Cubans Struggle Against a Tightening US Noose

HAVANA — Cuban women cooking dinner in the dark with charcoal. Images of these scenes have become representative of the especially harsh period the country is going through at the moment, but they also highlight resourcefulness and resilience. 

“Blackouts are lasting more than 24 hours. Sometimes we get three hours of electricity, but that’s not enough time for things to cool down in the refrigerator. You have to cook what you’re going to eat that day because it will spoil. And how do you do that when you work and have to go to the city, eight kilometers away, to buy what you need?” says Caridad Curbelo Crespo. 

With the U.S. stopping other countries from selling oil to Cuba, there’s no fuel for the transport to cover those eight kilometers.  

On Jan. 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring a national emergency regarding Cuba and establishing a system of tariffs on products from countries that supply, directly or indirectly, oil to the Caribbean nation. Since then, everything has become more difficult, Curbelo says.

Two weeks after the executive order, Cuba is experiencing a critical fuel shortage. At the start of February, the Financial Post reported the country had only 15 to 20 days’ worth of oil remaining. As a result, gasoline is being rationed and most transport services have been suspended, which in turn affects distribution of food and other goods. Patients can’t get to hospitals due to lack of transportation. 

Cuba now produces about 1,000 megawatts of electricity — 38% of its daytime output — from solar panels. For the rest, it counts on oil. Cuba does produce some oil itself, but the amount is minimal. The lack of power has led to long daily blackouts, with cooking, refrigeration and food production harshly impacted. Water pumps and communications are severely affected, and school and work hours have been reduced. 

Cuba is experiencing a critical fuel shortage. The Trump administration’s stated goal is to pressure the Cuban government. The real effect, as documented by the testimonies of those who live on the island, is the collective punishment of a population already worn down by six decades of U.S. sanctions.

This type of mass “punishment is a crime,” said Carlos Fernández de Cossío, the Cuban foreign affairs minister, on X, referring to collective penalties and methods of intimidation that are prohibited under international law in the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Curbelo is 80 and lives with her brother on the road to Viñales, Pinar del Rio, in the west of the country. She is retired, but she continues to work. “We have both wanted to stay active, and our health has allowed us to do so,” Curbelo explains to Truthdig, speaking of herself and her brother. “Plus, we need that money to make ends meet, because the pension isn’t enough to live on, especially with this crisis.”

Curbelo works in an office of the Credit and Services Cooperative, an agricultural production organization in Cuba, several kilometers from her home. Her brother is a guard at a medicinal plant cooperative. When she talks about the current difficulties, she doesn’t separate work and domestic struggles: They are one and the same, she insists.

“Women feel it twice as much, because in addition to working outside the home, we also have to worry about household chores. I, for example, am the one in charge of everything: cooking, washing, cleaning, even the shopping. In my house, it was always like that, and now that we’re old, things haven’t changed.”

The blackouts, Curbelo says, have added to her burden. She normally cooks with electricity because cooking gas is rationed. “Sometimes I can only buy one gas canister a year,” she says. Now, she’s had to return to using charcoal. “It’s more work, but it’s not new to me. My mother always had her charcoal stove. The thing is, a sack of charcoal is very expensive now; 1,500 pesos [$58] is the cheapest option,” she says.

Suffocation as a strategy: The energy crisis is not an isolated phenomenon. It compounds already existing problems — inflation, currency shortages, deteriorating infrastructure — and increases the impact of financial and commercial restrictions by the United States that already make importing fuel, as well as basic supplies and medicines, expensive and difficult.

“The tightening of the U.S. blockade against Cuba is part of the Trump administration’s strategy of territorial control over the American continent,” Pável Alemán Benítez tells Truthdig. He is a professor and researcher at the University of Havana and an analyst on international affairs.

“They saw a window of opportunity in the weakening of international institutions, especially if we take into account what has happened in Gaza, where they have literally flouted the United Nations. They have tried to replicate that model of action in the Americas.”

With the Jan. 29 executive order, they are aiming for the collapse of Cuban society, a breakdown of its social fabric based on the population’s exhaustion from all the restrictions that the lack of energy imposes on daily life, Alemán says. “It makes life very uncomfortable for the ordinary citizen. In any country, this tends to be reflected in an increase in social protest, and that is what they are seeking in order to destabilize the government,” he said....   

