IS THE SUPREME COURT GUNNING FOR BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP? NATIONWIDE INJUNCTIONS? DUE PROCESS? ALL THREE?

I said back in January that I believe the Supreme Court will throw out birthright citizenship. The Supremes might not rule that way in the case of births to green card holders or other non-citizens who are here legally, but I strongly suspect that they'll say the U.S.-born children of immigrants who are here without legal certification aren't citizens. I don't think it matters that the arguments against birthright citizenship used to be seen as part of the right-wing fringe, as The New York Times noted yesterday -- the desire to restrict citizenship is utterly mainstream among the Republican rank-and-file, and it's not an important issue to swing voters, so I think the Court will, as usual, choose ideology over the Constitution.

But we don't know whether the birthright citizenship case currently before the Court will lead to a ruling on birthright citizenship itself. Politico reports:

It’s perhaps the most high-profile case of the year, but it’s not clear what exactly the court will be deciding.

Will the justices wade into the constitutionality of Trump’s effort to deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. whose parents are undocumented immigrants or here on temporary visas? Or will the justices sidestep that legal lightning rod for now and focus solely on a more procedural, yet still momentous, issue: whether lower-court judges will retain the authority to block federal policies nationwide.

“It’s the question that’s on everyone’s minds,” said Columbia Law professor Elora Mukherjee, an expert on immigration law. “I anticipate we’ll see some discussion of the underlying merits, but I am not clear on how much.”

... the administration, notably, is not asking the court at this stage to overturn the district judges’ legal reasoning and declare Trump’s policy constitutional. Rather, the administration says the judges simply lacked the power to issue any nationwide injunctions in the first place.

... If the justices invalidate the injunctions, Trump may be able to enact his citizenship policy in vast areas of the country — even though every court to squarely weigh the policy’s legality has ruled against it.

So for now we might just get a ruling on whether district judges can issue nationwide injunctions. If so, I assume that the Court will hand even more power to Trump by saying that nationwide injunctions are bad -- or are bad only in certain policy areas. The ruling will be crafted so it hands power to Trump while leaving open the possibility that executive power can be taken away if there's ever a Democratic president again.

In the current case, we may be left with a situation in which the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants are citizens in some parts of America and not citizens in other parts. That seems like a recipe for chaos -- are these kids still citizens if their parents take them from a pro-citizenship federal district to an anti-citizenship federal district? -- but it could be sort of an out-of-town tryout for the idea of overturning birthright citizenship altogether: the country will live with a two-tiered system for a while, and get used to that, which sets the table for a full abandonment of the principle that no longer seems radical to most Americans.

And I think it's possible that the Supremes will rule on birthright citizenship itself, in a way that has an impact far beyond what happens to immigrants' babies.

The argument in favor of universal birthright citizenship is that the Fourteenth Amendment is unambiguous:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

The phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" means that U.S. law applies to them (as it doesn't fully apply to, say, foreign diplomats who live here).

If, as I suspect, the Supreme Court says (now or in the future) that undocumented immigrants' babies aren't "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States, that will not only mean that these babies aren't citizens, it will also mean that no one living here illegally is entitled to due process rights. The Fifth Amendment says, "No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" -- note that it's "No person" rather than "No citizen." I think the Supremes are likely to rule that the Fifth Amendment wasn't really intended to extend due process to people here unlawfully (or, in Trump's America, people who were here lawfully until the administration declared that they weren't), and that the Fourteenth Amendment didn't really mean that people here unlawfully are "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States.

At that point, birthright citizenship will be a thing of the past and Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and Tom Homan will have the unchallengeable right to do anything they please to anyone deemed "illegal" by the Executive Branch.

It's disturbing that the Supremes pushed this case to the front of the line. The New York Times reports that today's arguments in the case

will take place after the justices have heard all of their scheduled cases this term, and in the weeks before they begin issuing their most consequential decisions of the year — an unusual move that signals that the justices regard the dispute as significant enough to consider immediately.

They want to legislate from the bench right now. That tells me they want tro do something nasty and ideological right away.

WE HAVE NO WAY OF KNOWING WHETHER A BIDEN WITHDRAWAL WOULD HAVE SAVED THE DEMOCRATS IN 2024

Next Tuesday is the publication date for the new book by CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios's Alex Thompson. The book tells us that the Democratic loss in 2024 was all President Biden's fault.

