COURTS 4
estb 10 24
TARGET BC GOP RECKLESS / LAWLESS, SO CONSTANTLY SWATTED DOWN?
see disbar fail // moderation correction eastman, kraken
SEE DOJ3 FAILS ~ REGULARITY 23 TO ZERO WINS?
SEE DEFAM MADDOW NUNES 1ST amend sullivan
SEE HOPE WIN 2
SEE STATE SCOTUS
SEE CIRCUIT DISTRICT APPELL
~TRUMP DOGE COUP --> TARGET
SEE RULE OF LAW CONCEPT
SEE TRUMP SUE LAWSUITS
LAWFARE WEAPONZ BS
SEE TRUMP JUDGE
SEE VOTER SUPPRESS
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HYPE HOPE msnbc atty? judges are rebuking BS trump atTempts, they don’t like to get hit repeatedly to act on emergency basis, if oder to destroy data dogebags have is ignored, contempt can be substantial , but...
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AN 10 26
Trump faces legal blow as BBC asks judge to crash his delay tactics
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an 8 26
Trump throws tantrum after rebuke of his National Guard deployments
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an 8 26
Judge hands Trump 23rd straight loss as she rips apart 'fishing expedition'
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AN 7 26
Judge drops hammer on Trump admin: ‘You’re violating my order!’
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President Donald Trump has lost again at another appeals court over the mass detention policy he's pushed out over the past year.
MS NOW producer Kyle Cheney reported that the 9th Circuit rejected U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) detention policy. It's the fifth straight loss at an appellate court. Cheney remarked that the district is the crucial one that covers California, Arizona, Nevada and Washington.
Politico reported Thursday that the decision is "the most significant rejection yet." Lower courts will now be bound by the ruling in states where there are thousands of detainees.
The ruling came down 2-1, and the court decided that he misconstrued immigration laws from decades ago that set the rules for the modern deportation system.
“The government’s change in policy has resulted in detained aliens filing thousands of habeas petitions in federal courts across the country, seeking bond hearings and possible release from detention,” wrote Trump appointee Judge Daniel Bress in the majority decision. “The implication of the government’s position is that Congress in 1996 made a major change to the immigration laws by subjecting millions of unadmitted aliens present in the United States to mandatory detention, but that this change then went unnoticed and unheeded, with the Executive Branch for the next three decades … We accordingly do not think that Congress in 1996 made such a large-scale change to our established system of immigration detention in the way that the government now contends.”
Anyone who has been in the U.S. for years and has established families can now only be detained after a bond hearing, which requires convincing an immigration judge that they can live safely in their own communities while the process unfolds.
Of the five courts that have ruled this way so far, Politico cited, are the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit, the New York-based 2nd Circuit, the Colorado-based 10th Circuit and the Cincinnati-based 6th Circuit, explained the report. Only two courts, the 5th and the 8th Circuit, have ruled in Trump's favor. There are court battles in four other circuits forthcoming.
Meanwhile, there have been a whopping 460 federal judges who have ruled against the administration on more than 10,000 cases involving the detention policies. This compares with 54 judges who have supported the ruling in about 1,100 cases, calculated Politico.
Trump's mandatory detention policy has faced unprecedented judicial resistance across the federal court system. Federal judges have overwhelmingly rejected the administration's interpretation of 1996 immigration law, with 460 judges ruling against the policy in more than 10,000 cases compared to only 54 judges supporting it in about 1,100 cases. The 9th Circuit ruling is particularly significant because it covers California, Arizona, Nevada, and Washington—regions with substantial immigrant populations.
The decision marks Trump's fifth consecutive loss at the appellate level. Only two circuits, the 5th and 8th, have sided with the administration. Legal experts argue Trump misread congressional intent, claiming Congress never intended to mandate detention for all undocumented immigrants regardless of ties to U.S. communities, creating a constitutional conflict between executive power and due process rights.
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AN 7 26
One of President Donald Trump’s closest allies, MyPillow founder and CEO Mike Lindell, got slapped down in a court case by a judge Trump himself appointed.
“After Mike Lindell was held in civil contempt and hit with a $500-per-day fine for 103 days for refusing to pay sanctions he's owed Smartmatic for years, a federal judge has given the MyPillow CEO exactly one month to pay an ‘extra penalty’ for his defiance,” reported Law and Crime’s Matt Naham on Tuesday. Smartmatic is a voting machine company that Lindell falsely accused of engaging in fraud during the 2020 presidential election, which Trump continues to insist he won despite losing more than 99 percent of his court cases making that allegation.
“In late June, Smartmatic asked U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols to clarify whether the voting machine conspiracy theorist would pay some of the contempt penalty to the company or if the sum was to be paid directly to the court,” Naham added. “The judge, a Donald Trump appointee, answered that question on Monday by entering a judgment in favor of Smartmatic and giving Lindell until Aug. 21 to ‘pay the total daily contempt penalty of $51,500’ to the ‘Registry of the Court.’
In his decision, Nichols pointed out that “when a sanction is designed to coerce a recalcitrant party to comply, the sanction should be payable to the court, rather than to the opposing party. [T]he Court imposed the daily civil contempt penalty to coerce compliance, not to compensate Smartmatic[.]"
Nichols began fining Lindell in April for saying he could not pay the $56,369 in sanctions even though he had spent $187,037.87 in campaign funds from his 2026 run for Minnesota governor solely to buy copies of his own book "What Are the Odds? From Crack Addict to CEO" and give them away.
Lindell’s gubernatorial campaign has also been beset with controversy. Despite being endorsed by Trump, Lindell was recently found to be registered to vote in Texas, indicating he may not be able to cast a ballot in his own campaign. What’s more, Lindell repeatedly tries to characterize himself as an outsider despite his close ties to Trump, such as when he said this to Trump’s former adviser and ongoing friend Steve Bannon.
“They’re having a big GOP endorsement where they’re having a debate and I’m not allowed to come,” Lindell told Bannon on his podcast War Room in May. “They’ve shut me out.”
Lindell continued, “The establishment doesn’t want me, Stephen. The Minnesota media—you wouldn’t even know I’m running.”
He later concluded, “I believe I am the only one that can win, and I believe I’m the only one with the solutions to our problems.”
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AN PHOENIX FLA 7 26
“‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’”
That’s how federal judge Mark Walker began his 2022 injunction blocking enforcement of Ron DeSantis’ “Stop Woke Act” in Florida institutions of higher education.
In case you don’t recognize the quotation, it’s from George Orwell’s “1984:” You know, the novel where the Ministry of Truth rewrites history and forbids free enquiry.
Certain words are banned; wrong thinking is punished. Even hearing about disfavored ideas is considered an attack on decency and order.
As defendant in the case, the State of Florida argued (apparently with a straight face) university professors have the right to free speech, sure, but only if the state approves of that speech.
The law forbade teaching anything that explores racial or gender injustice.
You weren’t allowed to say, given how we still struggle to overcome discrimination against minorities, women, and the disabled, that maybe diversity, equity and inclusion programs helped a lot of people; you must embrace color-blindness in all things (because we all know race doesn’t matter in America!); yet, woe betide you if you ever made a white person feel “guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex.”
Like many of us teaching in the state university system, the judge was unimpressed.
DeSantis and the legal team from his Ministry of Truth appealed up the food chain to the 11th Circuit, and what do you know?
‘Breathtaking assertion of power’
The majority opinion, by a Trump appointee, is unsparing.
Judge Britt C. Grant wrote, “If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it.”
She called the Stop Woke law “a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse.”
Naturally, the governor pitched a little hissy fit, taking to social media to say, “State universities are funded by taxpayers and directed by elected officials and their appointees. The state has both a right and a responsibility to ensure instruction at these universities is consistent with the underlying mission and to exclude indoctrination and ideological agendas.”
He called the decision “judicial overreach.”
Let’s talk about gubernatorial overreach. Or, to put it another way, what is this guy’s problem with education?
Is he really that frightened of ideas?
If he and his education appointees are so convinced their positions — slavery had an upside, gender is 100% biological, capitalism is divinely ordained, a woman’s highest destiny is to be a mother, vaccines are unnecessary, climate change isn’t real — are valid, surely they’d welcome testing them with historical records, expert reports, and empirical evidence.
Facts, even.
Reading books by and about, say, gay people, teaching the history of Stonewall, or examining central Supreme Court decisions such as Obergefell v. Hodges, do not mean straight people will somehow become gay, any more than studying Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” will necessarily inspire you to assassinate any official you think has gotten too big for his britches.
Gender studies will not destroy heterosexuality; it’s simply a way to talk about the ways people understand who they are, how they present themselves, how other people see them.
Snowflakes
Universities are supposed to be where you encounter people who aren’t like you, unfamiliar, maybe upsetting, points of view, tricky topics, and ideas your parents don’t approve of.
Intellectual freedom means we should be able to discuss almost anything.
Yet the DeSantis administration act like snowflakes, hypersensitive, unwilling to contemplate anything outside their very white, very Christian, pathetically nationalist, bubble.
DeSantis is especially nervous America’s racial history, trying to outlaw “The 1619 Project,” a brilliant collection of writings about how the arrival of the first slaves on the Virginia shore has informed and shaped our country, shutting down or crippling African American Studies programs.
I guess white people are so used to considering themselves the “real” Americans who had all the good ideas, invented all the good stuff, and “built this country,” the reality that Africa is as central to our identity as Europe is scary.
The governor and his crew seem especially freaked out by the possibility students might encounter Critical Race Theory. Listening to them, you’d think CRT is to blame for everything from high gas prices to the common cold.
CRT is pretty simple: Race is socially constructed (not biological) and racism is not merely a product of individual bias (though that’s part of it) but embedded in our legal, educational, medical, and financial systems.
Say a white person and a Black person commit the same crime. It would make sense if they got the same sentence, right?
But in most cases the Black person will get a longer sentence.
‘The perfect villain’
The Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health policy think tank, has repeatedly shown structural racism (conscious or not) in the medical profession means doctors and nurses misdiagnose Black, Latino, and members of other ethnic communities far more often than they do whites, and, unlike with white patients, tend to dismiss their pain.
Infant mortality among people of color is at least twice as high than it is for whites.
There’s nothing sinister or anti-American in acknowledging, as Justice Thurgood Marshall said, the original Constitution was “defective from the start,” given that it upheld slaveholders’ rights in their human property and protected the slave trade.
Slavery was at the heart of our republic since its beginning.
It still reverberates in our culture.
There’s nothing anti-white in pointing this out. The Founders installed in the Constitution ways to amend it, fix social problems, even change American society.
The country is an ongoing project: We’re still striving for that “more perfect union,” and acknowledging the blindingly obvious ways in which our deals don’t match up with our reality is not a heinous assault on patriotism.
CRT was developed by legal scholars, and has long been part of law school curricula. Nobody much noticed it until 2021, when a right-wing activist called Christopher Rufo kicked off a national moral panic.
You might remember Rufo from the 2024 presidential campaign, amplifying J.D. Vance’s lies about Haitians in Ohio eating cats and dogs.
Before that, Rufo had made a name for himself as a warrior against anything he saw as “woke,” especially in higher education.
DeSantis appointed Rufo to New College’s Board of Trustees (he’s since left) to help destroy what once was an admired, creative, and tolerant liberal arts school, labeling any teaching he didn’t like “Critical Race Theory.”
CRT, he said, is “the perfect villain.”
Army of lefties
Having tried to banish CRT along with sociology, the unpleasant parts of American history, the novels of Toni Morrison, and any science that might reveal things are more complicated than they’d like, DeSantis, the various mediocrities running Florida’s Department of Education, and fellow travelers such as Moms for Liberty, have convinced themselves universities are hotbeds of “Marxist indoctrination.”
Apparently, professors — especially in the Humanities and Social Sciences — are not merely “woke,” we’re a bunch of commies, determined to brainwash the Youth of Florida into hollering “Workers of the World Unite!” — assured they have nothing to lose but their chains.
Or something like that.
Alas, all my colleagues and I must be really lousy at indoctrination. I don’t know anybody who’s been successful in producing even one committed Marxist.
But DeSantis et al. are convinced higher education is a plot to produce an army of lefties.
Not that they can produce much evidence of this.
They’re more ideologically rigid than the most committed Trotskyite, and less logical than the American officer who, standing in the ruins of a Vietnamese provincial capital in 1968, told reporter Peter Arnett, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”
Maybe the administration’s idea is to destroy higher ed in order to save it.
Hypotheticals
No doubt DeSantis took some comfort from the dissent in the 11th Circuit’s ruling.
Judge Barbara Lagoa, a former member of the Florida Supreme Court, (indeed, a DeSantis appointee and often mentioned as a potential U.S. Supreme Court justice), argues, what if “a professor who says that Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel was ‘exhilarating’ and something to be celebrated and encouraged?”
She goes on to say, “Florida acts well within its authority to curb professorial endorsements of that kind within its own classrooms.”
First of all, if someone were stupid enough to say such a thing, that professor could be disciplined for creating a hostile educational environment.
But taking a hypothetical case of poor judgment and concluding somehow professorial speech must always be equivalent to the views of the state violates the First Amendment.
The First Amendment protects offensive speech — even hate speech.
In George Orwell’s essay “Freedom of the Press,” he writes, “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
Or to quote again from the majority opinion, the university’s mission is to get students to “puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth.”
Professors call this “teaching.”
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5th circuit most conserv
alito
2 11? 26 ruled ok detention camps ice?
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AN 6 26
Trump’s Penn Station extortion scheme ruled 'flagrantly illegal' by judge - Alternet.org
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6 26
- The Guardian
Judge blocks subpoenas for Walz and others over Minnesota immigration ...
1 day agoThe US Department of Justice issued subpoenas to the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz; the attorney general, Keith Ellison; the Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey; and other local officials in the Twin ...
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AN 5 26
In December, President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against the BBC, seeking the enormous sum of $5 billion under claims that the British news outlet selectively edited one of his speeches to give the impression that he was responsible for the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Now, Politico senior legal affairs reporter Josh Gerstein reports that a judge has dealt a massive blow to Trump’s case.
According to Gerstein, the Florida judge overseeing the case has refused a request by Trump’s legal team to have the magistrate judge overseeing the discovery portion of the case reassigned. The president’s lawyers had asked for a replacement for Judge Enjolique Lett, who had previously served as an attorney for Orbis, a company Trump sued in relation to the infamous Steele dossier, a controversial 2017 document that alleged a conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign.
The decision made by Judge Roy Altman asserts that the Trump legal team’s basis for the request was “unavailing,” rejecting the two arguments they put forth. They had questioned the mechanism for the assignment of Lett, which Altman rejected, saying the magistrate had been assigned based on workload and nothing else. They also questioned Lett’s ability to remain impartial considering her involvement with the Orbis lawsuit, but as Altman pointed out, the law states that judges can only recuse themselves from a case. “Accordingly,” wrote Altman, “we’ll leave any decision regarding Magistrate Judge Lett’s recusal to her sound judgment.”
Trump’s lawsuit stems from the assertion that the editing of a BBC piece was libelous. He claims that the news outlet intentionally edited a speech he delivered on January 6th, 2021, as the Capitol insurrection began, in a way that made it appear he had urged supporters to acts of violence.
The BBC lawsuit is the latest in a string of legal actions Trump has taken against news organizations. Some of these suits have been more successful than others, garnering Trump multimillion-dollar settlements from the likes of CBS and ABC. Another nearly half-billion dollar lawsuit against CNN was dismissed, and suits against the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are currently ongoing.
His latest legal blow comes on the heels of another setback in his case against the Wall Street Journal, in which a judge declared that Trump’s legal team could not use the process of discovery to search for evidence of their yet-unsupported claims. The judge, who had previously thrown the suit out for being "conclusory and without factual support,” has called the case “expensive yet groundless.”
