Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

2026 has already started. Get in the game.

If you are not in the habit of supporting non-federal downballot candidates, get in the habit. The election of Democratic governors in New Jersey and Virginia were harbingers of the 2026 wave that’s coming. More arrived last night (The Guardian):

Democrat Eileen Higgins was elected mayor of Miami on Tuesday night in a stunning upset victory that reversed a run of recent Republican successes in Florida.

The election of Higgins, 61, a former county commissioner, also added to a string of Democratic wins across the country that have served to highlight the growing level of resistance to Donald Trump in his second presidential term.

Miami-Dade, a county with a significant immigrant population, voted for Trump in historic numbers in 2024, making him the first Republican presidential candidate to win it since 1988.

That majority melted away in Tuesday’s run-off as Higgins became the first Democrat in 30 years to become mayor of the city of Miami. After winning 36% of the vote in last month’s election after which the top two candidates moved forward, she bested Republican Emilio González, a former city manager.

And from The Bulwark:

Meanwhile, Democrat Eric Gisler narrowly defeated Republican Mack Guest IV in a special election in the 121st state house district of Georgia. The district had been held by a Republican state legislator, and Trump carried it in 2024 by 12 points. Guest outraised Gisler, and was endorsed by the popular Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. But he couldn’t survive the anti-Republican wave.

Mother Jones reminds readers who might have missed last month’s other Democratic advances:

In Virginia, Democratic challengers flipped 13 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates, to secure their largest majority in the chamber in four decades. New Jersey Democrats grew their margin in the assembly by five seats—winning their largest majority since Watergate. Coupled with the party’s string of upset victories and double-digit shifts in special elections last year, the results have some party leaders dreaming big. 

How big? A new post-election analysis from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which supports Democratic candidates in statehouse races, argues that the current electoral climate presents the best chance in years for Democrats to consolidate power in blue states, flip battleground chambers, and loosen Republicans’ grip on power in solidly red states like South Carolina and Missouri.

By the group’s calculations, Democratic candidates over-performed the partisan leaning of their districts this fall by an average of 4.5 points—a shift that would put as many as 651 state legislative seats in play across the country in a midterm election year, and position the party for a bit of long-awaited payback.

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally transform legislative power,” said DLCC president Heather Williams. While the November results have many Democrats talking enthusiastically about a repeat of the 2018 blue wave, Williams goes back further: “We are looking at the makings of an environment that looks more like 2010 in reverse.”

Listen, the Republican 2010 victories in NC set us up for a decade of redistricting, redistricting again, and redistricting some more. Plus repeated legal fights over vote suppression legislation. Plus a battle that lasted until May to secure a state Supreme Court seat Justice Allison Riggs won last November. We have yet to recover.

Downballot Matters.

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Ethno-national imperialism

The president, in the words of an old TV commercial, is a chocolate mess. He held a rally in Pennsylvania on Tuesday backed by a banner reading “Lower Prices Bigger Paychecks.” He was there to connect with Americans seeing higher prices on every grocery store aisle and paychecks that haven’t increased and buy less. Instead he bragged that he’s ended inflation and lowered prices. One could say he lost the plot but it was never his plot:

He mocked the word “affordability,” touted how high the stock market had risen, and said Americans didn’t need so many pencils. He launched into a number of digressions to disparage the country of Somalia, the concept of climate change and the news media in the back of the room.

It’s a lesson Americans have been slow to learn. Don’t listen to what Trump says, watch what he does.

He hates neoconservatives, Adam Serwer lays out in The Atlantic. He’s mocked them and their mismanagement of military adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan, “though more in the tone of a fan angry about his team losing than of a principled opponent of militarism.”

Now with respect to his project for regime change in Venezuela, Trump is running the neocon playbook.

