Does the Impoundment Control Act get your heart pumping? Not likely, and yet another ruling without rational on the Supreme Court’s shadow docket makes it a far bigger deal than one might imagine. At issue was $4 billion that Congress allocated to foreign aid, but that Trump decided not to spend because it didn’t fit his agenda. The funds were impounded, pursuant to 2 USC Chapter 17B, which would otherwise put the question back to Congress to decide whether to rescind its earlier allocation, as the president requests, or to tell the president to spend it as Congress determined.

Except Congress did nothing with the recission request, because that’s what this Congress does best, and when the fiscal year expires, the money will disappear, mooting the question. See how sexy this is? Continue reading →

About two months ago, my son came to me expressing a desire to quit karate. My wife and I had him in martial arts since kindergarten and we’d honestly thought he’d enjoyed it this entire time. Apparently the kindest ten-year-old boy in the world doesn’t share his father’s joy at either punching people in the face during sparring or getting hit in the face during sparring. Go figure.

Anyway, he wasn’t getting off without going into some other form of physical activity. Enter my son’s friend Charlie (not his real name) who’s one of the popular neighborhood kids and something of a self-styled protector. Putting his arm around my boy, Charlie told him “Relax, you should join my church’s soccer league! You can probably even be on my team! My dad’s best friends with the director!” Continue reading →

To the extent one took pride in serving as a prosecutor, it was grounded in the integrity of the duty. With neither fear nor favor, a prosecutor followed the evidence and, when the evidence warranted, prosecuted crimes. It didn’t make a prosecutor infallible, or even right, but it did allow her to perform her duty with integrity. As Justice Jackson admonished, “do justice.” And justice was what United States Attorneys and their assistants could take comfort in doing.

That is over.

But the two-count indictment against Mr. Comey is the most far-reaching and public example of the second Trump administration’s efforts to co-opt the criminal justice system. And while Mr. Trump’s allies see it as an overdue and legitimate effort to hold Mr. Comey accountable for what they consider an abuse of power, it could well go down as a moment when a fundamental democratic norm — that justice is dispensed without regard to political or personal agendas — was cast aside in a dangerous way.

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While many of us tend to focus on the Supreme Court’s acquiescence to the Trump administration’s actions on its shadow docket, lawprof Steve Vladeck argues that the courts have been more effective in keeping Trump’s usurpation of power than we realize.

For all of the attention that is (understandably) being paid to the unprecedented number of cases the Trump administration is rushing to the Supreme Court (we’re up to 28), and to the Court’s (troubling) behavior in those cases, they represent only a small subset of the broader universe of legal challenges to Trump administration behavior. In the majority of cases in which the government is losing in the lower courts, it is (1) not seeking emergency or expedited intervention from above; and (2) otherwise complying with the adverse rulings while the cases move (very slowly) ahead.

Because this reality doesn’t make for quite as attractive headlines, it’s one to which too many folks are largely oblivious. That’s a problem worth fixing—not only because it’s important to tell both sides of the litigation story, but because including these cases paints a more complicated (and, in my view, far less nihilistic) picture of the role of the courts—and of the law, more generally—as a check on the Trump administration.

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After a three day hiatus, Jimmy Kimmel returned to ABC. Whether you love him or hate him, a lot of people watched him to see what he would have to say. Apparently, this did not please Trump.

While Trump and his surrogates claimed that his “indefinite suspension” had nothing to do with FCC chair Brendan Carr’s threatening ABC that “we can do it the easy way or we can do it the hard way,” or Trump’s saying mean things about him is illegal and ABC’s license should be taken away, Trump cut them off at the knees by his twit making clear that Kimmel’s “cancellation” was all about late night comedians being mean to him. Continue reading →

Signalgate? Musk’s Top-Secret China briefing? $600 toilet seats? Pentagon papers? Under the watchful if bloodshot eye of Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon has issued a 17-page memo telling the media that “the press does not run the Pentagon, the people do.” Henceforth, the press will no longer have unfettered access to the Pentagon and can only publish officially approved information. 

The Pentagon unveiled new restrictions on reporters covering the Defense Department (DOD) on Friday, asking them to pledge not to publish information that has not been authorized by the administration or risk losing access to the building.

Hegseth’s concern is that the Pentagon leaks like a sieve and given how many embarrassing and incompetent things that happen under his warfighter control, he’s had enough of looking like a blithering idiot. Continue reading →

Somehow, law enforcement, both state and federal, managed to do its job without individual officers and agents concealing their identities. And then came ICE under Trump, where everything purportedly changed.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California signed legislation on Saturday that would prevent federal immigration agents from wearing masks in the state, a direct response to President Trump’s deportation crackdown in the Los Angeles region.

The new law is believed to be the first such ban in the nation, though it is likely to be challenged in court before it can go into effect in January because it is unclear whether California can enforce such restrictions on federal law enforcement. The bill also applies to local law enforcement.

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Now that Honest Erik Siebert is out of the way, Trump sees no impediment to using the United States of America to impose retribution on his enemies. And the order was given to underling Pam Bondi.

He left out the part about where they convicted him, but I digress. To the MAGA faithful, this makes complete sense. After all, he is the president and the entirety of the government exists to serve his whims as far as they’re concerned. Sure, that might not be true for Presidents Obama or Biden, but they “did it first” and it was terribly wrong and evil, so that means Trump can do it now and it’s “perfect.” Continue reading →

Even Emil Bove, who is as deep down the Trumpian hole as it gets, liked Erik Siebert, apparently now former United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Bondi and Blanche were good with him. Senators Kaine and Warner were good with him. The district judges were good with him. Even Trump was good with him when he nominated Siebert and the Senate confirmed him. Until he did the one thing Trump couldn’t tolerate.

Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, had recently told senior Justice Department officials that investigators found insufficient evidence to bring charges against Ms. James and had also raised concerns about a potential case against Mr. Comey, according to officials familiar with the situation.

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President Trump declared that he will issue yet another Executive Order, this time designating Antifa as a “terrorist organization.” There are a few problems with doing so, starting with the fact that antifa isn’t an organization at all, but rather an ideology seized upon by left wing radicals who cloaked themselves in the name when they engaged in violence.

Antifa is a label for a political subculture or protest style. The phenomenon does not have a leader, an initiation process, membership rolls, a headquarters, a bank account or a centralized structure.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, an American University professor who studies domestic extremism, said antifa was an idea that could mobilize people. She compared it to concepts or ideologies like “white supremacy” and “Islamist extremism,” as distinguished from specific groups like the Aryan Brotherhood or Al Qaeda.

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