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.
Trump threatens to sue media after Wall Street Journal editorial criticizes tariffs
(Trump. who can not read well, has obviously not read the US Constitution's First Amendment.)
"Journal argued Trump’s tariff plans would harm ‘US auto workers and Republican prospects in Michigan’
A recent Wall Street Journal editorial was critical of the potential impact of Donald Trump’s planned tariffs on the auto industry.Photograph: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg via Getty Images
AWall Street Journaleditorial slammingDonald Trump’stariff plans as terrible for the US economy and auto industry prompted a broadside from the president on Wednesday followed by threats to sue themedia.
In an opinion piece titledTrump’s Tariffs Will Punish Michigan, the Journal argued Trump’s tariff plans would harm “US auto workers and Republican prospects in Michigan”.
Trump has threatened to impose 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, a move the editorial argues would increase US vehicle prices, hurt auto workers and advantage Asian and European manufacturers.
“If the goal is to harm US auto workers and Republican prospects in Michigan, then by all means go ahead, Mr President,” wrote the Journal.
On his social media site,Truth Social, Trump wrote the Journal is “soooo wrong”. “The tariffs will drive massive amounts of auto manufacturing to MICHIGAN, a State which I just easily one [sic] in the Presidential Election,” he wrote.
Trump followed the rebuttal with a threat to those publishing “Fake books and stories with the so-called ‘anonymous’, or ‘off the record’, quotes” criticizing the opening month of his second presidency.
“At some point I am going to sue some of these dishonest authors and book publishers, or even media in general, to find out whether or not these ‘anonymous sources’ even exist, which they largely do not. They are made up, defamatory fiction, and a big price should be paid for this blatant dishonesty. I’ll do it as a service to our Country. Who knows, maybe we will create some NICE NEW LAW!!!,” he wrote.
The Journal’s conservative editorial board has been a persistent critic of Trump’s tariff plans, calling them“the dumbest trade war in history”earlier this month.
That editorial triggered Trump to argue that a “tariff lobby”, headed by “the Globalist and always wrong, Wall Street Journal”, was working hard to “continue the decades long RIPOFF OF AMERICA, both with regard to TRADE, CRIME, AND POISONOUS DRUGS that are allowed to so freely flow into AMERICA”."
"Mr. Sunstein, a law professor at Harvard, is the author of “Climate Justice” and the forthcoming “Separation of Powers.”
In his opening weeks back in office, President Trump is asserting power in a way that pushes hard on, and sometimes past, the boundaries of executive authority.
One of the most important of those boundaries involves his relationship with independent regulatory agencies. Mr. Trump is the first president since the 1930s toassert controlover many of them, and this assertion of power will almost certainly be tested in the Supreme Court.
Mr. Trump is operating under the theory that the executive branch is unitary, in the sense that Article II of the Constitution places executive power in a single person, the president, who gets to control every high-level official who executes federal law (and plenty of lower-level ones, too).
If Mr. Trump succeeds in court, the country will see a significant shift in power from the independent agencies to the White House.
For better or for worse, that shift would be profoundly unsettling. And in some respects it could be dangerous — if, for example, a president is allowed to control monetary policy, or if he is in charge of the Federal Communications Commission, and thus able to play politics with national communications policy.
The president is not a king. In its most extreme version, the unitary executive theory is a form of invented history, a modern creation that threatens to change, and in important ways to undermine, the operations of the national government.
The theory of the unitary executive means that the president can fire, at his pleasure, the heads of the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board and other independent agencies. In its strongest form, the unitary executive theory means that the president can control the policy choices of those agencies. So if the F.T.C. wants to issue a rule to protect consumers, and the president thinks that’s a terrible idea, then he can prevent that rule from seeing the light of day.
The unitary executive theory is supported by some distinguished scholars, who point to the Constitution’s text. The first sentence of Article II states that “the executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America.” The same article gives the president, and no one else, the power to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
Everyone agrees that at the Constitutional Convention, the founders decided to have just one president, rather than a “plural” executive. Practically everyone also agrees that the very first Congress, in creating the departments of Treasury, War and Foreign Affairs, made a momentous decision, widely known as the Decision of 1789: Their heads would be at-will employees of the president. The Decision of 1789 is often thought to show acceptance of the unitary executive theory.
