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Governor Gavin Newsom: Do Not Give In to a Lawless President

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2025 //
16

Governor Gavin Newsom spoke to the situation in Los Angeles, which Trump is using as a target in his campaign to distract the public from his incompetence. In his hateful way, Trump always refers to Governor Newsom as “Newscum.”

Governor Newsom said, as transcribed by The New York Times:

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California delivered a speech on Tuesday, titled “Democracy at a Crossroads.” The following is a transcript of his remarks as broadcast online and on television channels:

I want to say a few words about the events of the last few days.

This past weekend, federal agents conducted large-scale workplace raids in and around Los Angeles. Those raids continue as I speak.

California is no stranger to immigration enforcement. But instead of focusing on undocumented immigrants with serious criminal records and people with final deportation orders, a strategy both parties have long supported, this administration is pushing mass deportations, indiscriminately targeting hardworking immigrant families, regardless of their roots or risk.

What’s happening right now is very different than anything we’ve seen before. On Saturday morning, when federal agents jumped out of an unmarked van near a Home Depot parking lot, they began grabbing people. A deliberate targeting of a heavily Latino suburb. A similar scene also played out when a clothing company was raided downtown.

In other actions, a U.S. citizen, nine months pregnant, was arrested; a 4-year-old girl, taken; families separated; friends, quite literally, disappearing.

In response, everyday Angelinos came out to exercise their Constitutional right to free speech and assembly, to protest their government’s actions. In turn, the State of California and the City and County of Los Angeles sent our police officers to help keep the peace and, with some exceptions, they were successful.

Like many states, California is no stranger to this sort of unrest. We manage it regularly, and with our own law enforcement. But this, again, was different.

What then ensued was the use of tear gas, flash-bang grenades, rubber bullets, federal agents detaining people and undermining their due process rights.

Donald Trump, without consulting California law enforcement leaders, commandeered 2,000 of our state’s National Guard members to deploy on our streets, illegally and for no reason.

This brazen abuse of power by a sitting president inflamed a combustible situation, putting our people, our officers and even our National Guard at risk.

That’s when the downward spiral began. He doubled down on his dangerous National Guard deployment by fanning the flames even harder. And the president, he did it on purpose. As the news spread throughout L.A., anxiety for family and friends ramped up. Protests started again.

By night, several dozen lawbreakers became violent and destructive. They vandalized property. They tried to assault police officers. Many of you have seen video clips of cars burning on cable news.

If you incite violence — I want to be clear about this — if you incite violence or destroy our communities, you are going to be held to account. That kind of criminal behavior will not be tolerated. Full stop.

Already, more than 220 people have been arrested. And we’re reviewing tapes to build additional cases and people will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Again, thanks to our law enforcement officers and the majority of Angelenos who protested peacefully, this situation was winding down and was concentrated in just a few square blocks downtown.

But that, that’s not what Donald Trump wanted. He again chose escalation, he chose more force. He chose theatrics over public safety. He federalized another 2,000 Guard members.

He deployed more than 700 active U.S. Marines. These are men and women trained in foreign combat, not domestic law enforcement. We honor their service. We honor their bravery. But we do not want our streets militarized by our own armed forces. Not in L.A. Not in California. Not anywhere.

We’re seeing unmarked cars, unmarked cars in school parking lots. Kids afraid of attending their own graduation. Trump is pulling a military dragnet all across Los Angeles, well beyond his stated intent to just go after violent and serious criminals. His agents are arresting dishwashers, gardeners, day laborers and seamstresses.

That’s just weakness, weakness masquerading as strength. Donald Trump’s government isn’t protecting our communities. They are traumatizing our communities. And that seems to be the entire point.

California will keep fighting. We’ll keep fighting on behalf of our people, all of our people, including in the courts.

Yesterday, we filed a legal challenge to President Trump’s reckless deployment of American troops to a major American city. Today, we sought an emergency court order to stop the use of the American military to engage in law enforcement activities across Los Angeles.

If some of us can be snatched off the streets without a warrant, based only on suspicion or skin color, then none of us are safe. Authoritarian regimes begin by targeting people who are least able to defend themselves. But they do not stop there.

Trump and his loyalists, they thrive on division because it allows them to take more power and exert even more control.

And by the way, Trump, he’s not opposed to lawlessness and violence as long as it serves him. What more evidence do we need than January 6th.

I ask everyone: Take time, reflect on this perilous moment. A president who wants to be bound by no law or constitution, perpetuating a unified assault on American traditions.

This is a president who, in just over 140 days, has fired government watchdogs that could hold him accountable, accountable for corruption and fraud. He’s declared a war, a war on culture, on history, on science, on knowledge itself. Databases quite literally are vanishing.

He’s delegitimizing news organizations and he’s assaulting the First Amendment. And the threat of defunding them. At threat, he’s dictating what universities themselves can teach. He’s targeting law firms and the judicial branch that are the foundations of an orderly and civil society. He’s calling for a sitting governor to be arrested for no other reason than to, in his own words, “for getting elected.”

And we all know, this Saturday, he’s ordering our American heroes, the United States military, and forcing them to put on a vulgar display to celebrate his birthday, just as other failed dictators have done in the past.

Look, this isn’t just about protests here in Los Angeles. When Donald Trump sought blanket authority to commandeer the National Guard. he made that order apply to every state in this nation.

This is about all of us. This is about you. California may be first, but it clearly will not end here. Other states are next.

Democracy is next.

Democracy is under assault right before our eyes, this moment we have feared has arrived. He’s taking a wrecking ball, a wrecking ball to our founding fathers’ historic project: three coequal branches of independent government.

