politics

Democratic U.S Rep. Shri Thanedar of Michigan is calling for the impeachment of Trump over the case of the man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador.

Thanedar's office said in a release Friday that the Trump administration's "blatant disregard" for a U.S. Supreme Court ruling requiring they facilitate the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is a "direct defiance of the U.S. Constitution."

"I've seen enough," Thanedar said in a social media post on Thursday. "Trump is not abiding by a Supreme Court ruling. I fully support impeaching him. Now."

Summary

First, it acted with startling speed—so quickly, in fact, that it published the order before Alito could finish writing his dissent; he was forced to note only that a “statement” would “follow.”

Relatedly, awkward phrasing in court’s order may imply that Alito—who first received the plaintiffs’ request—failed to refer it to the full court, as is custom, compelling the other justices to rip the case away from him.

Second, it is plain as day that the Supreme Court simply did not trust the Trump administration’s claims that it would not deport migrants over the weekend without due process.

Finally, and perhaps most obviously, it’s critical that only Thomas and Alito noted their dissents. When the court takes emergency action, justices don’t have to note their votes, but they usually do; we can probably assume that this order was 7–2. That would mean that Chief Justice John Roberts—along Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—joined this rebuke to the Trump administration.

Chris Van Hollen says ‘if we deny constitutional rights of this one man, it threatens constitutional rights of everyone’

Senator Chris Van Hollen, who travelled to El Salvador last week to meet Kilmar Ábrego García, the man at the center of a wrongful deportation dispute, said on Sunday that his trip was to support Ábrego García’s right to due process because if that was denied then everyone’s constitutional rights were threatened in the US.

The White House has claimed Ábrego García was a member of the MS-13 gang though he has not been charged with any gang related crimes and the supreme court has ordered his return to the US be facilitated.

But in an interview with ABC’s This Week, Van Hollen, a Maryland senator, stressed that the government had presented no evidence linking Ábrego García to MS-13 in federal court. “Mr President,” the senator said, “take your facts to court, don’t put everything out on social media.”

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/61920691

> > The first impression America gave me was gentle carelessness. We were driving down from Canada to visit family friends in Texas sometime in the mid- to late 1980s, and a young border patrol agent at a booth, crouched over a newspaper, leaning back in his chair, carelessly waved my family’s station wagon across without looking up. You didn’t even need a passport to enter the United States until I was 33. > > > You need clear eyes at the border today. Europe and Canada have issued travel advisories after a series of arbitrary detentions, deportations to foreign jails without due process and hundreds of valid visas pulled or voided amid a sense of general impunity. While I have crossed the border a hundred times at least, sometimes once a month when I lived there, I cannot say when I will see America again, and I am quite sure I will never return to the country I once visited. > > > The America I knew, the America I loved, has closed. > > > And so I find myself like a man who has been admiring bubbles floating in the air, trying to recall their shape and swerve and shine after they’ve popped. > > > America was a country of bubbles. I loved it as one loves anything that is both real and fantastical. > > > Donald Trump has blown himself into a bubble of gilded ceilings, ersatz Roman murals, sycophants on tap and midnight rants of imperial conquest on personally owned social media networks. He is only one story. America was millions of bubbles. For some reason, I find myself remembering Tom Waits in a junkyard making Bone Machine, turning rusted fenders and tossed-out dry cleaners and cracked sheet metal into a scrap marimba of his own invention. Even its dumps could give birth to magic. > > > Golf course palaces and wrecking-lot percussion: twin American truths. > > MORE AT: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/20/american-dream-trump-canada

He’s running for Prime Minister of Canada, but won’t get security clearance???

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/21081043

> No, you can't replace diplomacy and consular services with AI. What you'll get instead is dominance over the region by Russia and China

> Sen. Chris Murphy was dropped at the L Street entrance of Washington, D.C.’s convention center and hustled through the kitchen to a ballroom where 2,000 progressive activists waited to hear his thoughts on what to do about the 47th president of the United States and the sorry state of the Democratic Party. > > The audience was midway through a weeklong, largely off-the-record summit of “America Votes,” the self-described “coordination hub of the progressive community.” It promised “experts, strategists, and renowned progressive leaders to begin writing the next chapter of the American story.” > > Among them was Murphy, 51, the Democratic junior senator from Connecticut. Reelected in November to a third term, Murphy is in his third new phase as a senator — the first 10 years building a gun control movement, the last two as a broker of bipartisan deals on gun safety and border control. > > “And now I’m trying to convince my party to meet the moment and bash these guys over the head with a baseball bat, metaphorically,” Murphy said. > > The moment, as Murphy describes it in increasingly heated terms in person and online, is a campaign by President Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk to undermine the press and bully law firms, universities and business leaders into submission, and the only way it can be met is with uncompromising, if risky, defiance. > > “Our democracy isn’t at risk of dying. It is dying as we speak. We are watching it die. It is not too late to save it,” Murphy said in a Senate speech on April 10. “We say that again, it is not too late to save our democracy, but we can’t continue to close our eyes and think that our democracy can survive a coordinated assault on those four key institutions of accountability.” > > Murphy is a multiplatform messenger, a believer in repetition. On Thursday night, unshaven and casually dressed after a basketball game with the youngest of his two teenage sons, he delivered a live video briefing on Instagram that repurposed and updated the Senate speech. > > “So, I want to go over events that have been developing really, really fast. Trump’s plan is real. He has a plan,” said Murphy, who has 200,000 followers on Instagram and one million on X. “He is implementing it to convert our democracy to some form of autocracy, and that’s the only way that you can get away with the corruption and the thievery.”

Massive, sustained protests led to the 2021 downfall of billionaire oligarch Andrej Babiš, dubbed ‘the Czech Trump’

“In 2018, a popular movement, Million Moments for Democracy, began organizing rallies in the Czech capital, Prague,” against billionaire prime minister Andrej Babiš, “the Czech Trump.”

Despite “lost momentum caused by Covid and Babiš’s stubborn refusal to resign,” the movement succeeded in converting “discontent into votes at the ballot box” in 2021.

“We in the Czech Republic are an example of how long-term civic-society activities can bring, or help bring, political change.”

Jiří Pehe emphasized: “You can change things… but you have to be active.” “There has to be a very strong message towards the political class.”

> Labor leaders past and present have insisted on expanding the scope of what constitutes health.