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Trump boasted about the U.S. Supreme Court decision Trump v. Slaughter gave him more power than any other President. That decision removes protection from members of independent commissions. With the exception of the Federal Reserve Board (which regulates the banking system and whose stability is crucial to the economy), Trump now has the power to fire any member of any independent commission without cause. He can stack those commissions with his cronies, with people who have no expertise but will do whatever he wants.
What’s the point of having “independent” commissions if they are not independent of political influence?
Thom Hartmann wrote that the Court majority just rolled back the Pendleton Act of 1883, which created the Civil Service:
The six unscrupulous Republicans on the Supreme Court — over the loud objections of the three true constitutionalists on the Court — are aggressively dragging America back not just to the 1950s but, as of yesterday, to the 1830s.
Arguably the most depraved president in American history, Andrew Jackson (aka “The Indian Killer” a title he gave himself), Trump’s favorite, whose picture he hung in the Oval Office, invented what came to be called the “Spoils System.”
If you wanted a job in the federal government, or a favorable ruling from one of the then-few federal agencies, all you had to do was give a big enough gift to President Jackson, or pledge your loyalty to him instead of the Constitution and the people, and your wish would be granted…
The Federal Reserve protects the nations’ banking system and thus ensures stability and prosperity for America’s billionaires and the companies that made them that way. By blowing up Trump’s attempt to remove the Fed’s one Black governor (presumably as part of his and Hegseth’s Make America White Again campaign), the Republicans on the Court defended America’s oligarchs.
The other federal agencies, like the FTC, mostly protect you and me. They oversee our environment, consumer product safety, the purity of our food and drugs, and so on. If anything, America’s oligarchs consider them a pain in the ass.
If Democrats win the Presidency and control of both houses of Congress in 2028, they can write new laws reviving limits on Presidential power, protecting merit-based appointments, and strengthening the federal civil service.
Until that happens, Trump can fire any member of the Federal Trade Commission,
Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic, concludes that the U.S. Supreme Court has become too partisan. The public does not trust its judgments. Term limits won’t change it soon enough. He proposes expanding the Court and gives his rationale.
Was Thursday among the darkest days in the history of the Supreme Court? You could make a case. First, a majority cleared the way for a pesticide manufacturer to get thousands of lawsuits off its books from farmers who’d used its product and gotten cancer. Next, it ruled that the administration could turn away asylum-seekers at the border. And then it held that gun owners could now freely carry their weapons into private establishments that serve the public.
Let’s pause over that one for a paragraph. Here’s a good description of the particulars of the gun case and the legal arguments on both sides. But the upshot is this: Everywhere in America, gun owners will presumably be able to take their guns to shops, stores, malls, movie theaters, restaurants, bars, amusement parks, Baby Gaps, you name it. Does any rational person think that the Founders, who simply wanted men to have muskets to protect themselves from invaders, would want someone to be able to take a military-style semiautomatic rifle and 600 rounds of ammo into a Chuck E. Cheese?
But the worst of Thursday’s big four decisions was Mullin v. Doe, which will allow the Trump administration to begin deporting Haitians and Syrians who were granted Temporary Protected Status by the Obama administration in 2010 and 2012, respectively. My colleague Matt Ford shredded the decision in his piece, writing that the court “effectively blessed Trump’s bigotry toward Haitians and dealt potentially catastrophic damage to federal civil rights laws.”
The cases combine to give the executive branch more power. They turn several lower court decisions on their head (as The New York Timesnotes today, immigration hard-liners had lost case after case on TPS until yesterday). And in the case of Mullin, in particular, the highest legal authority in the land—namely, Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority—pretends that Donald Trump’s blatant racism toward Haitians doesn’t exist; that there was nothing “overtly racial” in Trump’s many disgusting and false comments about the Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio, and beyond.
This conservative court is out of control—blatantly partisan and ideological, the six-member majority scarcely even pretends otherwise anymore.