Lisandra Fariñas /T       -Truthdig

Cubans Struggle Against a Tightening U.S. Noose

"The average American household spent an extra $1,000 this year thanks to tariffs"

 

The Supreme Court emerged from its winter recess on Friday, and the justices appear to have spent that break with pens in hand. In a 6-3 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court ruled that President Donald Trump had no authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 to impose sweeping tariffs. Roberts was joined by conservative justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and the court’s three liberal justices: Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The ruling totaled 170 pages, including a 63-page dissent from Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and several concurrences. As SCOTUS blog’s Amy Howe wrote after the decision, “In a part of the opinion joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Roberts said that Trump’s reliance on IEEPA to impose the tariffs violated the ‘major questions’ doctrine – the idea that if Congress wants to delegate the power to make decisions of vast economic or political significance, it must do so clearly.” While there remains some uncertainty—the justices did not address whether anyone who’d paid tariffs were due refunds, and Trump could try to implement tariffs again under different statutes—businesses across the country that rely on imported goods were undoubtedly relieved. In a piece we published Friday morning just hours before the decision, John McCormack interviewed Beth Benike, a small-business owner who’d invented the “Busy Baby Mat” to keep toddlers occupied while dining out and had been selling her product since 2019. John wrote:

Things had been looking up for Benike and her small business’s five employees—until President Donald Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, 2025. At the time, Benike had a container ready to ship from China with $160,000 of product. “My tariff was going to be like an additional $230,000 on top of that,” Benike recalled. “I would have had to come up with that money within the 30 to 45 days it takes for this stuff to get to America.” Benike could not afford the $230,000 tariff, so her product languished in China until Trump later reduced tariffs below their “Liberation Day” highs (yet still higher than they were at the start of the year). But the damage had been done: For two months, her product was out of stock. Over the past year, Benike had to cut staff from five employees to three. “I cashed in my retirement and didn’t pay myself all summer, went through all my family savings to just stay afloat,” Benike said. “I would say, conservatively, we had half a million in lost revenue because of the tariffs.”

In the weeks leading up to the ruling, a few data points had brought home how clearly Trump’s trade policy has been hurting Americans. Earlier this month, the nonpartisan Tax Foundation published a report finding that the average American household spent an extra $1,000 this year thanks to tariffs. And on February 12, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a study showing that, contrary to what Trump has claimed since first imposing his “Liberation Day” tariffs, that the burden of paying the tariffs has fallen almost exclusively to Americans. In Wanderland, Kevin D. Williamson noted that while Americans are paying $94 out of every $100 in tariff revenue, there are plenty of other, hidden costs to tariff policy:

A tariff that adds $10 to the price of a tire does not necessarily mean that the price of a tire in the shop goes up $10, but it may mean that there are no tire-shop employee bonuses at the end of the year, that employees are expected to take on additional work at no additional pay, or that the tire store owners decide to wait another year to have the shop painted and the parking lot resurfaced. The guy who owns the local restaurant that used to be a favorite of the tire shop manager will not be conscious of the fact that a tariff schedule is the real reason the manager takes his family to dinner there once a month instead of two or three times a month—and that the commercial painter and the guy who owns the asphalt company are not making up the difference but instead are cutting back, too—but he will notice that it is a little bit harder to come up with the money to send his kids to summer camp this year.

Trump has long claimed that the threat of tariffs has enabled him to secure pledges of foreign investment, and in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, he wrote, “I have successfully wielded the tariff tool to secure colossal Investments in America. …In less than one year, we have secured commitments for more than $18 trillion, a number that is unfathomable to many.” In Capitalism, Scott Lincicome agreed with one aspect of Trump’s claim—the part about the number being unfathomable— “because it’s completely—and impossibly—untrue.” Scott debunked, on a number of fronts, the notion that Trump had secured $18 trillion in foreign investment—starting with the fact that the White House itself touts only $9.6 trillion in pledges that it attributes to the “Trump Effect.” And within that $9.6 trillion, some spending is for expenses, not investment; some likely won’t happen (India’s pledge to buy more U.S. liquid natural gas); and some can’t happen (as with promises from the EU, “because government officials in these places don’t have the authority to control private firms’ purchasing decisions.) ...  -The Dispatch Weekly

"More Chaos": Trump Hammered for Plan to Double Down on Tariffs After Supreme Court Ruling

 

Donald Trump defiantly vowed to continue slapping tariffs on imported goods on Friday after the US Supreme Court overturned the so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs he implemented last year. In a press conference held hours after the Supreme Court ruled against the president’s tariff regime, Trump said that he had other tools at his disposal that allowed him to hit foreign products with taxes.

