<....3) A Boondoggle for Private Schools

On the charitable giving side of the tax act, the House Bill creates a back-door subsidy for private school vouchers. Rich people who donate to nonprofits that hand out vouchers to private K-12 schools will now receive not a tax deduction - usually capped at 35 cents off taxes for every one dollar donated - but a tax credit. Every dollar donated is counted as a dollar paid in taxes. This tax credit not only applies to the value of cash donations, but the market value of stocks. In many cases - as outlined here - donors would be able to reap a greater return on their investments by donating stock that has appreciated in value, and reaping the tax benefits, than by selling the investment and then owing capital gains taxes. The value of this incentive is estimated at $23 billion over 10 years, with the administration subsidizing the flight from public education at the same time it aims to eliminate the federal Department of Education.

4) Leave No Heir Behind

No GOP tax bill would be complete without a giveaway to the scions of billionaire families. The Republican Party has long demonized the estate tax as the "death tax," inveighing against it as a threat to salt-of-the-earth family farmers. Thanks to Trump's first tax bill, the estate tax exemption currently stands at nearly $27 million for couples, but is due to fall to about half that, absent a change in the law. The "Big Beautiful Bill" indexes the current exemption to inflation and makes the tax break permanent. A rich couple will be able to pass on $30 million to their descendants without paying a penny of tax next year. According to a letter from Americans for Tax Fairness, "this handout to lucky heirs and heiresses will cost over $200 billion in lost revenue over 10 years."

5) Shortchange Kids of Immigrants

A MAGA tax bill needs some anti-immigrant juice. And the Big Beautiful Bill provides that by limiting availability of the child tax credit to only citizen children with a citizen parent. The child tax credit is currently available to children with Social Security numbers, so long as their parents have a taxpayer identification number, given to immigrants who pay taxes. The BBB would increase the value of the credit to $2,500, but require that the parent or parents claiming the credit also have Social Security numbers, as a proxy for citizenship status. The change is expected to disqualify nearly two million citizen children in mixed-status households from this vital government support.

6) No Insurance for You!

One of the most controversial changes in the Big Beautiful Bill is to impose a work requirement on supposedly "able-bodied" adults to maintain eligibility for Medicaid, the government health insurance program for low-income and disabled Americans. The requirement is spelled out as 80 hours a month of work or volunteering. The implementation is left up to states, some of which are committed to expanding health coverage, but others which have long been ideologically opposed. Enrollees must often navigate a maze of forms and bureaucratic hurdles to establish and maintain eligibility - even before this new work requirement - because Medicaid contains strict income caps. Recipients must prove they are, in fact, poor. The Big Beautiful Bill however adds insult to injury. People who are kicked off Medicaid by failing to navigate the requirements around work and work-reporting, will be punished by becoming ineligible for subsidies for individual insurance plans sold under Obamacare. By design, the Trumpy Medicaid changes will eliminate coverage for 10.3 million people, according to the CBO.

7) Work for Your Supper

Work requirements are fetishized throughout the Big Beautiful Bill, and also apply to recipients of SNAP, the acronym for the federal food assistance program. As passed, the House bill would expand work requirements in SNAP on adults up to the age of 65. (Current work requirements phase out at 55). It would also require parents with children as young as eight to work outside the house, turning another generation of young poor children into latchkey kids. According to modeling by the Urban league, the Big Beautiful Bill - which so richly rewards billionaires and their heirs - would be financed in part by taking food out of the mouths of hungry families. As many as 2.7 million households would lose food benefits, with the average blow to the family grocery budget totaling $254 a month.>

<Two setbacks suffered by Donald Trump this past week –– one legal, the other reputational –– has put him in a corner where he may have to double down on his tariff war to save face despite the possibility it could further s cripple his second term.

That is the opinion of one ally of the president who doesn't work in the White House and believes the present feels mortally wounded.

On the heels of losing a tariff case reviewed by the U.S. Court of International Trade, the president was made aware that he has become a joke among Wall Street traders who freely use "Trump Always Chickens Out" (TACO) when it comes to market bets of his tariff threats.

According to a report from Politico, the president and his inner circle see the setbacks and the mockery jeopardizing a central part of his economic policies which may lead him to double down instead of easing off on his constant tariff threats to calm both the markets and voters as his approval numbers tumble.

As (Politico's) Megan Messerly, Eli Stokols and Adam Cancryn wrote, "Trump is digging in on his vow to impose steep tariffs by any means necessary — and stick it to those who question his strength and think he’s bound to 'chicken out.' He and administration officials have said that negotiations with other countries will continue, are insisting they’ll win their current tariff battle in court and are even preparing back-up strategies for new tariffs in case they don’t."

According to the insider, the president's fear of looking weak will likely force him to go down the wrong path.

“I don’t think Trump can back down now, mainly because of this TACO theme,” they explained. “He’s clearly super irritated by it and it’s like a challenge to his very manhood now.”

Former Trump adviser Marc Short is of the same mind, remarking, "The president is not one to accept defeat. He certainly didn’t in 2020. It’s not like because he had a bad court ruling he’s going to turn his back on this.”

The report goes on to note that Trump allies outside the White House worry his inner circle isn't counseling him to reconsider his options.

“Whether you’re for tariffs or not, it’s pretty clear the president doesn’t have unilateral authority to raise taxes,” cautioned longtime Trump advocate Stephen Moore.>

<The Trump administration is once again asking the U.S. Supreme Court to lift an injunction issued by a federal court in California and allow the president to move forward with plans to dismantle much of the federal workforce through agency reorganization and mass terminations.

Monday’s emergency filing is the second time the Department of Justice has petitioned the high court in the case. The administration first asked the justices to intervene on May 16, after U.S. District Judge Susan Illston granted the plaintiffs’ request for a temporary a restraining order halting the firings. That filing was withdrawn when the injunction expired after two weeks.

Illston subsequently issued a preliminary injunction which a three-judge panel on the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to stay in a 2-1 vote on Friday.

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer excoriated Illston’s order in the petition to the justices, arguing that her injunction “rests on the indefensible premise that the President needs explicit statutory authorization from Congress to exercise his core Article II authority to superintend the internal personnel decisions of the Executive Branch.”

“Controlling the personnel of federal agencies lies at the heartland of this authority,” the filing states. “The Constitution does not erect a presumption against presidential control of agency staffing, and the President does not need special permission from Congress to exercise core Article II powers. The district court’s injunction violates these bedrock principles and other well-established doctrines.”

