<Every day, so many of us watch the actions of ICE agents in Minnesota and think, “That cannot be legal.” As content creators and news outlets break down events in real time, we grapple with the reality that it is far more complicated than that. It would be comforting to believe these agents are simply rogue actors, breaking the law in plain sight and daring courts and communities to stop them. What is happening here is more insidious.

Federal immigration agents are not abandoning the law. They are hollowing it out. They are stretching it, finessing it, and exploiting its gray areas to terrorize communities while maintaining the appearance of legality. Minnesota has become the testing ground. This enforcement operation has gone on longer than any previous surge and involves more federal agents than we have seen before. That is not an accident. It has allowed ICE to experiment with tactics that sit just inside the lines of the law while pushing those lines as far as they will go.

Take administrative warrants. Unlike judicial warrants, which are signed by a judge, administrative warrants are signed internally by ICE itself. For decades, courts have been clear that these documents do not authorize agents to enter private homes without consent. That principle is foundational to the Fourth Amendment. Yet under a new internal DHS memo, ICE agents have been instructed to treat these warrants as sufficient to enter homes after knocking and announcing, and to use force if refused entry.

When a federal judge in Minnesota ruled that one such forced entry violated the Constitution and ordered the individual’s release, ICE did not retreat. The man was detained again at a later check in. The message was unmistakable. Even when courts push back, enforcement continues. Once again, Minnesotans are confronted with images of ICE agents breaking down doors and pointing guns at people who reportedly have legal status, active asylum cases, and no history of violent crime, the very justification offered for these tactics.

The same pattern has played out in the streets. A federal judge attempted to curb ICE’s use of force against peaceful protesters and bystanders. The administration appealed. An appeals court paused those protections while the case proceeds. During that pause, agents resumed tactics many Minnesotans had hoped were no longer permitted.

This is how the law gets hollowed out. Not through open defiance, but through technical compliance paired with practical defiance. Court orders are followed narrowly, appealed immediately, and rendered toothless by delay. Rights still exist on paper, but they no longer reliably constrain power in practice.

Minnesotans recognized this early. Communities have organized protests, strikes, court watches, and mutual aid. Neighbors have shown up for one another in the streets and at front doors. Federal authorities underestimated this response. But they are also leaving behind something else. A blueprint.

If administrative warrants can be used this way here, they can be used this way anywhere. If temporary court protections can be neutralized through appeals, that tactic can be replicated. Minnesota is not just experiencing enforcement. It is being used to refine it.

What we are witnessing is not chaos. It is a deliberate strategy. And understanding that distinction matters, because you cannot fight what you refuse to name.>

<Even though it's only February, President Donald Trump's attempts to gum up the works ahead of this fall's midterm elections are virtually guaranteed to fail.

That's according to MS NOW's Ryan Teague Beckwith, who wrote in a Thursday essay that all of Trump's efforts to change the way the 2026 midterms will be conducted will likely all be for naught for one simple reason: He's too late. Beckwith wrote that even with nine months to go before Americans head to the polls, all of the preparations for the voting process are already being handled behind the scenes, meaning any sudden changes from the federal government are likely to be shot down in court.

"Right now, in local elections offices from Seattle to Miami and everywhere in between, election administrators are busy checking thousands of signatures submitted by candidates to get on the ballot, putting the finishing touches on training manuals for election judges and poll workers and sending out postcards to verify addresses of voters who haven’t cast a ballot recently," Beckwith wrote.

"They’ve already started recruiting the part-time staffers and volunteers who will help them run the election," he continued. "In fact, the national “Help America Vote Day” recruiting drive already happened in late January."

The MS NOW columnist explained that one common rule with elections is abiding by the "even-numbered year rule," in which no changes to elections can be made in a year when Americans are voting in a major election. He wrote that if Trump and Republicans hoped to make major changes to the voting process, they should have done so before December 31, 2025. Likewise, any attempt to pass election-related laws in time for the 2028 presidential election should happen before the end of 2027.

"Judges have long followed a similar principle when deciding cases that would change election rules too close to an election, following the logic that it is better to move forward with an imperfect system than try to change it drastically at the eleventh hour," he wrote.

Republicans have recently rolled out legislation to impose severe new restrictions on voting, and two GOP lawmakers entertained the idea of a "standing filibuster" in an attempt to include the controversial SAVE Act — which would require voters prove their citizenship before casting a ballot — during the recent government funding negotiations. The Trump administration's FBI is also organizing a conference call with state election officials and federal agencies, which Nevada's secretary of state described as "beyond crazy." Beckwith said these and other attempts to impose last-minute changes to elections are still little more than bluster giving their timing.

"With these proposals to dramatically change how Americans vote just months before a major election, Trump and congressional Republicans would all but guarantee chaos at polling places around the country," he wrote. "They would disenfranchise potentially millions of voters and create a massive headache for candidates, state parties, elections officials and the judges called in to clean up the mess. And that would undermine public confidence in elections."

"America’s voting laws aren’t perfect, and we can always have a debate over how to fix them," he added. "But in terms of this November’s elections, that time has passed.">

Will these obstacles truly spell defeat for GOP monkeying about? We can only hope.

<If American democracy survives the ravages of Trump’s presidency, those who follow in its wake will face the daunting task not just of repairing the immediate damage, but also shoring up the structural weaknesses in the American system to prevent similar abuses in the future.

The challenge seems almost too monumental to contemplate, especially given that partisan trench warfare makes large structural changes to the system difficult. That said, the president’s abuse of the pardon power may be one issue that is both so obviously in need of reform and potentially prone to abuse by all future presidents, that reform should be achievable across party lines.

To date, Donald Trump has issued an astonishing number of pardons across his first and second terms, often without the traditional consultation or advice from the Justice Department and the FBI. Trump’s pardons have included all of the January 6th rioters, as well as numerous individuals convicted of public corruption. Often these pardons appear to have been a product of direct bribes to the president’s election campaigns himself; in other cases, the recipients were donors or friends of donors; and, of course, many of them had committed crimes in direct support of Trump’s attempts to overthrow democracy itself. Just last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that in 2025, an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates purchased nearly half of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company. Soon after, the Emirati government secured an agreement with the Trump administration for the export of hundreds of thousands of advanced chips which had previously been withheld for national security reasons.

Part of what has rendered the United States so vulnerable to Trump’s systemic assault is that much of the stability of American governance has been predicated as much on norms as on legal rules. Many of those norms must be codified into law.

But America’s democratic backsliding in the Trump era is also a product of the Executive Branch’s direct flouting of the law. The Trump Administration has repeatedly violated laws and direct judicial orders (sometimes to be rescued later by the Supreme Court, sometimes not) without penalty or consequence. This is because 1) the framers of the Constitution did not anticipate that a man of such ill character as Trump would gain office (the Electoral College was supposed to prevent such a thing), but also 2) they expected that a lawless Executive would be countered by a Legislative Branch that jealously guarded its power as a coequal branch.

