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    Columbia University ‘refusing to help’ identify people for arrest – White House

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    The Trump administration said on Tuesday that Columbia University was “refusing to help” the Department of Homeland Security identify people for arrest on campus, after immigration authorities detained a prominent Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate over the weekend.The Trump White House’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said on Tuesday the administration had given the university names of multiple individuals it accused of “pro-Hamas activity”, reiterating the administration’s intention to deport activists associated with pro-Palestinian protests.“Columbia University has been given the names of other individuals who have engaged in pro-Hamas activity, and they are refusing to help DHS identify those individuals on campus,” Leavitt said in a press briefing. “And as the president said very strongly in his statement yesterday, he is not going to tolerate that.”Khalil, a permanent US resident who helped lead pro-Palestinian protests at the university last year, was detained on Saturday night in an unprecedented move that prompted widespread outrage and alarm from free speech advocates.Trump described the arrest this week as the “first arrest of many to come”.The federal immigration authorities who arrested Khalil reportedly said they were acting on a state department order to revoke the green card granting him permanent residency.As of Tuesday, Khalil had not been charged with any crime. However, two people with knowledge of the matter told the New York Times that the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was relying on a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that gives him broad power to expel foreigners if they give him “reasonable ground to believe” their presence in the US has “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences”. Zeteo also reported that Rubio himself “personally signed off on the arrest”.As of Monday morning, Khalil was being held at an immigration detention facility near Jena, Louisiana.On Monday evening, a federal judge in Manhattan barred his deportation pending a hearing in his case set for Wednesday.The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights have joined Khalil’s legal team, led by his attorney, Amy Greer. Greer stated on Monday that she had spoken with Khalil and that he was “healthy and his spirits are undaunted by his predicament”.On Tuesday, 13 members of Congress – led by the Palestinian-American US representative Rashida Tlaib – issued a letter demanding his immediate release.The arrest came just days after Donald Trump’s second presidential administration canceled $400m in funding to Columbia University over what it described as the college’s failure to protect students from antisemitic harassment on campus.On Monday, the US education department’s civil rights office followed the cuts to Columbia with new warnings to 60 other colleges and universities indicating that they may face “enforcement actions” for allegations of antisemitic harassment as well as discrimination on their campuses.In Monday’s letters to the 60 higher education institutions, the federal education department’s office of civil rights (OCR) said that the schools are all being investigated in response to complaints of alleged “violations relating to antisemitic harassment and discrimination”.A department statement said it sent the admonitions under the agency’s authority to enforce Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act, which “prohibits any institution that receives federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, color, and national origin”.“National origin includes shared (Jewish) ancestry,” the statement said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe letters stem from an executive order signed by Trump shortly after retaking office in January that purported to “combat antisemitism”. A fact sheet corresponding to Trump’s order suggested deporting international students involved in pro-Palestinian protests.In a statement on Monday, the education secretary, Linda McMahon, said her department was “deeply disappointed that Jewish students studying on elite US campuses continue to fear for their safety amid the relentless antisemitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year”.“University leaders must do better,” the former executive for the WWE professional wrestling promotion said. “US colleges and universities benefit from enormous public investments funded by US taxpayers.“That support is a privilege, and it is contingent on scrupulous adherence to federal anti-discrimination laws.”Trump had recently threatened to halt all federal funding for any college or school that allows “illegal protests” and vowed to imprison “agitators”. The president accused Columbia University of repeatedly failing to protect students from antisemitic harassment.The institution has been a focal point for campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Demonstrations erupted last spring both across the US and internationally, with students calling for an end to the US’s support to the Israeli military as well as demanding that their universities divest from companies with ties to Israel.At Columbia, such protests led to mass arrests, suspensions and the resignation of the university’s president at the time. More

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      US added to international watchlist for rapid decline in civic freedoms

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      The United States has been added to the Civicus Monitor Watchlist, which identifies countries that the global civil rights watchdog believes are currently experiencing a rapid decline in civic freedoms.Civicus, an international non-profit organization dedicated to “strengthening citizen action and civil society around the world”, announced the inclusion of the US on the non-profit’s first watchlist of 2025 on Monday, alongside the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Italy, Pakistan and Serbia.The watchlist is part of the Civicus Monitor, which tracks developments in civic freedoms across 198 countries. Other countries that have previously been featured on the watchlist in recent years include Zimbabwe, Argentina, El Salvador and the United Arab Emirates.Mandeep Tiwana, co-secretary general of Civicus, said that the watchlist “looks at countries where we remain concerned about deteriorating civic space conditions, in relation to freedoms of peaceful assembly, association and expression”.The selection process, the website states, incorporates insights and data from Civicus’s global network of research partners and data.The decision to add the US to the first 2025 watchlist was made in response to what the group described as the “Trump administration’s assault on democratic norms and global cooperation”.In the news release announcing the US’s addition, the organization cited recent actions taken by the Trump administration that they argue will likely “severely impact constitutional freedoms of peaceful assembly, expression, and association”.The group cited several of the administration’s actions such as the mass termination of federal employees, the appointment of Trump loyalists in key government positions, the withdrawal from international efforts such as the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council, the freezing of federal and foreign aid and the attempted dismantling of USAid.The organization warned that these decisions “will likely impact civic freedoms and reverse hard-won human rights gains around the world”.The group also pointed to the administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters, and the Trump administration’s unprecedented decision to control media access to presidential briefings, among others.Civicus described Trump’s actions since taking office as an “unparalleled attack on the rule of law” not seen “since the days of McCarthyism in the twentieth century”, stating that these moves erode the checks and balances essential to democracy.“Restrictive executive orders, unjustifiable institutional cutbacks, and intimidation tactics through threatening pronouncements by senior officials in the administration are creating an atmosphere to chill democratic dissent, a cherished American ideal,” Tiwana said.In addition to the watchlist, the Civicus Monitor classifies the state of civic space in countries using five ratings: open, narrowed, obstructed, repressed and closed.Currently, the US has a “narrowed” rating, which it also had during the Biden administration, meaning that while citizens can exercise their civic freedom, such as rights to association, peaceful assembly and expression, occasional violations occur.For part of Trump’s first term, Tiwana said, the US had been categorized as “obstructed”, due to the administration’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests and restrictive state laws that were enacted limiting the rights of environmental justice protesters, and other actions.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUnder Joe Biden, the classification went back to “narrowed”, Tiwana, said, but as of Monday, the US has been placed on the watchlist as the group says it sees “significant deterioration” in civic freedoms occurring.Tiwana noted that the US is again seemingly headed toward the “obstructed” category.While the Trump administration often say they support fundamental freedoms and individual rights, like free speech, Tiwana believes that the administration seem “to be wanting to support these only for people who they see as agreeing with them”.Historically, Tiwana said, the US has been “considered the beacon of democracy and defense of fundamental freedoms”.“It was an important pillar of US foreign policy, even though it was imperfect, both domestically and how the US promoted it abroad,” he added.But Tiwana believes that the recent actions and statements made by this US administration could empower authoritarian regimes around the world, undermine constitutional principles, and embolden those who “want to accumulate power and increase their wealth and their ability to stay in power for as long as possible”.Tiwana says that he and the organization want to draw attention to the fact that those in power in the US are, in his view, engaging in a “zero-sum politics game” that is eroding “constitutional principles and frankly, engaging in, anti American behavior”.“We urge the United States to uphold the rule of law and respect constitutional and international human rights norms,” said Tiwana. 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      Will Trump put a Fox News host on the US supreme court? Mark Tushnet can’t rule it out

