Many times a cartoon has more impact than an essay. Thought I would try my hand at cartoons once again and add a monthly cartoon or two to my posts. If you like pass on to friends and family. TKH
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
—Martin Niemöller
I try not to post more than one essay a week, but this week seems to warrant another. After reading an article about a viral video of a 70-year-old bookstore owner who said he was “fucking angry’ before walking back into a haze of smoke and tear gas in Minneapolis, I wanted to research the back story of the quote he posted in his store. The one above.
The history of the person, and why he said or wrote these words, is just as important at the words.
Martin Niemöller was a Lutheran pastor in Germany during the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum – which displays this quote on a wall as you exit the exhibits as a final thought — Niemöller originally ‘sympathized with Nazis ideas’ and supported the far right. However, when Hitler began to “interfere with the protestant church” he dared to criticize Hitler. He spent seven years in prisons and concentration camps.
For those who support the far right here in America that is your right. But when you stand by, and even cheer and gloat, when the government comes for migrants, liberal politicians, journalists, or late-night comedians, that quote should be a wakeup call. Don’t think you are immune, you are not. It’s not if, but when they come for you.
A lone English soldier in his red tunic stood post in front of Boston’s Custom’s House. ‘Lobster back’ was yelled, words were exchanged, things heated up, a crowd gathered. Tensions between colonists and soldiers was high. The colonists thought of them as occupiers. When all was said and done that March 5, 1770, three Bostonians were dead and another two would die of wounds in days to come.
The captain, who summoned additional soldiers to face down the hostile and aggressive crowd, and eight other soldiers were later arrested and jailed after the acting governor of Massachusetts called for an inquiry after the shooting. Seven months later Captain Preston stood trial for murder. The question was whether he ordered his soldiers to fire. Testimony by witnesses suggested he did not. The jury acquitted him.
A little over a month later, the eight soldiers were tried for murder. After a record 9 days of testimony, six of the eight were found not guilty. The remaining soldiers were found guilty of manslaughter verse murder. That is they had been provoked. They were offered the “benefit of clergy,” basically proving they could read a verse in the Bible, and were branded on their thumbs verse a jig at the end of a rope.
Bostonians were proud that they could provide a fair trial, that the accused were able to have defense lawyers, one of whom became president of the United States, John Adams, and that the jury of citizens were fair and impartial.
Four years later, however, the English Parliament removed the ability of colonial governments to conduct any judicial proceedings against crown officials who allegedly committed a capital offense while supposedly upholding the law or quelling protests. It was one of several acts known as the Intolerable Acts enacted following the Boston Tea Party in 1774. The Administration of justice Act as it was formally known, was nicknamed the ‘murder act’ by colonists. In short time, America exploded in Revolt in 1775 and declared independence in 1776. 250 years ago, to be exact.
Now, during the 250th anniversary celebration of our independence from capricious rule, Trump and his administration officials have basically reimagined the Administration of Justice Act by repeatedly claiming that federal law enforcement officers have absolute immunity for acts committed to uphold the law or quell protests of ICE operations. Rule by decree instead of representation has overtaken our government. Congress has become a debating society of half-wits and imbeciles.
The feds have stifled local and state officials from investigating two homicides committed by ICE or Border Patrol agents. Following the last homicide, Border Patrol and ICE agents who participated in the assault on, dog pile on, and shooting of Alex Pretti, fled the scene, leaving the crime scene unsecured.
Immediately, Trump advisor, and architect of these brutalist occupations of American cities, Stephen Miller, labeled Pretti an “assassin.” The director of the Border Patrol, defended his agents, saying that Pretti intended to shoot ICE and Border Patrol agents without any evidence other than Pretti was carrying. He was. He had a concealed carry permit but did not draw his weapon or attempt to draw his weapon. Video evidence suggests an agent had taken Pretti’s gun moments before a single gunshot rang out, followed by a barrage of gun shots directed at a prone, non-resisting Pretti.
Another heinous and unprovoked murder by Trump’s masked agents.
As every day passes into tomorrow, ICE and Border Patrol Agents look and act more like the reserve police battalions that followed the advancing German army in to Poland at the start of the second world war than true law enforcement officers. These reserve police officers, recruited from Germany’s working classes, slaughtered millions of Jews.
