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Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic, concludes that the U.S. Supreme Court has become too partisan. The public does not trust its judgments. Term limits won’t change it soon enough. He proposes expanding the Court and gives his rationale.
Was Thursday among the darkest days in the history of the Supreme Court? You could make a case. First, a majority cleared the way for a pesticide manufacturer to get thousands of lawsuits off its books from farmers who’d used its product and gotten cancer. Next, it ruled that the administration could turn away asylum-seekers at the border. And then it held that gun owners could now freely carry their weapons into private establishments that serve the public.
Let’s pause over that one for a paragraph. Here’s a good description of the particulars of the gun case and the legal arguments on both sides. But the upshot is this: Everywhere in America, gun owners will presumably be able to take their guns to shops, stores, malls, movie theaters, restaurants, bars, amusement parks, Baby Gaps, you name it. Does any rational person think that the Founders, who simply wanted men to have muskets to protect themselves from invaders, would want someone to be able to take a military-style semiautomatic rifle and 600 rounds of ammo into a Chuck E. Cheese?
But the worst of Thursday’s big four decisions was Mullin v. Doe, which will allow the Trump administration to begin deporting Haitians and Syrians who were granted Temporary Protected Status by the Obama administration in 2010 and 2012, respectively. My colleague Matt Ford shredded the decision in his piece, writing that the court “effectively blessed Trump’s bigotry toward Haitians and dealt potentially catastrophic damage to federal civil rights laws.”
The cases combine to give the executive branch more power. They turn several lower court decisions on their head (as The New York Timesnotes today, immigration hard-liners had lost case after case on TPS until yesterday). And in the case of Mullin, in particular, the highest legal authority in the land—namely, Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority—pretends that Donald Trump’s blatant racism toward Haitians doesn’t exist; that there was nothing “overtly racial” in Trump’s many disgusting and false comments about the Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio, and beyond.
This conservative court is out of control—blatantly partisan and ideological, the six-member majority scarcely even pretends otherwise anymore.
Some major decisions about executive power—Trump’s power—are yet to be handed down this term, involving the firing of Fed Governor Lisa Cook, the removal of Democratic appointees from independent agencies, and of course the birthright citizenship case. If the court rules predictably on two of these three, or certainly on all three, it will have completed a term—with the aforementioned four decisions already on the books, as well as Callais v. Louisiana, which did away with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act—that might well be the most reactionary in its history. And all this is on top of the earlier reversal of a 49-year-old precedent in 1973’s Roe v. Wade and the handing to Trump of sweeping immunity for all “official” acts.
It’s now unavoidable: This has to be a front-and-center issue in 2028. Democratic presidential contenders will have to answer the question: What do you plan to do about the Supreme Court?
Many of them will be afraid to dip a foot into these waters. They shouldn’t be. Poll after poll shows us that majorities disapprove of the court and think of its decisions as being more political than jurisprudential. According to Gallup, disapproval of the court topped 50 percent five years ago and has stayed there ever since (in contrast, that number was just 29 percent as recently as 2010). So the public—not just the progressive base of the party—is ready to hear ideas.
Terms limits, the most common idea bruited, are fine. But imposing term limits won’t really change the makeup of the court for years; maybe decades. How many more rights will they strip away before then? How much more power will they give to the uber-rich to buy political campaigns and candidates? How much more immunity will they grant to corporations? How many new ways will they find to weaken protections for workers and litigants against corporate power? And perhaps most of all, how will they figure out how to allow the executive branch to undermine the laws passed by Congress and refuse to write regulations and enforce the laws Congress has passed?
No—terms limits are no longer enough. It’s time to talk seriously about court expansion. And I think there’s a smart and totally constitutionally defensible way to do it.
The United States has 13 federal circuit courts. That number, naturally, grew over the course of the country’s history, as the number of states grew and as the population expanded. This is relevant here because each Supreme Court justice is responsible for overseeing a certain number of circuits. Historically, Congress has expanded the number of justices as it simultaneously increased the number of circuits.