One consequence of the devolution of the conservative movement into a cult of personality around Donald Trump is that almost no Republicans remain who dare to challenge the president. The framers expected that a president who so avariciously abused the pardon power would be impeached. But Republicans in Congress refuse to fulfill their constitutional role.

Meanwhile, the pardon power in the hands of a ruthlessly criminal president is the skeleton key to a dictatorship. So long as his allies in Congress refuse to impeach, a criminal president could repeatedly, openly and intentionally violate the law and order his accomplices to do likewise, with promises of infinite pardons to follow. Only the threat of state-level prosecutions might dissuade his minions, but many of the worst crimes Executive Branch officials can commit are covered more by federal law than state law. The pardon power, combined with the Supreme Court’s ruling that a president has immunity for all “official acts” conducted while in office, functionally allows a president to rule as a tyrant.

So the power itself must be curtailed.

Because the pardon power is found in the Constitution itself, revising it would require a Constitutional amendment. Those are typically waived off as impossibly difficult lifts, given that they require two-thirds of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of states.

But this is one case where bipartisan outrage might render the seemingly impossible possible. President Biden’s pre-emptive pardons of his immediate family were somewhat understandable given Trump’s promise to abuse the Justice Department for political vendettas, but they were also clearly outside of the normative expectations for presidential pardons. The way to address potential abuse of the Justice Department by incoming president is not to grant plenary pardon power to the current president to protect their inner circle....>

<....If Trump somehow leaves office in a peaceful transition of power, he will almost certainly go out the door pardoning anyone and everyone close to him. He might even attempt a categorical mass pardon for every Executive Branch employee during his term, including and especially those in ICE, Border Patrol and Homeland Security. This is particularly salient right now as ICE and Border Patrol commit increasingly shocking abuses in Minnesota, knowing that they will likely receive federal executive pardons and that state governments are unlikely to risk open confrontation with the federal government by arresting federal officers for state crimes. Meanwhile, if a Democratic candidate succeeds him as president, Republicans will certainly fear what the next holder of the Oval Office might do with their pardon power. Democrats would be outraged over Trump’s abuse of the power. Republicans would want to constrain the next Democratic president.

That combination of incentives could lead to a bipartisan agreement to mandate structural reform.

Progressives will, of course, argue that the pardon power is essential to rectify abuses of the justice system in egregious cases. This is true and an unfortunate side effect. That said, few other democracies give their chief executive such unlimited authority to grant pardons.

Many suggestions have been made as to precisely how to reform the pardon power. Washington Monthly’s own Garrett Epps recently reviewed Saikrishna Prakash’s book The Presidential Pardon, which listed a few: pardons could be overridden by Congressional veto; a president could be barred from signing any pardons between Election Day and Inauguration Day; some offenses might be might unpardonable; family members could be barred from pardons, and so on. Sadly, few of these provisions seem likely to prevent Trump from hypothetically pardoning all federal officials in his entire administration throughout the Pentagon, ICE and Border Patrol for any and all actions. It is likely that a stricter limit would be required to prevent a de facto unaccountable dictatorship.

Representative Steve Cohen (TN-09) has introduced a weightier measure that would bar the president from pardoning themselves, any family member, any member of the president’s campaign or administration, anyone who benefited the president personally for pecuniary or corrupt reasons, and anyone carrying out crimes ordered by the president. That seems to be a more effective approach to prevent the worst possible abuses of the pardon power.

But regardless of the details of the solution, it seems clear by now that in order to prevent future Trump-like attacks on constitutional democracy, the Constitution will need to be reformed to limit the power of the Executive Branch—including and especially the pardon power. It’s not too soon to begin building momentum for ratification in Congress and the states to make it happen.>

<As 2025 came to a close, mainstream liberal and centrist commentators were boldly declaring, often with visible relief, that Donald Trump’s authoritarian power grab had exhausted itself. The tide, they insisted, had finally turned in favor of American democracy and its resilient institutions.

That relief was premature. One month into 2026, Trump is striking back with the strength of a tsunami. The authoritarian tide is rising again — faster than before.

It began in earnest on Jan. 3 when the U.S. military attacked Venezuela and abducted President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. After bringing the couple to New York, where they have been indicted on drug trafficking and weapons charges and are awaiting trial in a detention center in Brooklyn, Trump and members of his administration began threatening other countries, including Colombia, Cuba and even Mexico. Then the president once again became fixated on Greenland and threatened to take it by force. (He has since appeared to back away from his military threats.)

Trump’s lawlessness abroad reflects a profound contempt for the rule of law and democratic institutions at home. Despite Wednesday’s announcement that around 700 federal immigration officers would be withdrawn from Minneapolis and St. Paul, the Twin Cities remain effectively under occupation by thousands of agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol in an effort to enforce the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.

Vice signaling explains Trump’s enduring appeal

In a development largely ignored by the mainstream media, Defense Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has granted the Department of Homeland Security additional space for hundreds of vehicles and personnel at Fort Snelling, which is located next to the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. The move suggests that the Battle for Minneapolis is far from over.

Meanwhile, DHS is building dozens of detention centers around the country, with a combined capacity of approximately 80,000 people.

On Jan. 28, the FBI raided Fulton County’s election office ostensibly to “prove” the Big Lie conspiracy that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen from Trump. Many legal scholars suspect the action is part of the president’s plan to nationalize elections ahead of the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election. On Tuesday’s episode of “War Room,” MAGA influencer and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon said the quiet part out loud: “We‘re gonna have ICE surround the polls… We’ll never again allow an election to be stolen.”

The following day, journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were arrested and charged with violating federal law while covering an anti-ICE protest at St. Paul Church where a pastor served as a leader in a local ICE field office. In fact, they were exercising their First Amendment rights by reporting on the protest — a fact the indictments have attempted to criminalize..

Perhaps in an effort to soothe their own fears, too many observers in the news media are fixated on the legality and viability of the charges that have been brought against Lemon and Fort instead of what is undoubtedly the real goal: chilling dissent and silencing the opposition.

The Human Rights Campaign noted another important dimension of the case. Lemon and Fort are both Black, and Lemon is queer, and both work to “amplify perspectives too often excluded from mainstream discourse.” HRC President Kelley Robinson said, “This moment should serve as a wake-up call to every American who cares about civil liberties: when journalists can be detained for covering protests, none of us are safe.”

Trump’s tsunami is not unopposed. From the streets of Minneapolis to nationwide “No Kings” protests and strikes, resistance is growing. Congressional Democrats are trying to cut off funding for ICE and impose restrictions on its conduct. Public opinion has turned sharply against Trump, and increasing numbers of Americans are saying “no more.”

Democrats continue to defeat Republican incumbents in off-year and special elections. Most recently, in Saturday’s special election in North Texas’s 9th District, Democratic candidate Taylor Rehmet defeated Leigh Wambsganss by 14 points. A blue wave in the November midterms appears increasingly likely — assuming elections remain reasonably free and fair....>

<....With the notable exception of the Supreme Court, federal and state courts remain among the few institutions actively attempting to fulfill their constitutional duties. On Saturday, a federal judge ordered the release of a five-year-old child and his father from federal immigration custody. Images of the child, Liam Conejo Ramos, wearing a Spider-Man backpack as he was taken by deportation officers in Minneapolis last month, sparked national outrage.