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RWW
05/05/2026
by
- Media Matters: Media Matters secures complete and total victory against Federal Trade Commission
FTC agrees to forgo future investigations of MMFA to secure withdrawal ahead of judgment.
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AN 4 26
With its controversial 6-3 ruling in Trump v. the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court's GOP-appointed hard-right supermajority ruled that U.S presidents enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution for "official" acts in office but not for "unofficial" acts. Donald Trump applauded the ruling. But on Tuesday, March 31, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta — applying that standard — ruled that Trump's speech at a January 6, 2021 rally in Washington, D.C. was political in nature and therefore, is not protected from civil lawsuits related to the attack on the U.S. Capitol Building.
According to Politico journalists Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, Mehta "delivered a serious setback" to Trump "in long-running civil lawsuits seeking to hold him liable for the violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021."
Mehta, they note, "ruled that evidence produced so far in the litigation brought by police officers and Democratic lawmakers indicated that Trump's speech at the Ellipse that day was political in nature and not subject to the immunity the Supreme Court has found for a president's official acts."
Gerstein, in a March 31 post on X, former Twitter, noted that Mehta's "ruling could lead to a trial but appeal could lead to year-plus more delay."
Attorney Joseph Sellers, who is representing the Democratic lawmakers suing Trump in civil court, is applauding Mehta's ruling.
Sellers told Politico, "We're very pleased that the court recognized that President Trump cannot avoid accountability for his conduct on January 6, 2021. This decision, if it holds up, is going to pave the way to a trial in federal district court on these claims."}:
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SAME DAY 3 25 26
Trump admin begs judge's forgiveness after another flub - Alternet.org
Firestorm erupts as Trump admin ridiculed after admitting lack of evidence - Alternet.org
Another judge obliterates Trump’s 'massive' attack on blue states - Alternet.org
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AN 3 26 PIT BILLS?
Georgia court blocks GOP's bid to seat election deniers on Fulton County board - Alternet.org
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an 3 26
President Donald Trump’s attempt to strip several progressive law firms and individual lawyers of security clearances and federal contracts is over.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration is abandoning its defense of the president’s executive orders issued last year. Those actions sanctioned several law firms and individuals for their associations with Trump rivals and causes that he didn’t favor.
Subsequent trial court rulings in four instances struck down the Trump executive actions. On Monday, the Justice Department told the WSJ that it will drop its appeals of the trial court rulings.
Trump’s executive orders would have prevented firms and individual lawyers from entering federal buildings, eliminated federal contracts with the firms and their clients and removed any security clearances. Now, that threat is ended.
Law firms Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, Perkins Coie and Susman Godfrey were among those affected. But the impact of Trump’s actions sent a broader chill. Several other large law firms cut deals with the president, providing more than $1 billion in pro bono work on causes Trump favored.
Trump cited the sanctioned parties for their connections to his political rivals. He also noted their diversity initiatives and pro bono work for immigrants, transgender rights and voting protections in his executive orders.
The affected firms and individuals called the actions unconstitutional retaliation and an abuse of executive power. In one trial court decision, Judge Richard Leon, appointed by Republican President George W. Bush, said blocking the sanctions would preserve an “independent bar willing to tackle unpopular cases, however daunting.”
The Trump administration countered in its appeals and defenses that a president has leeway to act when it comes to firms that work with the federal government.
MSNBC journalist Sam Stein saidthe decision by DOJ to end its defense would be particularly “humiliating” for firms that preemptively settled.
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AN 2 26
President Donald Trump wants a Republican politician in Utah, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, to hand over the entire voter registration database — but she is refusing.
“Neither state nor federal law entitles the Department of Justice to collect private information on law-abiding American citizens,” Henderson said in a statement responding to Trump’s lawsuit against Utah and 28 other states. “Utahns can be assured that my office will always follow the Constitution and the law, protect voters’ rights, and administer free and fair elections.”
Trump’s Justice Department continues to claim without evidence that there is widespread voter fraud and they must acquire all states’ voter registration data. Federal judges have dismissed Trump’s lawsuits in California, Georgia, Michigan and Oregon.
Henderson is not alone among state officials condemning Trump’s actions. Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar (D) described Trump’s claims of noncitizen voting and other kinds of foreign interference as a “red herring” and “non-issue” meant to intimidate voters.
“The only people who should be concerned by this are criminals,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement defending its actions. “Noncitizen voting is a crime. Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”
Although the White House has repeatedly threatened to nationalize elections, the president lacks the authority to do so.
“Here is the reality: the president has no authority to run federal elections,” University of Kentucky professor Joshua A. Douglas said. “The Constitution, through the Elections Clause in Article I, Section 4, assigns that power to the states, while allowing Congress to make or alter election regulations. Courts have already blocked the president’s executive order on voter registration rules. Neither an executive order nor presidential bombast can override our decentralized constitutional structure.”
Conservative historian Robert Kagan told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour earlier this month that the GOP is the “party of dictatorship” because it is considering anti-democratic measures to keep Trump in power.
“I am worried, as I have said and others have been pointing out, about whether we will even have free and fair elections in 2026, let alone in 2028,” Kagan told Amanpour. “I think Trump has a plan to disrupt those elections, and I don't think he's willing to allow Democrats to take control of one or both houses as could happen in a free election.”
Sometimes Republicans drop their mask regarding their intentions regarding the midterm elections.
:{“The writing on the wall,” tweeted Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida in a message tagging Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.). Luna attached a flowchart which showed two paths from “Gain majority” in which, unless Republicans pass the SAVE Act, they lose control of the House.
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an 2 26
Republicans have been fighting the decision to add another congressional seat to the state of Utah after its population in Salt Lake City expanded significantly. The seat has been caught up in litigation for six years, with Republicans well aware that such a seat would likely be a Democratic one.
On Monday, federal judges refused to further block the new district, Fox12 reported.
A three-judge panel unanimously rejected demands from the lawyers, commissioners mayors, and Reps. Celeste Maloy and Burgess Owens to stop the new district.
"Because we conclude Plaintiffs have failed to demonstrate a likelihood of success on the merits ... we DENY Plaintiffs’ preliminary injunction motion," the ruling said.
The only way to stop the new blue seat from being added is if the U.S. Supreme Court steps in.
Elections lawyer Marc Elias cheered the ruling, posting on X, "Federal Court three-judge panel DENIES republican motion for a preliminary injunction to block Utah's new congressional map from going in to effect. The new map will stand for the 2026 midterms. Democrats will likely gain 1 seat!"
State Sen. Nate Blouin, a Democrat, is among those running for the state. In a post on X he wrote, "Done deal. Vote for blutah. Vote for Blouin."
AN 2 26
*This is a developing story and may be updated.
Ongoing legal fights over President Donald Trump’s attempt to send hundreds of Oregon, California and Texas National Guard troops to Portland last fall over the objections of residents and state and local leaders will come to an end.
Mary Helen Murguia, chief judge of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, agreed Tuesday to let the federal government drop its appeal of a November decision from a lower court judge that barred the attempted Guard deployment.
Judge Karin Immergut, of the U.S. District Court in Portland and a Trump appointee, sided with Oregon and the city of Portland in their case against Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Her November order barring guard deployment to the city stays in effect.
Immergut found Trump’s justification for the attempted deployment — that protests outside of a Portland Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility since June constituted a “rebellion” against the federal government and significantly impeded its functions — was unfounded. She further found that the attempt to deploy guard troops violated the federal code and the U.S. Constitution.
Federal lawyers immediately appealed Immergut’s decision. But in late January, they reversed course, asking the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in a single sentence to permit them to drop the case.
Lawyers for Oregon, the city of Portland and California — which joined Oregon’s lawsuit against Trump — agreed not to challenge the request for dismissal as long as the appeals court judges ensured Immergut’s decision would stand and the federal government would be required to comply with it.
“This is a win for Oregon, and it shows that no one is above the law. The federal government didn’t have a case — facts mattered. Our communities won’t be treated as a testing ground for unchecked federal power,” Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield said in a statement. “Judge Immergut’s injunction stands, and we’ll keep defending Oregon’s laws, our values, and the safety of our cities — and if the government tries to overstep, we won’t hesitate to go back to court.”
Willamette University professor Norman Williams, a constitutional law expert, echoed Rayfield, similarly calling it a “win for the state.” And not an unexpected win. The “handwriting was on the wall,” Williams said, when the U.S. Supreme Court in December ruled against Trump in his attempt to send National Guard troops to Illinois.
The Portland ICE facility at the heart of the case is now the subject of two court cases brought against federal officers by nearby residents and the Oregon chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, on behalf of protesters and journalists, who claim ICE and federal officers have used excessive force and tear gas against them.
A judge recently temporarily barred the officers from deploying less-lethal munitions and chemicals at protesters unless the agents are in “imminent threat of physical harm.” The ruling came after agents used excessive force and heavily gassed crowds of nonviolent protesters that included children and seniors.
{2:53 pm Updated with comment from Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield.}:
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ELECTION FUCKERY? CT LOSS 2 26 AN
Republicans just suffered a significant setback in North Carolina ahead of this fall's midterm elections, where they're hoping to stop Democrats from flipping a crucial U.S. Senate seat.
NBC News reported Monday that a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the North Carolina Republican Party — which alleged roughly 250,000 voters were improperly registered — resulted in the court allowing 73,000 voters to remain on the rolls while presenting identifying information.
Republicans were hoping to have all voters in question removed and their 2024 ballots thrown out after alleging that their voter registrations didn't include the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers or a statement that they had neither document. Democrats countersued on behalf of North Carolina election officials, resulting in Monday's settlement granting extra time to the group of 73,000 voters.
According to NBC News, the North Carolina Board of Elections began updating its database of voter registrations last year, sending letters to roughly 82,000 voters asking them to update their registrations. Approximately 100,000 voters in the Tar Heel State lack identifiers like a driver's license number. Because North Carolina requires voters show ID when voting, the settlement allows for the 73,000 voters in question to present ID when casting their ballots, upon which election officials will update their information on state voter rolls with the information shown on those voters' identifications.
Had those ballots been tossed, it could have potentially changed the outcome of one or more U.S. House elections. According to the Associated Press' vote count, Rep. Don Davis (D-N.C.) narrowly won his race in North Carolina's 1st Congressional District by roughly 6,300 votes. And the statewide vote count could also prove decisive with Monday's settlement, as President Donald Trump only won North Carolina by 183,000 votes in 2024.
"This latest victory is a win for Americans and yet another blow to the Republicans’ scheme to disenfranchise voters ahead of the midterm elections," Democratic National Committee chairman Ken Martin said in a statement.
North Carolina voted for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024. However, North Carolina voters also elected Democrat Roy Cooper to the governorship in 2016 and 2020, and elected Democrat Josh Stein as governor in 2024. Cooper is now running for North Carolina's open U.S. Senate seat, where he and former RNC chairman Michael Whatley are favored to win the March 3 primary. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C,.) is retiring from the Senate and not seeking a third term.
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AN 2 26
AN 2 26 KELLY?
Republican-appointed judge cites Orwell in scathing rebuke of Trump admin
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AN 2 26
Judge shuts down Trump's attempt to defund blue states
The New York Times reports a federal judge in Illinois blocked the Trump administration’s plot to snatch $600 million in public health funds from four states led by Democrats.
“Judge Manish S. Shah of the Federal District Court in Northern Illinois wrote in a two-page order that the plaintiff states — California, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota — had provided enough evidence that the cuts were ‘based on arbitrary, capricious or unconstitutional rationales’ to halt what would have been deep cuts in federal public health funding that had already been allocated while legal arguments continue in the case,” reports the Times.
Some of the $600 million in grants was intended to help specific populations, often communities of color or gay and bisexual men, which scratches against the Trump administration’s campaign against federal funding for underprivileged racial and socioeconomic groups.
This order, said the Times, is the latest ruling squashing President Donald Trump’s broader effort to impose politically motivated federal cuts to Democratic-led states. Just last week, another federal judge extended an unrelated order blocking the Trump administration from withholding $10 billion in child care and social services funding in the same four states, as well as New York — despite New York paying, on average, $20 billion more in taxes to the federal government than it gets back in federal spending.
The Times reports a court also blocked Trump’s plan to suspend funding of food stamps and other hunger relief programs in Minnesota.
Judge Shah did not specify the $600 million in grants in his decision, but applied his ruling broadly to block the Trump administration from terminating all public health grants “based on undisclosed agency priorities.”
While judges are heartily attacking Trump’s attempts to defund blue targets others are dismantling Trump’s other endeavors. On Thursday, GOP-appointed Judge Richard Leon issued a scathing ruling in Sen. Mark Kelly's (D-Ariz.) lawsuit against the Pentagon, which sought to demote him for appearing in a video reminding soldiers that they do not have to carry out unconstitutional orders.
A Manhattan federal judge, meanwhile, put an end to Trump’s attempted extortion of New York and New Jersey residents by ordering the administration to “unfreeze funding for a sprawling project paving the way for work to resume on a new set of Hudson River tunnels.”
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FAIL IN CT
AN 2 26
The New York Times reports a Washington D.C. grand jury has again refused to acquiesce to President Donald Trump’s quest to prosecute his political foes, with the paper calling the rejection “a remarkable rebuke” from ordinary citizens.
The Times reports: “Federal prosecutors in Washington sought and failed on Tuesday to secure an indictment against six Democratic lawmakers who posted a video last fall that enraged President Trump by reminding active-duty members of the military and intelligence community that they were obligated to refuse illegal orders, four people familiar with the matter said.”
The *Times* additionally reports it was already remarkable that the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington — led by Trump ally Jeanine Pirro — even authorized prosecutors to approach a grand jury with an indictment of the six members of Congress, all of whom had served in the military or the nation’s spy agencies.
It is rare for grand jurors to snub prosecutors’ indictment requests, considering prosecutors get to dominate the jury with one-sided arguments leading up to their decision. However, the Times reports it has happened with increased frequency with Trump’s Justice Department “as his appointees push ahead with questionable cases.”
It is doubly surprising considering the president of the United States accused Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and the other legislators of seditious conspiracy and said they could potentially be put to death. The U.S. Department of Defense later announced that it was launching an investigation into Kelly for participating in the video warning active-duty troops to not follow illegal orders from Trump and also threatened to court martial the NASA astronaut.
But the jury apparently disagreed on all counts and refused to indict any of the legislators incriminated by Trump.
Trump’s targets also Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) and four colleagues in the House: Jason Crow (D-Colo.) Maggie Goodlander, (D-N.H.), Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.) and Chris Deluzio (D-Pa).
Kelly is already suing the Pentagon over its attempts to punish him.
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AN 2 26 NOT SURE WHAT LEVEL
Judge denies DHS push for 'retaliatory' deportation of 5-year-old’s family
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AN 1 26
Judge smacks down Feds for using 'legal fiction' to illegally detain man in jail
Clark Kauffman, Iowa Capital Dispatch
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AN 1 26
A new court filing by disqualified former interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan is now accusing a judge appointed by President Donald Trump of committing a "gross abuse of power."
On Tuesday, All Rise News editor-in-chief Adam Klasfeld tweeted that Halligan — backed by Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Pam Bondi — attacked U.S. District Judge David J. Novak (who Trump appointed to the Eastern District of Virginia in 2019) as "flat wrong" for suggesting that Halligan should no longer call herself a U.S. attorney due to her prior disqualification. Klasfeld called the filing an "extraordinary, pugilistic brief."
