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Allison Gill: Did the Supreme Court Waffle on the Return of the Unjustly Imprisoned Man from Maryland?

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2025 //
5

ICE swept up a Maryland man and deported him to the infamous prison in El Salvador for terrorists and hardened criminals. But Abrego Garcia was not a terrorist or a gang member. The Trump administration admitted that his arrest and detention was an “administrative error” but claimed that he could not be returned because he was no longer in U.S. jurisdiction. The lower federal courts ordered the administration to bring him back. The Trump administration objected–unwilling to bring home an innocent victim of their error–and the case went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court released a unanimous ruling that seemed to favor the return of Abrego Garcia.

Allison Gill took a close look at the decision and finds many opportunities in its decision to keep Mr. Garcia imprisoned.

She wrote:

It appears to be a victory – that the Supreme Court “unanimously” agrees that the government must “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia – the Maryland father that was disappeared to the CECOT torture prison in El Salvador on a government-admitted “administrative error.” 

But the Supreme Court did the wrong thing here by even bothering to weigh in.

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Do you remember in the immunity ruling, when the Supreme Court sent the case back down to Judge Chutkan after they made their “rule for the ages?” They shoved their robes where they didn’t belong because they should have just denied Trump’s application. Remanding it back to the District Court left the door open for Judge Chutkan’s clarification on official acts to be appealed again – all the way back up to the Supreme Court if necessary – so that the supremes could once again have final say over what the lower court had decided. It also had the added bonus of tacking at least another year of delay onto the case – provided the Supreme Court would have let the case live after the second go-round.

In the Abrego Garcia case, the liberal justices say they would have denied Trump’s application outright, leaving the lower court order in place:

Because every factor governing requests for equitable relief manifestly weighs against the Government, Nken v. Holder, 556 U. S. 418, 426 (2009), I would have declined to intervene in this litigation and denied the application in full. (Statement of Justice Sotomayor, with whom Justice Kagan and Justice Jackson join.)

Technically, the ruling is unanimous because the three liberal justices ultimately agree with the court’s ruling, but by intervening instead of denying the application outright, the Supreme Court is asking the District Court to clarify it’s ruling “with due regard” to Trump: 

The rest of the District Court’s order remains in effect but requires clarification on remand.The order properly requires the Government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador. The intended scope of the term “effectuate” in the District Court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority. The District Court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.

The District Court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs. I mean, you could park a truck in that sentence. It might as well say “Hey District Court, go ahead and give it a shot but don’t cross the blurry lines we aren’t going to draw and don’t break the secret rules which we aren’t going to tell you about. See you in a month!” 

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They were super vague on their instructions to the lower court in the immunity ruling, too: virtually guaranteeing the case would come before them again. Remember Footnote 3? It was about as clear as mud:

“[a] prosecutor may point to the public record to show the fact that the President performed the official act. And the prosecutor may admit evidence of what the President allegedly demanded, received, accepted, or agreed to receive or accept in return for being influenced in the performance of the act. … What the prosecutor may not do, however, is admit testimony or private records of the President or his advisers probing the official act itself. Allowing that sort of evidence would invite the jury to inspect the President’s motivations for his official actions and to second-guess their propriety. As we have explained, such inspection would be “highly intrusive” and would “ ‘seriously cripple’ ” the President’s exercise of his official duties. … And such second-guessing would threaten the independence or effectiveness of the Executive.”

And just as with the immunity ruling, the Supreme Court will likely get another review of whatever the court orders the Trump administration to do to return Abrego Garcia. Because I’m pretty sure that the government isn’t going to want to do what the lower court tells it to, nor will it be forthcoming with the steps it’s taking to comply with court orders. The Trump administration will say “The Supreme Court told you to have deference for how we conduct foreign affairs. You’re not deferencing enough.”

So yes, it’s awesome that the Supreme Court didn’t outright abandon Abrego Garcia, but now we’re going to potentially drag out the remedy – while a man is wrongfully imprisoned in a gulag – and give the Supremes another at-bat when things don’t go smoothly. The high court should have outright denied the application, just as they should have done in the immunity case. 

Just my two cents. 

~AG

Categories Accountability, Ethics, Fake, Immigration, Justice, Trump

Ian Millhiser: Trump’s Attacks on Law Firms Are Outrageous and Arrogant

By dianeravitch
April 7, 2025 //
5

   

SCOTUS, Explained is a newsletter written by senior correspondent Ian Millhiser. Check out more developments on the United States Supreme Court on our site.

Friends,

We just wrapped up another busy sitting at the Supreme Court — this week, the Court looks very likely to give another big win to religious employers, and maybe a little less likely to blow up Medicaid in order to spite Planned Parenthood.

But, rather than send you my write-ups of those two arguments, I will invite you instead to consider that it is unwise for Trump to target John, Brett, and Amy’s friends and law school classmates.

—Ian

Trump’s single most arrogant action

All nine of the Supreme Court justices are lawyers. All of them have friends and law school classmates in private practice. All of them sit at the apex of a legal system that depends on lawyers to brief judges on the matters those judges must decide. Many of them were themselves litigators at large law firms, where their livelihood depended on their ability to advocate for their clients without fear of personal reprisals.

So it’s hard to imagine a presidential action that is more likely to antagonize the justices President Donald Trump needs to uphold his agenda, not to mention every other federal judge who isn’t already in the tank for MAGA, than a series of executive orders Trump has recently issued. These actions aim to punish law firms that previously represented Democrats or clients opposed to Trump.

The lawyers targeted by these orders are the justices’ friends, classmates, and colleagues. It would likely be easy for, say, Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Brett Kavanaugh to empathize with law partners who do the exact same work they once did.

The striking thing about all the law firm executive orders is that they barely even attempt to justify Trump’s decision with a legitimate explanation for why these orders are lawful.

The order targeting law firm Perkins Coie attacks the firm for “representing failed Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton” in its second sentence. The order targeting WilmerHale accuses it of engaging “in obvious partisan representations to achieve political ends,” as if Democrats do not have the same right to hire lawyers who advocate on their behalf that everyone else does.

The order targeting Jenner & Block justifies that attack because the firm once hired Andrew Weissmann, a prominent television legal commentator who, in the executive order’s words, engaged “in partisan prosecution as part of Robert Mueller’s entirely unjustified investigation” into Trump. Weissmann left Jenner in 2021.

The sanctions laid out in these orders, moreover, are extraordinary. They attempt to bar the firms’ attorneys and staff from federal buildings, preventing lawyers representing criminal defendants from engaging in plea bargaining with federal prosecutors — and potentially preventing lawyers who practice before federal agencies from appearing before those agencies at all. They also seek to strip security clearances from the firm’s lawyers, and to strip federal contracts from companies that employ the targeted law firms.

It’s hard to think of a precedent for this kind of sweeping attack on a business that did some work for a president’s political opponents. During the second Bush administration, a political appointee in the Defense Department criticized lawyers who represent Guantánamo Bay detainees and suggested that their firms’ clients should look elsewhere for legal representation. But that official apologized shortly thereafter. And he resigned his position three weeks after his widely criticized comments.