On Feb. 11, President Donald Trump issued an executive order entitled “Implementing The President’s ‘Department Of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative.” The order purported to “commence” a “critical transformation of the Federal bureaucracy” by “eliminating waste, bloat, and insularity.”

In a 115-page complaint, the plaintiffs alleged various separations of powers violations, arguing Trump’s order unconstitutionally oversteps into areas reserved for Congress. The complaint also alleged numerous violations of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), the broad statute governing agency actions.

As Law&Crime previously reported, Trump’s plans would have had administrative agency heads quickly begin initiating “large-scale reductions in force” (RIFs), or massive layoffs, in service of the goal to restructure the government.

Illston pumped the brakes on those efforts.

The lower court reasoned the three agencies principally tasked with the firings and reorganization — the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — simply lacked the requisite statutory authority to carry out such tasks.

“In sum, no statute gives OPM, OMB, or DOGE the authority to direct other federal agencies to engage in large-scale terminations, restructuring, or elimination of itself,” Illston wrote in the May order. “Such action is far outside the bounds of any authority that Congress vested in OPM or OMB, and, as noted, DOGE has no statutory authority whatsoever.”

The appeals court echoed the district court’s findings on the authority of the three agencies tasked with the reorganization plans — finding each agency acted beyond its statutory authority.

“As Defendants concede, OMB and OPM have only supervisory authority over the other federal agencies,” the order stated. “DOGE has no statutory authority whatsoever. We therefore agree with the district court that these organizations’ actions directing other federal agencies to engage in restructuring and large-scale RIFs were ultra vires.”....>

<....The administration on Monday asserted that from a substantive perspective, the “general direction and guidance” prescribed in Trump’s executive order and subsequent memo are “unquestionably lawful,” reasoning that the “entire executive power belongs to the President alone.”

“That includes the power to effectuate policy objectives by directing agencies to exercise their statutory authority to conduct RIFs, subject to the guidance of OPM and OMB, so long as it is done in a manner that is fully consistent with law,” Sauer wrote. “The district court turned the constitutional structure upside down by treating as supposed ‘evidence’ of ‘unlawful action’ the mere prospect that ‘agencies are acting at the direction of the President and his team.'”

The administration also argued it was “meritless” for the district court to assert that Trump, as president, cannot “fundamentally reorganize” federal agencies with out the express consent of Congress, emphasizing that federal bureaucrats were never intended to become “a class with lifetime employment, whether there was work for them to do or not.”

Justice Elena Kagan, who handles emergency petitions out of the 9th Circuit, ordered the plaintiffs in the case to respond by June 9, 2025.>

<North Carolina has always been a conservative, business-friendly state in which lobbyists for corporate interests have generally had their way in the state Legislative Building under both Republicans and Democrats.

From the days of tobacco, textiles and furniture to the modern era in which industries like banking, technology, construction and health care predominate, it’s been a rare instance in which lawmakers have said “no” to the policy demands of a large industry – especially those willing to make significant “investments” in political campaigns.

One notable and interesting minor exception to this pattern in recent decades, however, has been in the realm of predatory consumer lending. Throughout the latter decades of the 20th Century right down to the present day, grifting high-cost lenders have generally struggled to gain the foothold here that they enjoy in many other states.

Despite repeated efforts to loosen state laws that bar exploitive products like “payday loans” and “car title loans” and that cap interest rates and fees charged by “consumer finance” companies and makers of high-cost home loans, North Carolina lawmakers have largely held firm.

Several factors that have contributed to this situation, including consistent and forceful advocacy from the consumer protection offices of Attorneys General Mike Easley, Roy Cooper, Josh Stein, and Jeff Jackson; resistance from several legislative leaders (including a handful of Republicans like veteran State Rep. Julia Howard and former State Rep. Jeff Barnhart); and tough stances by the state’s military commanders who’ve seen how predatory loans target and harm the readiness of their troops.

Together with the rise of one of the nation’s strongest networks of consumer advocacy nonprofits – a group that included, among others, advocates from the Center for Responsible Lending, the North Carolina Justice Center, the Financial Protection Law Center and the state’s Legal Aid community — these forces helped keep North Carolina a state that is comparatively predatory lender-free.

What’s more, the successes in this area were so numerous and impactful that following the financial crisis of the early 2000’s that morphed into the Great Recession, they helped inspire action in Washington to establish a watchdog federal government agency known as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

In the years since, the CFPB has done prodigious work – winning billions of dollars in refunds for ripped-off homebuyers, student loan borrowers, and banking customers and even putting some predatory lenders out of business. Since its inception, more than 300,000 North Carolinians have turned to the agency with complaints of consumer abuses. More than 86,000 have thus far won relief....>

<....Unfortunately, as one might expect, laws and lawyers that target grifters, scammers and predators are anathema to President Trump – a man whose business career was largely predicated on all manner of shady deals — and he and Republicans in Congress are working hard to gut or abolish the agency.

According to Adam Rust of the Consumer Federation of America, since Trump returned to office in January, his minions have quickly sought to lay off virtually the entire CFPB staff (a move that has waxed and waned in the federal courts), cancelled numerous consumer protection regulations (including rules designed to protect vulnerable seniors from junk fees, rein in online payment app scams and debt collectors, and cap bank overdraft fees), and dismissed more than 20 lawsuits targeting predatory actors.

Where federal law protected certain kinds of work from complete elimination – as with the Office of Servicemember Affairs (a creation of the Military Lending Act) – Rust says Trump’s team evaded the law by simply firing everyone in the office except for a single person. The massive budget and tax bill recently approved by the U.S. House doubles down on this pattern by slashing the agency’s funding agency by around 75%.

To their credit, however, North Carolina advocates and activists – some of whom helped birth the CFPB — have no intention of letting the agency be destroyed without a fight. Last Thursday, several of them gathered for a press event outside of Sen. Thom Tillis’s Raleigh office to plead with him to intervene.

In addition to Rust, speakers included community organizer Emma Horst-Martz, who cited her grandmother’s victimization by an online tech firm as an example of the need to preserve protections for seniors, and a pair of small business women – Ashley Gaddy Robbins and LaCharo Owens – both of whom explained the critical role CFPB protections have played in making access to safe, affordable credit possible for minority and women-owned businesses.

Is there a chance that Tillis could muster the courage, as is his wont every once-in-a-blue-moon, and do the right thing? Experience and a glance at some of his past actions indicate that it’s a huge longshot, but with an uphill reelection race looming in 2026, it seems at least possible that Tillis will see handing such an issue to a Democratic challenger could be a dangerous move.