There are no longer any checks and balances. Congress is nowhere to be found. Speaker Johnson has completely abdicated that responsibility.

The rule of law has increasingly been given way to the rule of Don.

The founding fathers didn’t live and die to see this kind of moment. It’s time for all of us to stand up. Justice Brandeis, he said it best. In a democracy, the most important office — with all due respect, Mr. President — is not the presidency, and it’s certainly not governor. The most important office is office of citizen.

At this moment, at this moment, we all need to stand up and be held to account, a higher level of accountability. If you exercise your First Amendment rights, please, please do it peacefully.

I know many of you are feeling deep anxiety, stress, and fear. But I want you to know that you are the antidote to that fear and that anxiety. What Donald Trump wants most is your fealty, your silence, to be complicit in this moment.

Do not give into him.

Categories Bigotry, California, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Immigration, Justice, Trump

Thomas Edsall: What Scholars Say About Trump’s Reign of Error and Chaos

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2025 //
12

Thomas Edsall writes a regular feature for The New York Times. In this stunning article, he recounts the views of numerous scholars about what Trump has done since his Inauguration.

This is a gift article, meaning you can open the link and finish reading the article, which is usually behind a paywall.

Edsall writes:

One thing stands out amid all the chaos, corruption and disorder: the wanton destructiveness of the Trump presidency.

The targets of President Trump’s assaults include the law, higher education, medical research, ethical standards, America’s foreign alliances, free speech, the civil service, religion, the media and much more.

J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush, succinctly described his own view of the Trump presidency, writing by email that there had never

been a U.S. president who I consider even to have been destructive, let alone a president who has intentionally and deliberately set out to destroy literally every institution in America, up to and including American democracy and the rule of law. I even believe he is destroying the American presidency, though I would not say that is intentional and deliberate.

Some of the damage Trump has inflicted can be repaired by future administrations, but repairing relations with American allies, the restoration of lost government expertise and a return to productive research may take years, even with a new and determined president and Congress.

Let’s look at just one target of the administration’s vendetta, medical research. Trump’s attacks include cancellation of thousands of grants, cuts in the share of grants going to universities and hospitals and proposed cuts of 40 percent or more in the budgets of the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Science Foundation.

“This is going to completely kneecap biomedical research in this country,” Jennifer Zeitzer, the deputy executive director at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, told Science magazine. Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association, warned that cuts will “totally destroy the nation’s public health infrastructure.”

I asked scholars of the presidency to evaluate the scope of Trump’s wreckage. “The gutting of expertise and experience going on right now under the blatantly false pretext of eliminating fraud and waste,” Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, wrote by email, “is catastrophic and may never be completely repaired.”

I asked Wilentz whether Trump was unique in terms of his destructiveness or if there were presidential precedents. Wilentz replied:

There is no precedent, not even close, unless you consider Jefferson Davis an American president. Even to raise the question, with all due respect, is to minimize the crisis we’re in and the scope of Trump et al.’s. intentions.

Another question: Was Trump re-elected to promote an agenda of wreaking havoc, or is he pursuing an elitist right-wing program created by conservative ideologues who saw in Trump’s election the opportunity to pursue their goals?

Wilentz’s reply:

Trump’s closest allies intended chaos wrought by destruction which helps advance the elite reactionary programs. Chaos allows Trump to expand his governing by emergency powers, which could well include the imposition of martial law, if he so chose.

I asked Andrew Rudalevige, a political scientist at Bowdoin, how permanent the mayhem Trump has inflicted may prove to be. “Not to be flip,” Rudalevige replied by email, “but for children abroad denied food or lifesaving medicine because of arbitrary aid cuts, the answer is already distressingly permanent.”

From a broader perspective, Rudalevige wrote:

The damage caused to governmental expertise and simple competence could be long lasting. Firing probationary workers en masse may reduce the government employment head count, slightly, but it also purged those most likely to bring the freshest view and most up-to-date skills to government service, while souring them on that service. And norms of nonpoliticization in government service have taken a huge hit.

I sent the question I posed to Wilentz to other scholars of the presidency. It produced a wide variety of answers. Here is Rudalevige’s:

The comp that comes to mind is Andrew Johnson. It’s hardly guaranteed that Reconstruction after the Civil War would have succeeded even under Lincoln’s leadership. But Johnson took action after action designed to prevent racial reconciliation and economic opportunity, from vetoing key legislation to refusing to prevent mob violence against Blacks to pardoning former members of the Confederacy hierarchy. He affirmatively made government work worse and to prevent it from treating its citizens equally.

Another question: How much is Trump’s second-term agenda the invention of conservative elites, and how much is it a response to the demands of Trump’s MAGA supporters?

“Trump is not at all an unwitting victim,” Rudalevige wrote, “but those around him with wider and more systemic goals have more authority and are better organized in pursuit of those goals than they were in the first term.”

In this context, Rudalevige continued, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025

was not just a campaign manifesto but a bulwark against the inconsistency and individualism its authors thought had undermined the effectiveness of Trump’s first term. It was an insurance policy to secure the administrative state for conservative thought and yoke it to a cause beyond Trump or even Trumpism.

The alliance with Trump was a marriage of convenience — and the Trump legacy when it comes to staffing the White House and executive branch is a somewhat ironic one, as an unwitting vehicle for an agenda that goes far beyond the personalization of the presidency.

