Hegseth Vows to Keep up Kelly Retribution Crusade 

Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️

After a federal judge decisively shot down Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s attempt to downgrade Sen. Mark Kelly’s (D-AZ) rank and retirement benefits this week, Hegseth wasted no time in responding publicly. 

“This will be immediately appealed,” he tweeted. “Sedition is sedition, ‘Captain.’” (The Justice Department had not appealed the ruling as of Friday evening; the judge gave 30 days for both parties to advise the court on how they plan to proceed.) 

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon had rebuked the Trump administration for chilling the speech of retired servicemembers, adding that Congress could hardly function if lawmakers who’d served in the military were uniquely muzzled from airing criticisms. 

“This Court has all it needs to conclude that Defendants have trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees,” he wrote. “After all, as Bob Dylan famously said, ‘You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.’ To say the least, our retired veterans deserve more respect from their Government, and our Constitution demands they receive it!”

The ruling came on the heels of news that a D.C. jury declined to indict Kelly, along with the other five Democratic lawmakers featured in a video — all former CIA officials or veterans — urging servicemembers not to follow illegal orders. 

Kelly said Friday that he expects the administration to press on with its attempts to punish him, despite those major setbacks. 

“If they’re successful in doing what they’re trying to do to Sen. Slotkin and me, this is the date you can put on your calendar, because this is what happens in other countries when the democracy begins to die, is when the authoritarian or the executive starts throwing the legislative branch members into jail,” he said at a Politico event.

— Kate Riga

GOP’s Voter Suppression Bill Heads to Senate. Will Anything Happen There?

The House passed the SAVE America Act in a largely party-line vote on Wednesday. All House Republicans and one very vulnerable House Democrat, Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), voted for the legislation, which, if passed into law, would disenfranchise millions of voters.

The bill, which President Donald Trump is pushing Congress to enact, would require, among many other things, documentary proof-of-citizenship — like an American passport or birth certificate — in order to register to vote and cast ballots in federal elections. It is, of course, already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. 

But the original version of the legislation, the SAVE Act, was introduced back in 2024 when President Trump’s allies were looking to manufacture hysteria about widespread voter fraud ahead of the presidential election, so they would have something to point to if Trump lost. The myth of non-citizens voting en masse in federal elections is one that Republicans resurrect every few years even though it has been repeatedly debunked. 

The legislation is sweeping in its attempts to take back power over election administration from the states. If enacted, the bill would also require voters to show a photo ID in order to cast a ballot in person and submit a copy of an ID when requesting and casting an absentee ballot.

“The so-called SAVE Act is not about voter identification, it is about voter suppression. And they have zero credibility on this issue,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told reporters when asked about the issue.

The SAVE America Act is headed to the Senate now, but its fate there is unclear.

Normally, as Democrats in both chambers have been reiterating, a highly partisan bill like this would be “dead on arrival” in the upper chamber due to the filibuster. On top of that, several Senate Republicans have already expressed concern with the bill and some have already come out against it.

But far-right Republicans in both chambers, with support from the president, are pushing their colleagues to support the bill. There are even talks of breaking from regular procedure to try to pass it, with some pushing for Republican leadership to use the “standing filibuster,” also known as the talking filibuster to force the bill through the Senate.

This option came up earlier in the month when Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) and a handful of other far-right House Republicans were threatening to tank the funding package that included the five full-year appropriations bills for funding the federal government, alongside the now-expired Department of Homeland Security CR.

Luna later said she would support the funding package as she got assurances from Trump that Senate Republicans would use the “standing filibuster” to force the bill through in the Senate. That maneuver would force Senate Democrats to hold the floor continuously by speaking in order to block the bill.

At the time, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SC) quickly shut down the Luna-Trump scheme, saying he only promised to discuss the option with his caucus. Since then it has become clear many in the Senate GOP caucus are weary of using the “standing filibuster.” For one, using it could hold up the Senate floor for weeks, suspending regular order and stopping Republicans from passing anything else. Another important factor: if Republicans decide to use the rarely discussed tactic, there’s no guarantee Democrats won’t do the same when they hold the majority in the upper chamber.

Senate Republicans reportedly discussed the option in a closed-door meeting this week but the vast majority of the caucus seems unconvinced.

“I think people that might support [a talking filibuster] think we should talk longer about it, and people that don’t are done,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R- ND) said.

— Emine Yücel

With Echos of the Three-Fifths Compromise, Trump Wants To Redefine Who Belongs in America

Like many of President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again policies, understanding his immigration operation requires a look back at how U.S. leaders have historically decided who gets to be a citizen and who doesn’t. A lot of times, Black people were left out. And today, while the Trump administration has thus far focused its attention on people who immigrated to the U.S. or were naturalized more recently, scholars told TPM Trump’s mission to redefine who belongs here can trace its roots back near the founding of the country, when enslaved Africans weren’t granted personhood.

“Throughout the entire history of the U.S., citizenship has been a charged question about who belongs in America and who gets to be American,” said Amaha Kassa, executive director of African Communities Together. “This goes back to the Three-Fifths Compromise and the treatment that African-Americans would not be counted.”

Since he retook the presidency last January, Trump has leaned heavily on the “again” part of his MAGA slogan, aggressively rolling the nation back in time in areas from architecture to education, from federal department names and missions to, most recently, climate change. Trump’s immigration enforcement actions hearken back to the 1790 Naturalization Act, which only let free white people become naturalized U.S. citizens, Karla McKanders, a critical race theory and immigration law scholar, told TPM.

“I think people have to go back in history and look at who has traditionally been entitled to the rights that are associated with citizenship,” McKanders said. 

Because of this history, Black Americans should be concerned about any rollback of citizenship rights coming out of the White House.

“Black people should be really concerned because you have to look at history going back to Dred Scott, going back to the reconstruction amendments because it leads to it to this moment right now in history,” McKanders said.

— Layla A. Jones

Creating the ‘Enemy Within’

The second Trump administration loves to call its opponents “domestic terrorists.” People who protest ICE raids, who stage rallies, even progressive nonprofits and mutual aid organizations — they’ve all been blamed for contributing to political violence and domestic terrorism.

But it was after the killing of Charlie Kirk that this morphed from rhetoric into a sustained push to criminalize dissent. The Trump administration used Kirk’s death to justify a new legal architecture that would allow them to begin to wage a shadow war on the opposition. We at TPM had a question: How much of this was real? How would it manifest itself?

I’ve spent the past month looking into these questions via a new series called “Creating the Enemy Within.” This campaign marks a very obvious assault on freedom of speech. But, from another perspective, the cases that they’ve managed to charge so far as domestic terrorism almost comically fall short of the rhetoric. A Birmingham BLM activist arrested with psilocybin who allegedly set a shopping cart in a Walmart on fire and a group of anarchists in Texas the Trump administration has dubbed an “antifa cell” mark the first domestic terrorism prosecutions under this effort. These are the big terrorists?

The qualifier there is that this is what they’ve managed to come up with so far. It’s gratifying to work at one of the few places left in American journalism willing to devote resources to stories like these: complicated, full of unsavory characters, but with potentially huge implications for our basic rights. We’ll be following along as this state campaign to treat dissent as terrorism develops.

— Josh Kovensky