Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 20, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
‘We’re Not Stopping’: Trump Border Czar Vows to Ignore Judges
[The Daily Beast, via MSN 03-18-2025]
Trump is Opening The Enemies Briefcase: Congress Paved the Way
Andrew Cockburn, April 19, 2025 [Spoils of War]
We can’t say we weren’t warned. The emergency powers Trump has invoked to impose the largest tariffs in a hundred years, fast track energy and mineral production, and militarize federal lands on portions of the southern border were at least on the public record, authorized by Congress in The National Emergencies Act of 1976. The act permitted a president to unleash 150 statutory powers by declaring a national emergency. Legislators thought they had curbed the possibility of untrameled presidential power by adding the proviso of a "legislative veto" giving Congress the ability to terminate an emergency with a simple majority vote. But in 1983 the supreme court nixed that with a ruling, INS v. Chadha, that declared legislative vetoes unconstitutional. Trump’s first term deployment of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, passed by Congress in 1975, to build his border wall excited comment and alarm, but no effective action to stop him.
But in March, 2020, Trump cryptically remarked “I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about.” He was referring to “presidential emergency action documents,” or PEADs, orders that authorize a broad range of mortal assaults on our civil liberties. Kept in a locked safe at the department of justice, these documents, in the words of a rare official description, outline how to “implement extraordinary presidential authority in response to extraordinary situations”
These instruments of dictatorship have not only never been authorized by Congress, they have remained almost totally secret. Elizabeth Goitein, senior director for liberty and security at the Brennan Center, is one of the few to investigate this momentous issue. As she told me when I first covered this topic in Harper’s Magazine, “This really is one of the best-kept secrets in Washington, but though the PEADs are secret from the American public, they’re not secret from the White House and from the executive branch. And the fact that none of them has ever been leaked is really quite extraordinary.”
Thanks to Goitein’s sleuthing, we know that in the past, PEADs have enabled the following: ….
Chris Hedges, April 16, 2025
Those who build concentration camps build societies of fear. They issue relentless warnings of mortal danger, whether from immigrants, Muslims, traitors, criminals or terrorists. Fear spreads slowly, like a sulfurous gas, until it infects all social interactions and induces paralysis. It takes time. In the first years of the Third Reich, the Nazis operated ten camps with about 10,000 inmates. But once they managed to crush all competing centers of power — labor unions, political parties, an independent press, universities and the Catholic and Protestant churches — the concentration camp system exploded. By 1939, when World War II broke out, the Nazis were running over 100 concentration camps with some one million inmates. Death camps followed.
Those that create these camps give them wide publicity. They are designed to intimidate. Their brutality is their selling point….
'Open Enemy of the Constitution': JD Vance Ripped for Defending End of Due Process
Jake Johnson, April 16, 2025 [CommonDreams]
In his post on X, Vance—who has a law degree from Yale University—placed due process in scare quotes and claimed that "what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors," not the U.S. Constitution.
Dean Obeidallah, April 19, 2025
What Donald Trump did on Friday should make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. Trump literally fabricated evidence in an effort to keep Abrego Garcia in a prison in El Salvador. You must understand that Trump would do that very thing to imprison anyone he wants to “disappear” --including you or your family. I can say that with 100% confidence because Trump is following the fascist playbook and that is what they have long done to critics or anyone else they simply want to make vanish. This is where we are as a nation.
We have all seen Trump lie to support his claims. But the way his regime has defended the unconstitutional deportation of Garcia means we have entered a new and far more dangerous for all of us. And I’m not talking about a “constitutional crisis,” I mean far worse.
The Supreme Court Got It Badly Wrong
Joyce Vance, April 15, 2015 [Civil Discourse]
What makes for a concentration camp as opposed to a prison? Max Burns turned to this entry in the Holocaust Encyclopedia for a definition: “What distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison (in the modern sense) is that it functions outside of a judicial system. The prisoners are not indicted or convicted of any crime by judicial process.” That’s what’s happening in El Salvador. Kilmar Abrego Garcia has not been indicted or convicted, but he’s in prison. The same for many of the other people deported to El Salvador….
