July 2, 2025 (Wednesday)

The Senate’s passage of its version of the budget reconciliation bill yesterday sent House members rushing back to Washington today to debate passing what the Senate had sent them. The bill is hugely unpopular. It cuts taxes for the wealthiest Americans and corporations and slashes Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, energy credits, and other programs that help the American people, while also pouring money into Immigration and Customs Enforcement and detention facilities for migrants.

While Democratic representatives are united against the measure, people from across the country are flooding lawmakers with calls and demonstrations against the bill in hopes of swaying Republicans. At the office of Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), hundreds of his constituents held a die-in to demonstrate how cuts to healthcare in the bill would affect them.

Far-right Republicans think the bill doesn’t make steep enough cuts; Republicans from swing districts recognize that supporting it will badly hurt both their constituents and their hopes of reelection. But Trump has demanded Congress pass the measure before July 4, an arbitrary date he seems to have chosen because of its historical significance.

A new element in the Republicans’ calculation emerged a few days ago as billionaire Elon Musk reentered the fight over the measure, warning he would start a new political party over it. He has threatened to run primary challengers against lawmakers who vote yes, a threat that is a counterweight to Trump’s threat to run primary challengers against lawmakers who vote no. Already Musk has claimed to be donating to the reelection campaign of Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), an outspoken opponent of the bill.

Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) wrote today about the dysfunction on the House floor. “A functioning House leadership team would work the members, make changes as necessary and bring this bill to the floor once they knew they could pass it. But Mike Johnson does not run a functional House leadership team. He does what Daddy says and Daddy said pass it before July 4.” This morning, the House took a procedural vote, but recognizing that they did not have the votes to pass the bill itself, Republican leadership refused to close the vote.

Later, House leadership held another vote open for more than two hours when they could not win it. When Representative Joe Neguse (D-CO) challenged this trick, the chair told him that the rules established a minimum time for votes, but no maximum.

To find the votes Republicans need to pass the bill, Trump met today with those expected to vote no. Riley Rogerson and Reese Gorman of NOTUS reported that at a meeting with some of the swing-state Republican holdouts, Trump seemed to believe the lie that the bill doesn’t cut Medicaid. Three sources told the reporters Trump told Republicans they shouldn’t touch Medicaid, Medicare, or Social Security if they want to win elections. “But we’re touching Medicaid in this bill,” one of the members at the meeting answered.

Trump also met with far-right members, but because the Senate measure must pass the House unchanged, he can offer them little except to promise they will fix the bill after it passes. While that appeared to work on at least one representative, Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) told the NOTUS reporters: “Now we’re having to once again hear the line, ‘Let’s pass this and then we’ll fix it later,’ And we never fix it later, and America knows that.”

Political journalist Judd Legum of Popular Information posted: “To review: Trump spent all day rounding up votes for his mega bill Trump did not round up enough votes So the ‘plan’ was just to start voting and bully anyone who votes no until they switch their vote (It could work.)”

Democrats called out Republicans from swing districts, listing the numbers of their constituents who will lose healthcare insurance if the measure passes. They urged Republicans to stand up to Donald Trump, and to stand up for their constituents.

Pennsylvania representative Fitzpatrick faced the die-in at his office and was also so angry at today’s news Trump is withholding weapons already pledged to Ukraine that he wrote to Trump today warning that Ukraine is “holding the line for the entire democratic world” and asking for an emergency briefing on the decision to withhold aid. He voted no on a key procedural vote tonight.

Just after 10:00 tonight, NBC News Capitol Hill correspondent Melanie Zanona reported: “Republicans are trying locate Rep Brian Fitzpatrick, who delivered a surprising NO vote on the mega bill rule. Likely to try to flip him. I told a member I saw him bolt out of the chamber & leave the area. ‘Smart,’ the member said.”

As of midnight, the Republicans did not have the votes to advance the measure.

Representative Maxwell Frost (D-FL) posted: “Speaker Johnson should just take the L on this vote. Most of America doesn’t want this bill to pass anyways. It’s…both the worst and most unpopular piece of legislation in modern history.”

On Bluesky, user shauna wrote: “say what you will about nancy pelosi (as one of her constituents believe me i have) she’d have impaled herself with a gavel live on the house floor before she’d have allowed this sh*tshow of a vote on her watch as speaker.”

I like the way Ms Cox Richardson advises, in the comments, as to whether her post is suitable for reading before bedtime, or to leave it till morning.

Thanks for posting the HCR letters.

I appreciate it. I usually read them. Sometimes, a day or few late.

Carrick Ryan

Even looking at US foreign policy from an entirely cynical perspective, Trump has fundamentally misunderstood one of the USA’s greatest geopolitical strengths.

For the last 80 years, it really mattered if the USA was your friend.

If you were a US ally, they had your back. In war, in trade, and with substantial influence throughout the planet. It was generally a very lonely place to be if you weren’t on Team USA.

But fortuitously, for most of the last century, it’s been pretty easy to stay on the team.
Either be a liberal democracy, or be useful.

If you were a dictatorship, a theocracy, or looked too much like a socialist… then they could deny you access to the economic infrastructure that they had largely built for the world.

Access to the international banking system, the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organisation, as well as access to technologies provided by US multinationals, has generally been contingent on the USA never perceiving you to be an adversary.

It meant it mattered what the US Government thought of your nation. But perhaps more importantly, it mattered what the voting public in the US thought of your nation. While US power was absolutely utilised for self-serving purposes, the fact it generally needed to appease the threshold of US public opinion meant that foreign policy had a filter of morality that other historic hegemonic powers haven’t.

Most nations of the world thus understood that if they couldn’t be geostrategically important to the Pentagon, they need only be recognised as peaceful and “freedom loving” to the American people to remain on Team America
The equation has now changed.

Trump’s repeated unprovoked use of trade as a weapon against former allies has made the international community increasingly nervous that the power of the US to impose substantial economic pain upon anyone and everyone, makes it a national security risk to everyone. There is no more Team America, there is only Team Trump, and he alone decides who is on his team.

Previously, US sanctions were a threat only to hostile regimes, or regimes the US determined to be illegitimate (again, unless they provided geopolitical value). But Trump has made democracies, once considered firmly within the US camp, wary that they too could fall victim to the capricious and vindictive impulses of a US President who doesn’t believe in alliances.

The BRICS group was formed by nations who sought a means to insulate themselves from the threat of sanctions or economic exclusion by the US. Ironically, their domestic ideological inclinations have never more closely aligned with the White House.

While I don’t expect a line of liberal democracies from the West queuing to sign up to the proudly illiberal BRICS forum, I suspect that economic powers across the European Union and Asia are making preparations already to insulate themselves from a global economic system that operates largely at the discretion of the US.