In his scathing opinion ordering Ramos’ release, Judge Fred Biery of the Federal District Court for the Western District of Texas blasted the Trump administration while invoking the image of the rising authoritarian tide, equating the courts’ increasingly Herculean efforts to slow it as “a judicial finger in the dam.”

Like other autocrats and aspiring dictators, Trump’s escalating behavior reflects not absolute strength and power but a deep-seated fear that he may instead lose it. This makes the president and the MAGA movement all more dangerous.

Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a noted expert on authoritarianism, explained that he “appears to be testing the depths of the hole into which he can throw himself — and drag America with him… I have seen this brand of strongman megalomania and the adverse effects it can ultimately have on leaders and their governments.”

Like other authoritarian projects, Trumpism is a force not for democratic renewal, but for destruction. As Ben-Ghiat pointed out, “Autocratic backfire can end in a leader’s ouster and a nation’s collective ruin, as it did in Fascist Italy; in a leader clinging to power over a weakened state, as is happening with Putin’s Russia; or in popular resistance and mass mobilizations that help restore democracy in the end — which could yet be the fate of the United States.”

Behind all the recent wish-casting among commentators and the American people is a profound positivity and normalcy bias. Matters are very dire and they desperately want them to get better. Compounding these challenges, as a people, Americans have very short memories — and even less patience.

Trump, his MAGA Republicans and their allies control every organ of state power, and they will continue to use it to their own corrupt ends.

In most serious political fights or other types of battle, the other side usually gets a say in the outcome. Pro-democracy Americans are being reminded of that reality as their hopes for a cowed Trump and an easy victory dissolve.>

<Earlier this month, President Donald Trump floated the idea of canceling the 2026 midterm elections, drawing widespread attention and concern even as White House officials later dismissed the remarks as facetious.

But election experts consistently agree that Trump has neither the legal authority nor the practical ability to cancel elections. And state and local election officials consistently say they will carry out the elections they’re legally required to run.

The election system is under real strain, and bad-faith efforts to undermine it are serious. But after talking with local election officials, lawyers, and administrators across the country, I don’t see evidence that upcoming elections are at realistic risk of not happening at all. Elections happen because thousands of local officials follow state and local law that mandates them — and history shows they’ve done so before, even under immense pressure. The greater danger isn’t no election, but one that’s chaotic, unfairly challenged, or deliberately cast as illegitimate after the fact.

Stephen Richer, the Republican former recorder in Maricopa County, Arizona, said the idea that a president could simply halt or meaningfully cancel an election misunderstands how elections function on the ground. The system, he said, is “made up of so many disparate actors” — thousands of local officials, courts, vendors, and administrators operating under different authorities and timelines. Even if there were a coordinated attempt to get these people not to go through with the election, “you’ve got to figure at least half of those people aren’t big fans of the president, and many of the rest are on autopilot regardless of what they think of the president.”

Some election processes are fixed by law and timing. Military and overseas ballots, for example, must be sent on a specific schedule — a deadline Richer described as “an immutable deadline, like gravity.” Any attempt to disrupt that selectively would quickly become obvious. “How absurd would it be that one county got ballots and the next one didn’t?” he said, predicting “a gazillion lawsuits” and court orders compelling officials to move forward.

Richer also pointed to the scale of U.S. election administration: more than 9,000 jurisdictions and more than 90,000 polling locations nationwide. “You are not going around and shutting those down,” he said. He noted that even voter-intimidation efforts would face immediate legal challenges and injunctions, while plenty of voters would have cast ballots via other means (e.g., early or mail voting) anyway.

That assessment is echoed by David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, who speaks regularly with local election officials. (When we spoke, he was driving to a conference for Colorado election officials — and had just come from a conference of 300 officials in Texas.) Becker said nearly 1,500 local officials across 47 states have participated in his monthly informational sessions, which he’s held since Trump put out his executive order last March, and none of them have suggested canceling the election or violating state law.

“Every single one of them is committed to putting on the best election they possibly can,” Becker said. Even under pressure, officials aren’t signaling they’ll stop. “They are getting it done,” he said, adding that if support doesn’t come from the state, “they will band together and do it themselves.”

But state election officials aren’t backing down, either. Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, says elections will proceed as planned regardless of what Trump might say. The academics and media stars gaining popularity and attention for saying otherwise are being “disingenuous” and “dangerous,” he said....>

<....Courts have also played a critical role when local officials have threatened to overstep their authority. In 2020, even light suggestions that Trump might delay the election to accommodate COVID were met with outrage. After the 2020 election, judges made clear that certification is not discretionary and ordered officials to follow election law and move the process forward, even amid intense political pressure.

Those same state and local laws remain in place today. Courts and election offices are also better positioned than they were four years ago, with legal strategies drafted, training in place, and judges already familiar with these arguments. Across the country, clerks and secretaries of state describe updating contingency plans, consulting attorneys, and stress-testing procedures much as they would for a natural disaster or cyberattack.

If you’re worried about what lies ahead, election officials say there are meaningful ways to respond — and that spreading fear isn’t one of them. Richer said the bigger danger now is renewed distrust of election results. That distrust makes it easier for those in power to make bad-faith attempts to twist the math after votes are cast.

His advice is straightforward: “Continue being a repository for facts and truth about election administration, and kindly and sensitively inject those into conversations that you are a part of if you hear something you know to be wrong.” He added, “Don’t be dismissive. It never works.” And, he said, “you are responsible for the false information you spread.”

Aguilar said that academic voices predicting doom “don’t understand the nuances” of state and local law and that voters should be skeptical of them. Those who want better information should go to their local and state elections offices.

There’s also a risk that continually framing elections as likely not to happen — or as already lost — could have the opposite of the intended effect, discouraging participation rather than protecting democracy. If you’re concerned about what might happen in your county, there are concrete ways to help now: sign up to be a poll worker, volunteer to help register voters, offer your business or community space as a polling location, or donate to organizations preparing to defend election laws and certification in court.

Elections don’t happen just because people assume they will. They happen because people — especially at the local level — show up and do the work.>

<Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is having an ‘I told you so’ moment when it comes to President Trump’s tariffs.

At November’s blockbuster arguments, Gorsuch raised alarm about what he called a “one-way ratchet” of authority from Congress to the president if Trump wins a case that challenges his use of emergency powers to impose duties on a host of countries.

“It’s going to be veto-proof,” Gorsuch warned of Trump’s declared emergencies.

“What president’s ever going to give that power back? A pretty rare president. So how should that inform our view?”

Gorsuch’s concern is now in the limelight as the justices prepare to return to the bench to issue opinions on three separate days between now and next Wednesday.

Last week, Trump saw one of the first major pushbacks from Congress on the matter, when six House Republicans joined Democrats in voting 219-211 to repeal Trump’s Canada tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). That measure now heads to the Senate, where four Republicans joined Democrats last year on a similar effort. The new vote only needs a simple majority.