Joe Biden “totally fucked us” by leaving it too late to drop out of the 2024 US presidential election, a former top campaign aide to Kamala Harris has told the authors of a new book.

David Plouffe, who was manager of Barack Obama’s winning 2008 campaign and a senior adviser in his White House, was drafted in to help Harris’s bid for president after the declining Biden withdrew from the race last summer.

Harris’s 107-day sprint against Donald Trump was “a fucking nightmare”, Plouffe is quoted as saying by authors Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson in Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. A copy was obtained by the Guardian.

“And it’s all Biden,” Plouffe adds, reflecting on the former US president’s decisions to run for re-election and then to cling on for more than three weeks after a catastrophic debate performance against Trump raised questions about his mental acuity and age. “He totally fucked us.”

... In the wake of Harris’s loss [Plouffe] posted a message on X – formerly known as Twitter – that the Harris campaign had begun in a “deep hole”.

Plouffe's argument is that the lateness of Biden's departure from the race left him and other campaign professionals with inadequate time to work their magic. But the substitution of Kamala Harris for Biden in July 2024 led to a surge in the polls for the Democratic ticket and a massive wave of donations. Although the wave of enthusiasm was widely dismissed as a "sugar high," Harris seemed to have a decent chance of winning before the consultant bros came on board. Maybe they were the problem.

In an excerpt from the book published in The New Yorker, Tapper and Thompson quote George Clooney:

Democrats deceived the country about Biden’s abilities and, Clooney said, “that’s how Trump won.”

But was the country really deceived? Clips of Biden "senior moments," both real and manufactured, were all over the internet throughout Biden's term. This wasn't like the cover-up of Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer's in his second term. Voters knew that Biden was past his prime.

Would an earlier Biden withdrawal have saved America from a second Trump term? We have no way of knowing. I'll remind you that every contested Democratic primary since 2004 has been a battle between the Establishment and insurgents that left a significant number of voters bitter. In 2008, everything worked out, despite the lingering anger of Hillary Clinton supporters; in 2020, when Establishment candidates banded together to prevent a Bernie Sanders nomination, everything worked out again, but barely. (Biden received a record number of votes and won the popular vote decisively, but the swing states were extremely close.) On the other hand, in 2004, the Howard Dean insurgency was seen as a problem to be solved, and the Establishment's consensus candidate -- an uncharismatic John Kerry -- couldn't bring home a win. And in 2016, many voters were furious when Clinton beat Bernie Sanders, and some of those voters have continued to blow off the Democratic Party.

When Tapper and Thompson tell us that “The original sin of Election 2024 was Biden’s decision to run for re-election — followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment,” and when the subtitle of their book calls Biden's decision to run in 2024 "disastrous," what they're saying is that an earlier withdrawal would have guaranteed a Democratic victory. I'm not sure what else they could be saying, because the actual election couldn't have been much closer without tipping to Harris: Trump won the three states that gave him a victory, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, by less than 1.75% each. Tapper and Thompson don't challenge this anonymous quote that appears in the New Yorker excerpt:

“It was an abomination,” one prominent Democratic strategist—who publicly defended Biden—told us. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party. He stole it from the American people.”

But we don't know that.

If there's an "original sin" here, it's not Biden's choices with regard to the 2024 election and it's not the way Biden's team managed his diminished state, which wasn't a particularly effective cover-up. The "original sin" is how Biden managed his presidency. He did many good things, but he was a godawful public communicator, and he didn't delegate public communication to Harris or any other subordinates. He wasn't able to offer his side of the story every day in an effective way, which meant that the Republican smear machine operated without genuine opposition for four years.

In addition, I think age left Biden -- as it's left other old people I've known -- wanting to focus on what he wanted to focus on, which meant he was less capable of pivoting to other subjects. He wanted to manage the global coalition against Russia, and he did that effectively. He took pride in the Inflation Reduction Act, which included many provisions that would have improved Americans' lives and would have helped the planet deal with climate change. But he wasn't nimble enough to pivot to inflation, which damaged a lot of voters and continued to have a significant impact even after it cooled, probably because of record-high interest rates on credit cards. He also never found an effective strategy or message as Trump and the rest of the GOP noise machine ginned up a panic about immigration.