George W. Bush himself did not attempt anything even resembling the sanctions Trump now seeks to impose on law firms.

As Perkins Coie argues in a lawsuit challenging the order against that firm, these sanctions are an existential threat to the firms Trump is targeting. Perkins says that it “has nearly 1,000 active matters that require its lawyers to interact with more than 90 federal agencies,” and it fears it can’t continue many of those representations if it isn’t even allowed into the building to meet with government officials. Similarly, the firm says many of its biggest clients, including its 15 biggest clients, “have or compete for government contracts” that could be canceled unless those clients fire the firm.

Trump, in other words, is claiming the power to exterminate multibillion-dollar businesses, with over a thousand lawyers and as many support staff, to punish them for things as innocuous as representing a Democrat in 2016.

It’s hard to count all the ways these orders violate the Constitution. Perkins, in its lawsuit, alleges violations of the First Amendment right to free speech and free association, due process violations because it was given no hearing or notice of the sanctions against it, separation of powers violations because no statute authorizes Trump to sanction law firms in this way, and violations of their clients’ right to choose their own counsel — among other things.

The Trump administration has not yet filed a brief laying out its response to these arguments, but in a hearing, one of its lawyers claimed that the Constitution gives the president inherent authority to “find that there are certain individuals or certain companies that are not trustworthy with the nation’s secrets.”

Normally, when a litigant wants the courts to permit something that obviously violates existing law, they try to raise the issue in a case that paints them in a sympathetic light. But Trump has chosen to fight this fight on the most unfavorable ground imaginable.

There may be a perverse logic to Trump’s decision to fight on such unfavorable terrain. If he wins the right to punish law firms for representing a prominent Democrat a decade ago, it is unlikely that the Supreme Court will stop him from doing anything at all in the future. Most lawyers will be too scared of retaliation to even bring lawsuits challenging Trump’s actions. Already, one of the firms targeted by Trump, Paul Weiss, appears to have caved to him by agreeing to do $40 million worth of free legal work on causes supported by Trump’s White House. (Like Perkins, Wilmer and Jenner sued to block the orders targeting them.)

And, of course, if Trump’s endgame is to openly defy the courts, an obviously unconstitutional executive order targeting law firms that are in the business of suing the government is a good way to bring about that endgame quickly.

These stunning executive orders dare the courts to either make themselves irrelevant, or to trigger what could be the final showdown over the rule of law.

The anti-Thurgood Marshall strategy

If you want to understand how litigants normally proceed when they want to convince the courts to make audacious changes to the law, consider Sweatt v. Painter (1950), a case brought by future Justice Thurgood Marshall a few years before he successfully convinced the justices to declare public school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Marshall’s goal was to convince the justices that, as they eventually concluded in Brown, “separate education facilities are inherently unequal,” even if a state attempted to equalize the resources provided to segregated Black and white schools. Before he brought the much more difficult challenge to K-12 segregation, however, Marshall chose a more favorable ground to fight for integrated educational facilities: law schools.

In Sweatt, a Black man was denied admission to the University of Texas Law School solely because of his race. Rather than integrate UT, Texas opened a new law school for aspiring Black lawyers, and argued that this facility solved the constitutional problem because now Black law students could receive a similar education to the one they would receive at the state’s flagship university.

But the justices, all of whom were lawyers, understood the subtle hierarchies of the legal profession — in which where you go to law school can determine the entire trajectory of your career — all too well to be fooled by this arrangement.

As the Court’s unanimous decision explained, “the University of Texas Law School possesses to a far greater degree those qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness in a law school” — qualities like a reputation for excellence, and an alumni network full of successful lawyers eager to lend a hand to UT’s graduates.

Marshall, in other words, understood that, by appealing to the professional sensibilities of the justices, he could make them see that the concept of “separate but equal” is at odds with itself. And once those justices took the easy step of empathizing with law students denied access to an elite school, it was much easier to get them to see themselves in grade school students shunted into an inferior elementary school.

Trump has done the exact opposite of what Marshall did in Sweatt. And that means that the same empathy that Marshall’s clients benefited from in Sweatt and Brown is likely to cut against Trump.

Not only that, but the justices who will ultimately hear this case are likely to have unique sympathy for lawyers attacked by a politician seeking to discredit them, because many of them experienced just that in their confirmation hearings.

When Chief Justice John Roberts was nominated to the Supreme Court, for example, one of the few controversies surrounding his nomination was whether the positions he took as a lawyer representing a client could be attributed to him personally. Roberts had been a judge for only about two years when he was nominated for the Supreme Court, so his judicial record was quite thin, and some Democrats and their allies hoped to point to his work as a lawyer to discredit him. Among other things, they pointed to a brief Roberts signed as a Justice Department lawyer, which argued that Roe v. Wade should be overruled.

The White House and Senate Republicans’ defense of Roberts at the time was that a lawyer’s job is to represent their clients’ interests, even if they do not agree with the client. So it is unfair to attribute a former client’s views to their lawyer. And this was an excellent defense! The Constitution gives everyone a right to hire legal counsel to represent them before the courts. This entire system breaks down if lawyers who represent unpopular clients or positions face professional sanction for doing so.

The point is that the most powerful judge in the country, like numerous other judges who’ve had their careers probed by the Senate Judiciary Committee, has a very personal stake in the question of whether lawyers can be punished because the wrong elected officials don’t like their clients.

That does not mean that the author of the Court’s unconscionable Trump immunity decision will suddenly have an epiphany and turn against Donald Trump. But if Trump’s goal is to turn Roberts (and numerous other judges) against him, attacking lawyers who stand in very similar shoes to the ones Roberts wore 20 years ago is a pretty good way to do it.

📲  For more thoughts from Ian Millhiser, follow him on the platform he refuses to call “X” or on Threads.

Categories Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Justice, Trump

Chicago: Teachers Union Wins Landmark Agreement with School Board

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2025 //
4

After nearly a year of bargaining, the Chicago Teachers Union reached a landmark agreement with the City of Chicago and the school board. Karen Lewis, the late President of the Chicago Teachers, was a champion for the city’s children, their teachers, and the public schools. She must be smiling in heaven to see what the CTU has accomplished.

The CTU announced:

Chicago Teachers Union

NEWS ADVISORY: 
For Immediate Release

April 2, 2025

CONTACT:312-329-9100
Communications@ctulocal1.org

CTU to Hold Press Conference to Announce Results of Special House of Delegates Meeting

Union to announce results of next step to transform Chicago Public Schools after the 60+ rank and file members of the Big Bargaining Team sent tentative agreement to the House of Delegate members for approval.

