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      The Guardian view on UK military strategy: prepare for a US retreat – or be left gravely exposed | Editorial

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      With the prime minister’s Churchillian claims that “the front line is here”, the public might expect a military posture that meets the drama of the moment. Yet the promised rise in defence spending – from 2.3% to 2.5% of gross domestic product by 2027 – suggests something less than full-scale mobilisation. The strategic defence review is systematic and detailed, but it remains an exercise in tightly bounded ambition. It speaks of daily cyber-attacks and undersea sabotage, but proposes no systemic institutional overhaul or acute surge in resilience. Given the developing dangers, it is surprising not to spell out a robust home-front framework.Instead, it is a cautious budget hike in the costume of crisis – signalling emergency while deferring real commitment for military financing. The review suggests that the more ambitious spending target of 3% of GDP, still shy of Nato’s 3.5% goal, is delayed to the next parliament. The plan is not to revive Keynesianism in fatigues. It is a post-austerity military modernisation that is technocratic and geopolitically anxious. It borrows the urgency of the past without inheriting its economic boldness.The review marks a real shift: it warns of “multiple, direct threats” for the first time since the cold war and vows to reverse the “hollowing out” of Britain’s armed forces. But in an age of climate emergencies and democratic drift, UK leadership should rest on multilateralism, not pure militarism. Declaring Russian “nuclear coercion” the central challenge, and that the “future of strategic arms control … does not look promising”, while sinking £15bn into warheads, risks fuelling escalation instead of pursuing arms control.Given the war in Ukraine, there is an ominous warning about changing US “security priorities”. This calls into question the wisdom of being overly reliant on America, which is now internally unstable and dismantling global public goods – such as the atmospheric data that drones rely on for navigation. Left unsaid but clearly underlying the report is the idea that the old defence model is no longer sufficient – for example, when maritime adversaries can weaponise infrastructure by sabotaging undersea cables, or where critical data systems are in commercial hands. It cannot be right that Ukraine’s sovereignty depends on the goodwill of the world’s richest man. But the private satellite network Starlink keeps Ukrainian hospitals, bases and drones online, leaving Kyiv hostage to the whims of its volatile owner, Elon Musk.The menace of hybrid warfare – including disinformation, cyber-attacks, economic pressure, deployment of irregular armed groups and use of regular forces – intensified in the last decade. This should see Britain forge deeper institutional ties with European partners, not just military but in infrastructure and information technologies. This would allow for a sovereign digital strategy for European nations to free them from dependency on mercurial actors.Though the review gestures toward greater societal involvement, it stops short of articulating a whole-of-society doctrine like Norway’s. This, when some analysts say the third world war has already begun with a slow, global breakdown of the post-1945 institutional order. The defence review should be about more than missiles and missions. It must also be about whether the country can keep the lights on, the gas flowing, the internet up and the truth intact. This review sees the threats, but not yet the system needed to confront them. In that gap lies the peril. More

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      Trump’s tax bill helps the rich, hurts the poor and adds trillions to the deficit | Katrina vanden Heuvel

