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CHICAGO (WGN) — Federal authorities opened fire on a woman who was allegedly armed with a gun shortly after their vehicle was rammed and blocked in by a group of cars in Chicago on Saturday afternoon. According to officials from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the incident unfolded in an area near West 39th…

Injustice for All is a weekly series about how the Trump administration is trying to weaponize the justice system—and the people who are fighting back. Fam, is it good when a judge compares ICE to the Ku Klux Klan? Because that’s exactly what Judge William Young, a radical woke leftist—oh wait, he’s actually an 85-year-old Reagan appointee—had to say about President Donald Trump’s weaponization of immigration laws.  The Trump administration has suppressed the free speech of international students, particularly those who have made pro-Palestinian statements or participated in protests, by threatening, imprisoning, and deporting them, even if they are here legally. It turns out that even conservative judges do not love it when the government uses the might of the state to punish people for their protected First Amendment speech. Who knew?  Well, now the administration knows, thanks to Young’s 161-page decision absolutely excoriating it for its ceaseless attacks on free speech.  Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents came in for special scorn, and rightly so. Turns out even conservative judges do not like the idea of masked vigilantes terrorizing people. “ICE goes masked for a single reason — to terrorize Americans into quiescence,” the ruling read. “To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan. In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police. Carrying on in this fashion, ICE brings indelible obloquy to this administration and everyone who works in it.”  Not one single lie detected.  Guess we’ll find out exactly how special the Fed Board of Governors is The Supreme Court is going to take up the case of whether Trump can legally fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board. This is a frequent occurrence these days, what with Trump firing pretty much everyone, but this case has a twist.  For most other commissioners and board members illegally removed by Trump, the Supreme Court has let the firings stand while litigation proceeds. This is what the court said about Trump removing Rebecca Slaughter from the Federal Trade Commission, Cathy Harris at the Merit Systems Protection Board, National Labor Relations Board Chair Gwynne Wilcox, and every Democrat on the Consumer Product Safety Commission.  All of those people are currently out of a job, so why does Cook, ostensibly removed from the Fed because of her alleged mortgage fraud criming, get to keep her job while the Supreme Court has a think? Related | The Supreme Court’s latest kowtow, and Missouri’s AG is a mini-Trump Because while the Supreme Court’s conservatives are seemingly all in on overruling their own 90-year-old precedent so that Trump can completely take over formerly independent agencies, they don’t love that idea so much when it comes to the Federal Reserve Board.  In the case where they allowed Trump to fire Wilcox and Harris, they feebly tried to explain that the Federal Reserve is special and different, a “uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.” This, of course, is nonsense. It’s clear the court understands that if Trump gets a hold of the Federal Board, his nascent attempts at wrecking the economy will really kick into high gear, so they’re trying to figure out a way to let him fire everybody else but somehow protect the Fed. It’s absolute Calvinball, like everything else at SCOTUS these days.  Look who suddenly likes the FACE Act The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act is not exactly a favorite of conservatives, seeing as it is used to protect patients trying to access reproductive health care clinics in the face of a howling mob of anti-choice right-wingers.  One of Trump’s first acts in his second term was to pardon 23 people convicted of violating the Act, including people who broke into clinics and stole fetal tissue. The administration also issued a memo essentially saying that the real violence is against anti-choicers and that the Department of Justice would not pursue any abortion-related FACE Act prosecutions unless they involve death, serious bodily harm, or significant property damage. So cool that we will basically have to wait and see what the government does after an anti-choice terrorist blows up an abortion clinic. Is that enough property damage?  Now, however, the administration loves the FACE Act because they figured out how to use it in their faux crusade against antisemitism. So, they’ve filed a civil complaint against demonstrators who ostensibly disrupted a Jewish religious event by … wait for it—blowing vuvuzelas. Yes, the annoying horn that tens of thousands of people wailed away on during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.  According to the administration, blowing a vuvuzela is not protected speech and instead was a method of physical harm intended to cause permanent noise-induced hearing loss. To be fair, the things are ridiculously loud, but the notion that blowing a loud horn at people going to synagogue is something that requires the government to step in is even more ridiculous.  So in Trump’s America, reproductive health clinics will just have to wait and see if someone gets murdered enough for the DOJ to use the FACE Act, but when it comes to pro-Palestine protesters, blowing a horn is essentially terrorism.  Gather ‘round for a benchslap of Jeanine Pirro’s office U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro keeps getting no-billed at a comically alarming rate, unable to get a federal grand jury to indict D.C. residents on the ludicrously inflated felony charges she keeps bringing.  But Pirro is nothing if not persistent—so she came up with a genius plan to avoid federal grand juries altogether. After she failed to get a felony indictment from a federal grand jury, she instead secured an indictment from a local D.C. Superior Court grand jury. Then she had some unlucky prosecutor bring that indictment to the federal magistrate judge. You do not need to be a U.S attorney—or any kind of attorney, really—to understand that you cannot really get