The DOJ's briefing submitted Tuesday is Halligan's official response to an order Novak handed down last week giving the disqualified prosecutor seven days to explain why she continues to wrongly use the title of U.S. attorney given that senior U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie (an appointee of former President Bill Clinton) in November disqualified her in a binding ruling.
In the 11-page filing, Halligan, Bondi and Blanche used former DOJ special counsel Jack Smith as an example of why Judge Currie's order was not binding. They noted that when Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed Smith's 37-count felony indictment of the then-former president, she also deemed him to be improperly appointed under the Appointments Clause of the U.S. Constitution as he was never confirmed by the U.S. Senate, yet Smith continued to use his special counsel title in subsequent briefings. This is despite multiple DOJ special counsels appointed under both Democratic and Republican presidents never having been confirmed by the full Senate and still having their findings respected and found credible.
Klasfeld observed that Halligan and DOJ leadership accused Novak of making a "rudimentary error," and of using his powers as a judge as a "cudgel" against the executive branch. They also referred to his order demanding Halligan explain her continued use of the U.S. attorney title as an "inquisition."
"To put it mildly, this isn't the type of language one typically sees by a party addressing a judge," Klasfeld tweeted. "Halligan, Blanche and Bondi downplay the ruling disqualifying Halligan as a 'disagreement' with the government, which they say isn't binding on any other case."
Trump initially named Halligan as acting U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia after former U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert was forced to resign after declining to bring charges against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who are two of Trump's most high-profile political opponents. Halligan indicted both Comey and James shortly after replacing Siebert, though both indictments were dismissed after Judge Currie disqualified her.
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AN FAIL 1 12 26
Loss for Trump as federal judge rules budget chief broke the law to punish blue states
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maddow? 1 13 26 just lost 4 ct cases? norm eisen says 2/3rd
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AN 1 26
'The judge lost' it: NYC lawyer says courts are 'over' Trump’s Justice Department
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AN 12 25
On Friday, a nonprofit forced the Trump administration to unseal a damning complaint lodged by the Biden-era Federal Trade Commission against Pepsi for colluding with Walmart to raise food prices across the nation. New un-redacted information claims FTC Chair Ferguson and his colleague Mark Meador (both Trump appointees) were hiding the mechanics of Pepsi’s and Wal-Mart’s price fixing.
Pepsi is a “must-have” product for grocery stores, and Walmart is also massively powerful,” reports BIG Newsletter writer Matt Stoller. Critics say Pepsi allegedly engages in price discrimination to maintain the approval of Walmart, its biggest buyer — even going so far as to police prices at smaller rival stores. And it prepares reports for Walmart showing them their pricing advantages on Pepsi products.
When the “price gap” between Wal-Mart and its tiny rivals narrow too much, Pepsi tracks where consumers were buying Pepsi products outside of Walmart. It keeps logs on stores who would “self-fund” Pepsi product discounts, nicknaming them “offenders” and then raise their stock price, forcing them to carry those costs down to their customers.
“This dynamic is why independent grocery stores are dying,” said Stoller. “… It’s led to less competition, fewer local grocery stores, and higher prices. … To the end consumer, it creates an optimal illusion. Walmart appears to be a low-cost retailer, but that’s because it induces its suppliers to push prices up at rivals.”
Much of this information was redacted by Trump officials, however, including Ferguson and Meador. Normally, when the government files an antitrust case, the complaint gets redacted to protect confidential business information. Then the corporate defendant and the government haggle over what is genuinely confidential business information and complaints are eventually unsealed with some minor blacked out phrases, and the case goes on.
“In this case, however, … Ferguson abruptly dropped the case in February after Pepsi hired well-connected lobbyists,” said Stoller. “… Ferguson ended it the day before the government was supposed to go before the judge to manage the unsealing process. And that kept the complaint redacted. With the complaint kept secret, Ferguson, and … Meador, then publicly went on the attack.”
Ferguson released a “bitter and personal” statement against Biden-era FTC Chair Lina Khan — who had brought the complaint against Pepsi — implying that she was lawless and partisan, that there was “no evidence” to support key contentions, and that Ferguson had to “clean up the Biden-Harris FTC’s mess.” Fellow commissioner Mark Meador later echoed his comments on on X.
“And that was where it was supposed to stay, secret, with mean-spirited name-calling and invective camouflaging the real secret Ferguson was trying to conceal,” said Stoller. “That secret is something we all know, but this complaint helped prove that the center of the affordability crisis in food is market power. If that got out, then Ferguson would have to litigate this case or risk deep embarrassment. So, the strategy was to handwave about that mean Lina Khan to lobbyists, while keeping the evidence secret.”
But anti-monopoly group The Institute for Local Self-Reliance filed to make the full complaint public, and Judge Jesse Matthew Furman agreed to hear ILSR’s case, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Pepsi bitterly opposed.
“Last week, Furman directed the FTC unseal the complaint. So we finally got to see what Ferguson and Meador were trying to hide,” Stoller said.
Read the full BIG report at this link
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gmail cci 1225
connecticut-is-closer-than-ever-to-putting-exxon-on-tria
December 1, 2025
Connecticut’s climate accountability lawsuit is one step closer to trial after a state judge last week rejected ExxonMobil’s attempts to strike the case, delivering a major win for the state’s effort to hold the oil giant accountable for its decades of climate deception.
“ExxonMobil is throwing the kitchen sink at us, trying every angle to invalidate our case,” Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said in a statement. “Once again, they have failed on every count.”
The lawsuit, filed in 2020, argues that Exxon’s historic and ongoing “campaign of deception” about the climate harms of fossil fuels violated the state’s consumer protection law and has inflicted “decades of avoidable harm” and “catastrophic consequences” on Connecticut’s people, infrastructure, and ecosystems. The storms hitting Connecticut’s coastline and flooding communities’ homes have been supercharged by climate change that Exxon knew it was fueling decades ago. By one estimate, sea-level rise caused by climate change created an additional $8.1 billion in damages during Hurricane Sandy, which hit Connecticut in 2012.
In a ruling Wednesday, Connecticut Superior Court Judge John B. Farley rejected all of Exxon’s claims that the state’s case was preempted by federal law, barred by the First Amendment, and other unfounded legal arguments.
“[T]he fundamental objective of the lawsuit,” Judge Farley wrote, is “to remedy the defendant’s alleged unfair and deceptive marketing practices.”
Connecticut’s case — which aims to make Exxon stop deceiving the public, disclose internal climate change research, disgorge profits made while engaging in illegal activity, and fund a “corrective education campaign” about climate change — now enters the discovery phase of litigation.
“Our case is simple and strong — ExxonMobil amassed billions of dollars in profits off a decades-long campaign of lies, and they must be held accountable,” Attorney General Tong said. “We are in the midst of discovery and are aggressively prosecuting this case in Connecticut to uncover and expose ExxonMobil’s lies and to hold the company accountable for the harm their deception has caused.”
As climate accountability cases like Connecticut’s move closer to trial, the oil and gas industry is trying to find ways to block accountability outside the courthouse. Fossil fuel companies are lobbying Congress for a legal shield that would block communities from being able to access the courts and limit the ability of state lawmakers to demand accountability for the industry’s illegal actions. In June, more than a dozen Republican attorneys general proposed creating a “liability shield” for fossil fuel companies modeled on a 2005 law protecting gun manufacturers from lawsuits, and the New York Times later confirmed that securing similar legal protections is a priority for the fossil fuel industry this Congress.
“Exxon and other Big Oil companies are desperate to avoid facing the evidence of their climate lies, but as this ruling makes clear, the people of Connecticut deserve their day in court,” CCI President Richard Wiles said about the ruling. “As the fossil fuel industry lobbies Congress for a ‘get-out-jail-free’ card in cases like Connecticut’s, it’s critical for elected officials to stand up and protect communities’ access to the courts.”
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an 11 25
Trump's policiescracking down on undocumented immigrants by ramping up ICE authorities are facing sustained and growing push back from judges, according to a new analysis from Politico, including several that were appointed by him.
Politico's reporting on Friday concerned a policy Trump instituted back in July, calling for all individuals facing deportation proceedings to be jailed without the possibility of seeking a release. Though the Trump administration has defended its crackdown by claiming that it is being applied to dangerous and violent criminals, Politico noted that many of the immigrants targeted by this new policy "have lived in the U.S. for years, and sometimes decades, without incident and have been pursuing asylum or other forms of legal status."
The response to this rule sparked a "tidal wave of emergency lawsuits" claiming it violated immigration laws and immigrants' due-process rights. As of Friday morning, when its piece was published, Politico found that in an overwhelming percentage of these lawsuits, judges ruled against Trump's policy, with a good number of them being judges he himself appointed.
At least 225 judges have ruled in more than 700 cases that the administration’s new policy, which also deprives people of an opportunity to seek release from an immigration court, is a likely violation of law and the right to due process," the report explained. "Those judges were appointed by all modern presidents — including 23 by Trump himself — and hail from at least 35 states, according to a Politico analysis of thousands of recent cases."
The rate at which legal opposition to Trump's immigrant detention policy has grown is also considerable, with the number of judges who have ruled against the administration doubling in just the last month.
The scale of the push back feels even greater when considering the inverse: Politico found that only eight judges in the entire country, six of whom were Trump appointees, ruled in favor of the administration's position.
Judges have also grown "exasperated" by the volume of litigation flowing into their courts as a result of Trump's policy, making it difficult for them to keep up.
“The Court is unable to remain current on all new case authority supporting the Court’s conclusion, given the continued onslaught of litigation being generated by [the administration’s] widespread illegal detention practices,” U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder, a federal judge in California originally appointed by Bill Clinton, said in a comment from last week.
“Dozens of district courts across the nation — with more each day — have rejected DHS’s expansion of … mandatory detention,” U.S. District Judge Lynn Winmill, another Clinton appointee in Idaho. “This court joins the overwhelming majority.”
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an 11 25
'Game over': Experts slam GA prosecutor’s 'official' dismissal of Trump election case
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Kilmar Armando Ábrego García's ongoing case was back in court on Thursday as Judge Paula Xinis questioned U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.
It was revealed that top immigration official John Cantú didn't draft the sworn statements submitted to the court for the case. The statement was previously sealed, Lawfare's Roger Parloff wrote in a BlueSky thread.
Ábrego was sent to an El Salvador prison, despite a judge's order not to send him to the country. Initially, the administration sought to deport him to various African countries such as Uganda, Eswatini and now, Liberia.
Ábrego sought to go to Costa Rica, but Cantú wrote, and the government has alleged, that the country would not accept him.
Legal analyst Adam Klasfeld, of "All Rise News," reported on X, "A senior ICE official just admitted in an evidentiary hearing in Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s case that someone else drafted his declaration in the case and he didn’t know what certain words meant."
Parloff, who was live-posting about the court hearing, cited Judge Xinis saying that the witness had zero information about the content of his declaration.
"No shade on you Mr. Cantú," Xinis said, according to Parloff. "You've been very candid with the court."
Ábrego's attorney, Sascha Rand, asked who might have more information "about the sum and substance of your declaration that we could go talk to?"
Cantú responded, saying, "No, sir. As far as I know, I'm the only one he talked to," Parloff relayed.
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rww
11/12/2025
by
The Supreme Court on Monday rejected Liberty Counsel’s petition to overturn the court’s 2015 marriage equality ruling in Obergefell. Mat Staver, who heads the anti-LGBTQ group, insisted the next day that “it’s not if, but when, Obergefell will be overturned.”
While large majorities of Americans support marriage equality, religious-right groups are determined to destroy it. Staver has called the marriage equality ruling a “cancer” on the Constitution.
Liberty Counsel has spent the past decade representing Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk who refused to allow her office to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the Supreme Court overturned state marriage bans.
The case that Liberty Counsel asked the Supreme Court to hear was about the specific question of whether Davis could be held personally liable for damages for denying a gay couple the license to which they were entitled. A federal judge ruled against Davis, awarding the couple damages and attorney fees, and an appeals court upheld that ruling.
Liberty Counsel appealed and asked the Supreme Court to go well beyond the legal question at hand and take the opportunity to overturn marriage equality altogether. The Court declined.
It’s good news that the Court rejected Liberty Counsel’s appeal. But Liberty Counsel and other religious-right groups are certainly not going to drop their efforts to overturn marriage equality.
“I have no doubt that Davis’ resolve will serve as a catalyst to raise up many more challenges to the wrongly decided Obergefellopinion,” Staver wrote. He vowed that his group “will continue working with state legislators and individuals to overturn Obergefell and to return the issue of marriage to the states.”
Liberty Counsel has powerful allies who want to see marriage equality eliminated.
The Alliance Defending Freedom, the anti-equality legal giant that led the legal effort to overturnRoe v. Wade,views reversing marriage equality as another of its “generational wins” goals. ADF drafted the state law that the Supreme Court used to overturn Roe, and it's nearly certain that ADF is working on a similar strategy to undo Obergefell. ADF was not involved in Kim Davis’s case, but it is active at the Supreme Court this term.
The Ethics and Public Policy Center is headed by Ryan Anderson, who published a road map for overturning marriage equality when he was still at the Heritage Foundation. EPPC fellow Nathanael Blake wrote earlier this year that same-sex couples' ability to get legally married reflects liberalism’s “hatred for human nature.” Another EPPC fellow, Andrew Walker, wrote that same-sex marriage reflects “moral lawlessness.” He mocked gay parents and their families, writing, “If you’re anything like me, the sight of gay and lesbian couples and small children cosplaying in idyllic family settings is proving to be too much.”
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an 11 25
A federal judge on Wednesday ruled that President Donald Trump's administration unlawfully arrested and detained hundreds of people across the country as part of its immigration crackdown, and ordered them to be released by November 21.
that the decision by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Cummings (an appointee of former President Joe Biden) was a "major blow" to Trump's mass deportation efforts, while reporter Whitney Wild described the ruling was an "enormous win" for plaintiffs' attorneys suing the administration. She observed that Judge Cummings pointed out that more than 600 people detained across the country "have no deportation orders" and "no criminal history."
"This more practically applies to all 3,000 people who are who have been arrested by ICE and Customs and Border [Protection] between June and October," Wild said. "But most practically speaking, it applies to 615 people who are currently in custody all across the country."
According to Wild, plaintiffs' attorneys believe roughly 1,100 immigrants "simply left voluntarily after they were placed in custody because they just they gave up on their immigration status fight and chose to leave the United States." However, attorney Mark Fleming told CNN affiliate WLS that the ruling proved their argument that a bulk of the administration's arrests of immigrants in Chicago, Illinois this summer and fall — under the direction of Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino — were illegal.
"For the last two months, the terrorizing of our neighborhoods, the brutalizing of people here has all been unlawful," Fleming said. "That's what it's going to show. It's going to show that all of this, all of the tactics of Mr. Bovino, all of the tactics of ICE have been unlawful in the vast, vast majority of arrests."
So far, the Department of Homeland Security has not yet said if it will appeal Judge Cummings' decision to the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, though Fleming told WLS that he understood that the Department of Justice was planning to consult with Solicitor General D. John Sauer (one of Trump's former personal attorneys) about whether to file an appeal. However, Wild reported that the ruling may potentially have nationwide implications.
"More broadly, the question is, what does this mean for cases all across the country?" Wild said. "... The attorney for the ACLU told me that she believes that there are other cases across the country that are similar. And so you will start to see more cases end up just like this, with judges simply saying that these people who are in custody, it's completely improper."
RWW
Ryan J. Reilly @ NBC News: Jury acquits D.C. 'sandwich guy' charged with chucking a sub at a federal agent
Sean Dunn faced a single misdemeanor after federal grand jurors refused to indict him on the felony charge sought by prosecutors.
