And while the wheels of justice turn slowly, less than two months later a procession of judges have already ruled the administration has done exactly that.
In more than a dozen cases — and in three major rulings this week alone — a federal judge has ruled that the administration either has violated the law or has probably done so.
The total works out to one such finding about every four days.
And the pace is speeding up.
The most interesting thing about this is, as I posted yesterday, this is coming from liberal, centrist and conservative judges, across the board. Just as it was in the post 2020 election period he’s not finding any joy in court. Yet, anyway. I suppose that’s why the threats against judges are picking up:
Elon Musk has made the maximum allowable donation to Republican members of Congress who support impeaching federal judges who are impeding actions taken by President Trump, according to five people with knowledge of the matter.
Mr. Musk has given what had been until recently the legal maximum hard-dollar donation — $6,600 — to the campaigns of seven Republicans who have either endorsed judicial impeachments or called for some form of “action” in response to recent rulings against the Trump administration, including a weekend decision by Judge James E. Boasberg of Federal District Court in Washington.
On Saturday, Judge Boasberg ordered the administration to turn around planes carrying alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador and return them to the United States. The administration did not comply with that order, prompting concerns about a constitutional showdown.
Mr. Trump subsequently said on social media that Judge Boasberg should be impeached.Mr. Musk contributed on Wednesday to Representatives Eli Crane of Arizona, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Andy Ogles of Tennessee, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin and Brandon Gill of Texas. He also donated to Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, according to two of the people briefed on the matter.
He’s playing the refs (or nobody told him how impeachment works) but it is stupid. Judges know as well as we do that they don’t have the votes to convict. But I think Elon’s in his feelings right now and just wants to thank his friends.
The New York Times published this a few years back explaining that ad from 1987:
Like so many Americans of his generation, Trump’s world view was shaped by the trauma of the hostage crisis and the sense of US decline in the late 1970s and 1980s. He also shared the widespread sense that America’s allies were not pulling their weight, in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and that these “friends” were taking unfair advantage of the United States with respect to trade. In September 1987, Trump paid almost $95,000 to take out a full-page newspaper advertisement that ran in the New York Times and several other outlets to air his grievances with America’s leaders and its allies. .
He sounded like a simpleminded fool then and he sounds even dumber now after everything that’s happened in the nearly 40 years since he saw something on Larry King that gave him the idea. In case you can’t read it above, here it is:
There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.
An open letter from Donald J. Trump on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves.
To The American People:
For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.
The saga continues unabated as we defend the Persian Gulf, an area of only marginal significance to the United States for its oil supplies, but one upon which Japan and others are almost totally dependent. Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests? Saudi Arabia, a country whose very existence is in the hands of the United States, last week refused to allow us to use their mine sweepers (which are, sadly, far more advanced than ours) to police the Gulf. The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.
Over the years, the Japanese, unimpeded by the huge costs of defending themselves (as long as the United States will do it for free), have built a strong and vibrant economy with unprecedented surpluses. They have brilliantly managed to maintain a weak yen against a strong dollar. This, coupled with out monumental spending for their, and others, defense, has moved Japan to the forefront of world economies.
Now that the tides are turning and the yen is becoming strong against the dollar, the Japanese are openly complaining and, in typical fashion, our politicians are reacting to these unjustified complaints.
It’s time for us to end our vast deficits by making Japan, and others who can afford it, pay. Our world protection is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to these countries, and their stake in their protection is far greater than ours.
Make Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others pay for the protection we extend as allies. Let’s help our farmers, our sick, our homeless by taking from some of the greatest profit machines ever created — machines created and nurtured by us. “Tax” these wealthy nations, not America. End our huge deficits, reduce our taxes, and let America’s economy grow unencumbered by the cost of defending those who can easily afford to pay us for the defense of their freedom. Let’s not let our great country be laughed at anymore.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Trump
He simply does not understand how trade works. In fact, his thinking has actually evolved in one small way. He now believes that we don’t need to trade with other countries at all and America can build, grow and manufacture everything people could want or need at home and will sell overseas but only as long as there are no taxes or tariffs on American goods. He believes we can do this without immigration somehow (prison labor?) In other words he has actually become even dumber as time went on about how the world works.
Sure, there are useful tariffs at times and the US needs to manufacture more of its necessary goods if only for reasons of national security. But this is just nuts. Trade is inherent in capitalism and his fundamental lack of understanding about how it works is leading us to a trade war, a recession and a rapid, chaotic,devolution of the world economic order — and not in a good way.
Our new health establishment is explicit about wanting to go backwards. It’s right there on the hat: Make America Healthy Again.