For their part, the activists and small business owners who pleaded with him last week will not be giving up or going away. Their simple message: stand with the people of North Carolina, not the banks, billionaires and lobbyists. Let’s fervently hope Tillis was listening.>

<U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is doubling down after admitting she didn’t fully read the House GOP’s sweeping budget bill—despite now emphatically opposing its AI provisions. The outspoken Georgia Republican faced widespread ridicule Tuesday, as House Democrats blasted her for ignoring their earlier warnings about controversial measures in the legislation strongly backed by President Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson.

"Here's a lesson for us all," Greene declared in a speech on the House floor Wednesday. "No matter what political party holds office and is in charge, we should all watch carefully the bills that we pass."

Greene expressed strong disapproval over the provisions in the so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill" that bans states from regulating artificial intelligence for ten years, claiming such a regulation would "destroy federalism."

"With this warning, I urge all of my colleagues that when the House gets to vote on the one big, beautiful bill again after it leaves the Senate, that we make sure we protect a federalism and at the same time urge our colleagues in the Senate to pull this clause out of the one big, beautiful bill."

In a TV spot on Wednesday, Greene also told NewsNation that she is being "very transparent and honest" about not reading that provision.

Some of Greene's Democratic colleagues continued to chastise her for discovering the importance of reading bills in full.

U.S. Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL) wrote up this scenario mocking Greene:

"Surgeon: 'In hindsight, I should have washed my hands' Pilot: 'In hindsight, I shouldn’t have put tape over all the dials' Olympian: 'In hindsight, the pre-race martinis were a bad idea.'"

Other critics blasted her as well.

"Did she not read the briefing docs; Or did her LD [legislative director] not provide any?" asked The Lincoln Project's communications director Gregory Minchak. "So it's either she runs a terrible office or she's a terrible member. Either way she's telling on herself.">

<The Trump administration’s relentless assault on the rule of law is a kind of arson: It is setting so many blazes that the fire department is having trouble putting them all out at once. Last week, Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court to cut off the water.

Trump’s executive order revoking birthright citizenship for undocumented immigrants—which flagrantly overrides law, Supreme Court precedent, and the text of the Fourteenth Amendment—has, at least for now, reached the justices primarily as a procedural question. At issue during oral argument before the Court was the constitutionality of nationwide injunctions put in place by district-court judges, rather than the merits of the order itself.

Nationwide injunctions are not an inherently partisan issue—leaders of both parties have complained at one point or another about an overreaching federal judge. But in this case, allowing the federal government to revoke birthright citizenship would create a logistical nightmare for states that would have to figure out how to verify the citizenship of babies in order to allocate or administer benefits. An entire class of stateless infants would be created overnight. Indeed, one could imagine a ruling that narrows the authority of judges to issue nationwide injunctions to specific circumstances but that would still allow for such an injunction in this extraordinary case. That may be where the justices are headed, although there was no apparent agreement at oral argument on how to do so.

After listening to the arguments, I was convinced by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s observation that, in many cases, “universal injunctions” are just the courts “telling the defendant, <Stop doing this thing that the court has found to be unlawful>.” However frustrating nationwide injunctions may be when you oppose them, they seem preferable to the alternatives floated. Yes, they sometimes lead to judges making overbroad decisions, as with the abortion-medication case unanimously reversed by a very conservative Supreme Court. But the Trump administration’s view that such injunctions are unconstitutional, and that district-court judges should be able to bar the executive order revoking birthright citizenship with respect to only individual parties, would produce even worse outcomes, in which the federal government would be free to trample the constitutional rights of anyone who doesn’t specifically assert them unless the Supreme Court decides to act.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor attempted to put this in a context that her conservative colleagues might understand. “So when a new president orders that because there’s so much gun violence going on in the country, and he comes in and he says, ‘I have the right to take away the guns from everyone,’ then he sends out the military to seize everyone’s guns, we and the courts have to sit back and wait until every named plaintiff gets—or every plaintiff whose gun is taken comes into court?” Sotomayor asked.

This is more or less what is happening now with birthright citizenship. The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to let Trump run riot over the Constitution indefinitely while narrowing the ability of those affected to challenge violations of their constitutional rights. And its proposed remedy—class-action lawsuits—is something that it also believes to be legally suspect, and that it would presumably attack later. As Solicitor General D. John Sauer made clear to the justices, “I do not concede that we wouldn’t oppose class certification in this particular case.” It was reminiscent of when, during Trump’s second impeachment, his lawyers argued that impeachment was unnecessary because he could be criminally prosecuted; once prosecutions began, those same people argued that prosecuting him was unconstitutional. There is no acceptable way to oppose Trump and his agenda.

At one point, Sauer complained that nearly 40 nationwide injunctions against the administration have been issued in the past four months. His implication was that the courts are out of control. But another explanation is also available: An out-of-control executive who ignores constitutional restraints on his authority also results in a lot of injunctions. Even accepting the premise that there are too many nationwide injunctions, executive—not judicial—overreach seems like the actual problem here....>

<....Nationwide injunctions certainly aren’t a perfect solution to the problem of a lawless president, but class-action lawsuits are even more flawed. To begin with, a class action requires that a group get a lawyer and persuade a judge to certify it as a class. That’s already a difficult task—and likely not a speedy process—and in doing so, those bringing suit might reveal themselves to the federal government, which now claims that it can clap undocumented people in irons, put them on a plane, deport them to an overseas Gulag in El Salvador, and then refuse to bring them back. Many people likely would not participate for fear of this outcome. Then there’s the fact that the Trump administration has successfully bullied so many white-shoe law firms out of doing pro bono work opposing it that those seeking to assert their constitutional rights may find themselves short of advocates.

Even beyond this nightmarish but realistic scenario, the government’s solution is to impose ever-heavier administrative burdens on the people whose rights are at stake. This is the reverse of how it should be. Having each individual get a lawyer to assert his or her constitutional rights is much more difficult and complicated than one judge telling the government to stop breaking the law.

“Your argument seems to turn our justice system, in my view at least, into a ‘catch me if you can’ kind of regime from the standpoint of the executive, where everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights,” Jackson told Sauer. “Your argument says, We get to keep on doing it until everyone who is potentially harmed by it figures out how to file a lawsuit, hire a lawyer, et cetera. And I don’t understand how that is remotely consistent with the rule of law.”

To appeal to a higher court, one has to lose a case. Winners cannot appeal, meaning that if the administration lost in the lower courts, a final resolution on the question would be elusive, and a lawless administration could continue to violate the Constitution. As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out, under the Trump administration’s theory, the government could lose in one part of the country and then decide not to appeal, allowing it to keep enforcing an unconstitutional executive order elsewhere. “The government has no incentive to bring this case to the Supreme Court, because it’s not really losing anything. It’s losing a lot of individual cases, which still allow it to enforce its EO against the vast majority of people to whom it applies,” Kagan said.