In the ideal of the American political system, the government would never have reached the point of being shut down. The Republicans and Democrats would have compromised on the tax cut bill. The ACA subsidies and Medicaid would not have been cut. A crisis would not have been created, and the government would still be open. The system of representative government was built on the premise that differing interests would compromise for the good of the country. PoliticusUSA is independent news and opinion that bends the knee to no one. Please support our work by becoming a subscriber. Subscribe now A situation where one party would control the federal government and ignore all other voices was not imaginable to those who designed the system. When one political party chooses to unilaterally govern, the other party can’t sit back and pretend like this is business as usual, but that is what Democrats in the Senate did early in Trump’s term. Even as their supporters urged them to fight, the institutionalist Democrats in the Senate placed their faith in the institution and believed that things would be fine. They were wrong. One of the Republican talking points during this shutdown is that Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has been pulled left by the far left of his party, but that is not an accurate statement. The force that is moving Democrats to fight is coming from the party itself, and this is a reality that Republicans have failed to grasp. Democrats who are committed to fighting for healthcare in Congress aren’t just on the far left. They are also the centerists and moderates that Republicans have traditionally counted on to crack during episodes like government shutdowns. The anger isn’t just among Democratic supporters anymore. It has spread to members of Congress as well. Here is the evidence that the dynamic has shifted. Read more

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Thirty-four days into the previous government shutdown, in 2019, reporters asked President Donald Trump if he had a message for the thousands of federal employees who were about to miss another paycheck. “I love them. I respect them. I really appreciate the great job they’re doing,” he said at the time. The following day, caving after weeks of punishing cable-news coverage, he signed legislation to reopen the government, lauding furloughed employees as “incredible patriots,” pledging to quickly restore their back pay, and calling the moment “an opportunity for all parties to work together for the benefit of our whole beautiful, wonderful nation.” Doesn’t really sound like the same guy, does it? This time, it took Trump fewer than 24 hours to turn a shutdown into a weapon wielded against the civil servants he once praised and the opposing party he has long derided. The administration has targeted Democratic districts, announcing holds on more than $25 billion in projects in Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oregon, and elsewhere, with more cuts believed to be on the way. Trump has threatened to fire government workers en masse, casting the lapse in funding that led to their furloughs as an “opportunity” to further decimate their ranks and gut agencies he doesn’t like. Officials have defied ethics guidelines, with blatantly partisan out-of-office messaging and banners blaming Democrats for the shutdown splashed across government websites. This is what happens when a partial closure of the government meets the president’s second-term campaign to expand his powers and punish his enemies. The dynamic has created widespread uncertainty, as some Republicans blanch at the brazen norm-busting and some Democrats begin to reconsider how much pain they’re willing to bear in what they hoped would be a fight over health-care subsidies. [Russell Berman: How Democrats backed themselves into a shutdown] The president has shown no willingness to retreat, even as millions of federal workers and military troops are now working without pay or staying home. “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent,” Trump wrote this morning on Truth Social, referring to the director of the Office of Management and Budget. “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity.” Compare that with Trump’s comments a year ago, during a presidential debate, when he said: “I have nothing to do with Project 2025. I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it purposely. I’m not going to read it.” Democrats have quite obviously taken note of Trump’s more aggressive tactics now that he’s president again, as has anyone paying attention. Last time around, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia told us, “there was none of this kind of activity, because there were people inside the White House who put guardrails on him.” Now those people are gone, and Trump has “people like Russ Vought, who’s whipping up a frenzy,” he said. When we asked him whether Trump’s actions would lead the Democrats to reconsider their strategy of trying to force Republicans to negotiate before reopening the government, Warner would say only that he was “not going to predict” what would happen next. But at one point, he openly speculated about whether the federal workers he represents may eventually ask the Democrats to fold. “I think we had to bring the fight—it’s about health care. But it’s spurred on by the fact that there are so many norms and laws that have been broken, and there’s so few times that you can actually join the fight,” he told us, adding that many of his constituents have encouraged him to stay in the fight, at least for now. “Now, but I’ll be the first to admit it: Will they still say that if this goes for two or three weeks? I don’t know.” Even before the shutdown began yesterday, Trump-administration officials had begun working the levers of government to inflict pain on the Democrats. Vought appeared to be directing much of that activity. Two senior White House aides told us that Trump, though at times reluctant to elevate the fame of his staffers, likes Vought in the role of a “bad cop” and sees his eagerness to slash the bureaucracy as a potentially useful bargaining tool. Senate Majority Leader John Thune also warned Democrats about what they have unleashed, telling Politico that the party has effectively handed “the keys” of government to Vought. Yesterday morning, the OMB director announced a freeze on $18 billion in federal grants for infrastructure projects in New York City, a move that New York Democrats blasted as nakedly partisan. Later that day, Vought announced that the government was canceling more than $7.5 billion in grants for green-energy projects. He listed all of the states that would be affected, including Democratic strongholds such as California and Illinois. (No state that Trump won last year will be affected.) The Department of Energy said in a statement that the cancellation of the 321 projects resulted from “a thorough, individualized financial review” and suggested that more projects will be reviewed for potential termination. Vought has said that the shutdown will open the door for agencies to send out significant “reduction in force” notices, known as RIFs, and make permanent reductions to federal-agency staff. White House officials said those notices could begin going out imminently. But on a group video call yesterday, some federal workers at the Department of Health and Human Services were told that leaders had received no information about impending RIFs, according to a person on the call who requested anonymity to disclose internal communications. Such layoffs would represent a major escalation and a departure from how previous shutdowns have been handled, Abigail André, the executive director of the Impact Project, which has been