Serwer writes:

Like the neocons, Trump’s neo-neocons repeatedly invoke the West’s complacency and unwillingness to defend its own values, a frailty that can be rectified only through the ritual use of military force against weaker targets. The conservative writer Jonah Goldberg once articulated what he called the “Ledeen Doctrine,” after the neoconservative Michael Ledeen, which was: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” Despite Trump’s rejection of George W. Bush, MAGA bears many similarities to the right-wing politics of that era—a fetishization of violence and torture, the treatment of opposition as treasonous, a disdain for due process, and an anti-Muslim bigotry at odds with fundamental American principles.

But not at odds with what for Trump passes for principles. More like a schoolyard bully’s need for domination.

Although the pretense of adhering to democratic values has been abandoned by an administration that disdains democracy, free speech, and the rule of law, the theory is nonetheless the same: Unless America defends ethno-nationalism against the forces of multiracial democracy elsewhere, ethno-nationalism will not be safe here. The Trump administration’s rabid hostility toward the “Rainbow Nation” of South Africa, with its history all Americans can recognize, makes more sense in this context.

Some neocons actually believed in democratic principles, Serwer suggests, albeit “in their own misguided way.” Some of those became Never Trumpers. “But for others, the appeal of interventionism seems to have been more about a kind of ethnic chauvinism, about reiterating the superiority of the enlightened West over primitivist ‘Islamofascism.’ For that faction of former neocons, well, Trumpism fit like a well-tailored suit.”

Despite his condemnation of the neocons, what Trump really condemns are their failures. Their failure to subdue Iraq and Afghanistan (and Syria) overnight, as he would have, and to take their oil. (Venezuela has lots of oil.) Trumpism means not only to nurture ethnic chauvinism at home but to export it the way the neocons did, minus the pretext of exporting democracy.

Serwer wraps up:

The Trump administration’s strategy document states that “who a country admits into its borders—in what numbers and from where—will inevitably define the future of that nation.” Trump has made clear that this is no anodyne statement—at a rally Tuesday he defended his “permanent pause” on “third-world migration” by expressing his dismay at the fact that instead of people coming from Norway, Sweden, or Denmark, immigrants were coming to the U.S. from “Somalia, places that are a disaster, filthy, dirty, disgusting.” Trump is not concerned about “migration”; in some general sense, he’s concerned that the immigrants are not white.

This is the “Great Replacement” theory, applied globally. It is the same might-makes-right worldview of the worst neocons, but in service of the abhorrent principle of segregation instead of democracy, and suggesting a future of American imperialism unmoored from any pretense of a belief in the equality of mankind.

Trump the Incurious may have a deep preference for the skin tones (genes) of Nordic peoples. But he will never ask himself why more of them don’t want to join an American oligarcy in decline. They are happier in the social democracies they’ve built than they would be in the Trump-Miller-Vought white-nationalist project.

* * * * *

Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?

No King’s One Million Rising movement 
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May Day Strong
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Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Seriously. can even his cult members buy this bullshit? After all he says about Biden every day?

Yes he is just a demented old man — with the power to destroy the world.

Is this how we end?

Earlier today, I talked about how the Supreme Court is now just another phony, dishonest, Republican activist group. Exhibit A:

Senior Trump advisers are telling top GOP donors that a pair of upcoming Supreme Court decisions are likely to bolster Republicans in the 2026 midterms — and transform the party’s power to win elections for years.

What are the Supremes planning to do to help the GOP this cycle?

1. Louisiana v. Callais

The court — which has a 6-3 conservative supermajority — is set to decide whether to gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 law that prohibits the dilution of minority voting power in congressional redistricting plans.

• The law has resulted in the creation of “majority-minority” districts that ensure voters in predominantly Black areas can be represented by minorities.
• For years, Republicans have sought to weaken the law, arguing that it’s federal overreach and unfairly creates Democrat-friendly districts.
• Democrats say the law prevents discrimination and ensures that minority voters are represented in Congress.

[…]

The liberal-leaning Fair Fight Action has warned that overturning the law could result in Republicans dismantling as many as 19 Democrat-held majority-minority seats ahead of the midterms — “enough to cement one-party control of the U.S. House for at least a generation.”