If Donald Trump can refuse to return a person he has illegally deported to a foreign prison where he is paying for him to be held in indefinite custody, then he can do it to American citizens, too….
Trump Adviser Says Those Who Oppose Abrego Garcia Detention May Be 'Aiding and Abetting' Terrorism
Julia Conley, April 17, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Brooks and Capehart on Trump’s faceoff with the courts
[PBS, Apr 18, 2025]
Jonathan Capehart:
...And then for Harvard to do what it did, I think sent a message not just to university presidents, but to the country that if Harvard — if Harvard had folded, it would have been a devastating thing. But it didn't happen.
And I would just say this one last point. In Trump one, Adam Serwer wrote famously the cruelty is the point about the first Trump administration. And I would argue that in Trump two, it's now the cruelty is the policy.
A Fourth Circuit Judge Warns Against Reducing The Rule Of Law To Lawlessness
Joyce Vance, April 18, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
Judge Wilkinson’s remarkable opinion today seems to have been written for the public as much as for the parties.
ICE declares certain ideas 'illegal'
[The Grayzone, April 15, 2025, via defenddemocracy.press]
The Grayzone's Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate on the Immigration and Custom Service's now-deleted post declaring its intention to stop 'illegal' ideas at the border.
Has America Reached the End of the Road?
Garrett Graff, April 15, 2025 [Doomsday Scenario]
Donald Trump has forced the one crisis that will tell us who we are….
Think of how easy it would have been to bring this one guy home—it would have in many ways allowed them probably to strengthen public will and congressional support for the rest of the illegal disappearances into the torture gulag. (“Don’t worry! Truly innocent people don’t end up in the gulag!”) They probably would have been able to actually turbocharge the kidnappings and send several hundred more since. Instead — since Donald Trump is fundamentally sociopathically incapable of admitting a mistake — the administration dug in and one by one has crossed every red line that matters with the courts as this crisis has unfolded….
He's doing this because he wants to pick this fight — and because he wants to do worse. Once you cross this red line, there’s almost no other red line worth stopping at between democracy and full-blown authoritarianism.
We should not, for now at least, be comforted by the legal ruling that future “disappearances” require a modicum due process given that the Trump’s administration underlying argument in these cases is that once they get you out into international waters, no laws, court orders, or due process apply at all and everything that happens thereafter is totally out of bounds for legal review. This is “dropping-people-from-helicopters-into-the-ocean” legal logic….
Jonathan M. Katz, April 15, 2025 [The Racket]
...Yesterday, the U.S. client dictator of that country, Nayib Bukele, visited the White House to pay tribute to the Don. Dressed in a T-shirt and sport coat, in front of an Oval Office mantle that increasingly resembles a set piece from Warhammer 40K, Buekele openly laughed at the idea that Abrego García would ever come back to the United States. Trump smirked along. Trump then lied about the Supreme Court decision — claiming, falsely, that the order merely compelled his aides to “provide a plane” if Bukele chose to release him. On the way into the meeting, Trump revealed his true threat: “Homegrown criminals next.” Meaning, he intends to start sending U.S. citizens to — including, by implication, those who are as innocent of any charges as Abrego Garcia.
“I said, ‘Homegrowns are next.’ Homegrowns,” Trump repeated to his aides, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, Marco Rubio, and JD Vance. He then turned back to Bukele. “You’ve got to build about five more places.”
“We’ve got space,” Bukele said, laughing.
Let’s just take a moment to appreciate where we are. The president of the United States — himself a convicted felon, credibly indicted of many more crimes, including more concerted attempts to subvert elections — has been informed by the Supreme Court, including three justices he appointed and two older justices who are somehow even more loyal to him, that he must return a protected immigrant from a foreign gulag to which he was “improperly sent.” Moreover, Trump’s own administration knows and has publicly admitted that the man in question should not be there.
And yet instead of complying with those orders, Trump’s attorney general placed the Justice Department lawyer who admitted the error on administrative leave. And now, as other legal immigrants are rounded up on street corners and homes and marked for deportation without the government so much as pretending to allege a crime, that same president is now threatening to do the same to citizens of the United States.