Again.
Meaning: America used to be “healthy” and now is not.
I’m sorry, I know we’re supposed to meet people where they are and give them a loving truth sandwich, but this is the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.
Does anyone remember what “health” looked like in America a generation or two ago? Half the country smoked. People dropped dead at 50 on the reg. Child birth was dangerous. Seatbelts were suss. Drug use was off the charts.
Dangerous communicable diseases were still around. Cancer was a death sentence. AIDS looked like an unstoppable tsunami.
Food? Do remember what grocery stores looked like in 1980? Aisles of canned vegetables, processed foods, and frozen TV dinners. Fresh produce? Good luck. That section of the Acme was a shoebox.
He goes on to list one disease and health condition after another that has been eradicated or massively reduced in just the last half century. Cancer alone has changed from an automatic death sentence to commonly treatable and it’s getting better every day. (Or was … until now.)
Yes, diabetes is a major new problem mostly due to obesity. But there are some extremely effective new drugs that Bobby Jr and his crew want to take off the market. He says people just need to “eat right.” (No word on whether they should take steroids like he does.) There was a time when that kind of thing was said to be nanny state authoritarianism but now all those people at the Trump rallies are apparently going to switch to arugula and beet juice because Bobby says they should. Sure.
It’s all fatuous nonsense. Yes, people should eat healthier food. I’m all for it. It would be nice if it was more available and people had the time to cook their own food at home and didn’t eat processed junk. Unfortunately, just as Trump and his flunkies keep insisting that Trump gets to do whatever he wants because America voted for him, America has also voted for fast food and sugar and processed junk and they think they get to do what they want as well.
It’s fine to proselytize about healthy eating (although I remember Michelle Obama being excoriated for doing that) but it won’t cure all the diseases that make us sick and die, no matter how much Bobby and his goo-goo cohort thinks it will. It’s medical science that has given us the extra, healthier decades that we enjoy today and ruining it will take them away again. Make America Healthy Again — like it was in the 1890s.
Marjorie Taylor Greene tries to push Russian propaganda about Ukrainian nazis, and is completely shut down by Holocaust Historian and the Leading Scholar on Ukrainian Nationalism in America, Dr. Snyder. pic.twitter.com/ZPjjt9XznY
There have always been stupid people in Congress so Marge isn’t unique in that sense. But she is one of the most arrogantly stupid I’ve ever seen. This is a person who just a few years ago was all in on QAnon and just keeps “doing her own research.” I wish I thought she learned something yesterday but I don’t.
They’re coming for the women too. Going all the way back to WWII!
The Air Force Times has more evidence of the “DEI” purge going on at the Pentagon:
Some Air Force webpages on pioneering female pilots — from World War II to the modern era — have been taken offline, as the Trump administration continues its drive to eliminate diversity-related materials from government sites.
Air Force Times identified at least a dozen pages on the WWII-era Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs, and retired Maj. Gen. Jeannie Leavitt, the Air Force’s first female fighter pilot, including biographies, photos, museum exhibits, a video and a commentary, were no longer online as of Tuesday.
The removals come as the Trump administration and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have assailed diversity-related initiatives of previous administrations, calling them divisive and a distraction from efforts to make the military more “lethal.” President Donald Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office ending those initiatives and later directed the military and other government agencies to swiftly pull such materials from public view.
I guess that figures. It’s quite clear that Hegseth doesn’t think women belong in the military. He’s been forced to sort of accept it for now because they are necessary. But this DEI purge of all recognition of non-white men, LGBT and women pretty much says where he’d like to take it if given the chance. Those white supremacist tattoos and his history of sexual assault should have been the first clue.
Your terrifying bit of news of the day. (Well, the morning anyway.) The New York Times reports that Bobby Jr has some ideas about bird flu. They aren’t good:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official, has an unorthodox idea for tackling the bird flu bedeviling U.S. poultry farms. Let the virus rip. Instead of culling birds when the infection is discovered, farmers “should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flock so that we can identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that are immune to it,” Mr. Kennedy said recently on Fox News.
[…]
Mr. Kennedy does not have jurisdiction over farms. But Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, also has voiced support for the notion.
“There are some farmers that are out there that are willing to really try this on a pilot as we build the safe perimeter around them to see if there is a way forward with immunity,” Ms. Rollins told Fox News last month.
Yet veterinary scientists said letting the virus sweep through poultry flocks unchecked would be inhumane and dangerous, and have enormous economic consequences. “That’s a really terrible idea, for any one of a number of reasons,” said Dr. Gail Hansen, a former state veterinarian for Kansas.