The current conflict over the president’s authority owes its origins to the New Deal period. In a 1935 case, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the court ruled that Congress could limit the president’s power to remove a head of the F.T.C. — and thus that it could create independent agencies.
Until recently, many people agreed that under Humphrey’s Executor, independent agencies are just fine under the law, and that the president does not have much authority over them. In the early 1980s, I worked in the Justice Department under President Ronald Reagan, whose White House liked the idea of a unitary executive and who wanted to know if he could exert at least some control over the independent agencies.
Lawyers in the Justice Department decided that Humphrey’s Executor was settled law — but that it left the president some running room. If he wanted, we said, he could direct independent agencies to submit their regulations to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the president’s regulatory clearinghouse, for a degree of scrutiny and review. We did not think that the president could tell the independent agencies what rules to issue, but we did think that he could require them to subject their rules to a process of comment and analysis by the regulatory office.
Reagan decided not to impose that requirement, partly because of the seriousness of the legal question, and partly because of fear of a fierce congressional pushback.
In the past four decades, both Republican and Democratic presidents have followed Reagan’s lead. To be sure, they have overseen internal discussions about whether to assert the unitariness of the executive and to require independent agencies to submit their rules to the O.I.R.A.
I was administrator of O.I.R.A. from 2009 to 2012, and the issue came up. The White House’s ultimate judgment was that presidential control would not be a good idea. Some government lawyers thought it would raise serious legal doubts. Other White House officials thought that, for one thing, independent agencies avoided an excessive concentration of power in one person. For another, such agencies reduced the risk of self-dealing (as might occur if, for example, a president rewarded his friends and punished his enemies).
More recently, the Supreme Court has shown a distinct discomfort with the whole idea of independent agencies. In Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,decidedin 2020, the court struck down a provision making the bureau independent on the ground that it was headed by a single person. The court purported to preserve Humphrey’s Executor and the multimember independent agencies (like the F.C.C., the N.L.R.B. and the Fed). But at the same time, the court spoke enthusiastically about the unitary executive, and it is reasonable to doubt whether Humphrey’s Executor will ultimately survive.
President Trump does not like the idea of independent agencies. He recently fired a member of the N.L.R.B., even though board members can be discharged, under the law, only for “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office, but for no other cause.”
His acting solicitor general has said that the Justice Department intends to contest the for-cause protections given to the F.T.C., the N.L.R.B. and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. (Why she singled out those three agencies is not entirely clear.)
The acting solicitor general alsosaidthat in certain contexts, the department will contest the idea of independent administrative law judges — adjudicators within the executive branch who do not serve at the president’s pleasure.
And the president has directed the independent agencies to submit their rules for O.I.R.A. review, reversing the course set by Reagan and presidential administrations since.
Mr. Trump may ultimately win in court, but the best historical research throws the whole idea of a unitary executive into serious doubt. In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, who rejected a plural executive, also insisted that the president lacks unlimited removal power.
And defenders of the unitary executive appear to have misunderstood the Decision of 1789. The most careful evidence suggests that, at the time, a majority of members of Congress did not embrace but actually rejected the view that Congress lacks power to protect subordinate officials in the executive branch from presidential control. Indeed, independent agencies are hardly a creation of the New Deal — they havebeen with ussince the founding era.
It follows that if you are an originalist, you will probably reject Mr. Trump’s broadest claims.
Then there’s stare decisis, or precedent. The Trump administration’s claims would upset law that has been settled for 90 years. It’s true that the current court has not always respected stare decisis, but it has yet to undertake the kind of radical revision of national institutions that would come from invalidating independent agencies.
Requiring some independent agencies to submit their rules to O.I.R.A. would hardly be the end of the world. It could even do some good. O.I.R.A.’s staffers do a thorough, careful job, and agency regulations are usually improved by the process of review. It would not be unreasonable for the Supreme Court to allow the White House and the regulatory office to comment on, and have some degree of control over, the regulations of most of the independent agencies.