These reserve police officers, who Daniel Goldhagen argued in Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust were conditioned to kill, and willingly did so. Goldhagen wrote, “Simply put, the perpetrators having consulted their own convictions and morality and having judged the mass annihilation of Jews to be right, did not want to say “no.””
My point is not that ICE and Border Patrol Agents are Nazis, although, like the German death battalions, they are armed like soldiers, dress like soldiers, think like soldiers, and act like soldiers. The things they do lack, however, are martial discipline and apolitical ethos of real professional American soldiers and well-trained law enforcement.
It is this militarized police mindset, paired with Trump and his administration’s psychologically conditioning, that has caused ICE and Border Patrol agents to act in similar ways that the reserve police battalions behaved: Occupy supposedly ‘enemy’ cities (Trump’s words not mine), execute orders without question, and if need be, kill for ideological reasons. They have turned ordinary men and women into real and potential killers. Recall Trump’s speech to his assembled generals not so long ago.
Trump and rightwing conservatives have engaged in a pattern of excluding, stigmatizing, and humiliating migrants, especially migrants of color. Dehumanizing them like the Nazis did Jews. Trump’s claims of Haitians eating pets and his recent denigration of all Somalis as low-IQ are examples of this conditioning. It does not help that the Supreme Court conditioned citizenship and legal presence in America with whiteness.
It takes more than conditioning, however, to make ordinary people kill. Neo-ICE and Border Patrol agents must be raised in a family and community environment that leads them to believe and tolerate what Trump and his acolytates openly spew every day. Racism and white supremacy are alive and well in many corners of America. It is blasted from Fox News broadcasts every single day. It takes a village to raise a kid, it also takes a village of racists to raise a kid to become a killer.
Americans must not only condemn the individual actions of ICE and Border Patrol agents but the men and women in leadership — from Trump, to Vance, to Miller, to Bondi to Noem, to Bovino and downward – who articulate, condone, and encourage gratuitous violence and protect the murderers in the name of white nationalism. When ICE treats migrants and protestors like Noem treats her dogs, we must do what we can to stop the madness.
Get ICE and border patrol battalions out of our cities. Retrain them, fire the zealots, and sack their leadership, including Bondi, Bovino, Noem, Miller, and Patel. Most importantly, to diffuse the tension, let local and federal agencies jointly investigate the homicides of Good and Pettri, and if charges are warranted, let a local jury decide their guilt or innocence. That is the American way.
The alternative is revolution.
New York Times Reporter: “Do you see any checks on your power….”
Donald Trump: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
No Mr. President, we the people can stop you.
What is happening in America is not normal. When a president sitting in the White House, stewing in his own grievances and thirst for vengeance and proclivity to spectacle, says he is only bound by his “morality,” we as a nation are in deep trouble. As is the world.
I know this essay’s title may make some folks uncomfortable, but please bear with me (yes, a pun). I am self-aware enough to understand that invoking the Second Amendment can be provocative. I struggled while writing this essay on a number of levels. First, is that it even had to be written. Given the words and actions of Trump, I feel it is necessary. On another level, I don’t want to be interpreted as calling for armed revolt. I do not want that. That would be insane.
My whole adult life was living, working, or traveling to conflict and war zones, failed and failing states, police states. I know that option to be unacceptable. On a third level, I feel too many Americans are indifferent or distracted or worn. down and just don’t give a shit, that only some people are impacted and they will never by touched. Inevitably, in a dictatorship, even it you agree with the dictator now, you will be touched and your soul will be crushed eventually as you tire of being told what to watch, what to read, and what to think. Because you are reading this, you know I hit the publish button.
I want to lay out my thoughts on the limits of power of the central government and what States can do once Trump and federal government blows past those limits. The origin and intent of the Second Amendment figures prominently in any discourse about how to create “guards” to a tyrannical central government.
Blue states continue to get pounded by the Trump administration. It routinely withholds funds from blue states as punishment for resisting his policies. Incongruously, it is the blue states that provide most tax raised monies to the federal government, with red states getting more federal tax dollars in terms of spending than they actually put in. In essence, Trump is super charging the transfer of wealth from blue to red states. Oh, the irony.
Trump targets blue states and cities with mass deployments of militarized immigration agents as punishment for deigning to treat migrants as human beings. As the result of protests against these deployments, Trump federalized and deployed national guard units without traditional requests from state governors, and in all instances in blue states, against the wishes of the governor and the majority of the state’s peoples, to quell, he alleges, widespread violence, but we know it is to smother the people’s voices.