In the past, when presidential power has expanded, Rudalevige argued,

it has been in response to crisis: the Civil War, World War I, the Depression and World War II, 9/11. But no similar objective crisis faced us. So one had to be declared — via proclamations of “invasion” and the like — or even created. In the ensuing crisis more power may be delegated by Congress. But the analogue is something like an arsonist who rushes to put out the fire he started.

One widely shared view among those I queried is that Trump has severely damaged America’s relations with traditional allies everywhere.

Mara Rudman, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, wrote in an email:

The most lasting impact of this term will be felt in the damage done to the reputation of the United States as a safe harbor where the rule of law is king and where the Constitution is as sacred a national document as any country has developed.

Through his utter disregard for the law, Trump has shown both how precious and how fragile are the rules that undergird our institutions, our economic and national security and the foundation for our democracy.

To finish this excellent article, please open the link.

Categories Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Health, Justice, Science, Technology, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Courts Are Our Guardrail–For Now

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2025 //
11

Heather Cox Richardson is a national treasure. she is also an exemplar of the value of studying history as a guide to today’s events and their meaning.

She writes:

Political scientist Adam Bonica noted last Friday that Trump and the administration suffered a 96% loss rate in federal courts in the month of May. Those losses were nonpartisan: 72.2% of Republican-appointed judges and 80.4% of Democratic-appointed judges ruled against the administration.

The administration sustained more losses today.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled that 14 states can proceed with their lawsuit against billionaire Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency.” The administration had tried to dismiss the case, but Chutkan ruled the states had adequately supported their argument that “Musk and DOGE’s conduct is ‘unauthorized by any law.’” “The Constitution does not permit the Executive to commandeer the entire appointments power by unilaterally creating a federal agency…and insulating its principal officer from the Constitution as an ‘advisor’ in name only,” she wrote.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon struck down Trump’s March 27 executive order targeting the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, more commonly known as WilmerHale. This law firm angered Trump by employing Robert Mueller, the Republican-appointed special counsel who oversaw an investigation of the ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives.

Leon, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, made his anger obvious. “[T]he First Amendment prohibits government officials from retaliating against individuals for engaging in protected speech,” Leon noted. “WilmerHale alleges that ‘[t]he Order blatantly defies this bedrock principle of constitutional law.’” Leon wrote: “I agree!” He went on to strike down the order as unconstitutional.

Today NPR and three Colorado public radio stations sued the Trump administration over Trump’s executive order that seeks to impound congressionally appropriated funds for NPR and PBS. The executive order said the public media stations do not present “a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.” NPR’s David Folkenflik reported White House spokesperson Harrison Fields’s statement today that public media supports “a particular party on the taxpayers’ dime,” and that Trump and his allies have called it “left-wing propaganda.”

The lawsuit calls Trump’s executive order and attempt to withhold funding Congress has already approved “textbook retaliation.” “[W]e are not choosing to do this out of politics,” NPR chief executive officer Katherine Maher told NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly. “We are choosing to do this as a matter of necessity and principle. All of our rights that we enjoy in this democracy flow from the First Amendment: freedom of speech, association, freedom of the press. When we see those rights infringed upon, we have an obligation to challenge them.”

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis today denied the administration’s motion for a 30-day extension of the deadline for it to answer the complaint in the lawsuit over the rendition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man sent to El Salvador through what the administration said was “administrative error.”

Despite five hearings on the case, the administration’s lawyers didn’t indicate they needed any more time, but today—the day their answer was due—they suddenly asked for 30 more days. Xinis wrote that they “expended no effort in demonstrating good cause. They vaguely complain, in two sentences, to expending ‘significant resources’ engaging in expedited discovery. But these self-described burdens are of their own making. The Court ordered expedited discovery because of [the administration’s] refusal to follow the orders of this court as affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and the United States Supreme Court.”

Trump is well known for using procedural delays to stop the courts from administering justice, and it is notable that administration lawyers have generally not been arguing that they will win cases on the merits. Instead, they are making procedural arguments.

Meanwhile, stringing things out means making time for situations to change on the ground, reducing the effect of court decisions. Brian Barrett of Wired reported today that while Musk claims to have stepped back from the Department of Government Efficiency, his lieutenants are still spread throughout the government, mining Americans’ data. Meanwhile, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought will push to make DOGE cuts to government permanent in a dramatic reworking of the nation’s social contract. “Removing DOGE at this point would be like trying to remove a drop of food coloring from a glass of water,” Barrett writes.

Political scientist Bonica notes that there is a script for rising authoritarians. When the courts rule against the leader, the leader and his loyalists attack judges as biased and dangerous, just as Trump and his cronies have been doing.

The leader also works to delegitimize the judicial system, and that, too, we are seeing as Trump reverses the concepts of not guilty and guilty. On the one hand, the administration is fighting to get rid of the constitutional right of all persons to due process, rendering people who have not been charged with crimes to prisons in third countries. On the other, Trump and his loyalists at the Department of Justice are pardoning individuals who have been convicted of crimes.

On Monday, Trump issued a presidential pardon to former Culpeper County, Virginia, sheriff Scott Jenkins, a longtime Trump supporter whom a jury convicted of conspiracy, mail and wire fraud, and seven counts of bribery. Jared Gans of The Hill explained that Jenkins accepted more than $70,000 in bribes to appoint auxiliary deputy sheriffs, “giving them badges and credentials despite them not being trained or vetted and not offering services to the sheriff’s office.” Jenkins had announced he would “deputize thousands of our law-abiding citizens to protect their constitutional right to own firearms,” if the legislature passed “further unnecessary gun restrictions.” Jenkins was sentenced to ten years in prison.