But even if it gets to Trump’s desk, the revolt is largely symbolic. The party crossover falls far short of the two-thirds majority needed in both the House and Senate to override an expected veto.

Gorsuch saw it coming — and he wasn’t the only Trump-nominated justice to read the tea leaves back at November’s arguments.

“Let’s say that we adopt your interpretation of the statute,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett told the government. “If Congress said, ‘whoa, we don’t like that, that gives a president too much authority under IEEPA,’ it’s going to have a very hard time pulling the tariff power out of IEEPA, correct?”

Congress can amend IEEPA at any time to make clear whether the 1977 law does, or does not, authorize Trump’s tariffs. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has expressed no appetite for doing so, leaving the nine justices to parse the nearly half-century-old phrasing that has left global financial markets in suspense for months.

“I think the sentiment is that we allow a little bit more runway for this to be worked out between the executive branch and the judicial branch,” Johnson said last week.

No one outside the court knows if the tariffs’ opinion is being sent to the printers right now, or if there’s still time for tweaks. When it drops, watch to see if any of the justices take note of the recent developments on Capitol Hill.

The Trump administration hopes to convince the justices that Congress can, indeed, claw back the president. Solicitor General D. John Sauer would like everyone to remember that Congress clubbed together the votes to terminate the massive COVID-19 emergency just a few years ago.

“What the statute reflects is there’s going to be the ability for a sort of political consensus against a declared emergency. Nevertheless, that’s a political discipline,” Sauer said during the tariff arguments.

Speculation is still running rampant about when the Supreme Court will drop the highly anticipated decision. Some 105 days have now passed since oral arguments, longer than other recent expedited cases.

When asked about the wait during her book promo on “CBS Mornings” last week, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson didn’t think much of it. There are “lots of nuanced legal issues” and “it takes a while to write,” she said.

“The court is going through its process of deliberation, and the American people expect for us to be thorough and clear in our determinations and sometimes that takes time,” Jackson said.

The fact the junior liberal justice said anything at all was notable, as Supreme Court justices typically steer clear of talking about pending cases. Full stop.

We’ve got our ears perked up. As the justices return to the bench, the court has signaled it will hand down opinions on Friday, Tuesday and next Wednesday.

Bettors on prediction markets think it could be coming. After the court scheduled the opinion days, the odds of the tariff decision landing this month jumped from 40 percent to more than 70 percent on Kalshi, a popular prediction market.

Sandwiched between two of the opinion day drops is the State of the Union, scheduled for Tuesday evening.

Chief Justice John Roberts and several of the other justices typically attend (here’s the list of who has shown up each year). It’s a rare face-to-face moment between the justices and the president, with every move scrutinized.

<President Donald Trump is pushing Congress to end mail voting as Americans have come to know it. So far, Republican lawmakers aren’t heeding his calls.

Trump has long railed against the expansion of vote-by-mail, arguing despite scant evidence that it is rife with fraud and suggesting it was responsible in part for his 2020 election loss. Since retaking office, he has repeatedly called for action — most recently Monday night to reporters on Air Force One.

“Why would you want mail-in ballots if you know it’s corrupt?” Trump said. “It’s a corrupt system.”

But other Republicans don’t see it that way — many of their own voters have voted by mail consistently for decades. So far, the type of blanket ban on mail voting Trump wants has not gained traction on Capitol Hill as GOP lawmakers counsel for a more targeted approach.

“I support the use of mail-in voting,” said Rep. Mike Lawler, a New York Republican facing a tight reelection contest. “The idea that some states just mail out ballots without any requests is absurd, but the use of mail-in balloting, I do not have an objection.”

A sweeping elections bill the House passed last week, the SAVE America Act, included strict proof-of-citizenship requirements for voter registration and new photo-ID rules for casting ballots.

But it did not address voting by mail — even though Trump publicly called for a crackdown in a Truth Social post just three days before the vote: “NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS (EXCEPT FOR ILLNESS, DISABILITY, MILITARY, OR TRAVEL!)”

Behind the scenes, the White House pushed to include language in the bill that would prohibit mail-in voting, according to three people granted anonymity to discuss the issue. But that risked losing support from some Republicans and endangering the bill’s ability to pass the narrowly divided House, and it was ultimately left out.

A White House website touting the bill still lists “No Mail-in Ballots” as one of its features.

Asked about the discrepancy, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement that Trump “has repeatedly urged Congress to pass the SAVE Act and other legislative proposals that would establish a uniform standard of photo ID for voting, prohibit no-excuse mail-in voting, and end the practice of ballot harvesting to ensure the safety and security of our elections.”

Several House Republicans said in interviews over the past week they sympathized with Trump’s push to crack down on mailed ballots, but many couched their words carefully. A number hail from states like Florida that have a long history of expansive mail voting and little evidence that the practice has been abused.

Even as the president pushed to curtail mailed ballots, the RNC and state Republican parties worked to take advantage of the practice during the 2024 campaign to increase voter turnout — and they are planning to do much the same in 2026.

Instead, many congressional Republicans insist that Trump is really targeting states like California, Oregon and Utah that conduct their elections almost entirely by mail. Others emphasize the need for exceptions, as Trump has acknowledged, for cases of illness, military service and other reasons they view as legitimate, as well as the other election changes Trump is backing.

“We have to be very cautious about mail-in-ballot voting,” Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) said in an interview. “But I think that if we get the registration process correct, then that’ll fix a lot of this.”

GOP Rep. Byron Donalds, who is running for governor in Florida, said his state’s laws should serve as a model for the country. Florida voters have to request a mail-in ballot and include identification. But there is no limitation on who can request a mail ballot along the lines of what Trump is proposing.

“In Florida, we treat ballots like they’re evidence in a trial,” Donalds said. “Other states need to follow that. … I think that’s what the White House is referencing. You just can’t have ballots out there in the ether.”...>

<....Another elections bill moving through the House, the Make Elections Great Again Act, does include provisions dealing with mail voting — including language aimed at preventing “ballot harvesting” where third parties collect ballots on voters’ behalf. It would also ban “universal” vote-by-mail where ballots are sent to all registered voters — but would not narrow who could request a mailed ballot.

That policy appears to be more in keeping with what most GOP lawmakers envision for an elections overhaul — and they insist that is what Trump in fact supports.

“If you’re sick and you can’t get to the polling [place], he wants you to have a ballot. If you’re a military member, he wants you to have a ballot,” Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) said of the president. “Who he doesn’t want to have a ballot is the illegal alien that registered or even a lawful alien who got a driver’s license to be registered to vote and get a mail-in ballot.”

The MEGA Act is sponsored by House Administration Committee Chair Bryan Steil (R-Wis.) and was the subject of a recent hearing. But it has not yet moved through the panel or been scheduled for the House floor.

The SAVE America Act also appears likely to stall in the Senate, despite a conservative effort to utilize a so-called talking filibuster to skirt Democratic opposition there.

Trump appears to be recognizing the obstacles to his elections agenda on Capitol Hill.