Every infection is another opportunity for the virus, called H5N1, to evolve into a more virulent form. Geneticists have been tracking its mutations closely; so far, the virus has not developed the ability to spread among people. But if H5N1 were to be allowed to run through a flock of five million birds, “that’s literally five million chances for that virus to replicate or to mutate,” Dr. Hansen said. Large numbers of infected birds are likely to transmit massive amounts of the virus, putting farm workers and other animals at great risk.
Oh, I’m pretty sure it’s going to put all of us at great risk if the virus obtains the ability to spread among people. Which it could. We all know that having become conversant in the mechanisms of viral pandemics after living with one for a couple of years.
Bobby obviously believes that getting diseases make you stronger. And if you are a weakling, (like people his age who don’t take steroids) then sure, you might die. Kids too. Or people with other chronic illnesses. He talks all the time about how he had all the childhood diseases when he was a kid before there were vaccines and they all had tons of fun staying home from school. Well, many did, for sure. But many also had terrible long term effects and many others died. But he doesn’t care about them. Neither do all the MAGAs who care nothing for the million + who died from COVID.
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that there is talk that they are going to end the mRNA research because the cranks now in charge of scientific research in America are down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole. But you should know that an mRNA vaccine is showing incredible promise in treating pancreatic cancer, one of the most difficult of all. There are many other trials using this research underway. Bobby and his crew of weirdo health officials are thinking of ending it.
Will something like that be enough to wake America up to what these monsters are doing? I honestly don’t know. So many just don’t believe what they they don’t want to believe. But the fact is that people are going to die because of it. All to serve one man’s gigantic narcissistic need to exact revenge for having been held accountable for his actions.
The Department of Justice says the president has the power to fire all over 40 year olds or female heads of agencies:
“Could the President decide that he wasn’t going to appoint or allow to remain in office any female heads of agencies or any heads over 40 years old?” Judge Karen Henderson, a Reagan appointee on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, asked Deputy Assistant Attorney General Eric McArthur Tuesday in proceedings over the fired board members of two independent agencies.
“I think that that would be within the President’s constitutional authority under the removal power,” he responded, adding that “there would be separate questions about whether that would violate other provisions of the Constitution.”
They truly believe that he has no limits although another judge on the panel did remind him that the 14th Amendment still exists. (For now.)
The DOJ is aiming to get these cases to the Supreme Court, where it’s betting that enough of the right-wing justices will agree to overturn the high court’s own precedent on independent agencies — encapsulated primarily in a 1936 case called Humphrey’s Executor — and axe the removal protections that keep leadership at such entities as the NLRB or MSPB insulated from political will or vindictiveness
I would guess they’re going to be happy to give him this one. The right wingers on the court raised in (or under the influence of) the Reagan Revolution really do believe in an extreme definition of presidential power. They may be shocked enough by some of the applications of it they are seeing unfold in this wild administration to find ways to curb some of the worst excesses but this one’s a gimme. They have never believed that any agency or sub-agency of the executive branch should be independent in any way. Trump will be allowed to fire the heads of these “independent agencies” at his whim. Whether he is allowed to close the agencies themselves or fire people en masse without cause are other cases that may have different outcomes simply because they are affected by different precedents that have wider application. But the Supreme majority is going to give him some wins, never doubt it.
Last Friday President Trump gave a speech at the Department of Justice to assembled staff which appeared to be handpicked supporters. He had a prepared transcript about “law and order” but spent most of the hour talking off the cuff about his grievances against the justice system he believes did him wrong. The New York Times described it this way:
He delivered a grievance-filled attack on the very people who have worked in the building and others like them. As he singled out some targets of his rage, he appeared to offer his own vision of justice in America, one defined by personal vengeance rather than by institutional principles. “These are people that are bad people, really bad people,” Mr. Trump said. “They tried to turn America into a corrupt communist and third-world country, but in the end, the thugs failed and the truth won.”
He spent quite a bit of time on the idea that his enemies had intimidated and derided Judge Aileen Cannon who presided over the stolen classified documents case in Palm Beach Florida. He said she was strong and tough, “the absolute model of what a judge should be.” He went on an extended riff about the late basketball coach Bobby Knight explaining that this is a tactic used to “play the refs.”
He said:
He’d scream at the ref. He’d scream so hard, oh boy, it was terrible actually. And the people would come up, his assistant coaches would come up, the players. Coach, coach, don’t do that. Don’t do it…That’s when he threw the chair, he starts going crazy.
And he said, no, he’s not going to change this time, but he’s going to change for the next play.