This is occurring at a time when unpredictable tariffs, ballooning government debt, and political interference with the operation of the Federal Reserve is making the status of the US dollar as the reserve economy alarmingly tenuous.
While this decentralisation of power might have benefits, it shouldn’t be forgotten how often the ability of the US to exert economic pressure has made the use of military power unnecessary. If it loses this weapon that has served it so well, it could make the deployment of its still vastly superior military substantially more likely.

Bogsnorkler said:

Carrick Ryan

Even looking at US foreign policy from an entirely cynical perspective, Trump has fundamentally misunderstood one of the USA’s greatest geopolitical strengths.

For the last 80 years, it really mattered if the USA was your friend.

If you were a US ally, they had your back. In war, in trade, and with substantial influence throughout the planet. It was generally a very lonely place to be if you weren’t on Team USA.

But fortuitously, for most of the last century, it’s been pretty easy to stay on the team.
Either be a liberal democracy, or be useful.

If you were a dictatorship, a theocracy, or looked too much like a socialist… then they could deny you access to the economic infrastructure that they had largely built for the world.

Access to the international banking system, the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organisation, as well as access to technologies provided by US multinationals, has generally been contingent on the USA never perceiving you to be an adversary.

It meant it mattered what the US Government thought of your nation. But perhaps more importantly, it mattered what the voting public in the US thought of your nation. While US power was absolutely utilised for self-serving purposes, the fact it generally needed to appease the threshold of US public opinion meant that foreign policy had a filter of morality that other historic hegemonic powers haven’t.

Most nations of the world thus understood that if they couldn’t be geostrategically important to the Pentagon, they need only be recognised as peaceful and “freedom loving” to the American people to remain on Team America
The equation has now changed.

Trump’s repeated unprovoked use of trade as a weapon against former allies has made the international community increasingly nervous that the power of the US to impose substantial economic pain upon anyone and everyone, makes it a national security risk to everyone. There is no more Team America, there is only Team Trump, and he alone decides who is on his team.

Previously, US sanctions were a threat only to hostile regimes, or regimes the US determined to be illegitimate (again, unless they provided geopolitical value). But Trump has made democracies, once considered firmly within the US camp, wary that they too could fall victim to the capricious and vindictive impulses of a US President who doesn’t believe in alliances.

The BRICS group was formed by nations who sought a means to insulate themselves from the threat of sanctions or economic exclusion by the US. Ironically, their domestic ideological inclinations have never more closely aligned with the White House.

While I don’t expect a line of liberal democracies from the West queuing to sign up to the proudly illiberal BRICS forum, I suspect that economic powers across the European Union and Asia are making preparations already to insulate themselves from a global economic system that operates largely at the discretion of the US.

This is occurring at a time when unpredictable tariffs, ballooning government debt, and political interference with the operation of the Federal Reserve is making the status of the US dollar as the reserve economy alarmingly tenuous.
While this decentralisation of power might have benefits, it shouldn’t be forgotten how often the ability of the US to exert economic pressure has made the use of military power unnecessary. If it loses this weapon that has served it so well, it could make the deployment of its still vastly superior military substantially more likely.

Seems a fair analysis.

July 4, 2025 (Friday)

An American flag in the rigging of “Old Ironsides,” the U.S.S. Constitution.

Let’s take the night off and pick it all back up again tomorrow.

July 5, 2025 (Saturday)

Yesterday afternoon, President Donald J. Trump signed the nearly 1,000-page budget reconciliation bill Republicans passed last week. Trump had demanded Congress pass the measure by July 4, and Republicans rammed it through despite the bill’s deep unpopularity and Congress’s lack of debate on it. When House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) presented Trump with the speaker’s gavel during the signing event, the symbolism of the gift was a little too on the nose.

“Today we are laying a key cornerstone of America’s new golden age,” Speaker Johnson said at the signing. The new law is the capstone to the dramatic changes MAGA Republicans have made to the U.S. government in the last six months.

The measure makes the 2017 Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, which were due to expire at the end of this year, permanent. At the bill’s signing, Trump harked back to the idea Republicans have embraced since 1980, claiming that tax cuts spark economic growth. He said: “After this kicks in, our country is going to be a rocket ship economically.”

In fact, tax cuts since 1981 have not driven growth, and a study by the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model of the University of Pennsylvania projects that the measure will decrease national productivity, known as gross domestic product (GDP), by 0.3% in ten years and drop the average wage by 0.4% in the same time frame.

From 1981 to 2021, tax cuts moved more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1%, and Penn Wharton projects the top 10% of households will receive about 80% of the total value of this law, too. Those in the top 20% of earners can expect to see nearly $13,000 a year from the bill, while those in the bottom 20% of households will lose about $885 in 2030 as the pieces of the law take effect.

Past tax cuts have also driven budget deficits and increases in the national debt, and like them, this law will increase the deficit by about $3.4 trillion over the next ten years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The CBO also projects that interest payments on that debt will cost more than $1 trillion a year.

Sam Goldfarb and Justin Lahart of the Wall Street Journal noted on Thursday that economists, investors and politicians are sounding the alarm that the U.S. is “bingeing on debt” when there is no national emergency like a pandemic or a war to require taking on such debt. The measure will raise the nation’s debt ceiling by $5 trillion.

The Republican reliance on tax cuts to increase economic growth has inspired them to cut public programs since 1981. The Republicans’ new law continues the cuts begun as soon as Trump took office, cutting $890 billion from Medicaid over the next ten years, and about $230 billion out of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that provides food assistance for low-income Americans. It cuts tax credits for wind and solar power while promoting fossil fuels.

At the White House on Friday, Trump said: “I just want you to know, if you see anything negative put out by Democrats, it’s all a con job.” He claimed the new law is the “most popular bill ever signed.”

But it is clear administration officials are well aware that polls showed Americans disapproving of the measure more than approving by the huge gap of around 20 points. They are now trying to sell the law to voters. Notably, the previously nonpartisan Social Security Administration sent an email to Social Security recipients yesterday claiming the bill “eliminates federal income taxes on Social Security benefits for most beneficiaries, providing relief to individuals and couples.” Except the law does not actually eliminate federal income taxes on Social Security benefits. Instead, it gives a temporary tax deduction of up to $6,000 for individuals older than 65 with annual incomes less than $75,000, or $12,000 for married couples with incomes less than $150,000.

What the law does do, though, is pour $170.7 billion into immigration enforcement—more than the military budgets of all but fifteen countries. The law provides $51.6 billion to build a wall on the border, more than three times what Trump spent on the wall in his first term. It provides $45 billion for detention facilities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an increase of 265% in ICE’s annual detention budget. It provides $29.9 billion for ICE enforcement, a threefold increase in ICE’s annual budget.

According to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council, the law gives ICE more funding than the Federal Bureau of Investigations; Drug Enforcement Administration; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; U.S. Marshals Service; and Bureau of Prisons combined. In fact, Reichlin-Melnick told Democracy Now!, the law will make ICE the largest federal law enforcement agency “in the history of the nation.”

