Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 28
May 24, 2025
May 23, 2025
May 23, 2025
I’m going to take an early night tonight, but I want to record three things that jumped out at me today because they seem to tell a story.
After S.V. Date of HuffPost noted last week that the White House had published fewer than 20% of Trump’s speeches, the White House has stopped publishing a database of official transcripts of President Donald J. Trump’s announcements, appearances, and speeches altogether and has taken down those it had published. Instead it will just post videos. And yet it is publishing just a few of the videos of the president’s term: so far, fewer than 50 videos of the first 120 days of his term, according to Brian Stelter of CNN.
A presidential administration traditionally publishes the president’s words promptly to establish a record. The Trump White House, in contrast, says removing the transcripts will enable people to get a better sense of Trump by watching his videos. But it’s likely closer to the truth that Trump’s appearances since he took office have been erratic, and removing the transcripts will make it harder for people to read his nonsensical rambles.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “The Trump White House is the most transparent in history,” but of course, it’s objectively not. White House officials have made it impossible to tell who is making decisions at the Department of Government Efficiency, for example, or who gave the order to render migrants to El Salvador. Now the president’s words, too, will be hidden.
Trump’s erratic behavior was on full display this morning when he announced that he will impose a 50% tariff on goods from the European Union on June 1, suggesting he is frustrated because his promises of a new trade deal have failed to materialize. Trump had threatened to stop negotiating and simply dictate terms, and that is apparently the direction he’s moving. “I’m not looking for a deal,” he said this afternoon. “We’ve set the deal—it’s at 50%.” Trump also threatened a 25% tariff on Apple products unless the company begins to make the iPhone in the U.S.
Elisabeth Buchwald of CNN reported that three major European stock market indexes fell after Trump’s threat. U.S. stock market indexes fell for the fourth day. They rose from their lowest point after the White House said Trump’s tariff comments were not a formal statement of policy.
So the president of the United States can tank world markets, only to have his own staff inform the media that his comments should not be taken seriously.
The third story is that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has denied North Carolina’s request that it honor a commitment made by President Joe Biden to pay for 100% of the costs for removal of debris after Hurricane Helene devastated the western part of the state in September 2024. That storm killed 107 people in western North Carolina and destroyed or damaged 75,000 homes, as well as destroying roads and leaving mounds of debris.
As Zack Colman of Politico reported yesterday, the storm hit in the last weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign, and Trump undermined FEMA’s response, lying that it was not present and telling North Carolinians that the Biden administration could not help them because it had taken money from FEMA for undocumented immigrants. None of what he was saying was true, but MAGA mouthpieces picked up his criticisms and exaggerated them, claiming that the federal government intended to steal people’s land, that Biden had directed the storm to western North Carolina, and that 28 babies had frozen to death in FEMA tents—all lies, but lies that slowed recovery as riled-up people who believed them refused assistance, threatened officials, and demanded investigations.
Trump suggested he would respond more effectively to voters in North Carolina, and two of the hardest-hit counties there, Avery and Haywood, backed him in 2024 by margins of 75.7% and 61.8%, respectively, similar to those it had given him in 2016 and 2020.
Once in office, though, Trump began to talk of eliminating FEMA. Now the White House has told North Carolina residents they’re on their own as they try to dig out from Hurricane Helene.
Taken together, these stories from today seem to provide a snapshot of this moment in American history. They show an erratic president whose own officials discount his orders even as power is concentrating in the executive office and who won election through lies that are now being exposed as his policies disproportionately hurt the very people who backed him most enthusiastically.
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Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/22/media/donald-trump-media-white-house-transcript-purge
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/23/economy/trump-eu-tariffs
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/22/stock-market-today-live-updates.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/22/trump-fema-north-carolina-hurricane-helene-00352614
May 22, 2025
May 22, 2025
Just before 7:00 this morning, the House of Representatives passed the Republicans’ megabill by a vote of 215 to 214. All Democrats voted no. Two Republicans, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio, joined the Democrats in voting no. Chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus Andy Harris of Maryland voted “present.” The measure now advances to the Senate.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says the bill cuts at least $715 billion in healthcare spending, mostly from Medicaid, and $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, causing more than 2.7 million American households to lose benefits. Because the massive debt increase in the measure triggers a 2010 law requiring offsets, it will cut Medicare, as well, by an estimated $500 billion.
Economist Robert Reich points out that Americans making between about $17,000 and $51,000 will lose about $700 a year. On average, Americans with incomes of less than $17,000 will lose more than $1,000 a year. But if you are among the top 0.1% of earners, you’re in luck: you’ll gain nearly $390,000 a year.
The measure roughly doubles the current annual budgets of Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in what Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes is “the single biggest increase in funding to immigration enforcement in the history of the United States.” It increases ICE’s detention budget from $3.4 billion a year to $45 billion through September 2029, a staggering 365% increase on an annual basis that would permit ICE to detain at least 100,000 people at a time.
