He is well-qualified and will run the department as well as anyone could under President Trump.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito surprised the court Thursday by publicly rebuking fellow Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The rebuke happened after the court ruled in Mullin v. Al […]
Jack Goldsmith, who previously served as the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush, is issuing a stark warning Republican senators not to confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general.Thus far, Blanche has been auditioning for the attorney general gig, CNN said, by issuing indictments of President Donald Trump's political foes, whether or not they'll even make it to trial. Blanche was a former personal lawyer to Trump in a failed criminal defense against 34 felony fraud charges in New York. As Politico stated in April, Blanche is a "Trump loyalist who relishes every opportunity to pick a fight on the president’s behalf."“The DOJ is not a personal law firm, yet Donald Trump has installed another one of his former personal defense lawyers to lead the DOJ,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) wrote on social media at the time. “His blind allegiance to Trump is not a qualification for the job. He is wholly unfit to lead the DOJ.”The objections appear to also spread to conservatives like Goldsmith. Gregg Nunziata, the executive director for the Society for the Rule of Law, flagged Goldsmith's comments on X Friday. "If the Senate confirms Blanche, it’s not just confirming someone as attorney general; it’s endorsing Trump weaponization. That’s what’s at stake in the Senate confirmation: whether the Senate will exercise what I believe are its responsibilities to ensure that law enforcement isn’t abused. This is one very important check on that," Nunziata wrote."Now, to be clear," he added, "Blanche is going to be acting as attorney general one way or the other. But the question is whether the Senate will endorse what's been going on."Goldsmith and Bauer compared it to the nomination of Bill Pulte for the director of national intelligence post, which Trump withdrew and replaced with another appointee whom some also consider unqualified. The conversation was part of a discussion with former White House Counsel under President Barack Obama, Bob Bauer for his Substack and comes before former Attorney General Bill Barr wrote his glowing endorsement of Blanche for the Wall Street Journal. Attorney General Todd Blanche? by Jack GoldsmithThe vital role of the Senate in preventing law enforcement abuse Read on Substack
President Donald Trump‘s first-term Attorney General Bill Barr is making an aggressive public push for Senate Republicans to confirm Todd Blanche as the nation’s next attorney general, arguing the president’s acting Justice Department chief is the best person to lead the department. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Thursday, Barr wrote that Blanche is […]
“This is a victory 10 years in the making,” a White House official said after the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration could end deportation protections for some migrants.
A legal expert said on Thursday that a recent spate of decisions published by the Supreme Court made some of the liberal justices "incandescently angry" because the majority opinions read like "gaslighting."The court published opinions on a range of cases, from one that protects chemical giant Monsanto from lawsuits over cancer-causing chemicals in some of its products to an opinion that ended Temporary Protected Status for Haitian immigrants. In each of the cases, Lithwick argued, the court's majority continued to "twist itself into pretzels" to give the Trump administration what it wanted, according to Dahlia Lithwick, a lawyer and journalist. "The Court twisted itself into pretzels to say that the words that come out of Donald Trump's mouth have no significance," Lithwick argued during MS NOW's "Deadline: White House" with host Nicolle Wallace, referring to previous cases where the court ignored the president's words when determining the intent behind an immigration policy. "And this is the same problem on rocket fuel." "To have Justice Alito in his majority just batted away so much so that he won't even acknowledge it, which forces, in some sense, Justice Kagan to read it into the record to create a dissent where she says, 'Here are the words that were said that are emblematic of what Donald Trump was trying to do.' It really tells you again the degree to which the gaslighting is truly the thing that is making the justices ... absolutely incandescently angry."