• That, however, would require the court to rule quickly: Candidate filing deadlines in several states are coming up soon, and some already have passed.
• If the court overturns the law after next year’s filing deadlines, it would impact congressional line-drawing for the 2028 election.

2. National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) v. Federal Election Commission (FEC)

Oral arguments will be held Tuesday for this case, in which the justices will decide whether to eliminate a federal law that limits the amount of money big-money party committees can spend in direct coordination with favored candidates.

• Republicans argue the law violates the First Amendment and free political speech.
• Democrats say the law curtails corruption, and prevents major donors from flooding a candidate’s coffers with massive sums.
• The case is widely seen as the most consequential campaign finance-related dispute to land before the court since the landmark Citizens United decision in 2010 that lifted restrictions on political spending by corporations, unions and other groups.

Campaign finance experts predict Republicans would benefit more if the court overturns the law because the GOP relies heavily on billionaire mega-donors such as tech mogul Elon Musk, casino executive Miriam Adelson and hedge fund manager Ken Griffin.

I’m reminded that Musk spent a hundred million on a Supreme Court seat in Michigan and lost. Money isn’t everything. But it isn’t nothing either.

I expect that the DOJ is going to try to dismantle Act Blue for small donors before the election and I wouldn’t at all be surprised to see the Supremes step in with the shadow docket and rule that allowing ACT Blue to continue would cause Trump irreparable harm. That’s basically the argument they used to excuse the stopping of the vote count in Florida in Bush vs Gore. That certainly would give the GOP with its battalion of oligarchs an advantage.

But even with all that there is no reason that they would be a shoe-in for victory. Trump and the Republicans are extremely unpopular and many of the dipshits who just come out to vote like it’s American Idol whenever their favorite reality star is on the ballot are not likely to rouse themselves in this midterm. He’s never been all that successful in juicing turnout in off year elections.and the Democrats are champing at the bit. Still, it’s tragic that the Supreme’s are just a bunch of rank partisan hacks who don’t even try to hide that fact. Why should they? They have lifetime appointments and have learned that they can simply say “waddaya gonna do about?” Shamelessness … you know the drill.

The Democrats held a hearing on the ICE detentions of American citizens, based upon ProPublica’s reporting. (It would be nice if there was more press about it but…)

A congressional investigation out today has found that, contrary to the Trump administration’s claims, immigration agents have frequently detained and mistreated U.S. citizens. 

The report by Senate Democrats, which was prompted by ProPublica’s reporting, included interviews with nearly two dozen Americans.  Citizens told congressional investigators that immigration officers had dragged them from cars, detained them for days, fabricated claims of assault, routinely used excessive force and denied medical care.

The investigation also found that agents “treated children with reckless disregard for their safety and well being.” One citizen recalled that federal agents pointed guns at her youngest children, ages 6 and 8, and dragged her 14-year-old daughter out of a pickup and zip-tied her. 

The citizen, Anabel Romero, told investigators that an agent threatened to “fucking blow your head off” during the chaotic raid at a rural Idaho racetrack. Romero also said agents “wouldn’t let people get diapers or food for their kids.” 

Romero and her children were born in Idaho. 

And this is especially important, which a lot of congressional leaders probably don’t know unless they spend plenty of time on social media which has these reports in great numbers from all over the country every single day:

Five other citizens are giving their accounts publicly Tuesday on Capitol Hill.  The citizens’ accounts paint a dire picture, the senator behind the report told ProPublica in an interview. 

“What most struck me is the brutality and physical violence involved in every story,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. “This is stuff that should be unrecognizable as AmericaBrutal. It should make everyday Americans outraged that their fellow citizens could be treated this way.”

If they’re doing it to American citizens you know they’re treating immigrants even worse. The government isn’t tracking any of this and insists that this is all a lie and they have never detained American citizens.

