Oh, and don’t forget “newly leaked tapes prove once and for all that Joe Biden is old” as well.
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I will not be surprised if these changes cause more suffering, death, and stories like this from the survivors:
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May 17, 2025 (Saturday)
This weekend there are two major anniversaries for the history of civil rights in the United States. Seventy-one years ago today, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That landmark decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. It overturned the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision handed down 129 years ago tomorrow. On that day, May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court declared that the Fourteenth Amendment allowed segregation within states so long as accommodations were “equal.”
The journey from Plessy to Brown was the story of ordinary people creating change with the tools they had at hand.
Recently, scholars have shown how, after the Plessy decision, Black Americans in the South used state civil law to advance their civil rights. Insisting on their rights in the South’s complicated system of credits and debts, they hammered out a legal identity. Denied justice under criminal law, they sued companies, primarily railroad companies, for denying them equal protection against harassment. And, according to historian Myisha S. Eatmon, they often won these civil suits, even at the hands of all-white juries.
It was on these grounds that Black lawyers won discrimination suits over public schools early in the twentieth century. They relied on the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that allowed “separate” accommodations for Black and white Americans so long as they were “equal.” They would point out how much poorer the conditions in Black schools were than those in white schools, proving those conditions violated the “separate but equal” requirement in the decision condoning racial segregation.
Legal challenges to segregation were only one tool in the workshop of those trying to dismantle the system. After the organizers of the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 caricatured Black Americans, Black educator and suffragist Mary Burnett Talbert reached out to sociologist and writer W.E.B. DuBois to call for a movement to advance equal treatment.
In 1905, thirty-two Black leaders met in Fort Erie, Ontario, and launched the Niagara Movement to call for equal justice before the law and economic opportunities, including the right to an education, equal to those enjoyed by white men. A year later, journalist William English Walling joined the group. Walling was a well-educated descendant of a wealthy enslaving family from Kentucky who had become a social reformer. Another well-educated social reformer, Mary White Ovington, also joined. And so did their friend Henry Moskowitz, a Jewish immigrant from Romania who was well connected in New York Democratic politics.
A race riot in Springfield, Illinois, on August 14 and 15, 1908, sparked a wider organization. The violence broke out after the sheriff transferred two Black prisoners, one accused of murder and another of rape, to a different town out of concern for their safety.
Furious that they had been prevented from vengeance against the accused, a mob of white townspeople looted businesses and burned homes in Springfield’s Black neighborhood. They lynched two Black men and ran most of the Black population out of town. At least eight people died, more than 70 were injured, and at least $3 million of damage in today’s money was done before 3,700 state militia troops quelled the riot.
Walling and his wife visited Springfield days later. He was horrified to find white citizens complaining that their Black neighbors had forgotten “their place.”
Walling reached back to the principles on which the nation was founded. He warned that either the North must revive the spirit of Lincoln—who, after all, was associated with Springfield—and commit to “absolute political and social equality” or the white supremacist violence of the South would spread across the whole nation. “The day these methods become general in the North,” he wrote, “every hope of political democracy will be dead, other weaker races and classes will be persecuted in the North as in the South, public education will undergo an eclipse, and American civilization will await either a rapid degeneration or another profounder and more revolutionary civil war….”
In January 1909, leaders from the Niagara Movement met in the Wallings’ apartment in New York City to create a new civil rights organization. Sixty prominent reformers, Black and white, signed their call, and the next year an interracial group of 300 men and women met to create a permanent organization. After a second meeting in May 1910, they adopted a formal name, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was born, although they settled on the centennial of Lincoln’s birth as their actual beginning.
It was no accident that supporters of the project included muckraking journalists Ray Stannard Baker and Ida B. Wells, as well as Du Bois, for a vibrant Black newspaper culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was central to spreading knowledge of the atrocities committed against Black Americans, especially in the South, and of how to sue over them. In 1910, Du Bois would choose to leave his professorship at Atlanta University to become the NAACP’s director of publicity and research. For the next 14 years, he would edit the organization’s flagship journal The Crisis.
While The Crisis was a newspaper, a literary magazine, and a cultural showcase, its key function reflected the journalistic sensibilities of those like Baker, Wells, and especially Du Bois: it constantly called attention to atrocities, discrimination, and the ways in which the United States was not living up to its stated principles. At a time when violence and suppression were mounting against Black Americans, Wells, Du Bois, and their colleagues relentlessly spread knowledge of what was happening and demanded that officials treat all people equally before the law.
That use of information to rally people to the cause of equality became a hallmark of the NAACP. It took advantage of the skills of women like Rosa Parks, who after 1944 was the secretary of the NAACP’s Montgomery, Alabama, chapter. Parks investigated sexual violence against Black women and compiled statistics about those assaults, making a record of the reality of Black Americans’ lives.