And now, with the MAGA Republican political realignment in place, we wait to see whether it delivers the golden age Trump and his MAGA loyalists promise.

The early signs are not auspicious.

Within hours of Trump’s signing the bill into law, Gun Owners of America and a number of other pro-gun organizations filed a lawsuit claiming the measure makes the 1934 National Firearms Act (NFA) unconstitutional. That law regulated machine guns and short-barrel guns by imposing a tax on them and making owners register their weapons. The Supreme Court upheld that law as a tax law. The budget reconciliation bill ended those taxes and thus, the plaintiffs claim, the constitutional justification for the law.

In a press release, Gun Owners of America said its “team in Washington had been working behind the scenes with Congress since the November 2024 election to fully repeal the NFA,” and that the new law had teed up their lawsuit against the registry it called “an unconstitutional relic.”

Scholars of authoritarianism are sounding the alarm over the new law. Timothy Snyder warned that the extensive concentration camps that Trump has called for and the new measure will fund will be tempting sites for slave labor. Undocumented immigrants make up 4% to 5% of the total U.S. workforce. In agriculture, food processing, and construction, they make up between 15% and 20% of the workforce.

Comparing the detention camps to similar programs in other countries, Snyder warns that incarcerated workers will likely be offered to employers on special terms, a concept Trump appears to have embraced with his suggestion that the administration will figure out how to put workers back in the fields and businesses by putting them under the authority of those hiring them. Trump has called the idea “owner responsibility.”

“hey’re going to be largely responsible for these people,” Trump said. This echoes the system legislators set up in the U.S. South during Reconstruction thanks to the fact the Thirteenth Amendment permits enslavement “as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” That system permitted employers to pay the fines of incarcerated individuals and then to own their labor until those debts were paid. While we know that system from the chain gangs of that era, in fact employers in many different sectors used—and abused—such workers.

Today, according to the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute, of the 1.2 million people incarcerated in state and federal prisons, nearly 800,000 are prison laborers, working in the facility itself or in government-run businesses or services like call centers or firefighting. About 3% work for private-sector employers, where they earn very low pay.

Snyder urges Americans to be aware that the law paves the way to establish this system.

Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol identified “massive militarization of ICE” as “the real heart of this law.” She notes that American scholars have thought the federal system in the U.S., in which state and local governments control the police powers, bought the U.S. some protection against a police state.

But, Skocpol says, officials in the Trump administration “have figured out a devilishly clever workaround. Immigration is an area where a U.S. President can exercise virtually unchecked legal coercive power, especially if backed by a Supreme Court majority and corrupted Department of Justice. Now Congress has given ICE unprecedented resources—much of this windfall to be used for graft with private contractors Trump patronizes, but lots of to hire street agents willing to mask themselves and do whatever they are told against residents and fellow American citizens.

are not interested only in rounding up undocumented immigrants,” she wrote to Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. “They will step up using ICE and DOJ enforcements…to harass Democrats citizen critics, and subvert future elections if they can.”

At an event in Des Moines, Iowa, on Thursday, Trump complained that Democrats had not supported the budget reconciliation bill. Less than three weeks after a gunman murdered a Democratic Minnesota lawmaker and her husband, and shot another legislator and his wife, Trump said Democrats had opposed the measure only “because they hate Trump. But I hate them, too. You know that? I really do, I hate them. I cannot stand them, because I really believe they hate our country.”

July 6, 2025 (Sunday)

At least 80 people are dead and more than 40 are still missing in Central Texas after almost a foot (30 centimeters) of rain caused flash floods overnight on Friday. Most of the deaths were in Kerr County, where the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet (8 meters) in 45 minutes, engulfing a Christian girls’ camp.

Even as rescuers search for survivors, the disaster has highlighted the dangers of MAGA governance. The steps that left people in the path of the floods on Friday are unclear, but observers are already pointing to the administration’s cuts to government as well as the lack of systems that could have provided earlier warnings to those in the path of the floods.

Immediately after the catastrophe became apparent, Texas officials began to blame cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS)—part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—for causing inaccurate forecasts. The “Department of Government Efficiency” cut about 600 staffers from the NWS. After the cuts, the understaffed agency warned that “severe shortages” of meteorologists would hurt weather forecasting.

All five living former directors of the NWS warned in May that the cuts “ the nation’s official weather forecasting entity at a significant deficit…just as we head into the busiest time for severe storm predictions like tornadoes and hurricanes…. Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.”

But former NWS officials maintain the forecasts were as accurate as possible and noted the storm escalated abruptly. They told Christopher Flavelle of the New York Times that the problem appeared to be that NWS had lost the staffers who would typically communicate with local authorities to spread the word of dangerous conditions. Molly Taft at Wired confirmed that NWS published flash flood warnings but safety officials didn’t send out public warnings until hours later.

Meanwhile, Kerr County’s most senior elected official, Judge Rob Kelly, focused on local officials, telling Flavelle that the county did not have a warning system because such systems are expensive and “axpayers won’t pay for it.”

Officials will continue to examine the crisis in Texas but, coming as it did after so many deep cuts to government, it has opened up questions about the public cost of those cuts. Project 2025 called for breaking up and downsizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, claiming its six main offices—including the National Weather Service—“form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,” by which it meant the fossil fuel industry.

CNN’s Andrew Freedman, Emma Tucker, and Mary Gilbert note that several NWS offices across the country are so understaffed they can no longer operate around the clock, and many are no longer able to launch the weather balloons that provide critical data. The journalists also note that the Trump administration’s 2026 budget calls for eliminating “all of NOAA’s weather and climate research labs along with institutes jointly run with universities around the country.”

Brad Plummer of the New York Times noted that the budget reconciliation bill passed by Republicans last week and signed into law on Friday boosts fossil fuels and destroys government efforts to address climate change, even as scientists warn of the acute dangers we face from extreme heat, wildfires, storms, and floods like those in Texas. Scott Dance of the Washington Post added yesterday that the administration has slashed grants for studying climate change and has limited or even ended access to information about climate science, taking down websites and burying reports.

When a reporter asked Trump, “Are you investigating whether some of the cuts to the federal government left key vacancies at the national weather service or the emergency coordination?” he responded: “They didn’t. I’ll tell you, if you look at that water situation that all is and that was really the Biden setup. That was not our setup. But I wouldn’t blame Biden for it either. I would just say this is a 100-year catastrophe and it’s just so horrible to watch.”

The tragedy in Texas is the most visible illustration of the MAGA attempt to destroy the modern U.S. government, but it is not the only one.

On July 2, Gabe Cohen of CNN reported that state and local officials are meeting a “wall of silence” from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Cohen reported that FEMA leaders have ordered FEMA personnel to stop communicating with the Office of Management and Budget, the National Security Council, members of Congress, and state and local partners, leaving those communications up to the political appointees running the agency.