Some major decisions about executive power—Trump’s power—are yet to be handed down this term, involving the firing of Fed Governor Lisa Cook, the removal of Democratic appointees from independent agencies, and of course the birthright citizenship case. If the court rules predictably on two of these three, or certainly on all three, it will have completed a term—with the aforementioned four decisions already on the books, as well as Callais v. Louisiana, which did away with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act—that might well be the most reactionary in its history. And all this is on top of the earlier reversal of a 49-year-old precedent in 1973’s Roe v. Wade and the handing to Trump of sweeping immunity for all “official” acts.
It’s now unavoidable: This has to be a front-and-center issue in 2028. Democratic presidential contenders will have to answer the question: What do you plan to do about the Supreme Court?
Many of them will be afraid to dip a foot into these waters. They shouldn’t be. Poll after poll shows us that majorities disapprove of the court and think of its decisions as being more political than jurisprudential. According to Gallup, disapproval of the court topped 50 percent five years ago and has stayed there ever since (in contrast, that number was just 29 percent as recently as 2010). So the public—not just the progressive base of the party—is ready to hear ideas.
Terms limits, the most common idea bruited, are fine. But imposing term limits won’t really change the makeup of the court for years; maybe decades. How many more rights will they strip away before then? How much more power will they give to the uber-rich to buy political campaigns and candidates? How much more immunity will they grant to corporations? How many new ways will they find to weaken protections for workers and litigants against corporate power? And perhaps most of all, how will they figure out how to allow the executive branch to undermine the laws passed by Congress and refuse to write regulations and enforce the laws Congress has passed?
No—terms limits are no longer enough. It’s time to talk seriously about court expansion. And I think there’s a smart and totally constitutionally defensible way to do it.
The United States has 13 federal circuit courts. That number, naturally, grew over the course of the country’s history, as the number of states grew and as the population expanded. This is relevant here because each Supreme Court justice is responsible for overseeing a certain number of circuits. Historically, Congress has expanded the number of justices as it simultaneously increased the number of circuits.
Admittedly, all this happened a very long time ago. But still, it’s precedent. The court was established in 1789 at six justices. In 1807, Congress expanded the number of federal circuits to seven, and added a justice to match. In 1837, Congress created nine circuits and nine justices. In 1863—even while the United States of America had lost the 11 states of the Confederacy—Congress created 10 circuits and 10 justices. The current nine-justice format was set in 1869.
Later expansions in the number of circuits did not simultaneously add justices. But why not revive that thought? The country has had today’s 13 circuits since 1982. The population of the country in 1982 was 230 million. Today, it’s around 345 million. That’s a lot more people. And the courts are horribly backlogged.
That could be solved by just adding judges. But it’s also a justification for increasing the number of circuits. From there, a case can clearly be made that increasing the number of circuits requires increasing the number of high court justices. Or at the very least, Democrats can pursue a hybrid solution that would keep the number of circuits at 13 and add a large number of judges within those circuits—while increasing the size of the Supreme Court to 13. Democratic Congressman Hank Johnson of Georgia, a leader on these issues, introduced such a bill in 2023, and it had around 60 co-sponsors.
It would all be completely constitutional and completely legal. Which is more than can be said for a lot of the things Trump and the Republicans are getting up to, as they try to find new and blatantly illegal ways to stop mail-in voting and otherwise take the franchise away from citizens.
But the big door-opener here by Trump and the GOP is their rancidly unconstitutional mid-decade redistricting move. The Constitution clearly and plainly states that districts will be redrawn every 10 years, after the decennial census. What Trump and his party are doing with this redistricting is completely lawless.
Once they’ve done that, all bets are off. Democrats should do whatever they need to do to rebalance power. But—they should stay within the law. What I’m talking about here, what Johnson’s bill would accomplish, would be entirely within the law. Congress can set the size of the Supreme Court. And I believe that a smart Democrat, framing the argument the right way, can take that case to the American people and win it. He or she can convince the voters that far from destroying the court, such an action would constitute saving it from its own extremism—and saving the rights we cherish that these ideologues are stripping away.