What: Press conference announcing results of House of Delegates vote

Where: Chicago Teachers Union, 1901 W Carroll Ave; enter through the East entrance off Wolcott; parking will be available for camera trucks in the South lot (on Fulton)

When: Immediately following House of Delegates meeting (Meeting starts at 4:45pm and we will alert press once the media is adjourned)

Who: CTU officers, big bargaining team members, and elected delegates

In the next step toward ratifying a contract that represents a major leap forward in the process of transforming Chicago Public Schools started by CTU in 2012, the union will hold a special House of Delegates meeting on Wednesday, April 2nd. At the meeting, the elected delegates of the union will vote on whether or not the tentative agreement landed by the 60 rank and file members of the Big Bargaining Team shall be sent to the full membership for a vote as early as next week.

The union will hold a press conference immediately following the meeting to announce whether the tentative agreement that creates smaller class sizes, a historic investment in sports, grants recess students were being denied, and enshrines protections for Black history and academic freedom – among more than 150 other items – is going to a full membership vote or back to the bargaining table for improvements.

BACKGROUND

After more than eleven months of bargaining, working without a contract throughout the entire school year, and for the first time in more than 15 years of doing so without a strike or strike vote, the Chicago Teachers Union announced their big bargaining team made up of rank and file members approved a tentative agreement with Chicago Public Schools.

The tentative agreement will go to CTU’s House of Delegates Wednesday which will decide whether or not to advance it to CTU’s 30,000 members for a ratification vote. If accepted, it will represent a major leap forward in the transformation of a district that is still recovering from the gutting and financial irresponsibility carried out by Trump’s Project 2025 style efforts under Rahm Emanuel, Arne Duncan, Paul Vallas, and other privatization forces that closed over 200 public schools between 2002 and 2018.

Despite the efforts of right wing actors like Paul Vallas, The Liberty Justice Center, and Illinois Policy Institute, and the MAGA forces that seek to deny the investments Chicago’s students deserve, this proposed contract builds upon the past several contracts won by CTU in 2012, 2016, and 2019. It charts a new direction of investment, expansion of sustainable community and dual language schools, increased staffing, and a focus on reparatory equity to provide the educational experience Chicago students deserve no matter what neighborhood they live in.

The 2012 strike won the air conditioning that kept CPS open during the back-to-school heatwave at the beginning of the school year. 2016 established the model of 20 sustainable community schools, a program that helped to stabilize and resource schools like Dyett High School whose boy’s basketball team won the state championship this year. 2019 won social workers and nurses in every school and established the sanctuary status that protected CPS students from Trump’s federal agents earlier this year.

In 2025, some highlights of the Chicago Teachers Union contract include:

  • Doubles the number of libraries and librarians for our schools
  • Enforceable and smaller class sizes for all grade levels
  • Ensuring social workers and nurses serve students in every school, every instructional day
  • Doubles the bilingual education staffing supports for students 
  • Additional staffing, curricular and enrollment supports for Early Childhood education students and programs. 
  • Creates 215 more case manager positions district-wide to support students with disabilities. 
  • A cost of living adjustment of 17-20% compounded (tied to inflation) over the four years of the contract
  • Provide new steps that compensate veteran educators for their experience
  • Increases in prep time for clinicians, elementary and special education teachers so students arrive to classrooms ready for them
  • Expanded benefits for dental, vision, infertility and abortion care, gender-affirming care, hearing aids, speech therapy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, chiropractic services
  • A more than tripling of the number of Sustainable Community Schools, from 20 to 70, over the course of the agreement. 
  • Provides CTU, CPS, City and sister agency coordination for the first time to provide housing support, section 8 vouchers, rental assistance and affordable units to CPS families in need. 
  • Enshrines 12 weeks paid parental leave, equal parental, personal illness, and supplemental leave rights for PSRPs to teachers
  • A Green Schools initiation of additional resources and collaboration to remediate lead, asbestos and mold in aging school buildings while upgrading to green energy with environmentally sustainable technology, materials and practices. 
  • Protections for academic freedom, Black history, and culturally relevant curriculum for the first time in the contract. 
  • An additional $10 million annual investment in sports programming
  • Protections for academic freedom that enshrine educators’ ability to teach Black, indigenous, and other history
  • Continuation of Sanctuary School procedures
  • A new article that creates LGBTQIA+ safe schools

See the full list of tentative agreements at https://www.ctulocal1.org/movement/contract-2024.

“Our union is bargaining for what every parent wants for their child in our school communities. It shouldn’t be a fight for children to get access to arts, sports, wrap around supports, and libraries. It’s what should already exist,” explains CTU Local 1 President Stacy Davis Gates. “We’re proud to have landed a transformative contract that turns away from decades of disinvesting in Black children and turns toward creating the world-class education system for every single student in CPS no matter their zip code. If the contract is ratified by our members, we will be one major leap forward toward the educational experience Chicago’s children and the mainly women workers who serve them in our schools deserve.”

Additional Information:

###

The Chicago Teachers Union represents nearly 30,000 teachers and educational support personnel working in schools funded by City of Chicago School District 299, and by extension, more than 300,000 students and families they serve. The CTU is an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers and the Illinois Federation of Teachers and is the third-largest teachers local in the United States. For more information, please visit the CTU website at www.ctulocal1.org.

Categories Chicago, Class size, Closing schools, Community Schools, Courage, Democracy, Early Childhood Education, Equity, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Health, Justice, Students, Supporting public schools, Teacher Tenure, Teachers, Turnaround Schools, U.S. Department of Education, Union

Dana Milbank: Trump & Musk vs. The U.S. Constitution

By dianeravitch
April 1, 2025 //
2

In this essay in The Washington Post, columnist Dana Milbank offers to give Elon Musk private lessons about the Constitution. At no extra fee, he will let Donald Trump join the class. Both men are woefully ignorant of the foundational principles of American law. Musk was raised in South Africa, when apartheid was in force, so his ignorance is understandable. Trump has no excuse.

Milbank writes:

The man President Donald Trump put in charge of taking a chain saw to federal agencies showed once again this week that he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the government he is dismembering.

“This is a judicial coup,” Elon Musk proclaimed, reacting to the growing list of federal judges who have moved to halt the Trump administration’s headfirst plunge into lawlessness. “We need 60 senators to impeach the judges and restore rule of the people.”

How did this guy pass his citizenship test?

As the framers wrote in the Constitution, it is the House, not the Senate, that has “the sole power of impeachment.” And the Senate needs “the concurrence of two thirds of the members present” — 67, assuming full attendance, not 60 — to convict.

More important, the framers wrote that judges hold their offices for life “during good behavior” — which has been understood to mean they can only be impeached for corruption. That is how it has been since the 1805 impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, when Chief Justice John Marshall, himself a Founding Father, persuaded the Senate to abandon the idea that “a judge giving a legal opinion contrary to the will of the legislature is liable to impeachment.”

Musk, growing up in apartheid-era South Africa, probably wasn’t taught to revere constitutional democracy. But what’s the excuse of his colleagues in the Trump administration?