Paul Pelletier The former hard-charging deputy attorney general succumbed to political hubris as FBI director, and discredited the federal justice system in the process. The post James Comey’s Indictment, While Without Merit, Is Part of Comey’s Own Legacy appeared first on The Nation.

Democrat Mikie Sherrill is leading Republican Jack Ciattarelli in the New Jersey gubernatorial race more than a month out from the election, according to a new poll.  A Fox News survey released on Tuesday, which was conducted by Beacon Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research, found Sherrill leading Ciattarelli by 7 points, 48 percent to…

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House and Senate Democrats have reached a level of sharpness that has been missing for the last few years during the current government shutdown fight. Republicans are already cracking as they divide and look to make a deal. PoliticusUSA is independent news and opinion that belongs to no party or special interest. Please support us by becoming a subscriber. Subscribe now During the White House meeting on Monday, Trump tried a bit of trolling with Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, and it resulted in embarrassment for Vice President JD Vance. Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News posted on X: A few details from Monday’s White House meeting: — President Donald Trump gave Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries “Trump 2028” hats. The two men did not take the caps. Jeffries then turned to Vice President JD Vance and asked how he feels about that — a reference to Vance’s possible presidential ambitions. Vance said, “No comment,” and the room erupted in laughter. We have no indication whether Donald Trump, who hates to be upstaged and out of the spotlight, was one of the people in the room laughing. Read more