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      The blush is off the rose, or, rather, the orange. The erstwhile “First Buddy” and born-again fiscal hawk Elon Musk recently said he was “disappointed” by Donald Trump’s spendthrift budget currently under debate in the US Senate. Squeaking through the House of Representatives thanks to the capitulation of several Republican deficit hardliners, this “big, beautiful bill” certainly increases the federal debt bigly – by nearly $4tn over the next decade.Equally disappointed are those who have been busy burnishing Trump’s populist veneer. Steve Bannon had repeatedly promised higher taxes for millionaires, but he has confessed he’s “very upset”. That’s because the bill would cut taxes by over $600bn for the top 1% of wage-earners, also known as millionaires. It amounts to the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history.Yet this double betrayal will do nothing to impede the sundry Maga apparatchiks’ breathless support for their dear leader. Musk has already tweeted his gratitude to the president for the opportunity to lead Doge (that is, slash funding for cancer research). So this bill has once again proven Republicans’ willingness to relinquish their convictions as long as they can keep their grasp on power. And for Trump, it has reaffirmed that his pledged golden age is really just a windfall for the uber-wealthy like him. Now there can be no mistaking that Republicans’ governing philosophy is neither conservatism nor populism but unabashed hypocrisy.Expecting the self-proclaimed King of Debt to balance the budget – or hoping workers would be protected by the billionaire whose personal motto is “You’re fired” – was always imaginative thinking at best. In his first term, Trump added $8tn to the national deficit. Even excluding Covid relief spending, that’s twice as much debt as Joe Biden racked up during his four years in the White House. Almost $2tn of that tab came from Trump’s vaunted tax cut, which delivered three times more wealth to the top 5% of wage earners than it did to the bottom 60%. Nor did its benefits trickle down, with incomes remaining flat for workers who earn less than $114,000.Trump’s disingenuousness on the deficit continues a hallowed Republican tradition. All four Republican presidents since 1980 have increased the federal debt. By combining reckless militarism with rampant corporatism, George W Bush managed to balloon it by 1,204%. When Bush’s treasury secretary Paul O’Neill expressed concern about that spending, Dick Cheney, the then-vice president, reportedly retorted: “Deficits don’t matter.”Except, of course, when a Democrat occupies the Oval Office. During his campaign for the US Senate in 2022, JD Vance derided Biden’s signature $1tn infrastructure package as a “huge mistake” that would waste money on “really crazy stuff”. Like improving almost 200,000 miles of roads and repairing over 11,000 bridges across the country.Apparently less crazy, but certainly more callous, are the vertiginous cuts to the social safety net proposed in Trump’s current budget bill. Its $1tn evisceration of Medicaid and Snap would leave 8 million Americans uninsured and potentially end food assistance for 11 million people, including 4 million children. When the Democratic Representative Ro Khanna introduced an amendment to maintain coverage for the 38 million kids who receive their healthcare through Medicaid, Republicans blocked it from even receiving a vote.But for all the budget’s austerity, it also provides $20bn in tax credits to establish a national school voucher program. And equally outrageous are its provisions that have nothing to do with the pecuniary, from easing regulations on gun silencers to hamstringing the power of courts to enforce injunctions.Perhaps most breathtaking of all, though, is how shamelessly the bill enriches the already mega-rich. In its first year, its tax breaks will grace Americans in the top 0.1% of the income bracket with an additional $400,000, while decreasing the earnings of people in the bottom 25% by $1,000. In other words, those who can least afford it are financing relief for those who least need it.When the 50% of working class Americans who broke for Trump in last year’s election realize they voted for a pay cut, they might begin to feel a bit disillusioned with the crypto trader-in-chief. They might even feel pulled to the authentically populist vision outlined by the progressives Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on their nationwide Fighting Oligarchy Tour.In the meantime, it is almost an inevitability that Republican senators will wring their hands before pressing the green button to vote “yea.” Josh Hawley has called the budget bill “morally wrong and politically suicidal”, criticism which Trump has previously mocked as “grandstanding”. The insult contains a typically Trumpian flash of psychological insight, because Hawley and his colleagues will no doubt do exactly what their counterparts in the House have already done – cave.Once Trump has scribbled his oversized signature onto the bill, his vision for the US will have become unmistakable. Try as they might, not even the spinmeisters at Fox News will be able to deny that he runs this country the way he ran his Atlantic City casinos, leading working Americans to financial ruin while he emerges all the richer for it.

      Katrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of the Nation, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a contributor to the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times More

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      We’re minimizing the horror of Trump’s military birthday parade | Judith Levine

