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President’s chaotic trade war continues to unsettle financial markets as administration suffers further political setbacks in court
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Donald Trump will deliver a “law and order” address Friday at the Department of Justice, an agency he has stacked with his attorneys and purged of staff his administration considers disloyal.
The president is meanwhile reportedly planning to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to speed up the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, a key campaign pledge that is off to a slow start.
On Thursday, the president suffered a fresh legal setback when two federal judges ruled that his administration must reinstate thousands of probationary employees fired by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Hours after a judge ruled that officials from the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, Energy, Agriculture and the Interior must get their jobs back, another issued a similar ruling on behalf of employees from 18 agencies.
Trump has also appealed to the Supreme Court to let him enforce his executive order on birthright citizenship and praised top Democrat Chuck Schumer for supporting Republicans’ new spending bill after all, potentially averting a government shutdown. Meanwhile, demonstrators swarmed the president’s Trump Tower in Manhattan to protest the detention of Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil.
Democratic Senator Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, is urging her colleagues to vote against the Republican-drafted spending bill.
She called the “CR” — a continuing resolution — a “Complete Resignation.”
“If you refuse to put forward an offer that includes any Democratic input, you don’t get Democratic votes,” she said in remarks on the Senate floor before today’s vote. “We are going to keep fighting for the America we love.”
K-9 bomb sniffer dog units are the latest victims of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, just as the White House celebrated a national day honoring the heroic animals.
Mike Bedigan reports:
Dozens of House Democrats sent a letter to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to express their “strong opposition” to his support for Republican stopgap spending bill they call a “partisan continuing resolution that legitimizes President Trump and the Republican party’s dismantling of government.”
“If Republicans in Congress want to pass this bill, they should do so with their own votes. However, since they cannot, Republicans must work with Democrats to pass a clean [continuing resolution],” said the letter, which was signed by more than 50 House lawmakers.
“The American people sent Democrats to Congress to fight against Republican dysfunction and chaos,” they wrote.
After a brief court appearance this week, Mahmoud Khalil’s attorneys are now asking a judge to bring him back to New York after he was moved to a detention center in Louisiana, and for an order that blocks the Trump administration from similarly threatening noncitizens from removal from the country over support for Palestine.
A new filing fleshes out details from his arrest and detention, suggesting that Trump himself played a significant role overseeing the operation.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi decries a Republican-led spending bill as “a false choice between a government shutdown or a blank check” for Donald Trump and Elon Musk “that makes a devastating assault on the well-being of working families across America.”
She calls on Democrats to reject the resolution, defying her colleague Chuck Schumer. Pelosi argued Democrats should “ “listen to the women” and support a competing measure from Democratic appropriations committee officials Rosa DeLauro and Patty Murray.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the Trump administration will appeal and use the full force of the White House counsel’s office to fight a pair of court rulings that temporarily blocked mass firings of thousands of federal workers.
“You cannot have a low-level district court judge filing an injunction to usurp the executive authority of the president,” she told reporters Friday. “That is completely absurd.”
Trump and his allies, of course, repeatedly sought injunctions from “low-level district court judges” to block actions from his political opponents. His allies have repeatedly and baselessly accused judges across the ideological spectrum of trying to derail his agenda in rulings that have struck against key agenda items.
Leavitt called them “judicial activists.”
Senate Finance Committee Democrats appear to be giving the TV doctor a tough old time out there…
The Fox News host has once more been bemoaning cuts made by Elon Musk’s outfit now that they affect him personally, having previously been an enthusiastic cheerleader.
“I just saw some news that Trump took some grants away from Johns Hopkins where my sister works and now my mom is upset,” Watters complained on his show last night.
“She’s texting me. It’s going to be a whole family thing, so we’re going to have to deal with that over the weekend.”
Ariana Baio has more.
If you missed the president’s Truth Social post a little earlier he championed his team’s opening discussions in Moscow over a prospective ceasefire in the war and and claimed that he asked the Russian leader to order his troops not to commit a massacre of Ukrainian soldiers who they are attempting to dislodge from the Kursk region after months of occupation by Kyiv’s forces.
Here’s Andrew Feinberg’s report.
Trump’s pick to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has arrived for his job interview with the Senate Finance Committee.
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