Now he is deploying hundreds of additional Homeland Security agents to investigate alleged fraud in Minnesota’s social safety net programs, according to DHS’s secretary. A calculated and chilling response to the protests over the killing of a woman by an ICE agent and the states demand to be included in the investigation of the homicide of Renee Good. Incongruously, Trump condemns the death of protestors in Iran, but claims an American protestor shot and killed by an ICE agent was a domestic terrorist, and, intoned, deserved to die.
Hey, Ayatollah in Iran. News Flash: Just rebrand Iranian protestors as deranged left wing domestic terrorists. Then you are good to go.
This is what despots do. They flood the streets with thugs and faceless paramilitaries and then sanction investigations to cover up murders. Nazis Germany’s Brown Shirts of the past are being reborn as combat fatigue wearing ICE agents.
This is what he will do to Virginia now that we will have a democratic governor and a state legislature controlled by democrats. Expect payback with canceled programs, stopped federal grants, and deployments of Homeland Security agents to intimidate citizens.
The ability of a state to resist a tyrannical central government is how the Second Amendment was born.
What became the Second Amendment was not intended as an individual right to bear arms but a collective right of a state to bear arms to maintain its’ citizens inalienable rights. Lord Dunmore, the English Governor of Virginia’s, attempt to seize the militias’ arms in Williamsburg, Virginia, at the outset of America’s first civil war was still fresh in the mind of the founding generation.
It never crossed the minds of folks back then that the constitution needed to enumerate the right to own firearms for defense or hunting at the federal level. Gun ownership – mostly muskets — was so ubiquitous and a traditional right in the colonies that enumerating the right would be ridiculous. States had the right to regulate firearms and did so, most notably restricting possession primarily to whites.
The Second Amendment was intended as a state’s right to maintain armed militias for their defense against a tyrannical central government. It was a meant as bulwark of self defense against a large standing Army used by the central government to impose its will on a state or states. If you follow how the language of the amendment changed and unfolded, I think one can get a sense of what the intent was and how the amendment was seen and understood within a broader conception of constitutionalism, tradition, common law, and gun possession in the early republic.
On June 8, 1789, James Madison introduced nine propositions or resolutions for amending the Constitution. From these propositions the House of Representatives would derive 17 amendments, of which, ten would eventually become the Bill of Rights. Way down the list, buried in proposition four, after statements about religious freedom, freedom of speech and press, the right to peaceable assembly and petitioning for redressing of grievances, Madison, proposed what would become the second amendment.
The Annals of Congress contains the record of the running debates surrounding the amendments to the Constitution and reflect contemporaneous conceptions of the meanings of these amendments, and how they changed over the debates. Madison, borrowing from the other state constitutions and even the 1689 English Bill of Rights, proposed the following language regarding the right to bear arms (House Records, pp. 451-452):
“The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.”
Madison’s propositions did not gain much traction in Congress. Members of Congress were more concerned with the mechanics of setting up a functioning government. The debates preceding and surrounding the discussions on the proposed amendments centered on funding mechanisms and structure of the various executive departments being contemplated. Madison nonetheless persisted, and on July 21 requested further consideration of the amendments. After “desultory” conversation on the amendments, they were referred to a committee of eleven, which included Madison.
Just short of a month later, the committee of eleven finished their work on the proposed amendments and presented them to the House of Representatives on August 17. Madison’s language on bearing arms was revised and read:
“A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; but no person religiously scrupulous shall be compelled to bear arms (House Records, p.778)
Eldridge Gerry of Massachusetts, a veteran of the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787, and who was one of three delegates who refused to sign the Constitution at the end of the convention, led the debate regarding the amendment to bear arms. His remarks are crucial, I think to understanding, the intent of this amendment. He states:
“This declaration of rights, I take it, is intended to secure the people against the mal-administration of the Government; if we could suppose that, in all cases, the rights of the people would be attended to, the occasion for guards of this kind would be removed (p. 778).”
Not one person during the debate contradicted or challenged Gerry’s assertion, which seems to state that the ability to keep and bear arms referred to the people’s ability to form militias as a collective defense against a tyrannical central government. The remainder of the debate that day on this amendment surrounded primarily the question of religious scruples and service in the militia.