When it comes to supporting its public schools, Florida ranks dead last in the nation. Not only was it dead last of all states, it was at the very bottom in 2024 and 2025.
Florida betrays its state constitution, which contains a clear mandate to create and protect strong public schools.
Article IX, Section 1(a) states:
“The education of children is a fundamental value of the people of the State of Florida. It is, therefore, a paramount duty of the state to make adequate provision for the education of all children residing within its borders. Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education…”
Under the misleadership of Republican politicians like Jeb Bush and Ron DeSantis, Florida has diverted billions of dollars to privately governed charter schools and unaccountable vouchers for private and religious schools and home schooling. Bush and DeSantis have ignored and abandoned Florida’s state constitution.
And among all the states, Florida’s school rank dead last.
Based on the NPE report Public Schooling in America 2026, Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for public Education, wrote:
This is the third consecutive year that Florida’s statehouse has earned last place when it comes to supporting public schools. Florida’s lawmakers don’t merely encourage privatization through charters, vouchers, and homeschools; they actively engineer conditions that undermine public schools and worsen the environment for teaching and learning.
The damage from Florida’s universal voucher program is staggering. Close to four billion dollars in state education funding now flows annually to voucher programs — nearly one in four state education dollars diverted away from public schools, including to families whose children never set foot in a public school. And the funding mechanism puts the burden directly on school districts, which must absorb the loss.
Meanwhile, Florida continuously revises its school rating standards to ensure more public schools are labeled as failing, while simultaneously incentivizing and subsidizing charter expansion. Its Schools of Hope program even allows charters to colonize unused space inside public school buildings. Success Academy’s Eva Moskowitz teamed up with a Florida billionaire to help draft the enabling legislation, then used it to muscle her chain into the Miami charter market with generous public funding in tow.
Fifty percent of Florida’s charter sector is run by for-profit operators — one of the highest shares in the nation. Only Michigan has more. Florida is home to Academica, the largest for-profit charter chain in the country, and to Charter Schools USA. Both profit from the real estate they build and lease back to their own branded schools.
Charter schools claim to be equally open to all students. That is not the case in Florida, which lost points for the numerous enrollment privileges its laws permit. Florida is one of a small number of states that allow company-based charter schools. The Villages, the largest retirement community in the country, has its own charter school, and it functions less like a school of choice than a company store. The school was created by the community’s developer, and at least one parent must be employed by The Villages or a company that services it. If that parent quits or is fired, the child must leave immediately. For a low-wage service worker who might want to change jobs, the school becomes a trap — a reason to stay put rather than pursue something better.
Florida sinks to the bottom not only because of its weak charter and voucher laws and the financial incentives it offers to expand privatization, but because it actively undermines its public schools through policy and funding decisions at every turn. Florida lost every possible point on school funding — whether measured by cost-of-living-adjusted teacher salaries, equitable funding distribution, or funding based on capacity to pay. It has low teacher satisfaction, high student-to-teacher and student-to-counselor ratios, weak anti-bullying laws, and it still permits corporal punishment.
Of 102 possible points, Florida disgracefully earned only 14. You can read our full NPE 2026 report card here.
Graham Platner won the Democratic primary for the Senate, despite troubling allegations by women who questioned his treatment of them. When a woman he had dated said last Monday that he had forced her to have sex without her consent, it was all over for Platner. He was accused of having raped the girlfriend. He denied it, but the air was out of his balloon.
Tonight Platner denied the allegations, blamed the “establishment” for derailing his campaign, but announced that he was suspending his campaign.
The Maine Democratic Party will hold a convention and pick a new candidate.
This is the best outcome. In retrospect, the most damning evidence against Platner came from his wife, who told a campaign leader that her husband had been sexting with other women after they were married. Why would he do that? That’s a career destroyer.
But the worst instance of piling on was recorded by The Washington Post.
Last night at 10:20 pm, the Post published a vile, disgusting story about Platner that never should have seen the light of day, in my view..