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      Should Donald Trump get the chance to nominate a new justice to the supreme court, to join the three rightwingers he installed in his first term, he might pick “the equivalent of Pete Hegseth”, Mark Tushnet said, referring to the Fox News host who is now US secretary of defense.“Trump as a person has his idiosyncrasies, I’ll put it that way,” Tushnet said, from Harvard, where he is William Nelson Cromwell professor of law, emeritus. “And … I have thought about potential Trump nominees, and actually, what comes to mind is the equivalent of Pete Hegseth: a Fox News legal commentator.”Justice Jeanine Pirro? It’s a thought. Perhaps future historians will debate “The Box of Wine that Saved Nine”. Perhaps not.“I wouldn’t rule it out,” Tushnet said, of his Fox News theory, if not of Pirro, per se. “I don’t think it’s highly likely, but given the way those things work, and given the idea that you want people who aren’t simply judges, it’s not a lunatic thought, I guess.”The reference to “people who aren’t simply judges” is to arguments laid out in Tushnet’s new book, Who Am I to Judge?, in which he makes his case against the prevalence of judicial theories, particularly originalism, to which conservatives adhere, and calls for a rethink of how justices are selected.Tushnet is a liberal voice. Provocatively, he writes that Amy Coney Barrett, the third Trump justice who in 2022 helped remove the federal right to abortion, at least has a hinterland different from most court picks, as a member of People of Praise, a hardline Catholic sect.“I think her involvement in that group has exposed her to a much wider range of human experience than John Roberts’s background, for example,” Tushnet said, referring to the chief justice who was a Reagan White House aide and a federal judge. “And so if you’re looking for people who have been exposed to human experience across the board, I think she’s a reasonable candidate for that.”View image in fullscreenConey Barrett cemented the 6-3 rightwing majority that has given Trump wins including rejecting attempts to exclude him from the ballot for inciting an insurrection and ruling that presidents have some legal immunity. Now, as Trump appears to imagine himself a king and oversees an authoritarian assault on the federal government, reading Tushnet and talking to him generates a sort of grim humor.Looking ahead, to when Trump’s executive orders might land before the justices, Tushnet suggests “the court will put … speed bumps in the way of the administration. They won’t say: ‘Absolutely you can’t do it,’ except the birthright citizenship order.”That order, signed on Trump’s first day back in power, seeks to end the right to citizenship for all children born on American soil and subject to US jurisdiction, as guaranteed under the 14th amendment since 1868.On 23 January, a federal judge said Trump’s order was so “blatantly unconstitutional” that it “boggled” his mind. Should it reach the supreme court, Tushnet can see the rightwing justices “saying: ‘Look, yeah, if you want to do this, we’re not saying you can, but if you want to do it, you got to get Congress to go along. You can’t just do it on your own.’ So that would be a speed bump.”That said, Tushnet sometimes thinks “about how in the US, there are these traffic-calming measures that are literally speed bumps but sometimes, if you go over too fast, you fly”. Trump, he said, has licensed rightwing justices to take decisions that “may not count as speed bumps if you fly off them”.Tushnet was happy to answer a question he thinks all supreme court nominees should be asked: what’s your favorite book and favorite movie?Tushnet’s favorites are Middlemarch by George Eliot and Heaven, a 2002 film directed by Tom Tykwer from a script co-written by Krzysztof Kieślowski. He wrote his book containing such questions, he said, “because I had this longstanding sense that the [supreme court] nomination process has gotten off the rails, mostly by focusing exclusively on judges as potential nominees, and secondarily by focusing on constitutional theory.“For the past 20 years, the court … has been dominated by people whose background was as judges or appellate advocates, and historically that was quite unusual. There are always some judges but there always had been people with much broader kinds of experience, including a former president, William H Taft [chief justice between 1921 and 1930], and several candidates for the presidency, including Charles Evans Hughes [1916], Earl Warren [a vice-presidential pick in 1948], senators like Hugo Black. And those people had disappeared from consideration for the court, and that seemed to be a bad idea.”Tushnet describes a “political reconstitution of the nomination process provoked in large measure by the Republican reaction to the Warren court”, which sat from 1953 to 1969, the era of great civil rights reforms.“I think their view was the Warren court was not composed of judges, they were politicians, some called them ‘politicians in robes’, and Republicans sort of thought the way to get away from the substantive jurisprudence of the Warren court was to put judges on the court, rather than people with what I call broad experience,” Tushnet said.One justice on the current court was not previously a judge: Elena Kagan, one of the three besieged liberals, was dean of Harvard Law School, then solicitor general under Barack Obama.Tushnet “went into the project thinking that I would find more great justices who had been a politician than I actually did. When I was teaching, I would do this thing about who the justices were who decided Brown v Board of Education”, the 1954 ruling that ended segregation in public schools, “and I think it’s fair to say that not one of them’s primary prior experience was as a judge, and like seven or eight of their prior primary experiences were as a politician. And if Brown v Board is the premier achievement of the supreme court, the fact that it was decided by a court primarily made up of politicians counts in favor of thinking about politicians when appointing to the court.”“Why not do it? For me, the main feature of having been a politician is not that you’ve taken stances aligned with one or another political party at the time, but that you’ve provided reasons in many different ways, you’ve grown up amongst people with a wide range of life experiences that you’ve had to think about, as a politician, in order to get their votes, in order to get your way,” he said.Tushnet’s ideal might be Charles Evans Hughes, an associate justice from 1910 to 1916 and chief justice between 1930 and 1941, but also governor of New York, Republican candidate for president and US secretary of state.On the page, Tushnet imagines asking Hughes a question – “What constitutional theories do you use?” – and getting an appealing answer: “I try to interpret the constitution to make it a suitable instrument for governance in today’s United States.”Tushnet says modern judges and justices should say the same, rather than reach for judicial theories. His new book is in part an answer to a demolition of originalism by Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley law school: “I distinguish, I think, more clearly than other people have, including Erwin, between what I call academic originalism and judicial originalism.”Either form of originalism concerns working out what the founders meant when they wrote the constitution, then advocating its application to modern-day questions. Tushnet “think[s] a good chunk of academic originalism is not subject to many of the criticisms that Erwin levels. It’s not perfect but it’s an academic enterprise, and people work out difficulties, and there’s controversy within the camp and so on.View image in fullscreen“Judicial originalism is different because it has a couple of components. One is, we now know it’s quite selective. To get originalism into the TikTok decision, for example, you have to do an enormous amount of work. It’s not impossible, but it’s not an originalist opinion, fundamentally. So [justices are] selectively originalist, or, as my phrase is, opportunistically originalist. They use it when the sources that they’re presented with support conclusions they would want to reach anyway, and the adversary process at the supreme court isn’t a very good way of finding out what they say they’re trying to find out. And so as a judicial enterprise, originalism just doesn’t do what it purports to do.”To Tushnet, the late Antonin Scalia, an arch-conservative and originalist, is “the leading candidate to be placed on a list of great justices” of the past 50 years, “because of his influence and his contributions to the court.“But one bad contribution was his widely admired writing style. Now, writing styles change over time. And having read an enormous number of opinions of the 1930s, I know there’s an improvement in readability since the 1930s. But the idea that [opinions] become more readable, accessible and memorable by including Scalia-like zingers, short phrases that are quotable and memorable, seems to be just a mistake. But he’s very influential, and so people try to emulate him … Justice Kagan does it in a gentler way. I guess my inclination would be to say: ‘If you’re going to do it, do it the way Justice Kagan does, rather than the way Justice Scalia did.’”Tushnet agrees that some of Scalia’s pugilistic spirit seems to have passed into Samuel Alito, the arch-conservative author of the Dobbs v Jackson ruling, which removed abortion rights, if while shedding all vestiges of humor.In his book, Tushnet shows how Alito’s Dobbs ruling contained a clear mistake, the sort of thing that is largely down to the role clerks play in drafting opinions, as Tushnet once did for Thurgood Marshall, the first Black American justice.“Times were quite different then,” Tushnet said. “The year I was there, the court decided 150 cases. Now they’re deciding under 50 a year … the year I was there was the year Roe v Wade was decided [1973, establishing the right to abortion, now lost]. It had been resolved fundamentally the year before, so they were just cleaning things up, but we knew these were consequential decisions.”The court will soon have more consequential decisions to make. In the meantime, talk of a constitutional crisis, of a president defying the courts, grows increasingly heated.“My sense is that we’re not at the crisis point yet,” Tushnet said. “Like many administrations before it, the Trump administration is taking aggressive legal positions, which may or may not be vindicated. If they’re not vindicated, they’re muttering about what they’ll do. That’s happened before.“My favorite example is that in the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt, while a major decision was pending, had his staff prepare two press releases, one saying: ‘Actually the court has upheld our position,’ the other saying: ‘The court mistakenly rejected our position, and we’re going to go ahead with it anyway.’ Now, they didn’t have to issue that press release, because the court went with the administration. But, you know, muttering about resistance is not historically unusual. Resisting would be quite, quite dramatic, but we’re not there yet.”

