Thom Hartmann: 6 Unelected Justices Empowered Trump to Ignore Congress

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2026 //
1

Thom Hartmann is a brilliant researcher, author, journalist, and blogger. He writes incisively about American politics.

In this post, he explains that the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court on immigration was not about who gets to cross the border but whether the President can ignore laws passed by Congress. The rightwing majority of six is constructing and reinforcing the theory of the “unitary executive,” which makes the Presidency more powerful than the other two branches. Since the Reagan era, rightwingers have embraced this idea. This was not the intent of the Founders, who designed a government in which there was no sovereign, no king.

The rightwing majority on the Court are Originalists when it serves their purposes (didn’t everyone carry a gun whenever they went shopping?), but they are not shy about ignoring the Founders when it serves their purposes.

He writes:

Something happened inside the Supreme Court chamber on Thursday that almost never happens: Justice Sonia Sotomayor was so disgusted by what the six radical, on-the-take Republican appointees had just done that she read her dissent aloud from the bench, and Justice Samuel Alito, who’d written the majority opinion, snapped back at her in real time, a breach of the Court’s normally stage-managed decorum that left veteran reporters in the room visibly startled in slack-jawed amazement.

On the surface they were fighting about asylum seekers. But Sotomayor understood, as Alito surely did, that the real question wasn’t who gets to cross the border: it was whether the laws Congress writes still mean anything once a neofascist, imperial president (like Alito and his peers want) decides he’d rather not follow them because he’s above the law.

To understand this — and why it’s so insanely radical — look carefully at what the Court actually did in the two 6-3 all-Republican immigration rulings it handed down yesterday morning. 

Back in 1980, a bipartisan Congress passed the Refugee Act to bring American law in line with our promise not to send the persecuted back to be killed, and it laid out a specific, mandatory set of steps.

Under the law Congress wrote that year, a noncitizen who reaches our border and says she fears persecution gets referred for an asylum interview to determine the legitimacy of her fear of violence or death in her home country or the country she’s fleeing. The word Congress chose to write into the law was the administration “shall,” not “may,” hold that hearing and a judge “shall” make that determination. 

On Thursday the Republicans on the Court, however, ruled that Trump can erase or effectively ignore that law by simply ordering border agents to physically block people on the Mexican (or, presumably, Canadian or at an airport arrival) side of the line, so they never technically “arrive in the United States” and the law never kicks in.

Sotomayor called the reasoning illogical, because it is. A person standing at the threshold of a port of entry has plainly arrived. The Republican Trump toadies on the Court, however, pretended otherwise so Trump’s racial enforcers could essentially ignore both the intention and the letter of the law that elected members from both parties in Congress wrote.

The second ruling is even worse, albeit quieter.

Congress (whose job is to write laws for the United States) created Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in 1990 for people who can’t safely go home, and it built in court review of whether an administration followed the required procedures before yanking that status away. 

The Trump administration recently tried to strip TPS protections from hundreds of thousands of Black Haitians and brown-skinned Syrians as part of its “Make America White Again” program, and multiple lower courts found it had ignored those procedures the law requires, noting that Trump’s Haiti decision, in particular, was tainted by racial animus (hate of Black people from what Trump calls “shithole countries”).

As Amy Howe of SCOTUSblog wrote about Justice Elana Kagan’s reaction: 

“Kagan called it ‘plain to see’ that race played a role in the decision to terminate the TPS designation for Haiti. ‘The evidence’ that the Haiti TPS beneficiaries ‘have offered,’ she stressed, ‘includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print.’ But those ‘statements fairly shout,’ she said, ‘in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.’”

The Republican majority didn’t even bother to say if the Trump regime had or had not complied with the plain letter and clear intent of the law Congress passed. Instead, the six corrupt Republicans on the Court declared that no court anywhere in America is allowed to even ask if Trump, et al, are breaking that particular law (an oversight process by a court called “judicial review”).

As the American Immigration Council pointed out, that means even an openly illegal decision is now insulated from any review by any judge in the country, closing the courthouse door in a way that, in my opinion, even the most conservative of the Founders would have found astonishing and plainly unconstitutional. 

Congress, in other words, wrote a law that told the courts to check the legitimacy of asylum seekers claims to determine if they can or cannot stay here and apply for legal status; writing such laws is what the Constitution requires of an elected Congress. 

