Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Democrats nibble around the edges

Democrats in Congress have issued a list of demands for more restrictions on federal agents in exchange for funding the Department of Homeland Security (Washington Post):

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) laid out their demands late Wednesday in a letter to Republicans, including barring immigration agents from wearing face masks and entering private property without a warrant from a judge.

Republicans immediately criticized Democrats’ proposals as excessive. Sen. Katie Boyd Britt (R-Alabama), who is representing Senate Republicans in negotiations with Democrats, described it as “a ridiculous Christmas list of demands.”

The details are irrelevant despite multiple polls showing they have public support.

First, because cosmetic changes won’t address the cultural rot at the heart of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Ask people if they support requiring judicial warrants to enter homes and oppose having masked secret police on their streets, and what else will majorities of Americans say? But if you want to know how Americans really feel, don’t ask, listen:

Professional wrestling crowd erupts into chants of "FUCK ICE" pic.twitter.com/JUcMhLzAwe

— HQ (@headquarters68_) February 5, 2026

Second, the changes Democrats demand don’t address the problem of CBP/ICE thugs violating people’s civil rights with impunity. They know they can’t be touched if they bust your head. It’s what they’ve been hired to do, egged on by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, President Donald Trump, and Shadow President Stephen Miller. Republicans are all about personal responsibility and accountability … for their enemies. Disincentivizing random brutality by agents of the state — their agents of the state — is not on the fascist agenda.

“Scores of claims are expected to arise out of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Experts say suing the government will be tough,” The Washington Post begins. The Federal Tort Claims Act stacks the legal deck against the Trump administration’s victims. The process is long and arduous (another Washington Post article):

“It’s absolutely bonkers,” said Brian Orozco, a Chicago attorney for Ricardo Aguayo Rodriguez, the bike-riding immigrant who was hospitalized and is now detained, awaiting deportation to Mexico. “If a Chicago police officer abuses my civil rights, I can file a claim immediately. I don’t have to wait six months [to file a lawsuit]. I have a right to a jury trial. I don’t have that when I’m up against the federal government. It’s scary to me how protected these federal agents are.”

After the Civil War, Congress passed a law that established the right to sue local and state officials for the violation of constitutional rights. Federal officials weren’t included in the law, though a 1971 Supreme Court ruling established precedence for such lawsuits. But legal experts said that the court’s decisions within the past decade have narrowed that path and made it nearly impossible to successfully sue federal agents for civil rights violations.

“It is arguably harder today in 2026 than at any other time in American history to sue federal officials for money damages if they violate your constitutional rights,” said Harrison Stark, senior counsel at the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

As we mentioned on Monday, Democrats in the 119th Congress have filed over a dozen bills touching on removing qualified immunity from federal officials who violate people’s civil rights under color of law. The bills establish a right to for Americans to sue federal officials who violate their civil rights. But they’ve gained little traction with Republicans holding a trifecta in Washington, D.C. And don’t expect Schumer or Jeffries to break a sweat fighting for them.

“It’s a somewhat complicated area of law across different jurisdictions,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) said of the challenges in garnering support for the bill, which he sponsored. “But I didn’t see any huge partisan issues.”

[…]

Last fall, Whitehouse and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Georgia) reintroduced the measure. Legal experts told The Post they think it is unlikely to pass, citing anticipated concerns about exposing federal law enforcement officers to personal liability.

Personal liability, say, like Chicago policemen face? Or the New York Police Department? In the United States of America, some law enforcement officers are more equal than others. Republicans marching in step down the road to fascism mean to keep it that way.

We covered on Monday how a variety of states have passed or introduced measures to level the playing field for victims. Until then, under existing law victims may encounter difficulty in finding lawyers to take their cases. The government thumb on the scales of justice makes the cases tough to win.

Anya Bidwell, senior attorney for the nonprofit Institute for Justice in the D.C. area tells the Post, “even getting to trial is extremely difficult.” Plus the length of the existing process makes bringing cases cost-prohibitive for many victims.

Justice delayed, they say.