Admittedly, all this happened a very long time ago. But still, it’s precedent. The court was established in 1789 at six justices. In 1807, Congress expanded the number of federal circuits to seven, and added a justice to match. In 1837, Congress created nine circuits and nine justices. In 1863—even while the United States of America had lost the 11 states of the Confederacy—Congress created 10 circuits and 10 justices. The current nine-justice format was set in 1869.
Later expansions in the number of circuits did not simultaneously add justices. But why not revive that thought? The country has had today’s 13 circuits since 1982. The population of the country in 1982 was 230 million. Today, it’s around 345 million. That’s a lot more people. And the courts are horribly backlogged.
That could be solved by just adding judges. But it’s also a justification for increasing the number of circuits. From there, a case can clearly be made that increasing the number of circuits requires increasing the number of high court justices. Or at the very least, Democrats can pursue a hybrid solution that would keep the number of circuits at 13 and add a large number of judges within those circuits—while increasing the size of the Supreme Court to 13. Democratic Congressman Hank Johnson of Georgia, a leader on these issues, introduced such a bill in 2023, and it had around 60 co-sponsors.
It would all be completely constitutional and completely legal. Which is more than can be said for a lot of the things Trump and the Republicans are getting up to, as they try to find new and blatantly illegal ways to stop mail-in voting and otherwise take the franchise away from citizens.
But the big door-opener here by Trump and the GOP is their rancidly unconstitutional mid-decade redistricting move. The Constitution clearly and plainly states that districts will be redrawn every 10 years, after the decennial census. What Trump and his party are doing with this redistricting is completely lawless.
Once they’ve done that, all bets are off. Democrats should do whatever they need to do to rebalance power. But—they should stay within the law. What I’m talking about here, what Johnson’s bill would accomplish, would be entirely within the law. Congress can set the size of the Supreme Court. And I believe that a smart Democrat, framing the argument the right way, can take that case to the American people and win it. He or she can convince the voters that far from destroying the court, such an action would constitute saving it from its own extremism—and saving the rights we cherish that these ideologues are stripping away.
Trump has a new line of malarkey to peddle. He has decided that Democrats are not only “Dumbocrats,” they are Communists.
Trump does not know anything about bipartisanship. He knows nothing about the tradition of treating the other party with respect. He knows only how to dish out insults and ridicule.
He always has to stir up his base by having someone to hate. Communists are a good target.
When he spoke at Mount Rushmore on July 3, he warned about a “communist menace,” a threat posed by the election of two Democratic Socialists in New York City and one in Denver, Colorado.
Again, at his late-night speech on July 4, he warned about the danger of the Communist threat.
Among his statements were:
Democrats are not Communists.
Democratic Socialists are not Communists. They are Democratic Socialists like Senator Bernie Sanders and like the parties in Northern European nations such as Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. These are nations that spend generously for the health, education, and welfare of their citizens.
Does Trump know the distinction between Democratic Socialists and Communists? It’s hard to know since his knowledge is not expansive.
But he has his target. He will use smear tactics. He will fulminate about the “communist menace,” and about others who “don’t love America” as he allegedly does.
After all these years, we know who he is and we know he will lie without hesitation.
Be prepared. He is desperate.
The elected board of the Los Angeles Unified School District recently chose Andres Chait, a veteran educator, as its new superintendent, succeeding Alberto Carvalho, who is under investigation in relation to an AI contract.
Chait has served in the LAUSD for nearly three decades. He started as a kindergarten teacher and rose through the ranks. His own children are students in the district.
From my experience, I think this is a wise decision. Many big-city districts went through a long period of disruptive reform, in which they selected inexperienced outsiders to “shake up” and “reform” the district. Most of these disruptions failed, as the outsider fired experienced educators and spent at least one year learning what educators do. Alan Bersin in San Diego, Joel Klein in New York City, and Michelle Rhee in the District of Columbia come to mind, though there were many more. The Broad Superintendent’s Academy was dedicated to churning out such superintendents, indoctrinated in the belief that schools with low scores should be closed, not helped, that state takeovers were a cure, not a harsh and futile measure, that veteran teachers were slackers.
