Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 47
March 19, 2025
March 19, 2025
On the Fox News Channel’s The Five yesterday, the panel of Fox personalities expressed outrage that federal judge James Boasberg had ordered the Trump administration to stop its deportation of migrants based on the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. That act permits the president to arrest and deport citizens of other countries that are at war with the U.S. or invading it. If Trump’s claim that Venezuelan gang members are acting in concert with the Venezuelan government to invade the U.S. stands, it gives the president extraordinary scope to take power over immigration away from Congress by declaring any foreign country is invading the United States and thus making its citizens subject to deportation without going through the normal legal process.
The Fox News Channel hosts were also unhappy that when President Donald Trump called for Boasberg’s impeachment, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts issued a relatively mild statement that did not mention the president by name but criticized his call for Boasberg’s impeachment by saying: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”
Roberts was nominated for his position by Republican president George W. Bush and was the author of the Donald Trump v. United States decision establishing that a president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official duties, a decision that upended centuries of precedent to allow Trump to avoid criminal prosecution. Roberts can hardly be considered a member of the radical Left.
And yet, on The Five, Greg Gutfeld exploded: “Maybe a guy in a robe in D.C. can follow all the protocols, but Trump is the ‘f-ing’ president of the United States who protects 300 million plus people. He is a leader who does not have the luxury of opening up his little books to read ‘Oh my god, maybe he didn’t do it the right way.’ Roberts, shut the ‘f’ up. This is something that a president has to do. He HAS to do this.”
Gutfeld’s outburst shows just how far today’s right wing has slid toward autocracy. It is a grim marker for our democracy, when a commentator with a wide audience openly calls for the replacement of the rule of law with a dictator.
While Trump apologists are insisting that the men deported to El Salvador are part of a Venezuelan gang that has spread crime across the United States, the family members of some of the individuals who show up on videos of those deported insist their relatives are not gang members.
On Monday, March 17, two days after the men were deported, Acting Field Office Director Robert L. Cerna of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations added support to their families’ statements when he revealed that “many” of those deported did not have criminal records in the United States, although he insisted that the men were nonetheless associated with the Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang. In a sworn declaration, Cerna told the court that if the deportees lack a criminal record, “that is because they have only been in the United States for a short period of time.”
He went on to say: “The lack of criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat. In fact, based upon their association with TdA, the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”
That paragraph, from an American official, is worth rereading. It asserts to the court that a person’s lack of criminal record proves that they are more dangerous than people who do have a criminal record because their clean record simply shows that the government lacks a complete profile of their crimes.
Wow.
The United States has laws in place to prosecute criminals whether or not they are citizens and, if they are convicted, to imprison them and then, if they are not citizens, to deport them. This system was in operation long before Donald Trump became president. When people like Gutfield call for the president to act outside that system, they are saying that our legal system is insufficient to handle the conditions in modern America.
But arguing that the rule of law is obsolete is nothing new. It was common among certain circles in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Then, as now, gangs of Americans insisted that the courts had been corrupted by politicians who let members of certain populations off easily because they wanted their votes, and thus were unleashing criminals on the community.
In 1884, for example, Cincinnati, Ohio, erupted into three days of rioting when William Berner avoided a murder conviction after he and his fellow employee Joseph Palmer beat their employer, stableman William Kirk, strangled him, and threw his body in the woods outside the city. Convicted of manslaughter, Berner was sentenced to twenty years in prison rather than execution.
After the court announced Berner’s sentence, 8,000 of “the wisest and most prudent citizens” of the city, “well-known and respected citizens,” met to call for justice. They swept into the streets, becoming a mob that killed 56 people and injured more than 200 over the next two days. They fought against symbols of government authority, attacking the jail and police officers and burning the courthouse to the ground.
The argument used by the Cincinnati rioters—that a court system corrupted by politicians was letting criminals loose into the community—was the justification for the lynching of Black Americans from the 1890s onward.
Today, the attack on the rule of law is taking a different form. MAGA supporters are calling for the courts to be replaced not with lynching parties but with a dictator, a single man who will override the laws to bring what his supporters consider justice to those they claim are enemies. The end to the due process of the law leads to situations where a government official can argue that the lack of a criminal record for someone perceived to be an enemy of those in power just proves that person is a criminal.
The call to erase the rule of law and institute a dictatorship is more than just an attack on individuals’ rights. It is fundamentally an attack on the supreme power of the American people. “We the People of the United States,” our constitution reads, “do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” That constitution, which establishes the legislative branch in Article I as the first among equals, sets out a process by which American citizens elect lawmakers who write, debate, and pass the laws under which we live. Under this system, our laws represent the will of the American people.
Trump and today’s MAGA Republicans are proudly ignoring those laws, not only in Trump’s attacks on the judiciary but also in things like the administration’s lie, reported today by Andy Kroll of ProPublica, that nearly 7,000 employees at the Internal Revenue Service were fired for poor performance despite the repeated warnings of a top IRS lawyer that this was “a false statement” that amounted to “fraud” on the courts.