Although Jenkins was found guilty by a jury of his peers, just as the U.S. justice system calls for, Trump insisted that Jenkins and his wife and their family “have been dragged through HELL by a Corrupt and Weaponized Biden D[epartment] O[f] J[ustice].” Jenkins, Trump wrote on social media, “is a wonderful person, who was persecuted by the Radical Left ‘monsters,’ and ‘left for dead.’ This is why I, as President of the United States, see fit to end his unfair sentence, and grant Sheriff Jenkins a FULL and Unconditional Pardon. He will NOT be going to jail tomorrow, but instead will have a wonderful and productive life.”

Today Trump gave a presidential pardon to Paul Walczak, a former nursing home executive who pleaded guilty to tax crimes in 2024. The pardon arrived after Walczak’s mother donated at least $1 million to Trump. The pardon spares Walczak from 18 months in prison and $4.4 million in restitution. Also today, Trump announced plans to pardon reality TV stars Julie and Todd Chrisley, who were sentenced to 7 and 12 years in prison for conspiracy to defraud banks of $36 million and tax evasion. Their daughter spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention.

Bonica notes that delegitimizing the judicial system creates a permission structure for threats against judges. That, too, we are seeing.

Bonica goes on to illustrate how this pattern of authoritarian attacks on the judiciary looks the same across nations. In 2009, following a ruling that he was not immune from prosecution for fraud, tax evasion, and bribery, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi railed about “communist prosecutors and communist judges.” In 2016, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Türkiye rejected the authority of his country’s highest court and purged more than 4,000 judges. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe pushed judges to stop protests, and the judiciary collapsed. In the Philippines in 2018, Rodrigo Duterte called the chief justice defending judicial independence an “enemy,” and she was removed. In Brazil in 2021, Jair Bolsonaro threatened violence against the judges who were investigating him for corruption.

But, Bonica notes, something different happened in Israel in 2023. When Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition tried to destroy judicial independence, people from all parts of society took to the streets. A broad, nonpartisan group came together to defend democracy and resist authoritarianism.

“Every authoritarian who successfully destroyed judicial independence did so because civil society failed to unite in time,” Bonica writes. “The key difference? Whether people mobilized.”

—

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Justice, Trump

DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! The “Beautiful” Tax Bill Guts the Rule of Law!

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2025 //
12

That “One Big Beautiful Bill” is supposed to be about the budget and taxes but tucked into it are a variety of dangerous items that Trump partisans hope will go unnoticed.

The most dangerous item of all undercuts the rule of law.

Liz Cheney and Adam Kinziger noticed it. They posted this warning on Twitter:

Our blog contributor called Quickwrit noticed the innocuous but dangerous insertion into the bill.

Quickwrit write here:

DANGER!!! DANGER!!! DANGER!!!

Buried at the bottom of Page 562 in the Republicans’ 1,116-page “Big Beautiful Bill” is a provision that will end all federal court challenges to anything that Trump orders and that will allow Trump to declare null and void all previous rulings against his orders.

It will be the beginning of genuine dictatorial rule.

The provision on Page 562 invokes enforcement of Federal Rules of Civil Procedures Rule 65(c) which says that a federal court can ONLY issue an injunction AFTER a plaintiff has posted a bond to cover the costs of damages that an injunction could have on the party against which the injunction was issued if subsequent appeals overturn the injunction.

Because Trump and his federal agencies could claim billions of dollars in damages if an injunction is overturned by the pro-Trump U.S. Supreme Court, there is NO ONE WHO CAN AFFORD to seek any future injunction against Trump’s orders or those of his agencies.

IN ADDITION: Rule 65(c) will be applied RETROACTIVELY to all the injunctions issued so far against Trump and his agencies, and all those injunctions will be removed because no bond was posted with any of them.

THE EFFECT WILL BE that everything that has been blocked by the federal courts will be unleashed and there will be NO FUTURE INJUNCTIONS issued against ANYTHING that Trump orders to be done.

Even if none of the many other odious things are removed from the Big Beautiful Bill, this provision to invoke Federal Court Rule 65(c) MUST BE ELIMINATED or there will be no future restraints on Trump. He will be free to dictate anything he wants with NO COURT INTERFERENCE. Rule by law will end in America.

Categories Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Justice, Republicans, Trump

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences Issues a Statement about the Current Crisis

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2025 //
4

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is the most distinguished scholarly organization in the nation. It is dedicated to the advancement of the arts and sciences. It is decidedly nonpartisan. I was elected to membership many years ago. AAAS rarely issues a statement. Its board did so in April because of unprecedented attacks on higher education, scholarly independence, and the rule of law.

A statement from the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. 
Approved April 2025. 

Since its founding in 1780, the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Sciences has sought “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuouspeople.” We do this by celebrating excellence in every field of human endeavor and by supporting the unfettered pursuit of knowledge and its application to the common good.

The Academy fosters nonpartisan, deliberative discourse on pressing issues facing our communities in the United States and the world.Our founders were also the founders of our nation. From them, we inherit a deep commitment to the practice of democratic self-governance. Our constitutional democracy has been imperfect, but almost 250 years since its inception, it remains an inspiration to peoplenear and far. Ours is a great nation because ofour system of checks and balances, separation of powers, individual rights, and an independent judiciary — as the Academy’s founder JohnAdams put it, “a government of laws, not of men.” And we are a great nation because we haveinvested in the arts and sciences while protecting the freedom that enables them to flourish.

These values are under serious threat today.Every president of the United States has the prerogative to set new priorities and agendas; nopublic or private institution is above criticism or calls for reform; and no reasoned arguments, from the left or the right, should be silenced. But current developments, in their pace, scale, and hostility toward institutions dedicated to knowledge and the pursuit of truth, have little precedent in our modern history.