Choosing a respected insider guarantees stability, not disruption.
The Los Angeles Daily News told the story. Open the link to read it.
A new report was released over the weekend lambasting the Smithsonian Institution for political bias. In its desire to have federal museums teach “patriotic history,” the Trump administration is intent on gaining control of the Smithsonian, cutting its budget, and firing leaders who insist on telling both the good and the bad parts of the nation’s story.
The New York Times tells the story in this gift article, free to you.
In a broadside posted to its website just as Fourth of July fireworks were lighting up skies around the country on Saturday, the White House faulted the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for what it said was a failure to properly celebrate the nation’s heritage, arguing that it had become a tool of political activism intent on denigrating the American story.
The 162-page report, by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, represents a sweeping attack on the museum’s presentation of American history. It is the latest step in the Trump administration’s campaign to pressure the Smithsonian into conforming to what President Trump has described as “patriotic” history.
While the report concludes that the Smithsonian Institution — which oversees 21 museums and the National Zoo — “has not met its obligations to the American people,” it places particular blame on the National Museum of American History.
That museum has been the subject of “ideological capture,” the report says, accusing it of an anti-white bias and, in particular, of minimizing and distorting the nation’s founding. Those actions, the report asserts, have “moved the museum’s mission away from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”
The report, titled “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage,” says the museum does not recount U.S. history “clearly and fairly.”
“Our central finding is not that the museum has simply added overlooked stories, corrected perceived errors or broadened its historical scope,” it says. “Rather, it is that museum leadership has explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit and discourage our citizens.”
This short film was shown to me and my classmates in 1950 to encourage racial and religious tolerance. This is the Library of Congress version.
There is a slightly longer version that begins with Sinatra rehearsing a song in a sound studio. He takes a break, steps outside, and finds a bunch of kids picking on a Jewish boy. He stops the fight and sings this song.
The song was written by Abel Meeropol, who also wrote “Strange Fruit,” a powerful song about lynching, recorded by Billie Holiday.
A teacher at DeWitt Clinton High School in New York City, Meeropol and his wife had a strong sense of outrage about racism. They were blacklisted because of their membership in the Communist Party. They eventually quit the party. When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested, convicted and executed, the Meeropols adopted their two young sons.
Appalled by low scores in math, California is thinking of testing kindergartners to see what they know about math and to help them learn it. Many kindergartners don’t know how to hold a pencil. Most are likely unfamiliar with math. If the state doesn’t have the funding for smaller classes and extra support for students, testing won’t solve the problem.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
Confronted with math test scores showing that 68% of California public school third-graders do not meet grade-level standards, state lawmakers are considering one way to potentially reverse the trend: Give kindergartners a math test to find out if they are ready for the rigors of first grade.
Do they have a sense of what numbers mean? Can they group items? Can they compare quantities? Do they know the difference between a square and a circle?
By discovering what the state’s youngest students know about early, foundational math concepts, teachers can better target weaknesses before their skills sink, said supporters of the early tests.
Senate Bill 1067, authored by Sen. Akilah Weber Pierson (D-La Mesa), would require every public school to assess students in kindergarten through second grade for early math difficulties and provide additional support to those who are struggling.
The law aims to address sobering data. California ranks 43rd in the country in fourth-grade math achievement. Only about 38% of public school students test at or above grade level when testing begins in third grade. And early scores are the start of a steady decline in standardized math assessments through high school.
The bill passed the California Senate unanimously in May and is slated to be heard by the Assembly on Wednesday.
Recent amendments to be considered include assessing a kindergartner’s math knowledge rather than screening for math deficiencies, something that would help identify students who need additional support. Parents would be notified of the results and schools would be required to report the results to the California Department of Education.
The proposed law shares similar goals with California’s early literacy screening program — signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023 and rolled out this school year — which assesses kindergartners, first- and second-graders for reading difficulties.
The math bill calls for the State Board of Education to establish criteria for selecting assessments and then the education department would develop a recommended list of tests that meet those standards for schools. Assessments would be required by the 2028-29 school year.