The administration’s attempt to ignore the laws the Constitution charges it with executing amounts to an attack on the right of the American people to establish the rules under which we live.
In a webcast on Monday, Trump ally Steve Bannon defended the deportations even if, as his guest said, they swept in “some gardener or something who’d never been in trouble.” Bannon replied: “ Big deal…. Maybe some people got caught up in it. Who knows?... I think they got everybody who was a bad guy, but guess what? If there's some innocent gardeners in there? Hey, tough break for a swell guy. That's where we stand.”
Throughout our history, that is not where the laws of the United States, or the majority of its people, have stood.
—
Notes:
https://www.mediamatters.org/five/foxs-greg-gutfeld-supreme-court-chief-justice-roberts-shut-f
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25591745-cerna-march-17-declaration/
https://ohiomemory.ohiohistory.org/archives/6069
History of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, Ohio (Cincinnati: S.B. Nelson, 1894), pp. 367–378.
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-irs-firings-doge-fraud-law-job-performance
Bluesky:
March 18, 2025
March 18, 2025
On Saturday, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered that the Trump administration stop deporting anyone from the United States under the authority of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act and that the planes carrying individuals to prison in El Salvador be turned around. Despite the order, the administration declined to bring the planes back, and administration officials appeared to mock the order, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio reposting the message of Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele that read, “Oopsie… Too late,” along with a laughing emoji.
On Sunday, lawyers from the Department of Justice suggested that the planes were outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. when Boasberg issued the order, or that the order didn’t take effect until it was entered into the electronic docket, although his verbal order that he said had to be “complied with immediately” came about 45 minutes earlier, before at least one of the planes landed.
On Monday the Justice Department unsuccessfully asked a federal appeals court to remove Boasberg from the case. In a hearing, Boasberg asked the administration to clarify its actions after it appeared to defy the court by rushing the planes off the ground and to El Salvador. In response to the Justice Department’s claim that the judge’s orders had no authority over the flights once they left U.S. airspace, the judge noted that the power of the federal courts does not end at the end of U.S. airspace. Boasberg also appeared to reject the claim of the DOJ lawyers that there is no judicial order until it is published in a written filing. The DOJ also refused to tell Boasberg anything about the flights, saying that even their number was a question of national security, although the administration had talked extensively about them on public media.
Boasberg scheduled another hearing today to get the DOJ lawyers to answer the questions they had refused to address.
This morning, President Donald Trump took to social media to call Boasberg a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, was not elected President—He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE (by a lot!), he didn’t WIN ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, he didn’t WIN 2,750 to 525 Counties, HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING! I WON FOR MANY REASONS, IN AN OVERWHELMING MANDATE, BUT FIGHTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION MAY HAVE BEEN THE NUMBER ONE REASON FOR THIS HISTORIC VICTORY. I’m just doing what the VOTERS wanted me to do. This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!”
Trump’s post sounds as if he is nervous about the increasing unrest over his policies and is trying to convince people that he has a mandate although in fact more people voted for other candidates in the 2024 election than voted for him. But it was his suggestion that any judge with whom he disagrees should be removed that sparked pushback from Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts, who issued a statement saying: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”
Roberts wrote the Trump v. United States decision of July 1, 2024, establishing that presidents cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of their official presidential duties, and it seems likely that Trump did not expect a rebuke from him.
U.S. District Judge Theodore D. Chuang also sought to stop the administration’s power grab. In a scathing 68-page decision, Chuang found that the actions of Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency” to destroy the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, “likely violated the United States Constitution in multiple ways.” Chuang explained that the destruction of USAID hurt not only the 26 current or recently fired employees and contractors of USAID who had filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency.” That destruction also hurt “the public interest, because they deprived the public’s elected representatives in Congress of their constitutional authority to decide whether, when, and how to close down an agency created by Congress.”
While the question of who is in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is such a mystery that it has spawned its own social media hashtag—WITAOD, for “Who is the administrator of DOGE?”—Chuang clearly identified Elon Musk as the person in charge. Trump “identified Musk as the leader of DOGE,” he notes, and “Trump and Musk held a joint press conference in the Oval Office to answer reporters’ questions about DOGE.” Chuang noted the many, many times when Trump called Musk DOGE’s leader.
In the lawsuit, USAID employees argued that Musk has acted as an officer of the United States without having been duly appointed to such a role. The Constitution provides that the president can appoint such officers, who exercise “significant authority,” but that they must be confirmed with the advice and consent of the Senate. Musk, quite obviously, was not. The White House has tried to get around this issue by claiming that Musk is only an advisor to the president, but Chuang wasn’t buying it. “[B]ased on the present record,” he wrote, “the only individuals known to be associated with the decisions to initiate a shutdown of USAID…are Musk and DOGE team Members.” Musk therefore “exercises actual authority in ways that an advisor to the President does not.”