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BAD BEAT 3 STATES AND PA SCOTUS
AN 11 25
'Kamikaze pilots': Trump says Democrats will 'take down the country' after big wins
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AN 11 25
President Donald Trump is drafting an executive order aimed at rolling back voting rights, a measure that may include attacks on mailed ballots, a top administration official said Tuesday.
“The White House is working on an executive order to strengthen our elections in this country and to ensure that there cannot be blatant fraud, as we’ve seen in California with their universal mail-in voting system,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
“Like any executive order, of course, any executive order the president signs is within his full executive authority and within the confines of the law,” she added.
Asked by a reporter what is her evidence of electoral fraud in California, Leavitt replied without evidence that “it’s just a fact.”
Leavitt’s remarks came hours after Trump baselessly attacked California’s vote-by-mail system in a post on his Truth Social network.
“The Unconstitutional Redistricting Vote in California is a GIANT SCAM in that the entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED,” Trump alleged without evidence. “All ‘Mail-In’ Ballots, where the Republicans in that State are ‘Shut Out,’ is under very serious legal and criminal review. STAY TUNED!”
Trump has previously vowed to ban mail-in ballots, a move legal experts say would be unconstitutional.
The White House’s announcement also came as Americans voted in several high-stakes elections, including California’s Proposition 50 retaliatory redistricting proposal; the New York City mayoral race between progressive Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and Republican Curtis Sliwa; gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia; and a crowded contest for Minneapolis mayor highlighted by democratic socialist state Sen. Omar Fateh’s (D-62) bid to unseat third-term Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey.
The announcement also followed a federal judge’s permanent blocking of part of Trump’s executive order requiring proof of US citizenship on federal voter registration forms.
Democracy defenders have repudiated Trump’s attacks on mailed ballots and claims of voter fraud—a longtime right-wing bugaboo unsupported by facts on the ground.
“Voting by mail as permitted by the laws of your state is legal,” ACLU Voting Rights Project director Sophia Lin Lakin says in a statementon the group’s website about Trump’s order from March.
“In his sweeping executive order, Trump tried to bully states into not counting ballots properly received after Election Day under state law by threatening to withhold federal funding,” she continues. “A federal court has temporarily blocked this part of the executive order.”
“Trump’s effort to target mail-in voting is a blatant overreach, intruding on states’ constitutional authority to set the rules for elections,” Lin Lakin adds. “It threatens to disenfranchise tens of millions of eligible voters and would no doubt disproportionately impact historically excluded communities, including voters of color, naturalized citizens, people with disabilities, and the elderly, by pushing unnecessary barriers to the fundamental right to vote.”
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AN 10 25
A recent unanimous ruling against one of President Donald Trump's key policies suggests that the Supreme Court may have overplayed its hand, making rebels out of conservative lower court judges.
That's according to Slate legal correspondents Mark Joseph Stern and Dahlia Lithwick, who argued on Monday that last week's 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling preventing Trump from deploying the National Guard in Illinois may have been rooted in animus against how the nation's highest court has treated lower courts. That 7th Circuit ruling upheld a previous ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, in which the Trump administration's assertion that calling the guard was necessary to quell a "rebellion" in Chicago failed to convince the court to let him move forward with the deployment. The 3-0 panel even included Trump appointee Amy St. Eve.
Lithwick and Stern observed that the district court stage of litigation is typically seen as the "fact-finding" part of a legal case. And appellate court judges in those respective circuits are usually bound to accept the facts of the district courts unless they were proven to be erroneous.
The experts then pivoted to the Supreme Court's habit during Trump's second term of overturning lower court rulings, often in emergency docket or "shadow docket" rulings that contain no rationale or explanation for their decisions.
"I’m wondering if it was an unforced error by the U.S. Supreme Court to treat lower courts — their findings of fact, their efforts to do hard doctrinal work under unbelievably challenging circumstances — with hostility or overt contempt," Lithwick said. "I find myself wondering if the court, particularly over the summer, made a lot of enemies by using dismissive rhetoric, and now in a lot of ways emboldening judges to say: Not today, Satan. Don’t lie to me."
Stern agreed, saying: "[W]e are starting to see some conservative judges on the lower courts bristle at the way that the Supreme Court is treating them and their colleagues."
"It seems to me that the Supreme Court has fomented an 'us vs. them' dynamic with the lower courts. It’s presenting itself as the final arbiter of all facts on the ground, ignoring its obligation to defer to what the district court believes is happening in the real world," Stern said. "The Supreme Court has decided: We know everything, we have a crystal ball, we are omnipresent and omnipotent. That arrogance doesn’t just offend the lower courts’ egos — it undercuts the work they see as their duty, especially the careful establishment of facts. So when the Supreme Court treats fact-finding as optional, maybe judges like St. Eve respond by making it decisive. They’re not just fact-checking, they’re reality-checking."
Click here to read Lithwick and Stern's full analysis in Slate (subscription required).
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10 25 AN
ACTIVIST FELONY
GRAND JURY 3X NO BILL, MISDEMENOR TOSSED AFTER 2 HR DELIB
'Throw the book at people': Judges and lawyers say Jeanine Pirro has 'no credibility left'
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AN 10 25
In the case Abrego Garcia v. Noem, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) under Attorney General Pam Bondi is requesting a pause in Salvadoran immigrant Kilmar Ábrego García's deportation battle. But on Monday, October 6, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis denied that request and ruled against delaying the case because of the "important fundamental questions" involved.
"I'm just duty-bound to continue it," Xinis told attorneys.
Bloomberg News' Zoe Tillman reports, "The Salvadoran migrant's situation and complicated legal proceedings have emerged as a symbol of the Trump Administration's hardline — and hotly contested — immigration policies. He rose to prominence after he filed a high-profile lawsuit in March challenging his wrongful deportation to a notorious prison in El Salvador…. The (Trump) Administration's attorneys have secured extensions in a number of cases with little fanfare, but in some, such as Ábrego García's case, they've faced pushback from judges and opposing counsel who contend that some matters are too time-sensitive to delay."
García and his attorneys are fighting his deportation from the U.S. and efforts by the Trump DOJ to send him to Eswatini, a country in Southern Africa. Formerly Swaziland, Eswatini shares borders with South Africa and Mozambique.
"Xinis is weighing whether to order Abrego Garcia released again," Tillman notes.
Judge Xinis' decision is generating some discussion on X, formerly Twitter.
Nurse Diana Prince wrote, "The entire apparatus of the American government is still targeting this one man — because of their inability to admit to their own mistake. That seems like totally normal behavior."
Fox News' Jake Gibson wrote, "Judge Xinis answered, 'We don't know when the funding will be reinstated. If I order the case to proceed, then you become bound to that order… and it is of such importance, not only to Mr. Abrego-Garcia… but also to some fundamental questions…I am duty bound to continue it."
X user @blanche1977 posted, "This guy is being made an example by the fascist element of the Trump DOJ. He should not be deported."
Another X user, Sam, Your Uncle, tweeted, "So the lawyers aren't getting paid either" — to which computer engineer Jake Halloran responded, "No, only constitutional jobs are paid. Congress, president, [VP] and article 3 judges."
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:{an 9 25
US President Donald Trump is on a losing streak this week. Just look at the latest judicial decisions challenging his policies, from mass deportations to tariffs to his troop deployments to US cities.
The courts are proving to be a significant check on Trump’s thirst for absolute power.
These cases illustrate the point:
Immigration
Over Labor Day weekend, Immigration and Customs Enforcement attempted to begin deporting up to 700 unaccompanied Guatemalan children. In the dead of night, the first children were loaded onto planes in south Texas. “These are unaccompanied children who do not have a parent or a guardian with them,” Efrén Olivares, an attorney representing the minors, said on the *Democracy Now!*news hour.
At 1:00 am on Sunday morning, Olivares and his colleagues filed an emergency complaint with the federal court in Washington, DC. Judge Sparkle Sooknanam was woken after 2:00 am, and by 4:00 am she issued a temporary restraining order blocking the deportations until the children had the immigration hearings to which they have a legal right.
Meanwhile in Texas, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, considered the nation’s most conservative, ruled that Trump’s use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport people was illegal.
Tariffs
The Appeals Court in Washington DC ruled that Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs were illegal and unconstitutional, noting that only Congress has the power to impose tariffs. The ruling was “a sweeping decision that unequivocally rebukes President Trump’s idea that he can impose tariffs on American consumers on his own,” Neal Katyal, the attorney who argued the case, said on *Democracy Now!*
Domestic Deployment of the Military
Trump says, “We’re going in,” threatening to invade Chicago using, among other forces, the Texas National Guard.
But in California, a federal judge, invoking the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act that bars the use of military in domestic law enforcement, ruled in favor of Gov. Gavin Newsom, finding Trump’s deployment of the California National Guard to the streets of Los Angeles, along with several hundred US Marines, was illegal. Judge Charles Breyer, the brother of retired US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, issued an injunction barring the Trump administration from “deploying, ordering, instructing, training, or using the National Guard currently deployed in California, and any military troops [from] engaging in arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants.”
These are just a few of the recent court cases that have rebuked Trump as he attempts to subvert the US Constitution.
We recently got a personal glimpse into what judicial wins over Trump look like. In the high mountain air of Telluride, Colorado, we had a chance to spend time with E. Jean Carroll, the renowned advice columnist and journalist. She was at the Telluride Film Festival for the premier of the new documentary, Ask E. Jean.
Carroll had a long and storied career as the advice columnist forElle Magazine, and has published several books. In recent years she became known as one of the most prominent women to accuse Donald Trump of sexual abuse, saying he raped her in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s, in Manhattan.
The courts are playing a central role in opposing the lawless Trump administration, but the core of the resistance are people.
Carroll sued Trump in civil court, and a jury found him guilty of sexually abusing her. Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote, “Trump did in fact ‘rape’ Ms. Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood.” She was awarded a $5 million settlement from Trump. After the verdict, he called her a liar. She then sued for defamation, and won an additional jury award of $83.3 million.
Carroll cut an elegant figure, walking along Telluride’s main avenue with the sweeping Continental Divide as a backdrop. Her film premiered to rave reviews, and, should there remain a film distributor in this country not cowed by threats of lawsuits from Trump, it should be available for viewing by a wide audience. The film highlights the story of one courageous woman refusing to be defined as a victim of Donald Trump, providing inspiration, no doubt, to the hundreds of survivors of Trump’s old friend, the now-dead sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. Many of them spoke this week outside the US Capitol, demanding the full release of the Epstein files. The Trump administration, which controls the files, is resisting.
Behind each lawsuit are impacted people, whether immigrant children pulled from their beds in the middle of the night and thrown on planes, or people standing up in the streets of LA confronting illegally deployed troops, whether sexual abuse survivors banding together, or federal workers fired en masse.
The courts are playing a central role in opposing the lawless Trump administration, but the core of the resistance are people–people at every level organized in opposition, defending democracy.
NOW READ:Trump's horrific cult contains the seeds of its own destruction
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an 8 25
Atlantic writer Quinta Jurecic reports Trump’s plan to use the DOJ for revenge against protesters and Democratic politicians is not going as well as he’d like.
“The Justice Department has been slow to move forward with the investigations Trump demanded, hemmed in by the constraints of the legal system,” writes Jurecic. “… American criminal law appears to be a less flexible tool in the hands of an authoritarian than Trump hoped — at least for now.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi may be ready to carry out Trump’s “personal-retribution project” with investigations of the Obama administration and former prosecutor Jack Smith, says Jurecic, but a prosecutor still requires a jury to issue an indictment, and to do that the prosecutor has to make a convincing case. This is usually easy, but Jurecic says the “administration keeps tripping up.”
READ MORE: 'That's how this ends': George Conway reveals 'the only way' to stop Trump's 'gangsterism'
Acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli filed more than 35 felony prosecutions against June protestors against ICE raids in Los Angeles, but they only managed to persuade grand juries to indict some of them. Later, his office dismissed eight of his own indictments and downgraded others to misdemeanors after “falling short at the grand jury stage” according to the LA Times.
By comparison, Jurecic reports only six refusals by grand juries to indict suspects across the nation in 2016 — out of roughly 180,000 cases.
Meanwhile, over on the east coast, prosecutors moved to dismiss U.S. Attorney Alina Habba’s trespassing charges against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka after he attempted to visit an ICE detention facility. The judge in that case slammed Habba’s office so hard for trying to press the charges that Baraka could be heard saying: “Jesus, he tore these people a new a——.”
READ MORE: 'Severe pushback': House Republicans fear constituent revolt over divisive new proposal
And Jurecic reports Bondi appears to be “struggling” to pursue Trump’s demand to prosecute people involved in perpetrating what Trump calls the “Russia hoax.”
“The biggest challenge there is that there was no hoax,” said Jurecic, “as both Special Counsel Robert Mueller and a bipartisan Senate intelligence report concluded, Russia really did try to help Trump win the 2016 election.”
Jurecic said it looks like Bondi“was caught unawares” by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s release of documents related to the “hoax” from 2016, and “displeased about the political pressure from the right to launch an investigation in response.”
“All Bondi appears to have done is ask prosecutors to possibly present grand jurors with evidence, with no clear deadline,” said Jurecic, despite “exciting” Fox News headlines.
READ MORE: 'Don’t see that happening': Crockett calls Republicans' bluff on controversial Trump move
And regarding the investigation of Smith, Jurecic says the “harshest penalty that the Office of Special Counsel could demand would be Smith’s dismissal from government service, but he has already resigned.”
“A jury is in essence a democratic institution, requiring citizens to exercise their judgment in a model of shared deliberation that is at odds with Trump’s autocratic tendencies,” said Jurecic. “… So far, that system has held up against Trump’s encroachment. But the rapid erosion of democratic life in the United States over the past six months is a reminder of how quickly things can change.”
Read the full Atlantic report at this link.
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an 7 25
former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-California) hasn't been shy about filing defamation lawsuits that many legal experts considered frivolous according to the standards outlined in U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 1964 ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan. In April 2023, U.S. District Court Judge C.J. Williams threw out a Nunes lawsuit against Esquire. And in 2020, Judge John Marshall ruled that Nunes couldn't sue two parody accounts on X, formerly Twitter (one of which was named Devin Nunes' Cow and mocked him from the perspective of a fictional cow).
Nunes also sued NBC/Universal in response to comments from top-rated host Rachel Maddow. But on Friday, August 1, U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel dismissed that lawsuit, ruling that Nunes failed to show actual malice.
In New York Times v. Sullivan, the Warren Court ruled that libel has to involve actual malice — a ruling that, 61 years ago, countless journalists and legal experts hailed as a major victory for the First Amendment and freedom of the press.
READ MORE: Don't 'have any other choice': Outrage grows in the midwest as political crisis spirals
Castel's ruling is generating a lot of comments on X, formerly Twitter.
Reuters Jonathan Landay noted that Nunes' lawsuit involved "a comment by Rachel Maddow about his dealings with a suspected Russian agent."
X user EJW commented, "Perpetual Loser Nunes — loses again."
Another X user, Sadie NYC, wrote, "Sucks to be you dude. Trump Media CEO Nunes loses defamation lawsuit over Rachel Maddow show."
READ MORE:'Middle-aged Manson girls': Far-right 'bloodthirsty' MAGA women mocked in scathing take-down
Politico's Josh Gerstein observed, "BREAKING: Judge tosses fmr Rep. Nunes' libel suit re MSNBC report on handling of package from Russia-linked legislator. Maddow & producer said they relied on POLITICO report suggesting Nunes sat on package, didn't see later 1 saying he gave it to FBI."
X user Bill Thatcher wrote, "@DevinNunes Such an insecure little weenie. Did she hurt your little feelings?! Devin, the continuing poster boy for thin-skin, low IQ, politically deaf white boys."