It increases ICE’s budget for transportation and removal operations by 500%, from the current $721 million to $14.4 billion. It also calls for $46.5 billion for construction of barriers at the border, including completing 701 miles of wall, 900 miles of river barriers, and 629 miles of secondary barriers, and replacement of 141 miles of vehicle and pedestrian barriers.”
This bill highlights a truism: In the United States, racism has always gone hand in hand with the concentration of wealth among the very richest people.
By driving white fear of a darker-skinned other, elite southern enslavers convinced the poor white farmers who lost their land in the cotton boom of the 1850s to vote for politicians who insisted that the primary responsibility of the federal government was to protect human enslavement.
In an extraordinary meeting with South African president Cyril Ramaphosa at the Oval Office yesterday, President Donald J. Trump echoed the language of enslavers in 1859 almost explicitly when he insisted—falsely—that white South Africans are facing white genocide. As Tim Cocks and Nellie Peyton of Reuters explain, the conspiracy theory of white genocide in South Africa has circulated among fringe groups of white South Africans since the end of apartheid in 1994. It claims white deaths in a country with a high murder rate are deliberate ethnic cleansing, although data collected by white farmers themselves shows that since 1990, murders of white people make up only 1% of the total number of murders.
But Trump sidekick Elon Musk has embraced the theory, and Trump is pushing it, offering a fast track for asylum to white South African “refugees.” Yesterday, with Musk in the Oval Office, Trump showed to the cameras a picture of people moving body bags, and said “[t]hese are all white farmers that are being buried.” In fact, it was a picture from Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo, showing humanitarian workers burying bodies in a war zone.
The administration's immigration policies exacerbate racism, using it to undermine the rule of law on which the Constitution rests. Notably, the administration has ignored the concept of due process guaranteed by the Constitution, with rendition of migrants to prison in El Salvador based not on a review of their cases but simply on the claim—without evidence—that individuals are gang members.
Stories of immigrants arrested by ICE without any criminal history continue to surface, even as administration officials insist those individuals are dangerous criminals. Fewer than half of those swept up outside of Nashville last week had criminal records, although U.S. Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin called them “violent criminal illegal aliens” and attacked Nashville’s Democratic mayor Freddie O’Connell as being “pro-open borders.”
Yesterday Judge Brian Murphy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts ruled that the administration “unquestionably” violated a court order when it rendered eight men convicted of violent crimes to South Sudan. The court had ordered the administration to give the men due process before taking them to a country other than their own. McLaughlin called the judge’s ruling “deranged.”
Taking down the rule of law would permit MAGA officials to persecute their political opponents, indicting congressional representatives, for example, as it has recently done to Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ). It would also permit the concentration of wealth and power without fear of breaking the law.
There is the open corruption, as when the Trump administration officially accepted a 747 as a gift from the Qatari government yesterday, despite the constitutional prohibition against taking gifts from foreign governments. Trump currently says he will not use it after he leaves office, but since Air Force officials say it will take years and up to a billion in taxpayer money to secure it for use by a president, it seems unlikely that he accepted the plane simply to become an exhibit in an as-yet-unstarted Trump presidential library.
And then there is the more hidden corruption.
Last week, David Yaffe-Bellany and Eric Lipton of the New York Times called attention to the announcement by a struggling technology company with ties to China that it had secured funding to buy $300 million of Trump’s cryptocurrency $TRUMP. It appears the company is hoping to curry favor with the president.
Zach Everson of Forbes noted that the Trump family controls about 60% of World Liberty Financial, a decentralized financial platform that produces the USD1 stablecoin, a kind of cryptocurrency that fluctuates less than most cryptocurrencies because it’s pegged to the dollar. World Liberty Financial’s USD1 stablecoin began trading yesterday on KuCoin, an exchange headquartered in the Seychelles and banned in the United States after it admitted to violating laws against money laundering and agreed to pay a $300 million fine. A spokesperson for KuCoin told Everson that it had reached out about carrying USD1 after the coin “demonstrated strong demand in certain regions.”
The racism and the corruption are coming together tonight as the top 220 holders of the $TRUMP coin join the president at a private dinner. A Bloomberg analysis of the top 25 wallets shows that 19 are owned by individuals from outside the United States, and many of the winners are companies looking for access to the president. Many of them dumped their $TRUMP coins as soon as they made the cut for the dinner.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reported today that 50 of the people attending Trump's dinner tonight hold crypto assets with names from the alt-right, including Pepe the Frog and swastikas, or that have names that are racist or antisemitic, including the n-word and “F*CK THE JEWS.”
Their language echoes that of the elite enslavers of the 1850s—and for that matter, the Ku Klux Klan members of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the American Nazis of the 1920s and 1930s, and the segregationists of the years after World War II. And just like the elite enslavers in the 1850s, MAGA leaders want to get rid of laws that make it harder for them to monopolize the nation’s wealth and power and are using racism to get voters to support them.