In a Friday Truth Social post, he suggested he would take executive action to implement “Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not,” while also mentioning “No Mail-In Ballots, with exceptions for Military, Disability, Illness, or Travel.”

But to Republicans like Lawler, who voted for the SAVE America Act and is facing a tough reelection fight this year, the GOP’s efforts going forward would be best spent making sure “people get out and vote.”

“If they vote by mail, if they vote early, if they vote on Election Day, the objective is to get them out and vote,” he said.>

<n the span of months, one of America’s most storied broadcast institutions has managed to alienate its most recognizable late-night host and lose one of its most respected journalists, all while inviting scrutiny over whether it is voluntarily bending the knee to political pressure from the Trump administration. The optics are catastrophic.

CBS looks to have made a strategic blunder when it announced plans last year to cancel “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” but decided to keep host Stephen Colbert on air until May 2026. The decision created a lame-duck host with a nightly platform and a growing sense of grievance. On Monday, Colbert told his studio audience that CBS lawyers had called his show “in no uncertain terms” to block an interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico. According to Colbert, the network didn’t just want to censor the content — it wanted to censor the censorship itself, informing him that he couldn’t even mention that he’d been prohibited from airing it.

“Because my network clearly doesn’t want us to talk about this,” he told his audience, “let’s talk about this.” He ultimately posted the interview to YouTube, where it has since drawn more than 5.2 million views — far more than it ever would have attracted as a routine late-night segment. (CBS said it had “not prohibited” Talarico’s interview from running but admitted it had “provided legal guidance” and given Colbert’s team “options for how the equal time for other candidates could be fulfilled.”)

CBS handed the shovel to the very man they were trying to bury, and he dug himself out. Colbert knows he has nothing to lose now.

It’s amazing how long we’ve known about the Streisand effect, the phenomenon where an attempt to censor or suppress information ends up drawing more attention to it, yet institutions still can’t resist stepping on the rake. CBS handed the shovel to the very man they were trying to bury, and he dug himself out. Colbert knows he has nothing to lose now. It’s worth noting that his public criticism of CBS parent company Paramount Skydance’s $16 million to settle Donald Trump’s lawsuit over a 2024 “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris — a lawsuit that legal scholars widely regarded as meritless — is widely believed to be the real reason CBS canceled “The Late Show.”

The pretext CBS used to object to Colbert’s interview with Talarico originated from a January notice from the Federal Communications Commission issued by the agency’s chairman, Brendan Carr, a Trump ally who has spent his tenure weaponizing regulatory ambiguity to intimidate broadcasters. The notice warned that late-night and daytime talk shows could no longer assume they qualify for the “bona fide news exemption” from the equal time rule, a protection that has been in place since Jay Leno’s producers won it in 1996. Carr hasn’t formally repealed the exemption. He has merely threatened to — and watched as networks trip over themselves to comply with a rule that doesn’t yet exist. Colbert put it plainly on air: CBS was “unilaterally enforcing” guidance that had not been made law. No one forced their hand; they just folded.

The FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner, Anna Gomez, also called out both the network and the Trump administration. Gomez wrote on X that CBS’s decision is “yet another troubling example of corporate capitulation in the face of this Administration’s broader campaign to censor and control speech” and made clear that “the FCC has no lawful authority to pressure broadcasters for political purposes or to create a climate that chills free expression.”

Layered on top of all of this is the arrival of Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Weiss built her brand at The Free Press as a contrarian voice fluent in the grievances of people who believe mainstream media has become too liberal. She was installed by David Ellison after his acquisition of Paramount and almost immediately began leaving her mark with shifts in content and reports of chaotic decision-making behind the scenes.....>

<....In January, Weiss announced 19 new paid contributors to CBS News with evident excitement, describing them as experts who would appear across the network’s broadcasts and digital platforms. Among them was Dr. Peter Attia, a wellness influencer and longevity podcaster with a large online following and a heterodox approach to medicine that has made him popular in right-leaning media. Three days after Weiss announced Attia’s hire, the Department of Justice released a new trove of the Jeffrey Epstein files — in which Attia’s name appeared more than 1,700 times. The emails were not ambiguous. In a June 2015 message, the wellness influencer wrote to Epstein that the worst part about being his friend was that “the life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul.” In another exchange from 2016, Attia made a crude sexual joke directed at the convicted sex offender. The files also revealed that Attia had, on at least one occasion, chosen to spend time with Epstein rather than visit his infant son, who had been hospitalized after entering cardiac arrest.

What followed inside CBS News was, according to multiple reports, a battle. Weiss refused to fire Attia because she saw it as “giving in to the ‘mob,'” while senior Paramount executives took the position that a man with hundreds of documented email exchanges with an accused child sex trafficker could not function as a credible expert contributor on a broadcast network. The situation reportedly required escalation to Ellison himself to resolve. (Notably, Weiss reports directly to Ellison — not to the head of CBS News nor to the president of Paramount.) Weiss’ reported rationale — that Attia’s “contrarian voice” was too valuable to lose — reveals that in her editorial calculus, the network’s credibility with its audience is less important than her commitment to a particular brand of heterodoxy.

This comes after Weiss infamously delayed a “60 Minutes” segment at the last minute in December that documented Trump’s deportation of migrants to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador. She was also reported to have privately disparaged the show’s correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who reported the segment, to journalists in off-the-record briefings.

Early on, Weiss also expressed interest in wooing “60 Minutes” contributor Anderson Cooper away from his full-time role at CNN to anchor the “CBS Evening News,” before she settled on Tony Dokoupil. Cooper, in the end, chose to leave CBS entirely. According to reporting from Oliver Darcy’s Status newsletter, the editorial scrutiny Weiss applied to Cooper’s reporting — including a piece on the Trump administration’s differential treatment of South African refugees that had been in progress since last year — left his producer exasperated and the timeline for the segment unclear. As one insider put it, Cooper “wasn’t comfortable with the direction the show was taking under Bari, and is in a position where he doesn’t have to put up with it.”

Cooper’s reported judgment is a devastating verdict on the Weiss era from a nationally-known and widely-respected veteran correspondent, and comes one week after producer Alicia Hastey walked out of CBS News with a damning farewell note calling the newsroom atmosphere one of “fear and uncertainty.”

“Stories may instead be evaluated not just on their journalistic merit,” she wrote, “but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations — a dynamic that pressures producers and reporters to self-censor or avoid challenging narratives that might trigger backlash or unfavorable headlines.”

Cooper’s exit raises questions about the future of “60 Minutes.” Other veterans like Lesley Stahl and Scott Pelley have already spoken publicly about concerns over the state of CBS News and its changing newsroom standards. Longtime “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens resigned months earlier, making it clear that he believed the program’s editorial independence was under strain. The institution is not just losing talent; it is losing the credibility built over decades that no roster of podcasters can replace.