In that article, Lyndsey Fifield, the conservative woman who worked for the Heritage Foundation and was part of a group supporting Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, made a lewd accusation against Platner that could not be verified or corroborated. She said that when she had sex with Platner, he took off his condom without her consent, even though he knew she did not use birth control. Apparently this happened more than once. She dated him over a three-year period and said he “repeatedly” engaged in sex without a condom.
It started like this:
“An ex-girlfriend of embattled Senate candidate Graham Platner told The Washington Post that he repeatedly removed protection without her consent when they were having sex.
“Lyndsey Fifield, who said she dated Platner from 2013 to 2015 in D.C. and has previously accused him of physical abuse, said that she told Platner on multiple occasions that he had to wear condoms during sex because she was not on birth control.
“He would pull condoms off,” she said in an interview. “He would do it in a sneaky way. He wouldn’t tell me.”
“In a statement in response to questions about Fifield’s allegation, Platner’s campaign called the claim “categorically false and politically motivated.” The statement noted Fifield supported now-Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh when he was accused of sexual assault before his confirmation, an allegation he denied.”
Most of the comments–at least the first 100 or so–attacked Fifield’s credibility and motives. One asked why she didn’t use birth control. Another asked why she continued to have intercourse with him.
My reaction was that the charges should never have been published because a) there was no way to verify her allegations; b) how he had sex with a female friend is irrelevant to his character or fitness for office. Having unprotected sex is dangerous, because it might produce an unwanted pregnancy. But, to my knowledge, it is not criminal.
Rape and sexual assault are criminal acts. They do reflect on one’s fitness for office. We should have learned from Trump’s adjudicated behavior not to trust men who abuse women.
The story was disgusting. The Washington Post should be ashamed to have published this slime.
I’m glad Platner stepped aside. I’m sorry all the allegations about him did not come out long ago.
I hope the Maine Democratic Party picks a strong candidate who can unite the party and beat Susan Collins.
Trump is the master of using the courts to win his battles, but lately he’s been on a losing streak.
The U.S. Supreme Court denied his request to excuse him from paying E. Jean Carroll $5 million, which was awarded by a jury in New York. With the interest it has accrued, Trump now owes her $5.8 million.
Trump appealed to another court to delay the payment, and today the judge said “pay the bill.”
Trump appealed the removal of his name from the Kennedy Center. An appeals court ruled today against him.
An appeals court on Wednesday denied President Trump’s bid to pause the removal of his name from the Kennedy Center while he challenges a lower court ruling.
A three-judge panel determined the administration’s lawyers did not prove the president or the performing arts center would suffer irreparable harm if his name was removed from the venue as ordered.
“First, they argue that removal of President Trump’s name will inflict irreparable harm in terms of expense and time ‘squander[ed][.]’ Since that removal has already occurred, stay would not avert those harms (even assuming they would qualify as irreparable),” the judges wrote in their order.
“Second, Appellants allege financial harm to the Kennedy Center if they are not permitted to reinstate President Trump’s name. They argue that removal of President Trump’s name ‘threatens to impede the Center’s fundraising efforts and [will] contribute to the financial decline of the Center.’ Appellants, however, have failed to support this assertion with any specific facts or evidence,” they added.
Judge Gregory Katsas, a Trump appointee, and Judges Patricia Millett and Robert Wilkins, both Obama appointees, denied the Trump administration’s motion for a stay pending appeal.
Evan Hurst writes at Wonkette, a daily report on the crazy things happening in our world today. Consider subscribing.
Donald Trump dropped down in Ankara, Türkiye, for the big NATO summit, and wasted no time confirming every European leader’s worst instincts about whether or not the United States is any longer their friend.
You see, the stupid senile bitch Trump still thinks that part of the NATO deal is that the other members should jump up to help every time Benjamin Netanyahu tricks him into starting a war no other American president was stupid enough to start. He thinks they owe that to him. He thinks that’s part of Article 5. He’s the stupidest, most useless brain of any human who’s ever taken up space on God’s green earth.
