Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 36
May 16, 2025
May 15, 2025 (Thursday)
Perhaps in frustration, this season’s writers of the saga of American history are making their symbolism increasingly obvious.
Today the story broke that a long-neglected document held by Harvard University Law School, believed to be a cheap copy of the Magna Carta, is in fact the real document. More than 700 years ago, the Magna Carta, or Great Charter, established the concept that kings must answer to the law.
King John of England and a group of rebel barons agreed to the terms of the document on June 15, 1215, at Runnymede, a meadow a little less than an hour from London near the River Thames. After the king had raised taxes, barons rebelled, insisting that he was violating established custom. There were rumors of a plot to murder the king, and the barons armed themselves.
Those two armed camps met at Runnymede, where negotiators for the king and the barons hammered out a document with 63 clauses, mostly relating to feudal customs and the way the justice system would operate. But the document also began to articulate the principles central to modern democracies. The Magna Carta established the writ of habeas corpus—a prohibition on unlawful imprisonment—and the concept of the right to trial by jury.
Famously, it put into writing that: “No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way, nor in any way proceeded against, except by the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land.” It also provided that “To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.”
The Magna Carta placed limits on the king’s ability to tax his subjects and established the law as an authority apart from the king. Anticipating the idea of checks and balances, it set up a council of barons to make sure the king obeyed the charter. If he did not, they could seize his lands and castles until he made amends.
The original charter did not last. King John convinced the pope to declare the document illegal because it circumscribed the power of the monarch, and in reaction, barons fought for the rights outlined in the Magna Carta. After the death of King John in 1216, the Magna Carta was confirmed and reissued, becoming an accepted part of the understanding of British rights. In 1297, and then again in 1300, King Edward I reissued the Magna Carta and confirmed that it was part of England’s law.
The copy in Harvard’s possession is from 1300. Harvard bought the document after World War II for $27.50, about $500 today. It is one of seven original copies of the 1300 Magna Carta, and in the United States of America in 2025, it is priceless.
In the early 1600s, King James I and King Charles I both reasserted the power of the king. Jurist Sir Edward Coke used the Magna Carta to insist that longstanding English customs guaranteed liberties to British subjects and required the king to comply with the law. There were limits to a king’s power to tax his subjects and his power to punish them.
This legal struggle was unfolding just as British subjects were colonizing the North American continent, and the charters of the new colonies echoed Coke’s arguments. The 1629 charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company, for example, established that colonists and, crucially, the children they might have in the colony, “shall have and enjoy all liberties and Immunities of free and naturall Subiects.”
As constitutional scholar Mary S. Bilder notes, lawyers and political figures put into the documents of the early British settlement of North America the belief that liberties were the birthright of English subjects. That belief informed colonists’ opposition to the 1765 Stamp Act, which imposed a new tax to which they had not given their consent and called for those who violated the law to be tried not by a jury of their peers but rather in admiralty courts. The Massachusetts Assembly declared the Stamp Act to be “against the Magna Carta and the natural rights of Englishmen, and therefore, according to Lord Coke, null and void.” British politician William Pitt told Parliament: “The Americans are the sons not the bastards of England.”
In September 1774, as tensions between the king and the colonists intensified, the first Continental Congress met in Philadelphia and wrote a declaration of rights and grievances, claiming the liberties guaranteed by “the principles of the English constitution, and the several charters or compacts.” Showing the unity of the colonies, the Congress published an image of 12 arms holding a column crowned by a liberty cap and resting on the words “Magna Carta.”
In 1776 the colonists threw off the monarchy to establish a government based on the idea that all people must answer to the law. As Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense: “in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.” In 1776 the new states were writing their own constitutions that defended their liberties, including their protection from loss of life, liberty, or property without due process of the law.
That concept went directly into the first ten amendments to the Constitution, known collectively as the Bill of Rights. The Fifth Amendment provided that no “person shall be…deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” and in 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment applied that principle to the states as well as the federal government, saying: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The Harvard document is not the only Magna Carta in the U.S. In 2007, philanthropist David Rubenstein bought a 1297 copy of the Magna Carta from former presidential candidate Ross Perot. It was the only copy in the U.S., and Perot had permitted the National Archives to display it. Rubenstein bought the document for $21.3 million, hoping to keep it in the U.S. “to ensure that Americans could continue to see it, and to thereby be continuously reminded of its importance to our country.” He promptly lent it to the National Archives for public display, “as modest repayment of my debt to this country for my good fortune in being an American.”