After more “desultory” (I love that word) conversation, 17 proposed amendments to the Constitution were sent to the Senate on August 24. The bearing arms amendment was number 5 and read after some minor tweaking (Senate record, pp. 63-64):
“A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed, but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.”
On September 4, the senate, whose records of debate are not as detailed as the House’s records of debate, showed that senators objected to a number of the amendments, but without comment as to why. “On the motion to adopt the fifth article of the amendments proposed by the House of Representatives, amended to read as followeth: ‘a well regulated militia, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed:’ It passed in the affirmative” (Senate Record, p. 71).
So, there you have it, a brief but spectacular history of the origin of the Second Amendment.
Trump’s advisor Stephen Miller’s call to abandon America’s social contract and resort to a ‘state of nature’ where brute force is the first and only response should scare the shit out Americans. This new dogma of ‘power, strength, and violence’ will fundamentally rewrite the world order but also crush America’s social contract between the people and the government: the annihilation of the separation of powers, the demise of a democratic central government, and the eradication of shared sovereignty between the states and the central government. That, good reader, is why we have “guards of this kind,” the Second Amendment.
Let me be clear, I am not calling for armed revolt or violence against our central government or secession, I still believe in the vote and the power of the American people to reign in Trump. But as Congress and the Supreme Court not only fail to curtail Trump’s excesses, and in fact enable him, what are the people to do?
States are the peoples last bulwark against Trump and a despotic central government. A new pposition is rising, however. Not from spineless democratic leaders like Schumer, but from Republicans. Republican Senators that voted to restrain Trump’s war powers received threatening profanity laced phone calls by Trump. A sign he is losing control and trying to bully folks back into line.
What I ask is that our new, incoming governor, think long and hard about how to deal with an increasingly authoritarian and despotic central government that continues to ratchet up the level of violence against the people in targeted states and cities – maladministration as Eldridge Gerry put it. The governor needs to develop contingency plans on when and how to resist, to include using the National Guard to defend our natural and inalienable rights as a free people of Virginia.
It seems to me America cannot long remain a nation if Trump puts his boot on the neck of blue states while red states happily bend the knee to the tyrant in the White House. Time to mobilize once again, stay engaged, and get family and friends to vote this November.
Where does one start this week’s essay on democracy’s erosion in America? Do I focus on the criminalization of dissent in America? Should the latest threats of national guard and military deployments to democratic party led cities such as Chicago and New York lead this week? Or, perhaps, should the essay focus on Trump’s outrageous observation that slavery is being misrepresented by the nation’s premier museum system, the Smithsonian. Is there a positive argument for slavery…..ever? All part of his re-erasure of American history that includes people of non-European heritage. All that will be left of ‘official’ American history will be reinvented myths of dead white men.
I want to tell an authentic American story of liberation instead.
About a decade ago a cousin of mine, a doctor in residence at a military hospital on an Air Force base, was asked by a fellow resident if he was related to so-and-so. His response, ‘Yes, he was my grandfather.’ The follow up was startling. The name, he said, comes from his family’s lore. My grandfather, he revealed, rescued his family from certain death in a Nazis concentration camp.
This story of escape from death added an hitherto unknown dimension to my grandfather’s experiences during the second world war. His division, the 104th, landed at Normandy a couple weeks after D-day in 1944. In April 1945, his division helped liberate a slave labor concentration camp in Nordhausen, Germany.
According to my father, my grandfather never talked about the war, and not about Nordhausen in particular. The story of his father being a ‘hero’ of a Jewish family was new to him and brought tears to his eyes. My father never cries. While my grandfather did not talk much about the war, he did, however, write a description of what he witnessed at Nordhausen for the Minneapolis Star, based on a letter dated from April 5. Eighty years later they have not lost their punch and graphic images of that day:
“…….. I visited a town called Nordhausen where I saw the most horrible sights. You may have read about it or seen pictures. We overran a German concentration camp. It was filled with thousands of dead and half-dead POW’s and political prisoners. The bodies of the dead were unburied. Others were lying in rows and beds where they had died, most of them from starvation. The fields, for over a mile were strewn with bodies where the SS had mowed them down with machine guns.” He continued, “the living were mixed with the dead – too weak and too far gone to move. Several died while our medics were taking them to the hospital. Nearly 3500 unburied bodies were found, many which with evidence of torture before death, nearly all starved.” Observing that he had heard of such places before arriving a Nordhausen he added, “I have read stories of such places but never thought I would see such a thing as I did. Since then we have had reports of other camps that have been over run – nearly as bad. But I have seen enough…the brutality and inhumanity of the German SS Troops is beyond belief….If I had not seen the results with my own eyes.” I have his map that traces his unit’s route, with cities and towns they liberated — circled in red pencil — as they moved east.