That’s why the nationwide injunctions are necessary for getting cases to the Court. “If the Court narrows the scope of the nationwide injunction or eliminates it entirely, it means that the administration will have free rein to basically bring these cases in whatever district they want, and they’ll get unfavorable resolutions, and then they just sit on them, and there’s no way to actually get to a final resolution where the court weighs in on the merits,” Melissa Murray, a law professor at NYU, told me. “They can win by losing by simply sitting on their hands and not appealing any of their losses.”

The argument against birthright citizenship is an entirely ahistorical and atextual one that would restore the antebellum understanding of citizenship, in which one inherits the status of their parents—a kind of “blood guilt” where the sins of the parents are visited on the child. As the legal scholars Anthony Michael Kreis, Evan Bernick, and Paul Gowder dryly put it, “There was, to be sure, one circumstance where the American founders permitted degraded legal status to be heritable, but we hope that it is not one that today’s denationalizers would embrace.” (They mean slavery.)

Sauer, for his part, kept insisting that “the Fourteenth Amendment related to the children of former slaves, not to illegal aliens who weren’t even present as a discrete class at that time.” The Framers could have easily written “the descendants of the emancipated” if they had meant it that narrowly. Instead, they enshrined nonracial citizenship in the Constitution with the phrasing “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”....>

<....Indeed, President Andrew Johnson complained that the 1866 Civil Rights Act, parts of which were later adopted in the Fourteenth Amendment, extended citizenship to “the Chinese of the Pacific States” and “the people called Gypsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks, people of color, negroes, mulattoes, and persons of African blood.” Yes, and that was the point. “A liberal and brotherly welcome to all who are likely to come to the United States, is the only wise policy which this nation can adopt,” Frederick Douglass declared in 1869. “It would be madness to set up any one race above another, or one religion above another, or proscribe any on account of race color or creed.”

The text of the Constitution is at odds, however, with the Trumpist project. The conservative legal movement has done what it does best, which is fabricate a historical justification for a contemporary political goal. Former Justice Warren Burger called the transformation of the Second Amendment into a personal right to firearm ownership a “fraud,” but that interpretation of the right to bear arms at least has a long cultural tradition of firearm ownership behind it. Trump’s executive order is an attempt to rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment by fiat as the Confederacy would have written it—the precise opposite of the intent of the Republicans who drafted it.

“They wanted everyone to have citizenship. They did not want to leave it up to the political parties, and they wanted it to be clear,” Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia, told me. “They said, We’re going to resolve this question of citizenship once and for all, and if we leave it unclear, we’re afraid a future political party who doesn’t share our view of basic equality will have a different view.” That was prescient, although they couldn’t have imagined that the party that would not share that view would be their own.

A few days ago, Chief Justice John Roberts warned in an appearance at Georgetown Law School that the rule of law is “endangered.” One reason for that is Roberts’s own opinion that the president is nigh immune to criminal prosecution for lawbreaking, a finding that has emboldened Trump to ignore the law. Immunity is apparently insufficient, however—Trump also wants the ability to violate the Constitution at will without meaningful resistance from the courts. In the cases involving his deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Trump administration has already begun to ignore the judiciary and the Constitution. Here, Trump is asking permission. Have the justices learned their lesson yet?>

<On Fox News Thursday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich pushed back against media portrayals of a supposed power struggle between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, arguing the press has fundamentally misunderstood the dynamic and Musk’s place in it.

A feud between Trump and Musk escalated Thursday as the two traded attacks and financial threats in a public clash. During an appearance on “Jesse Watters Primetime,” Gingrich dismissed the idea that Musk’s influence poses any serious challenge to Trump’s authority or political capital.

“It’s a public relations struggle. There’s no power struggle here. One of them is president. The other one isn’t president. And I think that’s part of what the media doesn’t quite get,” Gingrich said. “And I think it’s part of what frustrates Elon Musk is that, you know, he has a fairly high sense of himself and should. I mean, I think he’s a brilliant guy. I think the things he’s done are remarkable.”

Gingrich suggested that the dispute would likely fade within days, as Trump remains focused on more pressing national priorities.

“You know, Henry Ford didn’t end up running the country. Thomas Edison didn’t end up running the country. And, in fact, in the end, Elon Musk is not going to end up running the country,” Gingrich said. “So I think probably things will calm down over the next two or three days. Trump has a lot of really serious things to do. And placating Musk is probably down around number 27 on the list.”

As for Musk’s claim that Trump’s “big beautiful bill” doesn’t actually cut the national debt, Gingrich wasn’t buying it. Gingrich reminded viewers of his own record balancing the budget for four consecutive years during the 1990s.

“It’s baloney. This bill does more to turn the curve on spending. Look, as you know, I am the only speaker to have helped balance the budget for four years in the last century,” Gingrich said. “So I have some notion of how you do this. This is the first step. It’s not the last step. It’s an important first step. It creates economic growth, which, if the Congressional Budget Office wasn’t a bastion of idiotic left-wing thinking by itself, the economic growth would virtually pay for the bill.”

Gingrich highlighted what he said were major reductions in domestic spending and praised the bill’s Medicaid reforms.

“It has a substantial cut in domestic spending in a very large way. It reforms Medicaid in a very positive way. And I think Musk probably ought to get a briefing on the real bill rather than his personality feelings,” Gingrich said.

Trump said Musk only soured on his bill after discovering it eliminated electric vehicle mandates. Musk responded on X, saying he never reviewed the legislation and claimed it was pushed through Congress without transparency.

Following his 2024 victory, Trump tapped Musk to head the Department of Government Efficiency, where he was charged with cutting federal waste. Musk said in late May that his temporary role had concluded, ending a contentious stint marked by sharp backlash from Democrats—particularly after his office moved to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development.>

<He'd never admit it publicly, but I'm betting Donald Trump is regretting that he relaxed the White House rules about drug testing.

As I predicted last week, Elon Musk's vow to leave politics behind did not last long. But I confess I had no idea that he would come back to the fold by taking swings at his beloved daddy replacement, Trump. It seems, however, that someone told Musk in recent days how much his businesses, which rely heavily on government subsidies, will be screwed by the president's already imperiled budget bill. So now the tech billionaire has become fixated on killing the bill. Musk kicked off his crusade Tuesday by tweeting that Trump's bill is a "disgusting abomination," and has been on a tear since, rallying his supporters to oppose the bill and making room for more Republicans on Capitol Hill to start pulling back support. As he and Trump snipe at each other publicly, the efforts to pretend this is a friendly disagreement are falling apart.