The issue is all the more critical since the Supreme Court issued a temporary order this fall allowing immigration agents in the Los Angeles area to stop civilians without clear cause.  Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued that citizens had no reason to worry. “If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen,” Kavanaugh wrote, “they promptly let the individual go.”

That’s why they call these grotesque assaults, Kavanaugh stops. Many people are being traumatized, some being held for days despite their legal status or citizenship. It’s a nightmare.

Following up on the post below, this comment is one for the books. Trump is running an honest-to-goodness war against “narco-terrorism” allegedly to stop the flow of drugs into America. He thinks drug runners should all be executed on sight and he is doing it.

When asked in the Politico interview how he squares that with the pardoning of the former Honduran president and drug king pen he knows nothing. Get a load of this:

Well, I don’t know him. And I know very little about him other than people said it was like, uh, an Obama-Biden type setup, where he was set up … there are many people fighting for Honduras, very good people that I know. And they think he was treated horribly, and they asked me to do it, and I said I’ll do it.

How can anyone not realize that this man is a sniveling coward? He simply cannot take responsibility for any of his fuck-ups, big or small.

Trump is running the country on a series of daily whims that have people scurrying around like a bunch of rats, desperate to do his bidding and grab whatever slice of the grift they can get their grimy hands on. He is wielding his power indiscriminately and apparently he simply cannot be stopped.

I’m really starting to worry about those nuclear codes. He’s that mentally disordered.

I can hardly stand to listen to him right now so I understand if you don’t want to watch the above. But here’s the transcript which is still horrifying but somewhat easier to take. And excerpt:

Burns: The most. You’re right. Um, your team has been going back and forth between Putin and Zelenskyy with various drafts of his peace deal. Which country right now is in the stronger negotiating position?

Trump: Well, there can be no question about it. It’s Russia. It’s a much bigger country. It’s a war that should’ve never happened. Frankly, it wouldn’t have happened if I were president, and it didn’t happen for four years. Uh, I watched that taking place, and I said, wow, they’re gonna cause some problems here. And it started and it, uh, could’ve evolved into, uh, World War III, frankly. I think it’s probably not gonna be happening now. I think if I weren’t president, you could’ve had World War III. I think you would’ve had a much bigger problem than you have right now, but right now it’s a big problem. It’s a big problem for Europe. And they’re not handling it well.

[…]

Burns: On Sunday, your son, Donald Trump Jr., responded to a reporter’s question about whether you will walk away from Ukraine, and your son said, I think he may. Is that correct?

Trump: No, it’s not correct. But it’s not exactly wrong. We have to … you know, they have to play ball. If they, uh … if they don’t read agreements, potential agreements, you know, it’s, uh, not easy with Russia ’cause Russia has the upper … upper hand. And they always did. They’re much bigger. They’re much stronger in that sense. I give Ukraine a lot of … a lot of … I give the people of Ukraine and the military of Ukraine tremendous credit for the, you know, bravery and for the fighting and all of that. But you know, at some point, size will win, generally. And this is a massive size, uh … you … when you take a look at the numbers, I mean, the numbers are just crazy.

This is not a war that should’ve happened. This is a war that would’ve never happened if I were president. So sad millions of people are dead, many, many soldiers. You know, last month they lost 27,000 soldiers and some people from missiles being launched into Kyiv and o … Kyiv and other places. But, uh, what a … what a s … what a sad thing for humanity.

You know, this doesn’t affect us. Uh, the … our country is no longer paying any money ever since Biden gave them $350 billion so stupidly. And you know, if he wouldn’t have given it, maybe something else would’ve happened.

Burns: But you, sir ..

President Trump: But Putin has … had no respect for Biden, and he had no respect for Zelenskyy, didn’t like Zelenskyy. They really hate each other. And part of the problem is they hate each other really a lot, you know. And it’s very hard for them to try and make a deal. It’s harder than most. I … I settled eight wars, and this … I would’ve said this is the ninth. This would’ve been the easiest one, I would’ve said, or one of the easier ones. I mean, I settled one … one that was going on for 36 years. Uh, I settled Pakistan and India. I settled so many wars. I’m very proud of it. And I do it pretty routinely, pretty easily. It’s not hard for me to do. It’s what I do. I make deals. Uh, this one is tough. One of the reasons is the level of hatred between Putin and Zelenskyy is tremendous.