It was NAACP leader Walter Francis White who in 1946 brought the story of World War II veteran Isaac Woodard, blinded by a police officer and his deputy in South Carolina after talking back to a bus driver, to President Harry S. Truman.
Truman had been a racist southern Democrat, but after hearing about Woodard, he convened the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, directly asking its members to find ways to use the federal government to strengthen the civil rights of racial and religious minorities in the country. Truman later said, “When a Mayor and City Marshal can take a…Sergeant off a bus in South Carolina, beat him up and put out…his eyes, and nothing is done about it by the State authorities, something is radically wrong with the system.”
The committee’s final report, written in the wake of a world war against the hierarchical societies of fascism, recommended new federal laws to address police brutality, end lynching, protect voting—including for Indigenous Americans—and promote equal rights, accounting for the internment of Japanese Americans as well as discrimination against Black Americans. It called for “[t]he elimination of segregation, based on race, color, creed, or national origin, from American life” and for a public campaign to explain to white Americans why ending segregation was important.
The NAACP had highlighted that the inequalities in American society were systemic rather than the work of a few bad apples, bearing witness until “the believers in democracy” could no longer remain silent.
Meanwhile, in South Carolina, an all-white jury acquitted the police officers who blinded Woodard. Presiding judge Julius Waties Waring, the son of a Confederate veteran, was disgusted at the jury’s decision and at the crowd that cheered when it heard the verdict. He began to stew on how to challenge racial discrimination legally when white juries at the state level could simply decide to nullify the law.
In 1940, Black NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall had founded the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., in New York City. Six years later, civil rights lawyer Constance Baker Motley joined him. He would go on to become the first Black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. She would become the first Black woman to argue before the Supreme Court and the first Black woman to become a federal judge. They were a powerhouse team.
In 1952, with the support of Judge Waring, Marshall and Motley and their collaborators took a new tack to oppose segregation in public schools. Rather than resting on the idea that poorly funded Black schools were not equal to white schools as Plessy required, they argued outright that racial segregation violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the same argument the Supreme Court had rejected in Plessy. This formula would enable the federal government to restrain white juries at the state level.
Truman had desegregated the military but had not been able to move civil rights through Congress because of the segregationist southern Democrats. After he took office in 1953, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower took up the cause. He appointed former California governor Earl Warren, a Republican known as a consensus builder, as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Warren took his seat in October 1953, as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, a group of cases from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware, was before the court.
The court’s decision, handed down on May 17, 1954, explicitly overturned Plessy, saying that segregated schools denied Black children “the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.”
The decision was a long time coming, even though Justice John Marshall Harlan had anticipated it almost 60 years before. Harlan wrote a dissenting opinion in Plessy harking back to the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision in which the Supreme Court denied that Black Americans could be citizens and said they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The American people had emphatically overruled that decision by adding the Fourteenth Amendment—on which Brown v. Board was based—to the U.S. Constitution.
“In my opinion,” Harlan wrote in 1896, “the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case.”
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He did say that, and his prediction proved correct. However, it’s also important to note that Harlan wasn’t some civil rights champion 60 years ahead of his time. In the paragraph immediately preceding that prediction, he wrote:
The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth, and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage, and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty. But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens.
He believed white people were better. He just thought the law should be color blind. He would have hated affirmative action programs. Later in his dissent, he said this:
There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race. But, by the statute in question, a Chinaman can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race in Louisiana, many of whom, perhaps, risked their lives for the preservation of the Union, who are entitled, by law, to participate in the political control of the state and nation, who are not excluded, by law or by reason of their race, from public stations of any kind, and who have all the legal rights that belong to white citizens, are yet declared to be criminals, liable to imprisonment, if they ride in a public coach occupied by citizens of the white race.
So basically, “I mean come on, blacks aren’t Chinamen! Those people are barely human and we let them ride with the whites!”
Harlan was not as enlightened as historians often make him out to be. He just believed in the rule of law, and the meaning and intent of the 14th Amendment was clear to him, and segregation clearly violated that.
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Thanks for that enlightening corrective. We often fail to realize how pervasive and normalized white supremacy was (no matter how extreme Harlan’s may have been – and to my understanding, they actually weren’t).
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Yeah, for his time, he probably would have been considered woke by many. But much like how most modern Democrats aren’t nearly as progressive or left of center as the media would have us believe, Harlan likewise had pretty centrist views for an elite white man of his day. He nailed that prediction about how history would view that decision, though. And he was known for his dissents, earning the nickname the Great Dissenter. His namesake grandson, John Marshall Harlan II, would join the Supreme Court himself just a year after Brown v Board was decided. He was considered a conservative on the Warren Court, but it should be noted that he was a conservative in the pre-Goldwater sense of the label. He voted in support of most civil rights issues, including in one of the first gay rights-adjacent case to come before the Court. The elder Harlan also was named after John Marshall, Chief Justice from 1801 to 1835.