What we are watching is the systematic dismantling of institutional independence in real time at one of the most historically significant news and entertainment corporations in America. Stephen Colbert is leaving in May. Anderson Cooper is already gone. What CBS should be asking itself is not how to manage the departure of the people who made it matter, but whether anyone left in the building still believes the mission is worth defending.>

<TRICIA MCLAUGHLIN, the top Department of Homeland Security spokesperson who over the past year became a prominent apologist for the Trump administration’s program of mass deportation, is leaving her post. After the news broke on Tuesday morning, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem bid McLaughlin farewell on X and expressed gratitude for her “exceptional dedication, tenacity, and professionalism.”

Tenacious is a good word for McLaughlin, who, Politico reports, often made as many as five media appearances per day to defend the administration’s policies. Over the course of these many media hits, and across countless tweets quoted in news reports—often following horrifying tragedies perpetrated by DHS agents—McLaughlin earned a reputation for extraordinary, shameless lying.

To mark the occasion of her departure, here are five of the most heinous lies McLaughlin told during her tenure at DHS.

Lie #1: Alex Pretti wanted to “massacre law enforcement” when federal agents killed him.

DHS’s first statement on the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, widely quoted in the media, reportedly came from McLaughlin; it said Pretti “approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun.” The statement was reposted to the DHS account on X along with a photo of the firearm. Officers tried to disarm Pretti, the statement said, and when he “violently resisted,” one of them “fired defensive shots.” “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” the statement said.

Video taken from numerous angles clearly and quickly disproved most of what the statement either alleged or insinuated about the shooting: Pretti, a lawful gun owner, never brandished his weapon at officers prior to being violently thrown to the ground, disarmed, and shot to death by two agents, since identified as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez.

Yet in press conferences and public statements following the tragedy, numerous officials, including Secretary Noem and Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Greg Bovinio, repeated verbatim the statement’s claim that Pretti intended to inflict “maximum damage” on officers. Noem added that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist,” a characterization Stephen Miller also affirmed. Miller then put his own further spin on things, describing Pretti as a “would-be assassin,” an assertion that Trump disputed and Miller later walked back, claiming he had based it on bad information from CBP agents at the scene.

Although McLaughlin helped build this false and slanderous narrative that even hardliners like Miller have abandoned, she herself has refused to renounce her office’s extreme—and baseless—claims about Pretti.

Lie #2: Renee Good committed an act of “domestic terrorism.”

Shortly after the killing of Renee Good, McLaughlin issued a statement from her personal X account: “ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.”

As in the statement that would follow Pretti’s killing, McLaughlin alluded to a federal agent who, “fearing for his life [and] the lives of his fellow law enforcement . . . fired defensive shots” at the hostile driver. The driver was killed, and although multiple “ICE officers . . . were hurt,” they were fortunately “expected to make full recoveries.” As in Pretti’s case, video taken by bystanders from a variety of angles would clearly show that McLaughlin’s account of the situation was wrong. But that didn’t stop the “domestic terrorism” narrative from rapidly spreading across the MAGAverse before many of its proponents would have even seen any of the video disproving it.

In the immediate aftermath of Good’s killing, The Bulwark’s national political reporter Andrew Egger offered a clarifying assessment of McLaughlin’s comms strategy: “By putting forward an alternate, fictional account of what happened in Minneapolis yesterday—and doing so before the footage from bystanders without preexisting social-media megaphones had a chance to pick up traction—McLaughlin gave the MAGA infotainment machine something important: a unified spin strategy, ready to be deployed at scale and at speed.”

And it worked. Eager to counterprogram, prominent MAGA influencers “uncritically parroted McLaughlin’s story to their enormous audiences,” Egger wrote....>

<....And just as in the case of the Pretti killing, McLaughlin refused to give up her lies. When CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked her about the administration’s repeated characterization of Renee Good as a domestic terrorist, calling it “outrageous,” McLaughlin doubled down, saying, “It was an act of domestic terrorism. In no way is that outrageous.”

Lie #3: “Children are not being zip-tied” during immigration enforcement raids.

In response to a prompt from Fox host Maria Bartiromo about an Illinois church’s nativity scene depicting baby Jesus zip-tied by ICE agents, McLaughlin claimed in December 2025 that “children are not being zip-tied. This is, again, another disgusting smear.”

However, during an FBI-led law enforcement operation in Idaho in October, in which over a hundred people were detained by ICE, a photo obtained by local news and passed along to the FBI reportedly showed a 14-year-old U.S. citizen in zip ties.

In response, McLaughlin gave the Idaho Capital Sun a statement in which she claimed that “ICE didn’t zip tie, restrain or arrest any children.”

Fast-forward to last week, when CBS reported that “children as young as 14” had been “zip-tied and questioned about their immigration status” during the Idaho raid in October. The 14-year-old U.S. citizen shared photos with reporters of bruising from the restraints on her wrists.

“ICE didn’t zip tie, restrain, or arrest any children,” McLaughlin repeated in a statement to CBS. “ICE does not zip tie or handcuff children. This is garbage rhetoric contributing to our officers facing a 1,300% increase in assaults against them and an 8,000% increase in death threats.”

It’s possible that McLaughlin is technically correct here: The Idaho operation was a collaborative affair between multiple federal and local agencies, so there is a chance that the men in masks and camo who rounded up the children and families that day were not from ICE, even though ICE made the arrests. But even if children were being zip-tied by FBI agents or local law enforcement officers or some other DHS personnel instead of ICE during this particular raid, it’s not as though they are being spared from the cruelty of the administration’s mass deportation efforts. Children like 5-year-old Liam Ramos have allegedly been used by DHS agents as bait to capture other family members.1 Of course, McLaughlin has denied that claim, too.

Lie #4: DHS is “focused on getting the worst of the worst out of this country.”

McLaughlin has said the administration’s mass-deportion effort is focused on getting the “worst of the worst out of this country”—rapists, murderers, terrorists, gang members, and so forth. If federal agents are targeting worksites, that’s just because those places are where they “find the worst of the worst.”

This core claim, that DHS is prioritizing removing violent criminal offenders, is blatantly false.

Of people booked into ICE custody since October 1, 2025, 73 percent had no criminal conviction, and only 8 percent had a violent or property criminal conviction, according to an analysis by the Cato Institute. As ICE’s own published detention numbers make clear, the mass deportations ramp-up has depended on arresting more and more people who have no criminal record.

Lie #5: “We’re making sure we’re using U.S. taxpayer dollars well.”

McLaughlin made this claim during an interview on Fox News about DHS painting the border wall black.

Trump asked that they do it. The going theory was apparently that in addition to mitigating rust issues, the new hue would make the wall hot to the touch, preventing people from climbing it. That makes a lot of sense—so long as you completely discount the existence of gloves, ladders, and the nighttime.

The black-paint boondoggle illustrates what sorts of purposes the administration is finding for our taxes. Responsible stewardship of the public purse, it is not. As ProPublica reported, DHS spent much of last year committing upwards of $200 million to a massive ad campaign, contracts for which were awarded outside of normal competitive bidding processes. Noem authorized the U.S. Coast Guard to spend $200 million of taxpayer money on a pair of luxury Gulfstream G700 private jets during last fall’s government shutdown.