[…]

Trump: You know, think of it, if our election wasn’t rigged … there was a rigged election. Now everyone knows it. It’s gonna come out over the next couple of months, too, loud and clear ’cause we have all the information and everything. But if the election wasn’t rigged and stolen, uh, you wouldn’t even be talking about Ukraine right now.

Blah, blah, blah. He actually thinks Putin has respect for him which is just hilarious. And yes, virtually all he has to say is that it isn’t his fault, like the 12 year old whiny little bitch he is. It’s pathetic.

He got very agitated when Burns noted that some of his supporters don’t like the fact that he’s spending too much time on foreign policy and blathered angrily about the trillions and trillions he’s supposedly bringing back.(He is not) He said he didn’t think anyone would say that is really a supporter.

Burns asked him again about the economy and this is what he said:

Burns: But … but I do want to talk about the economy, sir, here at home. And … and I wonder what grade you would give your economy.

Trump: A-plus.

Burns: A-plus?

Trump: Yeah, A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.

Burns: Well, it’s interesting because I … I talked to a supporter of yours. Her name is Melanie from Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. And she loves you. She gave you overall an A-plus-plus grade. But here’s what she said about the economy. She said, “Groceries, utility, insurance, and the basic cost of running small business keep rising faster than wages.” She also says that not enough is being done. Mr. President, this is one of your supporters.

Trump: Okay. Good. And I’m … I love her because you said I got an A-plus on everything, I guess. I don’t know. But here … here’s …

It goes on with more whining about how none of this is his fault and some lies about how great everything really is.

Good luck with that. He’s headed to Pennsylvania today where he will get a tongue bath from his most ardent supporters and I’m sure the media will interview them and conclude that he’s actually massively popular. I’m sure it will be the same old greatest hits. But from what we understand, this is what the White House has decided will win the midterms for the Republicans:

Susie Wiles, whom President Trump calls the most powerful woman in the world, says she has a plan to save the midterms for the Republican Party.

She says Trump will campaign like it’s 2024 all over again, and admits she hasn’t even told him this yet.

Her strategy is to make the… pic.twitter.com/qXxQdf5x2m

— Shadow of Ezra (@ShadowofEzra) December 9, 2025

I’m sure all those Republicans are thrilled to be yoked to a senile, orange clown with a 38% approval rating. Go for it!

Brian Beutler has an excellent piece up today that frames our current situation perfectly. He first makes the case that we need to be much more relentless in “stopping or slowing the process of public forgetting [and] … for mobilizing well in advance of harmful policy changes, so that we stand a better chance of stopping them.”

Then he focuses on Venezuela:

The last antiwar movement in the United States did not win the argument, but it won the battle for historical memory, and birthed a real progressive movement. It provided a moral foundation for ambitious and dissident politicians, one of whom would become America’s most unlikely president just a few years later. It is conceivable that absent mass, vocal, but unpopular opposition to the war, there would be no Affordable Care Act for Republicans to sabotage.

But in 2001 and 2002, the country was vengeance-minded. War was likely unstoppable. Strange as it sounds almost a quarter-century later, George W. Bush was as popular as any president had ever been, and his party had spent the past decade refining the art of partisan demagogy.

Most Democrats in Congress (thus) joined the march to war, rather than stand athwart it. They had elections to win. They wanted to be associated with the American flag, rather than the radical and iconoclastic ones scattered about antiwar rallies that attracted tens and hundreds of thousands of citizens.

Today is nothing like that.

Trump is terribly unpopular. The very idea of going to war with Venezuela is more unpopular still. The question of whether we should be murdering boaters in the Caribbean and Pacific is sensitive to question wording, but the fact that Trump’s policy of indiscriminate extrajudicial killing has engulfed his administration in a war-crimes scandal suggests Republicans don’t feel very sure-footed. And it is the opposition that has claimed the mantles of patriotism and freedom.