This is amazing

“Who made this?!?” asks X user Marmel.

I cannot get his post from X to embed. But Rick Wilson’s retweet does. Click through.

A hero, that's who. https://t.co/ggQ302hgdD

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) February 4, 2026

TGIF. Until the Friday night news dumps.

Update: Found it on Bluesky

“What do you think the odds are that person is a goat fucker?!”Grade A trolling

— Rachel Bitecofer (@rachelbitecofer.bsky.social) 2026-02-04T23:36:57.793Z

pic.twitter.com/mbeK9I2hI6

— mike luckovich (@mluckovichajc) February 4, 2026

Trump at the National Prayer Breakfast:

Trump at the National Prayer Breakfast: "They rigged the second election. I had to win it. I had to win it. I needed it for my own ego. I would've had a bad ego for the rest of my life. Now I really have a big ego. Beating these lunatics was incredible … the first time they… pic.twitter.com/KpExEgj3fg

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 5, 2026

“They rigged the second election. I had to win it. I had to win it. I needed it for my own ego. I would’ve had a bad ego for the rest of my life. Now I really have a big ego. Beating these lunatics was incredible … the first time they said I didn’t win the popular vote. I did.”

He’s not wrong about the ego part…

Now I understand Trump’s DEI strategy. He ordered the government to get rid of all mentions of Black American contributions and achievements so that he could then lie and claim it was actually done by Democrats. He’ll then say, “nobody cared about these great Americans until I came along and honored them as they should be honored.

You think I’m kidding?

The National Garden of American Heroes, which Trump originally announced during his first term, will include multiple Black heroes, he announced in a proclamation on Tuesday.

• The park will “honor our greatest Americans, including black icons like Booker T. Washington, Jackie Robinson, Aretha Franklin, Coretta Scott King, Muhammad Ali, and many others,” the action reads.
• Trump praised abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, Olympic sprinter Jesse Owens, poet Phillis Wheatley, NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson and economist Thomas Sowell.

The president also recognized Prince Estabrook, who served in the Revolutionary War while enslaved, and Lemuel Haynes, who is widely recognized as the first Black man in America to be ordained by a Protestant church.

• Trump called them “black patriots” and said “as President, I am fighting to restore the Nation that these titans helped build.”

What?

Trump also used the occasion to slam “the progressive movement and far-left politicians,” as has become a tradition in his White House commemorations.

• They “needlessly divide our citizens on the basis of race, painting a toxic and distorted and disfigured vision of our history, heritage, and heroes,” he said.

See? It’s the left that’s made everything worse for Black America. Trump is their greatest champion.

I assume most people won’t believe this crap but you never know. A reminder:

Trump’s Black History Month announcement comes amid his administration’s broader suppression of Black history and culture across the U.S. as well as diversity and inclusion efforts in corporations, hospitals, federal government agencies and beyond.

 In contrast to Trump’s Black History Month gesture, his administration has eroded bedrock civil rights measures and dealt unprecedented blows to institutions for their efforts to represent and include Black people, as well as other marginalized groups.[…]

Trump expressed support in his proclamation for Black History Month celebrations, which his administration has targeted in the past year. In response to his executive order last year banning DEI initiatives, the Pentagon’s intelligence agency paused special event programs and related events, including ones for Black History Month.

I’m sure they’ll just pretend that never happened even though they blackmailed countless institutions into abandoning their efforts to recruit qualified Black people, proclaiming such measures to be discrimination against white people. The assault on DEI has been comprehensive throughout the government and more broadly throughout society. Trump proclaiming himself a hero for restoring their place in history is enough to give you a blinding headache.

Leonard Leo constructed the court that gave Trump immunity for all his crimes and enabled him to destroy the nation, That little tantrum, a reprise of an earlier on last spring, is because Trump is worried that the Supreme Court is going to rule against his daft tariff scheme and he needs to blame someone and claim it was rigged because he never really loses.