      Who Am I to Judge? is published by Yale University Press More

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      Trump’s effort to curtail birthright citizenship suffers yet another setback

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      Donald Trump’s effort to curtail automatic birthright citizenship nationwide as part of his hardline immigration crackdown suffered another legal setback on Friday when a second federal appeals court declined to lift one of the court orders blocking the Republican president’s executive order.The Richmond, Virginia-based 4th US circuit court of appeals on a 2-1 vote rejected the Trump administration’s request for an order putting on hold a nationwide injunction issued by a federal judge in Maryland who concluded the order was unconstitutional.“For well over a century, the federal government has recognized the birthright citizenship of children born in this country to undocumented or non-permanent immigrants,” the appeals court’s majority said.It said it was “hard to overstate the confusion and upheaval” that would result from allowing Trump’s order to take effect, as it challenged long-standing legal interpretations and practice in ways that could cause “chaos”.The panel’s majority included the US circuit judges Roger Gregory and Pamela Harris, both appointees of Democratic presidents. The US circuit judge Paul Niemeyer, an appointee of Republican former president George HW Bush, dissented, saying a nationwide injunction was “inappropriate”.It was the second time an appellate court had taken up Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship, whose fate may ultimately be decided by the US supreme court.Another appeals court last week declined to lift a similar injunction issued by a judge in Seattle. Other judges in Massachusetts and New Hampshire have likewise enjoined the order, finding it violates the US constitution. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.Trump’s order, signed on his first day back in the White House on 20 January, directed US agencies to refuse to recognize the citizenship of children born in the United States if neither their mother nor father was a US citizen or lawful permanent resident.That order was to apply to children born after 19 February, but implementation has been repeatedly blocked by judges at the urging of immigrant rights groups and Democratic state attorneys general. It has also been rejected by the supreme court in the past. More