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      In 2017, watching a two-hour Bastille Day procession, Donald Trump told the French president that we’d have one too, only better. That time, the grown-ups said no. The reasons given were costs – estimates ran to $92m – hellish logistics, and the Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser’s worries that tanks and other armored vehicles would tear up Washington’s streets.Some retired generals objected publicly to the totalitarian-adjacent optics, especially given the US president’s praise for such bad actors as Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin. Several Republican lawmakers also expressed their distaste. “Confidence is silent, and insecurity is loud,” the Louisiana senator John Kennedy told MSNBC. “America is the most powerful country in all of human history … and we don’t need to show it off. We’re not North Korea. We’re not Russia, we’re not China,” he continued, “and I don’t wanna be.”This time, as Washington prepares for a huge military shindig on 14 June, Trump’s 79th – and, oh yes, the US army’s 250th – birthday, the generals are silent. The Republicans have sworn allegiance to the king. And the media are focused on the price tag, the potholes and the impending pomp; on tensions between the blue city of Washington and the red capital; and on the decimation of veterans’ healthcare, housing, and pensions while the administration throws $25m to $45m at a circus of war.All are important parts of the story. Yet commentary is muted and the debate mischaracterized as normal political discourse. The horrific point is missed: the spectacle of a massive show of military might, before a president who behaves like a dictator and views the armed forces as his personal foot soldiers, evinces memories of the worst totalitarian regimes. History may mark 14 June 2025 as the ceremonial birth of a new American fascism.Military Parade in Capital on Trump’s Birthday Could Cost $45 Million, Officials Say, reported the New York Times in mid-May. CBS also led with the cost. The Washingtonian described in detail the street-damage-preventive measures the army is installing: metal plates under the parade route, rubber padding on the tank treads – though transportation experts warn that running, at last count, 28 Abrams tanks, 28 Bradley fighting vehicles, 28 Strykers, and four Paladins, each behemoth weighing as much as 70 tonnes, could buckle the asphalt and smash power, water and telecom lines underneath.Even the New Republic, the president’s daily disparager, put the cost up top, tallied the ordinance, and noted that the man who “signed an executive order creating a program to ‘beautify Washington DC’” was now “plotting to transform his expensive birthday party into a demolition derby that will cause serious damage to the roads that line the nation’s capital”.In late May, three weeks after the Associated Press first revealed the parade plan, the army promised it would pay to fix the streets. It did not commit to picking up the multimillion-dollar tab for policing and cleanup, however, which will come out of a city budget from which the House cut $1.1bn in March and didn’t get around to restoring.Still, the partial resolution of the infrastructure problems liberated the press to get on with the fun stuff: “what to expect” on the festive day: not just planes, tanks and 6,700 soldiers, but also fireworks, football players and fitness competitions. USA Today linked to the free tickets page and published the parade route, plus a map of the military goodies on display, including robots and night-vision goggles. It called the event an “unofficial birthday party”. ABC News ran a feature on Doc Holliday, the dog who will join the parade in a mule-drawn cart.Tucked into some stories was a sentence or two indicating controversy, such as this from Reuters: “Critics have called a parade an authoritarian display of power that is wasteful, especially as Trump slashes costs throughout the federal government.”“The plans have drawn some criticism from Democrats,” said CBS.The Hill wrote: “Democrats and critics have questioned both the cost of the parade and whether it politicizes the military, which has traditionally been nonpartisan. The fact that the parade falls on Trump’s birthday has only fueled criticism from Democrats who view it as a way for the president to celebrate himself.”Over at Fox, they were telling the critics to get over themselves. “The Democratic party, they’ve chosen to be an outrage machine at a time when there is outrage fatigue in this country,” scoffed Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s former press secretary and current Fox News host. “People are fed up with the ‘authoritarianism coup’ language.”It’s true. Only one party is complaining. But what is striking about their complaints is the relative dearth of authoritarian coup language. “The egotist-in-chief wants taxpayers to foot the bill for a military parade on his birthday,” said Steve Cohen, a US representative from Tennessee, in a statement. As if the president were moved by mere narcissism.Reported Forbes on 15 May: “There has been no formal pushback to the proposal.”Trump likes hulking lethal toys, but he hasn’t always been partial to the people who run them. There was the fight he picked with a couple of Muslim Gold Star parents during his first campaign; the comments on a 2018 European trip that fallen soldiers are “losers” and “suckers”; the undisguised queasiness about seeing or being seen with wounded veterans; the Pentagon session where he called his top officers“a bunch of dopes and babies”.But he is warming to the role of commander in chief. In his commencement speech at West Point, between bloviations on Nato, drag shows, golf and trophy wives, he boasted about the unprecedented $1.1tn military budget. “You’ll become officers in the greatest and most powerful army the world has ever known,” he said. “And I know because I rebuilt that army, and I rebuilt the military … like nobody has ever rebuilt it before.”Also breaking from script on Memorial Day at Arlington Cemetery, he suggested that the parade, on top of nabbing the World Cup and the Olympics, was divinely ordained. “Look what I have, I have everything,” he cried. “Amazing the way things work out. God did that.”If he is to ease from commander of the armed forces to commander of everything, he will need more than God on his side. He’ll need to own the military. Forty-five million bucks is a good starting bid.Stalin’s 50th birthday celebration, in 1929, is considered the kickoff of his cult of personality. Hitler’s 50th birthday military parade, in April 1939, was organized by the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels for maximum grandeur, including a motorcade of 50 white limousines. Five months later, Germany invaded Poland.Kim Jong-un changed Loyalty Oath Day from 1 January to his birthday, 8 January. This February, the Republican US representative Claudia Tenney of New York introduced a bill to designate Trump’s birthday as a national holiday. It hasn’t gone anywhere – yet.The pieces are lining up like a phalanx of soldiers. The website of America250, the non-profit fundraising and marketing arm of the Semiquincentennial Commission, is an advertisement for Trump. Its description of the “grand military parade” refers to him in the second sentence and proclaims that under his “leadership, the U.S. Army has been restored to strength and readiness”.At the parade, the crowd of 200,000 spectators will be dominated by Maga idol worshippers. Trump will watch the extravaganza from a reviewing stand, just like Xi Jinping and Putin did recently at Red Square. The army’s Golden Knights parachute team will land on the Eclipse and hand the president a flag. Officials say there are “no plans” to sing Happy Birthday, but there are rumors the army will also give Trump a birthday gift.Let’s call 14 June what it promises to be: the ceremonial birth of the US’s 21st-century fascist regime.