But the six radical justices that rightwing billlionaires have spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to get on the Supreme Court told all the rest of the courts in America to simply look away and ignore the law. They’re not allowed to enforce it any more, even though Congress passed it and a president signed it. 

Robert Reich put his finger on it yesterday afternoon, noting in his excellent newsletter that: 

“[A] majority of the current Supreme Court — the abominable Roberts Court — has bent over backwards to ignore those laws.

“This must be seen for what it really is — a systemic effort by the six Republican appointees on the court to shrink congressional authority and enlarge the authority of the executive branch.

“If there was any doubt before, there should be none now: The Supreme Court is part of the anti-democracy movement led by Trump and the billionaires behind him.”

This agreement with Trump’s racist efforts to purge America of Black and brown refugees aren’t only losses for those would-be immigrants. As Reich points out, these decisions are stripping power from Congress, from the basic idea that the people’s elected representatives get to write laws that the Constitution requires a president to obey.

The Court’s defenders will tell you I’m being unfair in that assessment, claiming that the justices are just neutral umpires reading statutes as written. But that’s a lie, and recent history proves it.

Back in 2021, this very same Court struck down Joe Biden’s pandemic eviction moratorium, the one keeping millions of struggling families in their homes during a deadly COVID surge, ruling that his CDC had reached “past what Congress allowed” and declaring that if such a moratorium were going to continue, Congress, and not the president, would have to specifically authorize it.

Just a few years later, the same conservative bloc reasoned its way to blocking Joe Biden’s student debt relief, insisting Congress would never hand a president that kind of authority without saying so in unmistakable language. 

When a Democratic president acts, in other words, they read laws Congress has passed with a magnifying glass and demand crystal-clear permissions. But when Trump (or, presumably, future Republican presidents) wants to shred the asylum process or wants his immigration purges of nonwhite people placed beyond the reach of any judge, the magnifying glass disappears and the words suddenly bend whichever way Trump wants.

These six lawyers in robes started from the outcome that today’s captured hard-right MAGA Republican Party and its white supremacist Dear Leader wants and reverse-engineered their reasoning to reach it, and the reasoning changes from case to case because the only thing that has to stay fixed is who wins. 

As Sotomayer wrote, pointing to that magnifying glass in her dissent to yesterday’s Mullin v. Al Otro Lado decision: 

“The Court’s illogical interpretation [of Congress’ written law] is driven almost entirely by a fixation on a single word: ‘in.’”

And the consequences of these decisions aren’t merely academic: people will die because of the actions these corrupt Republicans just took allowing the President and his whiteness enforcers to ignore the statutes that Congress wrote, both parties passed, and presidents signed into law. As Sotomayor also wrote in her dissent:

“One woman who had fled Honduras after receiving death threats from gang members was beaten, cut, and knocked unconscious by an unknown man after being turned back from a port of entry. Another asylum seeker who was turned back at a port three times was later raped in the presence of her child. 

“Those living in migrant camps were subjected to break-ins, robberies, and assaults, ‘fac[ing] serious harm at the hands of criminal organizations, including kidnapping, extortion, physical violence, and sexual assault.’ Some were ‘murdered in Mexico while waiting for an opportunity to be processed by U. S. officials.’ 

“Desperate to flee these conditions and secure the opportunity to apply for asylum, ‘[s]ome attempted to reach U. S. soil by other means,’ including by attempting to cross the border between ports of entry by trekking through deserts or swimming across the Rio Grande. Often, these efforts had tragic ends. 

“One couple that grew discouraged after a month of waiting in a camp near the border decided to cross the river and ask for asylum once they reached U. S. soil, but they were caught in a swift current and drowned. Another woman also drowned, along with her 2-year-old son, after she gave up waiting in a tent camp and attempted to swim across the river. Hundreds of others have met a similar fate, and many more died crossing the desert along the southern border, all making 2020 and 2021 some of the ‘deadliest year[s] for migrant crossings’ in various regions of the southern border.”

I lived and worked in Germany in the 1980s, and you couldn’t be there in those years without feeling how the entire postwar refugee framework — in America and across postwar Europe — grew out of one unbearable lesson, that turning desperate people away at the door and sending them back to die is something decent nations swore they’d never do again.

