Category: American Empire

By Erwin Chemerinsky and Laurence H. Tribe / RSN – New York Times / April 9, 2025

Of all the lawless acts by the Trump administration in its first two and a half months, none are more frightening than its dumping of human beings who have not had their day in court into an infamous maximum-security prison in El Salvador — and then contending that no federal court has the authority to right these brazen wrongs.

In an astounding brief filed in the Supreme Court on Monday, the solicitor general of the United States argued that even when the government concedes that it has mistakenly deported someone to El Salvador and had him imprisoned there, the federal courts are powerless to do anything about it. The Supreme Court must immediately and emphatically reject this unwarranted claim of unlimited power to deprive people of their liberty without due process.

That would seem to be the obvious response. It was Thomas Jefferson who called the right of habeas corpus to protect against unlawful detention one of the “essential principles of our government.”

Jefferson’s concerns are underscored by the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a lawful resident of the United States, whom the federal government admits it wrongly deported to El Salvador. He has been incarcerated in El Salvador along with some 200 Venezuelan migrants deported there last month by the Trump administration, which says they were involved in criminal and gang activity.

By Lisa Rein and Hannah Natanson / The Washington Post — Reader Supported News / March 25, 2025

A flood of cuts led by Elon Musk has sent the agency into chaos as a new commissioner prepares to take charge.

The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in 10 days this month, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from logging in to their online accounts because the servers were overloaded. In the field, office managers have resorted to answering phones at the front desk as receptionists because so many employees have been pushed out. But the agency no longer has a system to monitor customers’ experience with these services, because that office was eliminated as part of the cost-cutting efforts led by Elon Musk.

And the phones keep ringing. And ringing.

The federal agency that delivers $1.5 trillion a year in earned benefits to 73 million retired workers, their survivors and poor and disabled Americans is engulfed in crisis — further undermining its ability to provide reliable and quick service to vulnerable customers, according to internal documents and more than two dozen current and former agency employees and officials, customers and others who interact with Social Security.

Musk Calls Social Security ‘the Greatest Ponzi Scheme’ — Musk’s Call for $700 Billion in Cuts Is a ‘Prelude’ to Social Security Privatization

“Why do you lie so much about Social Security? To get people to lose faith in the system, and then you can give it over to Wall Street,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders.

By Jake Johnson / Common Dreams / Mar 11, 2025

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders warned late Monday that billionaire Elon Musk’s new call for up to $700 billion in cuts to mandatory federal spending is an alarming step in the direction of Social Security privatization, a longstanding—and deeply unpopular—goal of right-wing politicians and corporate-funded think tanks.

Musk, who is spearheading a large-scale assault on federal agencies and workers, told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow on Monday that “waste and fraud” in “entitlement spending”—a category that includes Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—is “the big one to eliminate,” estimating that up to $700 billion could be cut from such programs.

By Steven Greenhut / San Diego U-T / March 9, 2025

Back when conservatives championed ideas rather than outsourced their thinking to their leader, they touted a simple saying: “Ideas have consequences.” Conservatives also understood that while people should always be free to make their own choices based on those ideas, they should be responsible for the consequences of their decisions.

By all means, follow the advice of that YouTube quack who argues that vaccines include microchips that control the population. But when your kid is hospitalized with measles, that’s on you. Unfortunately in a democratic society, the population must endure the brunt of ludicrous ideas imposed by elected officials. (Check out my columns about the awful ones in California.)

We’re now at the “good and hard” part of H.L. Mencken’s definition about democracy being “the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it.” That’s certainly the case with economic policy. If you occasionally check your retirement accounts and did so after the last two times President Donald Trump imposed 25-percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, you will have noticed that they dropped precipitously.

By Justine McDaniel / Washington Post / Feb. 25, 2025

The Trump administration will determine which journalists participate in the White House press pool, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday, breaking with nearly a century of practice in which the independent White House Correspondents’ Association has overseen the rotating group of news outlets that cover the president in Washington and on travels.

It is an aggressive move by the government to control which news outlets have access to the president — one that is unprecedented in modern American politics and comes amid Trump’s long-standing efforts to erode Americans’ trust in fact-based reporting.

As journalists and media critics warned that White House control of the press pool threatens the foundations of a free press and could allow the administration to more easily block reporters from the White House, Trump boasted about the move.

“We’re going to be calling those shots,” he said from the Oval Office late Tuesday afternoon.

by Ashleigh Fields / The Hill / Feb. 2, 2025

A majority of Americans are displeased with President Trump over his decision to pardon nearly all of those charged for their role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, according to a poll.

