Alien Acts 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱

Democrats in Disarray: On Friday, as predicted, the six-month continuing funding resolution already passed by the House, passed in the Senate by a vote of 62 to 38. Democratic Leader/NY Senator Chuck Schumer, together with Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman, Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto, Illinois’ Dick Durbin, Hawaii’s Brian Schatz, Michigan’s Gary Peters, New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen, New York’s other Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Maine Independent Angus King voted for it. Kentucky Republican Rand Paul joined the 37 Democrats who voted against the resolution, not because he didn’t support most of it but because it didn’t codify military spending cuts. Schumer and the Democrats who voted for the package did so over real concerns that throwing the government into a shutdown was a worse option, one that would give Trump and his crony MAGAs more power to act in destructive ways while also cutting the funding of the Judiciary, the one branch of government he hasn’t managed to control so far.  Nevertheless, their decision, most notably Schumer’s, was met with lots of outrage by many Democrats who, instead of spending the weekend attacking Trump and his awful policies, called for Schumer’s head.  Punchbowl News reported this morning that quite a few of the Democratic Senators who voted against the resolution, did so because they knew it would pass without their support, so while Schumer’s decision was publicly unpopular, quite a few of his colleagues were quite happy that his vote, together with the vote of the others who joined him, provided them cover. Politics is messy, and right now it’s downright deadly. Democrats would be wise to air their grievances more privately because only Trump benefited from their public wailing this weekend and there are lots more things to be freaked out about right now.

Constitutional Crisis:  On Friday,  Trump visited the Department of Justice.  While there he delivered a deranged speech calling all his opponents “scum,” judges who ruled against him ”corrupt” and the prosecutors who investigated him “deranged.”  He also called his political opponents, lawbreakers, suggesting that many of them should be sent to prison. Although the exact timing is unclear, sometime on Friday Trump invoked the rarely applied Alien Enemies Act of 1778 (the “Alien Act”).  The law which until now has been invoked only three times, during the War of 1812, and World Wars I and II, is supposed to only be used to protect the nation from potential spies and saboteurs at home during an actual overseas war.  However, Trump invoked it to justify the immediate deportation of members of Tren de Aqua, a mostly Venezuela based gang. While it’s widely accepted that the Tren de Aqua guys are violent thugs, Trump’s invocation of the Alien Act to deport them without following any of the legal procedures required for such removals was anything but kosher because we are not in a declared war and we have not been invaded by a foreign nation, two requirements of the Alien Act. Moreover, it’s not even clear that all of the more than 200 Venezuelans who he subsequently deported are even members of the gang, at least one of them was deported due to his questionable tattoos.  You know who else has controversial tattoos?  Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and he’s running the Pentagon. On Saturday after five of the alleged Tren de Acqua migrants sued, US District Judge James Boasberg ordered the Trump administration to immediately halt its removal activities until he had more time to consider the legality of Trump’s use of the Alien Act. However, the planes were already in the air enroute to an El Salvador detention facility and though the facts are fuzzy, the Trump administration asserted that the five affected by the judge’s ruling which was subsequently expanded to cover all of those affected by the invocation of the Alien Act were not among the deported while more ominously stating that during wars Trump is above the law so Judicial rulings, especially those by radical Democratic communist judges, don’t pertain to his actions anyway. Though some are trying to soft pedal Trump’s actions, none of us should be fooled, he’s doing an end run around the courts and it’s not just those nasty Tren de Acqua guys who he’s deporting.  Over the weekend, Lebanese kidney transplant specialist and Brown University professor Rasha Alawieh who had a valid visa, was expelled in apparent defiance of a court order from another US District Judge, Leo Sorokin. Dr. Alawieh’s “crime,” she had left the US to visit her family in Lebanon and then had the audacity to legally return to her duties saving kidney patients in the US. 

First Kill the Lawyers: It’s not just judges’ rulings that Trump is ignoring, over the weekend, despite an earlier order by Judge Beryl Howell  that said his banning of another law firm was an “extreme and dangerous effort” that appeared to violate core constitutional principles, including the ability of clients to obtain adequate legal representation he added Paul Weiss, the country’s third largest law firm to the government’s list of banned law firms.  He ordered the administration to strip Paul Weiss employees of any government security clearances, limit the firm’s access to federal buildings, and take steps to rescind government contracts from the firm and its clients. His justification: that Paul Weiss and a few more law firms he probably plans to add to his enemies list have “played an outsized role in undermining the judicial process and in the destruction of bedrock American principles.” He pointed in particular to the work such firms provide without charge, which he said gives some Americans preferential access to the country’s top legal talent that they couldn’t otherwise afford. That assertion was in reference to pro bono work provided to Washington DC in relation to the prosecution of the January 6^th rioters.  Trump also cited Paul Weiss’ association with Mark Pomerantz, who worked for the Manhattan district attorney’s office on its investigation into Trump and his business even though Pomerantz has not been affiliated with Paul Weiss for years.  So basically, Trump who has managed to fully exploit the long and winding legal process for years, stretching out his cases while successfully avoiding almost all legal consequences for his “alleged” illegal acts is thoroughly pissed that law firms represent the people he wants thrown to the wolves. To be clear, judges that rule against him and his administration should be impeached or worse and lawyers who represent his “enemies” should be bigly punished.

Fog:  The US bombed the Yemen based Houthis over the weekend. The Houthis, another one of Iran’s surrogates, are hard to eliminate because they have little worth protecting and don’t care much about their own civilian casualties so while attacking their so-called “strongholds” might feel gratifying, to date, it hasn’t stopped them from launching retaliatory strikes on shipping lanes and on Israel. However, attacking the Houthis makes for great press and provides “wag the dog” coverage when you are dismantling the US government, firing federal employees, and ignoring court rulings.  To that end, on Friday night Trump issued an executive order slashing funding to seven federal agencies: the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, US Agency for Global Media, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian Institution, Institute of Museum and Library Services, US Interagency Council on Homelessness, Community Development Financial Institutions Fund and Minority Business Development Agency. Don’t ignore the attack on the press and anything to do with minorities because that’s what Trump does over and over again.  On the Ukraine-Russia front, Putin is still attacking ruthlessly, Ukraine has lost much of the land that it had gained, and Putin is doing what he does, pretending to be interested in peace even though all he wants is Ukrainian territory.

#BringThemAllHomeNow