Excepts and reviews of the Tapper/Thompson book have persuaded me that Biden at his worst was somewhat more impaired than I realized. The New Yorker excerpt focuses on a fund-raiser at which -- after a grueling amount of travel -- Biden doesn't recognize George Clooney, and other observers see Biden struggling.

Clooney was certainly not the only one concerned. Other high-dollar attendees who posed for photographs with [Barack] Obama and Biden described Biden as slow and almost catatonic. Though they saw pockets of clarity while watching him on television, and onstage later that night, there were obvious brain freezes and clear signs of a mental slide. It was, to some of them, terrifying.

Obama didn’t know what to make of how his former running mate was acting. At one point, in a small group of a few dozen top donors, Biden began speaking—barely audibly—and trailed off incoherently. Obama had to jump in and preside. At other moments, during photos, Obama would hop in and finish sentences for him.

It's obviously a problem that, as the New York Times review notes, Biden staffers had to develop a habit of "restricting urgent business to the hours between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m." The Times review tells us that "By late 2023, [Biden's] staff was pushing as much of his schedule as they could to midday."

But midday Biden appears to have been a knowledgeable, thoughtful president with good judgment -- and his replacement is none of these things at any hour of the day. Biden and his smart, capable, decent aides ran the country better -- and, I believe, would have continued to run the country better -- than the current motley crew of know-nothings, flatterers, bigots, scoundrels, and psychopaths.

For the good of the country, we deserved to have a third option. Eventually we got one, and it's probably the one we would have had if there'd been a full slate of contested primaries. (The source material is gone, but in 2023 and the first half of 2024, as I noted last summer, Kamala Harris won every national Democratic primary poll listed at FiveThirtyEight that didn't include Biden.) Regrettably, America rejected the capable alternative the Democrats offered -- and that might very well have happened even if Biden had announced he wasn't running a couple of years earlier.

DONALD TRUMP, AN ELITIST TAKING HANDOUTS

Most of the time, Donald Trump seems good at messaging, and at creating bamboozlements that distract us from news stories that are bad for him. I generally resist the argument that he's doing X specifically to distract us from Y -- I think his strategy is to throw everything at the wall all the time, on the assumption that whatever lands poorly for him will be forgotten as soon as he generates the next cycle of people-pleasing (or at least base-pleasing) headlines.

But the plane from Qatar seems to be a messaging disaster for him. He can't seem to drive it from the headlines, and it buried the story of his China tariff deal, which wasn't much of a win but could have been spun as one. Stock markets rallied yesterday, today he has a decent inflation number -- yet he still can't get past the damn plane story.

I think Trump misread the way poor and middle-class voters respond to his wealth. Many Americans enjoy rich people's wealth vicariously. Many actually believe they'll get wealthy themselves someday. Trump has successfully sold millions of Americans on an idea connected to this: I'm rich because I'm a business genius. Now I'm applying my business genius on your behalf.

That's more or less the message he tried to convey on Truth Social when the first reports appeared:

But the Trump of his voters' fantasies shouldn't need a gift from the Middle East. Trump's voters think he's so brilliant that he should be able to get a new Air Force One built ahead of schedule and under budget. Why get one from foreigners? Why should America -- Trump's America! -- need a handout like this from overseas?

And the foreigners who gave us this handout are Muslims who don't wear Western clothes! Islamophobia isn't as visible in America as it was two decades ago -- we've swept the unpopular Iraq and Afghanistan wars under the rug (Trump has helped make them almost as unpopular among Republicans as they've been among Democrats), and we don't talk about the "war on terror" very much anymore -- but people on the right still regard Muslims with deep hostility, and everyone thinks the Middle East's petro-states are sleazy and suspect.

Much of Trump's corruption -- the crypto cash grab, for instance -- seems too complicated for most Americans to follow. But the plane is different. It's a big, expensive gift. Why would these rich Muslims in funny clothes give Trump something for nothing? They must be expecting something in return.