Chuang ordered that parts of USAID must be restored, although what effect that will have is unclear since the agency has been destroyed.
Trump continued his attack on the rule of law today when he fired the two Democratic commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission, which protects consumers from collusion and anti-consumer practices. The firings leave only two Republicans on the commission and leave it without a quorum to do business. Beginning with the 1935 case of Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the courts have established that the president cannot fire officials in agencies created by Congress without a serious reason like neglect of duties. Legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern wrote: “Trump’s action here is brazenly illegal under any interpretation of the law as it stands.”
Trump held a phone conversation today with Russian president Vladimir Putin, allegedly about a proposed ceasefire in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump boasted that he would end Russia’s war against Ukraine in a day, and he is now eager for any end to the hostilities. But Putin seems less eager to reach a solution than to demonstrate his dominance over Trump. Today, when the phone call was scheduled, Putin was on stage at an event. When his interviewer asked if he needed to go because he would be late for the call, Putin dismissed the question and laughter broke out. Brett Bruen, president of the Global Situation Room public relations firm wrote: “Making leaders wait is an old Putin power play. But, this is pretty brutal. Putin is publicly mocking Trump.”
While Trump’s team portrayed the conversation as productive, Putin maintained that Ukraine was the aggressor in the war, although it was Russia that invaded Ukraine. Putin also demanded that the U.S. and allies must stop all military aid and the sharing of intelligence with Ukraine, conditions that would hamstring Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion.
Finally today, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has proposed addressing the H5N1 bird flu that is decimating U.S. poultry and cattle farms by simply letting the disease run rampant. He suggests such a course would permit scientists to discover birds that are immune to the disease.
But veterinary scientists say that letting the virus sweep through flocks is “a really terrible idea, for any one of a number of reasons,” as Dr. Gail Hansen, a former state veterinarian for Kansas, told Apoorva Mandavilli of the New York Times. Chickens and turkeys don’t have the genes to resist the virus, and every infection is a chance for the virus to mutate into a more virulent form, one of which could mutate so it could spread among humans. If H5N1 were permitted to infect 5 million birds, “that’s literally five million chances for that virus to replicate or to mutate,” Hansen told Mandavilli.
The danger of this shoot first, ask questions later attitude of administration officials was on display today in articles about the men deported to El Salvador. A Washington Post article by Silvia Foster-Frau followed the story of four Venezuelan friends who had come to the U.S. illegally. They shared a townhouse in Dallas, where immigration officials picked them up last Thursday. The men signed deportation papers, expecting to return to Venezuela, but although there is no record that the men committed crimes in the U.S. and their families insist they are not affiliated with the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang whose members White House officials claim were on the weekend’s deportation flights, the men are shown in the videos of those deported to prison in El Salvador.
A Reuters story by Sarah Kinosian and Kristina Cooke reported that family members who suspect their loved ones have been sent to El Salvador have launched a WhatsApp helpline.
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Notes:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/16/deport-support-venezuela-el-salvador-00232379
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/17/judge-boasberg-trump-deportation-hearing-00234945
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5202045-trump-judicial-impeachment/
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.576293/gov.uscourts.mdd.576293.73.0.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/us/politics/elon-musk-usaid-doge-unconstitutional.html
https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trump-fires-2-democrats-federal-trade-commission/
https://www.newsweek.com/watch-putin-laughs-upon-being-told-hes-running-late-trump-call-2046618
Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance Deportations: It's not where it starts, it's where it ends.Just ahead of the hearing scheduled for 5 p.m. Eastern in the case we discussed last night, the Justice Department asked Judge James Boasberg to vacate the order setting the hearing. The government didn’t want to have to show up. Their reason? They wrote…Read morea day ago · 2648 likes · 293 comments · Joyce Vancehttps://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/18/trump-putin-ukraine-peace-talks/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/health/kennedy-bird-flu.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/03/18/trump-migrants-venezuelans-deportation-bukele/
Bluesky:
joycewhitevance.bsky.social/post/3lknqlrqyjc2q
kyledcheney.bsky.social/post/3lko2a2pbjj2o
muellershewrote.bsky.social/post/3lk7wgwzx4s2f
joshtpm.bsky.social/post/3lkofjthgbk2t
March 17, 2025
From 1942 to 1945, the Code Talkers were key to every major operation of the Marine Corps in the Pacific Theater. The Code Talkers were Indigenous Americans who used codes based in their native languages to transmit messages that the Axis Powers never cracked. The Army recognized the ability of tribal members to send coded language in World War I and realized the codes could not be easily interpreted in part because many Indigenous languages had never been written down.
The Army expanded the use of Code Talkers in World War II, using members of 34 different tribes in the program. Indigenous Americans always enlisted in the military in higher proportions than any other demographic group—in World War II, more than a third of able-bodied Indigenous men between 19 and 50 joined the service—and the participation of the Code Talkers was key to the invasion of Iwo Jima, for example, when they sent more than 800 messages without error.