Even if Musk fails in his efforts to kill Trump's bill, this battle is exposing a deeper truth that the White House can't hide: The MAGA coalition is fragile and some of the differences are starting to tear at the seams less than half a year into the second Trump term. Trump's slim win in 2024 was no doubt due in large part to Musk, and not just the eye-popping quarter-billion-plus Musk spent to push the old man's orange carcass over the finish line. It's because Musk and other influential figures, especially those associated with Silicon Valley or who pretend to be former liberals, were able to convince a chunk of more secular, largely male voters to throw their lot in with the Christian nationalist base that is the backbone of the MAGA movement. But while these two groups joined together based on a shared animosity towards racial minorities and women, it was always a far more uneasy alliance than Musk or Trump wanted to admit. And now it's getting shakier as two narcissistic billionaires are at odds.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., lies all day about everything, but he was probably telling the truth when he sneered that "the EV mandate is very important to" Musk. Tesla sales have been crashing since Musk joined the MAGA movement, meaning he needs government subsidies for electric vehicles more than ever. But while I have no doubt Musk is way more concerned about his bottom line than about government spending — his ostensible reason for hating the bill — his anger would be impotent if it didn't tap into existing tensions between the newfangled technofascist wing of the GOP and more traditional Republicans.

"The Silicon Valley tech world does not like this bill," Tim Miller of The Bulwark explained on his podcast Wednesday. It's not just Musk, but many wealthy leaders who are deeply invested in the energy and tech areas that President Joe Biden's administration invested so heavily in. They stabbed Democrats in the back as a thank-you for that money, and now are shocked they are being similarly betrayed by the Republicans they joined up with.

I don't think Musk and Trump were actually fighting when Musk ostensibly "left" last week — even as Trump was assuring reporters his billionaire buddy was going nowhere — but there's no doubt this conflict is disrupting their months of narcissistic codependency. On Thursday, Trump got angry and accused Musk of having "Trump derangement syndrome" on camera. It was during the same event that he lamented that the Allies prevailed on D-Day, suggesting the 78-year-old was in one of his increasingly common moments of uninhibited honesty.

This conflict was brewing for reasons that run deeper than Musk and Trump's competing egos or Silicon Valley's dependency on government funding, which their leaders disparage. The atheistic world of pseudo-intellectualism that Musk and his minions come from was always going to have friction with the Christian nationalists who actually run the MAGA-ified Republican Party....>

<....The most recent sign I've seen that there's trouble in fascist paradise came late last month, from a YouTube video that, at first blush, seems like it's not related: Jordan Peterson's ill-fated effort to "debate" 20 atheists at once. Peterson is a former psychology professor remade into a MAGA culture warrior, and was a huge player in radicalizing a lot of young, secular men to the right for years before Musk got into the game. But he, like Musk, has been feeling pressure lately to fully MAGA-ify by openly embracing Christianity. Last July, Musk and Peterson even did an interview together where they talked up being a "cultural Christian," creating the space for people who don't believe in God or Jesus to support Christian nationalists in their theocratic goals.

But Peterson's stint on the zoo-like faux-debate show "Jubilee" exposed how untenable the Christians-who-don't-believe stance may be. Initially, it was billed as "1 Christian versus 20 atheists," but then one of the atheists outed Peterson, by simply asking Peterson a simple question: "Am I not talking to a Christian?"

Peterson started yelling diversions and using other tactics to avoid answering the question. He did it again with another atheist by trying to nitpick what the word "believe" means when asked if one "believes" in God. It's all very funny, because it's obvious Peterson doesn't believe in God or Jesus, but also wants the cultural cachet of being a Christian on the right.

This matters because Peterson is up there with Musk for representing the more secular, nerdy wing of MAGA, which also happens to be comprised of some of the most fairweather Trump supporters. These are those young men who voted for Biden in 2020 and switched to Trump in 2024, helping Trump barely win the election. With the help of Musk and Peterson, they convinced themselves they can buddy up with people who believe in demon possession and think porn should be banned, all without risk to themselves.

Ultimately, the college-educated, secular nerds convinced themselves the rest of MAGA are dumb sheep who are easy to control. They underestimate their new allies, though. On Thursday, Musk complained that Trump was showing "ingratitude," claiming Trump would have lost the election without his support. (Which is probably true!)

This budget fight exposes how delusional that "we can handle the sheeple" attitude always was. It's not about religion, per se, but the culture clash between the Musk fanboys and the Christian nationalist debate is driving much of this. Musk and his acolytes envision a technofascism that sucks all the money out of social services and puts it into the tech industry, even as it pursues goals typically disliked by the Christian right, such as clean energy production. Meanwhile, the Christian right wing of the party, while happy to pass huge cuts to Medicaid and Obamacare, is largely leaving untouched Social Security or Medicare, which their working-class and aging base depends on. The techbro fascists may hate the liberals they live next door to, but at the end of the day, they're still part of the urban, atheistic, educated class that the MAGA movement demonizes. That difference was not going to be papered over forever.>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqM...

But harassing others is something you consider appropriate.

By the bye: if you intend to post here using other sockies, not to bother, as they will be summarily blocked and deleted without explanation.

<Donald Trump’s trade war has become his quagmire: legal, economic and political. On 28 May, the court of international trade ruled his tariffs exceeded his constitutional authority. Point by point, the decision decimated Trump’s arguments as flimsy and false, implicitly castigated the Republican Congress for abdicating its constitutional responsibility, and reminded other courts, not least the supreme court, of the judicial branch’s obligation to exercise its authority regardless of the blustering of the executive and the fecklessness of the legislative branches.

Trump’s tariffs, along with his withdrawal of active support for Ukraine and passivity toward his strongman father figure Vladimir Putin, have broken the western alliance, forcing the west to make its own arrangements with China, and cementing the idea for a generation to come that the United States is an untrustworthy and unstable partner.

On the economic front, Trump’s tariffs have already begun to increase inflation, shutter trade, devalue the dollar, and undermine manufacturing. They will soon create shortages of all sorts of goods, ruin small business, and force layoffs that bring about stagflation that has not been seen since the 1970s, which was then the result of an external oil shock, not self-harm. On 3 June, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported that as a result, principally, of Trump’s tariffs, the US will suffer a decline in the rate of growth from what had been forecast this year. “Lower growth and less trade will hit incomes and slow job growth,” the OECD stated.