Trump misread this because he now thinks the entire country is on board with everything about his presidency, including the corruption. This is Trump as an out-of-touch elitist -- which is ironic, because our entire political culture believes that Democrats are the out-of-touch elitists and Trump is a true Man of the People leading a party rooted in common American soil. At the same time, he also looks as if he's accepting charity in our name -- which is in character for Trump, who's spent much of his life scrounging for financing. All in all, it's a bad look. I hope the story stays in the news for weeks.

THE PRESS NEEDS TO ACKNOWLEDGE SECOND-TERM TRUMP'S CORRUPTION THE WAY IT (MORE OR LESS) LEARNED TO ACKNOWLEDGE FIRST-TERM TRUMP'S DISHONESTY (updated)

In Donald Trump's first campaign and first term, the mainstream media resisted describing his falsehoods as lies. The press did point out dishonest statements -- The Washington Post, for instance, began tracking Trump's "false and misleading claims" at the beginning of his term and then catalogued 30,573 such claims by January 2021. But the Post didn't use the word lie in reference to a Trump assertion until the summer of 2018, when he'd been in office for a year and a half.

Nevertheless, the press got somewhat better at categorizing Trump's claims, and doing so in the opening paragraphs of stories. After he began insisting that he won the 2020 election, it became common for the press to describe this as a "false" claim. And the press also used forms of the word lie: Here's a campaign fact-check from CNN's Daniel Dale in October 2024 that appeared under the headline "Trump, on a Lying Spree, Made at Least 40 Separate False Claims in Two Pennsylvania Speeches."

In Trump's second term, the press needs to improve its coverage of Trump's corruption the way some news outlets improved their coverage of his honesty. The corruption needs to be made clear in headlines and in the opening paragraphs of stories.

Here's the headline of a New York Times story datelined today:

Trump Heads to the Middle East With a Single Goal: Deals, Deals, Deals

President Trump has always viewed the presidency as a worldwide hunt for deals. And there is no better place for that than the Gulf, where a few men wield absolute authority over vast wealth.

Apart from the fact that any use of the word "deal" in a headline about Trump is using his own branding, this tells us nothing about how shady Trump's plans are. Nor does the lede:

When American presidents visit the Middle East, they usually arrive with a strategic vision for the region, even if it seems a far reach.

Jimmy Carter pushed Egypt and Israel to a historic peace accord. Bill Clinton tried and failed with Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader. George W. Bush imagined his war on terrorism would ultimately lead to democratization in the region. Barack Obama went to Cairo “to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.”

President Trump will tour the Gulf this week in search of one thing above all else: business deals. Planes. Nuclear power. Artificial intelligence investments. Arms. Anything that puts a signature on the bottom of a page.

The point of the story is that this trip is oddly disengaged from American foreign policy. And sure, that's worth noting.

... as a strategic exercise, the trip’s purpose remains foggy. During his 2017 journey to the region, Mr. Trump made waves by rallying dozens of leaders from majority-Muslim countries to confront and denounce extremism. It is unclear what foreign policy goals, if any, will be advanced on this visit.

It's only in paragraph 12 that readers begin to get a glimmer of how corrupt this all is:

In place of grand strategy will be a series of financial transactions that Mr. Trump will promote as producing jobs for American workers.

The agenda conveniently aligns with Mr. Trump’s expanding business plans. His family has six pending deals with a majority Saudi-owned real estate firm, a cryptocurrency deal with an affiliate of the government of the United Arab Emirates and a new golf and luxury villa project backed by the government of Qatar.

The Qataris are going to great lengths to court Mr. Trump. The Trump administration is poised to accept a luxury Boeing 747-8 plane as a donation from the Qatari royal family that will be upgraded to serve as Air Force One, in possibly the biggest foreign gift ever received by the U.S. government, several American officials with knowledge of the matter said.

The plan under discussion raises substantial ethical issues....

So "ethical issues" get mentioned, but only in paragraph 15. It's only in paragraph 26 that we're told, "No part of the world has been more important to the rising financial well-being of the Trump family than the Middle East." Jared Kushner's ties to the Saudis are mentioned in paragraph 27. Some of Trump's business dealings are cited in subsequent paragraphs. So if you read this all the way to the end, you understand that Trump is using the office of the president for self-dealing, and that this isn't normal. But it's all reported subtly. This needs to be stated much more overtly.