They have issued scores of executive orders that flatly contradict the Constitution and the laws of the land. Apparently, they are hoping a submissive Supreme Court will reimagine the Constitution to suit Trump’s whims — and federal judges have reacted as they should, by slapping down these lawless power grabs. As such, the administration is on a prodigious losing streak in court. Judges, in preliminary rulings, have already blocked the administration more than 50 times. Over the past week alone, judges:


• Ended Musk’s access to the private Social Security data of millions of Americans for a “fishing expedition.”
• Halted Musk’s continued destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
• Blocked enforcement of Trump’s executive order banning transgender people from military service.
• Stopped the administration from terminating $20 billion in grants from a congressionally approved climate program.
• Ordered the Education Department to restore $600 million in grants to place teachers in struggling schools.
• And, most visibly, required the administration to halt the deportation flights of Venezuelan migrants to a Salvadoran prison without any judicial review — an order the administration evidently defied.

There’s an obvious reason Trump is getting swatted down so often: He’s breaking the law. Instead of changing course, the administration is now trying to discredit the courts — and the rule of law. White House adviser Stephen Miller denounced “insane edicts of radical rogue judges” and declared that a judge had “no authority” to stop Trump. Border czar Tom Homan went full-on authoritarian on Fox News: “We’re not stopping,” he said of the deportation flights a judge had temporarily halted. “I don’t care what the judges think.”

Trump called the U.S. district judge in the case, James Boasberg (appointed to the bench by George W. Bush and elevated by Barack Obama) a “radical left lunatic” who, “like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” This drew a quick rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts (in case Musk doesn’t know this, he’s also a Bush appointee), who reminded Trump: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”

Trump later told Fox News that he “can’t” defy a court order — welcome news, except he apparently had done exactly that in more than one case — while arguing that something had to be done “when you have a rogue judge.”

Someone has gone rogue here, but it isn’t the judge. Boasberg’s actions are squarely within the best tradition of the judiciary, for they are in defense of principle, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, that no person in this country, citizen or alien, may be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” This is precisely what the Trump administration denied to those it deported and imprisoned.

Violations of due process have been alleged in dozens of the cases against Trump’s executive actions: terminating workers and programs; eliminating grants; violating union contracts; denying care to transgender people; banning the Associated Press from the White House; abolishing civil rights enforcement and everything else the administration calls “DEI”; harassing law firms; and summarily deporting migrants. All of these things were done without notice, without recourse, without adjudication and without clarity about which laws give the president the power to do them.


“Due process” might sound technical, but it was elemental to our founding and remains at the heart of our legal system. Trump’s flagrant denial of due process is so radical that it isn’t only at odds with 200 years of U.S. law — it’s also contrary to another 600 years of English law before that. For the benefit of Musk (who doesn’t seem to know about such things) and his colleagues (who don’t seem to care), perhaps a refresher is in order.

For this, I called Jeffrey Rosen, who runs the nonpartisan National Constitution Center, which finds consensus between conservative and liberal scholars. The concept of due process, he explained, is in the Magna Carta, which in 1215 asserted that “no free man shall be arrested or imprisoned … except by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” Britain’s 1628 Petition of Right, written during parliament’s struggle against the dictatorial Charles I, holds that “no man … should be put out of his land or tenement nor taken nor imprisoned nor disherited nor put to death without being brought to answer by due process of law.” The king, who imposed forced loans on his subjects and imprisoned people without trials, was beheaded during the English civil war.


“That example completely inspired the American Revolution,” Rosen explained. “They compared the tyranny of George III to the arbitrary rule of Charles I, saying George III was violating due process of law by insisting that patriots are tried in England rather than in local courts, that they can be put in jail without trial, and their liberty is at the whim of the king.” During the revolution, due-process provisions appeared in the constitutions of Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, North Carolina and Vermont. Similar language was included in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, then eventually repeated in the 14th Amendment to apply to all states.
“The very foundation of constitutionalism, which means a government according to law rather than autocratic whim, is the due process of law,” Rosen told me. “What distinguishes a constitutional officeholder from an absolute monarch or a tyrant is that he is bound by the Constitution and by laws.” Without due process, there is no free market, because private property can be taken without justification or explanation. Without due process, there are no civil liberties, for a person’s freedom can be taken for any reason, or none at all.


Without due process, you have what we see today: a leader using a wartime statute in peacetime to declare certain people to be dangerous gang members without providing any evidence, then imprisoning them without charges and finally denying the authority of the courts and defying a court order requiring the leader to obey the laws as written. It is no exaggeration to say that this is the road to despotism.

The Trump administration’s attempt to upend 800 years of settled law is staggering, but it is easily lost in all the other chaos the president is spreading. The Federal Reserve this week said that it expects slower growth and higher inflation than it did before Trump took office, in large part because of his tariffs, while falling confidence among consumers and businesses has raised the danger of recession.

In foreign affairs, Israel has restarted the war in Gaza, and Trump has launched a military campaign to see the Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen “completely annihilated.”

Trump failed to get Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine, despite Trump’s bullying of Kyiv and his termination of efforts to document Russian war crimes — including the kidnapping of Ukrainian children.

Trump silenced the Voice of America, to the benefit and delight of China, Russia and Iran. Even the annual visit of the Irish prime minister to the White House for St. Patrick’s Day became mired in controversy when MMA fighter Conor McGregor, given the podium in the White House briefing room, proclaimed that “Ireland is at the cusp of potentially losing its Irishness” because illegal migrants are “running ravage on the country.” Responded the prime minister: “Conor McGregor’s remarks are wrong, and do not reflect the spirit of St Patrick’s Day, or the views of the people of Ireland.”

The new administration’s bows to white nationalism continue apace. It removed, at least temporarily, thousands of pages from the Pentagon website and others that celebrated the integration of the armed forces and the contributions of people of color: a Native American who helped hoist the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima, the Navajo code talkers of World War II, the Native American who drafted the Confederacy’s terms of surrender, baseball great Jackie Robinson, and a Black Vietnam veteran, on whose page the URL was changed to “deimedal-of-honor.” Trump, meanwhile, reiterated his offer to give “safe refuge” to White South Africans, while at the same time expelling the South African ambassador. The administration has restored the names of Fort Benning and Fort Bragg, which honored Confederates — getting around a law prohibiting this by technically renaming the bases for other people with the surnames “Benning” and “Bragg.”

The Forward, a Jewish newspaper, reported this week that the head of Trump’s antisemitism task force shared a post on X on March 14 from a white-supremacist leader asserting that “Trump has the ability to revoke someone’s Jew card.” (The aide apparently later unshared the post, whose author led a group that called on Trump supporters to become “racially aware and Jew Wise.”)

The sabotage of the federal government continues, as recklessly as before: dramatically cutting Social Security staff, offices and phone support while simultaneously requiring millions more of the elderly and disabled to apply for benefits in person rather than online; slashing the taxpayer help staff at the IRS and calling off audits; scaling back scientific research at the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health. Paul Dans, the former chief of Project 2025, told Politico that there “is almost no difference between Project 2025 and what Trump was planning all along and is now implementing.”