As a political matter, besides being unpopular, Trump’s tariffs, in combination with his assaults on the institutions of civil and legal society, have drawn out the most intelligent and skillful members of the conservative legal establishment, who themselves have been some of the most crucial players in the rise of the right wing, to man the ramparts against him. These are not the familiar Never Trumpers, but newly engaged and potentially more dangerous foes.

While corporate leaders uniformly abhor Trump’s tariffs, they have stifled themselves into a complicit silence on the road to serfdom. But Trump’s new enemies coming from the conservative citadel of the Federalist Society are filing brief after brief in the courts, upholding the law to halt his dictatorial march.

Trump naturally cannot help but turn everything he touches into sordid scandal. After announcing his “Liberation Day” tariffs, which tanked the stock market, Trump declared a pause during which he promised he would sign, seal and deliver 90 deals in 90 days. But he has announced only a deal with Britain. Most of the deals Trump has seen have been with the Trump Organization. Under the shadow of a threatened 46% tariff, Vietnam, after a visit from Eric Trump, granted a $1bn Trump Tower in Ho Chi Minh City and a $1.5bn golf club and resort near Hanoi with “two championship golf courses”, relative crumbs alongside the billions the Trump family has accrued from across the Middle East, not to mention the $400m jet that his team solicited from Qatar to serve as his palatial Air Force One.

Standing before the white marble plinth of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington national cemetery on Memorial Day, 26 May, after reading prepared remarks about “our honored dead” to a gathering of Gold Star families, Donald Trump fell into a reverie about his divine destiny. “I have everything,” he said. He spoke about the parade of troops and tanks he has ordered for 14 June, his 79th birthday, which happens to coincide with the date that George Washington created the Continental army. “Amazing the way things work out. God did that, I believe that too. God did it.”

Two days after Trump had mused about his election by heaven to possess “everything”, the court of international trade issued what the Wall Street Journal called the “ruling heard ‘round the world … proving again that America doesn’t have a king who can rule by decree’”.

The US court of appeals for DC then temporarily stayed the ruling while it considered the case. But the trade court’s decision to deny Trump his toys was comprehensive, blistering and devastating. Now, Trump’s trade war is his Vietnam, a quagmire of his own....>

<....Trump’s entire program dances on the head of his tariffs. By fiat, without congressional approval, he has willfully invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act as cover for his helter-skelter gyrations to reshape the global economy according to his desire for domination of the Earth. He has further explained that his tariffs are necessary to pay for the vast tax cuts for the wealthy in his budget bill that would increase deficits. He claims that the tariffs will replace the revenue raised from income tax, fixed in the constitution by the 16th amendment, ratified in 1913. Without tariffs on the scope he projects his dream house of cards collapses. With his tariffs even as his stated minimal goal he blows up the world.

The court of international trade, a court based on specialized expertise, whose judges have lifetime appointments, flatly stated that Trump’s use of the emergency law under which he claimed his authority does “not permit the president to impose tariffs in response to balance-of-payments deficits”, “exceeds any tariff authority delegated to the president”, “would create an unconstitutional delegation of power”, and is “contrary to law”.

Having ruled that Trump’s worldwide tariffs are illegal, the court deemed his “trafficking tariffs” imposed on Canada and Mexico also lawless. Trump has asserted them on a contrived national security rationale of preventing the importation of fentanyl. But the court stated that Trump’s “use of tariffs as leverage … is impermissible not because it is unwise or ineffective but because … [the federal law] does not allow it”. Thus, the court concluded in both instances, “the worldwide and retaliatory tariff orders exceed any authority granted to the president … to regulate importation by means of tariffs. The trafficking tariffs fail because they do not deal with the threats set forth in those orders.”

The trade court’s ruling suddenly exposed the extent to which Trump’s relationship with the conservative legal movement is unraveling. The fissure runs deeper and wider than name-calling. Trump’s trade war has morphed into a widespread civil war within the right with the core of the conservative legal establishment resisting him.

Trump’s venomous social media posts against Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society co- chairman and rightwing powerhouse, reads like a memoir of an ingenue taken advantage of in the big city by strangers. “I was new to Washington,” Trump explained, “and it was suggested that I use The Federalist Society as a recommending source on Judges. I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real ‘sleazebag’ named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions.”

Slowly, Trump has come to the realization that this Leonard Leo “openly brags how he controls Judges, and even Justices of the United States Supreme Court”. Trump was revealing that Leo understood his power beyond his influence over Trump on appointments. “Backroom ‘hustlers’ must not be allowed to destroy our Nation!” He is victim of a con, Donald Chump.

“Talk about friendly fire,” editorialized the Wall Street Journal. But there was more to the story than Trump revealed, which the Journal’s editorial page, Leonard Leo’s friend in court as it were, happily provided. The judge on the trade court whom Trump appointed and blames on Leo, Timothy Reif, was in fact, according to the Journal, “recommended to the White House by Robert Lighthizer, who was Mr Trump’s first-term trade representative. Mr Leo had nothing to do with it.” Perhaps Trump is suffering from memory loss.

Trump bellowed that the reason for the trade court’s ruling must be “purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP’? What other reason could it be?” “Well,” suggested the Journal, “how about the law and the constitution?” After Leo had been the one to give Trump the names of the three justices he appointed to the supreme court who made possible the infamous decision granting him “absolute immunity” for “official acts” that enabled his evasion of prosecution during the 2024 campaign, this was a thick and rich ragu.....>

<....The Journal also rushed to Leo’s side with a podcast featuring John Yoo, who as deputy assistant attorney general under George W Bush and the author of the notorious Torture Memos. Yoo said it was “truly outrageous to accuse Leonard Leo, one of the stalwarts or the conservative movement, of being something like a traitor”. Yoo stated: “Why would President Trump turn his back on one of his greatest, if not his greatest achievements from the first term, appointing three justices?” Indeed, Yoo was right that Leo had dictated Trump’s choices, exactly as Trump confessed. What neither disclosed is that it was the price Trump paid for a political armistice with the mighty rightwing Koch political operation. Some deal, some art.

And Yoo added in an admission of truth-telling about the supreme court’s invention of absolute presidential immunity for “official acts”: “If it weren’t for Federalist Society judges, he would be in jail right now because it was the Roberts court that said former presidents just can’t be prosecuted for crimes.”