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      Julianne Moore’s freckles? How Republican bans on ‘woke’ books have reached new level

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      When the actor Julianne Moore learned her children’s book, Freckleface Strawberry, a tale of a girl who learns to stop hating her freckles, had been targeted for a potential ban at all schools serving US military families, she took to Instagram, posting that it was a “great shock” to discover the story had been “banned by the Trump Administration”.Moore had seen a memo that circulated last week revealing that tens of thousands of American children studying in about 160 Pentagon schools both in the US and around the world had had all access to library books suspended for a week, while officials conducted a “compliance review” to hunt out any books “potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics”.Although whether Moore’s book would be selected for “further review” or banned entirely remains unclear, the episode brought into stark relief that the movement to ban books in the US – which has been bubbling up for several years, mostly in individual states – had reached a whole new level: the federal one.Donald Trump’s re-election, and his subsequent crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, has many campaigners fearing that the Pentagon move to scrub its libraries of anything it opposes ideologically could be the first of a series of broad attempts to eliminate any discussions of race, LGBTQ+ issues, diversity and historical education from public schools.The Trump administration has scoffed at the idea that it is banning books, and last month it instructed the Department of Education to end its investigations into the matter, referring to bans as a “hoax”. Indeed, many deny that banning books is censorship at all – a disconnect that stems not just from the historical context of book banning, but from a semantic dispute over what it means to “ban” something.In the early 20th century, books such as Ulysses by James Joyce and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck were banned due to “moral concerns”.Likewise, the red scare of the 1950s saw increased censorship of materials perceived as sympathetic to communism, while the 1980s saw attacks against books dealing with race and sexuality, such as The Color Purple by Alice Walker, which was nearly banned two years after its release in 1984 after a parent petitioned against its use in an Oakland, California, classroom.The difference today, however, is that instead of coming primarily from conservative community organizers, the book banning movement is now coming from government – school boards, local governments and now, with the Pentagon move, even the federal government, increasingly working in lockstep.The modern wave of book bans could be said to have started with a backlash against The 1619 Project, a journalistic anthology by Nikole Hannah-Jones published by the New York Times. The project aimed to reframe US history by centering the contributions of Black Americans, but conservative politicians – including Trump – claimed it taught students to “hate their own country”.View image in fullscreenIn response, Republican lawmakers moved to ban the work in schools, marking the beginning of an intensified campaign against so-called “anti-American” literature.According to PEN America, a non-profit dedicated to defending free expression in literature, more than 10,000 book bans occurred in public schools during the 2023-2024 school year. Books that address racism, gender and history were disproportionately targeted.“The whole principle of public education is that it is not supposed to be dictated by particular ideologies that aim to censor what other people can learn and access in schools,” Jonathan Friedman, the managing director for US free expression programs at PEN America, said.Rightwing politicians, however, have increasingly used book banning as a rallying cry, portraying certain books as tools of “indoctrination” – failing to note the irony that indoctrination is the process of carefully limiting ideas, like banning books.One key figure has been the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis. He has echoed Trump’s dismissal of book bans as a “hoax”, and spearheaded multiple attempts to reshape education to reflect only conservative values, including the Stop Woke Act, which restricts discussions on systemic racism, and the Parental Rights in Education Act, widely known as the “don’t say gay” law, which limits discussions of gender identity and sexuality in classrooms.Banned titles in Florida schools now include Beloved and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Normal People by Sally Rooney, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.What DeSantis and other rightwingers often say is that these efforts don’t truly constitute “bans” because they only remove books from schools, rather than totally outlawing them from being bought in the US, and therefore don’t encroach on free speech. John Chrastka, the executive director and founder of EveryLibrary, argued that this is faulty reasoning.“The private marketplace is protected by the first amendment in ways that the government is not beholden to,” he said. “The idea that because a book is still available for sale means that it’s not being banned outright is only the difference between a framework that was in place prior to the 1950s” and today.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe noted that Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was first published in 1928 in Europe, was banned in the US for several years before finally getting its American publication in 1959 in what was a watershed affirmation of the right to free speech. Realizing that the first amendment prevented them from blocking the book from US bookstores, critics turned their attention to libraries instead, a grayer area in terms of constitutional protections.DeSantis and other rightwing politicians have taken the lesson: if the constitution prevents you from banning a book from being bought or sold in Florida, the next best thing is to ban it from the places most people would have the easiest access to it – schools and libraries.“It doesn’t add up,” Chrastka added, “the idea that a teenager in a state where it’s impossible for them to get to an independent bookstore because they don’t exist any more somehow has enough liberty to buy the book when the school library is blocked from having it available for them.”Another key distinction is between banning books from classroom curriculum versus removing them from school libraries – which, unlike classrooms, are historically protected spaces for free access to ideas.“What you read for a class supports the curriculum,” says Chrastka, whereas “the school library is supposed to support independent reading. One of them is required reading and the other one isn’t, but [the reading material] is meant to be available.”The landmark supreme court case Island Trees School District v Pico in 1982, when a school board in New York removed books from its libraries it deemed “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy”, established that school boards cannot restrict the availability of books in their libraries simply because they don’t like or agree with the content.Critics contend the new wave of book bans, although not yet about preventing sales at bookshops, fails to meet the intended purpose of libraries: to preserve and provide a variety of ideas and information that may not be readily or equally accessible to everyone.Now, many fear that once certain books are established as unacceptable in schools, the censorship could spread to colleges, bookstores and eventually nationwide bans. Even if that does not happen, experts say one of the most reliable ways to ensure ideas are suppressed is to dismantle the education system, making Trump’s repeatedly stated goal of eliminating the Department of Education a particular concern.“The vast majority of the budget for the Department of Education and the laws and regulations that make sure that the department is functional go to help students succeed and protect students who are otherwise vulnerable,” said Chrastka.With the education system having been chipped away at for decades with budgets cuts, low literacy rates and high dropout rates, book bans only make it weaker.“What we need in this country is for students to feel supported and to find their own identities, and reading is a core component of that,” Chrastka said. “Let’s let the kids discover themselves and discover their own path forward in the process.” More