And yet the fundamental principles on which the government of the United States is based are under attack. In an interview that aired on Sunday, May 4, President Donald J. Trump told NBC’s Kristen Welker that he “didn’t know” if persons in the United States had a right to due process. When Welker reminded him that the right to due process is written into the Fifth Amendment, he said: “I don’t know. It seems—it might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or two million or three million trials.”
Musician Bruce Springsteen has no doubts about those rights, embedded as they are in the country’s DNA. At a concert in Manchester, England, yesterday, he warned: “In America, the richest men… [are]... abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They’re defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands. They’re removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.” He criticized lawmakers who have “no…idea of what it means to be deeply American.”
And yet, Springsteen told the crowd: “The America that I’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and, regardless of its faults, is a great country with a great people, so will survive this moment.”
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Notes:
https://apnews.com/article/harvard-magna-carta-rare-copy-97754aee08aaab65a36e49bedebd5992
https://www.parliament.uk/magnacarta/
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-surrey-32828251
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2010/winter/magna-carta.html
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/mass03.asp
Mary Sarah Bilder, Charter Constitutionalism: The Myth of Edward Coke and the Virginia Charter,” North Carolina Law Review 94 (June 2016): 1545–1592, at https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi
https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/magna-carta/legacy.html
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/magna_carta
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/us/politics/trump-meet-the-press-interview-due-process.html
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/magna-carta-muse-and-mentor/magna-carta-and-the-us-constitution.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/world/europe/harvard-magna-carta-original.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2014/03/31/the-man-who-owns-a-magna-carta/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/15/entertainment/bruce-springsteen-trump-criticism-scli-intl
May 15, 2025
May 14, 2025
On May 8, political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt published an op-ed in the New York Times reminding readers that most modern authoritarian leaders are elected. They maintain their power by using the power of the government—arrests, tax audits, defamation suits, politically targeted investigations, and so on—to punish and silence their opponents. They either buy or bully the media and civil society until opposing voices cave to their power.
Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt call this system “competitive authoritarianism.” A country that has fallen to it still holds elections, but the party in power has so weighted the system in its favor that it’s virtually impossible for it to lose.
The way to tell if the United States has crossed the line from democracy to competitive authoritarianism, the political scientists explain, is to see if people feel safe opposing those in power. Can they safely protest? Publish criticism of the government? Support opposition candidates? Or does taking a stand against those in power lead to punishment either by the government or by government supporters?
Looking at the many ways the Trump administration has been harassing critics, law firms, universities, judges, and media stations, they conclude that “America has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism.”
Since they made that observation less than a week ago, there has been more evidence of the administration’s attempt to consolidate power.
After the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the nation’s top body for analyzing intelligence, produced a report that contradicted President Donald J. Trump’s assertion that the Venezuelan government was directing the actions of the Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired acting NIC chair Michael Collins and his deputy, Maria Langan-Reikhof. The administration used the claim that Venezuela was working with TdA as justification for invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to render migrants from Venezuela to El Salvador.
A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said: “The Director is working alongside President Trump to end the weaponization and politicization of the Intelligence Community.”
Department of Justice leaders are also consolidating power under the claim of ending weaponization. In a dramatic reversal of Department of Justice policies, Trump loyalist Ed Martin said yesterday that when the department finds it does not have the grounds to charge political opponents with a crime, it will “name” and “shame” them, attempting to convict them in the court of public opinion rather than a court of law. Trump initially nominated Martin to be the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, but Martin’s extremism convinced Senate Republican Thom Tillis to vote with Democrats on the Judiciary Committee to stop his nomination.
So Trump put him at the head of the Justice Department's "Weaponization Working Group,” allegedly designed to ferret out the weaponization of former president Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, but clearly intended to use the Justice Department to advance Trump’s interests.
A federal grand jury in Wisconsin yesterday indicted Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan, charging that she tried to help a man evade agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Dugan permitted an undocumented immigrant to leave her courtroom and enter the public hallway by the jury door rather than the public door. A week later, federal officials arrested her at the courthouse, photographed her in handcuffs, and spread the news of her arrest on social media, and Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters that Dugan’s arrest was a warning to others. A bipartisan group of 150 former federal and state judges wrote to Bondi to protest both Dugan’s arrest and the administration’s threats against the judiciary.
Today, U.S. Circuit Judge Amy St. Eve and Judge Robert Conrad, both of whom were appointed by Republican presidents, asked the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government to increase funding for judges’ security. David Gilbert of Wired reported today that calls for impeachment and violent threats against U.S. judges on social media have gone up by 327% since last year.
