One hundred and eleven people are dead and more than 160 are still missing in Texas after Friday’s tragic flood. “‘[W]ho’s to blame?’” Texas governor Greg Abbott repeated back to a reporter. “That’s the word choice of losers.” “Every football team makes mistakes,” he continued, referring to Texas’s popular sport. “The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who’s to blame. The championship teams are the ones that say, ‘Don’t worry about it, ma’am, we’ve got this.’”
Abbott’s defensive answer reveals the dilemma MAGA Republicans find themselves in after the cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service that came before the Texas disaster. Scott Calvert, John West, Jim Carlton, and Joe Barrett of the Wall Street Journal reported that after a deadly flood in 1987, officials in Kerr County applied for a grant to install a flood warning system, but their application was denied. They considered installing one paid for by the county but decided against it. Then county commissioner Tom Moser told the reporters: “It was probably just, I hate to say the word, priorities. Trying not to raise taxes.”
Since 1980, Republican politicians have won voters by promising to cut taxes they claimed funded wasteful programs for women and racial and ethnic minorities. Cutting government programs would save money, they said, enabling hardworking Americans to keep more of their hard-earned money. But leaders recognized that Republican voters actually depended on government programs, so they continued to fund them even as they passed tax cuts that moved more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.
Now, in Trump’s second term, MAGA Republicans are turning Republican rhetoric into reality, forcing Americans to grapple with what those cuts really mean for their lives.
Today the Supreme Court cleared the way for the administration to fire large numbers of employees at 19 different federal agencies and to reorganize them while litigation against those firings moves forward, although it required the administration to act in ways “consistent with applicable law.” A lower court had blocked the firings during litigation. Ann E. Marimow of the Washington Post notes that this court has repeatedly sided with President Donald Trump as he slashes the federal government. The court said it is not expressing a view on the legality of the cuts at this time.
The administration's cuts were in the news today as Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket reported that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has just 86 people deployed in Texas today although Trump declared a disaster on Sunday. At a press opportunity at a cabinet meeting today, Trump said it wasn’t the right time to talk about his plans to phase out FEMA.
The administration is getting pushback in a number of other places as well, including from medical organizations. Yesterday the American Academy of Pediatricians, the American College of Physicians, and four other groups sued the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the changes Kennedy has made to the vaccine advisory panel, to the availability of covid vaccines, and to vaccine recommendations. The lawsuit calls those changes "unlawful” and “unilateral” and says they violate the Administrative Procedure Act.
Just who is in charge of the administration remains unclear. In the New York Times yesterday, Jason Zengerle pointed to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller as the “final word” on White House policy. Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem defers to him. Attorney General Pam Bondi “is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice” to him. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles is concentrating on “producing a reality TV show every day,” a Trump advisor told Zengerle.
So Miller, with his knack for flattering his boss, wields power.
Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth did not inform the White House before he stopped the shipment of weapons to Ukraine last week. Natasha Bertrand and Zachary Cohen of CNN reported today that Hegseth’s lack of a chief of staff or trusted advisors means he has no one to urge him to coordinate with other government partners. Trump has ordered Hegseth to restart some of the shipments. When a reporter asked the president today who had authorized the pause, Trump answered: “I don’t know, why don’t you tell me?”
At today’s press opportunity, Trump was erratic, at one point veering off into a discussion of whether he should put gold leaf on the moldings in the room’s corners.
The administration has so few successes to celebrate that, as Jarrett Renshaw of Reuters reported today, it is claiming credit for investments that were actually made under former president Joe Biden. A government website touting the “Trump effect” claims more than $2.6 trillion in U.S. investments, but Renshaw found that more than $1.3 trillion of those investments originated under Biden or were routine spending. One company has warned that its pledge of investments worth $50 billion is threatened by Trump’s policies.
When asked why the administration had taken credit for projects that happened under Biden, White House officials said “the final investment decisions were announced under [Trump’s] watch and prove his economic policies are triggering U.S. investment.” Renshaw noted that “[i]t was not clear in many cases what role, if any, Trump or his policies played in getting the deals across the line.”
Instead of embracing proven economic policies, the administration appears to be turning to ideologically based ideas that seem far fetched. Today, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins rejected the idea that the government would find a way to protect undocumented agricultural workers. “There will be no amnesty,” she said. “The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way. And we move the workforce towards automation and 100% American participation, which again with 34 million people, able-bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do that fairly quickly.”
The administration is now facing a rebellion from MAGA supporters who expected that, once in power, a Trump administration would release information about those men implicated in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal as people for whom Epstein provided underage girls. MAGA loyalists maintained the “deep state” was hiding the list to protect unnamed Democratic politicians, and MAGA leaders fed the conspiracy theory to stoke anger at the Democrats.
Once in power, though, Trump officials have failed to produce a list of Epstein’s clients. MAGA loyalists have now turned their anger on those officials, especially Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said in February that the Epstein list “is sitting on my desk right now” and who now maintains that no such list exists.
Perhaps to distract their supporters from the issue, the Fox News Channel today announced that the FBI is launching criminal investigations of former Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan and former FBI director James Comey over their investigation of ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives.