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      Republican says he wouldn’t back unconstitutional third Trump term

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      A conservative lawmaker poured cold water on extremist Republican fantasies that Donald Trump could find a way to run for an unconstitutional third presidential term, saying he would not support that barring an amendment to the US constitution that would legalize it.Asked Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press about Trump’s boasts that he might just stay in the Oval Office after his second presidency ends in 2028, the Republican US senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma said: “No, I’m not changing the constitution, first of all, unless the American people chose to do that.”The comments from Mullin – who made it a point to invoke the maxim among some that Trump should be taken seriously though not literally – referred to a 1951 constitutional amendment that barred US presidents from serving beyond two terms.The exchange between Meet the Press host Kristen Welker and Mullin came after after Republican congressman Andy Ogles of Tennessee proposed a resolution in support of a constitutional amendment that would allow Trump to serve a third stint in the White House because his two terms were not consecutive. That would bar the other three living former presidents who served two consecutive terms from seeking the Oval Office again.Furthermore, Trump recently referred to himself as “King” – a title with no term limits – when discussing his push to halt New York’s congestion pricing policy.The US constitution expressly forbids presidents from running for a third term thanks to its 22nd amendment. That amendment was introduced after Franklin D Roosevelt served two terms after being elected in 1932 – and then was re-elected in 1940 and 1944 amid the second world war. He served as president until his death in 1945.Proposing to change that amendment – in the form Ogles suggested or otherwise – would need approval from two-thirds of both the US Senate and House, which is a margin of control that Trump’s Republican party does not have in Congress. Three-fourths of the US’s state legislatures also would need to approve the change.Republicans as of last year controlled only the legislatures and governorships of about 23 of the US’s 50 states. Democrats controlled those same levers of power in 17 states, with the rest being divided.Nonetheless, that steep math has not stopped Trump from raising the possibility of staying in office beyond his second presidential term since his victory in November’s White House election.At a White House event on Thursday, he teased: “Should I run again? You tell me.”The audience, which included elected Republican officials like US senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and Congressman John James of Michigan as well as famed golfer Tiger Woods, responded with chants of: “Four more years!”According to the Washington Post, Trump remarked that the crowd reaction to his comments would draw “controversy”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThey did indeed.On Sunday, the Democratic US House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said Trump is trying to “disorient everyday Americans” by talking about a third term and referring to himself as a monarch. Jeffries said those “outrageous” comments were “intentionally unleashing extremism”.Trump “is not a king”, Jeffries said on CNN’s State of the Union. “We will never bend the knee. Not now, not ever. And we’ll continue to point out that he’s focused on the wrong things.”As Republicans are wont to do when Trump muses on unconstitutional ideas, Mullin on Sunday insisted Trump was only joking about pursuing a third White House term.“The president is a very interesting guy that you can find extreme humor when you sit down to visit with him,” Mullin added. “At the same time, he can be deadly serious.” More

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      ‘X-rays into the president’s soul’: Jeffrey Toobin on Trump, Biden and the pardon power