But the case of the Fed puts a bright spotlight on the potential danger of giving the president unlimited authority over independent agencies. There are strong reasons for its independence. If a president could control interest rates, or oversee regulations that are connected to monetary policy, he could manage the economy so as to promote his own short-term political interests.
Or take the F.C.C. A president who oversees its decisions could punish news sources that he didn’t like and reward those he loved.
Or consider the claim that the president gets to impound congressionally appropriated funds and choose which ones to spend. That claim would render Congress subordinate to the executive in what might be its most fundamental power: the purse. Impoundment authority, on the part of the president, would go well beyond the idea of a unitary executive. It would be a devastating blow to the separation of powers.
There are decent arguments in favor of reforms that would increase presidential control over the administrative state. But the broadest current claims about executive authority are a creation of the 21st century, not the 18th. They are a form of hubris. They strike at the heart of our founding document."
Judge orders Trump administration to pay millions in USAID funds
"Officials have one day to resume foreign aid payments after a contentious hearing in which a government lawyer couldn’t say if funds had been unfrozen.
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Trump administration to pay hundreds of millions in foreign assistance funds that have been in limbo despite his previous directive that such aid resume — action targeting President Donald Trump’s broad pause in aid, which has led to chaos globally and dire warnings about escalating famine.
U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali gave the government until 11:59 p.m. Wednesday to fulfill its contractual obligations and restart payments to contractors whose work in impoverished parts of the world had been largely stopped during anongoing legal battle. Administration officials must also provide examples of communication sent to partners on the ground about resuming assistance, Ali ruled.
His order applies to work done before Feb. 13.
Aid groups that are plaintiffs in the case provided evidence that the government has not lifted its suspension of funding, Ali said, and the defendants did not rebut that Tuesday.
During the contentious 90-minute hearing, Justice Department lawyer Indraneel Sur told Ali he was “not in a position to answer” whether the Trump administration had taken needed steps to allow the assistance to begin moving. Sur said the administration would provide further details in a status report due at noon Wednesday.
“I don’t know why I can’t get a straight answer from you,” Ali responded. “We are now 12 days in. You can’t answer me whether any of the funds … covered by the court’s order have been unfrozen?”
The total amount owed to organizations by the U.S. Agency for International Development was not immediately clear, but one development group, DAI Global LLC, said in court filings that it is owed more than $115 million. Separately, the U.N. World Food Program — the largest distributor of food aid — is owed more than $820 million, officials confirmed this week.
More than 10 days of delays have wreaked havoc on some of the world’s poorest and sickest communities. People with HIV have lost access to lifesaving medicines. Those in famine-stricken areas of Sudan and other countriesare without food.
In an emergency request Monday, the partner organizations said they face possible eviction and threats to worker safety because of the administration’s ongoing defiance of Ali’s federal court order.
“What the government has revealed is that the government has done nothing to make the flow of payments happen,” Stephen K. Wirth, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, said in court.
The groups allege that instead of complying with Ali’s directive, the Trump administration “chose to take a series of new actions” around access to a key reimbursement system, adding new approval processes and terminating “hundreds of critical personnel” — “all but halting the disbursement of foreign-assistance funds,” according to their emergency motion.
Despite the State Departmentgranting a waiverfor certain lifesaving aid to resume, the plaintiffs contend, the payment system remains down, with employees seeing a variety of error messages when they try to submit invoices. Many organizations have not been paid for expenses incurred in the fourth quarter of 2024, before Trump returned to the White House.
Should the government not comply by Ali’s new deadline, “we are in uncharted and dangerous territory,” Lauren Bateman, another attorney for the plaintiffs, noted via email after Tuesday’s hearing.
A spokesman for the Trump administration has said officials will not discuss the pending litigation.
The case is among several in which legal experts say the administration hascome closeto the red line of disobeying judicial orders as Trump and his allies assert vastpresidential powers.
Thousands of federal workers have lost their jobs in recent weeks, adding to the chaos. On Sunday, the administration sent notices that it wouldeliminate1,600 jobs at USAIDand place all but a small number of the remaining employees on leave, after a different federal judge ruled that the job-cutting efforts could move forward.