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Yet at the same time… honestly if our conservative parties openly published this exact opinion I would be relieved.
What an interesting addition to the article, thanks for that.
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May 18, 2025 (Sunday)
Tonight, late on a Sunday night, the House Budget Committee passed what Republicans are calling their “Big, Beautiful Bill” to enact Trump’s agenda although it had failed on Friday when far-right Republicans voted against it, complaining it did not make deep enough cuts to social programs.
The vote tonight was a strict party line vote, with 16 Democrats voting against the measure, 17 Republicans voting for it, and 4 far right Republicans voting “present.” House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said there would be “minor modifications” to the measure; Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) wrote on X that those changes include new work requirements for Medicaid and cuts to green energy subsidies.
And so the bill moves forward.
In The Bulwark today, Jonathan Cohn noted that Republicans are in a tearing hurry to push that Big, Beautiful Bill through Congress before most of us can get a handle on what’s in it. Just a week ago, Cohn notes, there was still no specific language in the measure. Republican leaders didn’t release the piece of the massive bill that would cut Medicaid until last Sunday night and then announced the Committee on Energy and Commerce would take it up not even a full two days later, on Tuesday, before the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office could produce a detailed analysis of the cost of the proposals. The committee markup happened in a 26-hour marathon in which the parts about Medicaid happened in the middle of the night. And now, the bill moves forward in an unusual meeting late on a Sunday night.
Cohn recalls that in 2009, when the Democrats were pushing the Affordable Care Act, more popularly known as Obamacare, that measure had months of public debate before it went to the Committee on Energy and Commerce. That committee held eight separate hearings about healthcare reform, and it was just one of three committees working on the issue. The ACA markup took a full two weeks.
Cohn explains that Medicaid cuts are extremely unpopular, and the Republicans hope to jam those cuts through by claiming they are cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse” without leaving enough time for scrutiny. Cohn points out that if they are truly interested in savings, they could turn instead to the privatized part of Medicare, Medicare Advantage. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that cutting overpayments to Medicare Advantage when private insurers “upcode” care to place patients in a higher risk bracket, could save more than $1 trillion over the next decade.
Instead of saving money, the Big, Beautiful Bill actually blows the budget deficit wide open by extending the 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that those extensions would cost at least $4.6 trillion over the next ten years. And while the tax cuts would go into effect immediately, the cuts to Medicaid are currently scheduled not to hit until 2029, enabling the Republicans to avoid voter fury over them in the midterms and the 2028 election.
The prospect of that debt explosion led Moody’s on Friday to downgrade U.S. credit for the first time since 1917, following Fitch, which downgraded the U.S. rating in 2023, and Standard & Poor’s, which did so back in 2011. “If the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is extended, which is our base case,” Moody’s explained, “it will add around $4 trillion to the federal fiscal primary (excluding interest payments) deficit over the next decade. As a result, we expect federal deficits to widen, reaching nearly 9% of GDP by 2035, up from 6.4% in 2024, driven mainly by increased interest payments on debt, rising entitlement spending and relatively low revenue generation.”
On the Sunday talk shows this morning, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent dismissed the downgrade, saying it reflected conditions already in the market (although Moody’s explicitly said it was concerned about the potential passage of the Republicans’ Big, Beautiful Bill). House speaker Mike Johnson said that the credit downgrade just proved the need for the measure with its “historic spending cuts” to pass (although Moody’s named that bill as its reason for the downgrade).
The continuing Republican insistence that spending is out of control does not reflect reality. In fact, discretionary spending has fallen more than 40% in the past 50 years as a percentage of gross domestic product, from 11% to 6.3%. What has driven rising deficits are the George W. Bush and Donald Trump tax cuts, which had added $8 trillion and $1.7 trillion, respectively, to the debt by the end of the 2023 fiscal year.
But rather than permit those tax cuts to expire— or even to roll them back— the Republicans continue to insist Americans are overtaxed. In fact, the U.S. is far below the average of the 37 other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an intergovernmental forum of democracies with market economies, in its tax levies. According to a report by the Center for American Progress in 2023, if the U.S. taxed at the average OECD level, over ten years it would have an additional $26 trillion in revenue. If the U.S. taxed at the average of European Union nations, it would have an additional $36 trillion.
But instead of considering taxes to address the deficit, in the 2024 campaign, Trump insisted that foreign countries would pay for further tax cuts through tariffs, no matter how often economists said that tariffs are passed on to consumers.
