Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: A federal judge in Boston said on Wednesday that the Trump administration had violated an order he issued last month barring officials from deporting people to countries not their own without first giving them sufficient time to object. The finding by the judge, Brian E. Murphy, was one of the strongest judicial rebukes the administration has faced so far in a series of contentious cases arising from its sprawling deportation agenda. It was not immediately…

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Politico reports: The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to block an effort to open the inner workings of the secretive DOGE cost-cutting effort to public scrutiny. The Justice Department filed an emergency appeal Wednesday urging the high court to put a hold on a judge’s orders giving a watchdog group access to documents detailing firings, grant terminations and other actions proposed by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which was overseen by Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk….

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The Washington Post reports: Federal prosecutors across the country may soon be able to indict members of Congress without approval from lawyers in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, according to three people familiar with a proposal attorneys in the section learned about last week. Under the proposal, investigators and prosecutors would also not be required to consult with the section’s attorneys during key steps of probes into public officials, altering a long-standing provision in the Justice Department’s manual that…

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Richard Primus writes: President Donald Trump is cagey about whether he might try to stay in office after his current term expires. He frequently says that other people want him to do it, and the Trump Organization is selling Trump 2028 hats. In March, he said that he is “not joking” when he refers to a possible third term. More recently, he said that a third term is “something that, to the best of my knowledge, you’re not allowed to…

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Stephen I. Vladeck writes: It is often difficult to persuade anyone other than lawyers to care about the more technical, procedural minutiae of Supreme Court decisions. But Thursday’s oral argument in three Supreme Court cases challenging President Trump’s efforts to restrict birthright citizenship is a powerful example of how such technicalities can sometimes be even more important than the substantive legal question the justices are purportedly answering. The Trump administration is asking the justices, in effect, to let the president’s…

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Rolling Stone reports: Donald Trump’s administration is attempting a hostile takeover of the Library of Congress — an agency that is part of the legislative branch and functions as its research arm in addition to maintaining the world’s largest collection of books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and recordings. While the takeover has been framed as part of Trump’s broader purge of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) content, it is the latest effort by the president and his team to subsume the…

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Chris Lehmann writes: Back when outrage over Donald Trump’s blatant Oval Office corruption was still a novelty, a group of former national security officials filed an amicus brief in a 2019 lawsuit Democratic congressional leaders brought over Trump’s repeated violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. They cited one scenario as a clear and present threat to US national security interests: “A nation that plays a central role in the balance of power in the Middle East, one of…

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The Washington Post reports: Federal judges say unsolicited pizza deliveries to jurists’ homes that began in February may number in the hundreds across at least seven states, prompting increased security concerns and a demand from a Senate leader for a Justice Department investigation. Many of the deliveries have gone to judges presiding over lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s policies. The U.S. Marshals Service has been tracking the deliveries, and judges have been sharing details about their experiences in hopes of…

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Politico reports: A fundamental promise by America’s founders — that no one should be punished by the state without a fair hearing — is under threat, a growing chorus of federal judges say. That concept of “due process under law,” borrowed from the Magna Carta and enshrined in the Bill of Rights, is most clearly imperiled for the immigrants President Donald Trump intends to summarily deport, they say, but U.S. citizens should be wary, too. Across the country, judges appointed…

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