Trump appointed conspiracy theorist Michael Flynn, Sean Spicer, Steve Bannon’s daughter and the former White House valet to boards overseeing the U.S. military academies. He took time to visit the Kennedy Center, where he has fired the leadership — and used the visit to share “personal stories and anecdotes, including about the first time he saw ‘Cats’ and which members of the cast he found attractive,” as The Post’s Travis Andrews reported. The administration ordered the release of files on the John F. Kennedy assassination before bothering to remove the Social Security numbers of some people who are still alive.

Trump and his cronies continue to use the federal government for personal gain. Following last week’s promotional event for Musk’s Tesla at the White House, the commerce secretary recommended people buy Tesla stock, and the White House has installed Musk’s Starlink service despite security concerns. At the same time, Trump’s crypto project released a second crypto coin, raising $250 million to bring its total to $550 million — and 75 percent of the earnings go into the Trump family’s pockets. All of this is about as on the level as Trump’s golf game. “I just won the Golf Club Championship … at Trump International Golf Club,” he announced on Sunday, as storms and tornadoes ravaged a swath of the country. “Such a great honor!”

The most ominous development, though, is Trump’s expanding abuse of power to silence critics and disable political opponents. He went to the Justice Department last week and delivered a speech attacking lawyers who opposed him, such as Jack Smith, Andrew Weissmann, Norman Eisen and Marc Elias, as “scum” and “bad people” — and the administration has revoked the security clearances of many such lawyers. After issuing executive orders seeking to destroy three law firms because of their ties to Trump’s opponents, the administration has gone after 20 more law firms over their supposed DEI programs.

In the case of the alleged Venezuelan gang members, administration officials and allies are celebrating their defiance of the court. President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, which the Trump administration is paying to jail deported migrants at its infamous 40,000-inmate prison, responded on X to Judge Boasberg’s order by saying “Oopsie … too late,” with a laugh-cry emoji. Secretary of State Marco Rubio retweeted it, and Musk added his own laughing emoji. And Attorney General Pam Bondi outrageously claimed “a DC trial judge supported Tren de Aragua terrorists over the safety of Americans” — even though the migrants would not have been released under the court order, which only delayed their deportation.

After a reporter asked the president whether he would cut off Secret Service protection for former president Joe Biden’s children, Trump did exactly that. Trump’s acting head of the Social Security Administration admitted that he had canceled contracts with the state of Maine because he was “upset” at Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, for not being “respectful” of Trump during a public exchange they had. Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, have asked Trump’s FBI to probe the main Democratic fundraising platform, saying it “has advanced the financial interests of terror.”

Trump cut off $175 million of government funds going to the University of Pennsylvania because of its policy on trans athletes, following the White House’s suspension of $400 million of funds to Columbia University over Gaza protests there and its demand that the school change its discipline and admissions policies. More than 50 other universities are under investigation. Trump’s acting U.S. attorney for D.C., Ed Martin, has threatened to punish Georgetown Law School if it doesn’t change its curriculum, calling it “unacceptable” for the school to “teach DEI.”

Trump, in his appearance at DOJ, said negative coverage of him on CNN and MSNBC “has to be illegal.” He proclaimed that Biden’s use of the pardon, a constitutional power, to preemptively protect members of the House Jan. 6 committee from Trump’s harassment was “null and void.”

He fired the two Democratic commissioners from the Federal Trade Commission, his latest defiance of federal statutes protecting independent commissions. His administration fired the board of the independent U.S. Institute of Peace and seized control of its building, physically removing its president and threatening prosecution.

Then there are the summary deportations of people Trump finds undesirable. The administration has arrested and is seeking to deport a Columbia graduate student who is a green-card holder with no criminal record because of his role in Gaza protests. It deported a Brown University doctor even though a judge had issued an order requiring 48 hours’ notice before her deportation.

In the House, Trump’s allies raced to obey his instructions, filing impeachment articles against Boasberg on Tuesday. Freshman Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) submitted the articles, joined by five others. House Republicans have also moved to impeach four other federal judges over disagreements with their rulings.

Thus are Trump and his allies ignoring 215 years of precedent, going back to Samuel Chase, that objections to courts’ opinions are to be resolved through the appeals process, not impeachment.
Thus are Trump and his allies turning their backs on 810 years of precedent, going back to the Magna Carta, in which we protect ourselves from tyranny through the due process of law.

But this is where we are. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, in a delectable Freudian slip, proclaimed in a briefing this week that “we want to restore the Department of Justice to an institution that focuses on fighting law and order.”


If that is the goal, the Trump administration is to be congratulated on a job well done.

Categories Civics, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, History, Ignorance, Justice, Musk, Elon, Trump

Jay Kuo Explains What Happened When a Federal Judge Slapped Down Musk and DOGE

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2025 //
15

Jay Kuo is a lawyer , blogger, and author who here explains a very important court ruling that finally, at last, challenged the constitutionality of Musk and his DOGE vandals. They have gone through agency after agency, copying personal data, firing employees without any knowledge of their role, and generally wreaking havoc.

Anyone with the barest knowledge of the Constitution knows that the power of the purse belongs to Congress, not the President and certainly not to the President’s biggest campaign donor and his team of young hackers. If they know even more about the Constutution, they know that no one can shut down an agency or Department that was authorized by Congress except Congress itself.

One judge said stop.

Jay Kuo explains the decision and why it is important. The post appeared on Wednesday March 19.

He writes:

There are a lot of lawsuits and a lot of moving parts. But best I can tell, yesterday’s ruling from Judge Theodore Chuang of the federal district of Maryland was the first time any judge has directly addressed the illegality of Musk’s appointment as head of DOGE and then ordered his actions unwound.

Specifically, Judge Chuang, in a 68-page preliminary injunction, blasted the illegal appointment of Musk, ruled the ensuing shutdown of USAID by DOGE illegal, and barred Musk and DOGE from any further work at USAID.

A lot has happened since Musk first took the reins at DOGE, so to understand the impact of this order—specifically what it does and does not do within USAID and how it might have ripple effects in other cases—it’s useful to go back in time to the beginning of February, when Musk and DOGE first started taking a chainsaw to the federal government.

“Fed to the woodchipper”

In early February, DOGE workers arrived at USAID and sought access to the agency’s systems. Because USAID operates in many foreign countries, intelligence reports and assessments are commonly generated around its work. When DOGE members attempted to gain access to classified files, two security officials with the agency attempted to stop them. In response to the officials’ frankly heroic actions, they were placed on leave by the administration.

That was one of the first signs things were going to get very bad, very quickly. Musk even bragged online that over that weekend he and DOGE had “fed USAID into the wood chipper.”

DOGE proceeded to cut off email and computer access to USAID workers. Then, as CBS News summarized, hundreds of USAID officials were placed on administrative leave, the agency’s website went dark, email accounts were deactivated, and USAID’s Washington, D.C., headquarters were occupied by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio quickly named himself acting director of USAID and then proceeded to cancel 83 percent of its contracts. This left nonprofits around the world unable to continue their life saving work. The New York Times estimated that USAID’s shutdown would lead to hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of deaths worldwide from disease.