Researchers say the assessments focus on what’s known as early number sense: a child’s ability to count sets of objects, and grasp basic addition and subtraction. In kindergarten, that means manipulating objects rather than written numerals.
Beginning in kindergarten, children’s knowledge of numbers becomes more formal and symbol-based, according to Alice Klein, a developmental psychologist who studies early math screening and intervention. This means a child should be able to count a set of 10 or 15 tokens or blocks, recognize numerals up to 10 and match a set of objects with the correct numeral.
In the Compton Unified School District, for example, educators show kindergartners a photo of 10 cows and ask students to count them. It looks simple, but if a child miscounts, counts one cow twice or skips one, it reveals they need to work on their number sense.
“Early number sense is the single best predictor of academic success in elementary school,” Klein said. By first and second grade, problems become more symbolic, are presented verbally and use numerals.
The bill proposes for around $106 million over four years after approval to cover the work of the expert panel, district preparation and teacher training before the 2028-29 test mandate would take effect.
Some point out that there is no dedicated funding for what is most needed: Intervention plans for a child if the assessment reveals students aren’t on track.
Los Angeles Unified school board member Nick Melvoin said he supports the spirit of early math identification, but has reservations about whether a statewide assessment mandate is the right mechanism.
“When you’re a kindergartner, especially depending on where you went to preschool, or because kindergarten is not mandatory in California, you can come to first grade and never have had any formal math,” Melvoin said.
L.A. Unified schools and teachers, at their discretion, already use math assessment tools.
California Teacher Assn. President David Goldberg agrees that simply mandating a new test is not enough and a clear pathway to address challenges identified by the assessment is needed.
“In California, funding for math instruction, assessment and educator professional development is far below what is spent on literacy,” Goldberg said. “SB 1067 does not address that disparity or provide more support for students and educators to overcome ongoing learning challenges in math.”
One education expert said the bill targets early math intervention incorrectly, putting the burden on districts without giving teachers the tools to act on what the assessment finds.
“It basically just says: Test kids, figure out which ones are having difficulty — and in many school districts that’s going to be over 50% — and then fix it,” said Deborah Stipek, a professor emeritus at Stanford University specializing in early childhood and elementary education. “Among teachers it’s going to get you a lot of anger and anxiety, because their kids keep testing poorly and they don’t know what to do differently.”
Stipek says a assessment won’t capture what learning math looks like in its entirety — and some teachers tend to agree.
“Math, so much of it, especially in the primary grades is hands-on,” said Nicole Estrada, a first-grade teacher at Lucille J. Smith Elementary in Lawndale. “It’s them touching things, counting them, drawing things. I think a screener would be really difficult for kids like that.”
Administering the one-on-one assessment is also time-consuming, pulling teachers away from instructional time.
But Pierson said there is a real sense of urgency, warning that delaying intervention has lasting costs.
“When we wait and see, we are losing more students,” Pierson said. “We’ll look up and 10 years have gone by, we’ve lost a whole other generation of students.”
Pierson said she expects the bill to reach the governor’s desk before the legislative session ends in late August. But some districts aren’t waiting for a law to act.
Compton Unified has been screening students for math difficulties three times a year for students in kindergarten through eighth grade, according to Jennifer Moon, Compton Unified’s executive director of educational services for K-8. If a student scores below 80%, they are placed in an intervention group.
During the Presidential campaign of 2024, Trump claimed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating the cats and dogs of the local white people. He heard this from J.D. Vance, who was then a Senator from Ohio. It was such a stupid claim that it became a huge joke and the source of many memes and parodies.
What remained was Trump’s enmity towards Haitians, whom he wanted to deport.
Bill Kristol of The Bulwark posted this article by Jim Swift about the reaction in Springfield, Ohio, to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to revoke their Temporary Protected Status.
As Swift notes, the Haitian immigrants to Springfield had revitalized the city. The local white people wanted them to stay, not to be deported.