We oppose reckless funding cuts and restrictions that imperil the research enterprise of our universities, hospitals, and laboratories, which contribute enormously to our prosperity, health, and national security. We condemn efforts to censor our scholarly and cultural institutions, to curtail freedom of the press, and to purge inquiry or ideas that challenge prevailing policies. We vigorously support the independence of the judiciary and the legal profession, and opposeactions and threats intended to erode thatindependence and, in turn, the rule of law.

In this time of challenge, we cherish theseprinciples and stand resilient against efforts to undermine them. The Academy will continue to urge public support for the arts and sciences, and also work to safeguard the conditions of freedom necessary for novel discoveries, creative expression, and truth-seeking in all its forms. We join a rising chorus of organizations and individuals determined to invigorate the democratic ideals of our republic and its constitutional values, and prevent our nation from sliding toward autocracy. 

In the coming months and years, the Academy will rededicate itself to studying, building, and amplifying the practices of constitutional democracy in their local and national forms, with particular focus on its pillars of freedom of expression and the rule of law. We call on all citizens to help fortify a civic culture unwavering in its commitment to our founding principles.

Categories Art, Censorship, Creativity, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Higher Education, History, Justice, Science

Stephen Miller Wants to Abolish Habeas Corpus. This Is Why He Is Wrong.

By dianeravitch
May 16, 2025 //
9

Stephen Miller is the evil genius of the Trump administration. He has built his reputation as the person with the least heart or soul. He has been the loudest advocate for kicking out immigrants, as many and as quickly as possible. Miller recently proposed that the Trump administration might need to suspend habeas corpus so as to speed up the expulsion of millions of undocumented immigrants.

Habeas corpus means literally “you should have the body.” It means that a prisoner must be brought before a court so a judge can decide if the detention is lawful.

The U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to habeas corpus in Article I, Section 9,states that the right to habeas corpus, which is a legal procedure to ensure a person isn’t unjustly imprisoned, “shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it“

Miller said: “The writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion. So I would say that’s an option we’re actively looking at.”

Legal scholar Steve Vladeck wrote that “Miller made some of the most remarkable (and remarkably scary) comments about federal courts that I think we’ve ever heard from a senior White House official.” In this post, he explains why Miller is wrong.

He begins with Miller’s words:

Well, the Constitution is clear. And that, of course, is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion. So … that’s an option we’re actively looking at. Look, a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not. At the end of the day, Congress passed a body of law known as the Immigration Nationality Act which stripped Article III courts, that’s the judicial branch, of jurisdiction over immigration cases. So Congress actually passed what’s called jurisdiction stripping legislation. It passed a number of laws that say that the Article III courts aren’t even allowed to be involved in immigration cases.

Vladeck writes that Miller’s view is just plain wrong:

I know there’s a lot going on, and that Miller says lots of incendiary (and blatantly false) stuff. But this strikes me as raising the temperature to a whole new level—and thus meriting a brief explanation of all of the ways in which this statement is both (1) wrong; and (2) profoundly dangerous. Specifically, it seems worth making five basic points:

First, the Suspension Clause of the Constitution, which is in Article I, Section 9, Clause 2 is meant to limit the circumstances in which habeas can be foreclosed (Article I, Section 9 includes limits on Congress’s powers)—thereby ensuring that judicial review of detentions are otherwise available. (Note that it’s in the original Constitution—adopted before even the Bill of Rights.) I spent a good chunk of the first half of my career writing about habeas and its history, but the short version is that the Founders were hell-bent on limiting, to the most egregious emergencies, the circumstances in which courts could be cut out of the loop. To casually suggest that habeas might be suspended because courts have ruled against the executive branch in a handful of immigration cases is to turn the Suspension Clause entirely on its head.

Second, Miller is being slippery about the actual text of the Constitution (notwithstanding his claim that it is “clear”). The Suspension Clause does not say habeas can be suspended during any invasion; it says “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” This last part, with my emphasis, is not just window-dressing; again, the whole point is that the default is for judicial review except when there is a specific national security emergency in which judicial review could itself exacerbate the emergency. The emergency itself isn’t enough. Releasing someone like Rümeysa Öztürk from immigration detention poses no threat to public safety—all the more so when the release is predicated on a judicial determination that Öztürk … poses no threat to public safety.

Third, even if the textual triggers for suspending habeas corpus were satisfied, Miller also doesn’t deign to mention that the near-universal consensus is that only Congress can suspend habeas corpus—and that unilateral suspensions by the President are per se unconstitutional. I’ve written before about the Merryman case at the outset of the Civil War, which provides perhaps the strongest possible counterexample: that the President might be able to claim a unilateral suspension power if Congress is out of session (as it was from the outset of the Civil War in 1861 until July 4). Whatever the merits of that argument, it clearly has no applicability at this moment.

Fourth, Miller is wrong, as a matter of fact,about the relationship between Article III courts (our usual federal courts) and immigration cases. It’s true that the Immigration and Nationality Act (especially as amended in 1996 and 2005) includes a series of “jurisdiction-stripping” provisions. But most of those provisions simply channel judicial review in immigration cases into immigration courts (which are part of the executive branch) in the first instance, with appeals to Article III courts. And as the district courts (and Second Circuit) have explained in cases like Khalil and Öztürk, even those provisions don’t categorically preclude any review by Article III courts prior to those appeals.

