We begin today with Joe Patrice of Above the Law mocking the Trump Administration’s latest attempt to shred the U.S. Constitution, this time over the deportation of supposed “gang members to El Salvador at Nayeb Bukele’s inhumane prisons.
So now Trump is making the argument that court orders evaporate over international waters, an argument more at home as a Simpsons gag than in a federal courtroom… [...]
But after the Court greenlighting the explicit argument “the president can use SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival,” who can really blame him for trying? [...]
Whatever you might think about the idea of outsourcing convicts to countries where human rights are advisory, the people sent to El Salvador were “alleged” gang members. While the administration talks up getting rid of “the bad guys,” they did not export adjudicated bad guys but rather planeloads of innocent until proven guilty migrants that the government accuses of being bad guys. [...]
To sidestep the criminal justice process that might require the DOJ to present “evidence,” the White House’s new legal gambit invokes the Alien Enemies Act of 1789 to cover members of criminal gangs who hail from Venezuela. While the law was probably unconstitutional as a justification for sending Japanese-Americans to prison camps after Pearl Harbor, it is definitely unconstitutional as a justification for rounding up people from countries the U.S. isn’t even at war with.
Chris Geidner of LawDork passes along what he has been saying for months; get down what you can. Get it all down, win or lose.
The fact is that there are many bad-faith narrators flooding the zone right now, including many within the Trump administration — up to and, of course, including Trump himself. Some of those same people are working to keep information from the public as well. And, while there are many reliable narrators — including, I hope, me — they (definitely including me) don’t have all of the information.
As we have seen over the past two months, the multitude of narrators, the number of unreliable ones, and the intentional effort to keep information from the public makes understanding exactly what is happening at any specific moment difficult.
Maybe that ultimately doesn’t matter, and all that matters is the bottom line that Trump is OK with violating the Constitution and laws, and — particularly in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, at least as Trump himself appears to be viewing (living) it — that, ultimately, will break our constitutional, democratic republic if unchecked.
But — and this is a point that I have been making repeatedly over the past months — I strongly believe that it does matter that we work to understand what is happening. I think this for a few reasons.
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It is essential that we record what is happening at every step.
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It is essential that all questionable steps are challenged in court.
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It is essential that everyone in the structure of government is forced to be accountable for their role in supporting or allowing — or in seeking to stop — illegal and unconstitutional actions.
Phoebe Petrovic of ProPublica uncovers the beginnings of a disturbing effort to call for an Article 5 Constitutional Convention over the national debt.
Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica have obtained a draft version of a proposed lawsuit being floated to attorneys general in several states, revealing new details about who’s involved and their efforts to advance legal arguments that liberal and conservative legal scholars alike have criticized, calling them “wild,” “completely illegitimate” and “deeply flawed.” [...]
The draft lawsuit is the work of the Federal Fiscal Sustainability Foundation, a low-profile nonprofit that has drawn support from balanced budget advocates and the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council. The group’s chair, David M. Walker, oversaw government accountability as U.S. comptroller general during both the Clinton and Bush administrations. The draft lawsuit is signed by Charles “Chuck” Cooper, a high-powered conservative lawyer in Washington, D.C., who represented Trump’s previous attorney general during the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Walker and his team have shopped the lawsuit to over a dozen state attorneys general and Republican-controlled legislatures seeking to find states to serve as plaintiffs, according to emails obtained through records requests, public testimony and interviews. Alongside ALEC’s CEO, they met with members of the Utah attorney general’s office in 2023, trying to recruit the state to take the lead, and planned to meet with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, emails show. Lawmakers in Utah, Arizona, South Carolina and West Virginia have sought to get their states to join the lawsuit.
After the U.S. Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, conservative legal forces may as well try it.
Linda Jacobson writes for The Guardian that Amy Coney Barrett has recused herself from Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond and St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond, two cases that will decide the future of the separation of church and state precedents.