Also like their predecessors, MAGA leaders are getting a significant boost from the United States Supreme Court. In a decision made today on the so-called “shadow docket”—the emergency docket in which the court makes decisions without arguments or briefs and which previously wasn’t used for major rulings—the court made it clear it is willing to abandon the idea of independent agencies. Since 1935, the court has upheld Congress’s right to appoint the heads of independent agencies and has said that the president cannot fire them without cause. Today, in an unsigned two-page order, the court paused orders by federal judges allowing board members at two independent agencies to stay even after Trump tried to fire them.
This is an extraordinary step toward the idea of the “unitary executive,” a theory Republicans began to embrace in the 1980s that because the president is the head of one of the three unique branches of government, any oversight of that office by Congress or the courts is unconstitutional, although in fact presidents since George Washington have accepted congressional oversight. It gives Trump control over the independent agencies that currently run much of the government, agencies like the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board—both part of this case—and also the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and so on.
The six justices who handed down today’s order tried to say that the Federal Reserve Board is different from other agencies because it has a “distinct historical tradition,” so Trump can’t just fire its head, Jerome Powell. Trump has made it clear he wants to fire Powell, but that removal would make financial markets even more precarious than they already are.
The dissent, written by Justice Elena Kagan and joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, notes that “the majority’s order…is nothing short of extraordinary” and “favors the President over our precedent.” The court has abandoned 90 years of precedent under the emergency docket, and misrepresents the case as one about the interests of two employees in keeping their job.
In fact, the liberal justices say, “the interest at stake is in maintaining Congress’s idea of independent agencies: bodies of specialists balanced along partisan lines, which will make sound judgments precisely because not fully controlled by the White House.”
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Notes:
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5313198-house-passes-trump-big-beautiful-bill/
https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-05/61422-Reconciliation-Distributional-Analysis.pdf
Robert ReichWhat you need to share about the “one big beautiful” ugly horrible billFriends…Read more20 hours ago · 1562 likes · 109 comments · Robert Reichhttps://immigrationimpact.com/2025/05/05/house-reconciliation-bill/
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/21/africa/trump-resettling-south-africas-afrikaners-intl
https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2025/may/14/less-than-half-of-nearly-200-arrested-in/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/05/21/trump-south-africa-white-afrikaners-violence/
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/21/nx-s1-5406420/trump-accepts-qatar-plane-air-force-one
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a966_1b8e.pdf
https://www.wired.com/story/the-trump-memecoin-dinner-winners-are-getting-rid-of-their-coins/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/us/politics/trump-crypto-purchase.html
Bluesky:
May 21, 2025
May 21, 2025
Just after 1:00 this morning, the House Rules Committee began its hearing on what congressional Republicans have officially named The One Big, Beautiful Bill. If passed, this measure will put Trump’s wish list into law. Although this is technically a budget bill, items in it from that wish list include a significant restriction on “the authority of federal courts to hold government officials in contempt when they violate court orders,” as Dean of Berkeley Law School Erwin Chemerinsky explained in Just Security Monday. “Without the contempt power,” he writes, “judicial orders are meaningless and can be ignored.”
Three judges are currently considering whether the administration is in contempt of court over its apparent disregard for court orders over its rendition of undocumented immigrants to third countries.
But the center of the bill is indeed related to money: it is the $3.8 trillion extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which disproportionately benefit the wealthy and corporations. Yesterday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that Americans in the lowest tenth of earners will lose money under the measure while people in the top five percent of earners will see a tax cut of $117.2 billion, more than 20% of the tax cuts in the bill.
Poorer Americans take a hit from the bill because it cuts federal healthcare and food assistance programs to partially offset the costs of the tax cuts. Cuts to Medicaid are expected to leave at least 9 million people without healthcare coverage. Cuts of about 30% to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program would be “the biggest cut in the program’s history,” Ty Jones Cox, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told Lorie Konish of CNBC. They would cut about $300 billion from the program through 2034. More than 40 million people, including children, seniors, and adults with disabilities, receive food assistance.
Yesterday the CBO reported that the measure will add $2.3 trillion to the deficit over ten years, and noted that when a budget adds too much to the federal deficit, it triggers cuts to Medicare (not a typo) under the Pay-As-You-Go law. The CBO explains that those cuts are limited by law to 4% but would still total about $490 billion from 2027 through 2034.
Tobias Burns of The Hill summed it up: “Republicans’ tax-and-spending cut bill will take from the poor and give to the rich, Congress’s official scoring body has found.”
Tonight, after 22 hours of debate and after a set of amendments made steeper cuts to Medicaid to woo far-right Republicans, the House Rules Committee agreed to move the bill forward to the House itself. There, Republican leadership intends to push it through as quickly as possible, originally hoping to have the vote over by 6:00 Thursday morning.