So he arrived in Ankara and, during a press availability with Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, immediately started in babbling about his Greenland shit again.
“Greenland doesn’t help Denmark, Denmark doesn’t spend money to really help Greenland, but it’s an important part for the United States,” the president continued.
Greenland “should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark,” he concluded.
Sorry about all this yet again, Europe.
Notably, it was reported this weekend that France has had to prepare for the very real possibility of a “shooting war” with the US over Greenland. Now here comes Trump to start running his fucking mouth about that again, and Danish PM Mette Fredriksen is having to reiterateat NATO that she will defend Greenland, and that it’s “not for sale.”
Trump also continued yesterday to make threats to remove troops from Europe, said hopeful words about a peace deal for his father Putin in Russia and Ukraine (despite how his opinion on the matter is less than irrelevant), and said Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is a “nice person,” while whining some more that she wouldn’t help him bomb Iran at Netanyahu’s request. This, despite how just this weekend, he was still fanning the flames of the stupid feud he started with her by telling pathetic, unbelievable lies about her wanting to be in the same room with him.
He also recommenced his bitching that if it hadn’t been for the foul fucking dictator he was meeting with at the time, for whom he’s always had a little Trumpy boner, he might not have even come to the NATO summit:
“I was very disappointed with NATO, and frankly, if it weren’t held in Turkey, where my friend happens to be a very strong leader, a very strong person, it’s possible that I wouldn’t have attended. I felt I had to attend because of the fact that, you know, I know he’s gone all out.”
Did y’all hear about trashball Erdoğan’s latest stunt, denying a gay cruise ship permission to dock in Istanbul because of the homosexual lifestyle? Motherfucker does not belong in a community of respected nations like NATO, but we understand why they might keep him there as a means of controlling him. (It’s good that Turkey’s bid for European Union membership is forever stalled.)
Of course, the same could probably be said for the United States these days.
Anyway, back to Trump’s humiliation of himself and of the United States!
Here is Trump today in a press conference with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, HEREBY DEMANDING an end to all trade with Spain, including tourism!
“Spain is a wasted cause. We don’t want to do any trade business with Spain, please. […] Cut off all trade with Spain, please! Including visits, OK? We don’t want anything to do, watch them come running back …”
Can Trump actually do that unilaterally? Of course not, but he’s too stupid to understand that. And of course only 4.9 percent of Spain’s exports — 18 billion euros worth — head to the United States, whereas 23 billion euros worth of goods come from the US to Spain. Trump knows nothing about trade, but that’s called a trade surplus.
As for the tourism, does Trump think Spaniards are flocking to American shores? Or is he going to try to ban Americans from visiting Spain, AKA the second-most-visited tourism destination in the world?
Just curious how the dumb bitch is planning to humiliate himself here.
Spain has not committed to Trump’s THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER demands to kick its defense spending up to five percent of its annual budget by 2035. And Pedro Sánchez is always mean to him, and he does it while looking handsome and in Castilian Spanish, so it’s a humiliation for Trump on all fronts and that’s why he’s mad.
Trump finished that clip above by whining that Spain also mistreats Mark Rutte, Trump’s special boy who always stays in character pretending he respects Trump, and Trump buys it, because Trump is stupid and easily flattered.
Here is how Spain has responded:
In response to Trump’s comments, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s office said that Spain “maintains an excellent social, cultural, and economic relationship with the US, and we have no intention of seeing that change.”
The spokesperson said the Spanish government regarded such statements “as a matter of routine.”
The spokesperson referenced the U.S.’ trade surplus with Spain, and the fact that the European Union handles trade for the bloc’s 27 member countries.
How do you say “Yeah we hear that old bitch running his mouth” in Spanish? (Something like Sí, oímos a ese viejo cabrón parloteando sin parar, maybe.)
So anyway, that’s been what the beginning of the NATO summit has looked like. And Rutte had such high hopes for there being a united NATO front against Vladimir Putin! Too bad the ass he’s got his tongue up is that of a stupid orange Hitler wannabe who thinks he’s impressive because he (allegedly) passes dementia tests.