Toward the end of the video, Miller tries to make a specific point about whether revocations of “TPS” (temporary protected status) are subject to judicial review. Here, he appears to be talking about a California district court ruling in the TPS Alliance case, in which the Trump administration is currently asking the Supreme Court for a stay of the district court’s injunction (the appropriate remedy in case the district court erred). And as the plaintiffs’ response brief in the Supreme Court explains in detail, the district court had very good reasons for holding that it had the power to hear their case.

I don’t mean to overstate things; some of the questions raised by the INA’s (notoriously unclear) jurisdiction-stripping provisions can get very messy. But there’s a big difference, in my view, between reasonable disagreements over the language of complex jurisdictional statutes and Miller’s insinuation that Congress has categorically precluded judicial review in these cases. It just hasn’t.

Fifth, and finally, Miller gives away the game when he says “a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.” It’s not just the mafia-esque threat implicit in this statement (“I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse”); it’s that he’s telling on himself: He’s suggesting that the administration would (unlawfully) suspend habeas corpus if (but apparently only if) it disagrees with how courts rule in these cases. In other words, it’s not the judicial review itself that’s imperiling national security; it’s the possibility that the government might lose. That’s not, and has never been, a viable argument for suspending habeas corpus. Were it otherwise, there’d be no point to having the writ in the first place—let alone to enshrining it in the Constitution.

If the goal is just to try to bully and intimidate federal judges into acquiescing in more unlawful activity by the Trump administration, that’s shameful enough. But suggesting that the President can unilaterally cut courts out of the loop solely because they’re disagreeing with him is suggesting that judicial review—indeed, that the Constitution itself—is just a convenience. Something tells me that even federal judges and justices who might otherwise be sympathetic to the government’s arguments on the merits in some of these cases will be troubled by the implication that their authority depends entirely upon the President’s beneficence.

***

It’s certainly possible that this doesn’t go anywhere. Indeed, I hope that turns out to be true. But Miller’s comments strike me as a rather serious ratcheting up of the anti-court rhetoric coming out of this administration—and an ill-conceived one at that.

Categories Democracy, Extremism, Fascism, Justice

Chief Justice Roberts Blames “Lack of Civics Education” for Breakdown in Respect for Law

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2025 //
49

If this weren’t so pathetic, it would be funny.

Chief Justice John Roberts spoke at the Georgetown University Law School about the loss of respect for the rule of law.

Did he point his finger at the President who encouraged an insurrection on January 6, 2021?

No.

Did he blame the loser of the 2020 election who spent four years claiming that the election was rigged and that he didn’t lose?

No.

Did he blame the political party that spent four years asserting not only that the election of 2020 was rigged but that the rightful winner was “crooked” and every member of his family was part of a “crime family”?

No.

Did he blame the President who has openly ignored federal court orders?

No.

Did he blame the President who proposes to abolish due process of law even though it is written into the Constitution?

No.

Did he blame the President who said publicly that he didn’t know whether he is required to support the Constitution?

No.

Chief Justice Roberts is right to be concerned about the shrinkage of civics education, but he is wrong to ignore the reason for that shrinkage: No Child Left Behind made test scores the central goal of education, which diminished everything in the curriculum other than reading and math.

Because so many young people have not received civics education, they are likely to be misled by a charlatan whose actions model contempt for the rule of law and the Constitutuon.

And, worse, it was the Roberts Court that proclaimed that the President while carrying out his duties has absolute immunity and is above the law.

The Supreme Court, in short, overturned the deep-seated principle taught in civics classes that “no man is above the law.”

Mr. Chief Justice, if you want to know who encouraged disrespect for the rule of law, look in the mirror.

Categories Civics, Civil Rights, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, History, Justice, Trump

Lithwick & Stern: A Time for Lawyers to Defend Their Profession and Democracy

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2025 //
0

Writing in Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern criticize the big law firms that immediately caved to Trump’s demands to quash their diversity programs and pledge millions of dollars in pro bono work for Trump’s causes. They were singled out for punishment by Trump in executive orders because they dared to represent his political enemies.

In the present crisis of American law, judges have been overwhelmingly strong in upholding the rule of law over the demands of an egotistical, lawless president. Over 200 lawsuits have been filed against the Trump administration, which has so far not gone well for Trump. Judges have been targets of abuse, intimidation, even death threats directed at them and their families.

The authors single out Judge Beryl Howell for her fearless defense of the right of lawyers to represent their clients regardless of their political views.

They write:

Last Friday, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell deftly knit together the professional obligations of the bench to the bar when she handed down a 102-page opinion in favor of one of these fighting firms, Perkins Coie, handing it a massive victory that carried a deeper lesson for the entire legal profession. Howell’s decision is noteworthy for all manner of things, but perhaps the most important aspect is that it serves as a clarion call for lawyers—meaning every lawyer in the country—to find their way to doing the work of democracy. The judge highlighted the “importance of independent lawyers to ensuring the American judicial system’s fair and impartial administration of justice,” a role “recognized in this country since its founding era.” She condemned the administration’s “unprecedented attack on these foundational principles.” And she praised Perkins Coie for defending its lawyers’ right “to represent their clients vigorously and zealously, without fear of retribution from the government simply for doing the job of a lawyer.” Howell also gave credit to the hundreds of lawyers who filed amicus briefs on behalf of the firm, including a cross-ideological array of lawyers, former government officials, and retired judges, reflecting the profession’s near-unanimous revulsion at the prospect of singling out firms based on the clients they choose to represent.