In a piece in The Atlantic today, respected conservative judge J. Michael Luttig noted that for all of Trump’s insistence that he is the victim of the “weaponization” of the federal government against him, “[i]t is Trump who is actually weaponizing the federal government against both his political enemies and countless other American citizens today.”
Luttig warned that Trump is trying to end the rule of law in the United States, recreating the sort of monarchy against which the nation’s founders rebelled. He lists Trump’s pardoning of the convicted January 6 rioters (which he did with the collusion of Ed Martin), the arrest of Judge Dugan, which Luttig calls “appalling,” the deportation of a U.S. citizen with the child’s mother, and the “investigation” of private citizen Christopher Krebs.
“For not one of his signature initiatives during his first 100 days in office does Trump have the authority under the Constitution and laws of the United States that he claims,” Judge Luttig writes. Not for tariffs, not for unlawful deportations, not for attacks on colleges and law firms, not for his attacks on birthright citizenship, not for handing power to billionaire Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency,” not for trying to end due process, not for his attempts to starve government agencies by impounding their funding, not for his vow to regulate federal elections, not for his attacks on the media.
The courts are holding, Judge Luttig writes, and will continue to hold, but Trump “will continue his assault on America, its democracy, and rule of law until the American people finally rise up and say, “No more.”
And rising up they are.
The chaotic cuts of the Department of Government Efficiency soured people on billionaire Elon Musk and on government cuts. Yesterday, Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) told Ben Johansen of Politico that while Republicans claim the House DOGE caucus, created to work with Musk to audit the government, is “just getting started,” Moskowitz says it is “dead…defunct…. We only had two total meetings in five months.”
Currently, Newark Liberty International Airport is serving as an illustration of the effects of DOGE’s cuts. On Monday the airport was supposed to be staffed with 14 air traffic controllers but was down to just three, causing delays of up to seven hours. As Ed Pilkington of The Guardian reported, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy assured the public on Sunday that it was safe to fly out of the Newark airport, but on Monday told a podcaster that his wife was supposed to fly out of Newark but he had switched the flight to one out of New York’s La Guardia.
Recent polling shows that Trump is underwater in polling—meaning that more people disapprove than approve of his actions—even on his core issues of immigration and the economy. Many Trump voters apparently believed he would deport only violent criminals and are now shocked to see masked officers breaking car windows to arrest mothers with children. The rendition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador without due process and through what the administration initially called “administrative error” has caused such an uproar that, as Adrian Carrasquillo of The Bulwark noted today, the White House is working aggressively to try to recover control of the narrative by smearing the Maryland father as a member of the MS-13 gang, a human trafficker, and a terrorist with no evidence.
The administration has also lost credibility on the economy. Jeff Stein, Natalie Allison, and David J. Lynch of the Washington Post reported today that since he took office, Trump has changed his tariff policies at least 50 times. Some didn’t last a day. After insisting that his high tariffs would bring manufacturing to the United States, Trump’s administration on Monday announced it would reduce Trump’s 145% tariff on goods from China to 30%. China said it would correspondingly lower the tariff it had put on U.S. goods in retaliation for Trump’s tariff.
“It’s been completely insane,” economist Michael Strain, from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute think tank, told the Washington Post reporters. “When I step back from the euphoria over easing tariffs with China, what I see is the tariff rate is five times as high as when Trump took office. And we seem to have gotten nothing out of it at all.”
Evidently concerned that Trump’s economic agenda is so unpopular it will fail in Congress, Trump’s political operators have spent in the “high seven figures,” Alex Isenstadt of Axios says, to run ads in more than 20 targeted congressional districts to push lawmakers to get behind it. “Tell Congress this is a good deal for America,” the ad says. “Support President Trump's agenda to get our economy back on track.”
As the American people have turned on Trump, Democrats have been standing against him and members of his administration. Yesterday’s discussion of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” the Republicans are trying to get through Congress sparked dramatic pushback. The measure cuts taxes for the wealthy and corporations and helps to offset those financial benefits at the top of society with cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which used to be known as food stamps, as well as a bevy of other programs that help ordinary Americans.