If you have not read that incredible Wall Street Journal article from this weekend about all the ways European leaders work together to make Trump their useful idiot, how they scheme to manage that dumbfuck, all as they strategize on how to get out of their now-abusive relationship with Trump’s America, now would be a good time.
American allies have begun pushing the gas pedal on an unprecedented experiment in de-Americanization. Authorities from France to the Netherlands are quietly removing American tech from their systems, adopting European open-source software and urging civil servants to no longer use Microsoft Teams or Office.
It begins with an account of the secret meeting European leaders had at the beginning of this year on exactly how to break up with America. It discusses how Meloni thought Trump could be reasoned with at that meeting, but now no longer does. It talks about how they literally all craft their text messages to make the illiterate idiot feel safe:
When texting Trump, Rutte would echo the president’s own syntax and hyperbole, keeping his messages congratulatory, with staccato sentences. He immersed himself in the role so thoroughly some heads of government who worked with him began describing him as an actor who never broke character.
Soon, European leaders were following his lead. Finland’s president and Norway’s prime minister started workshopping their text messages to Trump, talking about which words they should render in capital letters. Sometimes, the Norwegian leader preferred his Finnish counterpart to send a message. Nordic officials worried that the mere mention of Norway, home of the Nobel Peace Prize, could reopen a sore wound.
The American president, that’s who they are talking about.
How they talk to him about advocating for a ceasefire in Ukraine, when he starts taking Putin’s side? They use his words: “Stop the killing,” because those are the simple words Trump understands. “Trump lectured top EU official Ursula von der Leyen for advocating sanctions on Russia, so she started referring to economic pressure as tariffs.”
If you want the senile dumbass to do anything, call it a tariff! Wow.
And then there’s:
Weeks into Trump’s second term, Macron visited to discuss NATO and Ukraine. The two spent hours together, and the U.S. president seemed open to his ideas. They used a tablet to dial into a video call led by Justin Trudeau. But as the Canadian prime minister was talking, Trump, frustrated with a technical issue that prevented him from chiming in, lobbed the device over the Resolute Desk and onto the floor, an official present said.
Like a toddler cat with dementia.
Does Trump bring foreign leaders into a room off the Oval Office full of MAGA hats and — no shit — Florsheim shoes, and tell them to pick whatever they’d like? He does. Apparently he thinks their wives (???) might like to relist the swag he gives them on Facebook Marketplace, or take it on Antiques Roadshow?
During their chat, Trump told [German Chancellor Friedrich] Merz he had something to show him, and walked the chancellor of Germany into a small study off the Oval Office. It was, Trump announced, “the Lewinsky room” and he had filled it with MAGA memorabilia, including red hats and boxes of Florsheim dress shoes. “Just grab whatever you want,” a congenial Trump told his German guests, adding that their wives could sell the swag for “thousands of dollars.”
“That’s the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever heard about Trump” has now happened more than once in this article.
If you want to see something really embarrassing, just watch the full presser with Rutte. You’ll be able to envision Trump throwing things off desks like a fucking baby quite easily.
There’s a second part of the report out now, on how Canadian PM Mark Carney has been at the forefront of the effort to get Europe thinking and acting as its own superpower in a world where it can’t rely on the USA, hammering to them the message that “the old America isn’t coming back.”
You’ll want to read that one while you, too, grapple with the world’s growing embrace of Carney’s thesis.
Scott Dworkin runs a Democratic activist’s blog, raising money for candidates and exposing Trump scandals and grifts. I subscribe and encourage you to do the same.
A NEW TRUMP BUSINESS: THE PENTAGON
A paper trail of federal money keeps showing up right behind the Trump name. Don Jr. joined drone maker Unusual Machines’ advisory board in November 2024—and within a year, one of the company’s largest orders ever was placed by the US Army.