But Howell went out of her way to cast doubt upon the capitulating firms that took Trump’s deal, for possibly compromising their own legal ethics. Describing Trump’s threat that “lawyers must stick to the party line, or else,” she wrote, archly: “This message has been heard and heeded by some targeted law firms, as reflected in their choice, after reportedly direct dealings with the current White House, to agree to demand terms, perhaps viewing this choice as the best alternative for their clients and employees.” Some clients, she noted, “may harbor reservations about the implications of such deals for the vigorous and zealous representation to which they are entitled from ethically responsible counsel”—an extraordinary warning to these clients that their lawyers may no longer be defending their best interests. And to make her position perfectly clear, the judge added: “If the founding history of this country is any guide, those who stood up in court to vindicate constitutional rights and, by so doing, served to promote the rule of law, will be the models lauded when this period of American history is written.”

Howell’s opinion serves as the most important reminder to date that in this constitutional moment, those trained to operate within the law and those who swear oaths to defend it have a singular and critical role to play. The days of “I just do mergers and acquisitions” are behind us, sports fans. If America were experiencing a national tooth-decay crisis, the dentists would be on the front lines; and were it experiencing a sweeping leaky-pipe epidemic, the plumbers would be on the front lines. Given that we are in the throes of the greatest legal disaster the country has faced in many Americans’ lifetimes, it might be a good idea for the nation’s attorneys to begin to understand that they have a role to play too. Howell, meanwhile, holds no quarter for those who would seek to be neutral. If you have the tools to fight lawlessness and you opt not to use them at this moment in history, you are emphatically still taking a side.

It is hard to read Howell’s opinion without worrying that some judge somewhere will find it too sweeping, too polemical, and too teeming with overinflated claims about the centrality of attorneys in American life. (She quoted Alexis de Tocqueville’s observationthat in the early United States, “the authority … intrusted to members of the legal profession … is the most powerful existing security against the excesses of democracy.”) What Howell seems to understand, with as much force as de Tocqueville, is that those entrusted to protect against the “excesses of democracy” are not going to have the luxury of appearing “neutral” much longer, or even just tamping down criticism by avoiding flowery prose in favor of more anodyne wrist slaps. Effective immediately, the defenders of the rule of law are those who went to school to understand it, who get paid to fight for it, and who swear an oath to uphold it.

Categories Accountability, Courage, Democracy, Ethics, Justice, Trump

The Atlantic: Trump Declares War on the Rule of Law

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2025 //
1

During Biden’s term in office, Republicans continually complained that Biden was “weaponizing” the Justice Department because it prosecuted Trump for inciting the insurrection of January 6, 2021, and for taking classified documents to his Mar-A-Lago estate.

Days ago, the Trump administration announced that it had reached a settlement with the family of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by a police officer as she attempted to be first to break into the House of Representatives’ chamber, where members of Congress were fleeing. The family is suing for $30 million. The police officer who shot her was defending the lives of our elected representatives, both Democrats and Republicans. It’s hard to imagine any other administration, whatever the party in power, paying off the family of a woman leading a mob into the House chambers to stop the electoral vote count.

Now that Trump is president again, he has turned the Departnent of Justice into his personal law office and assigned it the mission of prosecuting anyone whoever dared to cross Trump.

Trump is gleefully using his powers to weaponize the Department of Justice and to punish his political enemies. Not a peep from the Republicans, who unjustly accused Biden of doing what Trump is literally doing.

Trump has issued executive orders targeting law firms who had the nerve to represent Democrats or other Trump critics. His orders barred lawyers from those firms from federal buildings and directed the heads of all federal agencies to terminate contracts with the firms he designated. Several major law firms, fearful of being blocked from any federal cases, immediately capitulated. Trump exacted a price for releasing them from his attack: they had to agree to perform pro bono work on behalf of causes chosen by Trump. He currently has close a billion dollars of legal time pledged to him by those law firms that feared his wrath.

Individuals targeted by Trump must either find a lawyer who will represent them pro bono or face personal bankruptcy, that is, if they can find a lawyer willing to take on the Trump administration.

A few law firms have resisted Trump’s tyranny, and one of them–Perkins Coie–won a permanent injunction to block the enforcement of Trump’s ban. Perkins Coie represented Hillary Clinton in 2016, as well as George Soros. U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell said that Trump’s attacks on specific law firms, based on the clients they represented, were unprecedented and unconstitutional.

Judge Howell cited the example of John Adams, who represented the British soldiers accused of killing five colonists in the Boston Massacre of 1770. In two separate trials, Adams prevailed. He believed that everyone deserved a good lawyer and that they had been provoked into firing. Adams was a patriot and a man who defended the law. He was not stigmatized for defending the British soldiers.

An issue that Judge Howell raised but set aside for another time was whether Trump’s orders, which single out specific groups or individuals for punishment without trial are bills of attainder, which the Constitution forbids. They surely look like it, and this issue will come up again in the future.

As law professor James Huffman wrote in The Wall Street journal about Trump’s targeting of law firms:

A presidential bill of attainder places the powers of all three governmental branches in the hands of one man. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 47: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Paul Rosenzweig, who worked in the George W. Bush administration, wrote in The Atlantic about Trump’s destruction of the rule of law, which he has twisted into an instrument of retribution for his personal grudges.

He writes:

When Thomas Paine asked what made America different from England, he had a ready answer: “In America, the law is king.” America has not always upheld that ideal, but, taking the long view, it has made great progress toward that principle. In recent decades, the Department of Justice has become an institutional embodiment of these aspirations—the locus in the federal government for professional, apolitical enforcement of the law, which is in itself a rejection of the kingly prerogative. That is why Donald Trump’s debasement of the DOJ is far more than the mere degradation of a governmental agency; it is an assault on the rule of law.