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an 7 25
On Tuesday, a federal judge issued a 128-page ruling striking down President Donald Trump's ban on asylum applications for immigrants crossing the Southern border of the United States that he issued earlier this year via executive order. Some of Trump's most outspoken supporters are furious over the decision.
U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss — who former President Barack Obama appointed to the District of Columbia in 2014 — ruled that Trump's asylum ban violated the Immigration and Naturalization Act (INA) and was an illegal attempt to install an "extra-statutory, extra-regulatory regime for repatriating or removing individuals from the United States." He added that "nothing in the INA or the Constitution grants the President or his delegees the sweeping authority asserted in the Proclamation and implementing guidance."
According to Politico legal correspondent Kyle Cheney, Judge Moss also designated asylum seekers as a protected class. This would appear to insulate his ruling from the recent Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decision that prevented lower court judges from issuing nationwide injunctions.
READ MORE:'Can anyone spell recession?' Trump slammed as jobs report stuns economists
Moss' decision was met with widespread outrage by Trump supporters on social media. MAGA influencer Gunther Eagleman characterized Moss' ruling as "ordering President Trump to reopen the border," adding: "Ignore this political HACK!" Charlie Kirk, who is the founder of far-right group Turning Point USA, also blasted the decision in a post to his X account.
"There are a lot of conservatives who recklessly call for judicial rulings they don't like to be ignored. I have fought against that; it would be hugely destructive to throw out our constitutional balance of powers for the sake of a temper tantrum," Kirk tweeted. "But it is 100% not acceptable for a traitor on the federal bench to side with invaders in abolishing America. Period."
Far-right influencer Chaya Raichik's LibsofTikTok X account, which has more than four million followers, also piled on after Moss' decision was announced. She accused Moss of being an "activist judge who wants to turn the US into a Biden-era open border disaster."
Even though Moss has been a member of the D.C. District Court for more than a decade, his legal career stretches back nearly 40 years, when he was a clerk for U.S. District Judge Pierre Leval (an appointee of Democrat Bill Clinton) in 1986 in the Southern District of New York. He then clerked for SCOTUS Associate Justice John Paul Stevens (an appointee of Republican Gerald Ford) in the late eighties.
READ MORE:Republicans 'facing real general election problems' over Trump Medicaid cuts: ex-GOP rep
Click here to read Moss' full ruling.
texas 1o comm all classrm 6 25 ~
'Not a theocracy': Internet erupts after court blocks Louisiana's Ten Commandments law
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an 6 25
After Donald Trump lost the United States' 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden, MAGA attorney and far-right conspiracy theorist John C. Eastman did everything he could to help Trump overturn the election results. Eastman, an aggressive promoter of the Stop the Steal movement, is a close ally of the Claremont Institute — often promoting fringe legal theories that are rejected by traditional conservatives.
Many MAGA Republicans consider Eastman one of the intellectual thinkers of their movement. But he is facing disbarment in California, and according to jurisprudence professor Austin Sarat (who teaches at Amherst College in Massachusetts) and attorney Neil Goteiner, his problems are going from bad to worse.
In an article published by Salon on June 18, Sarat and Goteiner explain, "Friday, June 13, was a truly unlucky day for John Eastman, a key architect of President Trump's plot to disrupt the results of the 2020 presidential election. A California appellate court, charged with reviewing recommendations to discipline lawyers in that state, affirmed the findings of a trial judge and recommended that Eastman 'be disbarred from the practice of law in California and that Eastman's name be stricken from the roll of attorneys.'"
READ MORE: 'It's disgusting': Senators blast one of their own as blood boils over social media posts
Sarat and Goteiner continue, "The judges found that his work on the 2020 election case was shoddy and deceptive. 'Disbarment,' they said, 'is necessary to protect the public, the courts, and the legal profession.' For any lawyer, this is a professional death sentence. But the court's decision is not only a devastating blow to Eastman, but also, to the Trumpist myth that the 2020 presidential election was stolen…. The Eastman case demonstrates again that misinformation and lies collapse in a courtroom where facts and evidence rule "
In 2025, Eastman, Sarat and Goteiner observe, continues to claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. And his problems, they point out, are bad news not only for Eastman, but also, for the MAGA legal movement in general.
"Eastman will likely appeal to the California Supreme Court and, if he loses there, eventually to the U.S. Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds," Sarat and Goteiner argue. "It is also possible that when the next Supreme Court vacancy occurs, Trump may nominate Eastman. After all, if we can have a convicted felon in the White House, why not a disbarred, but loyal, lawyer on the nation’s highest court?"
READ MORE:'It shocks the conscience': Senate Republicans dump gas on 'five-alarm fire'
The legal experts continue, "Whatever unfolds for Eastman, and despite the profound damage that Trump's election denialism has done to American democracy, the Eastman case compellingly illustrates Alexander Hamilton’s confidence that this nation is well served by an independent judiciary."
READ MORE:Trump now faces the same terrible choice
*Austin Sarat and attorney Neil Goteiner's full article for Salon is available at this link.
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AN 5 25
MAGA is outraged today after a three-judge panel struck down the brunt of President Donald Trump’s "Liberation Day" tariffs. The panel ruled that the tariffs Trump imposed under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA) were "unlawful” and that the power to impose tariffs lies with Congress. The three-judge panel also ruled that the president cannot usurp the power of Congress in this matter by invoking an emergency.
The panel from the Court of International Trade consists of judges appointed by Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
Nevertheless, right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk called the people behind the ruling “activist judges.”
“What is even the point of having a president?!” Kirk posted. “FACT CHECK: While the Constitution grants Congress the power to impose tariffs, Congress delegated much of that power to the Executive Branch in the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which allows for adjustments to tariff rates without needing Congressional action. Courts have given the executive branch broad authority to negotiate trade, that is until now.”
READ MORE: 'Everyone is afraid to tell him': Trump brutally mocked following 'meltdown' with reporter
“Judicial activism strikes again,” posted another X user, who was quick to point out that the three judge panel ruled from a “New York-based Court.” “Three unelected judges apparently wield more power than the President of the United States.”
Most of the negative reactions decried the corruption of “activist” or “unelected” judges.
“The federal court’s decision to block Trump’s tariffs exposes judicial overreach at its worst,” wrote X user Jesse Cohen. “Unelected judges overriding executive authority to protect globalist interests? Classic D.C. swamp behavior.”
“OMG, THE JUDICIAL TAKEOVER IS ALMOST COMPLETE!” wrote right-wing podcaster Mark Levin.
READ MORE: Donald Trump finally faces his reckoning
But while reaction from MAGA accounts burned with anger, other business-minded conservative accounts said either nothing or accepted the ruling with composure.
The X account of best-selling author Dave Ramsey, who built a prolific career on offering financial advice had nothing to say about the judicial panel decision.
Other pro-business accounts, including ruby-red Republican strategist Russ Latino, asked audiences to see the upside of the ruling.
“A few positives: 1. Your daughter can have more than 2 dolls. 2. Small businesses in your community that rely on imports, with tight margins, may not have to declare bankruptcy. 3. One day, when someone you don’t like is in the Oval Office, their power will be limited,” Latino posted.
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AN 5 25 STATES N
Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump, with the help of billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has sought to vastly reduce the number of government workers through mass firings, drawing concern, criticism and several legal challenges.
According to a report from Reuters, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, an advisory body created through an executive order, has prompted the firing, severance and early retirement of more than 260,000 government employees. However, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston has issued a temporary restraining order, blocking efforts to restructure the federal government.
In March, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his own DOGE-related cuts, aiming to terminate 20,000 full time employees and reorganize the department’s 28 divisions to 15. The department has also closed its regional offices in Boston, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco and Seattle, halving its total regional facilities.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services, testifies during his Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Jan. 29, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
However, a coalition of 20 attorneys general, including Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, have taken legal action against Kennedy and several department officials, arguing these cuts would functionally dismantle the DHHS.
If the court doesn’t provide immediate relief, and the case is allowed to play out, Nessel warned that these cuts could cause “immeasurable harm” to the nation and its health system.
“You’re essentially leaving the agency, as a whole, completely dysfunctional by eliminating so many departments or regions, you know entire offices just wiped off the map and, of course, getting rid of some people with some incredible expertise,” Nessel told the Michigan Advance
The DHHS is eliminating roughly 3,500 employees at the Food and Drug Administration, 2,400 at the Centers for Disease Control, 1,200 at the National Institutes of Health and 300 at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
It will also work to consolidate the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, Health Resources and Services Administration, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health under the new Administration for a Healthy America.
Public health and infectious diseases know no borders, Nessel said, warning that the decision to shutter regional health programs, close CDC labs and close all 10 of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services’ regional offices jeopardizes public health in every community.
“Also it’s just a flagrant violation of the law. Disregards the separation of powers, and it places this new burden now, of course, on the states, because there are certain things that you rely upon the federal government to do, especially in terms of coordinating efforts between the states,” Nessel said.
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“Let’s say you have an outbreak of a new variant in bird flu that could impact the entire country. Maybe that happens in Vermont. Is Vermont supposed to coordinate that response with Michigan? You know, it’s the CDC that does that. How are we supposed to make up for that?” Nessel questioned.
While the state has its own lab testing capabilities, the federal government and its labs act as a conduit for sharing data with the states and across the nation, as well as monitoring other countries.
“They fill this incredibly important role in terms of preventing the next global pandemic and mitigating it here in Michigan. And it’s a burden that, frankly, the state simply can’t sustain. It’s the reason why we have a federal government,” Nessel said.
Additionally, it’s the federal government’s job to ensure its laws are enforced, Nessel said, and Congress delegates money to ensure those laws are complied with. Deciding to withhold those funds and cut staffing without regard for which workers are essential, and shutting down offices without regard for whether the department can continue to comply with federal law not only violates the law and the Constitution in a myriad of ways, Nessel contends, but it compromises the safety and health of people in Michigan.
While Kennedy said the intent of the cuts was to address waste and inefficiency within the department, Nessel said the argument doesn’t hold water due to the way the DHHS approached its firings.
“It’s not as if it took any significant period of time to evaluate, you know, is this really a necessary function of the government, and do we really need this to fulfill the mission of this agency? There were no determinations of any kind made like that” Nessel said, pointing to comments Kennedy made to the media where he admitted 20% of cuts at the agency were a mistake, and would need to be reinstated.
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he had forgone a line-by-line review of each employee’s jobs because “it takes too long, and you lose political momentum.”
Among those cuts were doctors and the administrator of the World Trade Center Health program, which certify illnesses in first responders and survivors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks as part of the requirements of the Zadroga Act, with the New York Daily News reporting nearly all 16 employees cut from the program had been rehired as of May 7, including the program’s director, James Howard.
“If you were more careful and cautious before you fired them in the first place, maybe we wouldn’t have this issue,” Nessel said.
The case filed by the attorneys general points to several other examples of offices impacted by the cuts, including the Food and Drug Administration missing a vaccine application deadline and canceling a critical test for the bird flu virus, suspending the testing program for a year.
The case also points to Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views and history of promoting misinformation about vaccination.
According to the filing, some FDA employees were told to go home following the March 27 downsizing announcement and prepare for the possibility that they would not be back. If they received a termination email, they would lose access to the building.
“Beginning in the early morning of April 1, 2025, HHS employees in all offices, administrations, agencies and sub-agencies began to receive termination notices. Some employees had not seen their early morning termination email before leaving for the office, and were surprised when they arrived at work to find their access cards had been deactivated,” the case reads.
“Many notices contained errors. For example, some listed incorrect information about workers’ recent performance ratings. At FDA, the listed point of contact for the Equal Employment Opportunity office had departed a month earlier,” it says.
While this case doesn’t directly address that lack of support and protection for employees, several unions and groups of federal employees have taken legal action on these concerns.
“It’s embarrassing and disturbing to see any workers treated like this, but especially, you know, ones that have worked so hard to protect the American people,” Nessel said.
She also pointed to the ways these firings would impact the economy, calling them “penny wise but pound foolish.”
In the announcement, Kennedy promised to lower costs for taxpayers, with the 10,000 person layoff expected to cut down on $1.8 billion a year. However, Nessel said these costs would crop up in other ways.
“What has a bigger impact on the economy than people’s health, you know? If people are too sick to be able to work, that’s a problem,” Nessel said, noting that widespread infectious disease can have a devastating impact on the economy.
“It’s not just that we’re not really saving money. We’re going to lose an unknown amount of money, an untold amount of money, if people who could otherwise have been healthy are not healthy,” Nessel said.
While Michigan is still assembling its state-specific declarations, these firings will also impact the state’s efforts on issues like mental health and create issues in how they distribute resources within their budgets, Nessel said.
“If we’re trying to prioritize and say, ‘Well, how much money are we going to spend on substance abuse, or how much money are we going to spend on mental health treatment?’ It’s kind of important to know how much of it you’re going to get from the federal government. And because this is done in such a chaotic manner, it’s really hard to know,” Nessel said.
In addition to their case on the mass firings, Nessel and 23 other attorneys general filed suit against Kennedy and the DHHS for terminating almost $11 billion in critical public health grants across the country.
That includes $379.3 million in grant funding awarded and owed to the State of Michigan for certain mental health and substance abuse grants and grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention meant to support infectious disease control and vaccinations for children and vulnerable adults, among other programs.
Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor for questions: info@michiganadvance.com.
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// DOJ LIARS CONSTANT SAY I DO NOT KNOW
'Embarrassment:' Trump admin asks judge to hide it's tactics for mass layoffs
AN 5 25
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4 25
4TH DISTR? TRUMP JUDGE ORDER RET OF 2ND CECOT
EVEN TERRY DOUGHTY?!
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NOTUS
April 29, 2025
A federal judge in D.C. on Tuesday blocked the White House from immediately exerting control over NPR and PBS just a day after President Donald Trump claimed to have the authority to fire most of the directors overseeing their parent company, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss forbade the Trump administration from replacing three board members without providing at least two days’ notice to give the court time to potentially step in....
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AN 4 25
On Tuesday night, President Donald Trump's administration suffered a loss in court — this time, at the hands of one of his own appointed judges.
Politico legal correspondent Kyle Cheney tweeted Tuesday that U.S. District Judge Mary S. McElroy, who Trump appointed to the District of Rhode Island in 2019, authored a ruling that overruled his funding freeze for multiple federal agencies. In her 63-page ruling, McElroy granted a preliminary injunction in favor of a coalition of nonprofit organizations suing the Trump administration allowing them to have their funding turned back on while litigation plays out.
"The judiciary does not and cannot decide whether [Trump's] policies are sound," she wrote. "But where the federal courts are constitutionally required to weigh in — meaning we, by law, have no choice but to do so — are cases 'about the procedure' (or lack thereof) that the Government follows in trying to enact those policies."
READ MORE:'Rein in this dictator': Red state constituents confront GOP senator at tense town hall
McElroy said the plaintiffs correctly sued the administration under the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), under an argument that federal money already appropriated by Congress during former President Joe Biden's administration by law had to go to its designated payees. She noted that while "elections have consequences" and administrations have a right to implement their own policies, they don't have the right to shut off money after Congress put it in legislation that was signed into law.
"Agencies do not have unlimited authority to further a President’s agenda, nor do they have unfettered power to hamstring in perpetuity two statutes passed by Congress during the previous administration," she wrote.
The Trump-appointed judge additionally quoted Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, saying he "put it best" when he wrote: "Justice [Oliver Wendell] Holmes famously wrote that 'men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.' But it is also true, particularly when so much is at stake, that the Government should turn square corners in dealing with the people."
"Here, the Government failed to do so," McElroy wrote in her ruling.