      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books. Her Substack, Today in Fascism, is at judithlevine.substack.com More

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      Republican Iowa congresswoman booed at town hall over Trump policies

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      Constituents booed Republican congresswoman Ashley Hinson at a town hall in her Iowa district Wednesday when she praised Donald Trump’s tax-and-spending plan and spoke approvingly of the “department of government efficiency’s” (Doge) efforts to downsize the federal government.It was the latest instance of a Republican lawmaker being taken to task at a public event over their support for Trump’s policies, and came days after Hinson had voted for the the One Big Beautiful bill when it passed the House of Representatives. The wide-ranging bill will extend tax cuts enacted during Trump’s first term, create new deductions for tips, overtime and car loan interest and fund mass deportations, while slashing federal social safety net programs.Hinson drew a chorus of boos when she told the audience in the town of Decorah that she was “proud” to have voted for the bill. “This is your time,” she said over the din. A similar outburst occurred from the audience at mention of Doge, which Hinson said she had received positive feedback about during an event elsewhere.The crowd broke into cheers when a constituent who identified himself as Steve Peterson referred to Trump’s acceptance of a jet from Qatar and promotion of his own memecoin and asked Hinson: “Could you help me understand why you are silent about this corruption?”“I think it’s really unfair to imply that I like to see corruption in Washington DC. I reject that premise wholeheartedly. I am here answering your questions in public because I care about transparency,” replied Hinson, who added that the jet was acquired from Qatar “ethically”.First elected in 2020, Hinson’s north-east Iowa district leans towards the GOP, but has been represented by Democrats in the past. At least one attendee at her town hall identified herself as a Democrat, and the county party noted that Hinson would be holding events in the district on Wednesday.Similar scenes have played out at town halls held by Republican lawmakers in Iowa and elsewhere. The state’s long-serving senator Chuck Grassley was grilled last month by constituents over his support for Trump’s hardline immigration policies, while in Georgia, police used a stun gun on two people during a town hall held by Marjorie Taylor Greene, a fervent Trump supporter.Democrats hope the public discontent is a sign that voters are ready to sweep them back into the majority in the House next year, and the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, which coordinates House campaigns, reportedly advised lawmakers to stop holding town halls.Hinson was not alone in facing questions over her support for Trump’s Big Beautiful bill, which passed the House narrowly and awaits consideration by Senate Republicans.On Tuesday, Mike Flood, a Republican congressman, faced a raucous crowd at his town hall in Seward, Nebraska, and admitted he was not aware that the bill contained language that could prevent federal judges from enforcing injunctions or restraining orders, several of which have been issued against Trump administration policies.“I am not going to hide the truth. This provision was unknown to me when I voted for that bill,” said Flood, who added he had expressed his disapproval to senators. More

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      Republican senator Tommy Tuberville launches run for Alabama governor