One can only imagine what my cousin’s fellow doctor’s family must have endured.
That two grandsons – one from an American soldier and another from a survivor of a liberated nazi concentration camp – both bound by that same day in history, would meet by chance somewhere in the American mid-west some 70 years later is astonishing.
Furthermore, that same month in 1945, 600 kilometers directly to the north, my mom, then a girl of six, and her family were liberated from five years of Nazi occupation. While my grandfather is long dead and only his writings remain of that fateful month, my mom still lives. She doesn’t remember much about the German occupation, mostly recalling food rationing, but I think mostly because the occupation was relatively calm. The Danes surrendered quickly and the occupation mostly uneventful. The Danes weren’t ethnic ‘Slavs’ and thus spared the rage and violence that enveloped Poland, the Ukraine and eastern Russia. Still, she remembers the trucks coming for suspected collaborators that lived nearby after liberation. She fears Trump, and with good reason, it seems.
My grandfather was asked to stay on active duty after the war, rising through the ranks. His career was abruptly dead ended, however, when he was accused of communist sympathies during the McCarthy era. It seems that his running for mayor of Minneapolis in the 1930s as a candidate of the Farmer-Labor Party had attracted attention once again. In 1953, the army reopened old, pre-war accusation of his alleged communist sympathies and weeks before the McCarthy hearings focusing on the army started, the Army purged him from their ranks, recommending his dismissal and removed from command. He was eventually reinstated after appeal, promoted to Colonel, but was exiled to the Reserve Officer Training Corps at the University of Alaska for the remainder of his career.
Purges, massive interment and concentration camps, masked government agents, disappearances, politically directed criminal investigations, erasing of peoples histories, military occupation of the capital, and collapse of the constitutional system. They are not theoretical constructs, they are real and here today. For me it is all too personal.
Today, our country stands at a fork in the road, one diverging right to authoritarian rule, perhaps even fascist rule, the other, the well-trod path pathway of democracy now seemingly blocked, detour signs pointing right. My family’s roots scream at me to resist the lurch to the far, extreme right, with everything I have. My grandfather words about the “…the brutality and inhumanity of the German SS Troops is beyond belief….If I had not seen the results with my own eyes” speak to me clearly. We must not cease resisting, we must not cease caring, we must not give up.
We are heading down that path of brutality and inhumanity where so-called ‘superfluous’ peoples are erased. But we can stop it dead in its tracks if we stay engaged and active as wave after wave of Trumpian bullshit tries to overwhelm and batter us into submission.
This mean calling your representatives weekly or daily if needed, join protest/resistance groups, make resistance artwork, spread the word, donate to campaigns, write a blog, vote. Don’t let the fascist bastards get you down. Let us walk together down that road to democracy together. Please share this essay. Thanks.
As of April 4, 2025
Weekly Summary of Democratic Backsliding and Erosion
Trump’s pace has slowed but the damage to liberal democracy continues to accumulate, like DDT did in Bald Eagles once. I mention the tariffs now, not because they are a backsliding of liberal democracy, but as they fail and economic chaos engulfs us, Trump will become more erratic and authoritarian thus accelerating the erosion of democratic values and norms.
I would also be wary of federal government economic data. The Departments that report the data, and offices that compile economic and labor data sets, are firmly in Trump’s hand. Any bad economic data, I fear will be subjected to Trump’s SHARPIE statistical methodology.
On the positive side, the lower courts for the most part are holding firm. There is the possibility that the judge overseeing the Venezuelan deportation case will hold the Trump administration in contempt this coming week. Stay tuned. Appeal Courts also seem leery of the constitutionality of many of Trump’s executive orders. As a reminder, written arguments for sustaining a pause on Trump’s Birthright citizenship order are due soon.
Below is this week’s summary. To see the cumulative backsliding list click the benchmark or menu link above.