Among other things, Trump said he was going to issue a 10% global tariff using his authority under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 that allows the president to levy tariffs to address “large and serious” balance-of-payments deficits with foreign nations.

However, as a Friday analysis by the libertarian Cato Institute explains, any tariffs enacted through Section 122 expire after 150 days without authorization from Congress, which in theory could put vulnerable congressional Republicans on the spot to vote for or against the president’s signature policy this summer right before the 2026 midterm elections.

The president’s decision to plow ahead with his politically unpopular tariffs drew immediate criticism from Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who said during an interview with MS NOW that Trump was creating even more economic uncertainty. “What he’s done is just doubled down and tried to make it worse,” Klobuchar explained, “which, of course, is going to create more cost and chaos for the American people.”

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman also predicted more chaos in the months to come from Trump’s trade policies, particularly when it comes to businesses that will now lobby to get back the money illegally seized from them by the president’s unconstitutional tariff regime.

Writing on his Substack, Krugman argued that Trump finding alternative means to levy tariffs would not “obviate the need to refund the tariffs already collected,” because “if you seized money without constitutional authority, finding other revenue sources going forward doesn’t make the original seizure legal.”

David Frum, staff writer at The Atlantic, predicted that the coming lawsuits aimed at getting refunds for the illegal tariffs would be a massive mess. “The post-tariff litigation is going to be nightmarish,” he wrote on social media. “Wrongfully taxed plaintiffs will now sue for return of their illegally taken money. Can their customers then sue for a portion of the higher prices caused by the wrongful taxes? More Trump chaos.”

However, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent downplayed the possibility of American businesses and consumers getting refunded for the tariffs. While speaking at the Economic Club of Dallas on Friday, Bessent was asked if he expected a “food fight” for the $175 billion in tariff revenues that government has illegally collected since April. “I’ve got a feeling the American people won’t see it,” Bessent said of the tariff money.

However, some Democrats indicated that they were not simply going to let the administration getting away with money they unlawfully confiscated from US businesses and consumers. “Donald Trump illegally stole your money,” wrote Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). “He should give it back to you. Instead Trump is scheming up new ways to force Americans to pay even more.”

Democrats on the US House Ways and Means Committee wrote that “Trump does not want to refund the money he illegally stole from you,” vowing the party “won’t stop fighting to get your money back.”

Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker wrote Trump a letter after the Supreme Court ruling demanding that the president provide every family in his state a $1,700 refund for the tariffs, which he said “wreaked havoc on farmers, enraged our allies, and sent grocery prices through the roof.”

-Brad Reed, Common Dreams

 

Are we "being led to another war in the Middle East by our newest coterie of buffoons"?

 

The Laurel and Hardy negotiating team of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, coupled with Trump’s appalling ignorance of world affairs and megalomania, seem set to push the U.S. into yet another debacle in the Middle East, one the Congress has not approved, and the public does not want.

The demands imposed on Iran by the Trump White House are no more acceptable to the regime in Tehran than those imposed on Hamas in Gaza under Trump’s sham peace plan.

Trump’s demand that Iran shut down its nuclear program and give up its missile capabilities in return for no new sanctions is as tone deaf as calling on Hamas to disarm in Gaza. But since we have long dispensed with diplomats, who are linguistically, politically and culturally literate, who can step into the shoes of their adversaries, we are being led to another war in the Middle East by our newest coterie of buffoons.

The U.S. and Israel foolishly believe they can bomb their way to decapitating the Iranian government and installing a client regime. That this non-reality-based belief system failed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya eludes them.

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The promise of no new sanctions will not incentivize Iran to broker an agreement. Iran is already crippled by onerous sanctions that have gutted its economy. This will do nothing to break the economic stranglehold. 

Iran will not give up its nuclear program, which has the potential to be weaponized, or its ballistic missile program, which Israel said it would target in an air attack. Israel’s reputed nuclear arsenal of some 300 warheads is a powerful incentive for Iran to retain the capacity to build a nuclear arsenal of its own. Iran, like Hamas, is never going to render itself defenseless against those seeking its annihilation.