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      To Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy, pardons are “X-rays into the soul” of the American president who gives them, revealing true character. Pardons can show compassion and mercy in the occupant of the Oval Office. More often, they expose venality and self-preservation.Toobin said: “One thing you can say about Donald Trump is that his moral compass always points in the same direction, and his motives are always the same, which are transactional and narcissistic. This is a good example, I think, of my thesis that pardons are X-rays into the president’s soul.”In his first term, Trump “wanted to settle a score with Robert Mueller, so he pardoned everyone Mueller prosecuted” in the special counsel’s investigation of Russian election interference in 2016 and links between Trump and Moscow, Toobin said.“Trump wanted to take care of his family, so he pardoned his daughter’s father-in-law, Charles Kushner,” who is now nominated as US ambassador to France, the author added. “He wanted to reward his House Republican allies, so he pardoned several who were engaged in egregious corruption, and he pardoned people who were [his son-in-law and adviser] Jared Kushner’s friends.”Asked why he wrote his 10th book to come out now, so soon after such a momentous election, Toobin, a former CNN legal analyst and New Yorker writer, said: “I saw that from a very early stage in the campaign Trump was talking about January 6 pardons. But I also recognized that if Kamala Harris won, there would be pressure on her to pardon Trump” on 44 federal criminal charges now dismissed.“I think the proper way to understand the January 6 pardons [issued on day one of Trump’s second term] is to remember that Trump himself was a January 6 defendant, Toobin said. “He wasn’t charged with the riot the way the others were, but he was charged with trying to overthrow the election with the fake electors scheme. And if you look at the way in the beginning part of his second term he is settling scores and rewarding his friends, the January 6 pardons told you exactly how he was going to go about conducting his administration.”Reportedly saying: “Fuck it, release ’em all”, Trump gave pardons, commutations or other acts of clemency to the absurd, such as the J6 Praying Grandma and the QAnon Shaman, and to the outright sinister: hundreds who attacked police, militia leaders convicted of seditious conspiracy, Toobin wrote.He said: “If Trump had tried to carve out the non-violent January 6 rioters [for clemency], that that would have been somewhat more defensible than what he wound up doing, which was, in my view, completely indefensible.”His point about pardons being an X-ray for the soul applies to Joe Biden too.On the page, Toobin decries the 46th president’s decision to pardon his son, Hunter Biden, on gun and tax charges and any other grounds, having said he would not do so.Toobin said: “When you think about Hunter, this is a guy who was convicted of a crime, who pleaded guilty to other crimes. So it’s not like these were made-up accusations against him. Yes, the criminal justice system came down hard on him, but the criminal justice system comes down hard on a lot of people, and their father wasn’t president of the United States, so they don’t get this kind of break. And I just think that’s not how the system is supposed to work.”Publishing schedules being what they are, The Pardon does not cover the last-minute pre-emptive pardons Biden gave his brothers, his sister and their spouses, as well as public figures held to be in danger of persecution by Trump, Liz Cheney and Gen Mark Milley among them.But Toobin told the Guardian: “The family pardons were just bizarre, because these people, as far as I’m aware, are not even under investigation. But [Biden] was so worried and fixated on his family that he took this extraordinary step, which is just egregious to me.”The pardon is older than America. British kings could pardon people. When the states broke away, they kept the pardon for presidents. George Washington used it after the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, for men convicted of treason. Abraham Lincoln used it during the civil war to reprieve Union soldiers sentenced to die and to forgive Confederates in the name of peace.Such acts of mercy continue, memorably including Jimmy Carter’s clemency for those who dodged the draft for Vietnam and Barack Obama’s record-setting issue of commutations for people mostly jailed for minor crimes. Even Trump handed down mercy in his first term, amid the push which produced the First Step Act, criminal justice reform he swiftly seemed to forget.Asked which modern president has best used the pardon power for the public good, Toobin picks Obama. Inevitably, though, most public attention falls on use of the power for controversial ends, including George HW Bush’s mop-up of the Iran-Contra scandal and Bill Clinton’s last-minute pardon for Marc Rich, a financier turned fugitive.The most famous pardon of all, the one Gerald Ford gave Richard Nixon after the Watergate scandal, hangs over every president. As Toobin sees it, had Harris taken office in January, pressure to pardon Trump of his alleged federal crimes would have been great, and it would have sprung from “an interesting shift in the conventional wisdom” about Ford and Nixon.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It was widely considered a disaster in 1974” – Carl Bernstein told Bob Woodward, his Washington Post partner in reporting Watergate, “The son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch” – “but now you’ve had Ted Kennedy giving Gerald Ford an award, saying he was right about the pardon. You have Bob Woodward changing his mind [to say the pardon was ‘an act of courage’]’, and at the oral argument of the Trump v United States supreme court case [about presidential immunity, last April], Justice Brett Kavanaugh said, ‘Well, everyone now agrees Ford did the right thing.’”Toobin thinks Ford did the wrong thing, given Nixon’s clearly criminal behavior. He was also “struck by the absence of a book heavily focused on that issue of the Ford pardon. So all those combinations led me to try to not only write a book, but have it come out in early 2025.”He duly devotes most of that book to the Nixon pardon: how Ford agonized about it, decided to do it, then employed an obscure young lawyer to make sure Nixon took it.“I had certainly never heard of Benton Becker when I went into this,” Toobin said. “And I think his central role illustrates how ill-prepared Ford was for the whole issue of dealing with Nixon, because if you want to address an issue that will be the central event of your presidency, maybe you want to entrust it to someone who is not a young volunteer lawyer, who is himself under criminal investigation.“Now, if you say that, you should say that Becker [who died in 2015] was completely cleared. But it struck me as ludicrous that a president with the entire resources of the White House counsel’s office, the justice department and the entire American government, chose to invest so much authority in this young man. I think that just illustrates how Ford’s anxiousness to get the whole Nixon subject behind him led him to fail to consider the consequences of what he was doing.”The rights and wrongs of the Nixon pardon echo to this day. Looking again to last year’s supreme court arguments over presidential immunity, which the justices decided did apply in relation to official acts, Toobin said: “I thought the best question at that oral argument was Justice [Ketanji Brown] Jackson saying, ‘If presidents are immune, why did Ford need to pardon Nixon?’ Which is a great question, and doesn’t really have an answer. The only real answer is that [Chief Justice] John Roberts just completely changed the rules” in Trump’s favor.The Pardon is Toobin’s guide to how presidential pardons work, for good or often ill. He is not optimistic that the power can be reined in or usefully reformed:“The both good and bad news is that our constitution is almost impossible to amend, and no one cares enough about pardons one way or the other to undertake the massive task of of trying to amend the constitution. It’s not even clear how you would amend it. My solution to pardon problems is not changing the constitution, it’s getting better presidents.”That will have to wait – at least for four more years.

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      ‘This is a coup’: Trump and Musk’s purge is cutting more than costs, say experts