SPRINGFIELD, OHIO—What organizers had hoped would be an evening of celebration was instead an interfaith prayer service. Ministers, immigration lawyers, community organizers, Haitian families, and hundreds of their neighbors gathered in front of Springfield City Hall beneath the city’s motto, “Forward Together,” alternating between English and Creole as they decried the Supreme Court’s decision and prepared for what many fear could become mass deportations.
Thursday morning, after the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to end temporary protected status for Haitians, the people who helped revive Springfield, Ohio, were trying to figure out how long they could keep their jobs and their driver’s licenses, and whether they should start preparing for deportation. Pastor Carl Ruby captured the mood: “We had hoped this would become a time of celebration . . . but it has become a time of lament.”
Fleeing gang violence and what has become a de facto civil war, thousands of Haitians have helped reverse decades of decline in Springfield since 2010. They filled factory jobs, opened businesses, started churches, and helped stabilize the city’s population after years of shrinkage. But that growth stopped after JD Vance amplified a pernicious lie about Haitians in Springfield eating dogs and cats.
Now the Trump administration is set on removing many of the very people who helped bring Springfield back.
Yesterday’s 6–3 ruling by the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to end TPS, meaning that although litigation may continue, many Haitians here in Ohio and all across America under TPS are subject to deportation immediately.
On a live zoom press conference earlier yesterday held by Springfield G92, a volunteer-led group of churches and faith advocates that focus on immigrant rights and mutual aid, Geoff Pipoly, a lead attorney on the TPS case, Mullin v. Doe, explained that while they’re reviewing what’s left of the case to determine whether any further legal appeals from his plaintiffs were tenable, the situation for Haitians here varies by their status.
Haitians here under TPS could consider filing asylum claims—if they can find an immigration lawyer to help them. The immigration court system is, to put it mildly, a shitshow right now. Donald Trump is purging judges who don’t deport a lot of people, the New York Times reported this week.
The data say the purge is having its desired effect: In Fiscal Year 2025, the denial rate for asylum claims more than doubled—from 14.3 percent to 30.8 percent—while the grant rate fell from 12.0 percent to 9.9 percent, its lowest level since 2017.
Those here under TPS alone are facing a lot: Their state-issued driver’s licenses are set to expire on July 6, as Ohio provided them with temporary extensions due to the uncertainty of their TPS status. Before the stay, Haitians were unable to renew their driver’s licenses because DHS made it clear that Trump wanted to end their protected status. Their expiry in ten days will make driving illegal, not that many are going to be venturing out due to the chance that ICE could stop them and deport them. And, unless they have another legal basis to remain, they won’t have jobs to drive to: the end of TPS will mean the end of their work authorization.
Biassou Pierre, a community organizer from Haiti, told the crowd: assembled in front of city hall, “Today many people call me asking, ‘How will I feed my children if I lose my job? What will happen to my family if I get detained by ICE?’ Unfortunately, we don’t have a good answer.”
But even if one had the money and could find an immigration lawyer with availability to take up their case, that doesn’t mean a quick return to work. “People who have pending asylum applications may be eligible to apply for a work permit after their application has been pending for 180 days,” Katie Kersh, a senior attorney with Advocates for Basic Legal Equality in Dayton, told reporters. “But the administration is trying to extend the required waiting period to one year.”
At the rally last night, Kersh put this avoidable tragedy in these terms: “These individuals followed the law. They followed the law and applied for TPS, and often asylum. The law abandoned them.”
There is some hope in Congress in the form of H.R. 1689, which would extend TPS until the end of the Trump administration. By some small miracle, it passed the House in April on a bipartisan basis, with ten Republicans, including Ohio’s Mike Carey and Mike Turner (who represents Springfield), supporting it. But Haitians here now have to depend on the Senate, and Ohio’s senators are notably silent.
Sens. Moreno, an immigrant himself, and Jon Husted, who is up for election this fall, having been appointed to fill Vance’s seat, do not have a position on the bill. Outgoing Gov. Mike DeWine, who grew up in the area and has done charitable work in Haiti with his wife, has supported extending TPS and called Thursday’s ruling a mistake that was “not in the best interest of the United States nor Ohio.”