When the House Committee on Energy and Commerce began to debate their piece of the bill yesterday, there were protests within the hearing room and in the hallway outside. After ten hours, the committee still had not gotten to the Medicaid cuts, which Democrats suggested was intentional. Representative Troy A. Carter Sr. (D-LA) recorded a video at 1:00 this morning noting that “Republicans want to do this in the dead of night…and not let the American people see.” He continued: “Shame on you…. The people deserve to see the actions that you’re doing to them by cutting Medicaid in favor of the richest rich for tax breaks. Hashtag, WeWontLetYou.”
The fireworks in two other hearings today rivaled the fights in the hearing over cuts to Medicaid. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem testified today before the House Homeland Security Committee. But she refused to answer Democrats’ questions about the deportation of U.S. citizens, the reality that the “MS13” on a photograph of Abrego Garcia’s hand was photoshopped, or that the Supreme Court has unanimously ordered the administration to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States. Instead, she simply kept talking over the members of Congress, reiterating administration talking points.
“Your department has been sloppy,” Representative Seth Magaziner (D-RI) said. “And instead of focusing on real criminals, you have allowed innocent children to be deported while you fly around the country playing dress-up for the cameras. Instead of enforcing the laws, you have repeatedly broken them. You need to change course immediately before more innocent people are hurt on your watch.”
Democrats also challenged Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. when he testified for the first time today before both the House Appropriations Committee and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee to promote Trump’s budget. Kennedy seemed angry at being questioned and, like Noem, repeated debunked lies. He angrily claimed he had “not fired any working scientists” and was “not withholding money for lifesaving research,” although during his tenure, 20,000 people—one quarter of the health workforce—have lost their jobs and the administration has cut $2.7 billion in research funding for the National Institutes of Health.
Memorably, Kennedy told Representative Mark Pocan (D-WI): “I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me.”
Judge Hannah Dugan herself pushed back against the administration today when she moved for an order to dismiss her indictment. Her motion called the government’s prosecution “virtually unprecedented and entirely unconstitutional.” The government cannot prosecute her, she argued, because she “is entitled to judicial immunity for her official acts.” As precedent she cited Trump v. United States, the July 2024 Supreme Court decision protecting Trump from prosecution for crimes committed as part of his official acts.
Voters in Omaha, Nebraska, last night dramatically rejected Trumpism when they elected Democrat John Ewing as their new mayor over Republican incumbent Jean Stothert. Ewing served in the Omaha Police Department for almost 25 years before becoming Douglas County treasurer for 17 years. He will be Omaha’s first Black mayor.
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/opinion/trump-authoritarianism-democracy.html
https://www.wpr.org/news/grand-jury-indicts-milwaukee-county-judge-allege-helped-man-evade-ice
https://www.axios.com/2025/04/25/hannah-dugan-trump-bondi-fbi-arrest
https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-judges-warn-threats-ask-congress-more-security-funding-2025-05-14/
https://www.wired.com/story/violent-threats-us-judges-increase-online/
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/law-america-trump-constitution/682793/
The Bulwark100 Days In, Mass Deportation Is a FailureDURING THE 2024 CAMPAIGN, Donald Trump promised to “launch the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America” on his first day in office, telling Time “15 million and maybe as many as 20 mi…Read more20 days ago · 505 likes · 77 comments · Adrian Carrasquillohttps://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/13/doge-caucus-dead-congress-00347009
The Bulwark100 Days In, Mass Deportation Is a FailureDURING THE 2024 CAMPAIGN, Donald Trump promised to “launch the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America” on his first day in office, telling Time “15 million and maybe as many as 20 mi…Read more20 days ago · 505 likes · 77 comments · Adrian CarrasquilloThe BulwarkKilmar Is a Symbol NowRead morea day ago · 521 likes · 62 comments · Adrian Carrasquillohttps://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/05/14/trump-tariffs-china-trade/
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/14/rfk-testify-congress-hhs-layoffs-measles-outbreak
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/us/politics/rfk-jr-hhs-overhaul-hearing.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/13/health/trump-administration-nih-funding-sanders-report
https://www.ketv.com/article/omaha-mayor-election-results-john-ewing-jean-stothert-2025/64746103
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/09/trump-ad-tax-cut-plan-budget-bill
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wied.111897/gov.uscourts.wied.111897.15.0_3.pdf
https://apnews.com/article/dugan-trump-wisconsin-judge-arrested-f2925c313e06f62324079e650d82a6ac
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/14/rfk-jr-kennedy-senate-house-hearings
Bluesky:
May 14, 2025
May 13, 2025
While President Donald Trump’s billionaire sidekick Elon Musk has said he is pulling back from his work with the “Department of Government Efficiency,” he is with Trump today in Saudi Arabia, along with representatives from leaders from some of the biggest companies in the United States. The business executives are looking for Saudi investments.