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      Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s radical drive to slash billions of dollars in annual federal spending with huge job and regulatory cuts is spurring charges that they have made illegal moves while undercutting congressional and judicial powers, say legal experts, Democrats and state attorneys general.Trump’s fusillade of executive orders expanding his powers in some extreme ways in his cost-cutting fervor, coupled with unprecedented drives by the Musk-led so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to slash many agency workforces and regulations, have created chaos across the US government and raised fears of a threat to US democracy.Trump and Musk have also attacked judges who have made rulings opposing several of their moves after they ended up in court, threatening at least one with impeachment and accusing him of improper interference.“In the US, we appeal rulings we disagree with – we don’t ignore court orders or threaten judges with impeachment just because we don’t like the decision. This is a coup, plain and simple,” Arizona’s attorney general, Kris Mayes, said.Trump and Musk, the world’s richest man and Trump’s largest single donor, now face multiple rebukes from judges and legal experts to the regulatory and staff cuts they have engineered at the treasury department, the US Agency for International Development and several other agencies.Incongruously, as Trump has touted Musk’s cost-cutting work as vital to curbing spending abuses, one of Trump’s first moves in office last month was to fire 17 veteran agency watchdogs, known as inspectors general, whose jobs have long been to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse in federal departments.Those firings were done without giving Congress the legally required 30 days’ notice and specific justifications for each one, prompting mostly Democratic outrage at Trump’s move, which he defended as due to “changing priorities”, and falsely claimed was “standard”.In response to the firings, eight of those inspectors general filed a lawsuit against Trump and their department heads on Wednesday arguing their terminations violated federal laws designed to protect them from interference with their jobs and seeking reinstatement.The IGs who sued included ones from the Departments of Defense, Education and Health and Human Services.View image in fullscreenDemocratic critics and legal experts see Trump’s IG firings and Musk’s Doge operation as blatant examples of executive power plays at the expense of Congress and transparency.“I think their claims that they’re going after waste, fraud and abuse is a complete smokescreen for their real intentions,” said Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.Likening Trump’s firing of the IGs to “firing cops before you rob the bank”, Whitehouse stressed: “It’s pretty clear that what’s going on here is a very deliberate effort to create as much wreckage in the government as they can manage with a view to helping out the big Trump donors and special interests who find government obnoxious in various ways.”On another legal track opposing Trump and Musk’s actions, many of the nation’s 23 Democratic state attorneys general have escalated legal battles against Doge’s actions and sweeping cost cutting at treasury, USAid and other agencies.For instance, 19 Democratic AGs sued Trump and the treasury secretary in February to halt Doge from accessing sensitive documents with details about tens of millions of Americans who get social security checks, tax refunds and other payments, arguing that Doge was violating the Administrative Procedures Act. The lawsuit prompted a New York judge on 7 February to issue a temporary order halting Doge from accessing the treasury payments system.In response, Musk and Trump lashed out by charging judicial interference. Musk on his social media platform Twitter/X where he has more than 200 million followers charged that the judge was “corrupt” and that he “needs to be impeached NOW”.Trump, with Musk nearby in the Oval Office on Tuesday, echoed his Doge chief saying: “It seems hard to believe that a judge could say, ‘We don’t want you to do that,’ so maybe we have to look at the judges because I think that’s a very serious violation.”Legal experts, AGs and top congressional Democrats say that Trump’s and Musk’s charges of improper judicial interference and some of their actions pose dangers to the rule of law and the US constitution.View image in fullscreen“The president is openly violating the US constitution by taking power from Congress and handing it to an unelected billionaire – while Elon Musk goes after judges who uphold the law and rule against them,” said Mayes.Ex-federal prosecutors echo some of Mayes’s arguments.“The suggestions by Trump, Musk and Vance that courts are impermissibly interfering with Trump’s mandate to lead is absurd,” said the former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade, who now teaches law at the University of Michigan.“Under our constitutional separation of powers system, each co-equal branch serves as a check on the others. The role of the courts is to strike down abuses of executive power when it violates the law. Comments disparaging the courts seems like a dangerous effort to undermine public confidence in the judiciary. If people do not respect the courts, they will be less inclined to obey their orders.”Likewise, some former judges worry that certain judges could face violence sparked by the threats Musk and Trump have publicly made.“While federal judges expect people to disagree with their opinions, I have long feared that personal attacks like those from Trump and Musk against at least one New York judge would expose them to harm and even death,” said the former federal judge and Dickinson College president, John Jones.“Worse, judges are essentially defenseless when it comes to fighting the false narratives that are being promulgated because their code of conduct prevents them from engaging with the irresponsible people who make these statements.”Legal experts too are increasingly alarmed about how Musk and Trump are exceeding their power at the expense of Congress, including some of the retaliatory firings by Trump against critics or perceived political foes.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn one egregious case the IG for USAid, Paul Martin, on Tuesday was abruptly fired almost immediately after he issued a highly critical report warning of serious economic repercussions from the sweeping job cuts that Doge was making as it gutted agency staff.Musk has blasted USAid, which doled out over $40bn in congressionally authorized aid in 2023 and consummated $86bn in private sector deals, as a “criminal organization” and an “arm of the criminal left globalists”. The agency’s mission is to provide humanitarian aid and fund development assistance and tech projects in developing countries.“The firing of IG Paul Martin, a highly respected and experienced inspector general, on the day after his office released a critical report, risks sending a chilling message that is antithetical to IGs’ ability to conduct impactful independent oversight on behalf of the American taxpayer,” said the ex-defense department IG Robert Storch.Storch, one of the 17 IGs Trump fired abruptly last month who has joined the lawsuit against the Trump administration, stressed more broadly that “IGs play an essential role in leading offices comprised of oversight professionals across the federal government to detect and deter waste, fraud, abuse and corruption.”A former IG, who requested anonymity to speak freely, warned bluntly: “Trump and Musk are gaslighting the American people. No one should believe Musk and his troops have actually discovered billions of dollars of waste, fraud, abuse and ‘corruption’. If they had, we would know the specifics. They can’t provide them and they won’t. At most, they have seen things that may need to be explained, but they haven’t bothered to seek the explanation from anyone with relevant knowledge.”Despite rising concerns about the powers assumed by Musk, Trump unveiled a new executive order in the Oval Office on Tuesday expanding Musk’s authority and mandate.Trump’s new order requires federal agencies to “coordinate and consult” with Doge to slash jobs and curb hiring, according to a White House summary.All agencies were instructed to “undertake plans for large-scale reductions in force” and limit new hires to only “essential positions”, according to the summary.View image in fullscreenDuring the Oval Office meeting on Tuesday Musk spoke in grandiose terms about his mission with a few dubious and broad claims about frauds that it had uncovered, while declaring without evidence that it was what “the people want”.Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, which have received billions of dollars in federal contracts in recent years, is wielding his new federal authority as a “special government employee” without giving up his private-sector jobs. Musk’s post is a temporary one that bypasses some of the disclosure requirements for full-time federal employees.As Musk’s powers have expanded and Doge has done work in more than a dozen agencies, 14 state AGs filed a lawsuit in federal court in DC on Thursday broadly challenging Musk and Doge’s authority to obtain access to sensitive government data and wield “virtually unchecked power”.The lawsuit argues that Trump violated the constitution’s appointments clause by establishing a federal agency without Congress’s approval.At bottom, some legal experts and watchdogs say the threats posed by Musk’s cost-cutting drive that Trump has blessed, are linked to the record sums that Musk gave Trump’s campaign.“After Musk reportedly spent close to $300m to help Trump get elected, Trump has been giving Musk what appears to be unprecedented access to the inner levers of government, including private and confidential information about individuals,” said Larry Noble, a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission who now teaches law at American University.“Musk and his followers can use that access to help Trump kill or neutralize congressionally created agencies and rules that serve and protect the public interest, while ensuring the government protects and serves the ability of the wealthy to grow their fortunes.”Other legal watchdogs fear more dangerous fallout to the rule of law from Trump’s greenlighting Musk’s Doge operation and agenda.“President Trump has not only afforded Elon Musk and Doge extraordinary power over federal agency operations with little public oversight and accountability, but he has also done so at the expense of Congress and its constitutionally mandated power,” said Donald Sherman, the chief counsel at the liberal-leaning watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.“Trump enabled Musk’s capture of the federal government after illegally firing more than a dozen inspectors general despite Congress strengthening the laws protecting IGs less than three years ago … ”Sherman noted that “what’s even more troubling is that congressional Republicans have been more than willing to cede their constitutional powers in service of President Trump and Elon Musk’s political agenda.” More