The Fox News Channel also announced that the White House has waived executive privilege for former president Biden’s White House physician Kevin O’Connor, who had asked to postpone his testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee about former president Biden’s mental acuity and use of an autopen. On Saturday, O’Connor’s lawyer wrote to committee chair James Comer (R-KY) asking for the postponement, noting: “We are unaware of any prior occasion on which a Congressional Committee has subpoenaed a physician to testify about the treatment of an individual patient. And the notion that a Congressional Committee would do so without any regard whatsoever for the confidentiality of the physician-patient relationship is alarming.”
As its popularity sinks, the administration appears to be turning to extraordinary measures to enforce its will. Ellen Nakashima, Warren P. Strobel, and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post reported today that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has tried to get access to emails and chats of people working in the Intelligence Community in order to root out those perceived as insufficiently loyal to Trump.
Gabbard’s press secretary claimed the effort was designed to “end the politicization and weaponization of intelligence against Americans,” but Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told the reporters that Trump’s loyalists “zeal to root out ‘politicization” “often seems to be shorthand for anything less than unconditional support for the president.” He noted their effort risks “creating an echo chamber within the intelligence community or creating counterintelligence risks.”
The Internal Revenue Service today changed longstanding policy to say that churches can now endorse political candidates without losing their tax-exempt status. According to Gary Grumbach and Dareh Gregorian of NBC News, the rule prohibiting churches from endorsing candidates is rarely enforced, and Trump, whose strongest supporters are white evangelical Protestants, has called for an end to it.
A judge will have to agree to the change.
The administration’s show of force in Los Angeles yesterday, when immigration officers and about 90 National Guard members descended on MacArthur Park with 17 Humvees and four tactical vehicles in what looked like a military operation, appears to have been designed to intimidate immigrants and Trump’s opponents.
And today, Trump suggested he could take over New York City if voters elect Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. He then suggested the administration could take over Washington, D.C., as well. “We could run D.C. I mean we’re, we're looking at D.C. We don’t want crime in D.C. We want the city to run well,” he told reporters. "We would run it so good, it would be run so proper, we’d get the best person to run it…. We want a capital that’s run flawlessly, and it wouldn’t be hard for us to do it.”
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One hundred and eleven people are dead and more than 160 are still missing in Texas after Friday’s tragic flood. “‘[W]ho’s to blame?’” Texas governor Greg Abbott repeated back to a reporter. “That’s the word choice of losers.” “Every football team makes mistakes,” he continued, referring to Texas’s popular sport. “The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who’s to blame. The championship teams are the ones that say, ‘Don’t worry about it, ma’am, we’ve got this.’”
Abbott’s defensive answer reveals the dilemma MAGA Republicans find themselves in after the cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service that came before the Texas disaster. Scott Calvert, John West, Jim Carlton, and Joe Barrett of the Wall Street Journal reported that after a deadly flood in 1987, officials in Kerr County applied for a grant to install a flood warning system, but their application was denied. They considered installing one paid for by the county but decided against it. Then county commissioner Tom Moser told the reporters: “It was probably just, I hate to say the word, priorities. Trying not to raise taxes.”
Since 1980, Republican politicians have won voters by promising to cut taxes they claimed funded wasteful programs for women and racial and ethnic minorities. Cutting government programs would save money, they said, enabling hardworking Americans to keep more of their hard-earned money. But leaders recognized that Republican voters actually depended on government programs, so they continued to fund them even as they passed tax cuts that moved more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.
Now, in Trump’s second term, MAGA Republicans are turning Republican rhetoric into reality, forcing Americans to grapple with what those cuts really mean for their lives.
Today the Supreme Court cleared the way for the administration to fire large numbers of employees at 19 different federal agencies and to reorganize them while litigation against those firings moves forward, although it required the administration to act in ways “consistent with applicable law.” A lower court had blocked the firings during litigation. Ann E. Marimow of the Washington Post notes that this court has repeatedly sided with President Donald Trump as he slashes the federal government. The court said it is not expressing a view on the legality of the cuts at this time.
The administration's cuts were in the news today as Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket reported that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has just 86 people deployed in Texas today although Trump declared a disaster on Sunday. At a press opportunity at a cabinet meeting today, Trump said it wasn’t the right time to talk about his plans to phase out FEMA.
The administration is getting pushback in a number of other places as well, including from medical organizations. Yesterday the American Academy of Pediatricians, the American College of Physicians, and four other groups sued the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the changes Kennedy has made to the vaccine advisory panel, to the availability of covid vaccines, and to vaccine recommendations. The lawsuit calls those changes "unlawful” and “unilateral” and says they violate the Administrative Procedure Act.
Just who is in charge of the administration remains unclear. In the New York Times yesterday, Jason Zengerle pointed to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller as the “final word” on White House policy. Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem defers to him. Attorney General Pam Bondi “is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice” to him. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles is concentrating on “producing a reality TV show every day,” a Trump advisor told Zengerle.
So Miller, with his knack for flattering his boss, wields power.
Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth did not inform the White House before he stopped the shipment of weapons to Ukraine last week. Natasha Bertrand and Zachary Cohen of CNN reported today that Hegseth’s lack of a chief of staff or trusted advisors means he has no one to urge him to coordinate with other government partners. Trump has ordered Hegseth to restart some of the shipments. When a reporter asked the president today who had authorized the pause, Trump answered: “I don’t know, why don’t you tell me?”
At today’s press opportunity, Trump was erratic, at one point veering off into a discussion of whether he should put gold leaf on the moldings in the room’s corners.