“Were it not for the Navajos,” Major Howard Connor said, “the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.”
Today, Erin Alberty of Axios reported that at least ten articles about the Code Talkers have disappeared from U.S. military websites. Broken URLs are now labeled “DEI,” an abbreviation for “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.”
Axios found that web pages associated with the Department of Defense have also put DEI labels on now-missing pages that honored prominent Black veterans. Similarly missing is information about women who served in the military, including the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) of World War II. A profile of Army Major General Charles Rogers, who received the Medal of Honor for his service in Vietnam, was similarly changed, but the Defense Department replaced the missing page and removed “dei” from the URL today after a public outcry.
Two days ago, media outlets noted that the Arlington National Cemetery website had deleted content about Black, female, and Hispanic veterans.
The erasure of Indigenous, Black, Hispanic, and female veterans from our military history is an attempt to elevate white men as the sole actors in our history. It is also an attempt to erase a vision of a nation in which Americans of all backgrounds come together to work—and fight—for the common good.
After World War II, Americans came together in a similar spirit to create a government that works for all of us. It is that government—and the worldview it advances—that the Trump administration is currently dismantling.
The most obvious attack on that government is the attempt to undermine Social Security, a system by which Congress in 1935 pulled Americans together to support the nation’s most vulnerable. President Donald Trump and his sidekick billionaire Elon Musk have been asserting, falsely, that Social Security is mired in fraud and corruption.
Today, Judd Legum of Popular Information reported that an internal memo from the Social Security Administration, written by acting deputy commissioner Doris Diaz, called for requiring beneficiaries to visit a field office to provide identification if they cannot access the internet to complete verification there. Diaz estimated that implementing this policy would require the administration to receive 75,000 to 85,000 in-person visitors a week.
But Social Security Administration offices no longer accept walk-ins and the current wait time for a visit already averages more a month, while this change would create a 14% increase in visits. The administration is currently closing Social Security offices. Diaz predicted “service disruption,” “operational strain,” and “budget shortfalls” that would create increased “challenges for vulnerable populations.” She also predicted “legal challenges and congressional scrutiny.”
In the news over the weekend has been the story of 82-year-old Ned Johnson of Seattle, Washington, who lost his Social Security benefits after he was mistakenly declared dead. Upon that declaration, the government clawed back $5,201 from Johnson’s bank account, canceled his Medicare coverage, and warned credit agencies that he was “deceased, do not issue credit.” While Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” said the error had “zero connection” to its work, it is at least an unfortunate coincidence that Musk has repeatedly insisted that dead people are collecting benefits.
Various recent reports show the cost of the destruction of the government that worked for everyone. Kate Knibbs of Wired reported today that cuts at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) have decimated the teams that inspect plant and food imports, creating risks from invasive pests and leaving food to rot as it waits for inspection.
Today, Sharon LaFraniere, Minho Kim, and Julie Tate of the New York Times reported that cuts to the top secret National Nuclear Security Administration have meant the loss of critical employees—from scientists and engineers through accountants and lawyers—at the agency that manages the nation’s 3,748 nuclear bombs and warheads. The agency was already shorthanded as it worked to modernize the arsenal and was hiring to handle the additional workload. Now it appears to have lost many of its leaders, who were most likely to be able to land top jobs in the private sector.
Republicans convinced Americans to vote to undermine a government that enables all of us to look out for each other by pushing a narrative that says such a government is dangerous because it gives power to undesirables and lets crime run rampant in the U.S. On Friday, Musk reposted an outrageous tweet saying that dictators “Stalin, Mao, and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector employees did.”
The idea that a government that works for everyone is dangerous is at the heart of the administration’s rhetoric about the men it has deported to El Salvador without the due process of law. Although we have no idea who those men are, the administration insists they are violent criminals and that anyone trying to protect the rule of law is somehow siding with rapists and murderers. On Saturday, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a statement saying that the judge insisting on the rule of law was supporting “terrorists over the safety of Americans.”
In place of a world in which the government works for all Americans, President Donald Trump and his supporters are imposing authoritarianism. This morning, Trump declared the presidential pardons issued by his predecessor, President Joe Biden, “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT,” and went on to say that members of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol “should fully understand that they are subject to investigation at the highest level.” The Constitution does not have any provision to undo a presidential pardon, and Shawn McCreesh of the New York Times noted that “[i]mplicit in his post was Mr. Trump’s belief that the nation’s laws should be whatever he decrees them to be.”
After White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt walked back Trump’s insistence that Biden’s pardons were invalid by saying that Trump was just suggesting that Biden was mentally incompetent when he signed the pardons, Trump pulled the Secret Service protection from Biden’s children Hunter and Ashley, apparently to demonstrate that he could.