Last August, Don Jr.’s firm, 1789 Capital, bought into a startup called Vulcan Elements; three months later it landed a $620 million loan, the biggest in the Pentagon’s lending office history. ProPublica found the loan was initiated by senior White House official Peter Navarro—a friend of Don Jr.’s—and pushed through in a matter of weeks, sending Vulcan’s value skyrocketing from $200 million toward $2 billion.
The sons swear their names have nothing to do with it, but the record says otherwise: roughly $3.7 billion in federal money went to at least ten companies tied to the brothers since the regime took power. That’s your April taxes, meant to defend the country, rerouted to whoever hired the right last name.
Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, is now demanding the Pentagon’s inspector general investigate: “his sons are cashing in on defense contracts funded by hardworking taxpayers.”
They built this in the dark to work in secret, betting nobody would ever turn on the lights. The investigation just started, the receipts are already public, and every dollar gets traced. This fight is only beginning.
DOGE’s mandate expired July 4, the end date written into Trump’s own executive order. Elon Musk swore he’d cut $2 trillion. DOGE’s website claims $215 billion—a number they haven’t updated since January and that budget experts don’t buy. Even taking their figure at face value, that’s a dime in cuts for every dollar promised.
Molly Hardy was the National Endowment for the Humanities’ 2024 employee of the year. DOGE laid her off anyway. Then in March, the agency came crawling back, emailing to ask if she’d return. She turned them down—not bitter, just clear-eyed: “It didn’t feel good. It just felt really sad.”
She’s not alone, and that’s the part they didn’t see coming. All over the government, the wreckage is being reversed: HHS fired 10,000 workers and is now scrambling to hire 12,000. Agencies that bragged about the chainsaw are begging people to come back. Asked if shrinking the workforce was even still the goal, OPM chief Scott Kupor admitted: “I’m not hearing that.”
And when Congress asked what DOGE actually accomplished, budget director Russell Vought had nothing to show: “We have no plans to do kind of a closing DOGE report.”
The people who took a chainsaw to our government don’t get to slink off without a full accounting. We’ll see to that.
Adam Kinzinger, former Republican member of Congress, writes an always interesting blog. He wrote yesterday that the Trump administration is harassing legal immigrants by failing to process their applications for green cards and work permits. The immigrants affected come from those countries on Trump’s restricted travel list. They have done nothing wrong. They are here legally. U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley in Columbus, Ohio, ordered the administration to resume processing their paper work.
Yesterday, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restart green card and work permit applications it had frozen. The freeze targeted immigrants from countries on the President’s travel restriction list. These are people already living here, many of them for years.
The case was brought by 25 of them. A hospital pharmacist. A nurse doing cancer research on federal funding. College graduates with job offers in science and engineering. Young couples raising kids. They all followed the process, and they all watched their paperwork freeze with no end date.
The Judge wrote that the administration was treating a person’s home country as a “significant and negative factor” in whether their case moved at all. He even named the President and the Vice President, writing that both men have “publicly and repeatedly expressed outright hostility toward immigrants.”
This is the second time in a month a federal judge has thrown out these freezes. A court in Rhode Island did the same in June.
The ruling does not hand anyone a green card. It forces the government to make a decision instead of leaving people in the dark. And the administration could not tell the court how making a nurse who already lives here wait longer keeps a single American safer. Because it can’t.
Here’s what I know after spending more than a decade in Congress. The Republican talking point was always the same. We are not anti-immigrant, we are anti-illegal immigration. Come the right way. Get in line. Well, these people got in line. They did everything my old party claimed to want. And this administration is trying to get rid of them anyway. The talking point was never true. It was just cover. They never wanted any immigrants here at all.
In a stunning victory for the First Amendent’s guarantee of free speech, a federal appeals court overturned Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE” act. A district court judge had previously issued a preliminary injunction on the law, calling it “positively dystopian.”
The state contended that it paid the professors’ salaries and had the authority to tell them what to teach. The appeals court decision disagreed, by a 2-1 vote. The dissenting judge–Barbara Lagoa– was appointed by Trump.
