Just How Unbounded Will Trump’s Power Be? Courts Get Closer To Weighing In
Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ?? As President Trump...
As President Trump pushes the bounds of executive power, a few major court rulings that will decide how successful he is in the endeavor are inching closer to their finales.
On Friday, the D.C. District Court heard a case stemming from Trump’s firing of independent agency board members who can’t be fired at-will. The administration is aiming to get the case before the Supreme Court, where it bets that enough conservatives are ready to overturn Humphrey’s Executor and get rid of the removal protections.
If it does that, every agency in the executive branch — including, alarmingly, the Federal Reserve — could be stocked and led by Trump groupies. It’s one of the last bastions of civil service resistance that Trump and Elon Musk have so successfully decimated. And on Thursday, the Supreme Court heard an argument tangential to Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order — whether judges can order universal injunctions, blocking such a policy for the whole country and not just the named plaintiffs. If Trump prevails there, courts will be much more limited in stopping his most lawless action.
— Kate Riga
Hunter Walker dug up Trump administration State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce’s blog from the early 2000s, which featured plenty of George W. Bush-era right-wing nuttery, but also a substantial amount of culture war commentary narrated through the voice of … her family pets? The current plan to slash Medicaid and supplemental nutrition programs for low-income and disabled Americans isn’t enough for some House Republicans. Emine Yücel has more on the latest GOP conference schism as it attempts to pass Trump’s sweeping budget bill out of the House by Memorial Day. Josh Kovensky examines the legal concept of constructive custody, which may end up being critical as courts weigh bids to secure the return of those the administration has rendered to an El Salvador prison.Let’s dig in.
— Nicole Lafond
There is an animal voice inside a top Trump administration spokesperson.
One of the Fox News personalities filling out the ranks of the Trump administration is State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce. Before she was leading the briefings in Foggy Bottom, Bruce had a long career as a conservative commentator and author, which included working as a Fox News contributor and hosting her own show on the Fox Nation streaming service. But Bruce’s pre-State Department punditry wasn’t limited to these conventional venues — or even by the bounds of the human mind.
Before becoming one of the top voices of American foreign policy, Bruce also spent years maintaining her own blog and website that featured posts apparently written in the voice of her cat and dog, Sadie and Sydney Bruce. TPM dug up these animalistic writings through the web archive.
While the “Sadie & Sydney” blog was ostensibly dedicated to “animal news and commentary,” even this was not presented entirely without politics.
“Here on the S&S; Blog, you will get only good animal news, which is always under-reported by the evil MSM,” the introductory post promised. “So there, and welcome aboard! Meow and Woof”!
Bruce’s pet blog typically featured links to news stories about animals, one entry from November 3, 2006 included commentary on a series of photos showing “How to Hug a Baby.” In the voice of Bruce’s dog, this inspired a musing on how Tammy herself enjoyed watching her pet make little children “scream.” It’s quite a scene:
“I’ve seen them, those human baby things, on my walkies. They always are very friendly toward me–they hold out their hands and smile. Sometimes they scream and jump up and down. I’m not quite sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing but the humans, including Tammy, seem to like it,” the post said. “Sometimes the human allows their ‘baby’ to pet me. To cause a ruckus, or because I can’t help myself (who really knows) I sometimes give the baby a kiss. That makes them scream, too.”
Bruce did not respond to a request for comment about what she learned from pet blogging or whether she plans to return to writing in the pet voice at the State Department. The rest of Bruce’s blog was far more conventional Bush era right wing fare. Her site featured the tag lines “YOUR DEFENSE AGAINST THE NEW THOUGHT POLICE” and “SHE’S A CHICK WITH A GUN AND A MICROPHONE.”
Now, in the new Trump era, her microphone has become much bigger.
— Hunter Walker
Far-right members of the House Budget Committee voted to reject House Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act (that is literally what they are calling it, just FYI) on Friday — in an act of rebellion that raises some questions about the fate of the legislation, which includes much of Trump’s fiscal agenda.
A band of Republicans on the committee joined all of the committee Democrats to vote “no” on the reconciliation package, which House Republican leadership has been trying to put together for weeks. Apparently dissatisfied with the level of social safety net slashing the bill is already doing, they are calling for steeper spending cuts.
Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX), Ralph Norman (R-SC), Andrew Clyde (R-GA), and Josh Brecheen (R-OK) all voted against the bill. Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-PA), who initially voted “yes,” changed his vote to “no” as a procedural move that will allow Republicans to call the bill up again later.
During the hearing, Roy, a Freedom Caucus member, said he is against the bill in its current form as it adds to the deficit.
“I have to now admonish my colleagues on this side of the aisle,” Roy said. “This bill falls profoundly short. It does not do what we say it does with respect to deficits.”
“I am a no on this bill unless serious reforms are made today, tomorrow, Sunday. Something needs to change or you’re not gonna get my support,” he later added.
The far-right members who are against the bill are also specifically upset that the Medicaid work requirements included in the bill would not kick in until 2029.
The fact that leadership delayed the implementation of work requirements until 2029 “indicates that there was kind of a lack of sincerity,” Grothman said, according to Politico.
House Republican leadership and the holdout far-right members will soon be back at the negotiation table, with indications that they might try to come up with a solution before the end of the weekend. The Budget Committee is planning to reconvene on Sunday at 10 p.m. ET to vote again on the reconciliation package.
— Emine Yücel
It’s been two months since the U.S. began sending hundreds of migrants to El Salvador’s notorious detention camp, CECOT. After March 15, the government removed several more people to CECOT via Guantanamo under “normal” immigration proceedings.
Getting them back to the U.S. — or simply out of CECOT and out of El Salvador — will not be easy. Right now, that fight centers around how the courts will apply a legal concept called constructive custody. It contemplates: if you are not under the direct physical control of the U.S. government, but are being detained at its behest, are you still in U.S. custody?
Think about private prisons, or people awaiting extradition to the United States on American arrest warrants. In both cases, these detainees are understood to be in a form of somewhat mediated U.S. custody. They can file habeas corpus petitions in American federal courts and thereby ask for their release, though the specifics depend on the circumstances.
The question here is whether that same logic applies to El Salvador, and the people that the Trump administration sent there using both Alien Enemies Act and non-Alien Enemies justifications. There’s one case from the War on Terror that somewhat touches on this issue: in that matter, Abu Ali, the Saudi government held a U.S. citizen for questioning by the FBI. A district judge ruled that the man’s parents could bring a habeas case because the man was under American constructive custody. This case never made it up to an appeals court as the government brought formal charges against the citizen and extradited him to the U.S., ending the habeas claim.
With CECOT, the contradictions abound. These people aren’t U.S. citizens, though the government is paying for their detention. They face no charge; there’s no real end date for their confinement. In one case in D.C., overseen by Chief Judge James Boasberg for the District of Columbia, the ACLU is seeking records in an effort to prove that these people are in U.S. constructive custody, and therefore can be subject to a U.S. court order directing the government to attempt their return. Boasberg is directing the government to produce copies of the agreement between the U.S. and El Salvador over the detentions, information about any efforts the government has made to secure people’s return to the U.S., and various other communications. Boasberg’s decision here will help define what the courts and others can do to return or release these people.
— Josh Kovensky
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