The administration has so few successes to celebrate that, as Jarrett Renshaw of Reuters reported today, it is claiming credit for investments that were actually made under former president Joe Biden. A government website touting the “Trump effect” claims more than $2.6 trillion in U.S. investments, but Renshaw found that more than $1.3 trillion of those investments originated under Biden or were routine spending. One company has warned that its pledge of investments worth $50 billion is threatened by Trump’s policies.
When asked why the administration had taken credit for projects that happened under Biden, White House officials said “the final investment decisions were announced under [Trump’s] watch and prove his economic policies are triggering U.S. investment.” Renshaw noted that “[i]t was not clear in many cases what role, if any, Trump or his policies played in getting the deals across the line.”
Instead of embracing proven economic policies, the administration appears to be turning to ideologically based ideas that seem far fetched. Today, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins rejected the idea that the government would find a way to protect undocumented agricultural workers. “There will be no amnesty,” she said. “The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way. And we move the workforce towards automation and 100% American participation, which again with 34 million people, able-bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do that fairly quickly.”
The administration is now facing a rebellion from MAGA supporters who expected that, once in power, a Trump administration would release information about those men implicated in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal as people for whom Epstein provided underage girls. MAGA loyalists maintained the “deep state” was hiding the list to protect unnamed Democratic politicians, and MAGA leaders fed the conspiracy theory to stoke anger at the Democrats.
Once in power, though, Trump officials have failed to produce a list of Epstein’s clients. MAGA loyalists have now turned their anger on those officials, especially Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said in February that the Epstein list “is sitting on my desk right now” and who now maintains that no such list exists.
Perhaps to distract their supporters from the issue, the Fox News Channel today announced that the FBI is launching criminal investigations of former Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan and former FBI director James Comey over their investigation of ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives.
The Fox News Channel also announced that the White House has waived executive privilege for former president Biden’s White House physician Kevin O’Connor, who had asked to postpone his testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee about former president Biden’s mental acuity and use of an autopen. On Saturday, O’Connor’s lawyer wrote to committee chair James Comer (R-KY) asking for the postponement, noting: “We are unaware of any prior occasion on which a Congressional Committee has subpoenaed a physician to testify about the treatment of an individual patient. And the notion that a Congressional Committee would do so without any regard whatsoever for the confidentiality of the physician-patient relationship is alarming.”
As its popularity sinks, the administration appears to be turning to extraordinary measures to enforce its will. Ellen Nakashima, Warren P. Strobel, and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post reported today that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has tried to get access to emails and chats of people working in the Intelligence Community in order to root out those perceived as insufficiently loyal to Trump.
Gabbard’s press secretary claimed the effort was designed to “end the politicization and weaponization of intelligence against Americans,” but Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told the reporters that Trump’s loyalists “zeal to root out ‘politicization” “often seems to be shorthand for anything less than unconditional support for the president.” He noted their effort risks “creating an echo chamber within the intelligence community or creating counterintelligence risks.”
The Internal Revenue Service today changed longstanding policy to say that churches can now endorse political candidates without losing their tax-exempt status. According to Gary Grumbach and Dareh Gregorian of NBC News, the rule prohibiting churches from endorsing candidates is rarely enforced, and Trump, whose strongest supporters are white evangelical Protestants, has called for an end to it.
A judge will have to agree to the change.
The administration’s show of force in Los Angeles yesterday, when immigration officers and about 90 National Guard members descended on MacArthur Park with 17 Humvees and four tactical vehicles in what looked like a military operation, appears to have been designed to intimidate immigrants and Trump’s opponents.
And today, Trump suggested he could take over New York City if voters elect Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. He then suggested the administration could take over Washington, D.C., as well. “We could run D.C. I mean we’re, we're looking at D.C. We don’t want crime in D.C. We want the city to run well,” he told reporters. "We would run it so good, it would be run so proper, we’d get the best person to run it…. We want a capital that’s run flawlessly, and it wouldn’t be hard for us to do it.”
On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation without systematic Black enslavement.
In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited slavery on the basis of race, but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which Black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after actor John Wilkes Booth murdered President Abraham Lincoln, white southern Democrats had done their best to push their Black neighbors back into subservience. So long as southern states had abolished enslavement, repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy and made war on the United States.
Northern Republican lawmakers refused. There was no way they were going to rebuild southern society on the same blueprint as existed before the Civil War, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it. Having just fought a war to destroy the South’s ideology, they were not going to let it regrow in peacetime.
Congress rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction.
But then congressmen had to come up with their own. After months of hearings and debate, they proposed amending the Constitution to settle the outstanding questions of the war. Chief among these was how to protect the rights of Black Americans in states where they could neither vote nor testify in court or sit on a jury to protect their own interests.
Congress’s solution was the Fourteenth Amendment.
It took on the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision declaring that Black men "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens.”
The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
The amendment also addressed the Dred Scott decision in another profound way. In 1857, southerners and Democrats who were adamantly opposed to federal power controlled the Supreme Court. They backed states’ rights. So the Dred Scott decision did more than read Black Americans out of our history: it dramatically circumscribed Congress’s power.
The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857 this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm.
And so the Fourteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures had passed discriminatory laws. “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it said. And then it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down the Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South.
Those same principles took on profound national significance in the post–World War II era, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment aggressively to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states. The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.
Opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. They began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level. Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court.
Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”
Kennedy’s comments foreshadowed the world advanced by today’s MAGA Republicans. In 2022 the Supreme Court, stacked as it is with right-wing justices, overturned the federal protection of abortion rights provided in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and sent the question of abortion back to the states, many of which promptly banned the procedure.
When the court overturned the federal protection of abortion rights, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that federal protections for access to birth control and same-sex marriage should also be reexamined. In 2024, President Donald Trump suggested he would be open to letting states decide whether to restrict access to birth control, walking his statement back after a ferocious backlash.
Justice Samuel Alito has joined Thomas in attacking the Obergefell v. Hodges decision that provides federal protection for same-sex marriage, claiming that right, too, ought to be left up to voters in the states, even as Republican-dominated states are passing laws to limit who can vote.
Not only have today’s Republicans launched an attack on the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement that the federal government protect Americans against discrimination in the states, President Donald Trump has launched an assault on the birthright citizenship that is the centerpiece of the amendment.
That section of the amendment— the first section— acknowledges that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens,” who enjoy the same rights, and that no state can take those rights away without due process of law.
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another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Just a week ago, Republicans in the House of Representatives passed the nearly 1,000-page budget reconciliation bill President Donald Trump demanded, and at the signing ceremony for the bill the next day, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced Republicans were “laying a key cornerstone of America’s new golden age.”
But the past week has shown a nation—and an administration—in turmoil.
On July 4, the day Trump signed the bill, flash floods devastated central Texas, leaving more than 100 people dead and about 160 still missing. Local officials immediately blamed cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS) for the disaster, but reviews showed that NWS meteorologists had predicted the storm accurately and had sent out three increasingly urgent warnings at 1:14 a.m., 4:03 a.m., and 6:06 a.m.
But four hours passed before the police department in the City of Kerrville issued a warning. It wasn’t until 7:32 that the city urged people along the Guadalupe River to move to higher ground immediately. The missing link between the NWS and public safety personnel appears to have been the weather service employee in charge of coordinating between them. He took an unplanned early retirement under pressure from the “Department of Government Efficiency” and has not been replaced.
Then, as Gabe Cohen and Michael Williams of CNN reported, search and rescue teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could not respond to the disaster because Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose department is in charge of FEMA, had recently tried to cut spending by requiring her personal sign-off on any expenditure over $100,000. That order meant FEMA couldn’t put crews in place ahead of the storm, or respond immediately. Noem didn’t sign off on the deployment of FEMA teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding started.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, told Cohen and Williams that Noem did not authorize FEMA deployment because DHS used other search and rescue teams. “FEMA is shifting from bloated, DC-centric dead weight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens,” McLaughlin told CNN in a statement. “The old processes are being replaced because they failed Americans in real emergencies for decades.”
“DHS is rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and is reprioritizing appropriated dollars. Secretary Noem is delivering accountability to the U.S. taxpayer, which Washington bureaucrats have ignored for decades at the expense of American citizens,” McLaughlin said. Noem has called for the elimination of FEMA.
Meanwhile, FEMA’s acting director, David Richardson, has been nowhere to be found, making no public appearances, statements, or postings on social media since the disaster, and not visiting the site. Former FEMA officials told Thomas Frank of Politico that Richardson’s absence suggests Noem is controlling the FEMA response. Trump appointed Richardson after his team fired his first appointee, Cameron Hamilton, for telling Congress he did not think FEMA should be scrapped.
The day after he took office in May, Richardson, who has no experience with emergency management, told staff: “Don’t get in my way…because I will run right over you. I will achieve the president’s intent…. I, and I alone in FEMA, speak for FEMA,” he said.
Even as rescuers were still at work today in Texas, DHS cancelled a $3 million grant that had been awarded in New York to make sure the NWS can communicate effectively with local officials.
Tariffs are back in the news as Trump’s postponement for his high tariff has ended. They are as chaotic and as problematic as ever.
On April 2, Trump announced tariffs on countries around the world. He said that, beginning on April 9, he would impose a baseline tariff of 10%—a significant increase from the 2.5% rate then in effect—and additional tariffs of up to 50% on countries using a bizarre formula apparently cooked up by his trade advisor, Peter Navarro.
Immediately the stock market lost more than $5 trillion. So rather than let the tariffs go into effect on April 9, Trump pushed the start of the tariffs off until Wednesday, July 9 (yesterday), vowing to negotiate trade deals with individual countries rapidly: 90 deals in 90 days, Navarro said. But only two deals have been forthcoming—one with the United Kingdom and one with Vietnam—meaning that on July 9 the high tariffs of April 2 would take effect.
Then, on Tuesday, Trump announced on social media the real date for the start of the tariffs would be August 1. Somewhat bizarrely, he told reporters he had not changed the date the tariffs would go into effect, although on Monday he signed an executive order changing the date of the start of the levies from July 9 to August 1.
Throughout the week, Trump has been sending letters to world leaders informing them that he intended to impose high tariffs on their countries unless they negotiated with him. At a press opportunity at a cabinet meeting, as Danielle Kurtzleben of NPR noted, he tried to rebrand his letters as deals. “A letter means a deal,” he told reporters. “We can't meet with 200 countries. We have a few trusted people that know what they're doing, that are doing a good job, but you can't do it. You have to do it in a more general way. But it's a very good way. It's a better way. It's a more powerful way.”