The Washington Post/Ipsos survey, released Thursday, found that 83 percent of respondents were opposed to Trump’s offer of clemency for violent criminal offenders. Roughly 55 percent said the same about pardons for rioters convicted of nonviolent crimes. Another 14 percent had the opposite view, supporting the president, while 3 percent chose not to answer.

The numbers indicate an uptick in disapproval for the move after a Reuters/Ipsos poll from last month found that 58 percent of Americans were not in favor of the president pardoning the insurrectionists.

Moves to Bolster Country’s Sovereignty Against Trump’s Threats to Invade Under Guise of Attacking Cartels

By Mexico News Daily Staff / Feb. 20, 2025

At her Thursday morning press conference, President Claudia Sheinbaum responded to the United States’ designation of six Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations by announcing she was sending a constitutional reform proposal to Congress to bolster the protection of Mexico’s sovereignty.

Among other issues, Sheinbaum also spoke about United States President Donald Trump’s decision to launch an anti-drug campaign.

Sheinbaum’s proposed reform would add two paragraphs to the Mexican constitution’s Article 40, stating among other things, that Mexico will not consent to intervention by foreign entities in Mexican territory, not even for the purpose of investigating or prosecuting crimes. (Daniel Augusto/Cuartoscuro)

On the day the United States’ designation of six Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations took effect, Sheinbaum declared that Mexico’s sovereignty is not up for negotiation.

The terrorist designations of the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and other Mexican criminal organizations “can’t be an opportunity for the United States to invade our sovereignty,” she said.

By Jessica Piper / Politico / Feb. 20-21, 2025

Donald Trump’s honeymoon may be wearing off.

New polls show a majority of Americans say he has overstepped his presidential authority — and hasn’t done enough to address high prices.

Two new polls from CNN/SSRS and The Washington Post/Ipsos show the GOP president’s approval rating underwater (47-52 in the CNN poll, 45-53 in the Post), a shift from polling earlier this year that found voters roughly divided on him, with some surveys even showing a positive approval rating.

Trump’s poll numbers are at an historic low for this spot in any president’s first month in modern times. SEE: Rachel Maddow’s blistering analysis of recent polls — video.

One reason for the erosion of support: a slight majority of respondents in both surveys said Trump has overstepped his presidential power in his attempts to reshape the federal government driven by tech billionaire Elon Musk. Many of Trump’s most controversial early initiatives, including a sweeping spending freeze, have been blocked in court thus far, but the new administration has still made waves with layoffs of federal workers, cuts to federal contracts and a flood of executive orders.

Newsweek / February 20, 2025

The White House has released photos styling President Donald Trump as a king on social media.

The administration’s official X (formerly Twitter) account posted a fake paper cover in the style of Time Magazine, with the caption: “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”

Why It Matters — In the initial stages of his second presidency, Trump has faced criticism for his consistent use of executive orders to make changes to the federal government. The images give his critics, who fear he is consolidating power in the executive branch at the expense of courts, more ammunition.

What To Know — On Wednesday, the White House’s official X account released the image, which appears to be AI-generated.

By Erwin Chemerinsky / OpEd LA Times / Feb. 10, 2025

If one were to design a path to authoritarian rule, it would be what we have seen in the first weeks of the Trump administration. For my book No Democracy Lasts Forever, I studied how democracies die and are replaced by authoritarian regimes. Almost always the rulers are elected rather than coming to power through a coup, and then they consolidate authority and silence their critics.

Where are we on the path?

Checks and balances are being destroyed. The quintessential legislative power is control over the purse. But President Trump and those around him have asserted that he can control that by refusing to spend money appropriated by federal statute. The newly installed director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, at his confirmation hearings, was explicit that the president could refuse to spend funds notwithstanding a federal law — the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 — that prohibits this. And the president already has done this on a large scale, by signing an executive order freezing a massive amount of federal expenditures (enjoined by two federal courts), and by all but eliminating the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was created and funded by federal statutes. At the same time, he has asserted the power to spend money without congressional authorization as in the offer of a buyout to federal workers.

Breaking down the president’s suggestion — and whether it’s a distraction, a negotiating ploy or something more.

by Aaron Blake / Washington Post / Feb. 5, 2025

President Donald Trump on Tuesday offered the most untethered idea of an increasingly untethered second term.

Trump said at a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the United States “will take over the Gaza Strip,” will “own it” long-term and will redevelop it — even floating turning it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

Trump’s promise has shocked the Middle East, Trump’s opponents and his domestic allies alike. Pursuing such a course would mean the displacement of 2 million Palestinians from their land — Trump proposed setting up “various domains” for them elsewhere — and injecting Americans into the cauldron of the Middle East.

It would also in all likelihood require a massive mobilization of U.S. troops, despite Trump’s years-long attacks on the concept of foreign nation-building.

The immediate question is, of course, whether he’s actually serious. Here are a few theories.