This dialog between Dahlia Lithwick at Slate and Lisa Graves, legal expert and the author of Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights speaks to the reality we are dealing with:

Lithwick: Since Trump has taken office, that same Federalist Society–constructed majority is giving cover, sometimes even fighting lower court judges (including Federalist Society judges) to protect Trump’s prerogatives. The Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention made news last month when Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche did a little fireside chat where he more or less said that he and the Justice Department were at war against federal district courts and asked young members of the Federalist Society to join in that battle. The video of that chat now seems to have been taken down. So there is this public-facing “We’re just a debate society” FedSoc, but at the same time, what’s happening in the inside of that ballroom is someone is openly trying to foment a rebellion against Article 3 judges. How do you square that particular circle?

Graves: The president’s job is to faithfully execute the law. I was just finishing writing my book on Inauguration Day and John Roberts swore Trump in, and the president swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, to faithfully execute it. I wondered at that time, and I wonder even more so now, what that oath even means. It seems to have been rendered meaningless by John Roberts and his cohorts in the immunity decision, and in the series of unprecedented rulings this year that have allowed Trump to move forward with extreme actions that on their face look like they’re in violation of the Constitution, or statutes, or regulations, or rules, or contracts.

President Trump tapped out a few posts on Truth Social recently, “To Leonard Leo, Koch, and all of the countries and slimeballs that have ripped off the United States of America for years through the use of their own tariffs. We don’t have a court system that’s going to let you destroy our country any longer.” I think parsing Trump tweets—well, that way madness lies, but I do want to ask whether that signals to you a meaningful break between Trump and the conservative legal movement? 

It’s clear that he has this notion of 100 percent loyalty and anything less is not OK. Charles Koch has gotten a huge amount of what he wanted from Donald Trump. The tax breaks from Trump’s first term were crafted by the Koch machine, pushed through in part with the help of Koch, and then they were made permanent. These are generational changes to our tax structure in ways that benefit billionaires like Koch, and Trump was more than happy to do it. The only time he’s not happy is if the Koch operation dares to issue a brief on the other side, as it has done in the tariff case.

The tariff case is an extraordinary circumstance where Trump has, yet again, claimed a power that is expressly committed to Congress. His lawyer has tried to expand a statute in order to basically shoehorn him into the ability to issue arbitrary and capricious and irrational tariffs. Some in the business community, like Koch, are objecting. Some groups that have lawyers who’ve been tied to Leonard Leo are objecting too—on that one issue. And it’s the one issue where the Roberts court, that’s so beholden to this right-wing agenda and also to Trump, may defect. It looks like they may say that this is the one bridge too far, along with perhaps Trump’s attempt to control the Fed, because it cuts against business interests. But on every other issue where our rights are at stake, where our future is at stake, where programs that Congress has funded to support our kids in schools, our health, cancer research, parks, the environment, on and on, this court has been putting its thumb on the scale of justice in a way that favors Trump and favors this right-wing movement. For an authoritarian, any daylight between someone and the regime is too much, but that doesn’t mean that there’s a meaningful, deep and wide difference between where Leonard Leo wants the court to head—unitary executive theory, consolidating the other gains on anti-regulation, moving forward when they think it’s politically expedient on assailing marriage equality, continuing to drive forward on limiting abortion access—these things are aligned, and Charles Koch, despite his libertarian roots, has been funding the groups that are all on board for that same agenda. Groups associated with Koch have announced that they will be spending big again in this midterm election like they did in the presidential, like they did in the midterm before that, to try to ensure that Donald Trump has a majority in both houses of Congress, regardless of the destruction that is unfolding for the rest of us.

They’re all getting what they paid for. Trump, as usual, thinks he deserves more than anyone else.

The tariff case was heard on a semi-expedited basis (at least in terms of these Trump cases) but they;re taking their sweet time with a decision. I would not be surprised if it goes Trump’s way. Why would they delay the decision for so long unless they wanted to pull one of those, “well, we might not agree with this but it’s too late now to reverse anything so maybe just don’t do it next time opinions?”