In 1939, the United States turned away the St. Louis, a ship carrying 937 Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s Nazi Germany purge of all “non-Aryan” people. The ship returned to Europe where the Nazis seized its passengers, ultimately murdering 254 of them in the “detention centers” Germany ran in occupied countries. 

Americans were horrified and humiliated as the story became known well after the war, and the Refugee Act of 1980 was our nation writing the promise that we’d never repeat such a horror into law; it passed with broad bipartisan support. 

On Thursday of this week five unelected men and one unelected woman in robes decided that promise is now optional for a president who welcomes white South African “refugees” but wants to purge American of people whose skin is darker than his.

I’ve argued for years, including in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, that Republicans on this Court long ago seized powers the Framers never gave it, and have — since Nixon flipped the court to the right and appointed Lewis Powell (of Powell Memo infamy) in 1972 — spent the last fifty years using them on behalf of the morbidly rich and the party that serves them. 

From Buckley in 1976 and Bellotti (written by Powell himself in 1978) through Citizens United in 2010, this generation’s Republican justices — each carefully placed on the Court by big money interests since the 1980s — rewrote our democracy and turned it into an auction; earlier this term they even gutted what was left of the Voting Rights Act to help solidify raw GOP political power. 

Now they’re telling Congress its laws are merely suggestions whenever a Republican president disagrees.

Justice Louis Brandeis warned us a century ago that, “[W]e can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.” The morbidly rich men who put these justices on the Court made their choice, and the justices are delivering for them, tearing another bite out of our democracy with every decision.

The good news is that the branch the Court just tried to sideline is the one closest to you. Ahilan Arulanantham, who argued the Syrian case, urged Congress to act to overrule the Court, and he’s right, because Congress can restore judicial review, can rewrite these statutes in language even Sam Alito can’t twist, can expand and rebalance the Court itself, and can be made to do all of it if enough of us demand it. 

Call your senators and representative at 202-224-3121 and tell them a Court declaring Congress irrelevant is a five-alarm constitutional emergency: we need a judicial code of ethics for SCOTUS so they have the follow the same laws as all other federal judges must; impeachment hearings for Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Roberts; 18-year term limits; and a rapid expansion of the Court to at least 13 members to bring it into line with previous, historic ratios to other senior courts. 

None of this changes unless ordinary people refuse to let it stand. So get loud, stay in it, and if this piece helped you understand what really happened yesterday, share it and send people to hartmannreport.com so more of us understand exactly what we’re up against, exactly who to hold responsible, and how.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Injustice, Racism

Slate: The Supreme Court Chose Gun Rights Over Property Rights and the Right to Life

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2026 //
1

The best part of subscribing to Slate is Mark Joseph Stern’s legal commentary. In this post, he explains the tortured and wholly inadequate logic behind the decision to strike down a Hawaii law that allowed owners of private property to prohibit people from bringing guns into their establishments. Property rights vs. gun rights. The six rightwing members of the U.S. Supreme Court chose gun rights over property rights and pretended that it was a traditional, well-established practice throughout American history. In the preface, Stern described Justice Alito’s opinion as “deranged.” Surely it is deranged to be so indifferent to human life, especially hypocritical from the six who banned abortion because of their devotion to a “right to life.”

I suppose the resolution is that fetuses have a right to life but human beings, once born, do not have a right to live. Thus, no place is protected from guns except courthouses, schools, and the Halls of Congress. How long will it be until it’s okay to carry guns in schools? The justices will never allow guns in their courthouses.

Stern writes:

The Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision in Wolford v. Lopez on Thursday confirms our worst fears about the supermajority’s Second Amendment jurisprudence: It is a freewheeling policy project utterly unmoored from history that allows the Republican-appointed justices to implement their preferred gun laws under the thin guise of judicial review. These justices struck down Hawaiʻi’s law restricting guns on private property not because the Constitution required them; to the contrary, the state proved beyond doubt that its statute was deeply rooted in history and tradition. Rather, the supermajority killed the law because it was offended that Hawaiʻi would dare try to mitigate the violence that SCOTUS has unleashed through its radical, incoherent gun rights jurisprudence. Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion for the court bristles with annoyance toward the state government’s attempts to protect people on private property from getting shot to death. Constitutional law has given way to six justices’ ad hoc nullification of any law that favors human life over the paranoid obsessions of gun enthusiasts.