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      Republican US senator Tommy Tuberville has officially entered the race for governor of Alabama, revealing a campaign website on Tuesday to launch his candidacy.If the campaign is successful, Tuberville could become Alabama’s governor-elect by the end of 2026. He aims to succeed Republican governor Kay Ivey, who is finishing her second term and is barred from running again due to term limits.His announcement was the next anticipated step following Tuberville’s transition from college football coach to politician. In 2016, he was coaching at the University of Cincinnati, having earlier led Auburn University’s football team. By 2020, he had made his political debut, winning a US Senate seat representing Alabama.Tuberville built upon his reputation from the football world to enter politics, often referring to himself as “Coach”. His celebrity status in Alabama gave him a strong base of support, which he further bolstered by aligning himself closely with Donald Trump.The US president previously endorsed Tuberville over former US attorney general Jeff Sessions in the 2020 Republican primary. Sessions, once a senator from Alabama, had fallen out of favor with Trump, who appointed and later dismissed him as attorney general.Tuberville went on to defeat Democratic incumbent Doug Jones in the general election. Jones had briefly flipped the seat in a 2017 special election after Republicans nominated Roy Moore, whose campaign was derailed by allegations of sexual misconduct.Since entering the Senate, Tuberville has cultivated strong ties with conservative organizations such as the Club for Growth, which recently endorsed his campaign. He has also drawn national attention for his months-long blockade of military promotions in protest of the Pentagon’s abortion-related policies under Joe Biden.Tuberville, known for his strongly conservative beliefs, says that he believes that “men are men and women are women” and that “allowing men to compete in women’s sports is wrong” on his new campaign website.He also mentions “poisonous ideologies” such as “Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), which teach our kids to hate each other”. He adds that “zero taxpayer dollars should go towards abortions” in his view.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe senator also faces scrutiny over allegations that he was not a full-time Alabama resident, charges he has denied. Tuberville is now the second sitting US senator to announce a gubernatorial campaign this year. More

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      The anti-woke warriors used to defend free speech. Now they make McCarthyism look progressive | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Thoughts and non-denominational prayers to all the anti-woke warriors out there. It may seem as though everything is going their way now Donald Trump is back with a vengeance, but the poor things have run into a bit of a branding problem. For years, the anti-woke crowd positioned themselves as fearless free thinkers taking on the intolerant left. The journalist Bari Weiss wrote a fawning New York Times piece in 2018 describing rightwing voices such as Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens as “renegades of the intellectual dark web” (IDW).Now, however, the people who used to position themselves as oppressed truth-tellers operating in what Weiss’s article called an “era of That Which Cannot Be Said”, have a state-sanctioned microphone. They’ve won. But in winning they’ve made it difficult to continue the charade that they give a damn about “cancel culture”. Look around: some of these self-styled free speech warriors are doing everything they can to ruin the lives of everyone who doesn’t 100% agree with them.Most conservatives don’t seem to mind that their hypocrisy is now on full display. But, according to a recent piece on the news site Semafor, a handful of people within the anti-woke media ecosystem are starting to have something of an identity crisis. “One didn’t have to be especially prescient to spot those ‘anti-woke’ types who would just slowly become Maga flunkies,” said the libertarian journalist Michael Moynihan, who had a short stint at Weiss’s publication the Free Press before becoming disillusioned.Remember when the right railed against people losing jobs for old comments they’d made? In 2018, for example, the Atlantic fired the conservative columnist Kevin Williamson after the backlash about a 2014 podcast appearance in which the 60-year-old had suggested women should face hanging for having an abortion. Cue a million furious tweets from the “renegades of the IDW” about how, as Ben Shapiro put it on X, “virtually everyone is vulnerable if they run afoul of the Left’s interests”.Now, however, there’s no denying that virtually everyone is vulnerable if they run afoul of the right’s interests. Semafor’s piece notes that “One [Free Press] investigation that exposed two low-profile employees at PBS who had focused on diversity and got them fired rubbed even some of its allies the wrong way”.At least the DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) employees at PBS “only” got fired. Canary Mission and Betar US, two pro-Israel groups, have been compiling “deportation” lists of pro-Palestinian activists on college campuses and sharing them with the Trump administration. Betar US has also warned that it is going to expand its focus beyond immigrants to naturalised US citizens.These organisations are just a couple of cogs in a massive dissent-crushing machine. The Christian nationalist Heritage Foundation, which spearheaded Project 2025, is behind a dystopian plan called Project Esther that cynically weaponises very real concerns about antisemitism to shut down criticism of Israel and quash pro-Palestinian activism. And you can bet these censorious projects won’t end with Palestinians: at the rate we’re going, pro-choice sentiment will soon be considered “anti-Christian” and anyone espousing it will get deported. If that sounds far-fetched, let me remind you that last month the veterans affairs department ordered staff to report their colleagues for “anti-Christian bias”.Drunk on their power to deport and defame, some on the right have officially lost the plot. For months a number of conservative voices have been engaged on a mission to cancel Ms Rachel, a children’s entertainer whose real name is Rachel Accurso. If you have small children, Ms Rachel needs no introduction. For everyone else, she wears a pink headband and sings songs such as Icky Sticky Bubble Gum. Ms Rachel’s videos have always been gently inclusive: she incorporates sign language and she has frequently had Jules Hoffman, a non-binary musician, on her show. On her personal social media she has also advocated for issues such as paid family leave.The right tried to cancel Ms Rachel over Hoffman’s gender identity back in 2023. Now they’re trying to cancel the beloved star again; this time for the “crime” of speaking up about Palestinian kids and featuring a three-year-old double amputee from Gaza in a video. The fact Accurso is humanising Palestinian children is driving some rightwing voices so berserk that they’re smearing her as antisemitic, asking the US attorney general for an investigation, and spreading the ridiculous and completely baseless lie (which the New York Times bizarrely chose to amplify) that she is being funded by Hamas.Welcome to our “new era of That Which Cannot Be Said”: one that may make McCarthyism seem progressive. It would seem the new renegades of the intellectual dark web are those of us who think you shouldn’t bomb starving babies in their sleep just because they are Palestinian.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