Dozens of USAID staffers sued, arguing that Musk’s and DOGE’s actions were wholly unauthorized because Musk was never appointed and confirmed by the Senate, as required under the Constitution. They further argued that only Congress, not the executive branch, has the authority to shutter an agency established by statute rather than by executive order.

An “end-run around the Appointments Clause”

One of the most important parts of Judge Chuang’s ruling confirms that the administration tried to have it both ways with Musk.

On the one hand, there Musk was, with DOGE members already inside of an agency, bragging about how he had destroyed it in the course of a weekend. Musk made public statements and posts claiming he had firm control over DOGE, and Trump even praised Musk for this in his joint address to Congress.

Per the New York Times,

The judge noted that Mr. Musk, during a cabinet meeting he attended at the White House last month, acknowledged that his team had accidentally slashed funding for Ebola prevention administered [by USAID]. He also cited numerous instances in which Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk have both spoken publicly about their reliance on Mr. Musk’s team to effectuate goals like eliminating billions in federal contracts.

In addition to the “wood chipper” post, Judge Chuang noted that Musk wrote in February that it was time for USAID to “die” and that his team was in the process of shutting the agency down.

On the other hand, the government tried to argue that Musk was only serving in some kind of advisory rather than official role. Government attorneys have argued in many cases that Musk does not have formal authority to make government decisions, and therefore he didn’t need to have been formally appointed by Trump and officially confirmed by the Senate.

When pressed as to who was actually in charge of DOGE then, the White House claimed last month that a woman named Amy Gleason, who worked for DOGE’s predecessor, was its acting administrator.

That’s so very odd, because as Kyle Cheney of Politico noted with a journalistic eagle eye, in a recent court filing in another matter the administration revealed that Gleason was actually hired by Health and Human Services as an “expert/consultant” on March 4. That’s just a few days after the White House insisted she was the acting administrator of DOGE.

The fact is, the government has been DOGE-ing the truth for weeks about who was really in charge. Everyone knew and bragged that it was Elon Musk, but that actually created a legal problem because of the pesky Appointments Clause. So they apparently filed false affidavits with the courts to try and backfill the position with someone who was never in charge of it, and then they got caught.

Judge Chuang wrote this while ruling for the plaintiffs on their Appointments Clause claim:

To deny plaintiffs’ Appointments Clause claim solely on the basis that, on paper, Musk has no formal legal authority relating to the decisions at issue, even if he is actually exercising significant authority on governmental matters, would open the door to an end-run around the Appointments Clause.

If a president could escape Appointments Clause scrutiny by having advisors go beyond the traditional role of White House advisors who communicate the president’s priority to agency heads and instead exercise significant authority throughout the federal government so as to bypass duly appointed officers, the Appointments Clause would be reduced to nothing more than a technical formality.

Judge Chuang further noted that Musk appears to have been involved in the closure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau headquarters and that he and DOGE “have taken other unilateral actions without any apparent authorization from agency officials,” including firing staff at the Department of Agriculture and National Nuclear Security Administration.

“Under these circumstances, the evidence presently favors the conclusion that contrary to defendants’ sweeping claim that Musk acted only as an advisor, Musk made the decisions to shutdown USAID’s headquarters and website even though he ‘lacked the authority to make that decision,’” Chuang wrote, throwing arguments made by the Trump administration right back at them.

Musk’s “unilateral, drastic actions”

Plaintiffs also claimed that the executive branch had acted outside of its authority in seeking to shut down an agency established by congressional statute. Judge Chuang agreed.

“There is no statute that authorizes the Executive Branch to shut down USAID,” Judge Chuang wrote, noting that only Congress has the constitutional authority to eliminate agencies it has created.

“Where Congress has prescribed the existence of USAID in statute pursuant to its legislative powers under Article I, the president’s Article II power to take care that the laws are faithfully executed does not provide authority for the unilateral, drastic actions taken to dismantle the agency,” Chuang wrote.

He concluded, “The public interest is specifically harmed by defendants’ actions, which have usurped the authority of the public’s elected representatives in Congress to make decisions on whether, when and how to eliminate a federal government agency, and of officers of the United States duly appointed under the Constitution to exercise the authority entrusted to them.”

But… he can’t truly undo the damage

The judge was stark in his assessment of the fatal injuries Musk and DOGE have inflicted upon USAID. He noted that because of the firings, the freezing of funds, the locking out of staff access to computers and communications, and the shuttering of the building itself, USAID is no longer capable of performing as required by statute.

“Taken together, these facts support the conclusion that USAID has been effectively eliminated,” Chuang wrote.

And while he ordered DOGE to reinstate email access to all employees and to submit a plan to allow them to reoccupy the building, he acknowledged that it wouldn’t be long before someone with actual authority could allow DOGE back in. That’s because even though something may have been illegal and unauthorized at the time it was done, someone with the proper constitutional and legal authority can in theory come back later and ratify those actions.

That effectively means that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is Senate-confirmed and now the acting director of USAID, is still free in a couple of weeks to order the permanent closure of the main facility in Washington, as he had planned. And even though another judge has ordered $2 billion in USAID’s frozen foreign aid funds released, and there might even be enough employees now available to make that happen, once that work is done USAID might still functionally cease to exist.

So is this an empty victory?

If USAID employees get to return to the building and access their emails and computer systems, only to be kicked out of it later and likely fired all over again, isn’t this just a hollow win?

The ruling may not save USAID from its fate, especially with an administration so bent on eliminating it entirely and the power to ratify DOGE’s activities after the fact. But thinking ahead a bit, this ruling could still throw significant sand in the gears of DOGE going forward.

If Elon Musk is, as Judge Chuang has ruled, the effective head of DOGE, and his position and consequential actions as an effective agency head requires him to have been formally appointed by Trump and confirmed by the Senate, then this will help other litigants in other cases put an immediate stop to what DOGE is doing currently. That could gum things up for Musk, who would suddenly lack the power to slash and burn the government using just his team of hackers.

Instead, the agencies and departments themselves would have to order all of the cuts, cancellations and terminations. And there may be far more statutory limits and processes governing what they as agencies can do. Further, plaintiffs are likely far more accustomed to challenging a familiar foe like a big government agency than an inter-agency, non-transparent wrecking crew like DOGE.

We will have to wait and see how this plays out. But I imagine Judge Chuang’s decision is going to start showing up as a big red stop sign in every case challenging the authority of DOGE to have done what it did and to keep doing what it’s doing.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Ethics, Failure, Funding, Justice, Musk, Elon, Trump

Corruption Unlimited, Sponsored by the Trump Administration

By dianeravitch
March 16, 2025 //
4

David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo describes the evisceration of all guardrails that protect us from looting by public officials and private billionaires.

Trump’s flunkies have eliminated the Inspectors General in every Department; they are the nonpartisan watchdogs who scrutinize contracts and official actions to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse. They were all summarily fired, without even the 30-day notice to Congress required by law and without cause.

Kurtz writes about the purge at the Justice Department, which will never again investigate Trump or any of his allies.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has eviscerated the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section, NBC News reports, in another sign that rampant unrestrained public corruption will be a defining feature of the Trump era.