FEMA is housed in the Department of Homeland Security, whose secretary, Kristi Noem, is tightening her control over the agency and recently called for the firing of employees “who don’t like us.”

On June 30, the medical journal The Lancet published an analysis of the impact of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and consequences of its dismantling. The study concluded that from 2001 through 2021, programs funded by USAID prevented nearly 92 million deaths in 133 countries. It estimates that the cuts the Trump administration has made to USAID will result in more than 14 million deaths in the next five years. About 4.5 million will be children under 5.

On June 30, Dr. Steven H. Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University warned in the New York Times that a health catastrophe is brewing in the U.S. as well, as “he administration has upended the operation of almost every agency that deals with our health and medical care, leaving behind fewer staff members and programs to address critical needs, and changing policies in ways that could endanger us all.” Woolf lists cuts of 39% to the institute that researches heart disease, chronic lower respiratory diseases, and diabetes; 37% to the institute that researches cancer; 40% to the institute that researches stroke, 40% to the institute that researches Alzheimer’s; 38% to the institute that researches drug overdoses and suicide; and 36% to the institute that researches covid, flu, and pneumonia.

Those cuts, along with the deregulation of industries that pollute our environment and the destruction of programs and agencies that address mental illness, suicide, chronic diseases, poisoning, car accidents, and drowning, Woolf writes, are putting Americans at risk. In May, Laura Ungar and Michelle R. Smith of the Associated Press noted the elimination of 20,000 jobs at national health agencies as well as cuts of $11 billion in covid-era funding to state and local health departments that inspect restaurants, monitor wastewater, and so on.

In a New York Times op-ed on July 4, Dr. Perri Klass added that changes to the childhood vaccine schedule under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threaten to bring back diseases that routine immunizations had all but eliminated in the U.S.

Yesterday, Deidre McPhillips of CNN reported that measles cases in the U.S. have surged to a record high since the country declared the disease eradicated twenty-five years ago. There have been at least 1,277 confirmed cases of measles in the U.S. this year, passing the previous record of 1,274 set in 2019 and likely a “severe undercount.”

On July 2, Nahal Toosi of Politico reported that cuts to the National Security Council (NSC) have created a “dysfunctional” policymaking process. The NSC is supposed to coordinate policymaking across the different parts of the government. But Toosi reported that when the Pentagon recently announced it was reviewing whether the AUKUS security pact between the U.S., Australia, and the United Kingdom advances Trump’s “America First” agenda, the announcement came from Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby without input from other key U.S. officials, who were blindsided by the move.

The acting national security advisor, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has downsized the NSC and held so few meetings that career staffers are kept in the dark and others are jockeying for power. One person told Toosi, “It’s Game of Thrones politics over there.” Under Trump, the NSC has gone from being a body that can give the president advice to one designed simply to advance the president’s agenda.

And that is the point of the dismantling of modern government systems under Trump: to give him and his loyalists the power to control the country. On July 3, Charlie Savage of the New York Times reported on letters Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote to companies like Google and Apple, claiming Trump has the constitutional power not just to ignore laws himself, but to authorize others to ignore them too.

Last year, Congress passed a law banning TikTok in the U.S. unless its China-based parent company, ByteDance, sold its stake in the platform to a non-Chinese company within nine months, or twelve if a sale was in progress. The Supreme Court upheld the law unanimously and TikTok disappeared from U.S. app stores.

But when he took office, Trump told the Department of Justice not to enforce the law for 75 days while his administration reviewed it. He also told Bondi to tell companies they can continue to carry the TikTok app “without incurring any legal liability,” no matter what the law says.

The letters she wrote, newly available through Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, suggest Trump can ignore the law because of his “unique constitutional responsibility for the national security of the United States, the conduct of foreign policy, and other vital executive functions.”

The law banning TikTok— that Congress passed, President Joe Biden signed, and the Supreme Court upheld 9–0— had to give way, she wrote, to Trump’s “core presidential national security and foreign affairs powers.”

July 7, 2025 (Monday)

At about 10:30 this morning local time, heavily armed masked agents in trucks, armored vehicles, a helicopter, on foot, and on horseback, accompanied by a gun mounted on a truck raided the MacArthur Park area of Los Angeles. Journalist Mel Buer reported that agents from Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), the National Guard, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brought what she called a “massive federal presence.”

Fox News Channel personnel were embedded with the raiders and broadcast throughout the operation, suggesting that it was designed for the media as a show of force to intimidate opponents. CBP brought its own press team, and its people were also taking photos of bystanders. After Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass arrived and spoke with Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino, the agents left. It is not clear that there was a specific target for the raid, or that anyone was arrested.

Later, Bovino told Bill Melugin of the Fox News Channel, “I don’t work for Karen Bass. Better get used to us now, cause this is going to be normal very soon. We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.”

Immigrants rights groups sued Bovino last week to block what they call an “ongoing pattern and practice of flouting the Constitution and federal law” during immigration raids.

Steve Beynon of Military dot com reports that about 70 National Guard troops have been deployed to the new detention facility in the Florida Everglades as the administration “leans harder on the military to enforce its nationwide immigration crackdown.” Unlike the National Guard troops Trump federalized in Los Angeles, these troops are operating as state troops under Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Another 8,500 active-duty and National Guard troops are stationed along the border between the U.S. and Mexico.

The Trump administration is also sending 200 Marines to Florida to aid ICE, part of a push to increase deportations by using active-duty troops.

The U.S. Marine Corps has launched a pilot program to station ICE agents at Camp Pendleton in California, Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, and Marine Corps Base Hawaii. Sarah Rumpf-Whitten of Fox News writes that the plan is to strengthen security at those bases, although University of Tampa defense professor Abby Hall Blanco pointed out: “It gives kind of an odd impression that the Marine Corps is not handling its own security sufficiently. Having known quite a few Marines in my time, I can’t imagine that they would find that to be a particularly flattering interpretation.”

As Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol pointed out in Talking Points Memo, it appears that officials in the Trump administration are using immigration as a way to establish a police state. Indeed, they are using the concept that presidents have control of foreign affairs as a way to work around the laws in place to prevent a dictatorship.

In its 2024 Donald J. Trump v. United States decision, the Supreme Court majority held that a former president has “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority,” as well as “presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.” In April 2025 the court specified that it considered foreign affairs to fall within a president’s constitutional authority, writing in Noem v. Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia that the executive branch was owed “deference…in the conduct of foreign affairs.”

Although the Framers of the Constitution put the power to make laws in the hands of Congress, they divided power in foreign affairs between Congress and the president. Almost immediately, presidents began to assert their authority over foreign affairs, noting that the Constitution gave them power to appoint ambassadors and negotiate treaties and pointing to the president’s role as commander-in-chief of the Army. The branches have tussled over this power ever since, but as James Goldgeiger and Elizabeth N. Saunders wrote in Foreign Affairs, presidential power over foreign affairs has grown dramatically since 2000.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, members of Congress were unwilling to appear soft on terror and so allowed President George W. Bush great leeway in the nation’s “war on terror,” even after it became clear that Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 was failing. In Foreign Affairs last month, Saunders wrote that a lack of accountability for either the failures of the Iraq War or the 2008 international financial crisis fed the idea that the president could make sweeping decisions about both foreign intervention and the international economy without check by Congress.