A pair of immigration rulings sparked a clash among Supreme Court Justices on Thursday. Following his 6-3 decision announcement on both cases, Justice Samuel Alito accused liberal colleagues of blindsiding on the Court bench. The tension began after Alito announced the first ruling, which adopts a narrow interpretation of what constitutes arrival in the United States, reported CNN's Joan Biskupic. Thus making it significantly harder for asylum seekers who traveled through Mexico and South America to qualify unless they physically set foot on U.S. soil.Justice Sonia Sotomayor read a dissent lasting roughly 10 minutes, invoking the 1939 voyage of over 900 Jewish refugees turned away from Cuba and the United States, who later perished in the Holocaust. She tied the historical event to international treaties protecting people fleeing persecution. Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined her dissent. "Typically, it's the justice who is reading the majority opinion who's the only one who speaks," Biskupic explained outside the courtroom. "If somebody reads a dissent in this case, from the liberals really protesting what has happened in this refugee case."Alito responded from the bench, stating he would have said more had he known Sotomayor would deliver her dissent orally. Alito then announced a second 6-3 ruling restricting Temporary Protected Status for migrants from Haiti and Syria.Watch the video below. Your browser does not support the video tag.
MS NOW anchor Nicolle Wallace likened Supreme Court dissents to a "primal scream" after a spate of decisions.Wallace was highlighting parts of Justice Elena Kagan's dissenting opinion in immigration cases that end legal protections for recipients of temporary protected status."The justices to put so much storytelling in a dissent does feel like a real primal scream for people to wake up and see what the human toll is of today's decisions," Wallace said.She read excerpts of Kagan's dissent that recounted the stories of Syrian and Haitian nationals and "put human beings at the center of today's stories," Wallace said."Consider Laila Doe, who fled Syria with her daughter in 2013 after her neighborhood was bombed," Kagan's dissent read. "Without TPS, she will have to leave her mother and return to a still ravaged, violent, and dangerous country."Wallace also looked at a part of Kagan's dissent that talked about Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot, "a Haitian national who has held TPS for fifteen years," according to Kagan. "Miot suffers from Type 1 diabetes, which is easily treated in the United States, but in Haiti, the same disease can be a death sentence.""He lives in California, where he works in a laboratory researching Alzheimer's, a job he can hold only because of his TPS work authorization," Kagan wrote.Dahlia Lithwick, a legal analyst, described the opinions from Justice Samuel Alito and others who voted to pull back TPS protections as "crabbed." She added that Justice Alito was "angry" at Justice Sonia Sotomayor being "upset" like Kagan.Lithwick also called Justice Alito and others in the majority opinion "vulcans" who saw it as their job to take on a "hyper-textual approach," as opposed to the human-oriented approach that she and Wallace saw in the reactions of Kagan and Sotomayor."What they end up doing is ignoring the explicit intent of Congress," Lithwick said about the justices in the majority opinion. "They end up absolutely circumscribing judicial power of review."
A decision by Justice Sonia Sotomayor to take 12 minutes of the court’s time on Thursday to read her dissent in a 6-3 ruling that makes it significantly harder for asylum seekers who traveled through Mexico and South America to enter the US provoked Justice Sam Alito to take an unseemly potshot at her, which stunned court regulars.According to MS NOW legal analyst Lisa Rubin, arch-conservative Alito sat and listened to a very “calm” Sotomayor read her dissent, with Rubin pointing out, “That is certainly not unusual.”“But here there was a moment of tension between Justices Sotomayor, with her dissent and Justice Alito, who wrote the majority opinion here,” she elaborated. “Producer Peggy Helman, who is in the court for the reading of all of these decisions, said that Justice Alito said in response out loud, ‘There's much I would have added if I had known a dissent would be read from the bench.’”“She [Helman] said that people in the Supreme Court, in the gallery gasped when he said that because this is a group of people that, for all of their differences in terms of legal, interpretive methodology or even the outcome of cases, they like to make it seem as if they get a long; that they are all just rowing in the same direction, trying to do their job to uphold the rule of law” Rubin reported. “Even when their conceptions of what the rule of law is differs, that very obvious public fracture between the two of them was one that was surprising even to the most veteran court watchers in the room today,” she added. - YouTube youtu.be