Who knows? But the idea that Leonard Leo has suddenly come to Jesus is ridiculous. He may be pretending that he isn’t a full-blown Trump lackey but for all intents and purposes he might as well be.

The good news is that maybe 40% or so are not:

More than a week after nurse Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis, 61 percent of voters think the Trump administration has not given an honest account of the incident and 25 percent think the Trump administration has given an honest account of the incident, with 14 percent not offering an opinion, according to a Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pea-ack) University national poll of registered voters released today.

Democrats (93 – 2 percent) and independents (65 – 20 percent) think the Trump administration has not given an honest account of the incident, while Republicans (60 – 19 percent) think the Trump administration has given an honest account of the incident.

An overwhelming majority of voters (80 percent) think there should be an independent investigation into this shooting, while 15 percent don’t think so.

Most people don’t much like ICE at all:

Fifty-nine percent of voters think the recent ICE-involved shootings in Minneapolis are a sign of broader problems in the way ICE is operating, while 32 percent think the shootings are isolated incidents.

When it comes to the way ICE is enforcing immigration laws, 34 percent of voters approve, while 63 percent disapprove.

This is a drop in approval from Quinnipiac University’s January 13, 2026 poll when 40 percent approved and 57 percent disapproved.

Sixty percent of voters think ICE should withdraw from Minneapolis, while 36 percent think ICE should continue its operations in Minneapolis.

And despite Trump’s insistence that he’s never been more popular, he is sinking fast:

Thirty-seven percent of voters approve of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president, while 56 percent disapprove.

This compares to Quinnipiac University’s January 14, 2026 poll when 40 percent approved and 54 percent disapproved.

When it comes to Trump’s handling of the economy, 39 percent of voters approve, while 56 percent disapprove. In Quinnipiac University’s January 14 poll, 42 percent approved and 53 percent disapproved.

When it comes to Trump’s handling of immigration issues, 38 percent of voters approve, while 59 percent disapprove. This is a drop in approval from Quinnipiac University’s December 17, 2025 poll when 44 percent approved and 54 percent disapproved.

When it comes to Trump’s handling of foreign policy, 37 percent of voters approve, while 58 percent disapprove. In Quinnipiac University’s January 14 poll, 41 percent approved and 56 percent disapproved.

Remember, in the depth of the Great Depression, this was the vote:

In the 1932 U.S. presidential election, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt won with 57.4% of the popular vote (22,818,740 votes) and 88.9% of the electoral vote (472 votes), defeating Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover, who received 39.6% of the popular vote. 11.1% of the electoral vote (59 votes). 

There’s always at least 40% of right wingers who simply can’t abide liberals.

Imagine that:

When Stephen Miller offered his first big rollout of Donald Trump’s immigration agenda during the 2024 campaign, he demonstrated great enthusiasm for the idea of giant migrant camps. He gushed about creating “vast holding facilities” built on “open land,” which would enable Trump to escalate the volume and speed of deportations to unprecedented heights. Trembling with excitement, Miller vowed: “President Trump will do whatever it takes.”

But a funny thing has happened with Miller’s authoritarian fever dreams. As plans for these new detention facilities have become public, they’re encountering opposition in some very unlikely places. Notably, that includes regions that backed Trump in 2024.

The whole deportation scheme is becoming a non-starter:

We’re now learning that this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to retrofit around two dozen vast new facilities. In keeping with Trump-Miller’s visions, ICE vows to detain an additional 80,000 people in them. Some will reportedly hold up to 10,000 detainees apiece. In other words, the Trump-Miller threat to create a system of new detention camps is just getting underway in earnest.

To put a ghoulish twist on the oft-discussed ideal of bureaucratic “capacity,” this will allow Trump and Miller to imprison and then deport vastly more people a whole lot faster. Right now, more than 70,000 migrants are languishing in detention—a record—but the administration is running out of space. Add another 80,000 beds, and it would supercharge expulsion capacity.