Jason Karaian of the New York Times notes that the Saudis are looking to diversify their oil-dependent economy and are now the world’s largest investors in artificial intelligence, or AI. In addition to Musk, the AI entrepreneurs in today’s entourage include, as Karaian reports, “Sam Altman, the chief executive of ChatGPT parent OpenAI; Jensen Huang, the leader of the advanced chipmaker Nvidia; Ruth Porat, the chief investment officer of Alphabet, Google’s parent company; and Andy Jassy, the chief of Amazon, which is a major provider of cloud-computing services.” Cyber experts note that DOGE’s mining of Americans’ personal data under Musk has given him access to a treasure trove of verified information for his own company xAI. Karaian notes that xAI is in the process of raising money that could bring the value of the firm to $120 billion.
After the promise of $600 billion in Saudi investment in the U.S., including a $20 billion investment in AI and energy infrastructure to support it, Trump today promised Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, $142 billion in state-of-the-art defense and security equipment from dozens of U.S. defense firms.
Musk’s turn from DOGE back to AI is revealing not just in providing evidence that his primary interest all along was not in “waste, fraud, and abuse” but in collecting government data about the American people. It is not likely a coincidence that the administration fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden last Thursday and Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter on Saturday. Both Hayden and Perlmutter have questioned the unauthorized use of copyrighted material to train AI.
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt explained Hayden’s firing by saying “[t]here were quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and putting inappropriate books in the library for children,” but the Library of Congress collects according to a list of principles to enable it to perform research for members of Congress and to keep a record of the American people. It is not a lending library. In order to conduct research at the Library of Congress, researchers must be at least 16 years old.
Musk powers his AI from a massive supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee. As Dara Kerr of The Guardian reported last month, the Southern Environmental Law Center discovered that Musk had quietly moved at least 35 methane-powered generators—enough to power a city—to the plant to help power the supercomputer he calls “Colossus,” which powers his chatbot “Grok.” Those generators are unpermitted and are major producers of carcinogens and other toxins. After the company assured Memphis mayor Paul Young that only 15 of the generators were on, thermal imaging showed at least 33 running.
The supercomputer is in a historically Black neighborhood with a history of industrial pollution and higher rates of cancer and asthma than other Memphis neighborhoods. When residents spoke out against the supercomputer, a group calling itself “Facts Over Fiction” but without any other identifying information spread flyers claiming the turbines are “specially designed to protect the air we all breathe.” They also claimed that the Environmental Protection Agency and the county health department regulate the generators, but both agencies told Kerr that they had not issued permits for their use at the Memphis plant.
In March, Musk bought another property in Memphis to expand the plant by a million square feet.
With Musk turning back to his business interests, the task of cementing DOGE’s cuts into law is falling to Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought. Vought is a Christian nationalist who was a key author of Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump presidency. Project 2025 called for slashing the federal government that Christian nationalists think is undermining Christianity.
It said the federal government must “decentralize and privatize as much as possible” and leave “the great majority of domestic activities to state, local, and private governance.” That destruction could be accomplished by an extraordinarily strong president, who would refuse to accept the law that Congress had the final say in appropriations and programs and would “impound” congressionally appropriated funds in order to slash programs he didn’t want.
This plan was so unpopular that only four percent of Americans who had heard of Project 2025 before the 2024 presidential election wanted to see it enacted. Opposition to it was so strong that, as a candidate, Trump ran away from it, claiming he had nothing to do with it. But Ken Thomas, Scott Patterson, and Lindsay Wise of the Wall Street Journal report that Vought “has served as Musk’s lower-profile partner on DOGE” and has been putting the plans in Project 2025 into place. The sweeping cuts to public services and to government agencies are straight out of the Project 2025 playbook.
If anything, those plans are even less popular now than they were last summer when they were only hypothetical. In the past three months, Americans have discovered that cuts to the government invariably affect programs they like as well as those they think are superfluous.
And yet cuts are on the menu in the House, where Republicans have been pulling together a measure to enact Trump’s agenda in what he calls “one big, beautiful bill.” Lisa Mascaro of the Associated Press reported that at least 11 committees have been working on their pieces of the bill, but the pieces produced by the Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, and Agriculture committees have been the most closely watched.