This has the potential to become a big campaign issue for both Husted and Vivek Ramaswamy, the controversial Republican candidate for governor. As Jonathan Cohn reported in these pages earlier this week, Haitian immigrants are a bedrock in multiple industries around the country, most notably healthcare.
Former Sen. Sherrod Brown, running against Husted, has been vocal in his support for the Haitian community, calling on both Husted and Moreno to support an extension of TPS for Haiti. Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for governor, has been more careful in her wording, saying: “Law enforcement should be keeping people safe by going after dangerous criminals, not terrorizing communities.”
Viles Dorsainvil is a Haitian pastor and co-founder of the Haitian Support Center, which has been helping with utility bills, rent assistance, legal services, and transportation for Haitians who have been looking over their shoulder since Trump and Vance propagated heinous lies about them.
“Everything has changed in the community” Dorsainvil told reporters early Thursday, “And the worst thing now is that the employers will terminate workers immediately. . . . It was predictable that our community will be in trouble and that the decision will amplify the humanitarian crisis that we’ve already had here. That’s the reality. So as a center, we’ll continue to do our best, but we don’t know how long we’ll be able to survive.”
Viles Dorsainvil (L) and Carl Ruby (R) talk to the press after the rally. (Photo by Jim Swift)
What awaits these Haitians in Springfield? Pastor Ruby, who welcomed me into Springfield Central Christian in February to talk and show me the preparations they had made to provide this community sanctuary, said, “We have had to think about issues of civil disobedience. We’ve had to think about the issue of providing sanctuary, and when there’s a conflict between man’s laws and God’s laws, we have an obligation to side with God’s laws.”
The situation in Haiti remains bleak. The State Department doesn’t advise Americans to travel there, as it’s one of the “most dangerous places on earth right now” Ruby says. He recounts a conversation with a young boy, about his life before coming to America:
I was talking with a 12-year-old boy . . . we were talking about farm animals. And he started talking about seeing huge pigs. . . . I said, “What were the huge pigs doing?” And he said, “The huge hog was eating bodies.”
He added:
So that’s what Haitian children have observed. They’ve all been traumatized. This is gonna re-traumatize them. I can’t imagine the fear that they’re experiencing right now. There’s another person in our church . . . the decapitated body of a friend was left in front of his house. That’s what Haiti is like right now, and our justices knew that.
Springfield residents console each other. (Photo by Jim Swift)
Dorsainvil, for his part, is appreciative of the support his center has gotten from around the country. “We are grateful for people who’ve been standing in solidarity with us . . . because you understand our struggle . . . We will continue to count on you to stand in solidarity with our community here in Springfield.”
“I am no different from other folks.” he told reporters, “I just have a pending asylum. . . . Everything is in limbo now. I don’t know how that will be.”
Pierre, speaking to an audience beyond those assembled in front of him, pleaded: “We are not just immigration cases or statistics. We are your neighbors, your coworkers, and members of your church.”
“Please don’t forget us.”
You can donate to the Haitian Support Center here and other local charities here.
Tina Peters was a county clerk in western Colorado who was convicted of tampering with voting machines, as she tried to show that Trump had won the election. Although she certified that the election was fair, she allowed an unauthorized person to access Mesa County’s voting machines and copy their hard drives. In her conservative county, she was sentenced to nine years in prison. President Trump was furious that one of his avid supporters was in prison, and he pressured Democratic Governor Jared Polis to commute her sentence. In mid-May, Polis ordered Peters’ release, and she was freed on June 1.
Many Democrats were appalled that Polis would set free a prominent and unrepentant election denier.
Two members of the Governor’s clemency board went public in opposing his decision. Polis fired them.
Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado on Wednesday fired two members of his clemency board after they spoke out against his decision to commute the prison sentence of the election denier Tina Peters.
The board members, Hannah Seigel Proff and Azra Taslimi, had objected to Mr. Polis’s decision in May to release Ms. Peters from prison after pressure from President Trump.