Yet these detention dreams are hitting stiff opposition. ICE wants to buy a warehouse in Virginia’s Hanover County, which went for Trump by 26 points in 2024 and combines rural territory with Richmond’s northern suburbs. Residents recently turned out in force and angrily condemned the proposed sale, with local reports suggesting only a “handful” backed it. The GOP-heavy Board of Supervisors opposed the transaction. The warehouse owner canceled the sale.

It’s also happening in GOP districts in New Jersey and even in Oklahoma, Kansas and Utah.

As MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow noted in a useful overview of the opposition Monday night, we’re already seeing mass protests outside existing facilities. Those are smaller than some of the gargantuan new camps ICE hopes to create, yet migrant deaths are already soaring in the current facilities, and the bigger ones will be even worse. “If they build them, they will fill them,” Maddow said, labeling them “prison camps.” She added: “How do you think those facilities are going to be run?”

They are literally concentration camps:

A concentration camp is a facility for confining political prisoners, minorities, or specific demographics, often on the grounds of national security, exploitation, or punishment, typically without trial. These camps often feature severe overcrowding, inhumane conditions, forced labor, and high mortality rates.

Is it possible that Miller over estimated the public’s tolerance for his grotesque scheme?

Time is a curious construct in Donald Trump’s second term. It’s hard to believe that it was only one month ago that the U.S. staged a military incursion in Venezuela and abducted Nicolás Maduro, the country’s president, and his wife, bringing them back to America to stand trial. At the time, this seemed like a world-altering event. Now it has almost completely disappeared from the news due to all that’s happened — in Minneapolis, in Iran, in Greenland — in the weeks since. 

Today, it’s just business as usual in the Trump administration. 

On Tuesday the president met with Colombian President Gustavo Petro in the White House, and considering the harsh words exchanged between them over the past year — Petro was a “lunatic” and a “sick man,” Trump said, while Petro accused Trump of being a fascist and “complicit in genocide” — nobody knew what to expect. But Trump signaled all would be well in advance of the meeting, suggesting that his action against Maduro had cowed the Colombian leader, who would now be content to serve as the president of a docile, vassal state of the U.S. 

Apparently Trump was right. The meeting was hailed as a massive success with both of them exchanging hats and autographs, and the president pronouncing his Colombian counterpart as “terrific.”

The descriptor was a long way from the days when Trump was warning that Petro “had better watch his a*s” and musing that invading Colombia “sounds good.” Since it’s easy to flatter Trump — and he doesn’t seem to care about anything beyond what’s happening in the current moment — we can’t know whether this shift in rhetoric is temporary or will be permanent. If he finds it to his benefit to launch another broadside against Petro, he won’t hesitate to do it. 

But for the moment, things have calmed in the region. Latin American countries are all adjusting to the knowledge that the U.S. is now openly proclaiming its dominance of the Western hemisphere and that Trump will be exercising his power in erratic ways for the remainder of his term. All eyes are on Venezuela to see exactly how this bold infringement of national sovereignty shakes out. 

As Petro was traveling to Washington, Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s interim president, met with U.S. chargé d’affaires Laura Dogu to talk about the future. One might have thought such talks would have taken place before now, but the fact that they haven’t is indicative of the administration’s lack of serious day-after strategy. No one still seems to know the plan. 

Last fall, while the U.S. was assembling a large naval task force to patrol the waters off the Venezuelan coast and randomly blowing up small boats at sea — claiming without proof that they were running drugs — back channels had formed. The Guardian reported in January that Rodríguez and her brother Jorge, the head of the National Assembly, agreed in advance to cooperate with the Trump administration once Maduro had been deposed. Suspicions had been raised that this was the case, especially considering how blithely Trump accepted the woman who his own Drug Enforcement Agency had been tracking for years as a drug-running criminal. Then again, he had also just pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who had been sentenced to 45 years in prison on charges of trafficking tons of cocaine to the U.S., so all of Trump’s caterwauling about drugs was clearly not something he actually cared about. 

Rodríguez is considered a canny politician who some contend is much less ideological than her leftist history implies. According to the Guardian, her conversations with the Trump administration took place through a back channel in Qatar over the course of months. She reportedly made it plain that she would cooperate with the U.S. after Maduro was exiled or taken into custody, but would not participate in the operation itself. (Rodríguez has denied any cooperation.)

