Van Hollen told Rubio, “I have to tell you directly and personally that I regret voting for you for Secretary of State.”
Rubio responded, “Your regret for voting for me confirms I’m doing a good job.
Such a typical FU response from one of King Donald’s cronies.
The former chair of the United States Council of Economic Advisers warned Monday that the bond markets are flashing red over Donald Trump’s economic agenda.
In a sharply worded MSNBC op-ed titled, “The Bond Market is an Economic Lie Detector Test,” Jared Bernstein, a Biden administration economist, argued that markets are reacting to “a toxic combination” of MAGA-inspired policies that threaten to both raise interest rates and slow growth.
Trump “is failing” the test, according to Bernstein, and “that’s bad news for your wallet,” he added.
A federal judge ruled on Friday that the Trump administration must restore medical research articles from a government database, which were removed for promoting “gender ideology,” per The Christian Post.
The authors of the articles, Harvard medical researchers Gordon Schiff and Celeste Royce, sued the Trump administration over the removal of their research from the Patient Safety Network, according to The Harvard Crimson.
One of the articles in question was removed for commenting on the diagnosis of endometriosis, an often-debilitating medical condition, for women, transgender and non-gender-conforming individuals.
Another paper was removed for commenting on the importance of recognizing groups at risk for suicide, stating that young people, veterans, men, Indigenous, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer groups are at particular risk.
Massachusetts District Court Judge Leo Sorokin argued that the articles’ removal violated the First Amendment.
“This is a flagrant violation of the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights as private speakers on a limited public forum,” he stated according to The Christian Post. “Because irreparable harm necessarily flows from such a violation, and the balance of harms and the public interest favor the plaintiffs, the motion for a preliminary injunction is allowed in part.”
President Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr., is opening a new exclusive club in Washington D.C. And he’s making it clear that only a certain kind of Republican is welcome.
The Daily Beast reported Monday that the new club, which will be called “Executive Branch,” is tailor-made for the MAGA crowd — and its founders are making it clear that traditional conservatives and journalists will be barred from entering. David Sacks, who the Beast described as Trump’s “crypto czar,” told the New York Times he wants to make sure that the type of conservatives who frequent other GOP-oriented D.C. clubs will be turned away at the door.
“To the extent there are Republican clubs, they tend to be like more Bush-era Republicans as opposed to Trump-era Republicans,” Sacks said. “So we wanted to create something new, hipper, and Trump-aligned.”
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis has warned the Trump administration about its handling of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s case, a Salvadoran national mistakenly deported to El Salvador. Key officials have admitted ignorance about crucial details in court proceedings, raising concerns about compliance with the judge’s order to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return. Xinis has reportedly set a new compliance deadline and scheduled an in-person hearing.
Xinis said, “Evidently missing from the defendants’ filing is the privilege log that this court ordered to be produced.” She added, “Failure to file the privilege log or otherwise respond will be construed as an intentional refusal to comply with this court’s orders.”
…
Xinis said, “You haven’t complied, and you haven’t in bad faith.”
Xinis has identified officials’ ignorance as noncompliance with her order to produce witnesses with direct knowledge of Abrego Garcia’s situation.
…Xinis stated, “The whole reason we’re here is because I’ve said repeatedly you’ve done nothing, and now you tell the world you’re not going to do anything.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/my-head-is-spinning-deportation-draws-backlash/ss-AA1FwI5y
Monday reporting from the Financial Times that U.S. President Donald Trump’s family media company “plans to raise $3 billion to buy cryptocurrencies” sparked a fresh wave of alarm over his administration’s policies and potential corruption.
After winning a second term last year, the Republican president transferred his stake in Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG)—which is behind the Truth Social platform—to a revocable trust overseen by his son Donald Trump Jr.
Citing six unnamed sources, FT reported that TMTG “aims to raise $2 billion in fresh equity and another $1 billion via a convertible bond,” and “also plans to launch an exchange-traded fund focused on cryptocurrency.”
The Pentagon is reportedly in the grip of a new Cold War, and it has nothing to do with Russia.