After the commutation, Ms. Proff and Ms. Taslimi revealed that the board — appointed by Mr. Polis — had twice voted unanimously to reject Ms. Peters’s application for a shortened sentence. Mr. Polis, a Democrat, has the final decision, and overruled the board.
The board normally operates in secret, and does not disclose the pardon and commutation recommendations it makes to the governor. Ms. Proff and Ms. Taslimi said they had been compelled to pierce that veil of secrecy in Ms. Peters’s case.
On Wednesday, they said they had paid the price. They received a letter from the governor saying they were being dismissed for violating the board’s confidentiality standards.
“You breached the required duty of confidentiality by publicly divulging board members’ votes,” Mr. Polis wrote to each of the women, who shared the letters with The New York Times.
Ms. Peters, a former county clerk in conservative western Colorado, had been sentenced to nine years in prison after being convicted in 2024 in a plot to tamper with voting machines under her control in an attempt to show that the 2020 election had been rigged against Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump spent months attacking Mr. Polis and demanding that he free Ms. Peters, but Mr. Polis has said that the president’s harangues played no part in his commutation decision.
On Wednesday, Ms. Proff and Ms. Taslimi said they had known that they might be removed. The women, who are former public defenders now working as lawyers in Denver, said the public had a right to know how the governor’s clemency board had grappled with one of the most consequential cases to ever cross its desk.
Still, they said they were disappointed in Mr. Polis.
The dissenters: Azra Taslimi and Hannah Seigel Proff
“He’s saying the public doesn’t have the right to know his own advisory board told him no — twice,” Ms. Taslimi said. “He’s not protecting a process. He’s protecting himself from scrutiny.”
Ms. Peters has hardly stayed in the shadows since getting paroled. She has appeared on right-wing podcasts and a conservative “Freedom Fest” event in Colorado, where she continued to promote election conspiracies. This week, she met with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office.
Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist, is outraged by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the almost century-old precedent known as Humphrey’s Executor, which held that presidents could not fire members of independent commissions without cause..
The case was called Trump v. Slaughter. Rebecca Slaughter sued when Trump removed her from the Federal Trade Commission without cause. The court ruled in favor of Trump 6-3, allowing him to fire members of independent commissions without cause and replace them with cronies. Empowered with this decision, he can fire every Biden appointment and replace them with a MAGA yahoo who takes orders from Trump or Stephen Miller.
The New York Times wrote:
Rebecca Slaughter, the former Federal Trade Commission member whose firing was upheld by the Supreme Court on Monday, warned that the justices allowed for the possibility of abuse of presidential power.
Independent agencies like the F.TC. were created to act as watchdogs of powerful corporations, without interference by the president, the former Democratic commissioner said in a statement shortly after the decision was handed down.
“Today’s ruling makes it possible for presidents to fire watchdogs who won’t put politics over principle, and replace them with lap dogs,” Ms. Slaughter said. “It’s a recipe for corruption; working families will pay the price.”
The Supreme Court’s 6-to-3 decision in the case, Trump v. Slaughter, effectively gives the president free rein to fire members of more than 20 independent federal agencies, which are typically led by members of both parties. The decision overturned a 90-year-old law restricting presidents from firing officials without cause.
The F.T.C. was founded in 1914 to oversee fair trade and competition in commerce and enforces consumer protection and competition laws. The agency typically has five commissioners, three from the party in the White House.
Ms. Slaughter was appointed by President Trump in 2018 and served as acting chair of the agency during the early Biden administration. When Mr. Trump began his second term, she was the longest serving commissioner.
Paul Krugman said the decision is a blow for dictatorship and chaos:
Earlier today, the Supreme Court declared war on U.S. democracy. It also declared war, basically, on modern society, on everything it takes to function in the 21st century. And I’m not sure that people understand that yet.
Hi, Paul Krugman with a quick video update. I’ll have more on this tomorrow.
Really shocking decisions handed down by the Supreme Court. There were a couple that were not awful. Lisa Graves gets to stay at the Federal Reserve, although that in itself is a huge contradiction to the important stuff that the court did. I mean, Lisa is important and the Fed is important, but much more important is Humphrey’s Executor, which is the generations-long precedent that says that when Congress creates an independent agency, it is independent. It’s able to make decisions.