In fact, we know at least one U.S. citizen in the president’s sights: On April 9, Trump issued an official memorandum denouncing Christopher Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, for having “baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen” and “suppressed conservative viewpoints” about COVID-19.3 This is totalitarian shit; pure Stalinism, in fact, shades of the show trials against the so-called Trotsky-Zinoviev Center. A accusation out of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland: accusing a former bureaucrat of “baselessly denying” something that was in fact itself shown over and over again in court and repeated investigations to be completely made up.
Meghnad Bose, April 19, 2025 [Drop Site]
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 04-15-2025]
If I understand this correctly, the US president has launched a trade war against the world, believes he can force the EU and China to meet his terms, is determined to annex Canada and Greenland, but is powerless before the sovereign might of El Salvador. Is that it?
Nicole Foy, April 14, 2025 [propublica]
Amid increasing reports that U.S. citizens have been caught up in the Trump administration’s immigration dragnet, a dozen members of Congress have written to the government with pointed questions. None has received a reply.
Read the Trump Administration’s Letter to Harvard
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 04-15-2025]
Harvard’s reply (note from counsel, which are litigators): “But Harvard is not prepared to
agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.”
The Attack on International Students
Don Moynihan, April 13, 2025 [Can We Still Govern?]
New surveillance and punishment systems are a warning to us all
A Trump Administration Plan to Crowdsource Deregulation?
[Lawfare, via Naked Capitalism 04-17-2025]
Two recent events suggest that the Trump administration intends to expeditiously rescind existing regulations: (a) a constitutional argument that the president has authority to unilaterally rescind regulations without following the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act and (b) a new online form that seeks to crowdsource the process of drafting these rescissions. When stitched together, the Trump administration has created a toolkit to rescind regulations without the required procedures of the Administrative Procedure Act or the involvement of the experts who understand the purpose of these regulations.
Ordinarily, an agency must follow the same procedures under the Administrative Procedure Act to promulgate, amend, or rescind a rule. Those procedures include providing notice in the Federal Register and an opportunity for interested parties to comment on the regulations. The Department of Energy did not follow these procedures. In a final rule that will go into effect on May 15, Energy explained that it was foregoing notice-and-comment rulemaking in light of the executive order and “the President’s constitutional authority to direct rescissions of regulations.”
ICE Just Paid Palantir Tens of Millions for ‘Complete Target Analysis of Known Populations’
[404Media 04-16-2025]
Men DOGEbags at Work
DOGE takes over federal grants website, wresting control of billions
[Washington Post], via Naked Capitalism 04-14-2025]
'Victory for Scammers' as Trump Fires 90% of Consumer Protection Agency Staff
Jake Johnson, April 18, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Judge temporarily blocks CFPB layoffs, probes potential violation of order
Zach Schonfeld and Julia Shapero, 04/18/25 [The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 04-19-2025]
A federal judge temporarily barred the Trump administration from laying off roughly 90 percent of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) as she mulls whether it violates her previous order.
At a Friday hearing, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson prevented the agency from cutting off the employees’ computer access as planned later in the day until the judge holds a hearing near the end of the month.
Palantir Is Helping DOGE With a Massive IRS Data Project
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 04-13-2025]
Inside the DOGE immigration task force
[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 04-13-2025]
Deliberately Polluting the Death Master File Violates the Fair Credit Reporting Act
Adam Levitin [CreditSlips, via Naked Capitalism 04-15-2025]
[Yves Smith: In case you missed it, DOGE’s latest caper is to place immigrants it knows are alive on the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File. The intent is to cut them off from banking services. Levitin lays out why this is illegal and I hope someone takes up the case. But as I pointed out, this won’t even necessarily work out as intended. When my mother died on Christmas Day, 2021, I reported it to Social Security as soon as possible. Of her four financial institution relations, only two cancelled or restricted access to her account.]