The opinion said:
“Florida’s salary-for-speech rule is a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse in the very places the state’s own statutes recognize as centers of inquiry — classrooms where students are trusted to puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth,”
The dissenting judge wrote:
“We need not agree or disagree with Florida that the viewpoints at issue here constitute racial discrimination,” Lagoa wrote. “We need only acknowledge that the state is allowed to decide what is endorsed by its professors in its own classrooms.”
The American Civil Liberties Union announced:
TALLAHASSEE, FL – The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit today struck down the higher education provisions of the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, a classroom censorship law in Florida that severely restricted educators from teaching about race and gender in schools and workplaces. The court ruled the higher education provision of the law was unconstitutional, saying: “Florida’s salary-for-speech rule is a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse in the very places the State’s own statutes recognize as centers of inquiry—classrooms where students are trusted to puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth.”
The court goes on to say it does not matter if the State of Florida agrees or disagrees with the ideas. “Either way, in this context the First Amendment trusts students to figure it out for themselves.”
“This ruling sets a strong precedent that higher education cannot be limited to the whims of politicians,” said Leah Watson, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program. “All students and educators deserve to have a free and open exchange about ideas without government control. Students can’t fight racial discrimination that they don’t see; training and instruction is key to empowering future leaders to pursue racial justice.”
The decision comes in Pernell v. Lamb, a 2022 lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Florida, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), and the law firm Ballard Spahr on behalf of a group of Florida professors at public universities whose teaching has been impacted by this law.
“We are thrilled the court has stopped the erasure of topics that have real implications for our students, allowing them to learn, discuss, and develop tools for combatting the complex issue of racism in our country without being gagged by those who would dictate that only state-approved thought may be promoted,” said LeRoy Pernell, a Florida A&M University College of Law professor and the named plaintiff in this lawsuit.
Championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, this overreaching law specifically targeted and placed vague restrictions on educators’ ability to teach concepts such as racism, sexism, privilege, and unconscious bias. It also imposed harsh penalties, including ineligibility for millions of dollars in performance funding from the state for colleges and universities and termination for educators who had been found to violate the law.
The court concluded, “[i]f the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it.”
“The Stop W.O.K.E Act is an egregious example of widespread efforts across the country, most notably in Florida, to force the public higher education system to adopt the viewpoints of those in power. Thankfully, we have a judicial system to protect First Amendment rights and ensure that professors have the academic freedom to foster the type of learning environment where all students can learn and thrive,” said Jin Hee Lee, Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Legal Defense Fund. “It is no coincidence that this state law aimed to censor the perspectives of Black people and LGBTQ+ people, the very same people who are currently under attack. With this decision, the federal appeals court has made clear that Florida cannot actively erase their history of discrimination or their lived experiences without running afoul of our Constitution.”
This decision marked the first time an appellate court has considered the constitutionality of this censorship movement, and it will have implications for students and educators across the country who are subject to related laws. Since the Stop W.O.K.E Act went into effect, more than 30 states have moved to introduce and pass higher education classroom censorship bills. In May 2024, a federal court struck down a law in another ACLU lawsuit in New Hampshire, holding that the law’s vagueness violated the 14th Amendment. A similar higher education classroom censorship law was struck down in an ACLU lawsuit in Oklahoma, ruling that many of its provisions were so vague that it was difficult for teachers to know what they could and could not teach in the classroom.
“By upholding the district court’s ruling, the Eleventh Circuit ensured that our system of higher education is guided by the principle of free speech, not government censorship,” said Carrie McNamara, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Florida. “Our classrooms are meant to be rooms of curiosity, creativity, and learning. When we stifle this kind of critical thinking, we risk losing our education system as we know it.”
“The recent legislative efforts to undermine academic freedom and limit the rights of marginalized communities are incredibly harmful,” said Emmy Parsons, a litigator at Ballard Spahr who was a member of the legal team. “We are proud to be part of this historic case and will keep fighting to protect the First Amendment rights of those teaching the next generation of leaders.”
The opinion can be viewed below.
Jul 7, 2026
Diane Ravitch's blog 