But to Trump, the betrayal is cutting. The trade court’s ruling against him echoed the amicus brief filed by a bipartisan group of legal eminences that included leading conservative lights. There was Steven Calabresi, professor at Northwestern Law School, the co-founder and co-chairman of the Federalist Society, and the chief theorist of the conservative doctrine of the “unitary executive”. There was Michael W McConnell, former federal judge, Stanford law professor, and a chief defender of religious right lawsuits. There was Michael Mukasey, former federal judge and George W Bush’s attorney general. There was Peter Wallison, President Reagan’s White House counsel. They all signed the brief stating: “The president’s tariff proclamations bypass the constitutional framework that lends legitimacy and predictability to American lawmaking.”

The breaking of ranks on the right is not isolated. Other well-known members of the conservative legal establishment have done more than submit an amicus brief. They have become counsels to some of the most important institutions in Trump’s crosshairs – Harvard University, National Public Radio and the WilmerHale law firm.

William Burck and Robert Hur are co-counsels representing Harvard in its suit against the Trump administration order denying its enrollment of international students unless the university submits to his draconian control over its academic processes.

Burck, former deputy White House counsel to George W Bush and a current member of the board of directors of the Fox Corporation, is the head of “one of a few top US firms that seemed well placed not only to avoid Donald Trump’s wrath but also benefit from connections to the president’s inner circle”, according to the Financial Times. He was hired to be an ethics adviser to the Trump Organization – that is, until he chose to represent Harvard. Trump ranted against him: “Harvard is a threat to Democracy, with a lawyer, who represents me, who should therefore be forced to resign, immediately, or be fired. He’s not that good, anyway, and I hope that my very big and beautiful company, now run by my sons, gets rid of him ASAP!” Eric Trump, who had previously called Burck “one of the nation’s finest and most respected lawyers”, wielded the executioner’s axe for his father.

Hur had been appointed the US attorney for Maryland by Trump and served as the special counsel investigating President Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified documents stored in boxes in his home’s garage. Hur filed no charges, but said of Biden that he was “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.

In Harvard’s suit against the Trump administration, Burck and Hur state that its actions against the university are “a blatant violation of the first amendment, the due process clause, and the Administrative Procedure Act. It is the latest act by the government in clear retaliation for Harvard exercising its first amendment rights to reject the government’s demands to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum, and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students. The government’s actions are unlawful for other equally clear and pernicious reasons.”

For its representation in its suit against the Trump administration, which seeks to slash its funding, National Public Radio has hired Miguel Estrada, a star of the conservative legal firmament, whose nomination to the federal bench by George W Bush was blocked by Senate Democrats in 2002. According to the NPR complaint, Trump’s action “violates the expressed will of Congress and the first amendment’s bedrock guarantees of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of association, and also threatens the existence of a public radio system that millions of Americans across the country rely on for vital news and information”....>

<....When Trump issued executive orders against big law firms that had somehow offended him, coercing their surrender to his whim, one of those firms, WilmerHale, subject to such an order for having had as a senior partner Robert Mueller, the former FBI director who headed the investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 election, did not cave. Instead, it hired Paul Clement, George W Bush’s solicitor general, who has argued on behalf of many of the most controversial conservative causes before the supreme court, including against the Defense of Marriage Act and against the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.

Citing the example of John Adams, who defended British soldiers in the Boston Massacre, Clement argued against the Trump administration that “British monarchs’ practice of punishing attorneys ‘whose greatest crime was to dare to defend unpopular causes’ – which threatened to reduce lawyers to ‘parrots of the views of whatever group wields governmental power at the moment’ – helped inspire the Bill of Rights”.

Then, Ed Whelan, who holds the Antonin Scalia chair in constitutional studies at the rightwing Ethics and Public Policy Center, and is a close surrogate for Leonard Leo, savaged Trump’s nomination of Emil Bove, who was his personal attorney in the New York hush-money trial and whom he had appointed as deputy attorney general, to be a judge on the US court of appeals for the third circuit.

Bove ordered corruption charges dropped against the New York City mayor, Eric Adams, which a federal judge said “smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions”. The US attorney for Manhattan, Danielle Sassoon, a conservative Republican, resigned in protest, stating that the deal “amounted to a quid pro quo” and that Bove had ordered her not to take notes during meetings. Seven members of the public integrity section of the justice department also resigned.

Whelan, writing in the conservative magazine National Review, called Bove Trump’s “henchman”, decried his “bullying mishandling” of the Adams case, and suggested he might be put on the federal bench to “position him well for the next supreme court vacancy. A rosier possibility is that Bove is tired of being Stephen Miller’s errand boy.”

Now, Trump is worried about what conservatives on the supreme court might rule when presented with the trade court’s decision. He rails in private against Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whom he appointed to the supreme court, for her unexpected occasional independence. The Journal, with the inside track, writes that “the White House boasts it will win at the supreme court, but our reading of the trade court’s opinion suggests the opposite. Mr Trump’s three court appointees are likely to invoke the major-questions precedent” – which would uphold the trade court and force Trump either to bring his policy before the Congress or drop it.

Trump is enraged that his betrayers from the Federalist Society have claimed roles in the resistance. He has no loyalty to anyone or thing, but demands personal fealty, certainly now above any ideological litmus tests. The only ideological tests are to be imposed on universities. Trump has learned his lesson. In his insistence on obedient judges, Trump is returning to his first principle as he was taught in the beginning by his mob attorney Roy Cohn, who said: “Don’t tell me what the law is, tell me who the judge is.”>

<I’m truly sorry that Joe Biden has an aggressive form of prostate cancer.

But the Biden news that’s been dominating headlines, exciting columnists, lighting up social media, and grinding up endless podcast hours has been something else: a so-called “cover-up” of the extent of Biden’s declining cognition before he resigned.

(Unless you’re Donald Trump Jr., in which case you suspect that even Biden’s prostate cancer was covered up.)

In their explosive new book out today, Original Sin, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson call Biden aides’ refusal to admit how badly Biden’s mental capacities had deteriorated a “cover-up.” The book details Biden’s cognitive lapses and an alleged effort by aides to conceal them from the public ahead of his decision to end his reelection bid.

Many commentators are livid about what the book reveals. “The book makes it very, very clear there are people who knew and said nothing. And that is a crime against this republic,” huffed CNN’s Van Jones on Sunday. “I think the Democrats are going to pay for a long time for being a part of what is now being revealed to be a massive cover-up.”

Oh, please.

Can we get back to reality? If one of our major parties is to rot in political hell for harboring “people who knew and said nothing,” it’s the party that now controls Congress.

Congressional Republicans know Trump has usurped the powers of Congress, is using the Justice Department to prosecute his enemies, is abducting people off the street and sending them to a brutal prison in El Salvador, and is actively dismantling American democracy — and yet they say nothing.