Of course, the president has some role. Typically, the president can choose the agency’s head subject to congressional approval, but the president can’t just go and fire officials that he doesn’t like for whatever reason or for no reason, because the agencies that operate the U.S. government and basically run our society are supposed to be professional. They’re supposed to be following their legal mandate. They’re not supposed to be personal tools of a dictator in the White House.
Well, the court just scrapped that. Now, lawyers, people who are legal experts, can do a better job of explaining just what went down. But what I think is important to understand is not only does this give essentially dictatorial powers to the occupant of the White House, but it also makes it extremely difficult for the economy to function. It makes it extremely difficult for society to function.
We live in a complicated world, a world of technology, where there are all kinds of spillovers, all kinds of ways in which it’s important that there be well-established ground rules. If you’re a business, take the example of medicines and foodstuffs, where we have an FDA, Federal Drug Administration, that is charged with ensuring that products that people consume are safe. We do that for very good reason. We know that not just that that there have been examples, historically, of products that were foods, medicines that were not at all safe, but also that people want some assurance.
The fact that something has been FDA approved is a bit of a warranty, that it might turn out to be very harmful, but probably not. Businesses that want to invest in developing stuff need to know that there are some ground rules that determine what they can and cannot sell.
Now imagine that all these decisions are made by political appointees who are loyalists to the president, who basically do whatever the president wants, whatever the people around the president want.
Do you want to invest in something where you have absolutely no idea what the ground rules will be, whether it will be approved or not? Do you want to invest in a whole business line when, for all you know, the White House will abruptly decide that your product isn’t safe and that a competitor’s product is, based on spurious grounds?
And what would cause those decisions to happen? Well, how about the fact that some businesses are better at the business of bribing the president and his family than others. And if you think that this is outlandish — you know, a few years ago you might have said this was outlandish, things like that wouldn’t really happen — well, as we speak, these things are happening all the time.
So you are setting up a situation in which, you know, it’s a little bit like traffic laws. Traffic laws, yeah, they can be annoying, but aren’t we all kind of glad that there are in fact rules about when you can turn and when you can go through an intersection? In order to function, in order to drive your car around you need to have a set of stable traffic rules, not a situation in which a police officer can decide you broke the law and the other guy did not because I say what the law is. And especially not where the police officer does that based upon who’s been paying him off or who he expects to be paid off.
The real world is far more complex than traffic rules but we need those rules and we need some stability and those rules cannot be specified with every letter, every punctuation mark set by Congress. The world is too complicated and changes too much. You need to have standing ethos, standing doctrine at the agencies that make modern life possible.
Now all of that is gone.
Now, it just adds to it that all of this is being done to empower a president who is the worst possible person for this job. This is not somebody you want supervising anything, everything that Trump touches turns to crud because he doesn’t care and he doesn’t actually understand or recognize that there’s such a thing as expertise as knowing what you’re doing.
So this would be terrible even if we had a temporarily competent administration. But now you’re doing all of this, the Supreme Court is doing all of this to empower the guy who brought you the Reflecting Pool, who brought you the Iran war. Utter nightmare.
Now, what will happen, hopefully, we emerge at the other end having fended off dictatorship. Then, I mean, as everybody knows, this Supreme Court is not actually empowering the presidency. It is empowering this president. And as soon as there’s a Democrat in the White House, suddenly there will be all kinds of restrictions on what that person can do.
Well, this cannot go on. This is a clear argument that says we have to one way or another disempower the Supreme Court. I don’t know enough to tell you what is the best route to do that but court packing or something else is going to have to happen. Because this has been the clearest signal yet that we have six people (there are three who are not part of it, but we have six people) who are fundamentally hostile to democracy, fundamentally hostile to the modern world and determined to put the catastrophically bad leader that we currently have sitting in the White House in charge of everything, which is a nightmare scenario on every level.
Take care, I guess.