If this is what responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars looks like, what would <irresponsible> stewardship entail?>

<A federal judge apparently had enough of the Trump administration's "frivolous arguments" and "indefinite detentions," so she sided with class action plaintiff noncitizens and repeatedly mocked the government in a lengthy order.

U.S. District Judge Sunshine Sykes, the first Native American federal judge in California after President Joe Biden appointed her to the bench in 2022, was abundantly clear from the start on Wednesday that the Trump administration's "extreme language" in press releases about deporting the "worst of the worst" is "an inaccurate description of most of those affected by DHS and ICE's operations."

Lazaro Maldonado Bautista's case is one of hundreds or more such examples, said Sykes of a man with "no criminal record" living and working in Los Angeles for "approximately four years" near U.S. citizen relatives but remaining in the country "without admission." Nonetheless, Bautista was arrested in June, held by ICE, and denied a bond hearing by the executive branch's immigration judges.

To carry out such mandatory indefinite detentions of "non-criminal noncitizens" with no chance at a bond hearing, the executive has insisted it can do so based on a "new" interpretation of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Sykes had already declared in December that the DHS policy was "not in accordance with law" and the class action plaintiffs were "entitled to consideration for release on bond by immigration officers[.]" Concerned about how "large" the number was of "people in Bautista's exact situation," the judge greenlit the class action case on a nationwide basis.

But the more that rulings went against DHS, Secretary Kristi Noem, ICE, Acting Director Todd Lyons, and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in the case — up to and including the judge vacating the DHS policy backing "unlawful" indefinite detentions — the less it seemed to matter, Sykes said.

"On each occasion, and with each ruling being based on a more developed factual record than before, the Court determined the DHS Policy improperly interpreted the INA and that continued detention of Plaintiff Petitioners and those similarly situated was unlawful," Sykes said. "One might assume that four separate orders issued by a federal district court interpreting a federal statute would make clear that enforcing executive policies premised on a contrary legal interpretation is improper. Remarkably, that has not been the case."

"Somehow, even after the judicial declaration of law that the DHS was misguided in its act of legal interpretation that nullified portions of a congressionally enacted statute, Respondents still insist they can continue their campaign of illegal action," she added, calling that position "shameless."

The judge said that her court was left with "no other option but to uphold its constitutional duty," as the "threats posed by the executive branch cannot be viewed in isolation."

"Americans have expressed deep concerns over unlawful, wanton acts by the executive branch. It is not the 'worst of the worst' that are swept into the nationwide and reckless violations of the law by the executive branch," Sykes continued. "In the past weeks, the Government detained Adrian Conejo Arias and his five-year-old son without a valid warrant. Beyond its terror against noncitizens, the executive branch has extended its violence on its own citizens, killing two American citizens — Renée Good and Alex Pretti — in Minnesota."

Next, the judge cited the continued detention of plaintiffs as "ample evidence" of the government's "noncompliance" with her judgment, slammed "frivolous arguments that aim to insulate unlawful policies from judicial review," and refused to assume a posture of judicial "helplessness."

Sykes blasted the Trump administration for deploying a "deliberately dense three-step maneuver to reach their core absurd conclusion that no further relief is warranted."

Here is the Trump administration's tactic for lulling courts to sleep, according to the judge:

Step 1: Identify an immaterial difference between two things that are functionally the same.

Step 2: Insist that the immaterial difference is so consequential that it can violate separation of powers.

Finally, and most importantly,

Step 3: Make sure to never mention the Constitution with the hope that a federal court will not notice.

Sykes did notice — and in parting shots she scolded the Trump administration about the damage done.

<The Department of Veterans Affairs this week issued a public notice announcing some changes in how it evaluates disability ratings. The administration has been finding ways to shortchange veterans since Donald Trump retook office last year, and the VA's new rules for determining disability ratings, which are how the government determines what kind of benefits veterans receive, appears to be yet another way to erode care for the men and women who have served the nation.

The new rules, which went into effect on an interim basis on Tuesday, open the door for the VA to slash earned disability ratings from veterans in two major ways, breaking from years of established U.S. law on workers' compensation.

First, the VA can now take medication into account when rating a disability. For example, tinnitus, or ear ringing, is one of the most common conditions for which the VA assigns a disability rating. Under the new rule, if the VA says aspirin or painkillers reduce your tinnitus, they can lower your rating or refuse to rate it at all.

Second, the VA can factor a veteran's earning capacity into a disability rating. If the VA determines that a veteran is employed, it can deny disability or pension payments entirely. It's a cruel and arbitrary change. If you give a leg for your country, you should be compensated for it, whether you work a job that requires use of the leg or not.

VA disability ratings are a government acknowledgement that military service led to a permanent condition that affects quality of life and long-term earning capacity. They are given on a percentage scale. One veteran could be rated 100 percent permanently disabled, for example, while another can be rated at 10 or 20 percent for minor injuries or ailments. The percentage determines monthly pay, health care priority, housing and caregiver programs, and other benefits. It is not unemployment assistance. It is indemnity for harm incurred in service.

For generations, VA disability compensation has followed the same legal logic as workers' compensation. The compensation is for the injury itself, independent of how well you may be able to manage it. This was codified in U.S. law by Ingram v. Collins, a 2025 case brought against VA Secretary Doug Collins in which the court ultimately ruled that when a VA disability rating rule does not explicitly mention medication, the VA must evaluate the veteran's condition as it is, without the assistance of medication. The decision was designed to protect veterans from losing benefits regardless of whether they followed medical advice. The new rule announced this week explicitly mentions the need to "minimize the negative impact" of Ingram v. Collins.

Before the new policy was announced this week, the VA rated conditions based on their underlying severity over time, not whether medication temporarily reduced symptoms or whether the veteran was employed. A veteran could work and still receive compensation because the payment recognized the existence of the service-connected injury. Tinnitus, PTSD, asthma, and chronic pain were evaluated on medical impairment and functional impact in daily life, while separate programs handled inability to work.

The VA claims the new rule does not represent any significant change in policy. "This regulation simply formalizes VA's longstanding practice of determining disability ratings based on Veterans' service-related disabilities and any medications they are taking to treat those disabilities," VA Press Secretary Pete Kasperowicz said in a statement to Rolling Stone.

Veterans groups see it differently.

"For years, courts held that VA could not reduce ratings based on the effects of medication, requiring evaluation of a veteran's true functional impairment when evaluating a service-connected disability," Veterans of Foreign Wars said in a statement. "This new rule reverses that standard, directing examiners to rate disabilities as they present, including the impact of medication, and to disregard unmedicated baseline severity."...>

<....VFW National Commander Carol Whitmore added that while "VA has authority to amend the rating schedule, it must do so without adversely affecting veterans."

Coleman Lee, national commander of veterans group DAV, wrote in a statement that the group is "extremely disappointed and alarmed by VA's decision to issue an Interim Final Rule today that could potentially reduce disability compensation for millions of disabled veterans" and that the "new regulation would allow VA to reduce disability compensation ratings for veterans who take medications to control their conditions or reduce their symptoms."