A rift between two senior advisers to Pete Hegseth has led to a wider schism at the department, fueling speculation about the long-term prospects of the embattled defense secretary as a member of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, according to reporting by The Washington Post.
Numerous people familiar with the matter told the paper that claims of departmental unity are belied by continued dysfunction behind the scenes, stemming from personality conflicts, lack of experience, ongoing vacancies in important roles, and paranoia over what political crisis could erupt next.
…
Sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing retribution, described the most combustible relationship as that between two Hegseth aides, Eric Geressy and Ricky Buria.
They claim that Geressy, a retired soldier whom Hegseth has credited with mentoring him during their service in Iraq, has expressed ongoing concerns that Buria, until recently a military assistant to the defense secretary and now his acting chief of staff, has attempted to marginalize colleagues to enhance his own standing within the Trump administration.
Amidst the fallout from the Signalgate scandal in March, tensions between the two are said to have boiled over when Geressy found out he was excluded from meetings during a trip across the Pacific by Hegseth and blamed Buria.
Geressy also voiced concern about how many administration officials were using Signal and told staffers that the White House had a dim view of Buria, seeing him as self-important.
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As expected, a federal judge today granted the United States’ motion to dismiss its consent decree against the City of Minneapolis.
In the filing, the court states:
“The Court has grave misgivings about the proposed consent decree serving the public interest.”
The document adds that the consent decree is “superfluous” due to the city and Minneapolis Police Department entering into an agreement with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights.
Last week, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said they will continue with reform measures despite the dismissal.
When top Trump adviser Stephen Miller threatened on May 9 that the administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus in response to an “invasion” from undocumented immigrants, he was operating on a fringe legal theory that a right-wing faction has been working to legitimize for more than a decade.
…
Hard-liners have referred to immigrants as “invaders” as long as the U.S. has had immigration. By 2022, invasion rhetoric, which had previously been relegated to white nationalist circles, had become such a staple of Republican campaign ads that most of the public agreed an invasion of the U.S. via the southern border was underway.
Now, however, the claim that the U.S. is under invasion has become the legal linchpin of President Donald Trump’s sweeping anti-immigrant campaign.
The claim is Trump’s central justification for invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport roughly 140 Venezuelans to CECOT, the Salvadoran megaprison, without due process. (The administration cited different legal authority for the remaining deportees.) The Trump administration contends they are members of a gang, Tren de Aragua, that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is directing to infiltrate and operate in the United States. Lawyers and families of many of the deportees have presented evidence the prisoners are not even members of Tren de Aragua.
The contention is also the throughline of Trump’s day one executive order “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” That document calls for the expansion of immigration removal proceedings without court hearings and for legal attacks against sanctuary jurisdictions, places that refuse to commit local resources to immigration enforcement.
So far, no court has bought the idea that the U.S. is truly under invasion….
More than two months after the Trump administration flew more than 200 people to a detention camp in El Salvador, there’s still a lot that remains unclear.
We still don’t know who, exactly, the government sent there. We don’t know how many people were aboard each plane that went from Texas to El Salvador on March 15; we don’t know who was removed under the wartime Alien Enemies Act, and who was removed under more standard immigration authorities. The question of whether non-citizens that the U.S. government is paying El Salvador to hold are entitled to habeas corpus protections is also, somewhat ominously, unanswered.
It’s shocking given the lawlessness of the operation: the Trump administration sought to shield these removals from judicial scrutiny from the start, and, per the finding of one federal judge, sought to delay a court hearing until the airplanes could depart for El Salvador.
A report published this week by the Cato Institute adds another egregious fact to this story: many of those sent to El Salvador entered the United States legally.
The researchers behind the study attempted to learn as much as they could about a list of 238 men rendered to CECOT, the El Salvador prison, on March 15, obtained and reported by CBS News. They found that at least 50 of the more than 200 men sent to El Salvador complied with U.S. immigration law as they entered the country.
Their resulting removal and indefinite confinement in El Salvador has been a betrayal, David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute and the author of the study, told TPM.