Those committees released their plans over the past few days, beginning with the Committee on Energy and Commerce late Sunday night. Together, they call for extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts that benefit primarily the wealthy and corporations. This has been Trump’s top priority. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, extending those cuts will add at least 4.6 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years. Such increased spending makes it imperative to increase the debt ceiling, which caps how much money the Treasury can borrow. The Committee on Ways and Means calls for raising that ceiling by $4 trillion.
At the same time that it funnels money upward, the proposed bill also cuts programs that benefit ordinary Americans. It cuts funding for climate initiatives passed by Congress in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. It cuts the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that 42 million Americans rely on. And, despite Trump’s repeated promises not to touch Medicaid, the program that provides healthcare for poorer Americans, the plan calls for cuts to Medicaid. The CBO estimates that the cuts will take away healthcare from at least 10.3 million Americans over the next decade.
As Mike Lillis and Emily Brooks of The Hill note, Republicans are taking a mighty gamble by pairing tax cuts for the richest Americans with cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, and clean-energy tax credits. Each of those programs is popular among Republican voters, Lillis and Brooks note; a KFF poll from March found that 77% of Americans, including 64% of Republicans, have a positive view of Medicaid. Ninety-seven percent of Americans believe that Medicaid is important in their community. Republican lawmakers are gambling that voters will be willing to lose services in exchange for putting Trump’s agenda into law.
But it will not be an easy sell. When the House Energy and Commerce Committee began the process of debating and amending their section of the bill today—the section of the bill that outlines the cuts to Medicaid—committee chair Brett Guthrie (R-KY) explained that the proposed cuts were designed to “stop the billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse in the Medicaid program” and are “all commonsense policies that will return taxpayer dollars to middle-class families.”
Attendees who hoped to protect Medicaid, many of them in wheelchairs, disagreed. They began to chant “no cuts to Medicaid” and “waste, fraud, and abuse, my ass.” Activist Julie Farrar told Ben Leonard and Hailey Fuchs of Politico that there were about 90 people there from the disability rights organization ADAPT. They were, she said, “fighting literally for our survival right now.”
It is against the law to protest inside congressional buildings. U.S. Capitol Police arrested 25 people and removed others.
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Notes:
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5297426-trump-saudi-investment-deal/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/us/politics/trump-saudi-business-lunch-musk-altman.html
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/apr/24/elon-musk-xai-memphis
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/10/trump-u-s-copyright-official-00340306
https://www.loc.gov/acq/devpol/cps.html
https://guides.loc.gov/local-history-genealogy-research-guides/using-the-library
https://apnews.com/article/trump-big-bill-tax-cuts-medicaid-1c893945b416419d806dacb6d24b895a
https://thehill.com/business/budget/5296087-house-gop-debt-limit-increase/
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-medicaid-republican-bill-cut-benefits/story?id=121756481
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5297278-house-republicans-agriculture-snap/
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5298712-republicans-risk-political-backlash-over-medicaid-cuts/
https://www.kff.org/medicaid/poll-finding/7-charts-about-public-opinion-on-medicaid/
May 13, 2025
May 12, 2025
May 12, 2025
The biggest news over the weekend was silence: the silence of Republicans. They refused to disavow White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s statement that the administration is looking at suspending the writ of habeas corpus, that is, essentially declaring martial law. They have also stayed quiet after the administration announced it was planning to accept a gift of a $400 million luxury Boeing 747-8 plane from the Qatari royal family. President Donald J. Trump would use the plane as Air Force One during the rest of his presidency and take it with him when he leaves office.
This is in keeping with the refusal of 53 Republican senators to answer questions from Rolling Stone’s Ryan Bort after NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Trump, “Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States, as president?” and he answered: “I don’t know.” Only Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) went on the record, posting on social media: “Following the Constitution is not a suggestion. It is a guiding force for all of us who work on behalf of the American people. Do you agree?”
It seems as if Republicans who are not on board the MAGA train are hoping the courts or reality will stop Trump’s authoritarian overreach. As Steve Vladeck noted on Friday in One First, there is “near-universal consensus…that only Congress can suspend habeas corpus—and that unilateral suspensions by the President are per se unconstitutional.” In addition, Miller’s insistence that it would be appropriate to suspend the writ of habeas corpus because the United States is under attack—a position Trump echoed yesterday when he posted, “Our Country has been INVADED by 21,000,000 Illegal Aliens, many of whom are Murderers and Criminals of the Highest Order”—has failed repeatedly in court.