The government shutdown that began at 12:01 a.m. is the sixth such closure in the past three decades. It was easily the most foreseeable. That congressional Democrats would force this confrontation became clear almost from the moment they ducked a clash over spending with Republicans in March. Back then, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer convinced just enough of his members that a government shutdown would empower President Donald Trump to govern even more heedlessly and punitively than he already was. The blowback was intense. Rank-and-file Democrats—and even some party leaders—accused Schumer of surrendering one of the party’s only remaining levers in Washington without a fight. The springtime uproar ensured that Democrats would make a tougher stand this time, and now government offices across the country will close and federal employees will stay home without pay. Many could lose their jobs if the Trump administration carries out its threat to use a shutdown to supercharge its slashing of the workforce. But the political outcome for Democrats might be just as disappointing. They have no more power to extract concessions from Trump than they did six months ago. Democrats find themselves in the same unenviable position that Republicans were in during the Obama years, when they routinely took the government’s funding (and, at times, its credit rating) hostage to pick fights that party leaders knew they could not win. The GOP provoked a shutdown in 2013 to deny funding to the Affordable Care Act; a dozen years later, Democrats have forced a shutdown to ensure that it continues. Schumer and his House counterpart, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, are demanding that Republicans agree to extend enhanced ACA subsidies that expire at the end of the year; without congressional action, insurance rates would rise for millions of people. [Read: Trump’s grand plan for a government shutdown] As an issue, focusing the spending debate on health care makes political sense for Democrats. This is favorable terrain for them, and they are trying to prevent a painful spike in costs for consumers across the country. “The fact of the matter is that if we don’t address this, people are going to lose their health insurance,” Representative Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told me. Some congressional Republicans also want to extend the subsidies, both to protect their constituents and because they fear the electoral blowback of a rate increase during next year’s midterms. But GOP leaders correctly point out that the deadline for the health-care funding is not for another three months; the stopgap spending bill they’ve proposed runs for just seven weeks and is designed to buy time for the parties to broker a broader budget deal that could include the ACA subsidies. Democrats want to force Republicans into negotiating a health-care agreement now. (They also want the GOP to roll back the Medicaid cuts that it enacted in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” this summer, but those demands are considered even less likely to bring results.) “If the Republicans think that we will fold for any [spending bill], then Democrats will have no leverage in trying to push for any of our priorities in government funding,” a senior Senate aide told me, describing the party’s thinking on the condition of anonymity. A final effort to avoid a shutdown yielded no breakthroughs and seemed to be largely for show. Trump convened the bipartisan congressional leadership at the White House on Monday, and afterward both parties retreated to their talking points. Democrats implored Republicans to address a health-care “crisis,” and Republicans, who themselves had voted repeatedly for government shutdowns, denounced Democrats for doing the same. A few hours later, Trump posted on Truth Social a vulgar AI-generated video depicting Jeffries, who is Black, wearing a mustache and sombrero, with fabricated audio of Schumer speaking. [Read: How to end government shutdowns, forever] Congressional Democrats are—for now—mostly unified. Just one of the party’s members in the House, Representative Jared Golden of Maine, broke ranks to vote for a continuing resolution that would have averted a shutdown. In a shift from earlier in the year, lawmakers say they’re done basing their decisions on the fear of how they might embolden or empower the president. “I don’t buy the argument that if the government shuts down, that allows Trump to be a dictator. I just don’t buy that,” Pallone told me. Yet few in the Democratic Party are making confident predictions of success. For some, the decision to make a stand over health care is not so much a smart strategy as it is the only one available. When I asked Jim Manley, a former aide to the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and a veteran of shutdown fights, to assess the Democrats’ chances, he asked if he could be quoted shrugging. “It is what it is,” he said rather glumly. “Sometimes you’ve got to play the card you’re dealt.” How long a shutdown might last is unclear. The government closed twice during Trump’s first term. A shutdown instigated by the president over border-wall funding dragged on for 35 days; the one that Democrats provoked lasted just three. In the final days before this week’s deadline, Schumer reportedly floated a compromise that would have kept the government open for another week or 10 days—rather than the seven weeks proposed by Republicans—to allow for talks about health care. Both Republicans and progressive Democrats quickly panned the idea, but it suggested that, once again, Schumer might not be as dug in as others in his party are. In the Senate, some Democrats seem willing to claim victory as long as Republicans agree to negotiate an extension of the ACA subsidies, but Jeffries and House Democrats are demanding that a renewal be written into legislation before they vote to reopen the government. In an indication of the lingering differences among the party’s caucuses, Democratic Senators John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Catherine Cortez-Masto of Nevada, along with Senator Angus King of Maine, an independent

Paul Pelletier The former hard-charging deputy attorney general succumbed to political hubris as FBI director, and discredited the federal justice system in the process. The post James Comey’s Indictment, While Without Merit, Is Part of Comey’s Own Legacy appeared first on The Nation.