On February 12, 2025, the Trump administration made clear that its members intended to expand Trump’s power by pushing the boundaries of what foreign affairs entails. In an executive order, Trump claimed the Constitution “vests the power to conduct foreign policy in the President of the United States.”

Trump’s actual work in foreign affairs has been different from what he promised during his presidential campaign. His vow that he could end Russia’s war against Ukraine with one phone call has resulted only in Russian president Vladimir Putin’s accelerating his attacks on Ukraine.

As foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum wrote on July 4 in The Atlantic, it is clear that Putin believes he can conquer all of Ukraine because Trump is abandoning the longstanding U.S. bipartisan support for Ukraine and pivoting the U.S. to back Russia.

Last week the administration said it would not send Ukraine a large shipment of weapons already funded under President Joe Biden. It claimed that U.S. stockpiles of weapons are insufficient, a claim former Biden officials and independent analysts contradict. Applebaum notes that Russia has interpreted the change as a sign that the U.S. is ending its support for Ukraine.

The U.S. is also essentially lifting the economic sanctions that have hamstrung Russia’s economy. By not adjusting sanctions to combat developing Russian workarounds, the administration is allowing Russia to rebuild its economy. In addition, the Trump administration has stopped countering Russian disinformation around the world, while Trump appointees, including Trump’s main negotiator with Russia, Steve Witkoff, regularly parrot Russian propaganda.

Trump’s launching of strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapon production sites without input from Congress earned pushback from congress members who noted that the president’s authority to launch emergency operations depends on an actual emergency. Trump’s own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told Congress in March that the Intelligence Community assessed Iran was not, in fact, building a nuclear weapon.

Then Trump’s claim he had “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program turned out to be exaggerated, although as journalists questioned his statement, the administration doubled down on it. Today, Barak Ravid of Axios reported that Israeli officials believe Trump will green-light further Israeli attacks on Iran. Trump has said twice since the U.S. strikes that the U.S. could attack Iran again if Iran renews its nuclear program.

But the claim to domestic power based in the president’s alleged right to control over foreign affairs has fueled much of the administration’s domestic agenda. The administration claimed the power to render undocumented Venezuelans to the notorious terrorist CECOT prison in El Salvador by arguing that the Venezuelan government was sending members of the Tren de Aragua gang to invade the U.S. After wrongfully delivering Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador in violation of a court order, the administration claimed courts could not order him returned to the U.S. because that order would interfere with Trump’s ability to conduct foreign affairs.

Documents filed in court today said Salvadoran officials told the United Nations that the U.S. retained jurisdiction over the migrants it sent to El Salvador, undermining the administration’s insistence that it has no control over migrants once they are out of U.S. territory. El Salvador simply had an agreement with the U.S. to use the Salvadoran prison system to detain U.S. prisoners, they said. “In this context, the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively with the competent foreign authorities, by virtue of international agreements signed and in accordance with the principles of sovereignty and international cooperation in criminal matters.”

In a lawsuit against the administration, Abrego Garcia says he was tortured in El Salvador, severely beaten, deprived of sleep, inadequately fed, denied bathroom facilities, and tortured psychologically. He says he lost 31 pounds in two weeks.

Today the administration ended temporary protection from deportation for about 72,000 migrants from Honduras and another 4,000 from Nicaragua. The decision strips them of their legal status and echoes similar decisions made about migrants from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Haiti, Nepal, and Venezuela. A federal court has blocked the early termination of protected status for Haitians.

July 8, 2025 (Tuesday)

One hundred and eleven people are dead and more than 160 are still missing in Texas after Friday’s tragic flood.
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“‘Who’s to blame?’” Texas governor Greg Abbott repeated back to a reporter. “That’s the word choice of losers.” “Every football team makes mistakes,” he continued, referring to Texas’s popular sport. “The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who’s to blame. The championship teams are the ones that say, ‘Don’t worry about it, ma’am, we’ve got this.’”

Abbott’s defensive answer reveals the dilemma MAGA Republicans find themselves in after the cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service that came before the Texas disaster. Scott Calvert, John West, Jim Carlton, and Joe Barrett of the Wall Street Journal reported that after a deadly flood in 1987, officials in Kerr County applied for a grant to install a flood warning system, but their application was denied. They considered installing one paid for by the county but decided against it. Then county commissioner Tom Moser told the reporters: “It was probably just, I hate to say the word, priorities. Trying not to raise taxes.”

Since 1980, Republican politicians have won voters by promising to cut taxes they claimed funded wasteful programs for women and racial and ethnic minorities. Cutting government programs would save money, they said, enabling hardworking Americans to keep more of their hard-earned money. But leaders recognized that Republican voters actually depended on government programs, so they continued to fund them even as they passed tax cuts that moved more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

Now, in Trump’s second term, MAGA Republicans are turning Republican rhetoric into reality, forcing Americans to grapple with what those cuts really mean for their lives.

Today the Supreme Court cleared the way for the administration to fire large numbers of employees at 19 different federal agencies and to reorganize them while litigation against those firings moves forward, although it required the administration to act in ways “consistent with applicable law.” A lower court had blocked the firings during litigation. Ann E. Marimow of the Washington Post notes that this court has repeatedly sided with President Donald Trump as he slashes the federal government. The court said it is not expressing a view on the legality of the cuts at this time.
The administration’s cuts were in the news today as Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket reported that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has just 86 people deployed in Texas today although Trump declared a disaster on Sunday. At a press opportunity at a cabinet meeting today, Trump said it wasn’t the right time to talk about his plans to phase out FEMA.

The administration is getting pushback in a number of other places as well, including from medical organizations. Yesterday the American Academy of Pediatricians, the American College of Physicians, and four other groups sued the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the changes Kennedy has made to the vaccine advisory panel, to the availability of covid vaccines, and to vaccine recommendations. The lawsuit calls those changes “unlawful” and “unilateral” and says they violate the Administrative Procedure Act.

Just who is in charge of the administration remains unclear. In the New York Times yesterday, Jason Zengerle pointed to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller as the “final word” on White House policy. Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem defers to him. Attorney General Pam Bondi “is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice” to him. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles is concentrating on “producing a reality TV show every day,” a Trump advisor told Zengerle.
So Miller, with his knack for flattering his boss, wields power.

Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth did not inform the White House before he stopped the shipment of weapons to Ukraine last week. Natasha Bertrand and Zachary Cohen of CNN reported today that Hegseth’s lack of a chief of staff or trusted advisors means he has no one to urge him to coordinate with other government partners. Trump has ordered Hegseth to restart some of the shipments. When a reporter asked the president today who had authorized the pause, Trump answered: “I don’t know, why don’t you tell me?”
At today’s press opportunity, Trump was erratic, at one point veering off into a discussion of whether he should put gold leaf on the moldings in the room’s corners.

The administration has so few successes to celebrate that, as Jarrett Renshaw of Reuters reported today, it is claiming credit for investments that were actually made under former president Joe Biden. A government website touting the “Trump effect” claims more than $2.6 trillion in U.S. investments, but Renshaw found that more than $1.3 trillion of those investments originated under Biden or were routine spending. One company has warned that its pledge of investments worth $50 billion is threatened by Trump’s policies.

When asked why the administration had taken credit for projects that happened under Biden, White House officials said “the final investment decisions were announced under watch and prove his economic policies are triggering U.S. investment.” Renshaw noted that “t was not clear in many cases what role, if any, Trump or his policies played in getting the deals across the line.”

Instead of embracing proven economic policies, the administration appears to be turning to ideologically based ideas that seem far fetched. Today, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins rejected the idea that the government would find a way to protect undocumented agricultural workers. “There will be no amnesty,” she said. “The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way. And we move the workforce towards automation and 100% American participation, which again with 34 million people, able-bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do that fairly quickly.”

The administration is now facing a rebellion from MAGA supporters who expected that, once in power, a Trump administration would release information about those men implicated in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal as people for whom Epstein provided underage girls. MAGA loyalists maintained the “deep state” was hiding the list to protect unnamed Democratic politicians, and MAGA leaders fed the conspiracy theory to stoke anger at the Democrats.
Once in power, though, Trump officials have failed to produce a list of Epstein’s clients. MAGA loyalists have now turned their anger on those officials, especially Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said in February that the Epstein list “is sitting on my desk right now” and who now maintains that no such list exists.

Perhaps to distract their supporters from the issue, the Fox News Channel today announced that the FBI is launching criminal investigations of former Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan and former FBI director James Comey over their investigation of ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives.
The Fox News Channel also announced that the White House has waived executive privilege for former president Biden’s White House physician Kevin O’Connor, who had asked to postpone his testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee about former president Biden’s mental acuity and use of an autopen. On Saturday, O’Connor’s lawyer wrote to committee chair James Comer (R-KY) asking for the postponement, noting: “We are unaware of any prior occasion on which a Congressional Committee has subpoenaed a physician to testify about the treatment of an individual patient. And the notion that a Congressional Committee would do so without any regard whatsoever for the confidentiality of the physician-patient relationship is alarming.”

As its popularity sinks, the administration appears to be turning to extraordinary measures to enforce its will. Ellen Nakashima, Warren P. Strobel, and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post reported today that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has tried to get access to emails and chats of people working in the Intelligence Community in order to root out those perceived as insufficiently loyal to Trump.

Gabbard’s press secretary claimed the effort was designed to “end the politicization and weaponization of intelligence against Americans,” but Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told the reporters that Trump’s loyalists “zeal to root out ‘politicization” “often seems to be shorthand for anything less than unconditional support for the president.” He noted their effort risks “creating an echo chamber within the intelligence community or creating counterintelligence risks.”

The Internal Revenue Service today changed longstanding policy to say that churches can now endorse political candidates without losing their tax-exempt status. According to Gary Grumbach and Dareh Gregorian of NBC News, the rule prohibiting churches from endorsing candidates is rarely enforced, and Trump, whose strongest supporters are white evangelical Protestants, has called for an end to it.

A judge will have to agree to the change.

The administration’s show of force in Los Angeles yesterday, when immigration officers and about 90 National Guard members descended on MacArthur Park with 17 Humvees and four tactical vehicles in what looked like a military operation, appears to have been designed to intimidate immigrants and Trump’s opponents.

And today, Trump suggested he could take over New York City if voters elect Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. He then suggested the administration could take over Washington, D.C., as well. “We could run D.C. I mean we’re, we’re looking at D.C. We don’t want crime in D.C. We want the city to run well,” he told reporters. “We would run it so good, it would be run so proper, we’d get the best person to run it…. We want a capital that’s run flawlessly, and it wouldn’t be hard for us to do it.”

Carrick Ryan

Has Trump, finally, crossed a red line that MAGA can’t ignore?

To figure this out, it’s worth unpacking why Epstein is so politically consequential to MAGA, and how a concerted disinformation campaign designed to help Trump may end up being his downfall.

To start with, we need to understand how the MAGA information space relies on simple messages designed to appeal to emotions more than critical thought. One of the tenets of this was its inflated preoccupation with the issue of child sex trafficking.

When I say “inflated preoccupation”, I don’t mean to downplay how horrific a crime it is, but as someone who investigated child sexual exploitation rings as a job… I can say that it’s just nowhere near as prolific as many on the political right seemed to be convinced it is.

But paedophilia is so unequivocally immoral, and is an act entirely irredeemable by context, nuance, or any conceivable justification, that it provokes a visceral emotional reaction from any reasonable person. It breeds contempt from the pit of our stomachs, and pushes peaceful people to thoughts of violence – so it’s a perfect weapon to use against your political adversaries, especially if obedience to the truth isn’t a priority.

Right-wing social media influencers have, for decades now, promoted an array of conspiracy theories that all included themes of systematic child abuse and sex-trafficking.

Pizzagate, QAnon, and a host of other MAGA-aligned conspiracy theories all rested upon the premise of cult-like paedophilia networks being operated by powerful liberal elites. Every left-leaning politician, actor, or international organisation could be immediately besmirched with an implication in this mythical paedophilia network.

It’s difficult to overstate the emotional response every single one of us would have if we actually believed that there was a cabal of wealthy and powerful people running a child sexual slavery network. Thanks to a well-orchestrated and strategically relentless disinformation campaign spanning over a decade… millions of Americans do.

It was a perfect narrative in its moral simplicity; the Democrats were paedophiles, and in that reality, anything Trump does to stop them isn’t just permissible, it’s necessary.

When asked about QAnon, Trump played into the conspiracy, saying only: “…I do know they are very much against paedophilia, and I agree with that.”

From this, a broader theme emerged, even beyond a literal acceptance of the QAnon lore. Soon almost every culture war issue, from LGBTQI rights to Islamic immigration, was viewed through a child abuse nexus.
A movie about child sex smuggling, “The Sound of Freedom”, became hugely influential in MAGA circles, promoting this notion of a cover-up of systemic child abuse by shadowy leftist elites, while MAGA mouthpieces like Marjorie Taylor Greene called Democrats “the party of paedophiles”. Fox News referred to President Biden as the “Groomer in Chief”.

The Jeffrey Epstein case, therefore, became the perfect piece of evidence to confirm this growing sense within MAGA of systemic child sex trafficking that was being covered up by the political establishment.