An aerial attack on Iran will not be like the 12-day assault last June against Iran’s nuclear facilities and state and security facilities. Then Iran calibrated its response with symbolic strikes on Al Udeid air base in Qatar in the hopes that it would not lead to a wider, protracted conflict. 

If an aerial assault is launched, Iran will have nothing to lose. It will understand that appeasing its adversaries is impossible.

Iran is not Iraq. Iran is not Afghanistan. Iran is not Lebanon. Iran is not Libya. Iran is not Syria. Iran is not Yemen. Iran is the seventeenth largest country in the world, with a land mass equivalent to the size of Western Europe. It has a population of almost 90 million — 10 times greater than Israel — and its military resources, as well as alliances with China and Russia, make it a formidable opponent.

Despite Iran’s relative military weakness, when set against the combined forces of the U.S. and Israel, it can inflict a lot of damage. It will do this as swiftly as possible. Hundreds of American troops will likely be killed. Iran will certainly shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important oil chokepoint that facilitates the passage of 20 percent of the world’s oil supply. This will double or triple the price of oil and devastate the global economy. It will target oil installations along with U.S. ships and military bases in the region.

Mounting losses and a huge spike in oil prices will provide the fodder for Trump, and his vile counterpart in Israel, to ignite a sustained regional war. This is the cost of being governed by imbeciles. God help us.

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The Context You Need to Understand the Supreme Court's Tariffs Decision

 

The most shocking thing about the Supreme Court’s decision in Learning Resources, the tariffs case, is that three Justices would have let Trump use a statute that doesn’t mention tariffs to impose ones that are unrestricted in amount or length. Fortunately, the other six said no.

We discussed this case extensively ahead of oral argument on November 5, last year. Congress has the power to impose tariffs. But it has, in some cases, “loaned” them to the president, in specific grants with limitations. 

Here, the Court considered this administration’s claim that the president had the power to impose tariffs, without any limitations, under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The administration contended that the president has that power because the statute says that the president can regulate the importation of foreign goods if there is “any unusual and extraordinary threat” that poses a national emergency.

This is the common thread throughout Trump’s efforts to seize power that doesn’t belong to the presidency throughout the course of this administration: Find a statute that gives the president “unusual” powers during a national “emergency” and then proceed to drive a truck through our laws and norms with it. 

He did that with deportations by claiming the extreme powers the Alien Enemies Act affords a president during wartime applied because he thought a Venezuelan gang was invading the U.S. He did it with the National Guard, claiming crime was so rampant in American cities that he was entitled to federalize the National Guard to enforce the law. 

It’s the one consistent principle of this president: Accumulate and exercise as much power as possible, whether the Constitution assigns it to you or not.

In both of those cases, with deportations and the Guard, the Supreme Court administered a slap on the wrist to the administration, ruling against them in preliminary shadow docket rulings. The tariffs case is different; it has been fully briefed, and there was an oral argument before the Court. 

Today, the Justices issued a 170-page decision, explaining their reasoning, which doesn’t happen with shadow docket cases. I’ll be reading the opinion and digging into the nitty-gritty of it; we’ll discuss it in detail over the weekend. But I wanted to give you a quick baseline for understanding the “holding” (the ruling): IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs. 

It’s an important decision about the constitutional balance of power between the three branches of government. Remember that this president has both 1) claimed an outsize share of Congress’ power, and 2) argued the courts lack the power to review his decisions at every opportunity since he returned to office. Today, the Supreme Court told him to quit stealing from Congress and reaffirmed its own ability to engage in judicial review. 

It is a very important decision, perhaps the most important we’ve seen from the Court since it went the opposite direction and expanded presidential power in the criminal immunity case. Finally, they’ve pumped the brakes on the runaway presidency.

That doesn’t mean the Supreme Court is suddenly the hero of the Trump era. As we started out by noting, the decision was 6-3. The dissents came, predictably, from Thomas and Alito, and perhaps less so, from Kavanaugh. 

But the decision should have been 9-0. And we still have a long way to go before the end of this term, including Callais, the gerrymandering case, and other voting rights cases, where the Court could put a heavy thumb on the scales of justice and influence the outcome of the midterm elections and the political balance of power in the country for a generation. This is a good decision, in this specific case, for now. That’s the most I’m prepared to say before we see the remainder of the Court’s decisions.