A whistleblower’s disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data
[NPR, via Naked Capitalism 04-16-2025]
Government IT whistleblower calls out DOGE, says he was threatened at home
[Ars Technica, via Naked Capitalism 04-17-2025]
DOGE abruptly cut a program for teens with disabilities. This student is ‘devastated’
[NPR, via Naked Capitalism 04-15-2025]
Strategic Political Economy
Is Trump trying to save China? His messy trade policy is a boon to Beijing
Matt Stoller and Daniel Ranger [Unherd, via Naked Capitalism 04-17-2025]
If you had to invent a way to discredit populist reform — to trick Americans into embracing unlimited free trade, dominance by Wall Street and Big Tech, and Chinese control of manufacturing — you couldn’t do a better than President Trump’s recent flip-flops around tariffs….
America’s basic problem is that the country imports a trillion dollars of stuff that we used to make. As a result, the United States has sabotaged its working and middle classes, while losing the domestic capacity to make the medicines, industrial goods, and electronics on which Americans depend. At this point, America, which has some of the best farmland in the world, is now a net food importer. America has no domestic merchant marine, and largely lacks shipbuilding capacity….
It’s taken at least 45 years to get America into this same situation. Basically, American elites decided in the Eighties that high-value patents, design, and finance work was what the United States wase good at, and the grubby stuff could be done by foreigners. That was, of course, a huge and gruesome error, one that free-trade critics rightly decried. Opposition to free trade was a successful electoral strategy early on in Latin America, and leaders like Lula da Silva bolstered their popularity by opposing deals like the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Trump likewise rode anger over this status quo to the White House — twice.
And yet Trump never pointed out that the reason for offshoring wasn’t that foreigners screwed us, but that Wall Street did. The trillion dollars of foreign goods we buy is a trillion dollars Americans hand to Big Finance, which it then recycles into stocks and bonds. Those who benefit in this system aren’t just producers based in industrial export-oriented countries, but people who own and manage financial assets, as well as adjacent “services” industries like tech and consulting.
Moreover, by claiming that the world is taking advantage of America, Trump overlooks the fact that other countries that have embraced neoliberalism find themselves in a similar position and could serve as potential allies in reshaping the international economy. ...
Global power shift
China Bypasses SWIFT: $1.2 Trillion Digital Yuan Launches Globally—Can the U.S. Push Back? [video]
[Ave World, 04-12-2025, via YouTube]
China Just Cut Off SWIFT: China Activates DIGITAL FINANCIAL WEAPON- What will the USA do? [video]
[Pulse of the States, 04-18-2025, via YouTube]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Emptying Gaza (w/ Norman Finkelstein) | The Chris Hedges Report
Chris Hedges, April 17, 2025
Israel has blocked all food and humanitarian aid into Gaza and cut off electricity, so that the last water desalination plant no longer functions. The Israeli military has seized half of the territory — Gaza is 25 miles long and four to five miles wide — and placed two-thirds of Gaza under displacement orders, rendered “no-go zones,” including the border town of Rafah, which is encircled by Israeli troops.
Defense Minister Israel Katz recently vowed that Israel will “intensify” the war against Hamas and use “all military and civilian pressure, including evacuation of the Gaza population south and implementing United States President [Donald] Trump’s voluntary migration plan for Gaza residents.” Since Israel’s unilateral ending of the ceasefire on March 18 — which was never honored by Israel — Israel has been carrying out relentless bombing and shelling against civilians, killing over 1,400 Palestinians and wounding over 3,600, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
An average of one hundred children are being killed daily according to the United Nations….
Omer Bartov, April 24, 2025 issue [The New York Review]
The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met….
In Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, a moving account of his transformation from a strong supporter of Israel into a staunch critic of Zionism, Peter Beinart suggests that in the aftermath of the Holocaust a sense of “false innocence” came to suffuse “contemporary Jewish life, camouflag[ing] domination as self-defense.” For remembering must have consequences, especially when it comes with an absolute commitment to “never again” allow a Holocaust to happen. And when “never again” becomes not just a slogan but part of a state ideology, when it becomes the prism transforming every threat, every security issue, every challenge to the state’s legitimacy or righteousness into an existential peril, then no holds must be barred to defend those who have already faced annihilation. It is a worldview, Beinart writes, that “offers infinite license to fallible human beings.”
Once Hamas militants are seen as modern-day Nazis, Israel can be imagined as an avenging angel, uprooting its enemies with fire and sword….
[TW: I think Bartov could have been more forceful in confronting the tragic disfiguration of Israel by its embrace of a fascistic view of the Palestinian people as “not human.” But, there are so few people willing to discuss the issue, I decided to include it.]
Alon Mizrahi [via Naked Capitalism 04-19-2025]
Oligarchy
The Trump Billionaires Who Run the Economy and the Things They Say
Elisabeth Bumiller, April 19, 2025 [New York Times]
Paul K. Piff, an associate professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine, has studied the psychology of the rich for nearly two decades. He said that research shows that as a person’s wealth increases, more often than not empathy and compassion for others decreases. Professor Piff cautioned that there are exceptions, and that he was not speaking specifically about the billionaires in the Trump administration.But he said excessive wealth has profound effects on a person’s character. “You certainly have more power and more influence over people in your life,” he said. Money, he added, “buys you space and distance from people, and alongside that comes this increased focus on your own self. It’s not a difficult stretch to say that you lose touch for what it’s like for lots and lots of people.”
The fury at ‘America’s Most Powerful’
[Blood in the Machine, via Naked Capitalism 04-19-2025]
Oligarchy and the subversion of democracy – warnings from South Africa
[Review of African Political Economy, via Naked Capitalism 04-17-2025]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Donald Trump, Silicon Valley, and the Neoliberal Roots of an Unlikely Alliance
[Vanity Fair, via Naked Capitalism 04-16-2025]
Trumpillnomics
‘Tariff shockwave’ leads to collapse in ocean container bookings
Stuart Chirls, April 15, 2025 [www.freightwaves.com]
From March 24-31 to April 1-8, the logistics industry witnessed precipitous declines across multiple sectors, what Vizion termed a “tariff shockwave”:
- Global twenty-foot equivalent units booked plummeted by 49%.
- Overall U.S. imports fell by 64%.
- U.S. exports declined by 30%.
- U.S. imports from China dropped 64%.
- U.S. exports to China decreased by 36%.
These dramatic reductions coincided with the April 4 announcement by the Trump administration of new tariff measures, which were swiftly followed by retaliatory actions from China on April 5. The result was a widespread booking freeze, as shippers paused to reassess their strategies.
Trump’s in-the-know plan to demolish the US economy
[Asia Times, via Naked Capitalism 04-16-2025]
...a worldwide economic crash… it’s the guaranteed end state of a plan that Trump developed before the election – but has never publicly revealed.
We now know this from a 64-minute “infomercial” released on April 1 by stock promoter Porter Stansberry in the form of a staged interview with well-known Trump insider and investment advisor Brad Thomas.
Basic to the plan he reveals is Trump’s having recognized that correcting America’s impossibly unsustainable finances must produce colossal losses one way or another no matter who is in charge. Trump and his close personal advisors drew two conclusions.
First, it is better to execute “a controlled demolition of the financial markets” comparable to a controlled forest burn to “get rid of dead wood” than to permit a haphazard collapse as in previous depressions. Second, it is better to front-run the inevitable crash so as to place the blame squarely on his predecessor….
One can make sense of the current controversies in the financial press only by distinguishing three groups of Trump supporters:
* The inner core who knew the plan to demolish the economy.
* The opportunist financiers and businessmen who backed Trump expecting an orderly economic downturn leading to financial sustainability.
* Those members of the public who voted for Donald Trump for non-financial reasons such as immigration and anger over woke ideology.
The inner core knew the plan and positioned themselves by moving their assets and presumably shorting the sectors now targeted for demolition….
Trump’s China tariff shocks US importers. One CEO calls it ‘end of days’
[Associated Press, via Naked Capitalism 04-13-2025]
Manufacturing Business Confidence Plummets in April
Robert Schoenberger, April 17, 2025 [IndustryWeek]
...In the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s monthly “Manufacturing Business Outlook Survey,” in January about 39% of businesses reported plans to increase capital spending this year to improve operations — a figure similar to high points reached in 2017 and during the COVID recovery in 2021. In April, that figure fell to 2%. For context, that metric went negative during inflation run-ups during 2023 and during the financial crisis in 2009 but only fell to 9.7% at the worst of the COVID declines….
Some of the most dramatic declines came from the Equipment Leasing Finance Foundation (ELFF), an organization that represents lenders that help manufacturers obtain new capital equipment for factories. In March, more than half of manufacturers surveyed by that group expected capital spending to increase or stay about the same in the next four months. By April, more than 61% said they expect spending to fall….
Alec MacGillis, April 18, 2025 [propublica]
By slashing teams that gather critical data, the administration has left the federal government with no way of understanding if policies are working — and created a black hole of information whose consequences could ripple out for decades.
Trump’s Order to Cut Drug Prices Would Raise Drug Prices
David Dayen, April 17, 2025 [The American Prospect]
The so-called ‘pill penalty’ fix is a corporate favor designed to increase the period where prescriptions are immune from price negotiations.
How Trump Is Helping Price Gougers Exploit His Tariffs
[The Lever, April 19, 2025]
Emboldened by the new administration’s regulatory reprieve, “price optimization” consultants are showing corporations how to weaponize import levies to fleece consumers.
The 18 hours that changed Trump’s mind on trade
[Washington Post, via The Big Picture April 14, 2025]
From Tuesday evening to Wednesday afternoon, Trump and his trade advisers spoke to several Republican lawmakers and top foreign leaders who raised concerns about the faltering global markets.
The Bond Crisis Last Week Was a Global No-Confidence Vote in U. S. President Donald Trump
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, April 13, 2025 [Wall Street On Parade]
Internal budget document reveals extent of Trump’s proposed health cuts
[Washington Post, April 17, 2025]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Projecting Epstein: How the Insurgency Weaponizes Its Own Deviance
Jim Stewartson, August 19, 2024
Trump IRS Pick Was Just Enriched By Tax Schemers
[The Lever, April 15, 2025]
New documents show Billy Long’s $130,000 personal debt was suddenly paid off by donors at firms policed by the tax agency he’d lead.
Restoring balance to the economy
Google Found GUILTY of Monopolization Again
Matt Stoller, April 17, 2025 [BIG]
Google Is a Monopolist … Again
David Dayen, April 18, 2025 [The American Prospect]
In 2019, a month into my tenure as executive editor at the Prospect, we published an investigation into digital ad markets. The author was Dina Srinivasan, a former executive with advertising giant WPP who saw the corruption of these markets from the inside. She argued that two Big Tech advertising companies, Google and Facebook, had commandeered these markets by relentlessly tracking users across the internet, running the auctions to match users with advertisers, and skimming a huge cut for themselves off the top, something publishers and advertisers could not escape.
“One way to unhook Facebook and Google’s business model over the public at large is through more competition,” Srinivasan wrote. She went on to advise Texas in an antitrust case, which argued that Google’s dominance of advertising technology allows it to rig auctions to benefit its products and extract from publishers. That case is still ongoing, but many of its allegations also appeared in a Justice Department lawsuit filed in 2023. And yesterday, Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled for the Justice Department, affirming that Google indeed had monopolized adtech markets in harmful ways….
Disrupting mainstream economics
Steve Keen, April 18, 2025 [Building a New Economics]
By default, Neoclassical economists do not include energy at all in their models of production. When they do, they treat energy (E) as a third “factor of production” in the Cobb-Douglas Production Function….
Health care crisis
US measles total climbs to 800 cases, 10 outbreaks
[CIDRAP, via Naked Capitalism 04-19-2025]
Resistance
How States and Cities Might Repel Trump’s Police State Crimes
Harold Meyerson, April 15, 2025 [The American Prospect]
...Hence, the question increasingly sounded across the nation as the administration’s trashing of the rights Americans have historically enjoyed increases with each passing day: Is there anything we can do to actually stop this?
Well, we do live in a federal republic. So long as congressional Republicans remain Trump’s lapdogs, he controls two branches of the federal government and increasingly ignores the third. He does not control state governments or county or city governments, however, and they have justice systems and police powers of their own….
...Why can’t Maryland at least begin an investigation into Abrego Garcia’s arrest for the crime of kidnapping? What’s stopping California Attorney General Rob Bonta or Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman or LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell from at least investigating the DHS agents who showed up at two elementary schools last week seeking access to five small children—the oldest in sixth grade, the youngest in first grade—on the pretext that they were checking into the children’s welfare? Fortunately, the schools’ principals denied them entry into their schools. The agents lied that the children’s families had authorized them to proceed, though the schools, which checked with their parents, found that not to be true. Subsequently questioned by the Los Angeles Times about the incident, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said that the children had arrived as unaccompanied minors, which they had not (and which contradicted the other cover story that they were with their families). Not just the arrival of these DHS agents, but also their fictitious cover stories, should suffice to enable local police agencies to question if the real goal was to seize the children and thus pressure their parents, who may or may not have been immigrants, to come forward.
Suspicion of kidnapping? Suspicion of the child abuse inherent in putting a first grader under lock and key? Is that too much of a stretch?
Joyce Vance, April 13, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
This is another good week to call your members of Congress and express outrage. The House passed the SAVE Act, which will make it dramatically more difficult for millions of eligible American citizens to register to vote if the Senate passes it too, so it’s time to start campaigning for the Senate to reject it. The Capitol switchboard phone number, where you can ask to be connected to your members’ offices, is (202) 224-3121. Or Google your individual members. Calling a local office may give you the chance to talk to a real human. Consider a visit in person if you can.
If the SAVE Act becomes law, all Americans will have to provide a birth certificate, a passport, or one of a limited number of documents, such as certain (but not all) military ID cards, every time they register or reregister to vote. It seems innocuous enough, the idea that you have to prove you’re a citizen, but at least 21 million Americans don’t have that kind of proof readily available. Only 51 percent of Americans have passports, which cost adults applying for the first time a $165.00 fee, not to mention assembling the documents you need, getting a photograph of yourself, and making it to an appointment.
The bill would end registration by mail and online because it requires voters to show proof of citizenship to election officials “in person” when they register. That would also make it difficult, if not impossible, to conduct voter registration drives, say, at churches or schools. States that automatically register voters when they turn 18 would no longer be able to do so. And if you move or need to reregister for any reason, this applies to you, too. You’d have to bring your passport or original birth certificate in for inspection every time you do that.
Crossing the U.S. Border? Here’s How to Protect Yourself
Nikita Mazurov, Matt Sledge, March 29, 2025 [The Intercept]
Searches of phones and other electronics are on the rise for those entering the U.S. Take these steps to help secure your devices.
Managing Unexpected ICE Visits: Best Practices for Employers
March 19, 2025 [IndustryWeek]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Arkansas Dreams Up New Ways to Break the Ballot
Gabrielle Gurley, April 17, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Arkansas voters have used direct-democracy powers granted by the state constitution to raise the minimum wage and legalize medical marijuana. Yet abortion is the one progressive issue that has never made it to a vote. The circumstances surrounding the failed 2024 campaign to end the state’s total abortion ban likely galvanized state lawmakers to make sure that it never does. In the 2025 legislative session that ended Wednesday, the Arkansas General Assembly passed more than a dozen bills that emasculate direct democracy, many of them nonsensical intrusions on Arkansans’ ability to exercise their constitutional rights.
In 2024, the “Arkansas Right to Abortion Initiative” could have appeared on the fall ballot but wasn’t there when counting began on November 5, not because of some abstruse legal challenge but because of a colossal paperwork screwup. Arkansans for Limited Government had collected more than 100,000 signatures; volunteers obtained 87,675, and paid canvassers, 14,143. Under state law, they only needed 90,704. But as the state attorney general’s office went through the documents, they pounced on an error: Organizers had failed to file required documentation with the paid bundles. Those were invalidated, leaving the campaign short of the threshold that they needed to get on the ballot.