There's a similar problem with the headline of a Times story about Trump's memecoin:

Auction to Dine With Trump Creates Foreign Influence Opportunity

(Imagine a similar headline: "Piles of White Powder and Rolled Hundred-Dollar Bills Create Drug Abuse Opportunity.")

The subhead is similarly bland:

When the bidding stops Monday, the top buyers of a Trump family crypto coin will win a tour of the White House.

But the lede at least conveys some sense of Trump's ethical bankruptcy, although it absurdly implies that the corruption might just happen:

The sale of face-to-face access to President Trump using the Trump family’s own cryptocurrency has done more than benefit him financially, though it has certainly done that.

Mr. Trump announced last month that leading buyers of a digital coin his family is marketing would be rewarded with a private dinner with him at one of his golf courses and that the very top bidders would win a tour of the White House.

The auction, which ends Monday, has set off a spectacle that has drawn bipartisan criticism, triggered a suspicious trading pattern, and left a sitting United States president wide open to attempts to corruptly influence him.

Trump isn't "wide open to attempts to corruptly influence him." He's actively encouraging coin buyers to corruptly influence him.

The Times story about the Qatari plane is better:

Trump Is Poised to Accept a Luxury 747 From Qatar for Use as Air Force One

The plan raises substantial ethical issues, given the immense value of the lavishly appointed plane and that Mr. Trump intends to take ownership of it after he leaves office.

All of these stories describe presidential acts that raise "substantial ethical issues," but at least we're told that right away in this story.

The third paragraph of the story refers to "a day of controversy in which even some Republicans privately questioned the wisdom of the plan." Then we get this in paragraphs 5 and 6:

While a Qatari official described the proposal as still under discussion and the White House said that gifts it accepted would be done in full compliance with the law, Democratic lawmakers and good government groups expressed outrage over the substantial ethical issues the plan presented. They cited the intersection of Mr. Trump’s official duties with his business interests in the Middle East, the immense value of the lavishly appointed plane and the assumption that Mr. Trump would have use of it after leaving office. Sold new, a commercial Boeing 747-8 costs in the range of $400 million.

“Even in a presidency defined by grift, this move is shocking,” said Robert Weissman, a co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy organization. “It makes clear that U.S. foreign policy under Donald Trump is up for sale.”

That's much better. Trump is off-the-charts corrupt, and every story about his self-dealing should make that clear.

It's part of a larger media failing in Trump's second term: although nearly everything he's doing is in violation of the law, much of it is not described as illegal and potentially impeachable -- he's just doing stuff this way, and the law says it's supposed to be done that way, and the conclusion is often left unstated: What he's doing is illegal. But I don't expect the press to change.

*****

UPDATE: OMG.

Lipton is the lead author of the crypto story cited above. If this view of corruption is common among our elite journalists, no wonder Trump thinks he can get away with pretty much anything he wants to do.

TRUMPWORLD AUGMENTS REAL FASCISM WITH FAKE FASCISM

You might be aware of this story:

President Donald Trump's acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia was spat on by an irate woman while on air giving an interview to Newsmax....

In the altercation, the woman, walking a small dog, can be seen coming up to him, proclaiming, "You are Ed Martin!" She then spat on him and strode away, gesturing furiously back at him.

Right-wingers are now reporting that the woman has been arrested -- or is there an arrest warrant out for her? Either way, she could face a massive fine and eight years in prison. Or is it twenty?

JUST IN: The Leftist who spit on Ed Martin during a interview has been ARRESTED!

U.S. Marshals, arrested and she will be charged under 18 U.S. Code § 111. She is facing 20 years in federal prison for knowingly assaulting a federal official and potentially millions in legal… pic.twitter.com/nRM7DdEcJy

— Steve Gruber (@stevegrubershow) May 9, 2025

WITH “Ai” INSTANTLY SEARCHING DATABASES OF PHOTOS ALREADY ON FILE…

IT’S SO MUCH EASIER TO CATCH CRIMINALS!

THINK BEFORE YOU SPIT! HA!

THE SCUM THAT SPIT ON ED MARTIN HAS BEEN CAUGHT & FACES 20 YEARS IN FEDERAL PRISON & MILLIONS IN LEGAL FINES!