In October 2024, when editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News John Micklethwait corrected Trump’s misunderstanding of the way tariffs work in an interview at the Economic Club of Chicago, Trump replied: “It must be hard for you to, you know, spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you’re totally wrong.” Referring to analysis that his plans would explode the national debt, including analysis by the Wall Street Journal—hardly a left-wing outlet, as Mickelthwait pointed out—Trump replied: “What does the Wall Street Journal know?.. They’ve been wrong about everything. So have you, by the way. You’ve been wrong about everything…. You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”
Walmart’s suggestion that it will have to raise prices because of tariffs is forcing the administration to try to manage reality. “We’re wired for everyday low prices, but the magnitude of these increases is more than any retailer can absorb,” Walmart’s chief financial officer John David Rainey during an interview with CNBC on Thursday. Rainey predicted higher prices by June.
In response Trump appeared to agree that tariffs are paid by consumers, posting that Walmart should “‘EAT THE TARIFFS,’ and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!” Today, Bessent reassured Americans that he had spoken to the CEO of Walmart, Doug McMillon, who had agreed that Walmart would, in fact, eat some of the tariffs.
So with the current Big, Beautiful Bill, we are looking at a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary Americans to those at the top of American society. The Democratic Women’s Caucus has dubbed the measure the “Big Bad Billionaire Bill.”
Lest there be any confusion about who will benefit from this Big, Beautiful Bill, one of the many pieces tucked into it is a prohibition on any state laws to regulate artificial intelligence for the next ten years.
Despite its gargantuan energy demands, harm to the environment, and threats to privacy, the administration is pushing AI hard, and the country’s leading AI entrepreneurs, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Ruth Porat of Google’s parent company Alphabet, and Andy Jassy of Amazon all traveled with Trump to Saudi Arabia last week. The Saudis are looking to diversify their oil-dependent economy and are now the world’s largest investors in artificial intelligence.
Speaker Johnson hopes to pass the bill through the House of Representatives by this Friday, before Memorial Day weekend.
In other news today, the office of former president Joe Biden announced he is battling an aggressive form of prostate cancer. As vice president and president, Biden was a fierce advocate for cancer research, with the goal of reducing the death rate from cancer by at least 50 percent by 2047, preventing more than 4 million deaths from cancer, and improving the experience of individuals and families living with and surviving cancer.
And in international news, Romanian voters today rejected a far-right nationalist who deliberately styled his behavior after Trump and whose victory, until recently, was being treated as a foregone conclusion. Instead, voters elected the centrist mayor of Bucharest, Nicușor Dan. Even before the election, Dan’s opponent insisted the election was illegitimate, claimed that he was the new leader, and called for his supporters to protest in favor of his election. But in the end, Dan’s 8-point victory was too much to overcome and he conceded.
“This is your victory,” Dan told his supporters. “It’s the victory of thousands and thousands of people who campaigned [and] believed that Romania can change in the correct direction.”
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The next person who tells me that Republicans are good for the economy because they run the country like it’s a business gets punched in the nose. Idiots.
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Right?
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May 19, 2025 (Monday)
The House Rules Committee will take up the Republicans’ omnibus bill this week. Illustrating their confidence that the American people support this 1,116-page measure enacting much of MAGA’s wish list, the committee has set its meeting for Wednesday, May 21, 2025…at 1:00 in the morning (not a typo). The Republicans are trying to advance Trump’s entire agenda—from massive logging on public lands to slashing Medicaid—in one giant bill under a process known as “budget reconciliation,” which means it cannot be filibustered in the Senate. That means it needs only Republican votes to pass.
But even Republicans are deeply divided over the measure. While far-right Republicans insist cuts to the social safety net are not deep enough because of the massive deficits the measure’s tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations will create, other Republicans recognize that Medicaid cuts are hugely unpopular: according to a KFF poll released May 1, more than 75% of Americans oppose such cuts.
Catie Edmondson of the New York Times counts 12 swing-state Republicans who don’t want drastic Medicaid cuts, and 31 hardliners who do. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) can afford to lose only three Republican votes on the measure. Nicole Lafond of Talking Points Memo reported today that Trump will go to Capitol Hill tomorrow to talk Republicans into voting for the measure.
Right on cue, the administration served up another issue to draw attention. Trump lawyer Alina Habba, who is now serving as the interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey, announced that Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) will be charged with assaulting, resisting, and impeding law enforcement officers. On May 19, McIver was one of three Democratic representatives from New Jersey who, along with Newark’s Democratic mayor Ras Baraka, went to the Delaney Hall Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Newark, New Jersey, for an oversight visit. Such visits are permitted by law as part of a congress member’s oversight responsibility.