The rejection of a government that works for all Americans in order to concentrate power in the executive branch appears to serve individuals like Musk, rather than the American people. Isaac Stanley-Becker reported in The Atlantic on March 9 that although the government awarded Verizon a $2.4 billion contract to upgrade the Federal Aviation Administration’s communications network, Musk has instructed his SpaceX company to install its equipment in that network. Those installations seem designed to make the U.S. air traffic control system dependent on SpaceX, whose equipment, Stanley-Becker notes, “has not gone through strict U.S.-government security and risk-management review.”
When Evan Feinman, who directed the $42.5 billion rural broadband program, left his position on Friday, he wrote an email to his former colleagues warning that there would be pressure to turn to SpaceX’s Starlink for internet connection in rural areas. “Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” he wrote.
Cuts to the traditional U.S. government also appear to serve Russia. Over the weekend, the administration killed the Voice of America media system that has spread independent democratic journalism across the world for 83 years. About 360 million people listened to its broadcasts. The system was a thorn in the side first of the Soviet Union and now of Russia and China. Now it is silent, signaling the end of U.S. soft power that spread democratic values. “The world’s autocrats are doing somersaults,” the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote.
And maybe those two things go hand in hand. Maggie Haberman, Kate Conger, Eileen Sullivan, and Ryan Mac of the New York Times reported today that Starlink has been installed across the White House campus. Officials say that Musk has “donated” the service, although because of security concerns, individuals typically cannot simply give technology to the government.
Waldo Jaquith, who worked for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Barack Obama and who specializes in best practices for government procurement of custom software, posted on social media: “I'm the guy who used to oversee the federal government's agency IT telecommunications contracts. This is extremely bad. There is absolutely no need for this. Not only is it a huge security exposure, but the simplest explanation for this is that it is meant to be a security exposure.”
The test of whether Americans will accept the destruction of a government that works for the common good and its replacement with one that works for the president and his cronies might well come from the need to address disasters like the storm system that hit the Deep South and the Plains over the weekend. At least forty people died, including four in Oklahoma, three in Arkansas, six in Mississippi, three in Alabama, eight in Kansas, four in Texas, and at least twelve in Missouri. High winds, tornadoes, and fires did extraordinary damage across the region.
The destruction caused by a hurricane that flattened Galveston, Texas, in 1900 was a key factor in developing the modern idea of a nonpartisan government that could efficiently provide relief after a disaster and help in the process of rebuilding. As Alex Fitzpatrick of Axios reported last week, Trump has suggested “fundamentally overhauling or reforming” the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) or even getting rid of it entirely, turning emergency relief over to the states. A new analysis by the Carnegie Disaster Dollar Database shows that Republican-dominated states receive a lot of that assistance.
Sarah Labowitz, who led the study, told Fitzpatrick: “Up to now, when there is a disaster, the government responds. They clean up the debris, they rebuild the schools, they run shelters, they clean the drinking water. All of that is supported by a federal disaster relief ecosystem that spreads the risk around the country, spreads the costs around the country. And if we stop spreading the costs around the country, then it's going to fall on states, and it's going to fall on states really unevenly.”
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Notes:
https://www.thenmusa.org/articles/world-war-i-code-talkers/
https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/navajo-code-talkers-and-the-unbreakable-code/
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/17/nx-s1-5330848/defense-pentagon-black-medal-of-honor-charles-rogers
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz03gjnxe25o
Popular InformationEXCLUSIVE: Memo details Trump plan to sabotage the Social Security AdministrationAn internal Social Security Administration (SSA) memo, sent on March 13 and obtained by Popular Information, details proposed changes to the claims process that would debilitate the agency, cause significant processing delays, and prevent many Americans from applying for or receiving benefi…Read morea day ago · 1245 likes · 104 comments · Judd Legumhttps://www.axios.com/2025/03/17/social-security-trump-doge
https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2025-03-15/arlington-cemetery-website-race-gender-17151584.html
https://www.newsweek.com/seattle-man-loses-social-security-mistakenly-declared-dead-2045837
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/14/technology/elon-musk-x-post-hitler-stalin-mao.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/karoline-leavitt-walks-back-donald-trumps-rant-on-biden-pardons/
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/03/17/us/trump-news#autopen-pardons-biden-trump
https://www.wired.com/story/usda-food-supply-chains/
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/faa-trump-elon-plane-crash/681975/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/17/trump-silencing-voice-of-america/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/16/official-exits-commerce-department-musk-warning-00232278
https://www.axios.com/2025/03/13/fema-state-funding-trump-executive-order
https://carnegieendowment.org/features/disaster-dollar-database
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/us/autopen-pardons-biden-trump.html?smid=url-share
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/us/politics/elon-musk-starlink-white-house.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/03/17/storm-impact-damage-tornadoes-wildfires/
Bluesky:
did:plc:ux632osoaqigjkgvuei3m6no
wikisteff.bsky.social/post/3lkha7x2ums2s
joycewhitevance.bsky.social/post/3lkm6gajlec2u
craigsilverman.bsky.social/post/3lkiye5n2dk2p
March 17, 2025
March 16, 2025
March 16, 2025
Yesterday, President Donald Trump reached back to 1798 for authority to expel five people he claims are members of a Venezuelan gang. Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act as the legal basis for the expulsion. The Alien Enemies Act was one of four laws from 1798 that make up the so-called Alien and Sedition Acts.