Wolford involves a Hawaiʻi law that prohibits individuals from carrying guns on private property unless the owner affirmatively consents. (California, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York have enacted similar statutes—all now likely invalid.) The state intended this rule to respect property rights by creating a default rule that nobody takes a firearm onto someone’s land without their permission. Gun advocates promptly challenged it under Bruen, the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision holding that a burden on the right to bear arms is unconstitutional unless it has enough “historical analogues” from the distant past. They claimed that Hawaiʻi could not identify a sufficient number of these “analogues” to justify its law.

There are key problems with this argument, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson explained in dissent. First, Bruen ostensibly compels courts to figure out what conduct the Second Amendment protected when ratified; if a contemporary law infringes on that conduct, it is presumptively unconstitutional. But, Jackson wrote, “there is no right to carry a gun onto private property without the permission of the owner.” The majority did not even contest this point, because it is uncontestable. Instead, Alito ratcheted up Bruen’s level of generality: Rather than asking if Hawaiʻi’s law actually burdens a concrete, well-defined right, he merely asked if it “hampers” an individual’s ability to take their gun anywhere they want. Because it does, he concluded, it must be supported by appropriate “historical analogues.”

Then, having defined the right to bear arms as broadly as possible, Alito demanded granular specificity from older statutes that echo Hawaiʻi’s. The state offered many; its list included 18th-century laws in Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York that required permission from a property owner before carrying a gun on his land, as well as 19th-century laws in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas that restricted the unapproved carrying of guns on “the premises or plantations of any citizen.” Even under Bruen’s stringent standard, aren’t these statutes enough to shore up Hawaiʻi’s modern version?

No, Alito wrote, because each is “distinguishable” from Hawaiʻi’s. The state’s true goal, he asserted, is to enshrine “local attitudes” and “a Hawaiian tradition” that “disfavor the carrying of guns” in public to prevent violence. By contrast, the 1700s laws were mere “anti-poaching” rules meant to mitigate “harms and risks associated with unauthorized hunting.” So, under Bruen, they are not “relevantly similar” to Hawaiʻi’s in terms of “how and why” they were enacted. Meanwhile, the 1860s laws were post–Civil War “Black codes” meant to oppress former slaves. So Alito dismissed them as a “tainted artifact” that did not qualify as Bruen “analogues.”

Each of these moves infuriated Jackson. To start, she bemoaned the majority’s “boundless” Second Amendment that “presumptively protects” the right “to carry anywhere and everywhere.” Alito’s “newfound understanding of the first step of Bruen,” Jackson wrote, “obliterates any need for reference back to original meaning.” After Wolford, “judges are now free to insert any meaning they desire into the text of the Second Amendment and then demand the government provide analogues to fit that interpretation.”

As to those analogues: Jackson ridiculed Alito’s refusal to acknowledge that they show how “states routinely required affirmative consent for armed carry onto private property” at the founding. The 1700s statutes were not, in fact, limited to poaching, but were also meant to prevent “armed trespass, property theft or damage, and gun violence, whether intentional or accidental.” Lawmakers helpfully wrote down these aims, which Alito ignored. The purpose of these laws, Jackson wrote, was to “vindicate property rights” by mitigating “concerns associated with violations of those rights by armed individuals on private land.” That, of course, is precisely what Hawaiʻi seeks to do today.

And what about the Southern laws from the post–Civil War era that protected private property from armed trespassers? Jackson acknowledged that “confronting the origins of these laws is certainly uncomfortable. The Black Codes were ugly. And racist. And deplorable.” But that does not “automatically render these laws irrelevant to a fair assessment of the right to carry firearms.” If the majority chooses to “tether its Second Amendment analysis to facts about America’s past, it must contend with our nation’s entire history, warts and all.” Excluding laws that appear “ugly” to modern eyes empowers the court “to cavalierly pick and choose which parts of the historical record count,” giving it “discretion to cull the history” in “service of a single goal: preventing the government from responding to issues arising from the possession of firearms.”

Categories Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Guns, Injustice

Ross Wiener: I Supported NCLB. I Was Wrong.

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2026 //
3

Ross Wiener worked for Education Trust, a DC-based advocacy group that claimed to support low-income children of color. Funded by the Gates Foundation, among others, Education Trust enthusiastically defended No Child Left Behind and standardized testing as ways to improve the lot of the neediest students.