As a mayor, Baraka was not covered by the law permitting congressional oversight. He waited outside the facility’s gates in a public area. Masked agents tried to arrest him there, and as Perry Stein, Jeremy Roebuck, and Liz Goodwin of the Washington Post reported, video released by the Department of Homeland Security showed McIver rushing after the agents and shouting to protesters outside to “surround the mayor.” The video shows a crowd of people jostling, and McIver’s elbows possibly making contact with a masked officer in the crush of the crowd, but no one breaks stride. McIver says she was the one assaulted by ICE officers. In a statement about charging McIver, Habba said “it is my Constitutional obligation to ensure that our federal law enforcement is protected when executing their duties.”
Charging a congressional representative after an event in which no one was injured is a dramatic move indeed, but the Washington Post reporters noted that: “[a]s of 10 p.m., no charging documents were posted in federal court, and a spokesperson for McIver’s legal team said neither she nor her lawyers had seen any charging documents.”
In a statement, McIver said she and her colleagues “were fulfilling our lawful oversight responsibilities, as members of Congress have done many times before, and our visit should have been peaceful and short. Instead, ICE agents created an unnecessary and unsafe confrontation when they chose to arrest Mayor Baraka. The charges against me are purely political—they mischaracterize and distort my actions, and are meant to criminalize and deter legislative oversight…. I look forward to the truth being laid out clearly in court.”
Congressional Democrats are condemning this attack on their colleague. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar of California, Vice Chair Ted Lieu of California, and Assistant Leader Joe Neguse of Colorado issued a statement saying, “The criminal charge against Congresswoman McIver is extreme, morally bankrupt and lacks any basis in law or fact.” Habba’s statement “is a blatant attempt by the Trump administration to intimidate Congress and interfere with our ability to serve as a check and balance on an out-of-control executive branch. House Democrats will not be intimidated by the Trump administration. Not today. Not ever.”
And they pushed back, warning: “Everyone responsible for this illegitimate abuse of power is going to be held accountable for their actions.”
At the same time, the Department of Justice announced it was dropping all charges against Baraka stemming from the attempt to examine the ICE facility. Ten days ago, Habba broke the Department of Justice rule that it would not comment on ongoing investigations by posting that Baraka had “committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon. He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.”
Except, apparently, those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Alan Feuer, Devlin Barrett, and Glenn Thrush of the New York Times reported today that the Department of Justice is considering settling a wrongful death lawsuit with the family of Ashli Babbitt, whom a law enforcement officer shot and killed as she tried to break into the Speaker’s Lobby outside the House floor. The amount they are considering, the journalists report, is $5 million.
Reports that Walmart will raise prices because of the tariffs have Trump officials panicking. Walmart is the largest retailer in the United States, with a 2023 retail revenue of $534 billion. Higher prices there will hurt poorer Americans, particularly those in rural areas, the demographic most likely to have supported Trump in the past.
This, just as cuts to funding for food programs by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in March—programs started during Trump’s first term—have slashed the amount of food available to food banks. A USDA spokesperson said in a statement: “There is no need for new programs, but perhaps more efficient and effective use of current.”
So Republicans today continued their campaign to pressure Walmart into, as Trump put it “eating” the tariff costs. On CNBC today, Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) suggested that Walmart leaders “need to think hard” about raising prices. “I think they’re going to be very careful about how they do this. I know they’ve received some criticism from the president,” he said, adding: “They should know the president has been working very hard with China to make sure we get this thing addressed as quickly as possible.”
Nora Eckert and David Shepardson of Reuters reported that Subaru of America said today it will also be raising prices by between $750 and $2,055 on several models because of “current market conditions.” Executives recently told investors that the tariffs are expected to amount to $5 billion. Eckert and Shepardson reported that Ford raised prices on three models produced in Mexico by as much as $2,000.
Finally, today—because I actually planned to take tonight off, and so am not prepared to cover some very important legal developments and am putting them off until tomorrow so I get them right—Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman, Adam Rasgon, and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported the backstory to the Qatari offer to give a 747 to Trump.
The planes serving as Air Force One are over 30 years old, and Boeing has a contract to build two new jets by 2024, a deadline far in the rear view with no new planes in sight. Apparently, Trump was angling for a new plane and put officials up to buying one. They identified eight options, one of which was the Qatari plane, which Qatar had been trying to sell for at least five years in part because of the enormous cost of operating such a plane. Qatar sent the jet to Florida at a cost the reporters estimate to be as much as $1 million on February 15 for Trump to see, and he loved it.
At that point, discussions turned from purchasing the plane to accepting it as a gift, although it was apparently not the Qataris who changed the terms—they were still expecting to sell it to the United States. A Qatari government official told the New York Times reporters that no decision had yet been made about a transfer rather than a sale. And Pentagon officials estimate that getting the plane repaired and ready for a president would cost at least $1 billion.