On 30 April, the court will consider a legal question that has defined her career: can explicitly religious organizations operate charter schools? At the center of the dispute is St Isidore of Seville Catholic virtual school, an online school in Oklahoma that planned to serve about 200 students this year before the state supreme court ruled the decision to approve it violated the constitutional provision separating church and state. [...]
In a sign of the case’s gravity, the Trump administration filed a brief in support of St Isidore last week, arguing: “A state may not put schools, parents or students to the choice of forgoing religious exercise or forgoing government funds.”
But Barrett, who handed Donald Trump a conservative 6-3 supermajority when she was confirmed to the court, won’t be on the bench to hear it. She recused herself, leaving no explanation for sitting out what could be the most significant legal decision to affect schools in decades. [...]
Observers believe the cause is her friendship with Garnett, who was an early legal adviser to the school. Nicole and her husband Richard Garnett, also a Notre Dame law professor, are both faculty fellows with the university’s Religious Liberty Clinic, which represents St Isidore.
Paul Krugman writes for his Substack that America becoming a rogue nation will have monetary consequences in a variety of ways.
How much economic damage will America suffer because it has become a rogue nation? Of course, there’s much more than money at stake here. Still, becoming a nation that can’t be trusted to honor agreements or follow the rule of law has to have monetary as well as political and diplomatic consequences. How big are these monetary consequences?
Well, I’ve been exploring the available data, and U.S. exposure to foreign revulsion looks quite large.
Start with those military sales. U.S. sales of defense equipment to foreign governments have gone up a lot since Russia invaded Ukraine; much of the increase has gone either to Ukraine or to European governments supporting Ukraine, but there is also a general trend toward rearmament as we learn that the world is a more dangerous place than we realized, and pre-Trump that rearmament meant a lot of U.S. exports. In 2024 U.S. military exports were $318.7 billion; that was roughly 15 percent of total U.S. goods exports. It was also almost twice our agricultural exports.
How much will these sales shrink now that foreign governments know that we can’t be trusted? Given some time to find replacements, the likely answer is “a lot.” [...]
...Many foreigners come to America to study, attracted by the quality of our colleges and universities. In 2023, the most recent year for which data are available, they spent more than $50 billion. But if you were a foreigner considering study in the U.S. next year, wouldn’t you be worried that you might find yourself arrested and deported for expressing what the current administration considers anti-American views? I would. So we can expect a hit to higher education, which, although we rarely think of it this way, is a major U.S. export.
Finally today, Una Hadari of POLITICO Europe reports on the massive protests taking place in Serbia.
The most visible and wide-reaching protest movement in modern Serbian history escalated on Saturday when at least 100,000 people flooded Belgrade from across the country to demand the government take corruption more seriously.
The protests began over four months ago after the awning of the main train station in Novi Sad, Serbia’s northern regional capital, collapsed and killed 14 people on the spot. [...]
The collapse of the canopy in Novi Sad shocked people because of the sheer arbitrariness of the victims — commuters who simply happened to be taking the train or bus from the city’s main station during peak hours.
The tragedy was further amplified by Novi Sad’s strategic location near regional capitals like Budapest, Zagreb and Vienna, making it a hub for travelers from across the region.
When it comes to protests, Belgrade seems to hang right there with Paris; there were massive protests over the school shootings from two years ago.
Even The Joker is speaking out in favor of the protestors.
And then there’s...this
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Indiana alum Courtney Cronin on UNC in the NCAA Tournament over the Hoosiers:
"I have a problem with it for West Virginia... Indiana has no sympathy from someone who loves this program, loves this team... You are no longer a blueblood program when you handle business this way." #MarchMadness
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— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing.bsky.social) March 17, 2025 at 5:30 PM
Indiana has not been a “blueblood program” for some time now.
My question is this: Since I cannot possibly pick the team from Durham, NC to win the NCAA tourney just...because…, I’m picking the team that goes “chomp chomp” that just won the SEC tourney to win it all.
Maybe they become a “blueblood” after winning the tourney, who knows.
Everyone try to have the best possible day that you can!