Federalists in Congress passed the laws during what is known as the “Quasi-War” with France during the French Revolution, when it appeared that members of their political opposition in the U.S. were working to destabilize the U.S. government’s foreign policy of neutrality and overthrow the government so it would side with France in its struggles with Spain and Great Britain.
Their fears were not unfounded. In 1793, the year after French citizens overthrew the French monarchy, Edmond Charles Genêt arrived in the United States to serve as the French minister to the U.S. Immediately, Citizen Genêt ignored U.S. neutrality and began outfitting privateers to prey on British shipping. When the government told him to stop, he threatened to appeal to the American people. More radical French officials replaced Genêt in 1794, although he stayed in the U.S. out of concern for his safety under the new regime in France.
But his threat to appeal to Americans highlighted the growing tension between the party of George Washington and John Adams—the Federalists—and the party of Thomas Jefferson: the Democratic-Republicans (or Jeffersonian Republicans). Democratic-Republicans thought that the Federalists were moving toward monarchy, and they worked to undermine that shift by building ties with the French government to put members of their own party into office. In 1798 a private citizen, George Logan, traveled to France to negotiate with the government for policies that would strengthen the hands of the Democratic-Republicans at home.
It’s from Logan’s attempt that we got the Logan Act, which prohibits private citizens from “directly or indirectly” working with a foreign government to influence either the foreign government or the U.S. government. This is one of the laws Trump’s national security advisor Mike Flynn likely ran afoul of after the 2016 election when, as a private citizen, he talked to Russian operatives about Trump’s plans to change U.S. foreign policy once he was in office.
In addition to the Logan Act, Federalists in Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, including the Alien Enemies Act. That law, which applies during wartime or when a foreign government threatens an “invasion” or “predatory incursion,” permits the president to authorize the arrest, imprisonment, or deportation of people older than 14 who come from a foreign enemy country. President James Madison used the law to arrest British nationals during the War of 1812, President Woodrow Wilson invoked it against Germans during World War I, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used it against Japanese, Italian, and German noncitizens.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump said he would use the Alien Enemies Act to deport gang members, and in an executive order signed Friday night but released yesterday morning after news of it leaked, Trump claimed that thousands of members of the Tren de Aragua gang have “unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.” In connection with the Venezuelan government, he said, the gang has made incursions into the U.S. with the goal of “destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.”
Marc Caputo of Axios reported that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem orchestrated the weekend’s events. Caputo explained that after news of the executive order leaked, an immigration activist who tracks deportation flights posted on social media at 2:31 p.m. that “TWO HIGHLY UNUSUAL I[mmigration and] C[ustoms] E[nforcement] flights” were leaving Texas on a flight path to El Salvador.
The administration was deporting more than 200 men it claimed were members of the Tren de Aragua gang and sending them to El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele had agreed to accept prisoners from the U.S. for “a very low fee.” Tim Sullivan and Elliot Spagat of the Associated Press report that the administration agreed to pay El Salvador $6 million to imprison about 300 men for a year.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Democracy Forward promptly filed a lawsuit warning that Trump would be using the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans in the country as gang members, regardless of whether there was any evidence of their gang membership and regardless of whether Venezuela is truly trying to invade the United States. The suit asked a federal court to issue a temporary restraining order to prevent the deportation of five Venezuelans in federal custody who believed they were about to be deported. At least one of the men said he wasn’t a member of the gang.
Judge James E. Boasberg, chief judge of the D.C. Circuit, issued a temporary restraining order stopping the government from deporting the five men. The administration promptly appealed, and the ACLU asked the judge to expand the order to cover all migrants who could fall under Trump’s executive order.
Ryan Goodman of Just Security put together the timeline of what came next. At 5:00 last night, Judge Boasberg asked whether deportations would happen in the next 24–48 hours. The government’s attorney said he didn’t know; the ACLU attorney said the government was moving rapidly. Before 5:22, Boasberg ordered a break so the government attorney could obtain official information before the hearing resumed at 6:00.
At 5:45, Goodman reports, another flight took off.
Before 6:52, Judge Boasberg agreed with the ACLU that the terms of the Alien Enemies Act apply only to “enemy nations,” and blocked deportations under it. Nnamdi Egwuonwu and Gary Grumbach of NBC News reported that the judge ordered the administration to return the planes in flight to the United States. “Any plane containing these folks that is going to take off, or is in the air, needs to be returned to the United States,” the judge said. “Those people need to be returned to the United States.”
Caputo reports that White House officials discussed whether to order the planes, which were then off the Yucatan Peninsula, to turn around but chose not to.