And yet, administration officials lined up to say that a $400 million gift from a foreign government to a U.S. president was just fine, despite its explicit prohibition in the Constitution. On Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Qatar giving a plane to Trump was like France giving the Statue of Liberty to the U.S., or England giving the country the Resolute Desk.
These comparisons are not only wrong, but an offensive skewing of the real history of those gifts, which were intended to reinforce democracy, freedom, and the international cooperation of nations that value those principles.
It was the people of France who raised the money to send the Statue of Liberty, whose official name is “Liberty Enlightening the World,” to the United States to honor political democracy and freedom at the nation’s 100th anniversary. The people of the United States, in turn, raised the money for the statue’s pedestal. There was never any question about it being a personal gift to President Grover Cleveland. He would have refused it if such a thing were suggested, and Congress would have impeached him if he had not.
If the story of the Statue of Liberty is the story of the universal principles of democracy and freedom, the story of the Resolute Desk is one of diplomacy. After a famous British expedition to discover the Northwest Passage disappeared in the 1850s, a rescue expedition of five ships, including the HMS Resolute, set sail to find survivors. The Resolute became trapped in Arctic ice in April 1854 and her captain and crew abandoned the ship. When the ice thawed, the Resolute broke free and drifted south, where an American whaling ship found it in 1855. The captain, James Buddington, claimed it under the right of salvage.
At the time, tensions between the U.S. and England were high, and Congress decided to purchase the Resolute from Buddington, fix it up, and send it back to England as a gesture of goodwill and friendship from the American people. After the work was done, a U.S. naval officer and crew sailed the Resolute to England, where Queen Victoria and Prince Albert accepted it on behalf of all of Great Britain. The Royal Navy used the Resolute as a supply vessel for the next 23 years.
When the ship was decommissioned in 1879, the British government launched a public competition to design a piece of furniture that could be made of its timbers to give back to the United States. The winning design was a desk, and it arrived in the United States as a gift for President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880, bearing a plaque that recounted the history of the Resolute.
The plaque noted: “The ship was purchased, fitted out and sent to England, as a gift to Her Majesty Queen Victoria by the President and People of the United States, as a token of goodwill & friendship. This table was made from her timbers when she was broken up, and is presented by the Queen of Great Britain & Ireland, to the President of the United States, as a memorial of the courtesy and loving kindness which dictated the offer of the gift of the ‘Resolute’."
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$5 million of taxpayer dollars to pay reparatoins to an insurrectionist.
Can you imagine if a Democrat tried to strong-arm a company into not raising prices? Republicans would be screaming, “THAT’S NOTHING MORE THAN WOKE COMMIE SOCIALIST MARXISM!” as loud as they could.
I just imagine this being treated like a Supa Hot Fire moment for him. See, Statue of Liberty! Resolute Desk! Liberals = Pwned!
Never mind that the Statue of Liberty was a gift to the American people, not to Grover Cleveland, and was duly approved by Congress. Rutherford B. Hayes didn’t take the fucking Resolute Desk with him after he left office.
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Clearly that means we can all use the Qatari Air Palace. Dibs on Spring Break 2026!
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May 20, 2025 (Tuesday)
Today was a rough day for administration officials on Capitol Hill as Senate committees held hearings on the 2026 budget requests for the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of State. The Senate Finance Committee also held a hearing for Trump’s nominee to be Commissioner of Internal Revenue, former Missouri representative William “Billy” Long. Democrats came prepared and demanded answers that the department secretaries and nominee were either unable or unwilling to give.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee about the Department of Homeland Security’s budget for fiscal year 2026. When Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH) asked her to define “habeas corpus,” Noem’s response indicated she has no understanding of the nation’s fundamental law.
“Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country,” Noem said. Hassan corrected her: “Habeas corpus is the legal principle that requires that the government provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people. If not for that protection, the government could simply arrest people, including American citizens, and hold them indefinitely for no reason. Habeas corpus is the foundational right that separates free societies like America from police states like North Korea.”
Noem’s habit in these hearings is simply to ignore questions and to attack, and she tried that with Hassan, suggesting that the president has the right to suspend habeas corpus if circumstances require it. Her position echoes that of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, with whom she appears to be working to render immigrants to prisons in third countries, but it is dead wrong. The Constitution permits Congress to suspend habeas corpus; not the president.
While Republicans were generally supportive of the Republican officials in the hearings, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) used his time to beg Noem for help for Missouri. The state has suffered a number of natural disasters, including a deadly tornado last Friday, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has not shown up.