A billionaire from New York, who was associated with everyone from the Clintons to Bill Gates, being charged with child sex trafficking… he even had a secret island like a cartoon villain.

…and then like a Hollywood script, Epstein dies under suspicious circumstances. Seemingly confirming, yet again, the complicity of all powerful elites, potentially murdering Epstein to cover up their crimes.

As a result, the mythical Epstein “client list” became a rallying point through which MAGA became convinced that these elites would finally be exposed. This was the smoking gun to prove the moral depravity of liberals and moral righteousness of MAGA… and Trump was the anti-establishment force that could finally provide it.

In the lead-up to the 2024 election, Trump promised to release the list, JD Vance made multiple statements declaring the public’s right to see it, and the incoming FBI Director, Kash Patel, stated that he had the list under his control. Trump’s Attorney-General Pam Bondi then teased the MAGA faithful, assuring them the list was on her desk, about to be released…

This was the culmination of decades of intense information warfare, inducing an obsession from right-wing media, convinced this list would confirm the perverted truth about their political adversaries. The anticipation has been palpable.

Then, in June last year, when a Fox News host asked Trump to confirm that he would release the list, he suddenly began to awkwardly walk back his election promise, saying:

“I guess I would. I think that less so, because you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that world.”

Despite this, MAGA remained convinced that Trump would deliver on his promise, and early indications were that it was coming…

Until this week, when Bondi announced that there is no list… and Epstein killed himself… and Trump is suddenly, and quite remarkably, asking why people are still talking about him.

Many of us have always suspected Trump’s name would feature in any evidence linked to Epstein’s conduct. He’s been photographed with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell more than possibly any other celebrity. Epstein is even on tape saying Trump was his “closest friend”.

It was also noted that in his first term, Trump appointed a little-known US Attorney, Alex Acosta, to be his Secretary of Labor. It turned out, Acosta just happened to be the same US Attorney that negotiated Epstein’s initial plea deal in 2007, which granted Epstein immunity from federal prosecution, along with any “unnamed co-conspirators”.
It always seemed likely to the rest of us that a man caught on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women could be implicated in Epstein’s sexual exploitation of young girls. But for his base, circumstantial evidence is easier to dismiss.

Which raises the question: what is Trump so afraid of that has caused him to backflip on this issue so publicly?
Having spent years riling up the angry mob waiting for this great reveal, Trump is asking his supporters to simply move on, and not ask any more questions?

It is unlikely this evidence is proof of criminality against Trump, but after MAGA’s social media influencers have committed so much time to frame this list as evidence of complicity in Epstein’s heinous crimes, it’s going to be very difficult for this genie to be placed back in the bottle.

The story of Trump is one of defiance against moments that would have ended the careers of any other politician, so I am not going to pretend that this is a turning point, or that his base is suddenly going to turn on him. Already the talking heads are shifting the blame to deep state operatives, and Pam Bondi seems to be taking the fall.

But because of the subject of this implication, and because of the history associated with Epstein, and the years spent framing the moral narrative around this list… this will truly be his greatest escape if he pulls it off.

How much can he control the news cycle? and how easily can his base be pre-programmed to suddenly not care about something that has been a feature of their moral grievance for years?

This will be fascinating to watch.

It’s a background rather than a news piece today.

July 9, 2025 (Wednesday)

On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation without systematic Black enslavement.

In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited slavery on the basis of race, but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which Black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after actor John Wilkes Booth murdered President Abraham Lincoln, white southern Democrats had done their best to push their Black neighbors back into subservience. So long as southern states had abolished enslavement, repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy and made war on the United States.

Northern Republican lawmakers refused. There was no way they were going to rebuild southern society on the same blueprint as existed before the Civil War, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it. Having just fought a war to destroy the South’s ideology, they were not going to let it regrow in peacetime.

Congress rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction.

But then congressmen had to come up with their own. After months of hearings and debate, they proposed amending the Constitution to settle the outstanding questions of the war. Chief among these was how to protect the rights of Black Americans in states where they could neither vote nor testify in court or sit on a jury to protect their own interests.
Congress’s solution was the Fourteenth Amendment.

It took on the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision declaring that Black men “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens.”

The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The amendment also addressed the Dred Scott decision in another profound way. In 1857, southerners and Democrats who were adamantly opposed to federal power controlled the Supreme Court. They backed states’ rights. So the Dred Scott decision did more than read Black Americans out of our history: it dramatically circumscribed Congress’s power.
The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857 this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm.

And so the Fourteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures had passed discriminatory laws. “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it said. And then it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down the Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South.

Those same principles took on profound national significance in the post–World War II era, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment aggressively to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states. The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.

Opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. They began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level. Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court.
Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”

Kennedy’s comments foreshadowed the world advanced by today’s MAGA Republicans. In 2022 the Supreme Court, stacked as it is with right-wing justices, overturned the federal protection of abortion rights provided in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and sent the question of abortion back to the states, many of which promptly banned the procedure.
When the court overturned the federal protection of abortion rights, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that federal protections for access to birth control and same-sex marriage should also be reexamined. In 2024, President Donald Trump suggested he would be open to letting states decide whether to restrict access to birth control, walking his statement back after a ferocious backlash.

Justice Samuel Alito has joined Thomas in attacking the Obergefell v. Hodges decision that provides federal protection for same-sex marriage, claiming that right, too, ought to be left up to voters in the states, even as Republican-dominated states are passing laws to limit who can vote.

Not only have today’s Republicans launched an attack on the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement that the federal government protect Americans against discrimination in the states, President Donald Trump has launched an assault on the birthright citizenship that is the centerpiece of the amendment.

That section of the amendment— the first section— acknowledges that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens,” who enjoy the same rights, and that no state can take those rights away without due process of law.

July 10, 2025 (Thursday)

Just a week ago, Republicans in the House of Representatives passed the nearly 1,000-page budget reconciliation bill President Donald Trump demanded, and at the signing ceremony for the bill the next day, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced Republicans were “laying a key cornerstone of America’s new golden age.”

But the past week has shown a nation—and an administration—in turmoil.

On July 4, the day Trump signed the bill, flash floods devastated central Texas, leaving more than 100 people dead and about 160 still missing. Local officials immediately blamed cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS) for the disaster, but reviews showed that NWS meteorologists had predicted the storm accurately and had sent out three increasingly urgent warnings at 1:14 a.m., 4:03 a.m., and 6:06 a.m.

But four hours passed before the police department in the City of Kerrville issued a warning. It wasn’t until 7:32 that the city urged people along the Guadalupe River to move to higher ground immediately. The missing link between the NWS and public safety personnel appears to have been the weather service employee in charge of coordinating between them. He took an unplanned early retirement under pressure from the “Department of Government Efficiency” and has not been replaced.