In 2025 the Republicans’ signature bill redistributes wealth from the poorest Americans to the richest. Knowing the provisions in the bill will be enormously unpopular, the Republicans have been jamming it through, often in the middle of the night, as quickly as they could.
I have not been able to stop thinking today of the significance of the timing of the Republicans’ push for this bill, and what it says about how dramatically the U.S. has changed in the past 60 years.
On May 22, 1964, in a graduation speech at the University of Michigan, President Lyndon Johnson put a name to a new vision for the United States. He called it “the Great Society” and laid out the vision of a country that did not confine itself to making money, but rather used its post–World War II prosperity to “enrich and elevate our national life.” That Great Society would demand an end to poverty and racial injustice.
But it would do more than that, he promised: it would enable every child to learn and grow, and it would create a society where people would use their leisure time to build and reflect, where cities would not just answer physical needs and the demands of commerce, but would also serve “the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.” It would protect the natural world and would be “a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”
“But most of all,” he said, it would look forward. “[T]he Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.”
Johnson proposed rebuilding the cities, protecting the countryside, and investing in education to set “every young mind…free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination.” He admitted that the government did not have the answers to addressing the problems in the country “But I do promise this,” he said: “We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of White House conferences and meetings—on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. And from these meetings and from this inspiration and from these studies we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society.”
Johnson’s vision of a Great Society came from a very different place than the reworking of society launched by his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the 1930s. Roosevelt’s New Deal had used the federal government to address the greatest economic crisis in U.S. history, leveling the playing field between workers and employers to enable workingmen to support their families. Johnson, in contrast, was operating in a country that was enjoying record growth. Far from simply saving the country, he could afford to direct it toward greater things.
Immediately, the administration turned to addressing issues of civil rights and poverty. Under Johnson’s pressure, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibiting voting, employment, or educational discrimination based on race, religion, sex, or national origin. Johnson also won passage of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created an Office of Economic Opportunity, which would oversee a whole series of antipoverty programs, and of the Food Stamp Act, which helped people who didn’t make a lot of money buy food.
When Republicans ran Arizona senator Barry Goldwater for president in 1964, calling for rolling back business regulation and civil rights to the years before the New Deal, voters who quite liked the new system gave Democrats such a strong majority in Congress that Johnson and the Democrats were able to pass 84 new laws to put the Great Society into place.
They cemented civil rights with the 1965 Voting Rights Act protecting minority voting, created jobs in Appalachia, and established job-training and community development programs. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 gave federal aid to public schools and established the Head Start program to provide comprehensive early education for low-income children. The Higher Education Act of 1965 increased federal investment in universities and provided scholarships and low-interest loans to students.
The Social Security Act of 1965 created Medicare, which provided health insurance for Americans over 65, and Medicaid, which helped cover healthcare costs for folks with limited incomes. Congress advanced the war on poverty by increasing welfare payments and subsidizing rent for low-income families.
Congress took on the rights of consumers with new protective legislation that required cigarettes and other dangerous products to carry warning labels, required products to carry labels identifying the manufacturer, and required lenders to disclose the full cost of finance charges in loans. Congress also passed legislation protecting the environment, including the Water Quality Act of 1965 that established federal standards for water quality.
But the government did not simply address poverty. Congress also spoke to Johnson’s aspirations for beauty and purpose when it created the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities. This law created both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities to make sure the era’s emphasis on science didn’t endanger the humanities. In 1967 it would also establish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, followed in 1969 by National Public Radio.
Opponents of this sweeping program picked up 47 seats in the House and three seats in the Senate in the 1966 midterm elections, and U.S. News and World Report wrote that “the big bash” was over. And now, exactly 61 years later, we are seeing Republican lawmakers dismantle the Great Society and replace its vision with the idea that the government must work for the wealthy few.
“For better or worse,” Johnson told the University of Michigan graduates in 1964, “your generation has been appointed by history to deal with those problems and to lead America toward a new age. You have the chance never before afforded to any people in any age. You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the Nation.
“So, will you join in the battle to give every citizen the full equality which God enjoins and the law requires, whatever his belief, or race, or the color of his skin?” he asked.
“Will you join in the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty?...”
“There are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.”
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Notes:
https://www.justsecurity.org/113529/terrible-idea-contempt-court/
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5256814-appeals-court-boasberg-trump-contempt/
https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trump-violated-judge-court-deportation-order/
https://thehill.com/business/5311628-rich-gain-poor-loss-tax-cuts-bill/
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/21/snap-benefits-food-stamps-face-cuts-under-gop-tax-bill.html
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-university-michigan
U.S. News and World Report quotation is in Mary C. Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP, University of North Carolina Press, 2007, p. 119.
https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-05/61423-PAYGO.pdf
https://thehill.com/business/5311628-rich-gain-poor-loss-tax-cuts-bill/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/05/21/trump-tax-bill-house-rules-committee/
Bluesky:
May 20, 2025
Today was a rough day for administration officials on Capitol Hill as Senate committees held hearings on the 2026 budget requests for the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of State. The Senate Finance Committee also held a hearing for Trump’s nominee to be Commissioner of Internal Revenue, former Missouri representative William “Billy” Long. Democrats came prepared and demanded answers that the department secretaries and nominee were either unable or unwilling to give.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee about the Department of Homeland Security's budget for fiscal year 2026. When Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH) asked her to define “habeas corpus,” Noem’s response indicated she has no understanding of the nation’s fundamental law.
“Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country,” Noem said. Hassan corrected her: “Habeas corpus is the legal principle that requires that the government provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people. If not for that protection, the government could simply arrest people, including American citizens, and hold them indefinitely for no reason. Habeas corpus is the foundational right that separates free societies like America from police states like North Korea.”
Noem’s habit in these hearings is simply to ignore questions and to attack, and she tried that with Hassan, suggesting that the president has the right to suspend habeas corpus if circumstances require it. Her position echoes that of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, with whom she appears to be working to render immigrants to prisons in third countries, but it is dead wrong. The Constitution permits Congress to suspend habeas corpus; not the president.
While Republicans were generally supportive of the Republican officials in the hearings, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) used his time to beg Noem for help for Missouri. The state has suffered a number of natural disasters, including a deadly tornado last Friday, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has not shown up.
“The state has pending three requests for major disaster declarations from earlier storms,” Hawley told Noem. “[W]e’ve lost almost 20 people now in major storms just in the last two months in Missouri.” The Department of Homeland Security oversees FEMA, and Hawley asked Noem to expedite the requests and get them in front of Trump. “We are desperate for… assistance in Missouri,” he said.
When Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) asked Noem how she planned to meet the needs of American people when the administration is cutting 20% of FEMA employees and the agency has lost most of its leadership, Noem talked over him and said the problem was that the Biden administration had failed the American people.
Over in the Appropriations Subcommittee on Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies, things didn’t go much better.
Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. exploded when Senator Patti Murray (D-WA) asked him whose decision it was to withhold childcare and development block grant funding. Kennedy immediately pivoted to former president Biden’s 2021 budget. When she tried to get him back on track, he continued to talk over her, accusing her of “presiding over the destruction of the health of the American people” and of not doing her job. Murray repeatedly tried to recall him to appropriate behavior, finally appealing to the Republican chair of the committee, who asked Kennedy to stop.
When Murray repeated her question, he simply said the decision was made “by my department.” While he refused to take responsibility for the cuts himself, Murray did get him to admit that the department has blocked billions of dollars in federal child care funding.
Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) spelled out for Kennedy his concern about cuts to research funding for the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), sometimes called Lou Gehrig’s disease. “On April 1, ten laboratory heads at National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes received their layoff notices,” he said. “They were all PhDs and senior investigators. They're not administrators, whatever that might be. They were running intramural labs at NIH. If you have your way, they'll all be gone on June 2nd. Science magazine reported 25 of 320 physician researchers at NIH's Internal Clinical Center are leaving, and the number of patients treated in the hospital has been reduced by 30%. Three grants involving ALS and dementia work at Northwestern University [in] Illinois have been paused…. Just last week, an ALS researcher at Harvard had his grant cut.” Durbin asked: “How can we possibly…give hope to people across the country who are suffering from so many diseases when our government is cutting back on that research?”
Kennedy replied: “I do not know about any cuts to ALS research.” When Durbin responded, “I just read them to you,” Kennedy reiterated that he didn’t “know about them until you told…me about them at this moment.”
Brenda Goodman of CNN noted that when Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) asked Kennedy about ending the childhood lead poisoning prevention program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Kennedy assured Reed that “[w]e are continuing to fund the program.” Goodman notes that CNN reported in April that officials in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, had asked the CDC for help addressing lead hazards in Milwaukee Public Schools after the agency’s lead experts were fired. The CDC refused, possibly because Kennedy has said lead poisoning prevention would be moving from the CDC to his new “Administration for a Healthy America.”
Kennedy told Reed the federal government has “a team in Milwaukee, and we’re giving laboratory support to that, to the analytics in Milwaukee, and we’re working with the health department in Milwaukee.”
Officials in Milwaukee said that was untrue. “The City of Milwaukee Health Department is not receiving any federal epidemiological or analytical support related to the MPS lead hazard crisis. Our formal Epi Aid request was denied by the CDC,” spokesperson for the City of Milwaukee Health Department Caroline Reinwald told CNN. Earlier this month, Milwaukee’s health commissioner expressed dismay that the CDC’s entire team working on childhood lead exposure had been laid off. “These are the best and brightest minds in these areas around lead poisoning, and now they’re gone,” he said.
At the end of today’s hearing, Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) corrected the record, saying to Kennedy: “There are no staff on the ground deployed to Milwaukee to address the lead exposure of children in schools, and there are no staff left in that office at CDC, because they have all been fired.”
Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took Secretary of State Marco Rubio to task for abandoning the principles they believed he held when they voted to confirm him.
The administration rendered Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen’s constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador through what the administration said was “administrative error,” and yet officials are refusing to bring him back despite court orders to do so. Van Hollen reminded Rubio that they had served together in Congress for 15 years and that while they didn’t always agree, “I believe we shared some common values: a belief in defending democracy and human rights abroad and honoring the Constitution at home. That’s why I voted to confirm you. I believed you would stand up for those principles. You haven’t. You’ve done the opposite.”
Senator Jacky Rosen (D-NV) spoke to him “as a mother, a senator, and a fellow human being,” saying, “I'm not even mad anymore about your complicity in this administration's destruction of U.S. global leadership. I'm simply disappointed. And I wonder if you're proud of yourself in this moment when you go home to your family?" She noted how he appeared to have abandoned all his past principles, and said she no longer recognized him.
When Van Hollen told Rubio he regretted voting to confirm him as secretary of state, Rubio retorted: “Your regret for voting for me confirms I’m doing a good job.”
Billy Long had his own problems. In an opening statement, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) pointed out that Long was neither “an independent tax professional or somebody with extensive management experience.” He was simply a fierce Trump loyalist who would help Trump “use the IRS as a cudgel to beat his adversaries into submission.” Wyden also noted serious accusations against Long’s involvement with fraudulent tax schemes.
In his questioning, Wyden asked, “Did you promise any tax promoter you would help them if you got confirmed?” Long said no. Wyden followed up, asking if he had met with anyone when he was in Washington, D.C., for the inauguration and promised to help them. Long again said no, that he had been in his room for “about 50 hours” with food poisoning.
Wyden noted that staff investigators had tapes of a tax promoter saying he had met with Long at the inauguration and that Long had promised him favorable treatment. They also have another tape of a chief financial officer who had donated to Long after he was nominated for the IRS post, also saying he expected favorable treatment. Senators Wyden, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts are currently investigating these tapes.
Warren took up Trump’s misuse of the IRS to hurt his opponents. Trump has threatened to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status, although federal law expressly prohibits any official from using the IRS to punish any individual taxpayers. Warren tried to get Long to say it would be illegal for the president to direct the IRS to revoke a taxpayer’s nonprofit status, but he refused to. Warren concluded: “[T]he fact that you want to sit there and dance around about this tells me that you shouldn't be within 1,000 miles of the directorship of the IRS.”
The House was also a troubled place today, as Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) used a hearing of the House Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation Subcommittee, which she chairs, to accuse her ex-fiancé and other men of sexual abuse. She showed what she claimed were naked photos of herself and other women, taken without their consent. These accusations echo those she made in a speech in the House on February 10th. The men deny the allegations, and one is suing her for defamation. She is taking the position that her attacks on them in Congress are legally protected by the Constitution’s speech and debate clause.
If Republican lawmakers didn’t seem up to their jobs today, neither did the president. He announced a “Golden Dome” missile shield defense system—a U.S. version of Israel’s “Iron Dome”—that he claims will be operational in 3 years and cost $175 billion. Experts say it is not yet possible to construct such a defense system for intercontinental ballistic missiles and that such a project could cost as much as $542 billion.
When a reporter asked Trump about the cost, Trump claimed “we can afford to do it…we took in $5.1 trillion in the last four days in the Middle East,” a wildly made-up number. Such a system would likely benefit at least one person: it would depend on thousands of satellites, a requirement that seems likely to benefit billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Administration officials today seemed to illustrate their utter disregard for the work their jobs require and their refusal to govern for Americans. Instead, they seem to see their offices as ways to get access to large amounts of money and power they can use to impose their will on the country.
—
Notes:
no.gov/committees/hearings_meetings.htm
https://www.cnn.com/2025u/05/20/health/kennedy-lead-contamination-milwaukee
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-noem-fumbles-definition-of-habeas-corpus
https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/05202025_wyden_statement.pdf
https://www.levernews.com/ceo-says-trumps-irs-pick-promised-big-benefits/
https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/letters_to_seven_companies_rebillylong.pdf
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/02/nx-s1-5384897/trump-harvard-tax-irs-antisemitism
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/20/nx-s1-5405038/trump-golden-dome-missile-defense
https://www.404media.co/scientists-explain-why-trumps-175-billion-golden-dome-is-a-fantasy/
Public NoticeDonald Trump and the power of the big (fake) numberRead morea day ago · 343 likes · 16 comments · Paul WaldmanX:
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1924854771716129024
Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3lpmrtlv5y22y
murray.senate.gov/post/3lpn3iwj6ec2o
atrupar.com/post/3lpmrcjdvq22y
thebulwark.com/post/3lpmjn5yxcs2p
atrupar.com/post/3lpml3iyank2i
May 20, 2025
May 19, 2025
The House Rules Committee will take up the Republicans’ omnibus bill this week. Illustrating their confidence that the American people support this 1,116-page measure enacting much of MAGA’s wish list, the committee has set its meeting for Wednesday, May 21, 2025…at 1:00 in the morning (not a typo). The Republicans are trying to advance Trump’s entire agenda—from massive logging on public lands to slashing Medicaid—in one giant bill under a process known as “budget reconciliation,” which means it cannot be filibustered in the Senate. That means it needs only Republican votes to pass.