“The state has pending three requests for major disaster declarations from earlier storms,” Hawley told Noem. “[W]e’ve lost almost 20 people now in major storms just in the last two months in Missouri.” The Department of Homeland Security oversees FEMA, and Hawley asked Noem to expedite the requests and get them in front of Trump. “We are desperate for… assistance in Missouri,” he said.
When Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) asked Noem how she planned to meet the needs of American people when the administration is cutting 20% of FEMA employees and the agency has lost most of its leadership, Noem talked over him and said the problem was that the Biden administration had failed the American people.
Over in the Appropriations Subcommittee on Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies, things didn’t go much better.
Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. exploded when Senator Patti Murray (D-WA) asked him whose decision it was to withhold childcare and development block grant funding. Kennedy immediately pivoted to former president Biden’s 2021 budget. When she tried to get him back on track, he continued to talk over her, accusing her of “presiding over the destruction of the health of the American people” and of not doing her job. Murray repeatedly tried to recall him to appropriate behavior, finally appealing to the Republican chair of the committee, who asked Kennedy to stop.
When Murray repeated her question, he simply said the decision was made “by my department.” While he refused to take responsibility for the cuts himself, Murray did get him to admit that the department has blocked billions of dollars in federal child care funding.
Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) spelled out for Kennedy his concern about cuts to research funding for the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), sometimes called Lou Gehrig’s disease. “On April 1, ten laboratory heads at National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes received their layoff notices,” he said. “They were all PhDs and senior investigators. They’re not administrators, whatever that might be. They were running intramural labs at NIH. If you have your way, they’ll all be gone on June 2nd. Science magazine reported 25 of 320 physician researchers at NIH’s Internal Clinical Center are leaving, and the number of patients treated in the hospital has been reduced by 30%. Three grants involving ALS and dementia work at Northwestern University [in] Illinois have been paused…. Just last week, an ALS researcher at Harvard had his grant cut.” Durbin asked: “How can we possibly…give hope to people across the country who are suffering from so many diseases when our government is cutting back on that research?”
Kennedy replied: “I do not know about any cuts to ALS research.” When Durbin responded, “I just read them to you,” Kennedy reiterated that he didn’t “know about them until you told…me about them at this moment.”
Brenda Goodman of CNN noted that when Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) asked Kennedy about ending the childhood lead poisoning prevention program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Kennedy assured Reed that “[w]e are continuing to fund the program.” Goodman notes that CNN reported in April that officials in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, had asked the CDC for help addressing lead hazards in Milwaukee Public Schools after the agency’s lead experts were fired. The CDC refused, possibly because Kennedy has said lead poisoning prevention would be moving from the CDC to his new “Administration for a Healthy America.”
Kennedy told Reed the federal government has “a team in Milwaukee, and we’re giving laboratory support to that, to the analytics in Milwaukee, and we’re working with the health department in Milwaukee.”
Officials in Milwaukee said that was untrue. “The City of Milwaukee Health Department is not receiving any federal epidemiological or analytical support related to the MPS lead hazard crisis. Our formal Epi Aid request was denied by the CDC,” spokesperson for the City of Milwaukee Health Department Caroline Reinwald told CNN. Earlier this month, Milwaukee’s health commissioner expressed dismay that the CDC’s entire team working on childhood lead exposure had been laid off. “These are the best and brightest minds in these areas around lead poisoning, and now they’re gone,” he said.
At the end of today’s hearing, Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) corrected the record, saying to Kennedy: “There are no staff on the ground deployed to Milwaukee to address the lead exposure of children in schools, and there are no staff left in that office at CDC, because they have all been fired.”
Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took Secretary of State Marco Rubio to task for abandoning the principles they believed he held when they voted to confirm him.
The administration rendered Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen’s constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador through what the administration said was “administrative error,” and yet officials are refusing to bring him back despite court orders to do so. Van Hollen reminded Rubio that they had served together in Congress for 15 years and that while they didn’t always agree, “I believe we shared some common values: a belief in defending democracy and human rights abroad and honoring the Constitution at home. That’s why I voted to confirm you. I believed you would stand up for those principles. You haven’t. You’ve done the opposite.”
Senator Jacky Rosen (D-NV) spoke to him “as a mother, a senator, and a fellow human being,” saying, “I’m not even mad anymore about your complicity in this administration’s destruction of U.S. global leadership. I’m simply disappointed. And I wonder if you’re proud of yourself in this moment when you go home to your family?" She noted how he appeared to have abandoned all his past principles, and said she no longer recognized him.
When Van Hollen told Rubio he regretted voting to confirm him as secretary of state, Rubio retorted: “Your regret for voting for me confirms I’m doing a good job.”
Billy Long had his own problems. In an opening statement, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) pointed out that Long was neither “an independent tax professional or somebody with extensive management experience.” He was simply a fierce Trump loyalist who would help Trump “use the IRS as a cudgel to beat his adversaries into submission.” Wyden also noted serious accusations against Long’s involvement with fraudulent tax schemes.