We’ve come a long way since, ‘you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists.’

The broad left should thus foster another antiwar movement, isolating Trump and his vicious regime as the lawless aggressor, and nobody in Democratic politics should be afraid of it. If anything, the first ambitious Democrat to take a leadership role in galvanizing an antiwar movement will credential themselves for the next presidential primary.

He points out that this attack on Venezuela is as unpopular as Iraq was popular, nobody can figure out just what it has supposedly done to America and the administration isn’t even trying to get congressional fig leaf to authorize its action. It is out on a limb.

Beutler believes that it is both morally and politically right to oppose this war (of course) and that Democrats should not fall for the idea that it is a “distraction” from what people care about: affordability. It is part and parcel of the MAGA power grab and we should oppose it on principle but also for the political purposes he writes about above.

His headline “No Kings Means No Colonial Wars” is excellent and suggests that the No Kings movement might be a good platform for this message. It just rings true and reminds people that Trump is acting like one in every way.

Josh Marshal discusses the necessity of Supreme Court reform:

I’ve become something of a broken record on this. But repetition sometimes serves a critical purpose. Supreme Court reform is now the sine qua non of any reformist program in the United States, any program to re-implant/re-secure civic democracy in the United States. Filibuster reform, abolition of the filibuster, is comparably important. In fact, the two are interwoven with each other in such a way as to be almost indistinguishably joined together.

But a lot of people know the filibuster has to go. Reforming the Supreme Court, which involves one of several ways of breaking the power of the six corrupt Republican appointees, is a much harder lift. It’s not a harder lift in voting terms. It can be done by passing an ordinary law (once you’ve done away with the filibuster) and having a president to sign it. But for many in the political class, for many elected officials, it remains unthinkable. On the plus side, Democratic voters and opinion leaders have some time to lay the groundwork. The soonest anything can happen is January 2029. (You need Congress and the White House.) But there’s a huge amount of work to do. Because my sense is that Democratic officeholders, party elites, aren’t even close to being there. And there’s really no future without it.

After reviewing the arguments yesterday (and observing everything they’ve done in the last year) it’s clear that the Court is nothing more than an undemocratic, partisan faction in the U.S. political system. There may be a few instances where they push back on behalf of their wealthy patrons or reward some discrete conservative group that one of their wives is involved with that may not fully comport with Trump and MAGA but for the most part they are just part of the GOP political apparatus. They don’t even adhere to their own ideology anymore. It’s pretty much just serving Trump and his corruption and criminality. They are so beset by Fox News Brain Rot that they believe that drag queens are a bigger threat than authoritarianism and flagrant graft and cronyism.

We shouldn’t be surprised. most of the conservatives were political operatives in one way or another before they got on the court. The others are all corrupt themselves.

Marshall has written quite a bit about this reform agenda and here’s what he wrote recently about the Supremes:

Supreme Court reform. I said above that some of the decisions are hard. They cut against a lot of what we were taught about political life. This is one of them. It’s only in the last three or four years that I’ve come around to the necessity of it and it’s still sometimes hard to get my head around. But it is essential. With the filibuster in place, no broader anti-authoritarian reform, no retrofitting the house is possible. It’s the same with the Supreme Court. The current Republican majority is thoroughly corrupt and has hijacked the Constitution. They have cut free not only from precedent but from any consistent or coherent theory of the Constitution, no matter how wrongheaded. The purpose of the high court is not to run the country. It is to render decisions on points of constitutional and legal ambiguity in a good faith and broadly consistent manner. It is now engaged in purely outcome-driven reasoning, mixing and matching doctrines and modes of jurisprudence depending on the desired ends, with the aim of furthering autocratic and Republican rule. That is the heart of the corruption. Passing laws doesn’t matter if they can and will be discarded simply because six lifetime appointees don’t like them. That’s a perversion of the constitutional order. I know this one is hard to swallow for many people. It doesn’t come easily to me either. But the facts of the situation and fidelity to the Constitution require it. I’m not going to get into the specific kind of reform here. There are various ways to go about it. You can judge it by the end result. If you are for leaving intact the corrupt Republican majority’s absolute control over the political and partisan direction of the country, you should leave or be driven from office.

