Music: Marutyri — ‘Gaudi’
How Trump plans to seize the power of the purse from Congress
By Molly Redden This story was originally published by ProPublica Donald Trump is entering his second term with vows to cut a vast array of government services and a radical plan to do so. Rather than relying on his party’s control of Congress to trim the budget, Trump and his advisers intend to test an obscure legal theory holding that presidents have sweeping power to withhold funding from programs they dislike. “We can simply choke off the money,” Trump said…
Top Trump aide, Boris Epshteyn, accused of asking for money to ‘promote’ potential appointees
The New York Times reports: President-elect Donald J. Trump’s legal team found evidence that a top adviser asked for retainer fees from potential appointees in order to promote them for jobs in the new administration, five people briefed on the matter said on Monday. Mr. Trump directed his team to carry out the review of the adviser, Boris Epshteyn, who coordinated the legal defenses in Mr. Trump’s criminal cases and is a powerful figure in the transition. Several people whom…
Mexican president challenges Trump over tariffs and illegal weapons coming from the U.S.
Rolling Stone reports: Mexico’s recently elected President Claudia Sheinbaum has responded forcefully to Donald Trump’s plans to levy 25 percent tariffs on goods imported from Mexico if the nation doesn’t stem the flow of undocumented immigrants and drugs across the southern border. Sheinbaum promised during a morning news conference on Tuesday that Mexico will retaliate with tax penalties of their own if the president-elect goes through with his tariff plan. “President Trump, it isn’t with threats or tariffs that we…
Trump’s promises of mass deportation and high tariffs are now facing some corporate headwinds
Jay Kuo writes: Texas relies heavily on undocumented labor, especially in the construction sector. According to a report by the American Immigration Council and Texans for Economic Growth, around 60 percent of the immigrant workforce in the state is undocumented. That’s a quarter of a million workers. Deporting them would devastate the industry and drive up housing prices in the state. Marek, a big Houston-based residential and commercial construction company, warned NPR of the consequences. “It would devastate our industry,…
In Trump’s mass deportation plan, the private prison industry sees a lucrative opportunity
ABC News reports: As the government and law enforcement brace for the sweeping ramifications of President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to deport what could be millions of undocumented immigrants from the United States, another stakeholder appears poised to cash in on the complex logistics that would be required: the powerful private prison industry. On corporate earnings calls since Election Day, executives at the country’s top private prison firms have embraced Trump’s immigration agenda as a potential windfall if the federal government…
The entire history of Zionism’s injustices, in one Bedouin village
Orly Noy writes: Last week, the State of Israel hung the scalp of another Palestinian community on its belt after completing the demolition of Umm Al-Hiran. On the morning of Nov. 14, hundreds of police stormed the Bedouin village — which is located in the Negev/Naqab desert, in southern Israel — accompanied by special forces officers and helicopters. The residents, Israeli citizens who had long feared that this day would come, had already self-demolished most of the structures in the…
As climate change melts permafrost, microbes that we have never been exposed to will emerge
Valerie Brown writes: The popular image of the Arctic is as a “frozen North,” which it was for all of human history until a couple of centuries ago. In that view, intrepid explorers and scientists clatter over tundra and ice roads in dogsleds and decrepit trucks, risking everything to bring back important samples and wild tales of howling winds. But this vision is growing passé. The Arctic is warming four times as fast as the global average. While there are…
Music: Ayanda Sikade — ‘Mdantsane’
We know who’s to blame for Trump’s evasion of justice. It isn’t Jack Smith
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern write: The six-page filing that special counsel Jack Smith submitted Monday is surely one of the strangest requests a federal prosecutor has ever had to make. Smith moved to dismiss charges against Donald Trump for election subversion, asking Judge Tanya Chutkan to toss out the case due to an “unprecedented circumstance”: The defendant has, of course, been reelected president. In the filing, he assures the judge (and the public) that the government “stands fully…
Trump’s mass deportation plan could clog immigration courts for years
Axios reports: It’s one thing to call for the largest deportation in American history. It’s another to pull it off logistically, given the highly complex process of spotting, detaining, holding and evicting people in the U.S. illegally. Why it matters: The judicial process — one small piece of a long, expensive deportation machinery — illustrates vividly the complexity ahead. The big picture: The U.S. immigration system’s backlog of 3.7 million court cases will take four years to resolve at the current pace — but that could balloon…
U.S. farm groups want Trump to spare their workers from deportation
Reuters reports: U.S. farm industry groups want President-elect Donald Trump to spare their sector from his promise of mass deportations, which could upend a food supply chain heavily dependent on immigrants in the United States illegally. So far Trump officials have not committed to any exemptions, according to interviews with farm and worker groups and Trump’s incoming “border czar” Tom Homan. Nearly half of the nation’s approximately 2 million farm workers lack legal status, according to the departments of Labor…
Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo wants to ‘crush liberal dominance’
NPR reports: Leonard Leo may not be a household name, but odds are most people in the country know his signature achievement: Leo was a key architect of the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court that rolled back the federal right to an abortion. The conservative activist advised President-elect Donald Trump during his first term on the nominations of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. The three picks gave conservatives their 6-3 majority on the high court. And…
‘Total oppression’: West Bank children being killed at unprecedented rate
The Guardian reports: Mohammad was 12, a football-mad teenager who spent his days dreaming of a career on the pitch and his last minutes practising ball skills. Ghassan was 14, a quiet, generous teenager who ran errands for elderly relatives, with an adoring six-year-old brother who stuck to him like a shadow. Both boys were shot dead this summer by Israeli soldiers, victims of an unprecedented surge in attacks on children in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. In…
The growing enthusiasm among tech elites for genetically engineering their children
Emily R. Klancher Merchant writes: In the Operation Varsity Blues scandal of 2019, 50 wealthy parents were charged with trying to get their children into elite universities through fraudulent means. The story dramatically demonstrated the lengths to which some parents will go to ensure their children’s acceptance into places like Stanford, Yale, Georgetown, and USC. Actress Lori Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, bribed athletic coaches to recruit their children for sports they did not play. Actress Felicity Huffman…
Why walking helps us think
Ferris Jabr writes: In Vogue’s 1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” He drew a charming one himself. Several decades later, a Boston College English professor named Joseph Nugent and his colleagues put together an annotated Google map that shadows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom step by…