We didn’t get here overnight. A social, political, and legal transformation over the past decade has removed many of the most important guardrails to contain public corruption. The 2016 Supreme Court decision in McDonnell v. United States was the most overt early sign that democracy’s endemic but manageable corruption was going to be allowed to run free.

The implications of that and similar subsequent decisions are hard to isolate from the wholesale corruption that Donald Trump brought to the table beginning that same year. But the rank corruption of his first term pales next to the structural changes he’s already wrought less than two months into his second term.

The Trump White House’s takeover of the Justice Department writ large is the greatest boon to public corruption, but there have been a series of particularly egregious actions – like Trump’s executive order crapping all over the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act – that have cleared the way for more wrongdoing and less accountability for wrongdoers.

Bondi’s decision to strip the Public Integrity Section bare leaves Main Justice’s experienced career prosecutors on the sidelines in public corruption cases, shifts the onus to bring (and not to bring) such cases to more politically malleable U.S. attorneys, and weakens the mechanism for ensuring nationwide consistency across investigations and cases.

Unrestrained public corruption creates its own perverse political culture. It feeds into cynicism and nihilism about government that in turn is exploited by figures like Trump to justify further weakening and undermining the rule of law. It’s a death spiral and we’re now firmly in the grips of it.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Justice, Trump, Tyranny

Trump Speaks at DOJ, Urges Imprisonment of His Political Foes

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2025 //
14

It’s not customary for the President to speak at the Department of Justice, which seeks a measure of independence, but Trump is not a traditionalist. He spoke today at the DOJ, whined about how unfairly he had been treated (by clipping and hiding top secret documents and inspiring an insurrection to overturn the election), and railed against those who had prosecuted him. It was typical Trump: aggrieved, bitter, self-pitying, angry.

He said that his courtroom opponents were “scum,” the judges were “corrupt,” and the prosecutors “deranged.”

He said the people who did this to him are “bad people,” and they should be imprisoned.

Trump vowed to “remake the agency and retaliate against his enemies.”

He is unhinged, deranged, vindictive, and we are in deep trouble.

Categories Character, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Justice, Lies, Shame, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Bloody Sunday and Voting Rights

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2025 //
8

In this post, historian Heather Cox Richardson reminds us of the struggle to secure voting rights for Black Americans, as she commemorates the anniversary of “Bloody Sunday.” For most people, these stories are history. For me, because I am old, they are memories. in my lifetime, Black voters across the South were disenfranchised. People who advocated for civil rights, the right to vote, and racial equality put their lives at risk in the South. The KKK was active. Black churches were bombed. Civil rights leader Medger Evers was murdered while standing in his driveway.

The struggle for equal rights was violent and bloody. Yet today, we are told by our President and his allies that we shouldn’t talk about these parts of the past. It’s not patriotic. It’s “woke.” It’s DEI. It’s divisive. Let’s not talk about race anymore. Let’s all be colorblind. That’s what Dr. King wanted, wasn’t it? Cue the quote about being judged by “the content of their character, not the color of their skin.” No, that’s not what he wanted. He spoke hopefully about a future where no one was disadvantaged by the color of their skin. Where everyone had the same and equal rights. Where racism and prejudice no longer existed.

But that’s not the society we live in today. We live in a society where people of color and women are openly disparaged by the President as “DEI hires.” When race and gender are no longer reasons to belittle and demean people, then we can judge everyone by the content of their character. But that day has not arrived.

Heather Cox Richardson writes:

Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived in Selma, Alabama, in the 1960s, but the city’s voting rolls were 99% white. So in 1963, Black organizers in the Dallas County Voters League launched a drive to get Black voters in Selma registered. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a prominent civil rights organization, joined them.

In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, but the measure did not adequately address the problem of voter suppression. In Selma a judge had stopped the voter registration protests by issuing an injunction prohibiting public gatherings of more than two people.

To call attention to the crisis in her city, Amelia Boynton, a member of the Dallas County Voters League acting with a group of local activists, traveled to Birmingham to invite Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to the city. King had become a household name after delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington, and his presence would bring national attention to Selma’s struggle.

King and other prominent members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference arrived in January to push the voter registration drive. For seven weeks, Black residents tried to register to vote. County Sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2,000 of them on a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.

Then on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed 26-year-old, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson had run into a restaurant for shelter along with his mother when the police started rioting, but they chased him and shot him in the restaurant’s kitchen.

Jackson died eight days later, on February 26.

The leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression. Expecting violence, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee voted not to participate, but its chair, John Lewis, asked their permission to go along on his own. They agreed.

On March 7, 1965, sixty years ago today, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate brigadier general, Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator who stood against Black rights, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured John Lewis’s skull and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.

Images of “Bloody Sunday” on the national news mesmerized the nation, and supporters began to converge on Selma. King, who had been in Atlanta when the marchers first set off, returned to the fray.

Two days later, the marchers set out again. Once again, the troopers and police met them at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but this time, King led the marchers in prayer and then took them back to Selma. That night, a white mob beat to death a Unitarian Universalist minister, James Reeb, who had come from Massachusetts to join the marchers.

On March 15, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.

The marchers remained determined to complete their trip to Montgomery, but Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, refused to protect them. So President Johnson stepped in. When the marchers set off for a third time on March 21, 1,900 members of the nationalized Alabama National Guard, FBI agents, and federal marshals protected them. Covering about ten miles a day, they camped in the yards of well-wishers until they arrived at the Alabama State Capitol on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people.

On the steps of the capitol, speaking under a Confederate flag, Dr. King said: “The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.”

That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.

On August 6, Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Recalling “the outrage of Selma,” Johnson said: “This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.”

The Voting Rights Act authorized federal supervision of voter registration in districts where African Americans were historically underrepresented. Johnson promised that the government would strike down “regulations, or laws, or tests to deny the right to vote.” He called the right to vote “the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men,” and pledged that “we will not delay, or we will not hesitate, or we will not turn aside until Americans of every race and color and origin in this country have the same right as all others to share in the process of democracy.”

As recently as 2006, Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act by a bipartisan vote. By 2008 there was very little difference in voter participation between white Americans and Americans of color. In that year, voters elected the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, and they reelected him in 2012. And then, in 2013, the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision struck down the part of the Voting Rights Act that required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting to get approval from the federal government before changing their voting rules. This requirement was known as “preclearance.”

The Shelby County v. Holder decision opened the door, once again, for voter suppression. A 2024 study by the Brennan Center of nearly a billion vote records over 14 years showed that the racial voting gap is growing almost twice as fast in places that used to be covered by the preclearance requirement. Another recent study showed that in Alabama, the gap between white and Black voter turnout in the 2024 election was the highest since at least 2008. If nonwhite voters in Alabama had voted at the same rate as white voters, more than 200,000 additional ballots would have been cast.

Democrats have tried since 2021 to pass a voting rights act but have been stymied by Republicans, who oppose such protections. On March 5, 2025, Representative Terri Sewall (D-AL) reintroduced the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would help restore the terms of the Voting Rights Act, and make preclearance national.

