump administration efforts to bar foreign students from Harvard for the second time in a week.
Smashmouth Judge?
Tomorrow the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold confirmation hearings on Trump’s nomination of his former personal attorney, Emil Bove, to the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. As Trump’s acting Deputy Attorney General, Bove was notoriously at the center of the corrupt withdrawal of the federal corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
Justice Connection, a group of Department of Justice alumni, has also released a scathing video explaining why Bove is wildly unqualified for the bench.
An account by a DOJ attorney fired by the Trump administration, Erez Reuveni, provides even more damning details. According to Reuveni’s account, Bove openly pressed for the government to violate court orders in immigration cases. “Bove stated that D.O.J. would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’ and ignore any such order,” Reuveni revealed in a document submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee and the DOJ Inspector General yesterday, the New York Times reports.
Even the Wall Street Journaleditorial board questions Bove’s fitness for a lifetime appointment, writing that “his reputation lately is as a smashmouth partisan who wields the law as a weapon.”
DOGE Actually Has Cost Us Money
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has tallied just some of the cost of the assault on our federal government by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). It found DOGE cuts to medical research “could amount to an estimated $10 billion loss in economic activity, and a loss of approximately 44,000 jobs a year;” that U.S.-based organizations contracting with the U.S. Agency for International Development lost $28.9 billion in funding; and that $500 billion will be lost to the Internal Revenue Service owing to DOGE’s elimination of staff and programs there. These figures are just the tip of the iceberg, and do not include DOGE’s assaults on other agencies. Nor can we compute other kinds of losses, including America’s international soft power, the public’s trust in government, and countless non-monetary societal benefits accruing from a functional government staffed by nonpartisan experts in their fields.
What’s Next for DOGE?
The New Yorker’s Charles Bethea offers a look at Joe Gebbia, thought to be a possible successor to Elon Musk as head of DOGE. Bethea’s doozy of a lede contains most of what you probably need to know:
Who will help lead the Department of Government Efficiency now that Elon Musk has left the scene? News reports have mentioned Joe Gebbia, a Tesla board member and a co-founder of Airbnb, as a possible replacement. Gebbia is forty-three. Like Musk—his close friend—he is a billionaire, a resident of Austin, Texas, and the rumored recipient of a hair transplant. Gebbia formally announced his political conversion on X in January, posting that, after years of supporting Democrats, he finally “did [his] own research” and concluded that Donald Trump “deeply cares about our nation.” His feed has a MAHA flavor: Big Food exposés (“The truth about Ketchup”) alternate with digs at liberals suffering from “TDS,” or Trump Derangement Syndrome.
With or without Gebbia at the helm, DOGE continues to be a danger to democracy, health and safety, privacy, the civil service system, checks and balances–you know, everything.
Speaker Johnson Dismisses Invoking War Powers Act
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who has never met a Trump action he didn’t like, brushed off questions from reporters about whether he would bring a bipartisan resolution, co-sponsored by California Democrat Ro Khanna and Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie, to require Trump to seek Congressional approval for further military intervention in Iran. (Trump purported to expel Massie from the MAGA movement over his co-sponsorship of the measure, calling him a “pathetic LOSER.”) “It’s all politics,” Johnson said, his characteristic diversionary tactic. “This is not a time for politics.” Or, apparently, as ever, congressional oversight.
Good Advice
Media critic Mark Jacob offers eight suggestions for the media to avoid turning war with Iran into the sort of entertainment loop Trump craves.
The Misadventures of Kash Patel
Mother Jones reporter Anna Merlan digs into all the bogus investigations FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino have promised, but never delivered on. The piece is filled with eye-rolling details of all the ridiculous conspiracies that Trumpland chases, hoping to feed the base’s voracious appetite for new diabolical content about their perceived enemies, from Joe Biden to James Comey to the Chinese Communist Party. But for Patel and Bongino, who have their positions precisely because of their proximity to that world, there’s a serious catch:
Today, with the conspiracy world full of ever more competing storylines, theories, and hoped-for outcomes, the idea of disclosure remains a singular focal point of longing; that someone high up, somewhere, will finally tell us what we are desperate to know. Against that backdrop, Bongino, Patel, and other Trump figures are still awkwardly trying to transition from demanding to know the truth to being the people in a position to provide it.
In the meantime, Bongino and other Trump figures are continuing to create content by churning out endless tweets, sending performatively verbose press releases, and making appearances on partisan news channels, all aimed at heightening their own profile and shifting blame from anything they have not yet achieved. Where before they cast themselves as independent investigators calling on a shadowy government to reveal its secrets, now they’re forced to play new roles, as dedicated and diligent public servants. This is, of course, boring: “I gave up everything for this,” Bongino lamented recently on Fox & Friends.
Of course, as with all things Trump, the absurdity is part of the point. And, as always, that does not at all diminish how radically dangerous it is for this to be the conduct of the director of the FBI.