But even Republicans are deeply divided over the measure. While far-right Republicans insist cuts to the social safety net are not deep enough because of the massive deficits the measure’s tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations will create, other Republicans recognize that Medicaid cuts are hugely unpopular: according to a KFF poll released May 1, more than 75% of Americans oppose such cuts.
Catie Edmondson of the New York Times counts 12 swing-state Republicans who don’t want drastic Medicaid cuts, and 31 hardliners who do. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) can afford to lose only three Republican votes on the measure. Nicole Lafond of Talking Points Memo reported today that Trump will go to Capitol Hill tomorrow to talk Republicans into voting for the measure.
Right on cue, the administration served up another issue to draw attention. Trump lawyer Alina Habba, who is now serving as the interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey, announced that Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) will be charged with assaulting, resisting, and impeding law enforcement officers. On May 19, McIver was one of three Democratic representatives from New Jersey who, along with Newark’s Democratic mayor Ras Baraka, went to the Delaney Hall Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Newark, New Jersey, for an oversight visit. Such visits are permitted by law as part of a congress member’s oversight responsibility.
As a mayor, Baraka was not covered by the law permitting congressional oversight. He waited outside the facility’s gates in a public area. Masked agents tried to arrest him there, and as Perry Stein, Jeremy Roebuck, and Liz Goodwin of the Washington Post reported, video released by the Department of Homeland Security showed McIver rushing after the agents and shouting to protesters outside to “surround the mayor.” The video shows a crowd of people jostling, and McIver’s elbows possibly making contact with a masked officer in the crush of the crowd, but no one breaks stride. McIver says she was the one assaulted by ICE officers. In a statement about charging McIver, Habba said “it is my Constitutional obligation to ensure that our federal law enforcement is protected when executing their duties.”
Charging a congressional representative after an event in which no one was injured is a dramatic move indeed, but the Washington Post reporters noted that: “[a]s of 10 p.m., no charging documents were posted in federal court, and a spokesperson for McIver’s legal team said neither she nor her lawyers had seen any charging documents.”
In a statement, McIver said she and her colleagues “were fulfilling our lawful oversight responsibilities, as members of Congress have done many times before, and our visit should have been peaceful and short. Instead, ICE agents created an unnecessary and unsafe confrontation when they chose to arrest Mayor Baraka. The charges against me are purely political—they mischaracterize and distort my actions, and are meant to criminalize and deter legislative oversight…. I look forward to the truth being laid out clearly in court.”
Congressional Democrats are condemning this attack on their colleague. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar of California, Vice Chair Ted Lieu of California, and Assistant Leader Joe Neguse of Colorado issued a statement saying, “The criminal charge against Congresswoman McIver is extreme, morally bankrupt and lacks any basis in law or fact.” Habba’s statement “is a blatant attempt by the Trump administration to intimidate Congress and interfere with our ability to serve as a check and balance on an out-of-control executive branch. House Democrats will not be intimidated by the Trump administration. Not today. Not ever.”
And they pushed back, warning: “Everyone responsible for this illegitimate abuse of power is going to be held accountable for their actions.”
At the same time, the Department of Justice announced it was dropping all charges against Baraka stemming from the attempt to examine the ICE facility. Ten days ago, Habba broke the Department of Justice rule that it would not comment on ongoing investigations by posting that Baraka had “committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon. He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.”
Except, apparently, those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Alan Feuer, Devlin Barrett, and Glenn Thrush of the New York Times reported today that the Department of Justice is considering settling a wrongful death lawsuit with the family of Ashli Babbitt, whom a law enforcement officer shot and killed as she tried to break into the Speaker’s Lobby outside the House floor. The amount they are considering, the journalists report, is $5 million.
Reports that Walmart will raise prices because of the tariffs have Trump officials panicking. Walmart is the largest retailer in the United States, with a 2023 retail revenue of $534 billion. Higher prices there will hurt poorer Americans, particularly those in rural areas, the demographic most likely to have supported Trump in the past.
This, just as cuts to funding for food programs by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in March—programs started during Trump’s first term—have slashed the amount of food available to food banks. A USDA spokesperson said in a statement: “There is no need for new programs, but perhaps more efficient and effective use of current.”
So Republicans today continued their campaign to pressure Walmart into, as Trump put it “eating” the tariff costs. On CNBC today, Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) suggested that Walmart leaders “need to think hard” about raising prices. “I think they're going to be very careful about how they do this. I know they've received some criticism from the president,” he said, adding: “They should know the president has been working very hard with China to make sure we get this thing addressed as quickly as possible.”