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AN 4 25
Legal journalist Chris Geidner reports U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan agreed to temporarily block a Trump administration directive, while describing the directive as against the ideals of the nation’s founding fathers.
"Frankly, I think the framers of our Constitution would see this as a shocking abuse of power," AliKhan said, according to Geidner. "While I wish other firms were not capitulating ... I admire Susman [and others challenging Trump's acts]."
Law firm Susman Godfrey launched a suit against the administration after Trump retaliated against it for its role in litigating for plaintiff Dominion Voting Systems in a defamation case against Fox News. That case, challenging false claims that Democrats stole the 2020 election from Trump, ultimately ended in victory. Fox News settled for nearly $1 billion.
READ MORE: 'Rein in this dictator': Red state constituents confront GOP senator at tense town hall
The White House accuses several firms of "weaponizing" the legal system, claiming they have a connection to Trump’s legal and political adversaries, and they work on voting rights and other cases Trump personally opposes. The administration also seeks to punish firms over employment policies that encourage diversity.
Since taking office, Trump has been issuing executive orders and memos punishing major law firms by suspending security clearances, canceling government contracts, and barring employees from federal buildings, among other retaliatory tactics.
Nine firms, including Paul Weiss, Skadden Arps and Simpson Thacher have already cut deals with the White House to avoid threats to their right to conduct business. Many have pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in free legal work to Trump’s personal political and legal causes.
Judge AliKhan became the 4th judge to grant a temporary restraining order against the president’s retaliatory executive orders, finding the EO against Susman “retaliatory and discriminates based on viewpoint,” which is a First Amendment violation.
READ MORE:Legal expert details 'nightmare' that lies ahead if Trump uses 'military against Americans'
"Nothing in the order shows a compelling interest," Geidner reported the judge saying. She also found the order likely violates the Fifth Amendment right to due process.
See Geidner’s post at this link.
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thehill
Trump administration Friday demanded a federal judge step aside from overseeing Perkins Coie’s challenge to President Trump’s executive order targeting the law firm.
The new filing claims U.S. District Judge Beryl Howellhas repeatedly demonstrated “partiality” against and “animus” toward Trump, taking aim at both her decisions in the lawsuit and previous major cases she oversaw.
“Reasonable observers may view this Court as incapable of fairly adjudicating these claims against the Commander-In-Chief,” Deputy Associate Attorney General Richard Lawson wrote in the motion.
It marks the second time the Justice Department has called for a judge’s removal from a pending lawsuit against the administration, which comes as Trump himself steps up his chastising of judges who rule against him. Earlier this week, the administration called for the removal of the judge overseeing a high-profile deportation flight case.
Howell was randomly assigned to oversee Perkins Coie’s lawsuit challenging Trump’s executive order restricting firm attorneys’ security clearances and access to federal facilities. Trump has long clashed with the firm over its work advising Hillary Clintonduring her 2016 presidential campaign and connections to the discredited Steele dossier that contained unflattering allegations about Trump and his connections to Russia.
The case remains in early stages, but the judge has already temporarily blocked part of Trump’s order.
Nominated to the federal bench by then-President Obamain 2010, Howell longhasdrawn Republicans’ ire.
She previously served as chief judge of Washington’s federal district court and oversaw several sealed disputes concerning the criminal investigations into Trump. Howell’s decisions included invoking the “crime-fraud” exception to provide special counsel Jack Smith with documents from one of Trump’s attorneys and holding X, then known as Twitter, in contempt for not handing over Trump’s private messages.
“This Court’s pattern of hostility toward President Trump is not limited to his supporters. It also utilized the judicial power against President Trump himself,” Lawson wrote.
The Justice Department’s new motion also takes aim at a gala speech Howell gave in 2023 while accepting an award, when the judge did not name Trump but indicated she agreed that the country was “at a crossroads teetering on the brink of authoritarianism.”
“We are having a very surprising and downright troubling moment in this country when the very importance of facts is dismissed or ignored,” Howell said.
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AN 3 25
The U.S. Supreme Court delivered at least a temporary blow to President Donald Trump on Wednesday by refusing to overrule a lower court order that said approximately $2 billion in U.S. foreign aid funding ordered frozen by the administration should be resumed.
The 5-4 ruling, issued by Chief Justice John Roberts, paves the way for organizations and programs worldwide working in conjunction or with grants from the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to receive those funds already appropriated by Congress.
The legal team challenging the administration's move to block the funding celebrated the ruling.
“Today's ruling by the Supreme Court confirms that the administration cannot ignore the law," said Lauren Bateman, an attorney with Public Citizen Litigation Group and lead counsel in this case, said in response to the decision. "To stop needless suffering and death, the government must now comply with the order issued three weeks ago to lift its unlawful termination of federal assistance."
The center of the case that was before the high court stems from a lawsuit brought by nonprofit groups and NGOs impacted by the funding freeze, who argued that results were "devastating" for programing that "improves—and, in many cases, literally saves—the lives of millions of people across the globe."
In the suit, as CNNreports, the groups argued the administration's freezing of funds "usurped the power of Congress to control government spending and violated a federal law that dictates how agencies make decisions."
On February 13, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali, in a temporary restraining order, said the State Department and USAID must resume most of the funding while the case was under review, but the plaintiffs argued in a filing last week that little, if anything, had been done to comply with that order.
"The district court gave the government every opportunity to demonstrate what steps it was taking to release foreign-assistance funding, as the TRO required, and to explain any practical impediments it faced in pursuing compliance," the groups wrote in their filing."But even by the time of the district court's February 25 hearing—nearly two weeks after the TRO had issued—government counsel could not identify a single action the government had taken in the twelve days since the TRO to release frozen funds."
Wednesday's ruling by the Supreme Court did not make any judgment on the overall merits of the case that remains under review by the lower District Court.
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AN 2 25
Far-right House Republicans are pushing to impeach federal judges, alleging “high crimes and misdemeanors” in response to rulings that opposed actions by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). One congressman denounced a judge as a “predator” and a “radical anti-LGBTQ activist,” while another argued that blocking DOGE reflected bias against Trump voters. A third asserted that Congress has the “authority to impeach judges to defend the will of the people.”
Courthouse News reporter Benjamin S. Weiss notes that three federal judges have been targeted for impeachment by multiple members of Congress.
Senior U.S. District Judge John Bates
On Monday, *:{*U.S. Rep. Andy Ogles** (R-TN) made unsubstantiated accusations against Senior Judge John Bates, a Bush appointee serving on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Judge Bates was also appointed by Chief Justice John Roberts to serve on the FISA Court and to serve as the Director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.}:
READ MORE: ‘Axis of Evil’: U.S. Slammed for Voting with Russia, North Korea Against Ukraine at UN
“I just formally introduced articles of impeachment against RADICAL LGBTQ ACTIVIST U.S. District Judge John Bates. His attempt to block President Trump’s order to remove webpages containing resources for ‘gender-affirming care’ from government sites is appalling,” Congressman Ogles declared.
“At no point in American history has the judiciary considered the surgical or chemical castration of healthy children to be a compelling or even legitimate health concern and it shouldn’t start now,” he alleged, wrongly framing the judge’s actions. “We must protect our children from predators like Judge Bates.”
According to an extensive report in The Washington Post, however, Judge Bates had “ordered the nation’s premier health agencies to restore online access to several websites that monitor HIV, health risks for youths and assisted reproductive technologies, which were abruptly taken offline to ensure they complied with President Donald Trump’s recent executive order on gender.”
Judge Bates wrote in his opinion: “By removing long relied upon medical resources without explanation, it is likely that … each agency failed to ‘examine the relevant data and articulate a satisfactory explanation for its action.’”
The Post adds that Bates found “that the health agencies probably violated federal law in taking down the scientific data. He ordered the agencies to restore access to the websites.”
In a video posted to social media (below), however, Rep. Ogles insisted the webpages Bates ordered restored were about “transgender surgeries.” In a press release attacking Judge Bates, Ogles went even further in wrongly characterizing the judge’s actions.
“The continued socialization of this grave moral evil necessitates immediate Congressional action against those promoting it. America’s founders gave Congress the authority to impeach judges to defend the will of the people,” Congressman Ogles falsely claimed. The founders did not give Congress authority to impeach judges to defend the will of the people. “My articles will do just that. It is unacceptable for rogue judges to implicate taxpayers in woke LGBTQ propaganda and the irreversible destruction of children’s bodies.”
U.S. District Chief Judge John “Jack” McConnell Jr.
**U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde** (R-GA) has “threatened to file articles of impeachment” against U.S. District Chief Judge John “Jack” McConnell Jr. who, Fox News reports, “filed a motion ordering the Trump administration to comply with a previous restraining order. The order temporarily blocked the administration’s efforts to pause federal grants and loans.”
READ MORE: Trump Mass Firings May Be ‘Contrary’ to Law, Watchdog Rules
According to Fox News, “McConnell has since come under fire from Trump supporters and conservatives who have accused him of being a liberal activist after a 2021 video of him saying courts must ‘stand and enforce the rule of law, that is, against arbitrary and capricious actions by what could be a tyrant or could be whatnot’ resurfaced online.”
WPRI reports that Musk wrote on X: “Impeach this activist posing as a judge! Such a person does great discredit to the American justice system,” and later, “Impeach this pseudo-jurist!!”
U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer
Last week, **U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden** (R-WI) filed articles of impeachment alleging U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer “engaged in judicial misconduct when he halted President Donald J. Trump’s Executive order establishing and implementing the President’s Department of Government Efficiency on purely political grounds, demonstrating clear bias and prejudice against the President and the 74,000,000 Americans who voted for him.”
Congressman Van Orden also charged the judge with “improper handling” of that case.
Reporting on the articles of impeachment, Bloomberg Law noted that **U.S. Rep. Eli Crane** (R-AZ) is also filing to impeach Judge Engelmayer.
In a press release, Congressman Crane says Judge Engelmayer “responded to an overtly political emergency request by 19 Democratic attorneys general aiming to prevent Trump administration officials from accessing a payment system within the Treasury Department.”
Bloomberg reported that the “acts against Engelmayer come after Musk called for judicial impeachments, in response to judges issuing court orders that blocked many Trump administration actions.”
During Musk’s Oval Office press conference, President Trump, Axios reported, had said, “Maybe we have to look at the judges because I think that’s a very serious violation.”
But it was Vice President JD Vance who perhaps made the most waves when he wrongly claimed that federal judges “aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
Watch Congressman Ogles’ video below or at this link.
===
FAIL AN 2 25
Without even conducting a hearing, a Mississippi judge ordered a local newspaper to remove an editorial criticizing local officials over a lack of transparency.
The Independent reported Wednesday that the Clarksdale Press-Register in Clarksdale, Mississippi has since deleted the editorial in question following an order handed down by Hinds County Chancery Court Judge Crystal Wise Martin. The editorial called out municipal leaders in Clarksdale for not properly notifying the public about a hearing on proposed tax increases. Judge Martin's order accused the paper of "reckless disregard of the truth," and asserted that the editorial disrupts the local government's "legitimate function to advocate for legislation they believe would help their municipality during this current legislative cycle."
"The notice was posted at city hall as required by law and said stated the city would 'give appropriate notice thereof to the media,'" the editorial read. "This newspaper was never notified. We know of no other media organization that was notified."
READ MORE:'Open season': Experts slam Trump's 'disgusting' lawsuit against Iowa newspaper and pollster
Seth Sterns, who is the director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told the Independent that the case was "uniquely egregious."
"It's hard to imagine a more unconstitutional order than one compelling a newspaper to take down an editorial critical of the government," he said. “And it’s particularly ironic when the editorial in question is about government secrecy undermining the public trust ... If anyone previously trusted the secretive officials involved in this censorship campaign, they shouldn't now.”
Clarksdale Mayor Chuck Espy (the son of former U.S Department of Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy) celebrated Judge Martin's ruling in a Facebook post, exclaiming that "the city of Clarksdale WON today!"
"The judge ruled in our favor that a newspaper cannot tell a malicious lie and not be held liable. The newspaper had to take down a false story that they printed," Espy wrote. "The only thing that I ask, that no matter what you print, just let it be the truth; be it good or bad. Thank you GOD for a judicial system.”
READ MORE:'We're going to go after the people in the media': Trump ally calls for prosecuting journalists
Click here to read the Independent's full report. And click here to read an archived version of the Press-Register's now-deleted editorial.
===
mma
02/13/25
02/13/25
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50 suits? 2 13 25
Big news in one of the six lawsuits Public Citizen has filed so far against the Trump regime.
We’re so busy suing Trump that we haven’t even had time to tell you much about this particular case.
Here are the basics:
- In order to apply for and participate in federal financial aid programs, students must submit sensitive personal information to the Department of Education and authorize the Department to access their tax records.
- The Department of Education retains this information for millions of current and former students and their family members.
- Under the federal Privacy Act, the Internal Revenue Code, and the Department of Education’s own regulations, access to these records is strictly controlled, and these records may be used only for specified purposes.
- Yet Elon Musk’s “DOGE” squad got access to the computer systems that house this data.
- Last Friday, Public Citizen — representing the University of California Student Association, with co-counsel at Student Defense — sued to block “DOGE” from perpetrating this massive, dangerous, and unprecedented invasion of privacy.
- “DOGE” has also infiltrated other federal agencies, including the Treasury Department. After we sued to stop that, the judge restricted “DOGE” access at least until a hearing in two weeks.
On Monday, we asked the judge to issue a temporary restraining order against what “DOGE” is attempting at the Department of Education.
Then — just yesterday afternoon — the judge issued an order restricting “DOGE” access at the Department of Education at least until February 17 while our lawsuit goes forward.
We will be back in court this Friday to make the case that “DOGE” should be locked out of the Department of Education permanently.
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the hill 2 25
the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will be kept out of the Department of Education’s systems until Feb. 17, in an agreement reached in a lawsuit brought by the University of California student government.
In a filing Tuesday, the student government and Education Department came to an agreement to keep all DOGE personnel out of the databases in order to obtain an extended briefing and hearing schedule.
U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss, an Obama-era appointee, approved the agreement between the two sides and the first hearing will be on Friday.
The students, represented by Public Citizen, a left-leaning consumer advocacy group, sued the federal agency Friday, arguing that allowing DOGE employees into the department’s database would violate federal privacy law and the Internal Revenue Code.
The Department of Education has sensitive information on millions of Americans and students.
“Defendants’ action granting DOGE-affiliated individuals continuous and ongoing access to that information for an unspecified period of time means that millions of Americans from all walks of life have no assurance that their sensitive information — and that of their parents and/or spouses — will receive the protection that federal law affords,” the lawsuit states.
Trump stopping Penny production; Obama supported initiative. Coin org fights Back
“And because Defendants’ actions and decisions are shrouded in secrecy, individuals do not have even basic information about what personal or financial information Defendants are sharing with outside parties or how their information is being used,” it continues.
The Hill has reached out to the Department of Education for comment.
The first target since DOGE gained access seems to be the Institute of Education Sciences, which has canceled 169 government contracts. DOGE also posted on social platform X that the Department of Education canceled “89 contracts worth $881mm” and “29 DEI training grants totaling $101mm,” referring to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
Similar deals to keep some DOGE employees out of agencies for a limited time have occurred in other lawsuits against federal departments such as the Treasury Department.
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Fox News lashes out at judge who ruled that the Trump administration lawlessly disregarded his order
Written by Helena Hind & Alicia Sadowski
:{Published 02/11/25
On February 10, U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell Jr. ruled that the Trump administration failed to comply with his previous order temporarily blocking a federal funding freeze and ordering the administration to release billions of dollars in federal grants.