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      A hidden measure in the Republican budget bill would crown Trump king | Robert Reich

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      If enacted, Donald Trump’s Big Ugly Bill as it emerged on Thursday from the House of Representatives would result in the largest redistribution of income and wealth in American history – from the poor and working class to the rich.Hidden within the bill is also a provision that would allow Trump to crown himself king.For months now, Trump has been trying to act like a king by ignoring court rulings against him.The supreme court has told Trump to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Ábrego García, a legal resident of the United States who even the Trump regime admits was erroneously sent to a brutal prison in El Salvador.Trump has done nothing.Lower federal courts have ordered him to stop deporting migrants without giving them a chance to know the charges against them and have the charges and evidence reviewed by a neutral judge or magistrate – the minimum of due process.Again, nothing.Judge James Boasberg, chief judge of the federal district court for the District of Columbia, issued a temporary restraining order preventing the Trump regime from flying individuals to the prison in El Salvador without due process.Judge Boasberg has found that the Trump regime has willfully disregarded his order.Is there anything that the courts can do in response to Trump’s open defiance of judges and justices?They have only one power to make their orders stick. They can hold federal officials in contempt, and enforce such contempt citations by fining or jailing them.It’s a radical remedy, rarely used. But several federal judges are at their wits’ end.Boasberg said that if Trump’s legal team does not give the dozens of Venezuelan men sent to the Sallvadorian prison a chance to legally challenge their removal, he’ll begin contempt proceedings against the administration.In a separate case, the US district court judge Paula Xinis has demanded that the Trump administration explain why it is not complying with the supreme court order to “facilitate” the release of Ábrego García.Xinis has even questioned whether the administration intends to comply with the order at all, citing a statement from the. homeland security chief, Kristi Noem, that Ábrego García “will never be allowed to return to the United States”.According to Xinis, “That sounds to me like an admission. That’s about as clear as it can get.”So what’s the next step? Will the supreme court and lower courts hold the administration in contempt and enforce the contempt citations?Trump and his Republican stooges in Congress apparently anticipated this. Hidden inside their Big Ugly Bill is a provision intended to block the courts from using contempt to enforce its orders. It reads:skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued …”Translated: no federal court may enforce a contempt citation.The measure would make most existing injunctions – in antitrust cases, police reform cases, school desegregation cases and others – unenforceable.Its only purpose is to weaken the power of the federal courts.As Erwin Chemerinsky, UC Berkeley School of Law dean and distinguished professor of law, notes, this provision would eliminate any restraint on Trump.“Without the contempt power, judicial orders are meaningless and can be ignored. There is no way to understand this except as a way to keep the Trump administration from being restrained when it violates the Constitution or otherwise breaks the law …“This would be a stunning restriction on the power of the federal courts. The Supreme Court has long recognized that the contempt power is integral to the authority of the federal courts. Without the ability to enforce judicial orders, they are rendered mere advisory opinions which parties are free to disregard.”In other words, with this single measure, Trump will have crowned himself king.If it is enacted, no Congress and no court could stop him. Even if a future Congress were to try, it could not do so without the power of the courts to enforce their hearings, investigations, subpoenas and laws.The gross unfairness of Trump’s Big Ugly Bill is bad enough. It would worsen the nation’s already near-record inequalities of income and wealth.But the provision inside the bill that neuters the federal courts is even worse. It would remove the last remaining constraint on Trump, and thereby effectively end American democracy.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Top Republicans threaten to block Trump’s spending bill if national debt is not reduced