At 8:02, Goodman reports, more than an hour past the judge’s order to recall the planes, a flight arrived in El Salvador.
Last night, El Salvador’s president reposted an article explaining that a federal judge had ordered the planes to return to the U.S., adding the comment: “Oopsie… Too late,” with a laughing emoji. Secretary of State Marco Rubio reposted it.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Caputo, “If the Democrats want to argue in favor of turning a plane full of rapists, murderers, and gangsters back to the United States, that's a fight we are more than happy to take.” But while the administration would like to make this crisis about the alleged behavior of the men they deported, it is really about the rule of law in the United States.
As law professor Steve Vladeck explains, the administration is asserting that Trump himself can determine that the country is at war although it obviously isn’t, an assertion that Tim Balk of the New York Times notes would give Trump the power to arrest, detain, and deport all migrants over the age of 14 without due process, as he determined who is a gang member without due process. We have no evidence that the men deported were gang members, and now they have vanished.
In addition, the administration appears to have violated the orders of the court. As legal analyst Harry Litman wrote: “The table is set for the most direct showdown of Trump and the courts to date. Administration admits today that 100s of supposed gang members were deported w/ no process. chief judge of district court Jeb Boasberg had ordered them not to do it and to return any planes that had been sent.”
Legal commentator Joyce White Vance added that although there will be fights over who did what, when, the case will be headed to the Supreme Court, where Trump will hope for a decision “that says he can do these deportations regardless of other legal issues, because he is the president, and the president has the power to do whatever he deems necessary under Article II of the Constitution.” She adds:” If presidents can do whatever they want, including putting people on a plane and sending them to prisons in a foreign country with no due process whatsoever, then really, who are we?”
Trump’s erosion of the rule of law has been speeding up since he took office. On March 6 he began to target lawyers when he signed an executive order designed to put the Perkins Coie law firm, which often represents Democratic politicians and organizations, out of business. After a judge blocked his order harassing Perkins Coie, Trump followed it with attacks on the Paul, Weiss law firm, and then on Covington.
On Friday, Trump appeared at the Department of Justice, the arm of government charged with protecting the equal protection of the laws, where he said those who challenge his actions are “horrible people. They are scum.” The president of the United States identified lawyers he dislikes by name from the Department of Justice, an astonishing attempt to undermine the rule of law by endangering particular individuals who would protect it.
“We are inevitably headed,” Vance wrote, “to a confrontation between a president who has rejected the rule of law and a judge sworn to enforce it. We are in an exceedingly dangerous moment for democracy.”
In Common Sense, when he made the argument against monarchy that would drive the colonists to create their own new form of government, Thomas Paine warned his neighbors that without the rule of law, the country belongs to a king. He urged them to turn away from a world that gave one man such absolute power. “[S]o far as we approve of monarchy,” he wrote, “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.”
Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club held its championship today. He posted tonight that he is proud to have won it again this year.
—
Notes:
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/logan-act-and-its-limits
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1784-1800/citizen-genet
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/alien-and-sedition-acts
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/alien-enemies-act-explained
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/16/g-s1-54154/alien-enemies-el-salvador-trump
https://www.axios.com/2025/03/16/trump-white-house-defy-judge-deport-venezuelans
https://apnews.com/article/trump-aclu-deportations-venezuelans-b2566f05b10bf1cde1caf467a3b001cc
https://www.justsecurity.org/109173/timeline-flight-el-salvador-judge-order/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/15/us/politics/trump-alien-enemies-act-deportations-venezuelans.html
https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-addressing-doj-attorneys-fight-court-scum/story?id=119815272
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/addressing-risks-from-perkins-coie-llp/
One First132. Five Questions About Trump's Alien Enemy Act Proclamation[An edited version of this post also appears at Just Security…Read morea day ago · 169 likes · 42 comments · Steve VladeckCivil Discourse with Joyce Vance The Week AheadIt’s going to be an eventful week. That’s already clear. Chief among the issues is whether this is the week we reach the tipping point where the administration flagrantly ignores a federal court’s order, and we begin to see the ensuing constitutional crisis, which would be full blown at that point, play out. It’s not a prospect any of us relish focusing…Read more11 hours ago · 523 likes · 86 comments · Joyce VanceX:
nayibbukele/status/1901238762614517965 (this includes Rubio’s repost).
Bluesky:
/rgoodlaw.bsky.social/post/3lkjbr7e5y22b
harrylitman.bsky.social/post/3lkjc3utjr22s
rgoodlaw.bsky.social/post/3lkjnpdxtk222
atrupar.com/post/3lkjgbpe3mc2a
March 15, 2025
March 15, 2025
March 15 is a crucially important day in U.S. history As the man who taught me to use a chainsaw said, it is immortalized by Shakespeare’s famous warning: “Cedar! Beware the adze of March!”
He put it that way because the importance of March 15 is, of course, that it is the day in 1820 that Maine, the Pine Tree State, joined the Union.