I suspect that it’s going to take a full scale repudiation of the Republican Party at the polls to enable this. What that means in American politics is that the Democrats probably need to win at FDR 1932 levels which is a 60-40% landslide. With our current media diets it’s hard to picture that but it is possible. And even with that kind of mandate, it will be a very heavy lift, especially with the right having been so radicalized over the past few decades. But that’s what has to happen.

IOKIYAR

Time from this morning:

The U.S. is showing signs of undergoing a “rapid authoritarian shift” as civic freedoms in the country decline following President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, a group that tracks the status of such liberties and the threats they face around the world is warning.

CIVICUS, an international network of civil society groups that advocates for stronger civil liberties, downgraded its assessment of U.S. civic freedoms from “narrowed” to “obstructed” in a new report on Tuesday, months after it added the country to a global human rights watchlist earlier this year.

“Long-established democracies are showing signs of rapid authoritarian shift, marked by weakened rule of law and growing constraints on independent civil society. Argentina and the USA exemplified this trend,” the report said.

Perhaps you noticed. Trump is weaponizing the rule of law against his enemies. Following the law and respecting civil liberties is now optional for those assigned to protect and defend yours.

“Somewhere along the line, [Democrats] decided that resisting Trump meant resisting the rule of law,” Laura Ingraham alleged on her Monday show. To illustrate, she played clip of people protesting an ICE raid in Tucson. Specifically, Rep. Adelita Grijalva. The freshman from Arizona, Ingraham claimed, was “brazenly” obstructing the agents. The rest was a predictable Great Replacement Theory rant about a Democrat plot to flood the country with noncitizen Democratic voters (or something).

I spotted several social media posts which featured Grijalva “breaking the law” for which she was noticeably not arrested (although she did catch some second-hand pepper spray). In the clip, Grijalva noticeably neither blocked, brushed, hit or attacked any federal officer. She just protested their presence and, presumably, ICE deporting peaceful undocumented residents without repecting their due process rights. I’ll have more to say on that another time.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration carries out extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean in violation of the rule of law, domestic and international. Here’s where this gets extra interesting for Pete Hegseth. The Society for the Rule of Law reports on a column in The Hill by Chris Traux, one of its members:

Truax establishes the legal distinction that prevents Hegseth’s actions from enjoying pardon protection. Although the President may pardon someone for offenses against the United States, “The War Crimes Act that authorizes the Department of Justice to prosecute war crimes using international law defines them as, among other things, a ‘grave breach of the Geneva Convention’ and violations of Articles 23, 25, 27, or 28 of the Annex to the 1907 Hague Convention.” Since war crimes violate international law, and since those crimes can still be prosecuted by the U.S. government, Hegseth’s actions remove him from the protection that a presidential pardon could give. “While Hegseth could be pardoned for committing murder in violation of federal law, he cannot be pardoned for committing a war crime, any more than an American president could have pardoned the Nuremberg defendants.”

Truax emphasizes the unique breadth of war crimes law and the range of penalties that can be applied. These consequences extend beyond the ability of any single president to mitigate, and raise serious legal and ethical questions for not only the Secretary of Defense, but for any armed service-members involved. “If you commit an act that violates the laws of war — especially one that results in an intentional killing — sooner or later, you can be held accountable, and the president cannot save you.”

Fingers crossed. As for holding Kristi Noem’s stormtroopers accountable for flagrantly (if not gleefully) violating residents’ civil liberties, that’s TBD.

* * * * *

Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?

No King’s One Million Rising movement 
50501 
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink 
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense