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What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White

What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White

Know Anyone Who Thinks Racial Profiling Is Exaggerated? Watch This, And Tell Me When Your Jaw Drops.


This video clearly demonstrates how racist America is as a country and how far we have to go to become a country that is civilized and actually values equal justice. We must not rest until this goal is achieved. I do not want my great grandchildren to live in a country like we have today. I wish for them to live in a country where differences of race and culture are not ignored but valued as a part of what makes America great.

Thursday, February 13, 2025

GLOVES OFF: Bernie Sanders drops BOMB on Elon Musk

Donald Trump Orders Military to STOP RECRUITING BLACK PEOPLE!!!

With career officials gone, Justice and FBI lose national security expertise - The Washington Post

Justice, FBI ousters remove longtime experts from daily threats meeting

"Trump administration shake-ups at the Justice Department and FBI have eroded continuity on national security matters, people familiar with the situation said.

President Donald Trump listens as Pam Bondi speaks after being sworn in as attorney general on Feb. 5. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Every morning at 9:45, top FBI and Justice Department officials meet to discuss the nation’s most pressing threats and update each other on federal law enforcement’s biggest investigations.

The huddle, in a secure facility on the 6th floor of Justice Department headquarters, dates back through decades of presidential administrations. It has continued since President Donald Trump was inaugurated, but many of the veteran career officials have been removed from their jobs and no longer attend.

The top national security deputies from Justice are gone — transferred from the posts they have held for years to undefined roles dealing with immigration enforcement and “sanctuary cities.” The heads of the FBI’s criminal division and international terrorism division were pushed out. A longtime deputy in Justice’s criminal division focused on international affairs was transferred to sanctuary cities, but opted to retire instead.

Devin DeBacker, a national security prosecutor, had started attending the meeting when he stepped in as acting head of the national security division as the Biden administration ended. But he was abruptly removed from that post Monday night and returned to his role leading the division’s foreign investment review section.

The absences are just one example of how the Trump administration’s shake-ups at Justice and the FBI have eroded the continuity on national security matters that has long been a cornerstone of presidential transitions, according to multiple people familiar with the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.

Nearly all the career officials who attended the daily session for years — including during the first Trump administration — have been removed from their positions, gutting much of the expertise usually there to brief the attorney general, FBI director and top deputies. Past presidents did not make such sweeping changes in career personnel.

“Part of the reason why you keep the civil service there is to provide the continuity and context that the rotating political leadership does not have,” said David Aaron, a former national security prosecutor who now works in private practice and is not involved with the morning meeting. “When a situation comes up, they have the perspective of, ‘What have we done in the past? Did it work, did it not.’ ”

The Justice Department declined to comment. But Trump administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on this topic, said they are confident that they have ample qualified national security staff at the Justice Department and FBI to keep the country safe. They said the removal of top leaders will not hamper law enforcement.

Every presidential administration handles the morning meeting differently, with each attorney general deciding the invite list. While the meeting is not the only way the attorney general and top deputies are briefed on threats, it is a key opportunity for top Justice Department, FBI and other intelligence officials to easily communicate about the dangers facing the United States and decide how best to leverage resources and personnel to combat them.

In their farewell addresses in January, outgoing Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI director Christopher A. Wray warned that America was facing unprecedented threats domestically and abroad. During their tenures, they cited China’s attempts to penetrate key U.S. infrastructure, Iranians threatening the lives of political officials, Middle East extremism, mounting threats against public officials in the United States and more.

Amid that environment, national security experts said, the loss of veteran career experts could have serious implications if they are not quickly replaced with others who are qualified and up to speed on how the Justice Department and FBI operate.

“When you pull such a knowledgeable base out of an agency, you create a vacuum,” said a former FBI agent who served as a senior official in the bureau, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of being targeted for political harassment. “Every time you miss an opportunity to bring in people who understand the scope and depth of the issues, you risk missing things.”

Most of the top national security officials fired or transferred at the Justice Department and FBI have not yet been replaced, according to multiple people familiar with the personnel changes. Sue J. Bai, a former national security prosecutor in California who also served in the White House during Trump’s first term, is expected to succeed DeBacker as acting head of the national security division, the people said. The Trump administration had recently hired her to work in the deputy attorney general’s office.

Trump’s appointees at the Justice Department have been leading the morning meeting in recent weeks, running through the threats of the day. Multiple people familiar with the situation said the appointees appear more interested and animated by immigration enforcement — a top priority of both Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi — than other national security topics.

Some of the regular attendees under President Joe Biden — including section heads — were political appointees who were expected to depart once Trump took power. But many others who had come to the meeting for years were expected to stay on.

Typically, FBI directors, who are allowed to serve up to 10-year terms, span presidential administrations. Wray stepped down, however, after Trump signaled he would fire him and replace him with Kash Patel, an avowed Trump loyalist. Paul Abbate — Wray’s deputy, who was supposed to serve as acting director while Patel awaited confirmation — left the bureau soon after. Abbate was also pushed out, according to multiple people familiar with the personnel move.

Acting FBI director Brian Driscoll and acting deputy director Robert Kissane have been attending the meeting. But both are newly promoted from senior regional roles and did not attend during the Biden administration. Driscoll sometimes brings along an assistant director with the relevant subject matter expertise, a person familiar with the situation said.

Two top national security deputies at Justice — Eun Young Choi, who focused on cybercrimes, and George Toscas, a senior official for nearly two decades — stopped coming when they were transferred the sanctuary cities division in the early days of the Trump administration, according to people familiar with the matter. Bruce Swartz, the deputy for international affairs in Justice’s criminal division and another frequent attendee, opted to retire rather than accept a similar move.

Michael Nordwall, who had headed the FBI’s criminal and cyber investigations division, and Robert Wells, whose portfolio included all of national security for the FBI, attended the meeting daily for the first weeks of the Trump administration, just as they had under Biden. But they both were pushed out.

Multiple people said Nordwall and Wells had wanted to stay in their jobs during the Trump administration, and Driscoll fought to keep them, but acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove refused.

The department’s new leadership has quickly lost the trust among many career national security staffers, according to people familiar with the division.

When Choi and Toscas learned that they would be transferred, DeBacker told his staff that Bove said there would be no more removals within the national security division, the people said.

But days later, Bove fired Brett Reynolds, a national security prosecutor who worked on the special counsel team that investigated Trump.

Some officials have been shunted from their areas of expertise into a form of stasis, where they have new assignments but no actual work to do so far. The officials who accepted their sanctuary cities assignments have asked for details on their roles but have been offered little information, people familiar with the situation said.

Bondi’s exact role in or plans for the morning meeting could not be learned in recent days. But it seems clear she does not want any remnants of the last administration to linger in Justice Department headquarters.

On one of her first days as attorney general, Bondi entered a secured facility in the national security division, two people familiar with her actions said. She saw portraits of Biden, former vice president Kamala Harris and Garland.

In front of multiple Justice Department employees, Bondi pulled the portraits from the wall and stacked them in a corner.

Salvador Rizzo contributed to this report."

With career officials gone, Justice and FBI lose national security expertise - The Washington Post

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

GLOVES OFF: Democratic Leader drops BAD NEWS on Trump & Elon

Opinion | It’s America That Suffers When We Cut Foreign Aid - The New York Times

The U.S.A.I.D. Chaos Already Has Dire Effects

a photograph of relief items from USAID
Cheryl Ravelo/Reuters

"President Trump and Elon Musk were entirely right that America’s aid programs merited scrutiny and reform. Yet so far what these two billionaires have achieved is to crush the world’s poorest children in a cauldron of confusion and cruelty.

Having covered the United States Agency for International Development for decades, I reached out to my contacts around the world to get the real story of the Trump-Musk demolition.

In Sokoto, Nigeria, toddlers are starving because emergency feeding centers supported by U.S.A.I.D. have run out of the nutrient-rich paste used to save the lives of severely malnourished children. Nearby warehouses have the paste but can’t release it without a waiver from the agency — which is in such Muskian chaos that it can’t issue the waivers.

“Thousands of children can die,” said Erin Boyd, a former U.S.A.I.D. nutrition adviser who told me about the situation there.

An Ebola outbreak in Uganda has spread to three cities. The Ugandan government has pleaded with medical staff members previously paid by U.S.A.I.D. to “continue working in the spirit of patriotism as volunteers.”

A doctor on the scene told me that with U.S.A.I.D. absent, there is a greater risk that Ebola will spread — and maybe even infect Americans. It’s a reminder that a robust U.S.A.I.D. is a first defense against epidemics and pandemics, whether involving bird flu, Ebola or other diseases.

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I cite those two examples because the former represents humanitarian values and the latter our national interest; U.S.A.I.D. is the agency that unites the two.

Accounts of mayhem are flowing in from around the world. My Times colleague Stephanie Nolen reported that the effective closing of the agency abruptly halted 30 clinical trials, leaving patients stranded. In South Africa, for example, women had been fitted with experimental internal rings meant to prevent pregnancy and H.I.V. infection — but now the participants are on their own. Women and children are the main beneficiaries of humanitarian assistance, so they are the biggest victims of what is unfolding. The cutoff is causing some 130,000 women to lose access each day to contraception, according to the Guttmacher Institute (condoms are now in short supply in Zimbabwe). If the aid freeze continues for three months and family-planning access is not restored this year, there will be 4.2 million unintended pregnancies and 8,300 deaths of women in pregnancy and childbirth, the institute estimated.

U.S.A.I.D. employees, who mostly joined the agency in hopes of making the world a better place, are in agony. “We’re just paralyzed,” an agency employee in Africa told me. “No one is in charge.”

If antifreeze runs in your veins, you may be thinking, Well, too bad about kids starving to death and moms dying in childbirth, but how else can we clean out all those “fraudsters” Musk referred to in what he described as a “criminal organization”?

Unfortunately, Musk doesn’t seem to have verified a single case of fraud so far. The only lawbreaking appears to be the Trump assault on a congressionally established agency that he had no legal authority to close; the destruction of U.S.A.I.D. may have violated a whole series of federal laws, not to mention the Constitution.

In fairness, Republicans have cited several examples of what they call waste that do indeed sound silly, although most of their examples turned out not to involve U.S.A.I.D. at all. But sure, let’s concede the point that some aid money was not optimally used over the years.

In any case, Trump and Musk appear to have made the waste worse. More than $489 million in food aid has been left in limbo and is now at risk of rotting, the U.S.A.I.D. inspector general warned.

It gets more serious. The agency’s counterterrorism staff has been told not to report to work, increasing the risk that aid will be diverted to terrorist groups, the inspector general added.

China has long criticized U.S.A.I.D., and the Chinese internet erupted in cheers at the agency’s demise. That’s because — as Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, observed in 2021 — agencies like U.S.A.I.D. are “strategic instruments to beat China” in a global competition for influence.

Another senator noted that the agency is “critical to our national security” and a powerful tool to “counter the Chinese Communist Party.” Update: That senator, Marco Rubio, has since been elevated to a position where he can fight for the agency if he stands by his principles.

Above all, the demolition of U.S.A.I.D. is a human tragedy. One woman on the Myanmar-Thai border has already been identified as dead because of the cuts, because an agency-supported hospital could no longer treat her. And it’s almost certain that the world’s poorest are already dying because of decisions taken by the world’s richest.

In Kismayo, Somalia, a hospital serving 3,000 people each month has had to close its doors, an aid worker told me, with patients carried away on donkey carts or in wheelbarrows. In Gadarif, Sudan, I’m told, the only hospital in the region that can perform C-sections may now close within the month — which would mean that women in obstructed labor might die or suffer fistulas.

I’ve had malaria and have seen countless people dying of it, so I had been delighted that Myanmar was on track to eliminate it. Without American support, malaria is expected to rebound, “jeopardizing years of progress,” an aid worker told me. Pregnant women and children are the most likely to die.

I suspect that the assault on U.S.A.I.D. is a test run for an offensive against a lifeline for poor people here in the United States — Medicaid. Some Republicans would like to slash it to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.

That makes it particularly important that Americans speak up for humanitarian assistance internationally, for this is where our interests and our values converge. Readers keep asking me what they can do. I tell them to call their members of Congress and the White House to urge them to reform U.S.A.I.D., not disembowel it. And if you’re motivated to write a check, I have three suggestions.

First, Helen Keller Intl does an outstanding job combating malnutrition and blindness worldwide. Second, Muso Health is extremely cost-effective at saving the lives of children in countries where U.S.A.I.D. is now gutted. Third, a Sudanese “lost boy,” Valentino Deng, who was settled in the United States and became the subject of the best-selling book by Dave Eggers, “What Is the What,” returned to South Sudan to operate a school there through the civil war; I find his determination to use his good fortune to help others through his VAD Foundation an inspiring contrast to those who employ their wealth and power to gleefully grind the world’s most unfortunate into ever greater misery.

A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 13, 2025, Section A, Page 24 of the New York edition with the headline: Mr. President, Foreign Aid Does Put America First."

Opinion | It’s America That Suffers When We Cut Foreign Aid - The New York Times

Sen. Schiff Tears Into Trump Attorney Todd Blanche in Fiery Exchange

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

A picture says a thousand words. The only man not wearing a suit was the boar in charge.

 


The Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell 2/11/25 | 🅼🆂🅽🅱️🅲 Breaking News Feb...

EFF sends staunch message to Musk

EFF sends staunch message to Musk

“EFF Leader Julius Malema speaks during a media briefing. File Pic

The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) has fired back with a stern salvo at Tech billionaire, Elon Musk. This after Musk wrote on X, formerly Twitter, calling for the party’s leader  Julius Malema to be declared an international criminal and to be sanctioned.

Over the past week South Africa has seen a number of accusations from high-ranking members of the Trump Administration condemning the country for what they call -pushing an anti-white agenda. On the back of President Cyril Ramaphosa signing the Expropriation Act into law.

EFF National spokesperson, Sinawo Thambo has poured cold water on these remarks saying they are not fazed by the US’s antics.

“The EFF and all people who have been at the yoke of oppression perpetuated by the USA and its allies are bound to naturally be the quintessential enemies of billionaires who capture states and manipulate narratives and misuse their control of governments to cast dispersions against their natural enemies. The EFF takes the opportunity to tell Elon Musk and all of his allies in the USA, in Israel and the right-wing groups in South Africa which have mobilised Musk to collectively go to hell. The principle remains that equality in South Africa is rooted in the return of the land to South African people and this would be achieved through expropriation without compensation.”

Ibrahim Traoré Drops Bombshell Land Reforms Like South Africa | Leaves T...

The DARK SIDE of Guangzhou – The SHOCKING Truth China Doesn’t Want YOU t...

Opinion | Why Elon Musk and JD Vance Went to Bat for a Self-Described Racist - The New York Times

Why Musk and Vance Went to Bat for a Self-Described Racist

Elon Musk stands behind Donald Trump and JD Vance, who all face right.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

"If you want to understand the nature of our new regime, compare the fates of two federal employees who recently found themselves at least temporarily unable to keep doing their jobs. One is a West Point graduate, Army veteran and former prosecutor who was asked by political appointees in the first Trump administration to join a diversity committee. The other is a 25-year-old self-described racist. You can probably guess which of them Vice President JD Vance intervened to help out.

The West Point grad, who doesn’t want his name used because he’s still hoping to return to his duties, is a regional director at the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education. Based in a red state, he investigates abuses in the education system including racial discrimination, sexual harassment and the failure to accommodate disabilities. His last three performance reviews were impeccable, according to documents shared with me. He saw himself as an apolitical civil servant, and told me that even before Donald Trump’s inauguration last month, he was thinking about how to align his office’s priorities with those of the incoming administration. So he was blindsided when, on Jan. 31, he was placed on indefinite administrative leave, along with dozens of other Department of Education employees.

He and a few of those colleagues are now being represented by the civil rights attorney Subodh Chandra. Most of those put on leave from the Office of Civil Rights, said Chandra, served on a diversity committee, though some simply took diversity training. It doesn’t matter that Kenneth Marcus, an assistant secretary of education for civil rights in the first Trump term, created the committee that the regional director served on. It doesn’t matter that in a letter to employees, another Trump official at the time, Kimberly M. Richey, called its work “critically important.” It doesn’t even matter that, following a promotion, the regional director said he had less and less time for the committee, and attended only one or two meetings in the last year and a half. In the new administration, any connection to anti-discrimination efforts is considered suspect.

It’s useful to compare this administration’s treatment of the regional director to its handling of Marko Elez, a member of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency who, until recently, had access to a highly sensitive payments system at the Department of the Treasury. Elez resigned last week, after The Wall Street Journal uncovered racist social media posts he’d made just months ago, which included, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” and “Normalize Indian hate.” Reinstating him, however, quickly became a cause embraced by the world’s most powerful men.

On X, Musk polled his followers on whether Elez should get his job back; not surprisingly, most voted yes. Vance also weighed in, writing, “I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life. We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back.” Trump agreed. And so, according to Musk, Elez will be returning to government.

It is clearly absurd for Vance to insist that Elez is at once a “kid” who should be forgiven for things he wrote last year and a man who deserves a major role restructuring the federal government. But his argument isn’t supposed to make sense; Vance is asserting his freedom from the need to justify the administration’s actions according to pre-existing standards. Under the new standards, diversity is taboo, and racism is not. This stark reversal of values is a signature of the Trump restoration.

Elez, after all, is not the only member of Musk’s coterie who dabbles in far-right trolling. As Reuters reported, in just the last few months Gavin Kliger, a young engineer who helped shut down U.S.A.I.D., has boosted social media posts by the white nationalist Nick Fuentes and the rabidly misogynist influencer Andrew Tate.

Nor is bigotry a bar to high-level jobs elsewhere in the administration. Darren Beattie had to leave a job as a speechwriter in the first Trump administration for speaking at a conference that included white nationalists. Four months ago, he wrote on X, “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.” He’s now been appointed acting under secretary of state for public diplomacy, one of the State Department’s top jobs, sending a worldwide message about who represents Trump’s America.

The Trumpist right believes that the social justice causes of the last decade or so, including MeToo, Black Lives Matter and the trans rights movements, constituted a Maoist-style cultural revolution. The goal of Musk, Vance and their allies, evidently, is a counterrevolution as sweeping, cruel and arbitrary as the one they imagine they’ve suffered. Last year Vance, in an interview with my colleague Ross Douthat, said of liberals, “These guys have all read Carl Schmitt — there’s no law, there’s just power.” The suggestion that Democrats were taking cues from that infamous Nazi jurist was pure projection — a sign, in retrospect, of how Vance himself would behave in office.

According to the rules of the old system, Chandra’s client, the regional director, did everything right. But as the Trump administration shows us every day, those rules don’t apply anymore.

Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment."

Opinion | Why Elon Musk and JD Vance Went to Bat for a Self-Described Racist - The New York Times

Steel and Aluminum Tariffs May Raise US Manufacturing Costs - The New York Times

White House Failed to Comply With Court Order, Judge Rules

"The federal judge in Rhode Island said the Trump administration had failed to comply with his order unfreezing billions of dollars in federal grants.

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 an ruling he issued on Jan. 29.

That order, he wrote, was “clear and unambiguous, and there are no impediments to the Defendants’ compliance.”

Shortly after Monday’s ruling, Trump administration lawyers appealed the judge’s initial order to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, asking the appellate court to pause Judge McConnell’s order to keep federal funds flowing while their case was being considered. The White House responded with more defiance.

“Each executive order will hold up in court because every action of the Trump-Vance administration is completely lawful,” said Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman. “Any legal challenge against it is nothing more than an attempt to undermine the will of the American people.”

The legal actions on Monday marked a step toward what could evolve quickly into a high-stakes showdown between the executive and judicial branches, a day after Vice President JD Vance claimed in a social media post that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Mr. Fields’s statement suggested that the president would ultimately prevail in court, but neither he nor the Justice Department explained what the White House would do in the meantime. It appeared that the administration was trying to win through the legal system’s established procedures, even as officials questioned the legitimacy of those procedures from the outside.

To that end, some of Mr. Trump’s supporters accused the judges ruling against the president of overstepping their authority.

“Activist judges must stop illegally meddling with the president’s Article II powers,” wrote Mike Davis, who leads the Article III Project, a conservative advocacy group.

The Democratic attorneys general driving much of the legal pushback pressed their position.

“No administration is above the law,” said Rob Bonta, the attorney general of California, in a statement shortly after Monday’s order. “The Trump administration must fully comply with the court’s order.”

Already, more than 40 lawsuits have been filed to challenge Mr. Trump’s moves, which have included revoking birthright citizenship and giving Elon Musk’s teams access to sensitive Treasury Department payment systems.

Judges have already made preliminary rulings that those two executive actions, the funding freeze and other orders may violate existing statutes. On Monday, federal judges maintained a steady flow of challenges to the president’s authority, temporarily blocking the Trump administration from reducing health research grants and maintaining a stay on efforts to coax federal employees to quit.

The question looming over Washington is how Mr. Trump will respond.

“It’s very rare for a president not to comply with an order,” said Victoria Nourse, the director of the Georgetown Law Center on Congress and Democracy, who was formerly Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s general counsel during his years as vice president. “This is part of a pattern where President Trump appears to be asserting authority that he doesn’t have.”

Judge McConnell had previously ordered the White House to unfreeze federal funds locked up by the White House budget office. A memo from that office had demanded that billions of dollars in grants be held back until they were determined to be in compliance with President Trump’s priorities and ideological agenda.

On Friday, 22 Democratic attorneys general went to Judge McConnell to accuse the White House of failing to comply with his earlier order. The Justice Department responded in a filing on Sunday that money for clean energy projects and transportation infrastructure, allocated to states by the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure bill, was exempt from the initial order because it had been paused under a different memo.

Judge McConnell’s ruling on Monday explicitly rejected that argument.

The judge granted the attorneys general’s request for a “motion to enforce” — essentially a nudge. It did not find that the Trump administration was in contempt of court or specify any penalties for failing to comply.

However, the judge was straightforward in his finding that the initial temporary restraining order that he issued Jan. 29 was not being followed.

“These pauses in funding violate the plain text of the T.R.O.,” Judge McConnell wrote. That earlier ruling ordered the administration not to “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel or terminate” money that had already been allocated by Congress to the states to pay for Medicaid, school lunches, low-income housing subsidies and other essential services.

The judge also made clear that White House officials were obligated to comply regardless of how they thought the case might conclude. In his ruling on Monday, Judge McConnell quoted an opinion from a 1975 Supreme Court case noting that “persons who make private determinations of the law and refuse to obey an order generally risk criminal contempt even if the order is ultimately ruled incorrect.”

Going forward, if the judge finds that the government is still ignoring his initial order, he could order more than a dozen administration officials named in the lawsuit to explain why they should not be held in contempt of court, and then punish them with imprisonment — or, more likely, fines paid by their agencies, according to Adam Winkler, a professor at U.C.L.A School of Law.

“It’s unlikely you can put the secretary of an agency in jail,” he said, “but you can.”

The showdown is part of a broader effort by Mr. Trump’s opponents to get congressionally approved funding flowing again. Another order requiring that the disputed funds be released was issued last week by Judge Loren AliKhan of the District of Columbia. That case was filed by a coalition of nonprofits represented by Democracy Forward.

Skye Perryman, Democracy Forward’s chief executive, said that if there were to be a standoff between the executive and judicial branches, she hoped that the legislative branch would step in.

“That is really a call to action for Congress,” she said. “The judicial branch is not going to be able to stop this unlawful and extreme use of executive power on its own.”

The Trump administration has complied with the orders to unfreeze federal grants at least partially, but it is difficult to gauge precisely where funds remain stuck. The states have regained access to portals that allow them to be reimbursed for Medicaid. But David A. Super, a professor at Georgetown Law, said that he had heard directly from a number of groups, both inside and outside of government, that said their funding was still frozen.

“There’s no question that the government is not complying, has not even come close to complying, with the order,” Mr. Super said. “Even funds that weren’t frozen before the order are being frozen now.”

Mr. Super said Judge McConnell appeared to be trying to take the matter one step at a time.

“If you or I did this, the judge’s clerk would be on the phone saying, ‘Bring your toothbrush to the hearing to show cause because you might not be coming home tonight,’” he said. “This is the federal government, so the judge is trying to show restraint — expressing anger and reiterating its order, but not immediately bringing up penalties.”

The defiance may go beyond the domestic funding freeze. In another Monday filing, plaintiffs in a different lawsuit said that the Trump administration was still putting employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development on administrative leave, despite a court order requiring them to stop.

Charlie Savage contributed reporting. Seamus Hughes contributed research."

Steel and Aluminum Tariffs May Raise US Manufacturing Costs - The New York Times

Monday, February 10, 2025

Judge orders Trump admin to immediately unfreeze funds for federal grant...

Trump’s Actions Have Created a Constitutional Crisis, Scholars Say - The New York Times

Trump’s Actions Have Created a Constitutional Crisis, Scholars Say

"Law professors have long debated what the term means. But now many have concluded that the nation faces a reckoning as President Trump tests the boundaries of executive power.

The Supreme Court building as seen through large open windows.
It will take some time, though perhaps only weeks, for a challenge to one of President Trump’s actions to reach the Supreme Court.Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

There is no universally accepted definition of a constitutional crisis, but legal scholars agree about some of its characteristics. It is generally the product of presidential defiance of laws and judicial rulings. It is not binary: It is a slope, not a switch. It can be cumulative, and once one starts, it can get much worse.

It can also be obvious, said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley.

“We are in the midst of a constitutional crisis right now,” he said on Friday. “There have been so many unconstitutional and illegal actions in the first 18 days of the Trump presidency. We never have seen anything like this.”

His ticked off examples of what he called President Trump’s lawless conduct: revoking birthright citizenship, freezing federal spending, shutting down an agency, removing leaders of other agencies, firing government employees subject to civil service protections and threatening to deport people based on their political views.

That is a partial list, Professor Chemerinsky said, and it grows by the day. “Systematic unconstitutional and illegal acts create a constitutional crisis,” he said.

The distinctive feature of the current situation, several legal scholars said, is its chaotic flood of activity that collectively amounts to a radically new conception of presidential power. But the volume and speed of those actions may overwhelm and thus thwart sober and measured judicial consideration.

It will take some time, though perhaps only weeks, for a challenge to one of Mr. Trump’s actions to reach the Supreme Court. So far he has not openly flouted lower court rulings temporarily halting some of his initiatives, and it remains to be seen whether he would defy a ruling against him by the justices.

“It’s an open question whether the administration will be as contemptuous of courts as it has been of Congress and the Constitution,” said Kate Shaw, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “At least so far, it hasn’t been.”

That could change. On Sunday, Vice President JD Vance struck a confrontational tone on social media. “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” he wrote.

Vice President JD Vance struck a confrontational tone on social media on Sunday when he wrote, “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

Professor Shaw said a clash with the courts would only add to a crisis that is already underway. “A number of the new administration’s executive orders and other executive actions are in clear violation of laws enacted by Congress,” she said.

“The administration’s early moves,” she added, “also seem designed to demonstrate maximum contempt for core constitutional values — the separation of powers, the freedom of speech, equal justice under law.”

Pamela Karlan, a law professor at Stanford, added that a crisis need not arise from clashes between the branches of the federal government.

“It’s a constitutional crisis when the president of the United States doesn’t care what the Constitution says regardless whether Congress or the courts resist a particular unconstitutional action,” she said. “Up until now, while presidents might engage in particular acts that were unconstitutional, I never had the sense that there was a president for whom the Constitution was essentially meaningless.”

The courts, in any event, may not be inclined or equipped to push back. So much is happening, and so fast, that even eventual final rulings from the Supreme Court rejecting Mr. Trump’s arguments could come too late. After the U.S. Agency for International Development or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are disassembled, say, no court decision can recreate them.

In many cases, of course, the Supreme Court’s six-member conservative majority may be receptive to Mr. Trump’s arguments. Its decision in July granting him substantial immunityfrom prosecution embraced an expansive vision of the presidency that can only have emboldened him.

Members of that majority are, for instance, likely to embrace the president’s position that he is free to fire leaders of independent agencies.

The court may nonetheless issue an early, splashy ruling against Mr. Trump to send a signal about its power and independence. Striking down Mr. Trump’s order directing officials to deny citizenship to the children of immigrants would seem to be a good candidate, as it is at odds with the conventional understanding of the Constitution and the court’s precedents.

Such a decision would have an added benefit: It would be hard to disobey. From its earliest days, the Supreme Court has been wary of issuing rulings that might be ignored.

“I’m reminded of Marbury v. Madison, when the government did not even bother to show up before the Supreme Court to defend its position — strongly suggesting it would flout any court order against it,” said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia.

Even as the court ruled that the administration of Thomas Jefferson had acted unlawfully, she said, “the court carefully crafted its opinion in that case to avoid a ruling requiring executive branch compliance.”

Much has changed since that 1803 decision, and the Supreme Court’s stature and authority has grown. “Nonetheless,” Professor Frost said, “the Supreme Court may find it hard to defend the laws Congress enacted against executive usurpation when the Republican-controlled Congress refuses to do the same.”

Professor Karlan said she worried that the justices would rule for Mr. Trump for fear that he would ignore decisions rejecting his positions. “The idea that courts should preserve the illusion of power by abdicating their responsibilities would just make the constitutional crisis even worse,” she said.

Mr. Trump has already disregarded one Supreme Court decision, its ruling last monthupholding a federal law, passed by lopsided bipartisan majorities, requiring TikTok to be sold or banned. Mr. Trump instead ordered the Justice Department not to enforce the law for 75 days, citing as authority for the move his “unique constitutional responsibility for the national security of the United States.”

President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Ark., in 1957 to enforce Brown v. Board of Education, a Supreme Court decision in 1954 that banned segregation in public schools.Associated Press

Defiance of Supreme Court decisions is not unheard-of. Southern states, for instance, for years refused to follow Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision that banned segregation in public schools, engaging in what came to be known as “massive resistance.”

The Brown decision is now almost universally viewed as a towering achievement. But its enforcement required President Dwight D. Eisenhower to decide to send members of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Ark., to escort Black students through an angry white mob.

Not all presidents gave the court’s rulings the same respect. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce a Supreme Court decision arising from a clash between Georgia and the Cherokee Nation. A probably apocryphal but nonetheless potent comment is often attributed to Jackson about Chief Justice John Marshall: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

Even before this weekend, Mr. Vance has said that Mr. Trump should ignore the Supreme Court. In a 2021 interview, he said Mr. Trump should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state” and “replace them with our people.”

He added: “When the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. took note of such threats in his year-end report in December.

“Every administration suffers defeats in the court system — sometimes in cases with major ramifications for executive or legislative power or other consequential topics,” he wrote. “Nevertheless, for the past several decades, the decisions of the courts, popular or not, have been followed, and the nation has avoided the standoffs that plagued the 1950s and 1960s.”

“Within the past few years, however,” the chief justice went on, “elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings. These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.”

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. warned of the dangers of ignoring courts’ rulings in his year-end report.Doug Mills/The New York Times

That view has many supporters, though some use caveats. “It would be an extremely grave matter for a president to defy an actual (unstayed, in-effect) order of a federal court in a case that is indisputably in the court’s jurisdiction,” Ed Whelan, a conservative legal commentator, wrote on social media.

But considering discrete clashes may be relying on an outdated paradigm.

“One way to look at the administration’s assault on legal barriers is that it is seeking to establish ‘test cases’ to litigate and win favorable Supreme Court decisions,” Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith wrote in their Executive Functions newsletter. “But the typical test case is a carefully developed, discrete challenge to statutory or judge-made law with some good faith basis.”

Mr. Goldsmith is a law professor at Harvard and a former Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration. Mr. Bauer was White House counsel for President Barack Obama. They are students of Article II of the Constitution, which sets out the powers of the president.

Mr. Trump’s executive orders have some features suggesting that they mean to test legal theories in the Supreme Court, they wrote. “But in the aggregate,” they added, “they seem more like pieces of a program, in the form of law defiance, for a mini-constitutional convention to ‘amend’ Article II across a broad front.”

Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002. More about Adam Liptak"

Trump’s Actions Have Created a Constitutional Crisis, Scholars Say - The New York Times