McConnell’s ruling is the latest in a string of legal setbacks for Trump’s executive actions. Fox News has reacted to the rulings by attacking individual judges and claiming that the judicial branch is subverting the will of voters.
- ### Federal judge says that the Trump administration had not complied with his order unfreezing billions of dollars in federal grants
Federal judge John McConnell rules that the Trump administration is disobeying his order:
A federal judge said on Monday that the White House had defied his order to release billions of dollars in federal grants, marking the first time a judge has expressly declared that the Trump administration is disobeying a judicial mandate.
The ruling by Judge John J. McConnell Jr. in Rhode Island federal court ordered administration officials to comply with what the judge called “the plain text” of a ruling he issued on Jan. 29.
That order, he wrote, was “clear and unambiguous, and there are no impediments to the Defendants’ compliance." The NY Times, [2/10/25]
- ### Fox News criticized Judge McConnell and his ruling
- Guest and former George W. Bush administration official John Yoo characterized McConnell’s ruling as “another example of the courts trying to get into the middle of a fight between the president and the Congress.” Yoo described Trump’s actions as those of an “energetic executive,” claiming, “There is nothing wrong with the president saying, ‘I want to freeze spending now that I’ve come into office and see what's going on.’” Fox News, *America Reports*, [2/10/25]
- Laura Ingraham complained that McConnell, “an unelected Obama judge in Rhode Island,” ordered Trump to unfreeze federal spending “and stop a duly elected president from doing what the voters elected him to do. It is a scandal.” Ingraham said McConnell’s background is “as bad as you would imagine. McConnell once served as treasurer of the Rhode Island Democratic state committee and he donated more than $100k to liberal Democrats.” Later in the segment, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) suggested Trump “seek an extraordinary writ of mandamus” to stop “abusive action by a district judge midstream.” He urged Attorney General Pam Bondi to “consider all of these options because these judges are out of line. They don’t have the authority to go in and commandeer the presidency and undo the election of November 2024.” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [2/10/25]
- ### Fox News personalities launched attacks on other judges who have ruled on Trump’s executive actions
- Kayleigh McEnany claimed that the “Obama judge” who restricted access to Treasury Department data made the decision without precedent. She continued that the legal challenges prove Democrats “depend on bureaucracy” which is a “cash cow” for the party. Fox News, *Outnumbered*, [2/10/25]
- Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner asked if the challenges to Trump’s executive orders represented the “new lawfare.” Guest Phil Holloway claimed the rulings are an “anti-constitutional effort by the courts, in many of these cases, to simply substitute the judgment of an unelected judge for that of the duly elected president of the United States.” Fox News, *The Faulkner Focus*, [2/10/15]
- In response to host Will Cain’s question about the “legal challenges,” The Federalist’s Sean Davis attacked the “backwater judge in some blue enclave somewhere” arguing against presidential powers. Fox News, *The Will Cain Show*, [2/10/24]
//
- ### Matt Walsh: “The Trump administration should just ignore these judges and do what they're gonna do”
02/11/25 mma
dan Bongino argues that Trump “should ignore” court order blocking federal funding freeze 02/11/25
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an 2 25
'Small but important win': Court blocks Trump from sending some immigrants to Guantanamo
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AN 2 25
President Donald Trump has been back in the White House less than three weeks, and his executive orders have already inspired a long list of lawsuits.
In an article published by The Nation on February 7, progressive legal expert Elie Mystal applauds these "good faith" lawsuits against Trump orders that are "illegal and unconstitutional, and brazenly so." But Mystal, a frequent guest on MSNBC, emphasizes that "the courts alone will not save us" and lays out some reasons why.
"They will not be the backstop protecting us from the Trump-(Elon) Musk takeover," Mystal argues, "and any person who tells you otherwise — especially if that person is an elected Democrat in Congress — is selling you an excuse for inaction and complacency. Trump and Musk are barbarians at the gate; calling in the lawyers to tell them they're trespassing isn’t going to halt their advance."
:{READ MORE: How Michigan would pay bigly for Trump's trade war
The attorney adds, "Courts are not known for their harm prevention — they're best used when trying to hold someone accountable for the harm they already caused."
Courts, Mystal notes, are "designed to move slowly" — whereas Trump, with his executive orders, is moving rapidly with his far-right agenda.
"The Trump Administration has already been hit with TROs (temporary restraining orders) over a number of its illegal and insane executive orders — including its unconstitutional revision of the 14th Amendment to end birthright citizenship, its illegal funding freeze on money already appropriated by Congress, and its immoral and dangerous prisoner transfer of trans-women to male prisons," Mystal explains. "In theory, these orders should be effective stopgaps. The problem is that the court has no enforcement mechanism. It has no army, no police force, no power to impose its will. Instead, the executive — in this case, the president — is supposed to enforce the court's orders. But what if Trump doesn't?"
Mystal adds, "There is little reason to believe that Trump will enforce an adverse court ruling against himself."
READ MORE:'Not going to be replaced': Reformed white supremacist met with protest from extremists
The attorney argues that Democrats "who think the courts will save us" are forgetting how many "Federalist Society judges" are part of the federal judiciary — and how far to the right the U.S. Supreme Court has moved with "Chief Justice John Roberts and his crew of legal arsonists."
"A court order cannot enforce itself," Mystal warns. "It cannot change a mind. It cannot make white folks less racist. It cannot recapture things that have been lost, or stolen. The only thing that can save us is us."
READ MORE:Americans' 'legally protected' info now 'exposed' as Trump budget chief gets new powers: union
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an 2 25
Another federal judge just paused another one of President Donald Trump's executive actions from going into effect, and multiple experts, journalists and even federal workers are celebrating on social media.
On Thursday, Boston, Massachusetts-based U.S. District Judge George O'Toole — who was appointed by President Bill Clinton — paused the 11:59 PM EST deadline to Monday for federal workers to accept the Trump administration's offer to quit their jobs in exchange for several months of pay in advance through September. O'Toole's ruling sided with several labor unions representing federal employees who argued that the courts should "require the government to articulate a policy that is lawful, rather than an arbitrary, unlawful, short-fused ultimatum which workers may not be able to enforce."
Despite being the defendants in the lawsuit, the Trump administration celebrated the ruling on behalf of the plaintiffs. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told CNN: "We are grateful to the Judge for extending the deadline so more federal workers who refuse to show up to the office can take the administration up on this very generous, once-in-a-lifetime offer."
READ MORE:'Read the fine print': Officials call out 'misleading' Trump buyout offer to federal workers
But others interpreted O'Toole's ruling more literally. Writer John Thorsson observed that the Trump administration was "taking [losses] in court left and right." Lawrence County, Tennessee election commissioner Chris D. Jackson tweeted: "The Trump administration is losing in court left and right and it's a glorious sight to behold."
"This is the second time a judge has had to pause some action by the Trump [administration] in order to give them time to figure out what the hell they're doing," Albuquerque, New Mexico-based attorney Owen Barcala wrote on Bluesky.
However, the reception among federal workers themselves was mixed. Bryant Platt, who is a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, explained that he was "actually upset" about the deadline extension. He wrote that he and others had received "a deluge of nasty emails" from billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk's employees urging them to take the buyout.
"I was looking forward to them ending today, but this is going to draw things out," Platt wrote. "I’m very much at the hurry up and fire me or let me get back to doing my job stage."
READ MORE:'Probably a scam': Federal employees reject Trump buyout, say they're 'not going anywhere'
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lawsuits 2 5 25
sdSrtoepno6l 6c5:F32tPm1a856tr7uc93 1ba1Mtue407a1u 8cl3ycmr
Hello! I'm posting in response to the many sincerely anguished claims that not enough is being done to stop Trump. This is not reflected in the facts.
- Represented by Public Citizen Litigation Group and State Democracy Defenders Fund, the Alliance for Retired Americans, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) filed suit on Monday against the Treasury Department “for sharing confidential data with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), run by Elon Musk.” Go to Public Citizen's website to learn all about this lawsuit, which is very likely to prevail.
- On USAID, appearing with other Democratic lawmakers outside USAID offices on Monday, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) shouted, “Elon Musk, you didn't create USAID. The United States Congress did for the American people … like Elon Musk did not create USAID, he doesn't have the power to destroy it. And who's going to stop him? We are... This a constitutional crisis that we are in today.” Lawsuits have also been filed in this matter, and are also likely to prevail.
- Hakeem Jeffries has announced lawsuits have been filed regarding the firings of inspectors general.
- On Jan 21, Democracy Forward, was filed at 12:01 p.m. ET on Monday and accused Elon Musk's DOGE of being a "shadow operation led by unelected billionaires" that flouts federal transparency rules. That should win.
- National Security Counselors filed a suit arguing that DOGE meets the requirements to be a federal advisory committee and is therefore legally required to have "fairly balanced" representation, keep regular minutes of meetings and allow public access to meetings. Clearly accurate.
- Eighteen state attorneys general and a slew of immigrants' rights groups brought swift legal action against Trump after he signed his executive order seeking to ban birthright citizenship for some children born in the U.S., arguing that it violates the Fourteenth Amendment. Obviously, clearly unconstitutional.
- "Schedule F" has been challenged in court by the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents employees in 37 agencies and departments.
- Several immigrant rights groups in the United States, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have filed a lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s ban on asylum claims.
- GLAD Law and the National Center For Lesbian Rights (NCLR) have sued to stop Trump's ban on trans people in the military.
And there are many more - I'll link to a great list of them in the comments.
Yes, there are Trump judges in the courts, and if Aileen Cannon types get these cases, Trump may prevail. But most judges are not like her. These actions are clearly illegal and/or unconstitutional, and they WILL be stopped.
Just like the tariffs were not meant to prevail -- Trump won that round, "forcing" Canada and Mexico to take "action" on fentanyl -- these actions are not meant to prevail. They're meant to flood the zone with shit, confuse and immobilize us. They said they'd do "Shock and Awe" and that's what they've done. Nothing here should be surprising.
Shock and Awe is up to YOU. I am not shocked, I am not in awe.
Oh, and the "mainstream media" has reported on all of these. The info above has come from Newsweek, the NY Times, and other mainstream sources. Please stop attacking journalists when we are being threatened by the FBI. Who do you think you're helping by doing that?
Stop it with the doomsaying and gloomsaying. Want to make a difference? Give thousands of dollars to Public Citizen, the ACLU, and similar groups. Show up at marches. Put your ass on the line and help protect people from ICE. If you're safe, do simple symbolic things (like changing your social media pictures) to support people who are not safe. Just like we should not obey in advance, we should not panic in advance either. This is not the end of democracy. That is just what the bad guys want you to think. Get over it and fight.
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- ...tmp's DEI orders. Several groups, including “[t]he National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education and the American Association of University Professors, along with the city of Baltimore and a restaurant group, are asking the courts to block the implementation of the executive orders [relating to DEI] due toPresident Trump allegedly exceeding his authority under the Constitution.”
- Removal of health data from government websites**. “A liberal-leaning medical advocacy group is suing over the removal of health data from government websites, the latest in a series of lawsuits pushing back against the Trump administration’s shakeup of the federal government. Doctors for America filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the Office of Personnel Management, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services.”
- Ending refugee asylum. The ACLU is suing the Trump administration over its attempt to end refugee asylum.
- Retribution against FBI agents. In two separate lawsuits, anonymous FBI agents are suing the Justice Department over “efforts todevelop a list of employees involved in those inquiries that they fear could be a precursor to mass firings.”
- Birthright citizenship. In multiple lawsuits, numerous individuals, nonprofits and 22 Democratic attorneys general have sought to block Trump's executive order ending birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants. They have already succeeded in achieving a nationwide injunction blocking the order.
- National Labor Relations Board. Gwynne Wilcox, a member of the National Labor Relations Board, was fired by Trump on January 27. She has filed a lawsuit contesting the legality of her firing.
- Schedule F. Two unions representing government workers, AFGE and AFSCME, have filed lawsuits to block Trump's executive order that would reclassify large numbers of federal employees under Schedule F, which would make it easier for Trump to fire them. You can read more about these lawsuits at Reuters and Democracy Docket.
- Federal funding freeze. At least two federal judges have issued injunctions blocking the Trump administration's various funding freezes of federal spending. Numerous groups have joined in these lawsuits, including states attorneys general.
- Legal assistance for asylum seekers. In response to a lawsuit from the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights for other nonprofits, the Department of Justice has already reversed one of Trump's executive orders halting legal aid for asylum seekers.
- DOGE access to sensitive data**. The Alliance for Retired Americans, AFGE, and SEIUhave filed lawsuits against the Treasury Department to block the Department of Government Efficiency's access to sensitive data.
- Gender-affirming care. PFLAG and GLMA have filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for halting funding for gender affirming care for people under 19.
- Sanctuary Cities. According to Newsweek, a group of Chicago-based immigrant groups have filed a lawsuit against Trump administration guidance instructing the Department of Justice to take action against sanctuary cities.
- The existence of DOGE. A group called National Security Counselors has filed a lawsuit challenging the very existence of the Department of Government Efficiency. Additional lawsuits against the existence of DOGE have been filed by Public Citizen and the American Public Health Association.
- Transgender servicemembers. GLAAD and other groups have filed a lawsuit against Trump's order banning transgender Americans from serving openly in the military.
- Buyout offer for federal employees. AFGE, which has clearly been quite busy with lawsuits against the Trump administration, has filed suit against the Office of Personnel management for the buyout offer sent to many government employees over email in the earliest days of the Trump administration.
These are the 15 lawsuits or groups of lawsuits I could find news stories about as of 4:15 PM ET, Wednesday, February 5. It would not be surprising if more had been filed already, or that more were filed between when I wrote this article and when it was published. Many more lawsuits will be forthcoming, and soon.
As you can see, there is a lotof legal action against the Trump administration right now. Further, a few of these lawsuits have already made real progress, winning injunctions and/or reversals of Trump administration policy. My hope is that this will provide readers of this article with some solace, during what has been a very difficult time for many.
There was a passage I recently read in a*Politico*article about the legal resistance to Trump that, while referring specifically to federal employees, I believe applies to how many grassroots activists opposed to Trump will feel as the days and weeks move forward:
“Federal employees around the country are surely feeling Trump’s orders as body blows, as he likely intended,” said Daniel Richman, a lawyer and former adviser to FBI leadership. “But once the immediate shock at his extraordinary power claims wears off, I doubt they will all be cowed. Rather, they will be the source of litigation that all but the most die-hard Trumpist judges will take seriously.”
Things may seem overwhelming right now, but eventually that feeling will wear off. When it does, I doubt you will feel cowed. Instead, your support of the groups leading the legal resistance to Trump will be crucial in the many legal victories which are to come.
At Matt noted in his post "Whirlwind," we need to stay steady. Learn about the lawsuits against the Trump administration and, if you are able to do so, support some of the groups undertaking this crucial work.
If you are looking for one group in particular to support, allow me to recommend the Democratic Attorneys General Association (DAGA), the national party committee dedicated to supporting Democratic states attorneys general in elections around the country. Over the next four years, no group or groups will be more active in the lawsuits against the Trump administration than Democratic states attorneys general.
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AN 2 25 SEE 14TH ANNO
A federal judge in Maryland blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order to ban birthright citizenship on Wednesday, saying the order goes against the Constitution, Supreme Court precedent, and the country’s history.
ABC News reported Wednesday that U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman ruled in favor of two immigrant rights groups — CASA and Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project — and five pregnant women. They argued that the women’s unborn children could be affected by the order.
"Today, virtually every baby born on U.S. soil is a U.S. citizen upon birth," Boardman said. "That is the law and tradition of our country. That law and tradition are and will remain the status quo pending the resolution of this case,” Boardman said.