The most important requirement, at least from the administration’s perspective, was her agreement to work with oil companies that the U.S. was determined to bring into the country, ending years of ill will and legal complications. Trump’s plan to make Venezuela great again by taking over their oil fields, though, has encountered roadblocks. American oil companies, the president assumed, would jump at the chance to get in there right away, but that hasn’t happened. There is apparently little incentive to jump into a potentially unstable and unreliable situation, especially considering that someone like Rodríguez, with a fiery political history, is running the place. 

All the while, the interim president has been speaking out of both sides of her mouth, sucking up to Washington, promising full cooperation and releasing some political prisoners, while telling her own people and other countries in the region that she is completely independent and fighting back against U.S. control. Just last week, Rodríguez told a group of oil workers in a widely-televised speech, “Enough already of Washington’s orders over politicians in Venezuela!” When asked about it, Trump shrugged and said that he hadn’t heard her remarks but that he believes they have a very good relationship. 

So far, Rodríguez has had nothing to say about democracy, economics, profiteering or how she might deal with the corruption of Venezuela’s major institutions. But that’s not surprising, since she was in the middle of it all as a long-time member of both the Maduro and Hugo Chavez regimes. She is protecting the status quo and seemingly has no interest in reform. At this point, one might assume the U.S. is fine with that — as long as she agrees to keep the oil flowing and doesn’t cause them any trouble. 

In the event she does, the administration has made no bones of the fact that they are prepared to launch military actions. Trump has even threatened to mete out a “worse fate” than Maduro’s if Rodríguez fails to please him. 

The rest of Latin America is watching and waiting. With the exception of Argentinian President Javier Milei, one of Trump’s most fervent foreign allies, most countries in the region consider Maduro’s seizure and arrest an ominous violation of international law and potentially the first step on the way to realizing America’s stated imperial ambitions. They, too, can read the New York Times, in which Trump declared that the only limit to his global power is “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

During that interview, he took an off-the-record call with Petro. The Times’ reporters characterized the call as “an example of coercive diplomacy in action” — which is just a fancy way of saying that Trump said to Petro, “Nice little country you have there, would be a shame if anything happened to it.”

This week, after his meeting with the president, Petro walked out of the White House wearing a red MAGA hat to which he had added an “S” with what must have been one of the presidential Sharpies. “Make Americas Great Again,” the edited cap read. 

Apparently, Petro has gotten with Trump’s program.

Salon

Good? Evil? Not everything is political.

There’s been so much fascism to write about and a trove of Epstein documents still to review that I hadn’t noticed. Trae Crowder asks why all the QAnon crazies aren’t taking victory laps. They’ve gone mute.

All this Epstein stuff got me feelin insane over here pic.twitter.com/p6uX7RcAox

— Trae Crowder (@traecrowder) February 3, 2026

I know, I know. I’m worn out too. But I needed Trae’s Sgt. York joke this morning. And integrity’s gay.

How can anyone possibly defend what ICE/Border Patrol is doing?! pic.twitter.com/VFvR0NkA1e

— Trae Crowder (@traecrowder) January 26, 2026

“Good people fight evil.” Please do.

If consistent

Gerrymandering by race : bad. Gerrymandering for partisan advantage : SCOTUS-approved. Remember?

Associated Press:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed California to use a new voter-approved congressional map that is favorable to Democrats in this year’s elections, rejecting a last-ditch plea from state Republicans and the Trump administration.

No justices dissented from the brief order denying the appeal without explanation, which is common on the court’s emergency docket.

The justices had previously allowed Texas’ Republican-friendly map to be used in 2026, despite a lower-court ruling that it likely discriminates on the basis of race.

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito wrote in December that it appeared both states had adopted new maps for political advantage, which the high court has previously ruled cannot be a basis for a federal lawsuit.

Give SCOTUS points for respecting precedent for once. Their own.