When NCLB was reauthorized in 2015, critics of standardized testing hoped that Congress would remove the testing mandate (every child in grades 3-8 was tested every year, and their schools and teachers were held accountable). Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, chair of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said that Senate Republicans were open to changing the mandate.

Democrats, however, defended the most punitive elements of the testing regime, responding to the Obama administration and Education Trust, which continued to believe that high-stakes testing helped the poorest kids. The testing remained in the new Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015.

Now we know that NCLB did not “leave no child behind.” Many children were left behind by tests that invariably produced results that favored the kids from the most advantaged homes. The very nature of the normed tests guaranteed that half the students would rank below the norm and e patience the stigma of failure.

And we also know by now that not every student succeeds in the era of ESSA.

Now comes a remarkable article by Ross Wiener, high-level staff at Education Trust, recanting his views. His article appeared in The New York Times. This is a gift article.

He wrote:

New data from Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project confirms what close observers already knew: America’s test scores are slipping. The pandemic worsened the decline, but the slide began years before. In one-third of school districts, students are reading a full grade level lower than they were in 2015.

The new data is emboldening calls to restore something like the No Child Left Behind Act, the stringent, test-based accountability policy that defined American education from 2002 to 2015 and imposed penalties on schools whose students did not meet proficiency requirements on state standardized tests. The Atlantic captured that impulse in a 2025 podcast episode titled “Bring Back High-Stakes School Testing.” In it, Margaret Spellings, a secretary of education under President George W. Bush and now president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, argues we need to restore “the muscle of accountability, the muscle of assessment.” Rahm Emanuel, exploring a 2028 presidential run, said in April that Democrats have abandoned standards and accountability and must return to them.

It was a mistake in the past to treat test scores as the purpose of public schools rather than as partial proxies for what a good education actually delivers. Reading and math are profoundly important and improving instruction must be part of any serious agenda. But test-based accountability policies were not sufficient decades ago. They are even less adequate now.

From 2002 to 2009, I was the policy director for the Education Trust, one of the most influential education reform organizations in the country. I testified before Congress, built coalitions for standards-based reform, and published analysis to advance No Child Left Behind, genuinely believing it was the path to public schools that better served low-income students and students of color. The early results seemed to vindicate us: Test scores rose, especially in elementary math among Hispanic and Black students, though much less in middle school, and never much in reading.

But there was a question I couldn’t shake: Were the outcomes we were holding schools accountable for the ones that actually determined whether a young person flourished? I still remember when I first encountered research showing that high school G.P.A. predicted college graduation better than standardized test scores. I went to my boss’s office to discuss it, expecting her to help me push back, but she confirmed it was true, and always had been. If so, I recall thinking, why are we fighting so hard for test scores to be the arbiter of quality education?

Years later, research from the University of Chicago Consortium would show that schools’ effect on students’ social well-being and work habits predicted academic gains about as well as test performance did, and was more predictive than test scores for students’ graduating from high school, enrolling in college, and staying out of the criminal justice system.

Accountability policy gave unprecedented authority to the idea that standardized test performance is the most important outcome schools produce and made it the organizing principle of American schooling. What could be easily tested gained importance. What could not — the practical, civic, relational and developmental — was pushed to the margins.

Over time, I became convinced that, with the best of intentions, I and many others in the education reform community had transferred our moral commitment to children over to the standardized tests. We had done this earnestly, not cynically, but we still did damage.

In 2023, 40 percent of high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. One in five had seriously considered suicide; nearly one in 10 had attempted it. Research from the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins found that 40 percent of Gen Z believes political violence can be justified, compared with 11 percent of baby boomers. Too many students experience school as an obligation with few opportunities for agency or meaning; recent survey data indicates that large shares of students find school boring and irrelevant and are struggling with engagement in the classroom. The academic crisis and the human crisis are not entirely separate phenomena.

The strategies that produced the early gains of the No Child Left Behind era depended on a social contract: comply with adult-designed systems, defer questions of meaning and purpose, and the payoff will come. Earlier generations may have endured school that felt boring or disconnected because they trusted that adults and institutions knew better. Many young people today do not share that trust, and they are not going to push aside their own questions of meaning and purpose on the assurance that compliance will eventually be rewarded.

You cannot accountability-pressure your way to better educational outcomes when chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed, misbehavior is common, students are disengaged and skeptical that school prepares them for the lives they want to lead, and teachers feel not just tired but stripped of the professional trust that makes the work meaningful.

