I had a great conversation with Lisa Senecal of
yesterday.We covered the Harvard case I wrote about yesterday, the 12 state Attorneys General suing over Trump’s tariff chaos, and the difference it’s made that people stopped buying Teslas.
The tariff case is challenging Trump’s illegitimate use of emergency powers to impose tariffs when that’s a decision reserved for Congress. Watch Lisa explain how Trump’s ego-driven chaos undermines his own argument about a state of emergency:
And here’s a little more:
Enjoy the conversation!
Big Voting Rights Win
Although it wasn’t a surprise, yesterday saw a big win for voting rights.
A federal judge enjoined (froze) Trump’s executive order that attempted to do a lot of the damage of the SAVE Act, but directly (without passage in Congress).
As has been the case with so many of Trump actions, (including the tariff case above, the Harvard case, and the deportation cases), the problem isn’t just that the policy itself is legally problematic, it’s that he continues to violate the most foundational Constitutional principles in the way he is trying to impose these policies. He truly is trying to be a King, despite clear protections against his doing so.
In this case, the executive order would run roughshod over the Constitutional reality that states and Congress are given the responsibility to set voting rules by legislation—and not the president by Executive Order. As I wrote when this Executive Order first came out, it’s “a disaster when it comes to our Constitution….it’s an attempt by Trump to exercise powers over voting and elections that are specifically granted to Congress and states. It would’ve been as if Lyndon Johnson had attempted to pass the Voting Rights Act via executive order.” I predicted it would get routed in court.
Well, the judge pretty much said the same thing yesterday. It’s a long order, but the principle is the same as above:
“Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the States—not the President—with the authority to regulate federal elections.…And no statutory delegation of authority to the Executive Branch permits the President to short-circuit Congress’s deliberative process by executive order.”
The bottom line is that Trump and his team continue to engage in gross legal incompetence in the hopes of scoring political and PR wins. And this is leading to slam-dunk losses in court after court against their actions.
If he were to follow the Constitutional order in what he’s trying to do (ie. if the SAVE Act were to pass and he were to sign it), I’d worry far more about the outcome of some of these cases. But to the extent he continues to try to impose policies unilaterally via executive order, and wastes time through endless rounds of losing court hearings and appeals, he’s doing us an unintentional favor—versus trying to implement policies in the legally mandated way.
This is especially the case if we can win back the House next year.
Day 153 — April 23, 2025
Trump is hell-bent on kneecapping his political opponents and enemies: he wants to have them investigated and prosecuted; and he wants to deprive them of legal representation by attacking the lawyers that represent them.
And now he wants to cut off a big source of their financial support by investigating Act Blue. It’s a shameless authoritarian move on its face.
Even worse, as others have pointed out, the fact that this was an investigation demanded by the President, in a memo sent to the Attorney General, is far out of bounds from how US investigations are supposed to take place:
As Democracy Docket explained: “the reality of a U.S. president openly issuing orders to the Department of Justice (DOJ) represents a deeply troubling reversal of the department’s longstanding tradition of independence and apolitical law enforcement — though it goes largely unremarked upon in today’s Washington.”
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