On Tuesday, Trump also announced a 50% tariff on copper. Copper is vital to the defense industry, batteries, electric wires, plumbing, and so on, and the U.S. imports more than half of what it uses. Trump claims to want to see the U.S. produce the copper it needs, but getting the industry to that point will take years. He also announced a 35% tariff on goods from Canada.
Paul Wiseman of the Associated Press notes that the 10% tariffs are apparently here to stay because the administration needs that money to cover some of the hole the new tax cuts from the budget reconciliation bill will blast in the deficit.
While Trump continues to insist—incorrectly—that foreign countries pay tariffs, his former vice president Mike Pence reiterated the truth today. On Bloomberg “Surveillance,” he said of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s boast that tariffs will bring in $300 billion this year: “Well, tariffs are a tax, and American importers and businesses and, ultimately, consumers pay almost all of that. And so literally a week after we managed to extend the Trump-Pence tax cuts and prevent a $2,000 tax increase on working families, the administration is right now boasting of the fact that the average American household is going to see about $3,000 increase in the cost of goods.”
Last month, Trump nominated Department of Justice prosecutor Emil Bove to be a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, covering Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and the Virgin Islands. Bove is a Trump loyalist who defended Trump in his criminal indictments and participated in firing officials who investigated Trump and the January 6 rioters. He was also a central player in the dropping of corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams and the rendition of Venezuelan migrants to the CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador.
On June 24, Erez Reuveni, a former Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyer, filed an official whistleblower complaint about abuses in the department. Reuveni was fired after telling a court that the administration had made an error when it rendered Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia to CECOT despite a court order not to do so. In the whistleblower complaint, Reuveni alleged that the leaders at the Department of Justice and the White House had deliberately defied court orders and “engaged in unlawful activity, abused their authority, created substantial and specific threat to health and safety.”
Reuveni alleged that Bove insisted the planes carrying the men to El Salvador must take off and that he said DOJ “would need to consider telling the courts ‘f*ck you’ and ignore any such court order.” Reuveni then laid out the events of the March days in which the men were deported, along with the determination of the Department of Justice to violate the orders of the court.
Bove told the Senate Judiciary Committee last month he had “no recollection” of saying “f*ck you” to the court and said he had never advised the Department of Justice to violate a court order. Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on social media that Reuveni was a “leaker asserting false claims.”
Today, Senate Democrats released a trove of documents Reuveni had provided the committee, backing up his complaint. Texts and emails confirm that Department of Justice lawyers misled Judge James Boasberg, one telling him that he did not know when the Trump administration intended to deport the men when, as one of Reuveni’s colleagues said, “I can’t believe he said he doesn’t know. He knows there are plans for AEA removals within the next 24 hours.”
Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement Thursday that Bove “belongs nowhere near the federal bench.” “This is about more than a random f-bomb,” he said. “This is a declaration of defiance of our courts at the highest level of our government by a man who now seeks a lifetime appointment to one of the highest courts in our land.”
Today a federal judge appointed by Republican George W. Bush granted class action status to a lawsuit challenging Trump’s executive order attacking birthright citizenship. With that status in place, U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante barred the administration from denying citizenship to U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. Judge Laplante paused his ruling for a week to give the administration time to appeal.
Trump himself lost his appeal of a New York jury’s verdict that he must pay writer E. Jean Carroll $5 million for sexually abusing and defaming her. Trump now has 90 days to appeal to the Supreme Court to take the case.
Tonight the White House posted on X an image of “SUPERMAN TRUMP”—a much younger Trump dressed as the famous superhero, fists clenched, against a gauzy background—with the caption “TRUTH. JUSTICE. THE AMERICAN WAY.”
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One hundred and eleven people are dead and more than 160 are still missing in Texas after Friday’s tragic flood.
“‘[W]ho’s to blame?’” Texas governor Greg Abbott repeated back to a reporter. “That’s the word choice of losers.” “Every football team makes mistakes,” he continued, referring to Texas’s popular sport. “The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who’s to blame. The championship teams are the ones that say, ‘Don’t worry about it, ma’am, we’ve got this.’”
Abbott’s defensive answer reveals the dilemma MAGA Republicans find themselves in after the cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service that came before the Texas disaster. Scott Calvert, John West, Jim Carlton, and Joe Barrett of the Wall Street Journal reported that after a deadly flood in 1987, officials in Kerr County applied for a grant to install a flood warning system, but their application was denied. They considered installing one paid for by the county but decided against it. Then county commissioner Tom Moser told the reporters: “It was probably just, I hate to say the word, priorities. Trying not to raise taxes.”
Since 1980, Republican politicians have won voters by promising to cut taxes they claimed funded wasteful programs for women and racial and ethnic minorities. Cutting government programs would save money, they said, enabling hardworking Americans to keep more of their hard-earned money. But leaders recognized that Republican voters actually depended on government programs, so they continued to fund them even as they passed tax cuts that moved more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.
Now, in Trump’s second term, MAGA Republicans are turning Republican rhetoric into reality, forcing Americans to grapple with what those cuts really mean for their lives.
Today the Supreme Court cleared the way for the administration to fire large numbers of employees at 19 different federal agencies and to reorganize them while litigation against those firings moves forward, although it required the administration to act in ways “consistent with applicable law.” A lower court had blocked the firings during litigation. Ann E. Marimow of the Washington Post notes that this court has repeatedly sided with President Donald Trump as he slashes the federal government. The court said it is not expressing a view on the legality of the cuts at this time.