The so-called “Biden cover-up” is as much a distraction from all of this as are Trump’s stream of distractions (calling DEI an “illegal and immoral discrimination program” and jurists “communist radical-left judges”; saying we’ll invade Greenland, annex Canada, and remake Gaza into a Mediterranean resort).

If you want a cover-up, can you possibly find a bigger one than Trump’s entire regime? Every day, it seems, we learn of another effort to cover up facts to fit Trump’s wishes.

It was reported over the weekend that the chief of staff of Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, ordered a senior career analyst to change his finding that no evidence linked Venezuela’s government to the Tren de Aragua gang operating in the United States.

Why the attempted cover-up? Because the presumed link has been Trump’s entire justification for using the wartime Alien Enemies Act to abduct immigrants without due process and send them to the El Salvador prison.

The regime continues to insist that Kilmar Ábrego García is a gang member because he has “MS13” tattooed on his fingers. In fact, he doesn’t. That’s a cover-up, too. The photo released by the regime showing his hand with the “M,” “S,” “1” and “3” was photoshopped; earlier photos don’t show the tattoo.

Why the hell are we wasting time and energy debating who knew what and when about Biden’s deteriorating condition anyway, when voters really need to hear about the deteriorating condition of democracy and the rule of law under Trump?

Trump has always done better with so-called “low information” voters. But his second-term tactic of “flooding the zone” with all sorts of detritus is causing even average voters to lose track of major stories.

In a recent poll from The New York Times and Siena College, respondents who had not heard about his regime’s mistaken deportation of Ábrego García to a Salvadoran mega-prison — a significant percentage — gave Trump nearly a 10-point higher approval rating on immigration than respondents who had heard.

And what about Trump’s deteriorating cognition, and the failure of anyone in the Trump White House to talk about this?>

<....You don’t have to look hard to find evidence. Time magazine recently interviewed Trump in the Oval Office and had this exchange:

Time: “Mr. President, you were showing us the new paintings you have behind us. You put all these new portraits. One of them includes John Adams. John Adams said we’re a government ruled by laws, not by men. Do you agree with that?”

Trump: “John Adams said that? Where was the painting?”

Time: (pointing behind Trump): “It’s right here.”

Or consider this recent exchange between Trump and a reporter on Air Force One:

Reporter: “There was a car bomb in Moscow this morning that killed a Russian general, do you have any reaction to that?”

Trump: “Who killed what?”

Reporter: “Russian general killed by a car bomb.”

Trump: “Wow, no, I just heard. You’re just telling me that for the first time. Where did this take place?”

During an April 30 interview with NewsNation, a reporter asked Trump about his war against Harvard University. Here’s his response:

“Well, I say this. We had riots in Harlem, in Harlem, and frankly if you look at what’s gone on — and people from Harlem went up and they protested, Stephen, and they protested very strongly against Harvard. They happened to be on my side.” He continued, “You know I got a very high Black vote. You know that? Very, very high Black vote. It was a very great compliment to me.”

Or consider his bonkers postings, such as this one:

“Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country. Happy Easter also to the WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges and Law Enforcement Officials who are allowing this sinister attack on our Nation to continue, an attack so violent that it will never be forgotten!”

Why isn’t Trump’s cognitive decline — and the failure of White House aides to talk about it — a far more significant cover-up story than the alleged failure of Biden’s aides?

Some blame Biden’s aides for giving us another term of Trump. But to believe this you need to make a series of bonkers assumptions — that had they been more open about Biden’s cognitive decline, he would have abandoned his reelection campaign sooner; that had he dropped out sooner, Kamala Harris would have had more time to mount an effective campaign; that if she had had more time, she would have won. Why not blame Harris for an insufficiently compelling campaign?

Why look back to Biden at all when there’s so much that needs to be seen right now — so much that’s so devastatingly, frighteningly dangerous to all of us? When the fate of American democracy is hanging by such a thin thread?

(By the way, Joe, my wishes to you for a speedy recovery.)>

Trump: “Wow, no, I just heard. You’re just telling me that for the first time. Where did this take place?”>

I have met doors with a higher IQ than this fellow.

So have I.

<....But I wish you a fine weekend in good old Vermont !>

perv is still out in left field. Al keeps (uselessly) adding to his posting totals and then cries when called out for such ineptness, as if he is immune to correction of his embarrassing habit of yammering.>

You have no, that is to say zero, right to sit in judgement of anyone, <fredwuckfad>.

In your self-appointed role of Moe Rawn, you are an inutile piece of dross--on the best day of your life.

That a problem?

Choke on it!!

<U.S. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is under fire this weekend after proclaiming that there is an "insurrection" occurring with California protests.

After it was reported on social media that, "Protesters have surrounded the federal detention center in Los Angeles. California isn’t backing down, this is a full-blown standoff with the feds," Miller sought to define what is happening.

"An insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States," Miller wrote.

Podcaster Brian Allen responded, saying, "Stephen Miller is now calling the anti-ICE uprising in Los Angeles 'an insurrection against U.S. sovereignty.' Let’s be clear: over 800 protesters cornered federal agents in a garage, breached a government building, and caused widespread damage."

"This isn’t just chaos, it’s a full-blown standoff. Miller is demanding National Guard deployment and federal arrests. The stakes just got raised," Allen added. "Stephen Miller; the guy who architected family separation, is now crying 'insurrection' because Californians dared to protest ICE raids. You don’t get to weaponize the government, then act shocked when the people fight back. California isn’t backing down."

Internet personality Leah McElrath also chimed in:

"To give people an idea of where the Trump administration is wanting to take things, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is calling the anti-ICE protests in large cities in blue states 'an insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States.'"

Self-described "political junkie" Richard Angwin told his hundreds of thousands of followers:

"Calling peaceful protest an 'insurrection' disrespects our democracy. Protesting unjust policies is a constitutional right, not sedition. Miller's rhetoric endangers civil liberties and distorts the meaning of real threats."

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol echoed Miller's language, resulting in similar feedback.

"Let this be clear: Anyone who assaults or impedes a federal law enforcement officer or agent in the performance of their duties will be arrested and swiftly prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Attack a cop, and life long consequences will follow!" CBP wrote.

To that, speech writer Mark Salter replied, "Unless you’re breaking into the Capitol and trying to hang the VP.">

Whaddaya think, <fredthebore>? This worse than J6, when your heroine Ashli Babbitt got what she had coming for trying to break into the Capitol to harm lawmakers, or worse? You and your kind are beyond f***ing stupid.

Just a reminder: <I> control content here, so piss up a rope!