Aid advocates believe the Trump administration is determined to dismantle USAID, the chief U.S. agency for foreign assistance, which provides $40 billion in help each year. The president and billionaire adviser Elon Musk have both derided the diplomats’ work, with Trump calling them “radical lunatics” and Musk vowing USAID must “die.”
Elon Musk speaks during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on Thursday.Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
More than 150,000 people from Canada have signed a parliamentary petition calling for their country to stripElon Musk’s Canadian citizenship because of the tech billionaire’s alliance with Donald Trump, who has spent his second US presidency repeatedly threatening to conquer its independent neighbor to the north and turn it into its 51st state.
British Columbia author Qualia Reed launched the petition in Canada’s House of Commons, where it was sponsored by New Democrat parliamentary member and avowed Musk critic Charlie Angus, asthe Canadian Pressfirst reported over the weekend.
Born in South Africa and helming US companies including electric vehicle-maker Tesla, aerospace company SpaceX and the social media platform Twitter/X, Musk has Canadian citizenship through his mother: model and dietitian Maye Musk, who is from Saskatchewan’s capital, Regina. He has been crusading to slash the US federal government’s size at the behest of the US president, who has consistently challenged Canada’s sovereignty since returning to the White House for a second presidential term on 20 January.
Reed’spetition– filed on 20 February – accuses Musk of having “engaged in activities that go against the national interest of Canada” by acting as an adviser to Trump. Trump has invited the scorn of Canada’s 40 million residents by making threats about imposing steep tariffs on Canadian products and openly boasting about having the US annex the country, including shortly before its national hockey teamdefeateda selection of American opponents in a politically charged 20 February tournament final.
The petition asserts that Musk’s alignment with Trump makes him “a member of a foreign government that is attempting to erase Canadian sovereignty”. It asks Canadian prime ministerJustin Trudeauto take away Musk’s Canadian passport and revoke his citizenship with immediate effect.
Trump has often mocked Trudeau as “governor”, the title given to US states’ chief executives. And Musk wrote on X, the social media platform he bought in 2022 for $44bn to relish Trudeau’s announcement in January that he would resign as the head of Canada’s Liberal party after it selected a new leader, with the tech billionaire praising clips of the prominent Canadian Conservative party chief Pierre Poilievre.
As the Canadian Press noted, petitions like Reed’s require 500 or more signatures for them to gain the certification necessary to be presented to Canada’s House of Commons and potentially garner a formal government response. Reed’s petition evidently had no trouble clearing that threshold, having collected about 167,000 signatures as of early Monday, with no indication that the number would soon stop rising.
Canada’s House of Commons is scheduled to resume its work on 24 March, though the country could call for a general election before parliamentary members return. The signing period for Reed’s petition was set to expire on 20 June.
Musk’s directive to ostensibly cut federal spending – after Trump lost re-election in 2020 to Joe Biden but then secured it in November at the expense of Kamala Harris – has affected hundreds of thousands of US government civil servants. The cuts include thousands at the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Defense, Health and Human Services, the Internal Revenue Service and the National Parks Service, among others.
An Economist/YouGov poll of nearly 1,600 respondents recentlyfoundMusk and his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) are far less popular with the public that they claim to be serving than many of the areas they are targeting.
Nonetheless, on Friday at agathering of conservativesin Maryland, Musk made light of his involvement in the Trump administration by giddily waving a giant chainsaw in the air.
And on Sunday, Musk boosted an X post reading: “Of course we support Doge! Those who don’t support it are unAmerican.”
Donald Trump speaks to Brendan Carr, his new chair of the Federal Communications Commission.Photograph: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
TheTrump administrationis waging a “disturbing” attack on the freedom of the press that amounts to a “true free-speech emergency”,mediaexperts have warned, as the Federal Communications Commission recently launched an investigation into a series of media organizations, including theowner of NBC News.
The FCC, led by Donald Trump appointee and Project 2025 author Brendan Carr, has ordered investigationsinto NPR and PBSin the first month since Trump took office, while also scrutinizing a CBS News interview and a San Franciscoradio station.