In his questioning, Wyden asked, “Did you promise any tax promoter you would help them if you got confirmed?” Long said no. Wyden followed up, asking if he had met with anyone when he was in Washington, D.C., for the inauguration and promised to help them. Long again said no, that he had been in his room for “about 50 hours” with food poisoning.
Wyden noted that staff investigators had tapes of a tax promoter saying he had met with Long at the inauguration and that Long had promised him favorable treatment. They also have another tape of a chief financial officer who had donated to Long after he was nominated for the IRS post, also saying he expected favorable treatment. Senators Wyden, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts are currently investigating these tapes.
Warren took up Trump’s misuse of the IRS to hurt his opponents. Trump has threatened to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status, although federal law expressly prohibits any official from using the IRS to punish any individual taxpayers. Warren tried to get Long to say it would be illegal for the president to direct the IRS to revoke a taxpayer’s nonprofit status, but he refused to. Warren concluded: “[T]he fact that you want to sit there and dance around about this tells me that you shouldn’t be within 1,000 miles of the directorship of the IRS.”
The House was also a troubled place today, as Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) used a hearing of the House Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation Subcommittee, which she chairs, to accuse her ex-fiancé and other men of sexual abuse. She showed what she claimed were naked photos of herself and other women, taken without their consent. These accusations echo those she made in a speech in the House on February 10th. The men deny the allegations, and one is suing her for defamation. She is taking the position that her attacks on them in Congress are legally protected by the Constitution’s speech and debate clause.
If Republican lawmakers didn’t seem up to their jobs today, neither did the president. He announced a “Golden Dome” missile shield defense system—a U.S. version of Israel’s “Iron Dome”—that he claims will be operational in 3 years and cost $175 billion. Experts say it is not yet possible to construct such a defense system for intercontinental ballistic missiles and that such a project could cost as much as $542 billion.
When a reporter asked Trump about the cost, Trump claimed “we can afford to do it…we took in $5.1 trillion in the last four days in the Middle East,” a wildly made-up number. Such a system would likely benefit at least one person: it would depend on thousands of satellites, a requirement that seems likely to benefit billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Administration officials today seemed to illustrate their utter disregard for the work their jobs require and their refusal to govern for Americans. Instead, they seem to see their offices as ways to get access to large amounts of money and power they can use to impose their will on the country.
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What?! Did any reporter follow up on that claim with anything? That definitely deserved a “pics or it didn’t happen” at least.
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I doubt it. Any reporters allowed that kind of access are allowed because they’re spineless cowards. Anyway, Tramp would’ve just blathered some other crap, or started personal attacks on the reporter.
Oh how I wish one would ask him about his makeup, why he uses such an unnatural orange and so on.
I still think the first one is the main goal of most of these cynical shits-- grab all you can while the grabbing’s good. Some are true believers – Stephen Miller appears to be one – but most are incompetent greedheads.
Which makes me think this administration is just typical of what republicans have mostly been since the 80s, except on steroids, and that it’s bound to lose power, once its self-serving greed causes so much death and destruction that most Americans vote them out of office, and then Dems have to spend most of their new terms trying to clean up the mess again.
I say all that to actually say that that’s how I articulate lately what little optimism I can still muster.
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He also cornered her about the immigrant reality show. If the reporting on that is remotely accurate, she 100% perjured herself in her answers.
Looks like more perjury.
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I don’t know. I can totally believe that neither of them are actually in charge of their respective departments, that it’s the DOGE boys operating under the direction of Stephen Miller that’s actually in charge. There have been several instances already where someone in the media or Congress said, “Hey, what happened to this program/office/website?”, the Department Secretary says, “I don’t know, this is the first I’m hearing about it” and a day later, it’s back up.
FEMA, on the other hand, appears to be almost entirely gutted, and the administration is pretty consistently refusing to help any state, even red ones. That . . . could be one thing that could really come back to haunt them. To blame that on Biden now, like Noem did, is asinine, and not all Trump supporters will be stupid enough to buy that. Hawley isn’t buying it. And Huckabee-Sanders in Arkansas knows better, too. And both of them have now been told no to requests for disaster relief in their states. If Trump loses people like Hawley and Huckabee-Sanders, he’s going to be in trouble.
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Noem reportedly met with producers herself. That’s not DOGE, that’s her directly lying under oath.
While it’s possible Kennedy doesn’t know, his statement wasn’t that he didn’t know. He represented that he did know, and that teams from HHS were in Milwaukee. That is apparently a decisive lie, again, under oath. Even brain worms aren’t enough to get him out of perjury for that.
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