The administration's cuts were in the news today as Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket reported that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has just 86 people deployed in Texas today although Trump declared a disaster on Sunday. At a press opportunity at a cabinet meeting today, Trump said it wasn’t the right time to talk about his plans to phase out FEMA.
The administration is getting pushback in a number of other places as well, including from medical organizations. Yesterday the American Academy of Pediatricians, the American College of Physicians, and four other groups sued the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the changes Kennedy has made to the vaccine advisory panel, to the availability of covid vaccines, and to vaccine recommendations. The lawsuit calls those changes "unlawful” and “unilateral” and says they violate the Administrative Procedure Act.
Just who is in charge of the administration remains unclear. In the New York Times yesterday, Jason Zengerle pointed to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller as the “final word” on White House policy. Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem defers to him. Attorney General Pam Bondi “is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice” to him. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles is concentrating on “producing a reality TV show every day,” a Trump advisor told Zengerle.
So Miller, with his knack for flattering his boss, wields power.
Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth did not inform the White House before he stopped the shipment of weapons to Ukraine last week. Natasha Bertrand and Zachary Cohen of CNN reported today that Hegseth’s lack of a chief of staff or trusted advisors means he has no one to urge him to coordinate with other government partners. Trump has ordered Hegseth to restart some of the shipments. When a reporter asked the president today who had authorized the pause, Trump answered: “I don’t know, why don’t you tell me?”
At today’s press opportunity, Trump was erratic, at one point veering off into a discussion of whether he should put gold leaf on the moldings in the room’s corners.
The administration has so few successes to celebrate that, as Jarrett Renshaw of Reuters reported today, it is claiming credit for investments that were actually made under former president Joe Biden. A government website touting the “Trump effect” claims more than $2.6 trillion in U.S. investments, but Renshaw found that more than $1.3 trillion of those investments originated under Biden or were routine spending. One company has warned that its pledge of investments worth $50 billion is threatened by Trump’s policies.
When asked why the administration had taken credit for projects that happened under Biden, White House officials said “the final investment decisions were announced under [Trump’s] watch and prove his economic policies are triggering U.S. investment.” Renshaw noted that “[i]t was not clear in many cases what role, if any, Trump or his policies played in getting the deals across the line.”
Instead of embracing proven economic policies, the administration appears to be turning to ideologically based ideas that seem far fetched. Today, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins rejected the idea that the government would find a way to protect undocumented agricultural workers. “There will be no amnesty,” she said. “The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way. And we move the workforce towards automation and 100% American participation, which again with 34 million people, able-bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do that fairly quickly.”
The administration is now facing a rebellion from MAGA supporters who expected that, once in power, a Trump administration would release information about those men implicated in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal as people for whom Epstein provided underage girls. MAGA loyalists maintained the “deep state” was hiding the list to protect unnamed Democratic politicians, and MAGA leaders fed the conspiracy theory to stoke anger at the Democrats.
Once in power, though, Trump officials have failed to produce a list of Epstein’s clients. MAGA loyalists have now turned their anger on those officials, especially Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said in February that the Epstein list “is sitting on my desk right now” and who now maintains that no such list exists.
Perhaps to distract their supporters from the issue, the Fox News Channel today announced that the FBI is launching criminal investigations of former Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan and former FBI director James Comey over their investigation of ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives.
The Fox News Channel also announced that the White House has waived executive privilege for former president Biden’s White House physician Kevin O’Connor, who had asked to postpone his testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee about former president Biden’s mental acuity and use of an autopen. On Saturday, O’Connor’s lawyer wrote to committee chair James Comer (R-KY) asking for the postponement, noting: “We are unaware of any prior occasion on which a Congressional Committee has subpoenaed a physician to testify about the treatment of an individual patient. And the notion that a Congressional Committee would do so without any regard whatsoever for the confidentiality of the physician-patient relationship is alarming.”
As its popularity sinks, the administration appears to be turning to extraordinary measures to enforce its will. Ellen Nakashima, Warren P. Strobel, and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post reported today that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has tried to get access to emails and chats of people working in the Intelligence Community in order to root out those perceived as insufficiently loyal to Trump.
Gabbard’s press secretary claimed the effort was designed to “end the politicization and weaponization of intelligence against Americans,” but Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told the reporters that Trump’s loyalists “zeal to root out ‘politicization” “often seems to be shorthand for anything less than unconditional support for the president.” He noted their effort risks “creating an echo chamber within the intelligence community or creating counterintelligence risks.”
The Internal Revenue Service today changed longstanding policy to say that churches can now endorse political candidates without losing their tax-exempt status. According to Gary Grumbach and Dareh Gregorian of NBC News, the rule prohibiting churches from endorsing candidates is rarely enforced, and Trump, whose strongest supporters are white evangelical Protestants, has called for an end to it.
A judge will have to agree to the change.
The administration’s show of force in Los Angeles yesterday, when immigration officers and about 90 National Guard members descended on MacArthur Park with 17 Humvees and four tactical vehicles in what looked like a military operation, appears to have been designed to intimidate immigrants and Trump’s opponents.