(see LINKS & COMMENTS below) https://t.co/PkQwTIaPys pic.twitter.com/15pqrJ9NIT

— Cordell Baker (@CordellBaker12) May 9, 2025

18 U.S. Code § 111 exists and does concern assaults on government workers. But I can't find an actual news story reporting the arrest of this woman, or even a story mentioning the arrest warrant. There's nothing in the mainstream press, and nothing at Newsmax (where you'd expect the story to appear), Breitbart, or any other right-wing site.

So was there an arrest? Or do the Trump administration and its allies merely want the base to believe that this woman has been hunted down (or is being hunted down) and will face a draconian sentence?

A bigger story right now is, of course, the arrest of Newark mayor Ras Baraka at a Homeland Security detention facility in his city. (Baraka has since been released.)

Three members of Congress were also at the facility. They weren't arrested, and the reason they weren't seems clear. CNN reports:

Under the annual appropriations act, which allocates funds for federal agencies, lawmakers are permitted to enter “any facility operated by or for the Department of Homeland Security used to detain or otherwise house aliens.”

The law is also clear that members of Congress are not required “to provide prior notice of the intent to enter a facility” in their oversight capacity....

Baraka, to whom the appropriations law doesn’t apply, was held for a few hours before being released.

The Trumpers are deeply authoritarian, but for some reason they're still observing some limits. They knew that it was unquestionably legal for these members of Congress to be at the facility, so the agents didn't arrest them.

But the Trumpers think that's a bad look. They appear weak. There's no worse sin in Trumpland than weakness.

So here's a Fox News headline:

DHS Says ‘Arrests Are Still on the Table’ After New Jersey House Dems Caught on Camera ‘Storming’ ICE Facility."

RedState:

Arrests Very Much 'On the Table' for Dems Who Stormed ICE Facility to Stump for Criminal Illegal Aliens

Gateway Pundit:

“Definitely on the Table” – DHS Spox Says Members of Congress May Soon Be Arrested For BODYSLAMMING Female ICE Agent

Here's the "bodyslam":

🚨WATCH: US Congresswoman, LaMonica McIver (wearing a red blazer), storms the gate of Delaney Hall Detention Center ASSAULTING an ICE agent. pic.twitter.com/4Q1deds1tl

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) May 10, 2025

It's obviously upsetting the Trumpers that no member of Congress was arrested at the scene, so they need to talk tough right now. I don't know if the regime will actually go through with the arrests -- my guess is no -- or will simply wait for this story to drop out of the news cycle. But right now it's clear that the Trumpers are worried that they dont appear authoritarian enough.

THE RISE OF FASCISM AND THE TABLOIDIZATION OF GOVERNMENT

Now they're talking about suspending habeas corpus.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff who orchestrated President Trump’s crackdown on immigration, said on Friday that the administration was considering suspending immigrants’ right to challenge their detention in court before being deported.

“The Constitution is clear,” he told reporters outside the White House, arguing that the right, known as a writ of habeas corpus, “could be suspended in time of invasion.”

“That’s an option we’re actively looking at,” he said....

Actually, there is no "clear" constitutional mandate for a suspension of habeas corpus. Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution says:

The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

As an analysis of this clause from the Constitution Center notes, previous U.S. governments have invoked this clause only on rare occasions:

The writ of habeas corpus has been suspended four times since the Constitution was ratified: throughout the entire country during the Civil War; in eleven South Carolina counties overrun by the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction; in two provinces of the Philippines during a 1905 insurrection; and in Hawaii after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

That analysis also tells us:

The Clause does not specify which branch of government has the authority to suspend the privilege of the writ, but most agree that only Congress can do it.

Congress ratified Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas during the Civil War, and

On every other occasion, the executive has proceeded only after first securing congressional authorization.

I'd like to point out that this analysis was written by Amy Coney Barrett when she was an appeals court judge, in collaboration with Neal Katyal. I hope this means she'll be a vote against granting Trump the unilateral power to suspend habeas if that question reaches the Supreme Court, though I wouldn't bet the rent money on it.

Barrett and Katyal note that habeas has been suspended nationwide only once, during the Civil War, and locally only under extreme circumstances. The administration appears to be arguing that we're in a public safety emergency so dire that it justifies another habeas suspension, even as the administration is also arguing that it has effectively sealed the border and stopped the "invasion."