Diagnosis: Critical.
Prognosis: Uncertain
Military Loyalty Tests
Trump fires General Timothy Haugh and Wendy Noble, Chief and Deputy Chief of the National Security Agency, America’s critical signals intelligence agency. As a reminder, the NSA is forbidden by law from technical eaves dropping on American citizens.
They were fired at the request of right-wing pundit Laura Loomer for not being sufficiently ‘loyal’ to Trump: Loomer posted on X they were fired for being disloyal to Trump. Trump in a statement on AF1 heading to Florida, stated people will be fired because we don’t like them or “people that may have loyalties to someone else.” As the robot in the mid-60s ‘Lost in Space’ TV used to sa, with arms flailing about: “Danger, Danger, Will Robinson.”
These firings come after the firing of several National Security Council Staff earlier in the week, also worryingly at the behest of Laura Loomer. Press reports indicate Haugh testified in a closed hearing recently and was asked about the Signal scandal.
Whether the President was angry at Haugh for not giving the party line regarding Signal is unknown but the most likely cause for the firings. Nonetheless, Trump may have been looking for a reason to fire Haugh and Noble. Not saying Trump ordered Haugh and Noble to eaves drop on American politicians and others, but that option certainly is a possibility given the rogue nature of these first months of his administration. Frankly, I ask why and how a right-wing pundit with no security clearances may have knowledge of Haugh’s closed door testimony to the Senate. And even more worrisome, why the hell is Trump having sensitive national security discussions with her.
Continued Human and Civil Rights Violations
ICE admits wrongfully detaining Maryland man, says they can’t return him to US from El Salvador prison. Calling it an “administrative error.” Worse, they say they can’t get him back. This man from Maryland — married to an American, and father of a 5-year-old autistic child — was rounded up as part of the Trump’s press event, AKA the mass deportation of Venezuelan gang members. He was deported back to El Salvador, a country he fled because of gang threats without due process.
Rise of the Government Informer Class
Vigilante surveillance of pro-Palestinian activists on university campus(es). Pro-Israeli activists are using AI facial recognition to identify and report pro -Palestinian activists/protestors to ICE for deportation, per NBC reporting. The AI facial recognition was developed for this purpose. A far-right group — Betar USA –claimed credit for one arrest, per WGBH reporting.
Acts of Cowardice Continue
In an act cowardice and self-censorship, the White House Correspondents Association cancelled comedian Amber Ruffin’s appearance at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, stating that they had “unanimously decided we are no longer featuring a comedic performance this year.” This ends a 42-year history.
To avoid executive orders sanctioning them, several more law firms reached agreements with the White House, to include the law firm Wilkie Farr and Gallagher that Kamal Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, works for. They offered up $100 million in pro bono work for Trump priorities to avoid possible executive order sanctions. Through these dragnets, Trump has almost garnered a quarter billion dollars in pro bono legal work for Trump initiatives.
New Punitive Investigations
The FCC began an investigation into ABC’s DEI practices. ABC is part of Disney.
Destroying Civil Society and a blow to Labor Unions
Tens of thousands of additional federal employee layoffs announced. In addition, Trump bans federal government unions collectively bargaining ability. Agencies included in the ban are the Departments of State, Defense, Veterans Affairs, Energy, Health and Human Services, Treasury, Justice and Commerce and the part of Homeland Security responsible for border security. Police and firefighters will continue to collectively bargain. Another blow to labor unions.
Per CBS, senior officials at NIH terminated or reassigned: “Senior leaders at multiple agencies were removed, multiple health officials said, including Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo. Marrazzo replaced Dr. Anthony Fauci as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, senior officials put on leave and reassigned to the Indian Health Service include Dr. Karen Hacker, head of the agency’s chronic disease teams, Kayla Laserson, head of its global health center and Dr. Jonathan Mermin, director of the CDC’s STD and HIV/AIDS center.”
In a new executive order, President Trump targeted the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the federal agency charged with distributing Congressionally approved funds to state libraries and to library, museum, and archives program grant recipients. The National Endowment for the arts was also targeted for layoffs and funding cuts.