And today, Trump suggested he could take over New York City if voters elect Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. He then suggested the administration could take over Washington, D.C., as well. “We could run D.C. I mean we’re, we're looking at D.C. We don’t want crime in D.C. We want the city to run well,” he told reporters. "We would run it so good, it would be run so proper, we’d get the best person to run it…. We want a capital that’s run flawlessly, and it wouldn’t be hard for us to do it.”
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On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation without systematic Black enslavement.
In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited slavery on the basis of race, but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which Black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after actor John Wilkes Booth murdered President Abraham Lincoln, white southern Democrats had done their best to push their Black neighbors back into subservience. So long as southern states had abolished enslavement, repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy and made war on the United States.
Northern Republican lawmakers refused. There was no way they were going to rebuild southern society on the same blueprint as existed before the Civil War, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it. Having just fought a war to destroy the South’s ideology, they were not going to let it regrow in peacetime.
Congress rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction.
But then congressmen had to come up with their own. After months of hearings and debate, they proposed amending the Constitution to settle the outstanding questions of the war. Chief among these was how to protect the rights of Black Americans in states where they could neither vote nor testify in court or sit on a jury to protect their own interests.
Congress’s solution was the Fourteenth Amendment.
It took on the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision declaring that Black men "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens.”
The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
The amendment also addressed the Dred Scott decision in another profound way. In 1857, southerners and Democrats who were adamantly opposed to federal power controlled the Supreme Court. They backed states’ rights. So the Dred Scott decision did more than read Black Americans out of our history: it dramatically circumscribed Congress’s power.
The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857 this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm.
And so the Fourteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures had passed discriminatory laws. “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it said. And then it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down the Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South.
Those same principles took on profound national significance in the post–World War II era, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment aggressively to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states. The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.
Opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. They began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level. Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court.
Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”
Kennedy’s comments foreshadowed the world advanced by today’s MAGA Republicans. In 2022 the Supreme Court, stacked as it is with right-wing justices, overturned the federal protection of abortion rights provided in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and sent the question of abortion back to the states, many of which promptly banned the procedure.
When the court overturned the federal protection of abortion rights, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that federal protections for access to birth control and same-sex marriage should also be reexamined. In 2024, President Donald Trump suggested he would be open to letting states decide whether to restrict access to birth control, walking his statement back after a ferocious backlash.
Justice Samuel Alito has joined Thomas in attacking the Obergefell v. Hodges decision that provides federal protection for same-sex marriage, claiming that right, too, ought to be left up to voters in the states, even as Republican-dominated states are passing laws to limit who can vote.
Not only have today’s Republicans launched an attack on the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement that the federal government protect Americans against discrimination in the states, President Donald Trump has launched an assault on the birthright citizenship that is the centerpiece of the amendment.
That section of the amendment— the first section— acknowledges that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens,” who enjoy the same rights, and that no state can take those rights away without due process of law.
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Just a week ago, Republicans in the House of Representatives passed the nearly 1,000-page budget reconciliation bill President Donald Trump demanded, and at the signing ceremony for the bill the next day, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced Republicans were “laying a key cornerstone of America’s new golden age.”
But the past week has shown a nation—and an administration—in turmoil.
On July 4, the day Trump signed the bill, flash floods devastated central Texas, leaving more than 100 people dead and about 160 still missing. Local officials immediately blamed cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS) for the disaster, but reviews showed that NWS meteorologists had predicted the storm accurately and had sent out three increasingly urgent warnings at 1:14 a.m., 4:03 a.m., and 6:06 a.m.
But four hours passed before the police department in the City of Kerrville issued a warning. It wasn’t until 7:32 that the city urged people along the Guadalupe River to move to higher ground immediately. The missing link between the NWS and public safety personnel appears to have been the weather service employee in charge of coordinating between them. He took an unplanned early retirement under pressure from the “Department of Government Efficiency” and has not been replaced.
Then, as Gabe Cohen and Michael Williams of CNN reported, search and rescue teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could not respond to the disaster because Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose department is in charge of FEMA, had recently tried to cut spending by requiring her personal sign-off on any expenditure over $100,000. That order meant FEMA couldn’t put crews in place ahead of the storm, or respond immediately. Noem didn’t sign off on the deployment of FEMA teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding started.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, told Cohen and Williams that Noem did not authorize FEMA deployment because DHS used other search and rescue teams. “FEMA is shifting from bloated, DC-centric dead weight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens,” McLaughlin told CNN in a statement. “The old processes are being replaced because they failed Americans in real emergencies for decades.”
“DHS is rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and is reprioritizing appropriated dollars. Secretary Noem is delivering accountability to the U.S. taxpayer, which Washington bureaucrats have ignored for decades at the expense of American citizens,” McLaughlin said. Noem has called for the elimination of FEMA.
Meanwhile, FEMA’s acting director, David Richardson, has been nowhere to be found, making no public appearances, statements, or postings on social media since the disaster, and not visiting the site. Former FEMA officials told Thomas Frank of Politico that Richardson’s absence suggests Noem is controlling the FEMA response. Trump appointed Richardson after his team fired his first appointee, Cameron Hamilton, for telling Congress he did not think FEMA should be scrapped.
The day after he took office in May, Richardson, who has no experience with emergency management, told staff: “Don’t get in my way…because I will run right over you. I will achieve the president’s intent…. I, and I alone in FEMA, speak for FEMA,” he said.