Trump claimed that’s what his enemies did to Judge Cannon and that he doesn’t think it’s legal. But according to him, it didn’t work with her, she just “got angry.” (If true, it would be interesting to know how he knows that.)
He babbled on for quite a while on the subject of his “unfair” court cases and then said that Supreme Court is also being intimidated:
“Remember the way they treated Justice Thomas and Justice Alito and Justice Kavanaugh, Justice Gorsuch? Chief Justice Roberts gets treated unbelievably badly and they’re hoping that they can sway them to go along because, again, what do they do…they’re humans and they don’t like being accused of incompetence… they’re in a position; they can’t fight back really very well and so sometimes they get weak.”
By this time you are probably screaming to yourself, “Is he kidding? The man who so gravely insulted,threatened and degraded nearly every judge he came in front of they had to throw gag orders on him to keep their families and courthouse staff safe from his rabid followers is saying it should be illegal to criticize judges?” To call it hypocritical is laughably inadequate and chutzpah doesn’t even begin to describe it.
But it does reveal his own motivation in using that very tactic, not that it was hard to discern before. He does exactly what he accused his so-called enemies of doing. He threatens judges he doesn’t think are favorable enough to him with the expectation that they will bend over backwards to show “fairness” and prove they are not biased as he claims they are. The “playing the refs” gambit is hardly a secret and Trump hasn’t exactly been subtle about it.
Any American has the right to criticize judges but defendants usually don’t do it because generally it’s a bad idea to unnecessarily antagonize someone who has such power over your life. Trump behaves more like a Mafia boss whose insults can be interpreted by his lieutenants as an order to commit violence. It’s hard to know how well it works but it’s logical to assume that if nothing else it helped delay some of his cases, even those in which he was ultimately found guilty.
Whether the Supreme Court’s shocking decision to use Trump’s January 6th case to create “presidential immunity” out of nothing was motivated by sympathy or fear is unknown but their delay in deciding it was certainly a factor in making it impossible to further litigate the federal cases against him to determine if they qualified under the new rule.
And Trump is grateful. After the joint session of Congress last month, he walked down to the Supreme Court Justices in attendance and shook the Chief John Roberts’ hand saying, “thank you , thank you, I won’t forget it.” (He later claimed that he was thanking him for swearing him in on inauguration day but that’s hardly believable.) Already facing massive legal challenges to his reckless DOGE program, among other things, he was rightfully suspected of thanking the Chief for that immunity ruling.
Despite his tirade at the DOJ against his enemies “playing the refs” Trump went right out and insulted the judge in the latest case in DC challenging his ludicrous claim to wartime powers to deport people to a foreign prison with no due process. And this time, he’s joined his comrade in arms, Elon Musk as well as House Republicans who are calling for the impeachment of federal judges who don’t immediately capitulate to their arguments:
In a highly unusual move, Chief Justice Roberts put out a statement just hours later which said, “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”
Again, keep in mind that Trump knows better than anyone that impeachment will not work unless they have 67 Senate votes to convict in the Senate and Chief Justice Roberts knows that as well. So basically, it appears that Justice Roberts wanted to send a message to Trump that he is not amused by his “ref-playing.”
Trump’s response was:
Roberts is no doubt aware that the comment Trump made after the big speech last month thanking him and saying “I won’t forget it” went viral. And I assume that he hears the talk coming from Trump’s White House like this from Rolling Stone:
Another close Trump adviser simply says that the president’s ultimate leverage against certain judges who try to stand in the way of his agenda is that the judiciary does not command an army, while the president of the United States does. “Are they going to come and arrest him?” the adviser asked, rhetorically.
Trump’s “ref-working” against every judge who doesn’t rule his way is becoming a big problem for the Supreme Court and the Chief Justice knows it. Whether he and his colleagues will have the fortitude to stand up to him and preserve the Constitution and American democracy when the time comes is a bet I wouldn’t want to make after what they did with the January 6th case. Their credibility is already fragile.
But maybe Trump’s antics have broken through a little bit to show that no matter how grateful he is for the get-out-of-jail free card they’re not any safer from the chainsaw than the rest of us.
Salon
Update— This is interesting:
1/🧵 Judges across ideological lines are ruling against Trump at strikingly similar rates (84% liberal, 86% centrist, 82% conservative). This isn't partisan opposition to Trump—it's the judiciary functioning as intended by cutting across partisan lines to uphold the Constitution.
2/🧵 Here is the breakdown by ideological groupings. While liberal judges heard more cases (due to geography and venue selection), the consistency of rulings across ideological lines demolishes the narrative that judicial decisions against Trump reflect political bias.