As I wrote to you back in November ahead of the oral argument: “This is not a case about tariffs in general or about whether they are good policy. It’s a case about specific tariffs that President Trump imposed in February and whether he had the statutory authority to impose them…

We studied the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s decision that rejected Trump’s effort to impose tariffs using IEEPA (I-E-Pa), the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, for the very simple reason that the Act, unlike other statutes that do give a president the right to impose tariffs, doesn’t mention tariffs at all. 

It does not give the president any authority to impose them under the statute that he has expressly said he used to do so. This is the kind of textualist argument conservative justices have backed in other cases, and to abandon that approach here would be a sharp and hypocritical departure for them. Last term, Justice Gorsuch wrote that the justices’ primary focus should be on the text of the statute.

The Constitution gives the power to impose taxes, which includes tariffs, to Congress. Because IEEPA doesn’t extend that power to the president, his use of it here is just a power grab, the kind of practice the Supreme Court should push back against if it intends to remain relevant to the American experiment. 

The Federal Circuit’s decision pointed out that while other laws expressly give the president the power to impose tariffs, IEEPA does not. Congress knows how to give the president the power to impose tariffs when it wants to and because it did not do so here, that should be the end of the inquiry. The administration should lose here…” Thankfully, it did. More on this later.

You’ve just read this in-the-moment explanation of an important, but lengthy, Supreme Court decision without a paywall. Paid subscribers make that possible. If you want to help me keep this work available to everyone—and get extra benefits along the way like the Friday Night “Five Questions” interview columns (tonight’s is extra special)—please join us.

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-Joyce Vance

 

Trump's assault on the First Amendment continues

MAGA bad faith attacks on “wokeness” and left-wing “censorship” have obscured their thinly veiled effort to eradicate the history of non-whites, normalize racism, silence critics, and demand that white Christian nationalism be foisted on the rest of us. A year into Donald Trump’s autocratic rule, no one should doubt what the regime is up to.

Unabashed racism and antisemitism are part and parcel of MAGA’s verbiage and ideology. The vendetta against progressive academics; the movement to establish religion (and anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry) in public schools; and the assault on DEI (going as far as eliminating grants designed to combat certain population’s health issues) underscore the game-plan to insulate their own repulsive speech and falsehoods from any adverse consequences (social, political, economic or professional), while demolishing facts and crushing everyone else’s free speech rights.

The Trump regime enforces this double standard with authoritarian venom. From punishing foreign students for pro-Palestinian demonstrations to physically assaulting and threatening peaceful anti-ICE protests to frivolous lawsuits bullying media outlets and clamping down on late night talk show hosts, the MAGA regime has undertaken a censorship campaign not experienced since the Red Scare. Two recent cases highlight Trump’s dual threat to free speech: enforced conformity to a MAGA worldview, and punishment for dissent.

In a decision this week, U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania held that the Trump regime’s removal of an educational display about enslaved people from “The President’s House” exhibit at the Independence National Historical Park impermissibly attempted to rewrite history, warranting a TRO on behalf of the city of Philadelphia to stop further desecration of the site.

Rufe began powerfully:

As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims—to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not.

This was an easy case based on a simple reading of the relevant statute and undisputed historical fact. The legislation at issue authorized the Interior Department “to enter into cooperative agreements with the city of Philadelphia to assist in the preservation and interpretation of the property.” It specified that “no changes or alterations shall be made in the property within the Independence Hall including its buildings and grounds . . . except by mutual agreement.” The Trump regime acted unilaterally, and hence, illegally.

After dismissing specious claims that the court lacked jurisdiction to review the matter, Rufe held that the cooperative agreement authorizing such displays “clearly emphasizes the role of slavery and the importance of recognizing paradoxes at Independence National Historical Park.” Rufe slammed the government’s argument that “truth is no longer self-evident, but rather the property of the elected chief magistrate and his appointees and delegees, at his whim to be scraped clean, hidden, or overwritten. . . . [s]olely because, as Defendants state, it has the power.”