Ina letter to Comcast, which owns NBC News, Carr said he had asked the FCC’s enforcement bureau to “open an investigation” into the corporation, stating: “I am concerned that Comcast and NBCUniversal may be promoting invidious forms of DEI in a manner that does not comply with FCC regulations.”
It came after Carr, who was appointed to FCC chair by Trump, said he did not “see a reason why Congress should continue sending taxpayer dollars” to PBS and NPR, publicly funded organizations Trumphas threatened to defund.
“It’s really quite disturbing,” said Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters, a watchdog group.
“What we’re seeing is really an attack on freedom of speech and freedom of the press from all aspects of the Trump administration right now.”
Carr wrotea chapter on the FCCin Project 2025, the rightwing plan to overhaul the US government. A communications lawyer who has worked for the FCC since 2012, Carr is a Trump loyalist whose social media presence is dominated by fawningpraiseof the president. The Daily Beastreportedthat Carr has told friends he is having “the time of his life” launching investigations into media companies – Carrrepostedthe article on X, writing: “Find a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
As the FCC launches its investigation into Comcast, one danger is that news channel-owning corporations such as Comcast – a $100bn company – may not be inclined to go to war with the Trump administration over freedom of the press.
That could be brought into focus by Paramount Global, the owner of CBS News, which isreportedlydiscussing settling a lawsuit brought by Trump over a CBS News interview with Kamala Harris. Trump alleges the interview was selectively edited and is suing for $10bn. Earlier this month, Carr launched an investigation into CBS. There is no evidence the interview was edited beyond normal practices, and CBS denies the accusation, but a complicating factor is that Paramount is hoping to merge with Skydance Media – a move whichwould have to be approved by Carr’s FCC.
“This is the path that Viktor Orbán took in Hungary, where you use the power of the state to ensure that the media is compliant, that outlets are either curbed and become much less willing to be critical, or they are sold to owners who will make that happen,” Gertz said.
“Obviously, this is the early stages of anything like that, but the signs that we’re seeing right now are really quite disturbing.”
Rebecca Hamilton, a professor at American University Washington College of Law, told the Guardian that the FCC investigations could affect journalists’ ability to report on the Trump administration.
“Valid FCC investigations can have a positive impact on the information ecosystem. But the latest FCC investigations launched by Carr are aligned with a broader effort by the Trump administration to punish outlets that Trump dislikes. Such investigations risk creating a chilling effect on the ability of journalists to report with fear of retaliation,” she said.
The FCC’s investigations into media organizations, Hamilton wrote in a recent piece forJust Security, represent “a wholesale effort by Trump and his allies to eviscerate the free press in order to construct an information ecosystem dominated and controlled by those who espouse his views”.
Fox Corp, which owns the Trump-friendly Fox News, statesa series of valueson its website which could be considered to be an example of DEI. A section called “culture and belonging” states that Fox “provide[s] tools and resources for every person to feel connected, seen, heard, and inspired to do their best work”.
The page lists several internal groups employees can join, including a group called “BLK+”, which “celebrate[s] the intersectionality of our Black colleagues”, and a “Pride” group which aims to “foster a work environment where all FOX LGBTQ+ colleagues feel authentic and professionally supported”.
Inits 2023 reportto shareholders, Fox Corp said it “seeks to promote a diversity of professional background, expertise, perspective, age, gender and ethnicity among board members, including by ensuring that minority and female candidates are presented for consideration with each vacancy”.
The FCC did not respond when the Guardian asked if it planned to investigate Fox Corp, founded by Rupert Murdoch, and did not reply to a request for comment about its investigations.
Craig Aaron, co-CEO of Free Press, a non-profit organization that scrutinizes media freedom, said the US is “facing a true free-speech emergency”.
“The first amendment exists to stop the government from shutting down speech it doesn’t like. A weaponized FCC is trying to do exactly that. The FCC chairman is weaponizing the power of the agency President Trump appointed him to lead, in order to go after the president’s perceived enemies and chill critical coverage,” Aaron said.
“The government should never interfere with such editorial decisions or news content. Yet the FCC has sent threatening letters and launched investigations over editorial decision-making, reporting on law-enforcement activities, and basic fact checking. This is chilling and dangerous.”