The reality has changed. Too much of the old reform playbook has not.

Four years ago, the nonpartisan think tank Populace, which conducts opinion research that seeks to uncover what Americans actually believe, not what they say for social approval, asked adults to rank their K-12 priorities. Practical skills ranked first. Critical thinking ranked second. Demonstrating good character ranked third. Preparing for college was 47th on the list. Standardized test performance was 49th.

Meanwhile, young people are placing more emphasis on purpose, relationships and contribution than on older markers of status. For a generation, the reform coalition took its validation from economists and accountability metrics, while treating parents, students and communities as mere functionaries rather than partners in a shared civic enterprise.

Taking their priorities seriously would mean broadening what we expect from the classroom. Schools should put what students can do on equal footing with what they know, embedding real skills in academic learning rather than leaving them to chance or sequencing them to later in life. Schools should reconnect with the communities they serve, so young people learn through and about the places where they live. And they should reanimate the character-forming, developmental mission a pluralistic democracy requires.

Federal policy has an essential role to play in public education: protecting civil rights, funding quality data and research, and encouraging promising practices to spread. But the formative mission cannot be mandated by Washington. Belonging, the foundation of both learning and civic commitment, is relational and starts local; it cannot be standardized or scaled, but must be cultivated by schools that are responsive to the communities they serve.

In 2010, at Springfield Renaissance School, a public school in Springfield, Mass., serving mostly low-income students of color, ninth graders were trained by city engineers to conduct energy audits of school buildings. They collected data, ran cost-benefit analyses and produced a report recommending how the city could lower its carbon footprint and reduce energy costs. The mayor invested in their plan; the city began recouping its investment within a year. Organizations like EL Education, High Tech High and Big Picture Learning have built whole school models around a similar approach: rigorous academic learning embedded in real problems, with real audiences and real stakes.

Public schools educate nearly nine in 10 American children, in cities, towns and rural hamlets across the full range of our diversity and divisions. The era of national, test-based education policy helped turn schools into both targets and drivers of polarization. Renewing public education requires balancing firm commitments to excellence and fairness for every child with the recognition that public schools, at their best, are civic institutions that communities recognize as their own.

Categories Education Reform

Who Are the Big Donors to Political Campaigns This Year?

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2026 //
0

Who are the big donors funding the 2026 midterm campaigns? Typically, the billionaires spend big on Presidential elections, but now they are pouring hundreds of millions into 2026 because it will determine control of Congress.

Republicans have a much bigger war chest than Democrats.

This is a gift article from the Washington Post. That means you can open the link without a subscription. I pay for it so you don’t have to.

https://wapo.st/3QZmR2g

What this shows above all is the need for campaign finance reform, specifically, limits on individual and corporate donors.

The only way to defeat Big Money is to vote.

Categories Billionaires, Elections, Funding

Breaking News: Judge Orders DOJ to Remove Redactions from Epstein Files

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2026 //
3

In response to a lawsuit filed by independent journalist Katie Phang, a federal judge has ordered the Department of Justice to “unredact” specific portions of the Epstein files or explain why it could not comply. A redaction is a black mark used to hide names or other material.

CBS reporters Joe Walsh and Daniel Ruetenik write:

A judge on Thursday ordered the Justice Department to either release unredacted versions of several files on the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein or explain why it can’t do so, following a lawsuit accusing Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche of improperly redacting documents.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan gave the government until Thursday, July 2, to comply.

The documents in question include eight emails with either the sender or recipient blacked out, a draft indictment of Epstein with the names of potential co-conspirators obscured and a 2019 email that mentions several co-conspirators whose names were redacted. Sullivan also ordered the Justice Department to either release the interview notes behind several FBI documents summarizing unverified allegations against President Trump, or explain why it couldn’t release them.

The court order follows months of controversy over the Justice Department’s handling of the files, which were released in response to a federal law. Millions of records have been made public since December, including photos, emails and law enforcement documents from the federal investigations into the disgraced financier and his 2019 death in pretrial custody.

Lawmakers and Epstein survivors have raised questions about missing or heavily redacted records. The Justice Department has said only about half of the 6 million pages of documents it collected on Epstein would be released, and many of the released files are partially blacked out. The department has said the unreleased documents were either duplicates, unrelated to Epstein or protected by legal privilege.