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      The courts are a crucial bastion against Trump. What if he ignores their orders?

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      Years before he became the US vice-president and openly advocated defiance of the courts over the Trump administration’s blitz through the federal bureaucracy and constitution, JD Vance revealed his contempt for legal constraints.In 2021, Vance predicted that Donald Trump would again be elected president and advised him to “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people”.“Then when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it,’” he told the Jack Murphy Live podcast.Whether the seventh American president actually said that remains disputed, but the sentiment is alive and well as the Trump administration defies federal court orders to at least pause its subversion of the constitution and destructive rampage through the federal bureaucracy led by Elon Musk.In the absence of action by Congress to defend its powers, it has been government workers, state attorneys general and unions who have counterattacked, with a flurry of lawsuits – challenging presidential orders to limit the constitutional right of anyone born in the US to be a citizen, a federal funding freeze, and the dismissal of corruption watchdogs, among other measures. Nearly 50 legal challenges have been filed in the last three weeks, an unprecedented pushback in the courts against a new administration.The lawsuits have resulted in a string of court rulings. They have put a hold on some of Trump’s executive orders freezing some spending. They have also restricted Musk, head of the so-called “department of government efficiency”, from sending his staff to rifle through the financial records of federal agencies such as the US Agency for International Development (USAid) and the education department as a means to restrict their work or even close them down.But it quickly became apparent that the administration was defying some of the court orders, while its supporters attacked what they called “rogue judges” for ruling against Trump – and Vance portrayed the courts as just another bureaucratic obstacle to the president implementing the people’s will.That has prompted warnings from legal scholars, including Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley law school, of a constitutional crisis in the making.“It’s very frightening to think that they will disobey court orders. If they don’t, it will be a constitutional crisis unlike anything this country has seen, because if the president can violate constitutional laws and disobey court orders then the name for that is a dictatorship,” he said.“This isn’t the realm of normal. What we’ve seen in the first three weeks is unprecedented in American history.”The judge John McConnell has accused the Trump administration of deliberately disobeying an order obliging the government to reinstate billions of dollars in grants. Another judge, Loren AliKhan, accused the administration of defying its legal obligations after she ordered the office for budget and management (OMB) to halt a spending freeze.Vance pushed back against the rulings on X.“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” he wrote.“Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”Musk called for one of the judges involved to be impeached.Trump won a victory on Thursday when a judge ruled in favour of Musk’s offer to almost all of the 2 million-strong federal workforce of eight months of pay for not working if they resign now. The email’s subject line, “Fork in the Road”, was the same as one he used in a message to employees when he bought Twitter in 2022 and got rid of about 80% of its staff. Shortly after the deadline set by the email for voluntary redundancy, which was accepted by about 65,000 federal workers, unions said involuntary dismissals had begun.Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, praised the rare court victory.“This goes to show that lawfare will not ultimately prevail over the will of 77 million Americans who supported President Trump and his priorities,” she said.But mostly the courts have so far ruled against the Trump administration as it pursues a power grab.The American Bar Association, which represents hundreds of thousands of lawyers in the US, has condemned what it called the Trump administration’s “wide-scale affronts to the rule of law itself”.“We have seen attempts at wholesale dismantling of departments and entities created by Congress without seeking the required congressional approval to change the law,” it said.The ABA also condemned “efforts to dismiss employees with little regard for the law and protections they merit” and social media posts intended “to inflame”.“This is chaotic. It may appeal to a few. But it is wrong. And most Americans recognize it is wrong. It is also contrary to the rule of law,” it said.It’s likely that at least some of the flood of lawsuits will end up before the supreme court. The administration may in fact want to see some cases reach the highest court, which has a solid conservative majority after Trump appointed three of its nine justices during his first term, as it seeks to consolidate even more power in the presidency over issues such as who has final control over spending allocated by Congress.But the process of moving through district and appeals courts before making it to the supreme court is unlikely to be swift, by which time Musk may already have achieved much of what he aims to do in wrecking the work of USAid, the education department and other federal agencies.Then there is the unpredictability of a supreme court that has already overturned precedent in striking down the right to abortion.Chemerinsky believes the Trump administration is all but certain to lose cases on birthright citizenship, the freeze on spending and the dismissals of commissioners that oversee labour rights, consumer protection and equal employment opportunities, because they are in breach of federal law. He said the court was also likely to order the administration to back down from attempts to eliminate individual agencies created by Congress.But what if the administration follows Vance’s call to openly defy the courts? Chemerinsky said that would set up “a constitutional confrontation unlike any we’ve seen”.“The courts have limited ability to enforce their orders. They could hold individuals other than the president in contempt of court. They could figure out who’s responsible for carrying out the court order and hold that person in contempt with fines or jail for civil contempt. But the idea of the courts holding a cabinet secretary, an attorney general, a secretary of defence in contempt is just unheard of in the United States,” he said.“It’s so hard to imagine where we’ll be in four years. When you think about what’s going on in just three weeks, it’s certain Donald Trump is claiming expansive executive power beyond what any president has ever asserted. How much will the courts allow that? There’s no way to know.” More