Even as rescuers were still at work today in Texas, DHS cancelled a $3 million grant that had been awarded in New York to make sure the NWS can communicate effectively with local officials.
Tariffs are back in the news as Trump’s postponement for his high tariff has ended. They are as chaotic and as problematic as ever.
On April 2, Trump announced tariffs on countries around the world. He said that, beginning on April 9, he would impose a baseline tariff of 10%—a significant increase from the 2.5% rate then in effect—and additional tariffs of up to 50% on countries using a bizarre formula apparently cooked up by his trade advisor, Peter Navarro.
Immediately the stock market lost more than $5 trillion. So rather than let the tariffs go into effect on April 9, Trump pushed the start of the tariffs off until Wednesday, July 9 (yesterday), vowing to negotiate trade deals with individual countries rapidly: 90 deals in 90 days, Navarro said. But only two deals have been forthcoming—one with the United Kingdom and one with Vietnam—meaning that on July 9 the high tariffs of April 2 would take effect.
Then, on Tuesday, Trump announced on social media the real date for the start of the tariffs would be August 1. Somewhat bizarrely, he told reporters he had not changed the date the tariffs would go into effect, although on Monday he signed an executive order changing the date of the start of the levies from July 9 to August 1.
Throughout the week, Trump has been sending letters to world leaders informing them that he intended to impose high tariffs on their countries unless they negotiated with him. At a press opportunity at a cabinet meeting, as Danielle Kurtzleben of NPR noted, he tried to rebrand his letters as deals. “A letter means a deal,” he told reporters. “We can't meet with 200 countries. We have a few trusted people that know what they're doing, that are doing a good job, but you can't do it. You have to do it in a more general way. But it's a very good way. It's a better way. It's a more powerful way.”
On Tuesday, Trump also announced a 50% tariff on copper. Copper is vital to the defense industry, batteries, electric wires, plumbing, and so on, and the U.S. imports more than half of what it uses. Trump claims to want to see the U.S. produce the copper it needs, but getting the industry to that point will take years. He also announced a 35% tariff on goods from Canada.
Paul Wiseman of the Associated Press notes that the 10% tariffs are apparently here to stay because the administration needs that money to cover some of the hole the new tax cuts from the budget reconciliation bill will blast in the deficit.
While Trump continues to insist—incorrectly—that foreign countries pay tariffs, his former vice president Mike Pence reiterated the truth today. On Bloomberg “Surveillance,” he said of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s boast that tariffs will bring in $300 billion this year: “Well, tariffs are a tax, and American importers and businesses and, ultimately, consumers pay almost all of that. And so literally a week after we managed to extend the Trump-Pence tax cuts and prevent a $2,000 tax increase on working families, the administration is right now boasting of the fact that the average American household is going to see about $3,000 increase in the cost of goods.”
Last month, Trump nominated Department of Justice prosecutor Emil Bove to be a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, covering Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and the Virgin Islands. Bove is a Trump loyalist who defended Trump in his criminal indictments and participated in firing officials who investigated Trump and the January 6 rioters. He was also a central player in the dropping of corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams and the rendition of Venezuelan migrants to the CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador.
On June 24, Erez Reuveni, a former Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyer, filed an official whistleblower complaint about abuses in the department. Reuveni was fired after telling a court that the administration had made an error when it rendered Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia to CECOT despite a court order not to do so. In the whistleblower complaint, Reuveni alleged that the leaders at the Department of Justice and the White House had deliberately defied court orders and “engaged in unlawful activity, abused their authority, created substantial and specific threat to health and safety.”
Reuveni alleged that Bove insisted the planes carrying the men to El Salvador must take off and that he said DOJ “would need to consider telling the courts ‘f*ck you’ and ignore any such court order.” Reuveni then laid out the events of the March days in which the men were deported, along with the determination of the Department of Justice to violate the orders of the court.
Bove told the Senate Judiciary Committee last month he had “no recollection” of saying “f*ck you” to the court and said he had never advised the Department of Justice to violate a court order. Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on social media that Reuveni was a “leaker asserting false claims.”
Today, Senate Democrats released a trove of documents Reuveni had provided the committee, backing up his complaint. Texts and emails confirm that Department of Justice lawyers misled Judge James Boasberg, one telling him that he did not know when the Trump administration intended to deport the men when, as one of Reuveni’s colleagues said, “I can’t believe he said he doesn’t know. He knows there are plans for AEA removals within the next 24 hours.”
Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement Thursday that Bove “belongs nowhere near the federal bench.” “This is about more than a random f-bomb,” he said. “This is a declaration of defiance of our courts at the highest level of our government by a man who now seeks a lifetime appointment to one of the highest courts in our land.”
Today a federal judge appointed by Republican George W. Bush granted class action status to a lawsuit challenging Trump’s executive order attacking birthright citizenship. With that status in place, U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante barred the administration from denying citizenship to U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. Judge Laplante paused his ruling for a week to give the administration time to appeal.
Trump himself lost his appeal of a New York jury’s verdict that he must pay writer E. Jean Carroll $5 million for sexually abusing and defaming her. Trump now has 90 days to appeal to the Supreme Court to take the case.
Tonight the White House posted on X an image of “SUPERMAN TRUMP”—a much younger Trump dressed as the famous superhero, fists clenched, against a gauzy background—with the caption “TRUTH. JUSTICE. THE AMERICAN WAY.”
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