Maine statehood had national repercussions. The inhabitants of this northern part of Massachusetts had asked for statehood in 1819, but their petition was stopped dead by southerners who refused to permit a free state—one that did not permit human enslavement—to enter the Union without a corresponding “slave state.” The explosive growth of the northern states had already given free states control of the House of Representatives, but the South held its own in the Senate, where each state got two votes. The admission of Maine would give the North the advantage, and southerners insisted that Maine’s admission be balanced with the admission of a southern slave state lest those opposed to slavery use their power in the federal government to restrict enslavement in the South.
They demanded the admission of Missouri to counteract Maine’s two “free” Senate votes.
But this “Missouri Compromise” infuriated northerners, especially those who lived in Maine. They swamped Congress with petitions against admitting Missouri as a slave state, resenting that slave owners in the Senate could hold the state of Maine hostage until they got their way. Tempers rose high enough that Thomas Jefferson wrote to Massachusetts—and later Maine—senator John Holmes that he had for a long time been content with the direction of the country, but that the Missouri question “like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed for the moment, but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence.”
Congress passed the Missouri Compromise, but Jefferson was right to see it as nothing more than a reprieve.
The petition drive that had begun as an effort to keep the admission of Maine from being tied to the admission of Missouri continued as a movement to get Congress to whittle away at slavery where it could—by, for example, outlawing slave sales in the nation’s capital—and would become a key point of friction between the North and the South.
There was also another powerful way in which the conditions of the state’s entry into the Union would affect American history. Mainers were angry that their statehood had been tied to the demands of far distant slave owners, and that anger worked its way into the state’s popular culture. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 meant that Maine men, who grew up steeped in that anger, could spread west.
And so they did.
In 1837, Elijah P. Lovejoy, who had moved to Alton, Illinois, from Albion, Maine, to begin a newspaper dedicated to the abolition of human enslavement, was murdered by a pro-slavery mob, who threw his printing press into the Mississippi River.
Elijah Lovejoy’s younger brother, Owen, had also moved west from Maine. Owen saw Elijah shot and swore his allegiance to the cause of abolition. "I shall never forsake the cause that has been sprinkled with my brother's blood," he declared. He turned to politics, and in 1854 he was elected to the Illinois state legislature. His increasing prominence brought him political friends, including an up-and-coming lawyer who had arrived in Illinois from Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln.
Lovejoy and Lincoln were also friends with another Maine man gone to Illinois. Elihu Washburne had been born in Livermore, Maine, in 1816, when Maine was still part of Massachusetts. He was one of seven brothers, and one by one, his brothers had all left home, most of them to move west. Israel Washburn Jr., the oldest, stayed in Maine, but Cadwallader moved to Wisconsin, and William Drew would follow, going to Minnesota. (Elihu was the only brother who spelled his last name with an e).
Israel and Elihu were both serving in Congress in 1854 when Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, overturning the Missouri Compromise and permitting the spread of slavery to the West. Furious, Israel called a meeting of 30 congressmen in May to figure out how they could come together to stand against the Slave Power that had commandeered the government to spread the South’s system of human enslavement. They met in the rooms of Representative Edward Dickinson, of Massachusetts—whose talented daughter Emily was already writing poems—and while they came to the meeting from all different political parties, they left with one sole principle: to stop the Slave Power that was turning the government into an oligarchy.
The men scattered for the summer back to their homes across the North, sharing their conviction that a new party must rise to stand against the Slave Power. In the fall, those calling themselves “anti-Nebraska” candidates were sweeping into office—Cadwallader Washburn would be elected from Wisconsin in 1854 and Owen Lovejoy from Illinois in 1856—and they would, indeed, create a new political party: the Republicans. The new party took deep root in Maine, flipping the state from Democratic to Republican in 1856, the first time it fielded a presidential candidate.
In 1859, Abraham Lincoln would articulate an ideology for the party, defining it as the party of ordinary Americans standing together against the oligarchs of slavery, and when he ran for president in 1860, he knew it was imperative that he get the momentum of Maine men on his side. In those days Maine voted for state and local offices in September, rather than November, so a party’s win in Maine could start a wave. “As Maine goes, so goes the nation,” the saying went.
So Lincoln turned for his vice president to Hannibal Hamlin, who represented Maine in the Senate (and whose father had built the house in which the Washburns grew up). Lincoln won 62% of the vote in Maine in 1860, taking all eight of the state’s electoral votes, and went on to win the election. When he arrived in Washington quietly in late February to take office the following March, Elihu Washburne was at the railroad station to greet him.
I was not a great student in college. I liked learning, but not on someone else’s timetable. It was this story that woke me up and made me a scholar. I found it fascinating that a group of ordinary people from country towns who shared a fear that they were losing their democracy could figure out how to work together to reclaim it.
Happy Birthday, Maine.
[Photo by Buddy Poland.]
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