Then, as Gabe Cohen and Michael Williams of CNN reported, search and rescue teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could not respond to the disaster because Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose department is in charge of FEMA, had recently tried to cut spending by requiring her personal sign-off on any expenditure over $100,000. That order meant FEMA couldn’t put crews in place ahead of the storm, or respond immediately. Noem didn’t sign off on the deployment of FEMA teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding started.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, told Cohen and Williams that Noem did not authorize FEMA deployment because DHS used other search and rescue teams. “FEMA is shifting from bloated, DC-centric dead weight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens,” McLaughlin told CNN in a statement. “The old processes are being replaced because they failed Americans in real emergencies for decades.”

“DHS is rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and is reprioritizing appropriated dollars. Secretary Noem is delivering accountability to the U.S. taxpayer, which Washington bureaucrats have ignored for decades at the expense of American citizens,” McLaughlin said. Noem has called for the elimination of FEMA.

Meanwhile, FEMA’s acting director, David Richardson, has been nowhere to be found, making no public appearances, statements, or postings on social media since the disaster, and not visiting the site. Former FEMA officials told Thomas Frank of Politico that Richardson’s absence suggests Noem is controlling the FEMA response. Trump appointed Richardson after his team fired his first appointee, Cameron Hamilton, for telling Congress he did not think FEMA should be scrapped.

The day after he took office in May, Richardson, who has no experience with emergency management, told staff: “Don’t get in my way…because I will run right over you. I will achieve the president’s intent…. I, and I alone in FEMA, speak for FEMA,” he said.

Even as rescuers were still at work today in Texas, DHS cancelled a $3 million grant that had been awarded in New York to make sure the NWS can communicate effectively with local officials.

Tariffs are back in the news as Trump’s postponement for his high tariff has ended. They are as chaotic and as problematic as ever.

On April 2, Trump announced tariffs on countries around the world. He said that, beginning on April 9, he would impose a baseline tariff of 10%—a significant increase from the 2.5% rate then in effect—and additional tariffs of up to 50% on countries using a bizarre formula apparently cooked up by his trade advisor, Peter Navarro.

Immediately the stock market lost more than $5 trillion. So rather than let the tariffs go into effect on April 9, Trump pushed the start of the tariffs off until Wednesday, July 9 (yesterday), vowing to negotiate trade deals with individual countries rapidly: 90 deals in 90 days, Navarro said. But only two deals have been forthcoming—one with the United Kingdom and one with Vietnam—meaning that on July 9 the high tariffs of April 2 would take effect.

Then, on Tuesday, Trump announced on social media the real date for the start of the tariffs would be August 1. Somewhat bizarrely, he told reporters he had not changed the date the tariffs would go into effect, although on Monday he signed an executive order changing the date of the start of the levies from July 9 to August 1.

Throughout the week, Trump has been sending letters to world leaders informing them that he intended to impose high tariffs on their countries unless they negotiated with him. At a press opportunity at a cabinet meeting, as Danielle Kurtzleben of NPR noted, he tried to rebrand his letters as deals. “A letter means a deal,” he told reporters. “We can’t meet with 200 countries. We have a few trusted people that know what they’re doing, that are doing a good job, but you can’t do it. You have to do it in a more general way. But it’s a very good way. It’s a better way. It’s a more powerful way.”

On Tuesday, Trump also announced a 50% tariff on copper. Copper is vital to the defense industry, batteries, electric wires, plumbing, and so on, and the U.S. imports more than half of what it uses. Trump claims to want to see the U.S. produce the copper it needs, but getting the industry to that point will take years. He also announced a 35% tariff on goods from Canada.

Paul Wiseman of the Associated Press notes that the 10% tariffs are apparently here to stay because the administration needs that money to cover some of the hole the new tax cuts from the budget reconciliation bill will blast in the deficit.

While Trump continues to insist—incorrectly—that foreign countries pay tariffs, his former vice president Mike Pence reiterated the truth today. On Bloomberg “Surveillance,” he said of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s boast that tariffs will bring in $300 billion this year: “Well, tariffs are a tax, and American importers and businesses and, ultimately, consumers pay almost all of that. And so literally a week after we managed to extend the Trump-Pence tax cuts and prevent a $2,000 tax increase on working families, the administration is right now boasting of the fact that the average American household is going to see about $3,000 increase in the cost of goods.”

Last month, Trump nominated Department of Justice prosecutor Emil Bove to be a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, covering Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and the Virgin Islands. Bove is a Trump loyalist who defended Trump in his criminal indictments and participated in firing officials who investigated Trump and the January 6 rioters. He was also a central player in the dropping of corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams and the rendition of Venezuelan migrants to the CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador.

On June 24, Erez Reuveni, a former Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyer, filed an official whistleblower complaint about abuses in the department. Reuveni was fired after telling a court that the administration had made an error when it rendered Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia to CECOT despite a court order not to do so. In the whistleblower complaint, Reuveni alleged that the leaders at the Department of Justice and the White House had deliberately defied court orders and “engaged in unlawful activity, abused their authority, created substantial and specific threat to health and safety.”

Reuveni alleged that Bove insisted the planes carrying the men to El Salvador must take off and that he said DOJ “would need to consider telling the courts ‘f*ck you’ and ignore any such court order.” Reuveni then laid out the events of the March days in which the men were deported, along with the determination of the Department of Justice to violate the orders of the court.

Bove told the Senate Judiciary Committee last month he had “no recollection” of saying “f*ck you” to the court and said he had never advised the Department of Justice to violate a court order. Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on social media that Reuveni was a “leaker asserting false claims.”

Today, Senate Democrats released a trove of documents Reuveni had provided the committee, backing up his complaint. Texts and emails confirm that Department of Justice lawyers misled Judge James Boasberg, one telling him that he did not know when the Trump administration intended to deport the men when, as one of Reuveni’s colleagues said, “I can’t believe he said he doesn’t know. He knows there are plans for AEA removals within the next 24 hours.”

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement Thursday that Bove “belongs nowhere near the federal bench.” “This is about more than a random f-bomb,” he said. “This is a declaration of defiance of our courts at the highest level of our government by a man who now seeks a lifetime appointment to one of the highest courts in our land.”

Today a federal judge appointed by Republican George W. Bush granted class action status to a lawsuit challenging Trump’s executive order attacking birthright citizenship. With that status in place, U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante barred the administration from denying citizenship to U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. Judge Laplante paused his ruling for a week to give the administration time to appeal.

Trump himself lost his appeal of a New York jury’s verdict that he must pay writer E. Jean Carroll $5 million for sexually abusing and defaming her. Trump now has 90 days to appeal to the Supreme Court to take the case.

Tonight the White House posted on X an image of “SUPERMAN TRUMP”—a much younger Trump dressed as the famous superhero, fists clenched, against a gauzy background—with the caption “TRUTH. JUSTICE. THE AMERICAN WAY.”