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      Donald Trump has been warned by fiscal hawks within his own party in the US Senate that he must “get serious” about cutting government spending and reducing the national debt or else they will block the passage of his signature tax-cutting legislation known as the “big, beautiful bill”.Ron Johnson, the Republican senator from Wisconsin who rose to prominence as a fiscal hardliner with the Tea Party movement, issued the warning to the president on Sunday. Asked by CNN’s State of the Union whether his faction had the numbers to halt the bill, he replied: “I think we have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit.”Trump has invested a large portion of his political capital in the massive package. It extends the 2017 tax cuts from his first administration in return for about $1tn in benefits cuts including reductions in the health insurance scheme for low-income families, Medicaid, and to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) food stamps.The bill squeaked through US House by just one vote on Thursday. It now faces a perilous welcome in the upper legislative chamber.Sunday’s admonitions from prominent senators angered by the failure to address the budget deficit bodes ill for Trump’s agenda given the tightness of the Republicans’ congressional majorities. The Senate majority leader, John Thune, can afford to lose only three votes from among his party’s 53.Thune has indicated that changes to the bill might be needed to bring refuseniks on side. That in turn could present the House speaker, Mike Johnson, with a headache.The House will have to approve any changes made in the Senate under the process of budget reconciliation, which allows spending packages to be fast-tracked through Congress avoiding a Senate filibuster of 60 votes. The final contents of the bill will need to be blessed by both chambers, with Democrats almost certain to vote unanimously in opposition.The House speaker renewed his plea to his Senate colleagues on Sunday to go lightly with him. He encouraged them on CBS News’s Face the Nation “to make as few modifications as possible, remembering that I have a very delicate balance on our very diverse Republican caucus over in the House”.But Senate budget hawks do not appear to be in the mood for compromise. Ron Johnson estimated that the bill would add up to $4tn to the federal deficit, a calculation that is broadly in line with the latest analysis from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).Johnson added a rare note of personal criticism of Trump from a congressional Republican. He said that while Trump might not be worried about the national debt, “I’m extremely worried about that.”He added: “We are mortgaging our children’s future. It’s wrong. It’s immoral. It has to stop.”Another key Tea Party senator, Rand Paul from Kentucky, has also been vocal over the deficit. He laid into the spending cuts contained in the big beautiful bill, telling Fox News Sunday that in his view they were “wimpy and anemic” and would “explode the debt”.Other influential Republican senators have been expressing concern about the number of Americans who would lose access to health coverage as a result of the legislation’s cuts to Medicaid. According to the CBO, almost 8 million people would be thrown off the benefit.Speaker Johnson tried to dismiss the concern, telling CBS News that 1.4 million of those vulnerable people were “illegal aliens receiving benefits” – and a further 4.8 million were able-bodied individuals choosing not to work and “gaming the system”.An analysis by the non-partisan FactCheck.org found that the claim that 1.4 million undocumented migrants were on Medicaid was false. People living in the US without immigration papers are not eligible for the federal program other than to receive emergency medical treatment.More than 1 million undocumented immigrants are in danger of losing health benefits as a result of Trump’s cuts – but this assistance is provided by states and has nothing to do with Medicaid.Any reduction in Medicaid would be politically awkward for Trump, who promised repeatedly on the campaign trail last year that he would not touch basic safety nets such as Medicaid, Medicare and social security. The president’s loyal supporters in the Maga (“Make America great again”) movement have cautioned against the move.Steve Bannon, who served as chief White House strategist in Trump’s first administration and remains a persuasive voice within the movement, recently told listeners to his War Room podcast: “You got to be careful, because a lot of Maga is on Medicaid.”Josh Hawley, the Republican US senator from Missouri, recently said that “slashing health insurance for the working poor” would be “politically suicidal”. More