One of the emails covered by Thursday’s order — in which Epstein refers to a “torture video” — drew scrutiny earlier this year after Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California and GOP Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky questioned why the recipient was blacked out. Blanche later suggested on social media the recipient was Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, former CEO of the Dubai-based logistics firm DP World. CBS News has previously reached out to Sulayem for comment.

The Justice Department redacted the name of the recipient of this email released in the Epstein files. U.S. Department of Justice 

The department has defended its efforts, arguing the redactions are necessary to protect personal information or victims’ identities.

Thursday’s court ruling was spurred by a lawsuit filed in April by independent journalist and legal commentator Katie Phang over the redactions, which she argues are a “brazen, shocking, and ongoing violation” of the federal law mandating the release of the Epstein files. She asked a judge to order the release of several unredacted files.

The Justice Department responded earlier this month by arguing Phang cannot sue to force the documents’ release because the proper recourse is for her to file a Freedom Of Information Act request. Phang’s lawyers on Wednesday pointed to denials of Epstein-related FOIA requests. The judge then directed the Justice Department to respond by 1 p.m. on Thursday, and after the department missed that deadline, he ordered it to release the documents Phang had requested.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Evil, Failure, Scandals, Trump

Randi on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Immigration Decision

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2026 //
5

Today was a good day at the U.S. Supreme Court for Donald Trump and Stephen Miller: the Court gave them permission to deport hundreds of thousands of Haitians, Syrians, and others who hold Temporary Protected Status. Some 350,000 Haitians are affected. Under the same program, Trump has welcomed white South Africans. The Court’s vote was 6-3.

Among those now subject to deportation are engineers, doctors and thousands of health care workers.

The program was established in 1990 with bipartisan support.

In a different 6-3 decision, the Court’s rightwing majority struck down a law in Hawaii that allowed private businesses open to the public, like retail shops, grocery stores, coffee shops, and gas stations to bar patrons carrying guns. The majority said the Second Amendment protects gun owners and they should be allowed to enter these places carrying their guns. The rest of us are not protected from them.

Contact:
Alexis Lopez
305-878-9836
alopez@aft.org

AFT’s Weingarten on US Supreme Court Ruling Ending Protection for Hundreds of Thousands of Haitians and Syrians

WASHINGTON—AFT President Randi Weingarten issued the following statement in response to the U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing the Trump administration to end temporary protected status protections for thousands of workers from Haiti and Syria who live and work legally in the United States:

“This country has been a beacon of hope for people around the world who seek a safe haven from violence and persecution. Immigrants with temporary protected status pour billions into the economy each year, pay taxes and fill essential jobs across industries including healthcare, agriculture and manufacturing. Losing their right to work and live here will push them into poverty and leave our country weaker, poorer and more vulnerable.

“When darker forces—like those in the White House today—closed our borders in the 1920s, millions of people who needed shelter were slaughtered abroad. We said “never again,” yet now we have a Supreme Court that’s closed its eyes to that history. 

“It is ironic that the six justices who issued this ruling would likely never visit or live in Haiti or Syria because of the extreme and ongoing instability there. Yet they somehow feel constitutionally compelled to send others back based on an administration policy rooted in discrimination and hate. History will not be kind to those who joined this warped opinion—and it is now incumbent on Congress to reverse it.”

###

Categories History, Immigration

As Flu Cases Rise Past 200 at Training Base, Hegseth Restores Vaccine Mandate

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2026 //
5

Pete Hegseth announced recently that he was ending mandatory vaccines for the military. He jumped on the RFK Jr. bandwagon, believing the nonsense that vaccines are a personal choice, not a necessary part of public health.

Then reality bit.

The flu took down more than 100 recruits at Lackland Air Force Base, a training facility for new members of the military.

The military lives in close quarters. When one person catches a contagious disease, it spreads.

After the number infected with the flu rose past 200, Hegseth reversed himself and restored the mandatory vaccine.

Not even Hegseth can stop a contagious disease from spreading.

Categories Accountability, Extremism, Health, Medicine, Science

Who Are the Big Money Donors to Political Candidates?

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2026 //
5

Hundred of millions of dollars are pouring into the midterm elections.

Who are the big donors? The Republicans get far more money than Democrats.