Reality will trip up Trump’s plan to take possession of the Qatari gift. As David Kurtz noted this morning in Talking Points Memo, retrofitting the luxury plane with the defense capabilities and security protections necessary for Air Force One will take years, not months. (Air Force One is not a specific airplane; it is the call sign given to any Air Force aircraft carrying the president of the United States).
Still, the Republicans’ silence matters. Whether Trump’s plans are all possible is not the point: he and the members of his administration are deliberately attacking the fundamental principles of our democratic republic. That lawmakers who swore an oath to uphold those principles are choosing to remain silent makes them complicit in that attack.
The framers of the U.S. Constitution recognized that democratic government was a new departure from a world in which the world’s monarchs made deals amongst themselves. They placed strong guardrails around the behavior of future chief executives to make sure they would not sell the American people out to foreign leaders. “[N]o Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State,” they wrote in the Constitution. An emolument is a payment.
Until the Trump administration, the expectation was that presidents would not accept foreign gifts, let alone bribes. As Jonathan Yerushalmy of The Guardian explained today, U.S. law prohibits presidents from accepting gifts worth more than $480. Gifts worth more than that are considered a gift to the American people and are transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the same agency that oversees presidential libraries. President George W. Bush gave up a puppy that was a gift from the leader of Bulgaria. When he left office after his first term, experts estimate, Trump retained more than $250,000 worth of gifts.
Trump loyalist Attorney General Pam Bondi and Trump’s top White House lawyer, David Warrington, signed off on Trump’s acceptance of the Qatari jet. They concluded it was an acceptable gift because while it will be exclusively for Trump’s use, the “flying palace” will be transferred from the Qataris to the U.S. Air Force and then to Trump’s presidential library, and that it is not tied to a specific presidential act. In 2019, Bondi was a registered lobbyist for Qatar, earning $115,000 a month.
In defending his planned acceptance of the plane, Trump turned the emoluments clause on its head. That, in turn, turned on its head the idea of a democratic republic in which the government rejects the idea of foreign leaders colluding for their own profit and reached back to that world the framers of the U.S. Constitution rejected.
He posted: “So the fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE, of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane. Anybody can do that! The Dems are World Class Losers!!! MAGA”
In The Bulwark, William Kristol observed: This is the voice of old-world autocracy…. Those who care that our republican government not be dependent on foreign states, that our elected leaders not take favors from foreign princes, they are losers.”
This is corruption, and not just in the sense that a government official is getting a payoff. It is corruption in the old-fashioned meaning of the term, that the body politic is being corrupted—poisoned—by a sickness that must be cured or it will be fatal. That corruption is the old-world system the framers tried to safeguard against, and it is visible anew in the relationship of the Trumps with Qatar.
The Trump family’s connections to Qatar are longstanding. In 2022 the chair of the Senate Committee on Finance, Ron Wyden (D-OR), and the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), wrote to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III, asking for information in their “ongoing investigations into whether former Senior White House Adviser Jared Kushner’s financial conflicts of interest may have led him to improperly influence U.S. tax, trade, and national security policies for his own financial gain.”
Kushner is married to Trump’s daughter and was a key presidential advisor in Trump’s first term. The letter explained that Qatar had repeatedly refused to bail out the badly leveraged Kushner property at 666 Fifth Avenue (now known as 660 Fifth Avenue) in 2018. But after Kushner talked to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and the two states imposed a blockade on Qatar, Qatar suddenly threw in the necessary cash. Shortly after, the Saudi and UAE governments lifted the blockade, with Kushner taking credit for brokering the agreement.
Wyden and Maloney noted that “[t]he economic blockade of Qatar may have been used as leverage for the 666 Fifth Avenue bailout and was not supported by other officials, including the Secretaries of State and Defense.” They warned that Kushner “may have prioritized his own financial interests over the national interest. The pursuit of personal financial gain should not dictate U.S. tax, trade, and national security policies.”
In this administration the corruption is even more direct. On May 1, 2025, the Trump Organization cut a deal with Qatari Diar, a company established by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund in 2005 to “coordinate the country’s real estate development priorities.” Together with Saudi Arabian company Dar Global, which has close ties to the Saudi government, the Qatari company will build a $5.5 billion Trump International Golf Club in Qatar.
Trump heads to the Middle East tomorrow to visit Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—three of the world’s wealthiest nations—in search of business deals.
Republicans spent the four years of Democratic president Joe Biden’s term calling to impeach him for allegedly accepting a $5 million payment from Ukraine. The source for that story later admitted to making it up and pleaded guilty of lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And yet the Republicans are silent now.