But at least 40% of the public will probably accept the notion that we're experiencing an invasion so dire that it justifies the suspension of a fundamental civil liberty. I think I know why.

The dumbing down of America, on this and many other subjects, is a consequence of the politicized tabloidization of the news by Fox and other outlets. Let's look at what news ought to be and what it is now, thanks to Rupert Murdoch and other weaponizers of tabloidization.

We know what the news should ideally be: stories that tell us what we need to know about significant events in our communities and in the world at large. Tabloidization changes this formula: Instead of telling us what we need to know to understand our world, tabloid news tells us whatever makes our pulse race, and presents it all in the most emotion-inducing way possible. An editor of The Sun in Britain said that the paper should "shock and amaze on every page."

The evil genius of Murdochism is that it's politicized tabloidization. Fox doesn't present the news. It presents news (and pseudo-news) stories crafted as narratives of good and evil, with evil always represented either by liberals or by groups associated with liberals (people of color, sexual minorities, college professors, and so on). The top stories are whichever stories are most successful at getting viewers' blood to boil.

To the target audience for Fox and Fox-style tabloid news, the presence of undocumented immigrants in America really is a crisis at the level of the Civil War or Pearl Harbor, because over the years the audience has consumed hundreds of emotion-stirring stories demonizing immigrants. The Trump administration is shutting down or crippling parts of the government that do non-glamorous but critically important things Americans depend on -- but none of that stirs the blood of the Fox audience the way the presence of border crossers does. So we'll get extreme "emergency" immigration measures even as disease prevention and VA services and medical research falter.

Fox was intended to mislead ordinary Americans about what's really important, but it wasn't intended to mislead the people who run our government. Now, however, our government is run by people who also have Fox brain. They don't think they need to focus on issues Fox ignores, and they don't think they need to understand anything at a deeper level than what you get from Fox content.

So here's the president of the United States:

Since President Donald Trump was sworn into office in January, he has sat for just 12 presentations from intelligence officials of the President’s Daily Brief.

... with Trump, there is added concern as he is known not to read the accompanying briefing document, referred to as “the book,” that is put together by intelligence analysts in a highly labor-intensive process. This document is delivered in hard copy or on a tablet device to the president and his key advisers five days a week.

In imitation of the master, here's the FBI director:

FBI Director Kash Patel has alarmed some members of the bureau by taking what they say is an overly casual approach to the role....

For decades, the FBI chief has received an 8:30 a.m. daily “director’s brief” with the most important information gathered from thousands of agents and analysts. Patel reportedly had trouble making the morning briefing, so it was dropped from five days a week to two.

“Even that has been a struggle,” an unnamed official told NBC....

Patel also ended a long-standing practice of holding secure weekly video conferences with field office leaders across the country, according to NBC. The meetings were considered a crucial way to share information and priorities across the bureau....

There’s a “growing sense among the ranks that there’s a leadership void, and that the highest echelons of the bureau are more concerned about currying favor with the president, retribution and leaks than the actual work,” Stacey Young, a former DOJ lawyer who co-founded Justice Connection, a group dedicated to supporting current and former DOJ employees, told NBC.

Patel has recently bragged about arresting a state judge presiding over an immigration case and was dressed down by a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing for failing to put together a budget request.

Trump, Patel, and others in the administration -- Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem -- have such severe cases of Fox brain that they don't even seem to believe it's their job to do the tedious, non-headline-grabbing grunt work that their predecessors prioritized. They think their job is to provide blood-stirring content, whether it's Noem posing in front of shirtless caged men with tattoos in El Salvador or Hegseth doing push-ups with troops while boasting that the troops are "tough, disciplined, ready to fight." If you watch Fox, you think its emotion-stirring content is the news; in the same way, these top government officials thinks revving up emotions is their job.

Sometimes this thinking leads to empty photo ops. Other times it leads to brutality. But it's all driven by a tabloid sense of what's important and what isn't. And the stirring of blood could continue until we have no civil liberties and no functioning government at all.

NEW U.S. ATTORNEY JEANINE PIRRO SIGNED THE FRAUDULENT TAX FORMS THAT GOT HER HUSBAND A FELONY CONVICTION -- WHEN SHE WAS A D.A.