Nora Eckert and David Shepardson of Reuters reported that Subaru of America said today it will also be raising prices by between $750 and $2,055 on several models because of “current market conditions.” Executives recently told investors that the tariffs are expected to amount to $5 billion. Eckert and Shepardson reported that Ford raised prices on three models produced in Mexico by as much as $2,000.
Finally, today—because I actually planned to take tonight off, and so am not prepared to cover some very important legal developments and am putting them off until tomorrow so I get them right—Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman, Adam Rasgon, and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported the backstory to the Qatari offer to give a 747 to Trump.
The planes serving as Air Force One are over 30 years old, and Boeing has a contract to build two new jets by 2024, a deadline far in the rear view with no new planes in sight. Apparently, Trump was angling for a new plane and put officials up to buying one. They identified eight options, one of which was the Qatari plane, which Qatar had been trying to sell for at least five years in part because of the enormous cost of operating such a plane. Qatar sent the jet to Florida at a cost the reporters estimate to be as much as $1 million on February 15 for Trump to see, and he loved it.
At that point, discussions turned from purchasing the plane to accepting it as a gift, although it was apparently not the Qataris who changed the terms—they were still expecting to sell it to the United States. A Qatari government official told the New York Times reporters that no decision had yet been made about a transfer rather than a sale. And Pentagon officials estimate that getting the plane repaired and ready for a president would cost at least $1 billion.
And yet, administration officials lined up to say that a $400 million gift from a foreign government to a U.S. president was just fine, despite its explicit prohibition in the Constitution. On Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Qatar giving a plane to Trump was like France giving the Statue of Liberty to the U.S., or England giving the country the Resolute Desk.
These comparisons are not only wrong, but an offensive skewing of the real history of those gifts, which were intended to reinforce democracy, freedom, and the international cooperation of nations that value those principles.
It was the people of France who raised the money to send the Statue of Liberty, whose official name is “Liberty Enlightening the World,” to the United States to honor political democracy and freedom at the nation’s 100th anniversary. The people of the United States, in turn, raised the money for the statue’s pedestal. There was never any question about it being a personal gift to President Grover Cleveland. He would have refused it if such a thing were suggested, and Congress would have impeached him if he had not.
If the story of the Statue of Liberty is the story of the universal principles of democracy and freedom, the story of the Resolute Desk is one of diplomacy. After a famous British expedition to discover the Northwest Passage disappeared in the 1850s, a rescue expedition of five ships, including the HMS Resolute, set sail to find survivors. The Resolute became trapped in Arctic ice in April 1854 and her captain and crew abandoned the ship. When the ice thawed, the Resolute broke free and drifted south, where an American whaling ship found it in 1855. The captain, James Buddington, claimed it under the right of salvage.
At the time, tensions between the U.S. and England were high, and Congress decided to purchase the Resolute from Buddington, fix it up, and send it back to England as a gesture of goodwill and friendship from the American people. After the work was done, a U.S. naval officer and crew sailed the Resolute to England, where Queen Victoria and Prince Albert accepted it on behalf of all of Great Britain. The Royal Navy used the Resolute as a supply vessel for the next 23 years.
When the ship was decommissioned in 1879, the British government launched a public competition to design a piece of furniture that could be made of its timbers to give back to the United States. The winning design was a desk, and it arrived in the United States as a gift for President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880, bearing a plaque that recounted the history of the Resolute.
The plaque noted: “The ship was purchased, fitted out and sent to England, as a gift to Her Majesty Queen Victoria by the President and People of the United States, as a token of goodwill & friendship. This table was made from her timbers when she was broken up, and is presented by the Queen of Great Britain & Ireland, to the President of the United States, as a memorial of the courtesy and loving kindness which dictated the offer of the gift of the ‘Resolute'."
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Notes:
https://capitaloneshopping.com/research/largest-retailers/
https://rules.house.gov/media/announcement/meeting-announcement-may-21-2025
https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/walmart-raise-prices-trump-tariffs-rcna207351
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/05/19/dc-food-bank-cuts/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/us/politics/ashli-babbitt-jan-6-settlement-trump.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/05/19/rep-lamonica-mciver-charged-doj-ice/
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/20/lamonica-mciver-justice-department-trump-jeffries
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/us/politics/trump-air-force-one-qatar-jet.html
https://www.nps.gov/museum/exhibits/statue_liberty/index.html
https://www.whitehousehistory.org/photos/treasures-of-the-white-house-resolute-desk
https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/budget-reconciliation-simplified/
Bluesky:
atrupar.com/post/3lpjrvqvkvj2c
annabower.bsky.social/post/3lpkwgk47ws2i
thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3lorcjzip422o
replamonica.bsky.social/post/3lpks65f6ck2q
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