His attack on the institution is threefold: He is using the mechanisms of justice to go after political opponents; he is using those same mechanisms to reward allies; and he is eliminating internal opposition within the department. Each incident making up this pattern is appalling; together, they amount to the decimation of a crucial institution.

Investigations should be based on facts and the law, not politics. Yet Trump has made punishing political opposition the hallmark of his investigative efforts. The DOJ’s independence from political influence, long a symbol of its probity (remember how scandalous it was that Bill Clinton had a brief meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch?), is now nonexistent.

This development should frighten all citizens, no matter what their political persuasion. As Attorney General Robert Jackson warned in 1940, the ability of a prosecutor to pick “some person whom he dislikes and desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, [is where] the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies.” Choosing targets in this way flies in the face of the DOJ’s rules and traditions—to say nothing of the actual, grave harm it can inflict on people.

Far from eschewing the possibility of abuse, Trump and his allies at the Department of Justice positively revel in it. The most egregious example was Trump’s recent issuance of an executive order directing the government to investigate the activities of two of his own employees in the first administration, Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor, who later came to be political opponents of his. (Both men are friends and colleagues of mine.)

Their offense of perceived disloyalty is perhaps the gravest sin in Trump world, and as a result, they will now be individually targeted for investigation. The personal impact on each of them is no doubt immediate and severe. Krebs, who is a well-respected cybersecurity leader, has quit his job at SentinelOne and plans to focus on his defense. If Trump’s DOJ pursues this investigation to the limit, the two men could face imprisonment.

The cases of Krebs and Taylor do not stand in isolation. Recently, the U.S. attorney in New Jersey (Trump’s former personal attorney Alina Habba) launched an investigation into the state of New Jersey for its alleged “obstruction” of Trump’s deportation agenda. In other words, because New Jersey won’t let its own employees be drafted as servants of Trump’s policy, the state becomes a pariah in Trump’s mind, one that must be coerced into obedience.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Pam Bondi has announced that the U.S. government is suing Maine because of the state’s refusal to ban transgender athletes from playing on girls’ high-school sports teams. Not content with threatening Maine, Bondi has also announced an investigation of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office because of its alleged opposition to the Second Amendment and its “lengthy” process for approval of gun permits. And she recently announced that she would target leakers of classified information by going after journalists, rescinding a policy that protected journalists from being subpoenaed to assist government-leak investigations.

But the most aggressive abuser of the criminal-justice system has to be the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin. Martin has asked the FBI to investigate several of President Joe Biden’s EPA grantees for alleged fraud—a claim so weak that one of Martin’s senior subordinates resigned rather than have to advance it in court. He has also begun to investigate, or threatened investigations of, Georgetown University, Senator Charles Schumer, and Representatives Eugene Vindman and Robert Garcia, among others. More recently, in mid-April, Martin sent a series of inquiry letters to at least three medical and scientific journals, asking them how they ensured “competing viewpoints,” with the evident intention of suggesting that the failure to include certain minority opinions was, in some way, content discrimination.

A less-well-known example of Martin’s excess is his use of threats of criminal prosecution to empower DOGE. When DOGE was first denied entry into the U.S. Institute of Peace, one of the lawyers for USIP got a call from the head of the U.S. attorney’s criminal division, threatening criminal investigation if they didn’t allow DOGE into the building. Magnifying that power of criminal law, Martin sent D.C. police officers to the agency, telling the police that there was “an ongoing incident at the United States Institute of Peace” and that there was “at least one person who was refusing to leave the property at the direction of the acting USIP president, who was lawfully in charge of the facility,” according to the journalist Steve Chapman.

A final example of DOJ overreach is, perhaps, the most chilling of all. In a recently issued presidential memorandum, Trump directed the attorney general to “investigate and take appropriate action concerning allegations regarding the use of online fundraising platforms to make ‘straw’ or ‘dummy’ contributions and to make foreign contributions to U.S. political candidates and committees, all of which break the law.” Were the investigation neutral in nature, this might be understandable. But it isn’t.

In fact, there are two major fundraising platforms in use—WinRed (the Republican platform) and ActBlue (the Democratic one). Even though WinRed has been the subject of seven times as many FTC complaints as ActBlue, the Trump memorandum involves only the latter. By targeting his opponents’ fundraising, Trump is overtly marshaling the powers of federal law enforcement in his effort to shut down political opposition.

In essence, Trump is using the department to try to ensure future Republican electoral victories. One can hardly imagine a more horrifying variation on Lavrentiy Beria’s infamous boast: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

There is more to the article. I encourage you to read it in full.

Categories Accountability, Bias, Biden, Corruption, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, History, Justice, Lies, Trump

Trump Withdraws Nomination of Ed Martin as U.S. Attorney for DC!

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2025 //
4

Trump pulled the nomination of the noxious Ed Martin, whom he had nominated to be U.S. Attorney for DC, a crucial post.

After Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina announced that he would not vote for Martin, his nomination was dead. The vote in the Senate Juduciary Committee would be 11-11, and Martin’s name would not go to the Senate floor.

In the world of horrible nominations for important posts, this was one of the worst. Ed Martin has been a vocal defender of the January 6 insurrectionists, even those who violently assaulted police officers. Think MAGA, then think extreme MAGA, and that’s Ed Martin. It was recently revealed that Martin appeared on Russian state media more than 150 times since 2016.

Thankful there is at least one Republican in the Senate who is not kissing Trump’s feet.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Justice, Trump
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