The VA rewriting the rules on disability ratings, like many of the department's actions since Trump retook office, is in line with Project 2025, which called for a number of measures that would negatively impact health care and other benefits for veterans. "Efforts to expand disability benefits to large populations without adequate planning have caused an erosion of veterans' trust in the VA enterprise," Brooks T. Tucker wrote in the notorious right-wing policy manifesto. In fact, the opposite is true.

The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are already trying to restrict veteran care through bills that seek to redirect funds from the VA to outside private providers. The disability rating changes, however, are a back-door way for the administration to continue to turn the screws on veterans without congressional authorization.

The new rule changes could drastically change the way the VA decides compensation and disability claims, which accounts for over 50 percent of the VA's overall budget. As Trump calls for a historic $1.5 trillion military budget for 2027 (which Congress supports) while racking up a multi-trillion-dollar budget deficit, it seems once again that veterans will be the ones paying the price so billionaires and trillionaires can get their tax breaks.>

<Informational panels on slavery returned to a popular historical museum in Philadelphia on Thursday, after a federal judge evoked the dystopian world of George Orwell’s novel “1984” to order the Trump administration to bring back the long-standing exhibit earlier this week.

US District Judge Cynthia Rufe, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, included multiple references to Orwell in her ruling Monday granting the City of Philadelphia’s request to restore the exhibit panels to Independence National Historical Park while litigation over their removal continues.

“As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims—to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not,” Rufe said, referring to the famous novel, which deals with themes of oppression and rigid governmental control.

Last month, work crews took down large display panels at the President’s House Site, where Presidents George Washington and John Adams once lived. Soon after, the city sued the administration in federal court, claiming the government was required to consult with Philadelphia before making any changes.

A CNN crew observed workers adding the panels back to the exhibit on Thursday.

Siding with the city, Rufe noted that Congress passed legislation that “specifically limited” the authority of the Interior Department to “unilaterally alter or control” the park.

“The government can convey a different message without restraint elsewhere if it so pleases, but it cannot do so to the President’s House until it follows the law and consults with the City,” Rufe wrote.

The Interior Department told CNN in a statement Tuesday that it disagreed with the court ruling and that it was planning to file an appeal.

“The National Park Service routinely updates exhibits across the park system to ensure historical accuracy and completeness,” the department said. “If not for this unnecessary judicial intervention, updated interpretive materials providing a fuller account of the history of slavery at Independence Hall would have been installed in the coming days.”

CNN has reached out to the White House and Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker for comment.

The dispute is playing out as the Trump administration has ramped up its effort to purge cultural institutions of materials that conflict with the president’s views ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary in July.

Philadelphia City Council President Kenyatta Johnson celebrated the ruling, saying in a post on X, “Black history is American history, and we won’t let Trump erase our story.”

Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro previously criticized the removal of the slavery exhibit, saying the White House was “whitewashing” history.

In an executive order signed last March, President Donald Trump accused the Biden administration of advancing “corrosive ideology,” specifically citing Independence Park, and called upon the Interior secretary to remove contents that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”

Since then, the White House has also launched a review of Smithsonian museums and exhibits to get rid of what it considers anti-American propaganda.

“The American people will have no patience for any museum that is diffident about America’s founding or otherwise uncomfortable conveying a positive view of American history, one which is justifiably proud of our country’s accomplishments and record,” White House officials wrote to the Smithsonian in December.

Last year, the American Battle Monuments Commission, a small, little-known federal agency, also took down a cemetery display in the Netherlands that commemorated the contributions of Black WWII soldiers and highlighted the discrimination they faced.>

<[Event "21st World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1993.06.30"]
[EventDate "1993"]
[Round "2"]
[Result "0-1"]
[White "Teodoro, Eduardo"]
[Black "Friedman, Josef"]
[ECO "C06"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<After paedophile Jeffrey Epstein was given a mere slap on the wrist for crimes against underage girls in Florida, the official who reviewed the case reportedly said he had been told to lay off it because the financier “belonged to intelligence” and was “above his pay grade“.

This official, Alex Acosta, was at the time US attorney for the Southern District of Florida – a position he held from 2005 to 2009 before later becoming a close associate of Donald Trump.

Was he referring to the CIA, FBI, Mossad or a combination of all three? Even MI6 may have benefited from information provided by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. All these agencies would have had an interest in this duo, considering the range of compromising information on world figures they were amassing.

Were they protected assets, or was one of them an agent? There are no simple answers to these questions.

However, the unmistakable parallels between Ghislaine’s father, the late media titan Robert Maxwell, and Epstein could provide clues.

I wrote a book on Robert, who some – including former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe – have alleged was a Mossad spy. When an MP asked about this claim in the House of Commons in 1991, Robert dismissed it as “ludicrous”. But the question was revived after his death, when he was given what was close to a state funeral in Israel.

Aside from the paedophilia, Epstein operated much like Ghislaine’s father, a megalomaniac who I understand treated his wife and children, except for Ghislaine, with disdain and cruelty.

Both men had private planes and numerous passports to enable them to travel freely across the globe. Both used sex to compromise and exploit powerful men. Robert hired eastern European prostitutes to entertain senior US politicians, I was told, while Epstein forced girls to have sex with high-ranking politicians, financiers, celebrities and scientists.

In 2011-12, I looked into writing a book on Epstein, but eventually decided it was too complicated and presented too much risk to my family, after I had already faced serious security issues while writing on the Troubles in Ireland.

During my investigation, I established excellent contacts and acquired phone logs from Epstein’s Manhattan mansion and his plane logs of flights in and out of the US when he was accompanied by underage girls.

I sought advice from Miami lawyer Brad Edwards, who represented Epstein’s young victims. I also consulted intelligence sources I had built when writing Robert’s biography. Those sources believed Epstein was extorting rich men and selling the information he acquired about the financial world to intelligence agencies.

The person who brought Epstein into the world of the rich and powerful was the sophisticated, cunning and intelligent Ghislaine. As Epstein built a massive trove of dirt on the rich and powerful, he kept extending his network with her help.

After Epstein’s 2008 arrest, he was allowed to plead guilty to solicitation of prostitution and procurement of minors. He received an 18-month “work release stipulation” and served 13 months in a county jail. He went back to what he and Ghislaine did best.

He probably thought after this escape from justice that he could use his massive collection of kompromat to blackmail anyone daring to threaten him and Ghislaine.

The British socialite was an integral part of Epstein’s sex trafficking. She was more than just his fixer; she possessed special insights into the social fabric of America and the UK, and she had observed how her father operated.

His youngest daughter, she became the most powerful figure in the Maxwell clan after his mysterious death. Some – like Ben-Menashe – have claimed that Mossad assassinated him for threatening to expose the agency, although his lavish funeral in Israel suggested he had not fallen out of favour there.

Recently, I discovered from the Epstein files that the convicted sex offender had read my book about Robert and wrote to people that he agreed with its conclusion that Mossad had assassinated him....>