The new interim U.S. attorney for D.C. is Jeanine Pirro, one of President Trump's favorite Fox News stars. You probably know about her Trump sycophancy, which is extreme even by Fox standards:



You probably know that Fox pulled her off the air in late 2020 because she was spreading bizarre (and actionable) conspiracy theories about the election. You probably know that she was previously suspended by Fox for Islamophobic comments about Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Maybe you know that she once referred to immigrant children as "a lower level of human being."

But I want to get into the gutter and talk about her marriage.

Jeanine Pirro was married to Al Pirro from 1975 to 2013. She was a judge of the Westchester County Court from 1991 to 1993 and the county's DA from 1994 to 2005. Which meant that she was DA -- and, later, a candidate for New York state attorney general -- long after her husband's 2000 conviction on felony tax fraud charges. The returns in question were joint returns, which she co-signed, as New York magazine noted in a 2006 story:

Of course, Al and Jeanine’s tax forms (they co-signed the returns) were fraudulent. Al’s businesses—he had 32 single-purpose entities, one for each real-estate deal—took about $20 million in deductions. The government alleged that about 5 percent of those really were personal. Some of the personal expenses charged to businesses were tantalizing. There was an anniversary stay at the Plaza, $1,800 grillwork for the pet pigs’ pen, a $4,450 portrait of their two children, Al’s $123,000 Ferrari 348 Spider convertible, even $70,000 to fight Al’s paternity suit. (Al claimed he had to fight. The mother is a convicted embezzler who’d listed another father on the birth certificate.)

Did I mention that Al Pirro fathered a child out of wedlock during the marriage?)

The government also discovered a complicated lease structure that allowed Jeanine to claim a Mercedes as hers, though one of Al’s companies paid for it. (One of Al’s companies also picked up the tab for Jeanine’s mother’s Mercedes, which pissed off his own mother.)

The indictment of the sitting D.A.’s husband was extremely embarrassing to Jeanine. That she had co-signed fraudulent personal tax returns was worse. She wasn’t, as critics pointed out, a naïve homemaker. How could she have known nothing? Remember as you're reading all this that the GOP is -- or at least was at the time -- regarded as the party of traditional moral values.

During that run for DA in 2006, the Pirros' values were so embarrassing that even the New York Post wallowed in the story, which also involved adultery and wiretapping. This is from a Post report published in September of that year:

In a devastating blow to her campaign, Republican attorney-general candidate Jeanine Pirro admitted yesterday she is under federal investigation for discussing with former city Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik how to secretly record her bad-boy husband to see if he was cheating.

Bombshell transcripts of conversations between Pirro and Kerik reveal that an angry Pirro even offered to plant the bug herself on her husband’s boat, where she believed he was having sex with another woman.

“What am I supposed to do, Bernie? Watch him f- – – her every night?” Pirro is quoted as saying on the transcripts, obtained by WNBC-TV. “What am I supposed to do? . . . I can go on the boat, I’ll put the f- – -ing thing on myself.”

U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia ... is looking into whether Pirro engaged in illegal wiretapping, which carries a five-year maximum prison sentence....

Thinking that her husband was again cheating on her – he fathered a love child more than two decades ago when the two were married – Pirro admitted she had him followed “to see if what I suspected was true.” ...

Pirro ... belittled the AG’s office she is now seeking, calling it a “been-there-done-that kind of thing.” She said she would have been in the governor’s mansion if it weren’t for her husband....

It was 20 years ago that Pirro abandoned her campaign as the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor because of her then-virtually unknown husband Al’s alleged ties to mob-connected companies. And it was almost a year ago that Pirro abandoned her campaign for U.S. Senate – deciding instead to run for attorney general – after her husband secretly worked behind the scenes to undermine her candidacy....

In 2003, [Al Pirro] denied allegations from a suspended Mamaroneck police officer that the department covered up an incident in which Al was stopped while driving drunk. His wife, who was in the car, allegedly demanded special treatment.

In 2004, Al Pirro was alleged by a FBI informant to have bragged to a local Westchester mobster that he was leaking confidential information involving an investigation being conducted by his wife’s DA’s Office.

But -- but -- Hunter Biden!

It will not surprise you to learn that Al Pirro was pardoned by Trump on his last day in office in January 2021. The Pirros had separated in 2007 and divorced in 2013.