David Dayen, April 15, 2025 [The American Prospect]
...This is not the first defiance of the federal judiciary in Trump’s second term. The administration has ignored deadlines to restore foreign aid funding. It secretly withheld disaster relief to blue states in violation of a judge’s ruling. Literally yesterday, at the press avail with Bukele, the White House blocked the Associated Press from the event despite a court order requiring entry. None of this should be surprising; top officials at the Justice Department, some of whom were Trump’s personal lawyers, openly mused about defying court orders in their confirmation hearings.
But the invocation of the right to kidnap, the right to disappear, goes many steps further. It is not being done in service of a broader desire to protect the country from unauthorized migrants; deportations have been flat relative to the Biden administration. This is more akin to the elimination of dissidents that you see in despotic regimes worldwide. People who disagree with the regime, including green card and student visa holders, are targeted for removal, due to vague “sympathies” with perceived enemies, picked up at citizenship appointments or just off the street, flown across the country to avoid unsympathetic legal venues, and held as the courts play things out.
Making people fear being next is the bigger goal than the actual deportation. In this sense, the shuttling of 250 migrants, most of whom had no criminal record, to El Salvador’s most notorious prison was really just a show of what could be done, a warning to self-censor or self-deport. This is turning the United States into a place where the only real enforcement in the country is filling political prisons with those guilty of thought crimes.
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
SCOTUS Can Let the President Break the Law, But It Can’t Change the Law
Josh Marshall, April 17, 2025 [talkingpointsmemo.com]
Trump is hungry to walk through this door of lawless autocracy. But it is the conservative legal movement, embodied in the Federalist Society, organized by Leonard Leo and others, who opened the door. They manufactured the fraudulent idea that presidents cannot be constrained by the law. They imported it from abroad, from the degenerate ideologues of autocracy. They did this. They created the current moment in which a renegade President can simply start chainsawing through the legal fabric and do anything he wants….
[TW: I think it’s important to realize that when Donald J. Trump finally leaves the scene, there will still be thousands of highly educated, very smart, and very determined conservative ideologues left. Including those who wrote the memos, briefed Trump, transmitted the orders, carried out those orders, wrote the legal briefs, and stood up and argued on behalf of Trump and his regime’s actions in court after court after court. For years — no, decades — they have been researching and writing position papers, conducting seminars, investigating and approving conservative wish lists of judges and federal appointees, and running state governments in the red.
[What are we going to do about this right-wing apparatus that will survive after Trump? What do we do about the tens of thousands of intelligent Americans who have been indoctrinated by the neo-confederate ideas of Leo, the (anti)Federalist Society, and the conservative legal movement? Tens of thousands of intelligent Americans who graduated from places like Liberty University and Hillsdale College?
[And while it’s nice to see David Brooks’ recent realization that Trump and MAGA are an existential threat to the survival of democracy in USA, I have to wonder how long will it take for Brooks and other never-Trumpers to realize that someone like Trump and something like MAGA were the inevitable result of conservative thinking and actions.
[They spent the past half-century “feeding red meat to the base.” They knew that “red meat” was laced through and through with hatred and intolerance for liberals and “the other.” They knew that the most zealous of their precious conservative movement believed that Democrats were engaged in conspiracies to protect pedophiles. Fundamentalist preachers incessantly declared that Democrats were satanic baby-killers who hated America. Did David Brooks and other conservative leaders never realize that the injection of all this conservative poison into the body politic was going to someday allow a monster to emerge? ]
John Ganz, April 15, 2025 [Unpopular Front]
...Tait finds a lot of Sam Francis’s ideas to be fairly conventional fare when you put him in the context of his New Right milieu: a lot of people were saying the same things. Okay, but that’s sort of the whole point: the movement organically generated and abetted Francis’s fascist outlook, did not see it as intrinsically alien, or forcefully reject it until much later. Tait admits that contemporary right-wing thinkers are taking ideas from Francis. Well, that’s sort of reason enough to study him….