The measure is named after John Lewis, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader whose skull law enforcement officers fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Lewis went on from his days in the Civil Rights Movement to serve 17 terms as a representative from Georgia. Until he died in 2020, Lewis bore the scars of March 7, 1965: Bloody Sunday.

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Courage, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Inequality, Injustice, Justice, Trump

Trump Places MAGA Zealot as #2 at the FBI

By dianeravitch
February 25, 2025 //
8

The news every day is hard to stomach. It was bad enough that the Republicans appointed Kash Patel to lead the FBI, despite his documented history as a Trump flunkie, a conspiracy theorist, and a liar. Republicans who served in the first Trump term were aghast at his selection. Republican Senators choked but confirmed him.

Trump selected as the #2 at the FBI a guy who is even worse than Kash Patel: Dan Bongino.

Bongino started his career in the New York City Police Department, then joined the Secret Service. He left the Secret Service and morphed into an extremist. He ran for office three times and lost three times. He found his niche as a far-rightwing podcaster. He used his wildly popular podcast to stir hatred and fear. He, like Patel, is a conspiracy theorist.

He fervently believes that Trump won the 2020 election but was cheated by the Democrats. He ranted against vaccines and masks during the pandemic. He has said that the FBI is corrupt and should be cleaned out (Patel previously said that if he ever led the FBI, he would close its headquarters and turn it into a museum of the Deep State).

TIME magazine wrote this about Bongino:

The deputy director serves as the FBI’s second-in-command and is traditionally a career agent responsible for the bureau’s day-to-day law enforcement operations. The position does not require Senate confirmation. But Bongino, like Patel, has never served in the FBI, raising questions about their experience level when the U.S. is facing escalating national security threats…

The two are inheriting an FBI gripped by turmoil as the Justice Department over the past month has forced out a group of senior bureau officials and made a highly unusual demand for the names of thousands of agents who participated in investigations related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Bongino served on the presidential details for then-Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, before becoming a popular right-wing figure. He became one of the leading personalities in the Make America Great Again political movement to spread false information about the 2020 election, which Trump and allies have continued to maintain was marred by widespread fraud even though such claims have been widely rejected as false by judges and former Trump attorney general William Barr.

In another article in TIME, Bongino was described:

Bongino, like many new leaders across the Trump Administration including Patel, represents a radical departure from convention for his role. The FBI deputy director, which does not require Senate confirmation, is traditionally an active agent with significant operational expertise and experience—something Patel reportedly agreed to maintain before selecting Bongino.

Bongino, a 50-year-old former Secret Service agent turned conservative-media commentator, is instead most well known for his outspoken support for Trump and his frequent spreading of misinformation, including about the FBI…

Bongino’s popularity and brash style earned him a contract in 2018 with NRATV, the National Rifle Association’s short-lived online video channel. “My entire life right now is about owning the libs,” Bongino famously said during a segment in October 2018.

Over the years, Trump took notice of Bongino, frequently posting on social media about his comments. “Did you see what Bongino said?” Trump reportedly told a confidant after seeing Bongino as a contributor on Fox News in 2018, according to the Daily Beast. “He’s so right, he’s just so right about it all. You have to see it.”

In other words, Trump can be certain that he will not be investigated by the FBI. He owns it. Any agent who participated in the investigation of his ties to Putin or his theft of highly classified documents is likely to be ousted.

Trump controls the FBI, the Justice Departnent, the intelligence agencies, and the military.

Its pretty damn terrifying.

Categories Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Justice, Lies, Trump

Trump and the Governor of Maine Clash Over Transgender Women in Sports

By dianeravitch
February 24, 2025 //
7

At a White House meeting with Trump, he picked a fight with Janet Mills, the governor of Maine. He asked if she was present, then berated her because Maine allows transgender women to compete in women’s sports. Governor Mills stood up for Maine’s laws and didn’t back down. Trump threatened to cut off all federal funding to Maine. Mills said, in a direct challenge to Trump, “we will see you in court.”

Republicans used to be the party that believed in local control and in diminishing federal control over state and local decisions. No more. Trump is obsessed with the transgender issue. He signed an executive order banning their participation in women’s sports. In other orders, he has tried to erase any civil rights for transgender men or women, any access to medical care for them, and to define them out of existence.

I am not sure where I stand on the question of whether transgender women should participate in women’s sports; after all, biologically, men are typically stronger and faster than women. I am not sure it is fair to have biological men and women competing in races that require physical strength.

But of this I am sure: transgender men and women should be allowed to live their lives without harassment by government. Their decisions are theirs alone. They should get the medical care they seek from qualified professionals. They should use whichever bathroom they want. People don’t become transgender so they can go to a different bathroom. Women’s bathrooms all have closed stalls. Are men worried that a transgender man might see them pointing their penises at a urinal? Really?

Government should butt out of people’s personal decisions. Government should stay out of our bedrooms and out of our doctor’s offices. The decisions we make about our lives that don’t hurt anyone else should not be controlled by government. As Governor Tim Walz memorably said, “Mind your own damn business.”

The Boston Globe reported:

President Trump had a testy exchange with Maine Governor Janet Mills on Friday over his threat to withhold federal funding from the state unless it bans transgender athletes from competing in women’s and girls’ sports.

“You better do it, because you’re not going to get any federal funding,” Trump told the Maine Democrat at a White House event.

Mills told Trump the state’s policy is “complying with state and federal laws” and hinted at a potential legal battle over Trump’s order.

“We’re going to follow the law, sir,” she said.

“We’ll see you in court,” she added.

“Good, I’ll see you in court. I look forward to that — that should be a real easy one,” Trump said. “Enjoy your life after governor because I don’t think you’ll be in elected politics.”

The confrontation came a day after Trump told a group of governors that he “heard men are still playing in Maine” and threatened to withhold funding under the terms of an executive order he signed earlier this month.

“So we’re not going to give them any federal funding. None, whatsoever, until they clean that up,” Trump said Thursday at the Republican Governor’s Association meeting in Washington, D.C.

The executive order barred transgender girls and women from participating in female sports, reinforcing a key Republican stance in the 2024 campaign. The order grants federal agencies broad authority to enforce Title IX according to the Trump administration’s interpretation, which defines sex as a person’s gender at birth.

Several lawsuits have been filed against Trump’s transgender policies, with more challenges expected.

The Maine Principals’ Association allows transgender student athletes to choose between competing on a team based on their sex at birth or one that matches their gender identity. Despite Trump’s order, the group said it will continue to allow transgender female athletes to compete.

Mills, who was elected in 2019, said in a statement that Maine “will not be intimidated” by Trump’s threats, adding the state will “take all appropriate and necessary legal action.”

“If the president attempts to unilaterally deprive Maine schoolchildren of the benefit of federal funding, my administration and the attorney general will take all appropriate and necessary legal action to restore that funding and the academic opportunity it provides,” Mills said.

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Gender, Justice, Maine, Trump
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