As of March 28, 2025
Weekly Summary of Key Benchmarks of Democratic Backsliding and Erosion
What a week. Trump continued his assault on the 6th Amendment, the right to counsel, and the 1st Amendment through executive action targeting law firms. It has become a pattern, no a policy, of this administration to threaten, extort, strong arm law firms it considers “vexatious” by executive order. A modern day version of Bills of Attainder.
According to NBC, Trump issued a new memorandum March 22 titled “Preventing the Abuses of the Legal System and the Federal Court.” The memo gives AG Bondi the power to revoke security clearances of attorneys and terminate federal contracts of law firms if she deems their lawsuits against the administration are “unreasonable” or “vexatious.”
Also this week, Trump signed an executive order against the law firm Jenner and Block, a law firm with clients litigating Trump administration actions. The law firm also has some connection to Robert Muller.
In a disappointing move, one targeted law firm capitulated to Trump. The law firm Paul Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP bowed to Trump at a White House meeting following a Trump Executive Order targeting the law firm’s business. They admitted wrongdoing of a former partner who left the law firm in 2021 to work the New York City’s District Attorney’s Office which prosecuted Trump’s Porn Star payoff case; offered $40 million in free pro bono legal work supporting Trump administration initiatives; change their DEI hiring practices. Who would want to hire a law firm like that?
Trump continued to use police powers to violate the 1st Amendment right to dissent and assembly, focusing on foreign nationals legally in the U.S. A Tufts University PhD candidate of Turkish origin was arrested by ICE in an undercover takedown usually reserved for drug dealers. A federal judge ordered that the detainee remain in Massachusetts pending court hearings. In a bold and illegal subversion of Habeas Corpus, ICE engaged in a game of find-and-seek and the detainee ended up in a detention facility in Louisiana. I can’t imagine the terror and fear this woman must feel at this nightmare unfolds. This flagrant attack on the judicial system is a pattern of this administration. The slow slide in to authoritarian rule is in full expression this week.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a second generation Cuban-American whose grandfather fled Fidel Castro’s regime, announced that over 300 student visas had been revoked for students engaging in political activism, who he labeled “lunatics.” How sad that it only took one generation to turn from asylum seeker to despot.
For a detailed cumulative list of benchmarks charting our country’s slide into despotism please click the ‘Benchmark’ link above.
Let me know how I am doing. Leave a like or a comment. Thanks.
As of March 21, 2025
Benchmarks of Democratic Backsliding and Erosion
Leading the list of abuses this week was Trump’s unconstitutional declaration of war and invocation of the Aliens Enemies Act of 1798; timed to the mass deportation of 200 plus alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador and indefinite imprisonment in a maximum security prison with a history of human rights abuses.
Compounding this mass injustice was Trump’s call to impeach the federal judge who ordered a stop to the illegal deportations, cancelation of flights, and return of flight already in the air. This judicial order — in reality invoking Habeas Corpus a legal right that goes back to the Magna Carta — was ignored. The government lawyers even had the audacity to claim that it was too late because flights were over international waters by the time the written order was received even though the judge had orally ordered the stop earlier in court to the lawyers. Ironically, the flights were over the Gulf of America. How symbolic of how low Trump has sunk.
Rep. Jim Jordan has already planned hearings regarding the judge’s legal rulings. Elon Musk made max donations to members of Congress friendly towards the idea of impeaching judges who rule against Trump.
This is what happens after years of right wing rhetoric turning migrants into criminals. We know nothing about these men because they were disappeared without due process, the right to counsel. They had become unworthy victims in the eyes of too many Americans. I get rights, you don’t. That is not how American works. I think someone famous once said, “You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor.”
Of course Trump’s speech to the assembled staff of the Department of Justice where he rallied against the illegal press is of note. This attack on the press and free speech by a sitting President at the Justice Department is unprecedented.
Of additional note, is that government lawyers have determined that the Aliens Enemies Act permits government agents to enter homes without warrants. I presume under some Frankenstein interpretation of the ‘hot pursuit doctrine’ permitted by the Supreme Court. This determination would be in conflict with the bill of rights 4th Amendments protections from government intrusions and seizures without warrants. It suggests a government inching closer to declaring martial law.
I added a Friday Follies of all the sycophantic legislative bills introduced to kiss Trump’s derrière by fawning state and federal lawmakers. Got to have some sense of humor in this time. New entries to the benchmarks cumulative list of trespasses are in bold
For the full report please go to the menu and select Benchmarks. Thanks.