After the weekend, Monday started with the administration’s announcement that it has agreed to a 90-day pause in the 145% tariffs Trump imposed on Chinese goods and on the 125% tariffs China imposed in retaliation. Both nations will cut tariffs 115% during that period, bringing the U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods to 30% and the Chinese counter tariffs to 10%. The stock market rose at the news.
While the administration hailed this as a breakthrough agreement, as economist Paul Krugman pointed out, this wasn’t a case of China backing down. China’s tariffs were a response to Trump’s, which threw the U.S. economy into a tailspin. When Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent indicated Trump wanted a way out, China agreed. Quietly scraped into the memory hole is Trump’s insistence that his high tariffs would bring old-fashioned manufacturing back to the United States.
Still, Krugman notes, a tariff of 30% on goods from China is still “really, really high.” Combined with the 10% across-the-board tariffs Trump has imposed on goods from other countries, Krugman estimates that the average tariff is up about 10% since Trump took office, from about 3% to about 13%. Krugman also notes that the tariffs have only been paused, making economic uncertainty worse. Trump appears to relish uncertainty because it keeps attention glued on him. Such uncertainty is good for television ratings but terrible for the economy, as executives cannot plan for the future.
Today Helene Cooper, Greg Jaffe, Jonathan Swan, Eric Schmitt, and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that Trump followed a similar pattern in his bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen. He thought he could stop Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea by bombing the Houthis, and he expected results within 30 days.
After 31 days, the journalists report, the U.S. didn’t even have air superiority over the Houthis, who shot down seven U.S. drones—each of which cost about $30 million—and continued to fire at U.S. ships. In the first month, the U.S. campaign cost about $1 billion and lost two $67 million aircraft. Eager to get out, Trump agreed to stop the bombing campaign in return for the Houthis’ leaving U.S. ships alone, but without any promises from the Houthis to stop the more general attacks that had led Trump to start the U.S. strikes in the first place. On May 5, Trump ended the operations and declared victory.
For their part, the Houthis posted on social media: “Yemen defeats America.”
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Notes:
One First148. Suspending Habeas CorpusWelcome back to “One First,” an (increasingly frequent) newsletter that aims to make the U.S. Supreme Court more accessible to all of us. If you’re not already a subscriber, I hope you’ll consider becoming one (and, if you already are, I hope you’ll consider upgrading to a paid subscription if your circumstances permit…Read more4 days ago · 724 likes · 142 comments · Steve Vladeckhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/05/10/what-is-habeas-corpus-suspension/
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, May 11, 2025, 1:03 p.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, Aug 27, 2023, 5:40 p.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, May 11, 2025, 8:42 p.m.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/12/us-presidential-foreign-gifts-laws-rules-ntwnfb
https://www.thedailybeast.com/pam-bondi-cooks-up-brazen-scheme-to-give-trump-a-free-plane/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/22/politics/fact-check-house-republicans-fbi-informant-impeachment-push
The BulwarkA Garish, Outlandish, Stunningly Corrupt ActHappy China Trade Thaw Day to those who celebrate! The United States and China agreed overnight to suspend many of the tariffs put in place after Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day,” which had ground trade between the two nations to a virtual standstill. “The consensus from both delegations is that neither side wanted a decoupling,” Treasury Secretary Scott…Read morea day ago · 577 likes · 293 comments · William Kristol, Jonathan Cohn, and Jim Swifthttps://www.newsweek.com/pam-bondi-qatar-lobbying-attorney-general-1990130
Popular InformationTrump promised no new business deals with foreign governments. He lied.On January 10, 2025, President Trump released an "ethics agreement" detailing how he would handle his personal business interests while in the White House. It is remarkably weak and does not require Trump to divest any of his holdings. Unlike a similar agreement for his first term, it does not prohibit the Trump Organization from striking new deals abro…Read more8 days ago · 718 likes · 63 comments · Judd Legumhttps://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/12/us-and-china-agree-to-slash-tariffs-for-90-days.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/us/politics/trump-middle-east-visit-saudi-arabia-qatar-uae.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/11/middleeast/trump-visit-gulf-arab-states-saudi-uae-qatar-intl
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/us/politics/trump-houthis-bombing.html
https://substack.com/home/post/p-163393375
X:
TrumpWarRoom/status/1668794228967718914
May 11, 2025
May 11, 2025
And just like that, it’s Spring, and the lobstermen are getting ready to set their gear.
I took it easy today, but will be back at it tomorrow.
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