This article in The Washington Post identifies them. It is a gift article. That means you can open it and read it without a subscription.

https://wapo.st/3QZmR2g

George Soros is by far the biggest giver to Democrats. That helps explain why the MAGA folks demonize him.

The conclusion I draw from this article is that our political system is warped by the influence of unlimited money. We desperately need a Congress that will limit campaign spending.

Until then, we have a government for sale.

Most give to Republicans.

wapo.st/3QZmR2g

Categories Billionaires, Elections, Funding

Anti-ICE Protestors in Texas Given Harsh, Excessive Prison Sentences

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2026 //
6

The Guardian wrote about an extraordinary case in Texas, in which the Trump administration and two Texas judges meted out the equivalent of life sentences for those who participated in an anti-ICE protest that turned violent.

The Trump administration used the trial to show that it would seek draconian punishment for those who protested against its policies. The prosecutors treated the protestors as Antifa, the dread and shadowy anti-fascist group that has no address.

The Guardian described the protest, which turned violent:

Last year on the Fourth of July, a small group from Dallas-Fort Worth held a night-time noise demonstration, setting off fireworks outside the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility south of the cities, in solidarity with the detainees. A few protesters broke away and spray-painted graffiti on employees’ cars and a security post, slashed the tires on a government van, and broke a security camera. The facility’s guards ordered the protesters to disperse, and most of them did. When a police officer arrived at the scene, drawing his gun, an armed protester shot her rifle, hitting the officer in the shoulder. The officer survived.

After a three-week trial, a jury found eight of nine protesters guilty of “providing material support to terrorists”, among other crimes. For the Sotos, this “material support” included owning a “printing press” used to print anarchist zines and being part of a leftist book club, the federal government argued. The couple had already left the scene by the time guns were drawn. All eight of the defendants sentenced so far have received unusually harsh sentences – 30 to 100 years – essentially life in prison.

The Guardian article focused on a married couple, Elizabeth and Ines Soto. They were not at the scene when guns were drawn. But agents found a printing press in their home, where they printed leftist literature. Elizabeth was a member of the Emma Goldman book club. Elizabeth was sentenced to 50 years in prison. Her husband will be sentenced on July 1.

The protestor who fired a weapon, Benjamin Song, was sentenced to 100 years in prison.

Certainly, it is unlawful to bring a weapon to a demonstration and unlawful to fire it at an officer of the law. Slashing tires and attacking property is illegal.

Yes, those involved in acts of violence should go to prison. Those who commit crimes should go to prison. But their sentences are wildly disproportionate to their crimes. In the case of the Sotos, it is not clear that they committed any crime.

Here is a summary of the U.S. government’s case against them.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Extremism, Texas, Trump

Andy Spears: Tennessee is Last in the Nation in Spending but Has Plenty of $$ for Vouchers

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2026 //
3

Andy Spears is an experienced journalist who writes a blog called The Education Report, where he revealed that billionaire Jeff Yass is funding a pro-voucher candidate in the race to replace Governor Bill Lee.

Lee pushed hard to enact voucher legislation, and he too benefited from Jeff Yass’s giving. Tennessee public schools are suffering as a result of Republicans’ devotion to vouchers.

Spears writes:

Thanks to Bill Lee’s leadership, Tennessee has gone from 44th in the nation in school funding when he became governor in 2018 to 51st – dead last – as Lee is on his way out this year.

In addition to leading Tennessee to the bottom – $1.9 billion below Mississippi – in school funding, Lee has also led the way to a $300 million private school voucher scheme. 

Lee was helped in his voucher quest by the School Freedom Fund and its top donor, New York billionaire Jeff Yass. Yass’s group spent more than $4 million to support pro-voucher GOP legislative candidates – winning key primaries and delivering the votes to get Lee’s voucher scheme across the finish line.

Now, Yass is taking sides in the race to replace Lee. Yass is the largest single contributor in the gubernatorial race, giving $1 million to a political action committee (PAC) supporting Marsha Blackburn, according to Tennessee Lookout.

Yass is known for his investment in TikTok’s parent company and for being a major financial supporter of President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign.

He’s now the largest single contributor in Tennessee’s gubernatorial election after donating $1 million to Team Tennessee, a PAC that is backing U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s bid for the top job.

Blackburn is a vocal advocate for private school vouchers.

Categories Billionaires, Funding, Tennessee, Vouchers
« Older Entries