READ MORE:Don’t count on the Supreme Court to stop Trump’s new order — or uphold the Constitution
The order, she said, “conflicts with the plain language of the 14th Amendment, contradicts 125-year old binding Supreme Court precedent and runs counter to our nation’s 250-year history of citizenship by birth.”
“No court in the country has ever endorsed the president’s interpretation,” she said. “This court will not be the first.”
Trump signed the order on his first day in office, which instructs agencies to not recognize the citizenship of children who are born on U.S. soil whose parents are not U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents.
One woman who joined the lawsuit, a doctor from Venezuela, said she is worried about her child’s future. "I'm 12 weeks pregnant. I should be worried about the health of my child. I should be thinking about that primarily, and instead my husband and I are stressed, we're anxious and we're depressed about the reality that my child may not be able to become a U.S. citizen," she said.
READ MORE:Former federal prosecutor reveals why Trump birthright citizenship order is doomed
Trump’s order is “causing real-world confusion, fear, real-world harm, for countless people today,” Joseph Mead, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said at the hearing. “This executive order is such a departure from settled law. It’s so abrupt and such as departure from what we’ve been doing for over a century.”
He added: “People covered by the executive order are parents, people who have lived here for years and decades and are not temporary visitors. They are people we work with, who own the houses down the street, who made America their home. They are entitled to have their children have the same constitutional right to citizenship as every other child born in United States has.”
Another federal judge, John Coughenour, put a temporary block on the order in January, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.”
"I've been on the bench for four decades,” he said. “I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is. There are other times in world history where we look back and people of goodwill can say, 'Where were the judges? Where were the lawyers?'"
READ MORE:'Boohoo you got a ticket': Trump-backed Arizona senator calls for legislative immunity for speeding
Click here to read ABC's report in its entirety.
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not trump judge but all GOP
yikes an 12 24
'Totally unfounded': Legal experts blast GA appeals court’s disqualification of Fani Willis
fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis is now officially disqualified from prosecuting President-elect Donald Trump in his Georgia election interference criminal case, following a Thursday decision by the Georgia Court of Appeals (COA).
As NPR reported, the three-judge panel — all of whom were appointed by Republican governors — ruled that Willis' relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade amounted to a conflict of interest that required her being removed from the case. Assuming she doesn't accept the court's decision, the matter will now go to the Prosecuting Attorneys' Council of Georgia (PACGA), according to Georgia criminal defense attorney Andrew Fleischman. However, Fleischman said this likely means' Willis case is "100% dead," as the PACGA "declined to prosecute the one recused case it already got."
In a subsequent skeet (the term used for Bluesky posts), Fleischman opined that there was a "total lack of analysis" in the COA's decision, saying there was "no rule or explanation here that any other criminal defendant could possibly use in their own case" and that "in such an important case, the court should explain itself."
READ MORE:**Legal expert explains the one thing Fani Willis has to do to save her Trump investigation**
Rolling Stone reporter Nikki McCann Ramirez posted excerpts of **the dissent authored by Judge Ben Land (appointed by Governor Brian Kemp). He argued that attorneys representing Trump "failed to show that the district attorney had an actual conflict of interest, failed to show that she received any material financial benefit as a result of her relationship with Nathan Wade, failed to show that she had a personal stake in the conviction of any defendant, failed to show that her relationship with Wade involved any impropriety on her part, and failed to show that their relationship, including their financial arrangements, had any actual impact on the case."
"Because there was some evidence presented to the trial court that supported these findings, we are bound to accept them," Land continued. "The majority does not dispute these findings. Rather, it holds, with the citation of no supporting authority and apparently for the first time in the history of our state, that the mere existence of an appearance of impropriety, in and of itself, is sufficient to reverse the trial court's refusal to disqualify the district attorney and her entire office."
Brookings Institution senior fellow Norm Eisen wrote that the COA's ruling was "totally unfounded," and noted that "bipartisan experts agree" that Willis' relationship with Wade wasn't disqualifying on its own. But he added that despite Willis' removal from the case, "the indictment stands" and should be pursued "vigorously." Eisen reminded his followers that —just as in the New York hush money cover-up case — the Georgia indictment is not subject to the Supreme Court's immunity protections for official presidential acts.
Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance pointed out that the decision means "a new DA will be selected to take over the case," adding that this would likely amount to "a slow death knell if not an outright death for the case." In his own response to the ruling, Federation of American Scientists director of global risk Jon B. Wolfsthal lamented: "The entire American system of justice is broken." Attorney Bradley P. Moss, however, wrote that Willis "has no one to blame but herself" for her disqualification.
READ MORE:[Fani Willis in testy exchange: I'm not the one 'on trial for trying to steal an election'
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12 24 YMAIL
Today, the highest court of Montana agreed: Children have fundamental rights to a safe and livable climate!!
16 Montana youth held their government accountable for harming their fundamental rights to health, safety, liberty, dignity, equal protection of the law, and a clean and healthful environment. Our youth clients’ voices were heard. The Montana Supreme Court has upheld science-based protections for a safe and healthy climate, affirming that fossil fuel pollution is incompatible with children’s constitutional rights and that an environmental life support system includes a stable climate system.
This was a resounding 6:1 victory!
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AN 12 24
Rick Wilson, the former GOP political operative turned critic of Donald Trump and MAGA, has defeated a defamation suit filed by Michael Flynn, briefly Trump’s national security adviser, involving social media posts tying Flynn to Russia and the Qanon conspiracy theory.
Following a January trial, a Sarasota County trial judge ruled that Flynn, also a retired lieutenant general, failed to prove that Lincoln Project co-founder and Tallahassee resident Wilson had defamed him.
On Wednesday, the Florida Second District Court of Appeal affirmed the decision.
Wilson argued that his messages were protected by the First Amendment as opinion or rhetorical hyperbole; the trial and appeals courts agreed.
“We have the privilege of living in a country with a ‘profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks,’” Judge Susan Rothstein-Youakim wrote for a panel also including judges Darryl Casanueva and Laurence Silberman.
“Like it or not, such attacks are a characteristic feature of our democracy — regardless of the political persuasion of the speaker and regardless of the political persuasion of the public figure on the receiving end of that speech,” the opinion continues. “As the trial court noted, Wilson’s tweets may not have been polite, and they may not have been fair. But the First Amendment required neither, and so we affirm.”
Flynn sought $50 million in damages and an order for Wilson to stop “defaming” him. Instead, he has been ordered by the court to pay Wilson’s appellate fees — which, Wilson wrote, amount to “Many zeroes. Six figures.”
“Their decision wasn’t just a win for me — it was a powerful affirmation of free speech,” Wilson said in his newsletter. “Not the warped, Elon-flavored ‘The Nazis had some good points’ free speech MAGA Twitter loves to celebrate, but actual free speech: my right to call out Mike Flynn’s character, conduct, and record.”
Ukraine invasion
Wilson’s tweets came in response to Flynn’s reaction following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
“My ‘offense?’ I tweeted ‘Putin Employee Mike Flynn’ after he tried some shameless Vladwashing of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And their second ‘pillar’ — and I use that word as loosely as possible — was that I retweeted Jim Stewardson, who (in part) referred to Flynn as ‘Q’ of QAnon fame,” Wilson wrote Thursday in his Substack newsletter. “I kept imagining the legal implications if a retweet could be found to be defamatory. The world would be in some deep legal waters.”
Flynn has had a number of connections to Russia. He served 22 days as national security adviser but Trump fired him after concluding Flynn had lied to the FBI and Vice President Mike Pence about discussing U.S. sanctions placed by Barack Obama on Russia with the Russian government before taking office. Additionally, Flynn accepted a speaking engagement with RT, Russia Today, in Moscow in 2015, receiving $45,000, NBC reported.
Plain meaning
Flynn’s arguments focused on the plain meanings of the words Wilson used but the appellate judges replied that the context was crucial.
“And stripped from the rest of the tweet, Wilson’s statement may indeed appear to be making a factual claim about Flynn’s economic relationship with Putin,” the opinion reads. “But that is not what a reasonable reader of Wilson’s Twitter feed would think Wilson was trying to communicate. Rather, whether Flynn gets a regular paycheck from the Russian Federation — like Putin’s secretary perhaps — just isn’t Wilson’s point.”
The court said Flynn provided no evidence that Wilson acted with legal malice, nor could the Qanon statement be proven true or false.
“We agree with the trial court that no reasonable jury could find that Wilson defamed Flynn through the retweet of ‘FYI, Mike Flynn is Q,'” the judges wrote.
‘Lawfare’
Wilson wrote that the case exemplified the use of “lawfare” by the MAGA movement to intimidate critics.
“Flynn’s crusade against me is just one stitch in the broader MAGA tapestry of lawfare. Whether it’s their suits against the Federal Government, NBC, CNN, Nicolle Wallace, Andrew Weissmann, Fred Wellman, MeidasTouch, Jim Stewardson, or anyone else who dares to speak the truth, the strategy is clear: silence the critics of Trump World by any means necessary, ” he wrote.
“Thankfully, the lower court — and now the DCA — disagreed. Free speech isn’t a one-way street, no matter how hard Flynn and his ilk try to rewrite the rules.”
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.
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Oklahoma State Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters, a far-right Christian nationalist and MAGA Republican, has drawn scathing criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Americans United for separation of Church and State, and others for trying to impose Christian fundamentalism on students in public schools. And Walters has been clashing with journalists as well, including reporters for KFOR-TV in Oklahoma City.
Walters excluded KFOR reporters from press conferences, and the station responded with a lawsuit.
But on Wednesday, December 11, KFOR reported that it had "won a legal battle" against Walters and his allies.
READ MORE:'The next recession starts here': Trump team weighs abolishing bank regulators
According to KOSU-FM (a National Public Radio-associated station in Oklahoma), "State Superintendent Ryan Walters and his press secretary Dan Isett have agreed to allow KFOR journalists into all of the Education Department's news conferences and meetings. The leaders have also agreed to pay attorney fees and damages of $17.91 — a symbolic amount, as 1791 was the year the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified."
According to KFOR, Walters and Isett agreed to "add KFOR to" their "e-mail list for press releases."
KFOR noted, "Attorney fees have yet to be determined, but Ryan Walters and his attorneys did agree to pay them."
Charles Miller of the Institute for Free Speech said of the ruling, "This is a huge victory for journalism."
READ MORE: 'Chomping at the bit': Trump victory has red states feeling 'emboldened' to push far-right agendas
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Will Neal @ The Daily Beast](https://www.thedailybeast.com/alex-jones-says-infowars-might-be-shut-down-unless-good-guys-buy-platform-at-auction/): Alex Jones Says InfoWars May Soon Be Finally Shut Down
A glimmer of good news amid all the doom, Alex Jones’ reign of online terror may soon be over with a court-mandated auction to sell off his assets now fast approaching.
an 10 24
'Sweet justice': Rudy Giuliani mocked as judge seizes almost all of his property
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YIKES 11 24
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California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom is preparing on multiple fronts to protect his state from the impending Donald Trump presidency.
“The freedoms we hold dear in California are under attack — and we won’t sit idle,” Newsom said in a statement, the LA Times reports. “California has faced this challenge before, and we know how to respond. We are prepared to fight in the courts, and we will do everything necessary to ensure Californians have the support and resources they need to thrive.”
“California is ready to fight,” Newsom added, via social media. “Whether it be our fundamental civil rights, reproductive freedom, or climate action — we refuse to turn back the clock and allow our values and laws to be attacked.”
The 57-year old with reported presidential aspirations has called the state legislature back into session to provide additional funding for litigation against the Trump administration.
READ MORE: Marco Rubio to State? Ken Paxton to DOJ? Trump Administration Contenders Emerge
“California anticipates that Trump could seek to limit access to abortion, dismantle environmental protections and withhold federal disaster response funding,” The Times adds, along with repealing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
“The new special session provides an early look at the governor’s plan to wage an aggressive and highly visible campaign to shield California from the Trump White House.”
The governor sees the need “to increase legal funding to defend civil rights, climate change, access to abortion, disaster funding and other California policies from a conservative federal agenda before the inauguration in January.”
“Newsom’s preemptive strike signals the return of the hostile relationship between Democratic-controlled California and the Trump administration that was a hallmark of the Republican’s first term.”
RELATED: Day One: Trump Planning ‘Largest Mass Deportation Operation’
The governor’s additional preparations for the impending Trump presidency include having performed an analysis of Project 2025, the extremist playbook created by the far-right Heritage Foundation, and a review of the more than 100 lawsuits California filed against the first Trump administration.
Ezra Levin, who co-founded the progressive organization Indivisible in response to the first Trump presidency, commented on Newsom’s actions: “This is a good move and Dem leaders in trifecta states across the country should be taking similar action. If you’re a leader in this moment, go lead.”
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Faced with the return of a President of the United States who is now unchained by the law and unhinged by mental decline, California's Attorney General is once again prepared to resist.
Faced with four more years of a Trump administration and a more aggressive attack on the rights and peoples of the United States, California is once again poised to be a center of resistance. While the hellscape brought about by the election of Trump barrels toward us, the last days of sanity in our Federal government wind down, California Attorney General Rob Bonta had this to say:
"The best way to protect California, its values, the rights of our people, is to be prepared, so we won't be flat-footed," said Attorney General Rob Bonta, whose team has been working with advocacy organizations and attorneys general in other states on how they would answer another Trump administration. "We will fight as we did in the past if that scenario unfolds."
During Trump's first term, California sued more than 100 times over his rules and regulatory rollbacks. Bonta said his team has preemptively written briefs and tested arguments to challenge many of the policies they expect the former president to pursue over the next four years: passing a national abortion ban and restricting access to abortion medication; revoking California's waiver to regulate its own automobile tailpipe emissions and overruling its commitment to transition to zero-emission vehicles; ending protections for immigrants brought to the country illegally as children; undermining the state's extensive gun control laws, including for assault weapons, 3D-printed firearms and ghost guns; implementing voter identification requirements; and attacking civil rights for transgender youth.
"Unfortunately, it's a long list," Bonta told CalMatters days before the election. "We are and have been for months developing strategies for all of those things."
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'Double-whiff': Judges smack down Republicans' efforts to change voter rolls in two swing states
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mma 10 24 no twt
A federal court issued an order blocking Florida state officials and in particular Gov. Ron DeSantis' health secretary Joseph Ladapo, from threatening TV stations over ads in support of Amendment 4, the constitutional ballot referendum that seeks to repeal Florida's near-total abortion ban, reported constitutional attorney Adam Steinbaugh.
DeSantis' administration sent letters to TV stations threatening to prosecute their employees for airing the ad, citing an obscure "sanitary nuisance" law intended to apply to physical health hazards like improperly sealed septic tanks. Specifically, they argued that the law might falsely persuade women who are eligible for abortion under health exceptions from seeking care.
The court didn't buy the argument and called out the state for violating the First Amendment right to freedom of speech.
"While Defendant Ladapo refuses to even agree with this simple fact, Plaintiff's political advertisement is political speech — speech at the core of the First Amendment," said the ruling. "The government cannot excuse its indirect censorship of political speech simply by declaring the disfavored speech 'false.'"
The ruling cited the conclusion of the Supreme Court in the 1945 case *Thomas v. Collins*: "The very purpose of the First Amendment is to foreclose public authority from assuming a guardianship of the public mind through regulating the press, speech, and religion."
"To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it's the First Amendment, stupid," the ruling continued.
This comes after a tough day of oral argument, in which U.S. District Judge Mark Walker appeared visibly exasperated with Florida attorneys' arguments that the prosecution threats against TV stations were legitimate.
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