The court knocked down the Trump regime’s argument that it alone could determine facts (just as courts have refused to buy into the regime’s lies concerning an “invasion” from Venezuela or a “rebellion” allowing national guard to occupy cities). “An agency, whether the Department of the Interior, NPS, or any other agency, cannot arbitrarily decide what is true, based on its own whims or the whims of the new leadership, regardless of the evidence before it,” Rufe concluded.

In sum, Rufe upheld the proposition that the Trump regime, so long as district courts have the will to enforce the Constitution, does not have the power to override statutes, disregard history, or exercise dictatorial control over our national narrative. “Each person who visits the President’s House and does not learn of the realities of founding-era slavery receives a false account of this country’s history.” This principle is essential to preserving the true history of America while staving off dictatorship.

Crushing dissent

In another recent holding, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon for the District of Columbia blasted Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s effort to punish retired Navy officer Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) for a video with five House and Senate colleagues reminding armed services personnel to follow the Constitution. (The utterly dimwitted and constitutional ignoramus Jeanine Pirro failed to obtain an indictment against Kelly and his colleagues.)

Leon declared that while current service members have less robust First Amendment rights, “no court has ever extended those principles to retired service members, much less a retired service member serving in Congress and exercising oversight responsibility over the military. This Court will not be the first to do so!”

The judge, showing a preference for exclamation marks and fondness for folk lyrics, also rebuked Hegseth’s claim that the court lacked sufficient facts to decide the case:

This Court has all it needs to conclude that Defendants have trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees. After all, as Bob Dylan famously said, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” To say the least, our retired veterans deserve more respect from their Government, and our Constitution demands they receive it!

Leon concluded that rather “than trying to shrink the First Amendment liberties of retired service members, Secretary Hegseth and his fellow Defendants might reflect and be grateful for the wisdom and expertise that retired service members have brought to public discussions and debate on military matters in our Nation over the past 250 years.” He added, “If so, they will more fully appreciate why the Founding Fathers made free speech the first Amendment in the Bill of Rights!”

These cases illustrate well-established features of Trump’s lawless regime that either utterly lacks any understanding of the First Amendment, American history, and basic legislative interpretation, or (more likely) chooses to disregard all three. It aims to harass, chill speech, and penalize its opponents for daring to object to the frightful MAGA worldview.

Trump’s bludgeoning of opponents about inarguable facts (e.g., George Washington owned slaves, military personnel are obligated to follow the Constitution — not the whims of one mad king) is as much intended for his adherents’ consumption. His insistence on blatant falsehoods (e.g., election denial) forces allies to debase themselves by embracing obvious falsehoods. Forcing his own side to comply with absurd and easily disprovable assertions is a telltale sign of an aspiring strongman.

Finally, the regime’s lawyers’ incessant refrain that courts have no role in controlling the executive shows Trump’s utter contempt for checks and balances. Increasingly, however, courts appear to be growing impatient with this arrogant assumption of executive supremacy. If they want to deter further overreach and deter disobedience to court orders, judges should start sanctioning government lawyers for speciously arguing that the courts are irrelevant.

We need not indulge MAGA cultists who insist they are virtuous victims, muzzled by the left. The only ones muzzling critics are the historical and constitutional know-nothings who repeatedly try to rewrite history to comport with their goal of establishing a white supremacist autocracy. Such maneuvers are un-American — and cannot stand if our democracy is to survive.

-Jennifer Rubin, The Contrarian is reader-supported. To receive new posts, help with litigation, and keep this opposition movement alive and engaged, please join the fight by becoming a paid subscriber.

 

FBI won’t share Alex Pretti shooting evidence, Minnesota authorities say

A Minneapolis resident keeps watch for federal agents on a city street in late January. Photograph: Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images

Minnesota law enforcement authorities have said the FBI is refusing to share any evidence on its investigation into the death of Alex Pretti, the man killed by federal immigration authorities in late January. Pretti was shot on 24 January by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials in Minneapolis just two weeks after an immigration official shot and killed Renee Good and 10 days after the shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. Minnesota’s bureau of criminal apprehension (BCA), a state-level criminal investigative law enforcement agency, said the FBI had formally notified it that information or evidence relating to Pretti’s shooting would not be shared. How has the Minnesota governor responded to the news? Tim Walz demanded an “impartial” investigation into the shootings. “Trump’s left hand cannot investigate his right hand,” he said.

 -The Guardian